Mojitos with Merry Men

by Marianne Mancusi

  "And we're going in. Ready? One…two…three…" My heart pounded in my chest as the soldiers kicked down the door and ran into an Iraqi apartment building, yelling at the tops of their lungs. They'd got some intelligence that some jihad group had been hiding out there, though this entire area was off-limits to American personnel. I wondered if I should fall in behind them or wait outside while they secured the premises. I hadn't been given any instructions by the Colonel except, "Don't get in the way, baby," and thus was completely winging this whole assignment. If Nick were here he'd know what to do.

  I took a deep breath, then pulled the camera out from under my sleeve and switched it on. Just a few shots outside, maybe, then I'd go in. My hands shook as I raised the camera to my eye and I hoped all my shots wouldn't be too jittery.

  "You, what are you doing?"

  I froze in my tracks, instantly breaking out into a cold sweat. I slid the camera back into my sleeve as heavy footsteps pounded the stone street behind me. Getting closer. Louder. But I willed myself to stay put. To fight instinct and not turn around. Turn around and they may shoot, Colonel Devens had said, and I sure didn't want that.

  Of course they may shoot anyway, he had added with a chuckle. Just don't get seen.

  I'd laughed along with him at the time. It didn't seem so funny now.

  My heart pounded in my chest as I stood tall, silent. Waiting for the voice's owner to approach. I wondered if I should shout for help. Or would that just make the guy shoot me on the spot? I didn't want to take the chance.

  "Who are you?" the man demanded, coming up behind me and circling around. "And where are you going?"

  My brain, even in its panic, played observant reporter, cataloguing him quickly. He was a fashionable gent, looked to be Iraqi regular army, with a black mustache, stylish combat fatigues, and most importantly, the very latest in semiautomatic machine guns strapped to his shoulder.

  Aimed at my heart.

  "Hi, um…my name's, like, Dora? And I think I'm, like, lost?" I said, giving him my best Valley Girl imitation. I didn't binge-watch the entire first season of The Real Housewives of Orange County for nothing. "Is this, um, the Red Cross place?" I lowered my head and batted my eyelashes for good measure, channeling the dumb American tree hugger who'd come to help the Iraqis in their time of need. That sometimes worked.

  "No. This is not the Red Cross, American," the soldier said in broken, accented English. He spit out the word "American" like he was expelling poison, but lowered his gun a few precious inches. I allowed myself a quaky breath. Maybe this was going to work after all. "You must leave here now."

  "Okay, no problem," I assured him, backing away slowly. Forget the story. Just get out alive. That's what Nick would be telling me. No assignment is worth dying for.

  I should have never left without him. Stupid, Dora. Really, really stupid.

  As I backed up, my foot somehow got caught on the hem of my long skirt and I found myself flying backward, my butt slamming against the hard stone floor. But the initial shock and pain were nothing compared to the horror I felt as the tiny camera I'd hidden flew out from my sleeve. It bounced, once, twice, before landing right at the soldier's feet.

  The guard stared at the camera for a minute, then released a stream of angry Arabic. I didn't understand exactly what he was saying, but the outrage in his voice told me all I needed to know. I swallowed hard as he reached down to pick up the camera, adrenaline surging through my veins, fight or flight mechanisms warring for dominance. Where was my platoon? Didn't they notice I was gone?

  "You are…reporter?" he asked. His eyes flashed fire. Not such a big fan of the profession, it seemed. Not that I blamed the guy. At this very moment I would have preferred to be an accountant myself. Safe in some nondescript office. Crunching numbers before I went to crunch on some overpriced sushi on the Upper West Side with my bland but safe Wall Street boyfriend.

  A little dull, yeah, but it beat running for my life, which was, I assessed, what I was about to have to do.

  He'd probably shoot me in the back, but I was willing to take the chance. It was better to die quickly than to be slowly tortured in some Iraqi prison. At least, that was the theory. In actuality, both options seemed pretty sucky. What was the penalty for being in a prohibited area?

  Don't get seen, Colonel Devens had said.

  I scrambled to my feet and began a dash down the alley, weaving from side to side, trying to make for a bad target. Too bad I lacked Keanu Reeves's bullet-dodging Matrix powers. They would have so come in handy right about now.

  Behind, the man yelled for me to stop in a mixture of Arabic and English. To freeze. To surrender. To give up and come with him.

  No dice. Well, not until I felt the exploding hot pain in the back of my thigh anyway; that was pretty much all the persuasion I needed to obey his "stop" command. In fact, the next thing I knew I was flying forward, my palms slamming and skidding against the pavement, followed by my body and my face. I landed with a sickening thump.

  Oh my god. I'd been shot. I'd been SHOT!

  I reached down to grab my leg, almost crying. My face was bleeding. The pain flashed white-hot and my vision was fast turning spotty. Fear and agony fought for control of my brain as I watched the crimson stain on my skirt spread wider and wider.

  I thought about trying to crawl away—a last desperate escape attempt. But the guard was already tramping over to check his marksmanship and I knew any more resistance, in this case, was most definitely futile. Looked like I'd be spending this Valentine's Day in an Iraqi prison, a venue I was pretty sure boycotted all forms of candy hearts and roses.

  Thanks a lot, Nick Worst Valentine’s Day ever.

  CHAPTER ONE

  San Diego, CA One Year Later

  "I can't be the only one in this entire city who's too stressed for sex!"

  I sucked down the remainder of my chocolate brownie Frappuccino, struggling with a stubborn chunk caught in the straw. Finally, I gave up on the last smidgen of chocolate (a total crime against humanity, I know!) and set the cup down, letting out my most frustrated sigh.

  "I'm sure you're not," my photographer, Jenny, replied with a laugh. The pretty twenty-two-year-old brunette reached over and patted my hand. "But who wants to admit it on local TV news?"

  "Right." I stared out into the crowd of people milling about the Fashion Valley mall. We'd scoured the area for hours that morning, asking the inane "Man on the Street" question for my six P.M. news story—a fascinating feature on a new scientific study that found eighty percent of Americans feel uninterested in getting it on with their partners because of work pressures. Eighty percent claimed they were literally "too stressed for sex."

  The problem was, zero percent wanted to go on camera and tell me about it.

  "Besides, it's not that you're too stressed for sex," Jenny added with a twinkle in her sparkling blue eyes. "It's just that you only want to have it with a guy you refuse to talk to."

  I groaned. Not this again. It constantly amazed me how even after nearly a year, Jenny still rooted for Nick the Prick and I to get back together. I should have never told her my "We'll always have Baghdad" romance story on that oh-so-boring eight hour stakeout we'd been on when I first came back to California. (No, not that kind of stakeout. No lurking criminals or bad guys. Angelina Jolie had been rumored to be staying at the Four Seasons, if you must know.) Ever since that day, Jenny had been like a pit bull with a bone, and no matter how much I protested that I would never, ever speak to that jerk again as long as we both shall live, my words fell on naively deaf ears. In her yet-to-be-scarred mind, our relationship was beautiful, broken, and just dying to be mended. With her help, evidently.

  Sigh. She was as bad as Nick's geeky brother Tom. The dot-com billionaire whom Forbes claimed was busy revolutionizing interactive electronics seemed to have a lot of free time on his hands, trying everything under the sun to get Nick and me back together. He claimed his brother deserved a second chance, and nothing I said o
r did could dissuade him.

  But hey, the two of them could hold out hope 'til Judgment Day for all I cared. After what Nick had done to me last Valentine's Day halfway around the world, I'd sooner run away and join the circus than speak to him again. And that was coming from someone with a major clown phobia.

  Jenny grabbed her video camera as she stood up, and handed me the microphone. Time to get back to work. "You know, maybe you should call him sometime," she said, oh-so-casually. "See how he's doing up there in the City of Angels, all by his lonesome." She grinned. "Or maybe I should. I mean, he is really hot and all."

  I rolled my eyes and play-swatted her with the mic. "Your pathetic attempts to stir me into a jealous rage are completely in vain," I informed her. "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: Nick and I are through. Forever. Finito. End of story."

  "Bah," Jenny scoffed, shaking her head. "Have it your way. It's none of my business anyway, right? I'll just shut up and take the pictures."

  Grr. Great. Now she was going to go all sensitive on me. I drew in a breath and reached over to pat her on the shoulder.

  "Look, Jen. I know you're trying to help. But you don't know the whole story. What Nick did to me on Valentine's Day last year—it was unforgivable. And not a day goes by when it doesn't hurt." I glanced down at the ugly scar on my forearm and thought about the one I couldn't see running down the side of my face. It was amazing the station had hired me to be on air—me channeling the Phantom of the Opera and all. Well, maybe Phantom of the Opera was overstating it a bit, but I knew as well as anyone how the tiniest mark could mean a pink slip in the pristine, porcelain-doll world of TV news.

  Yup, I still hurt all right. Maybe not physically. But the mental pain. The fear. Stuff I knew would never completely go away.

  Not that I wasn't trying to move on. After all, I'd left Iraq, quitting my high profile career as a foreign correspondent to take on the most innocuous, non-dangerous reporting job on the planet—albeit the cheesiest. I'd spent the last year healing. Living one day at a time. Erasing the past scandal and creating a life for myself, one without fear and danger and heartbreak at every turn. And I had to admit, I was pretty proud I'd gotten as far as I had. Not that I didn't have a long way to go.

  Seeing Nick again would just hurl me backward. And I couldn't afford that. I just wasn't strong enough yet. I might never be.

  "Okay, okay, I get ya," Jenny agreed, punching me lightly on the arm. Luckily she knew when to quit. "Let's go find some undersexed San Diegans."

  I smiled, and together we walked down the open-air corridor of the Southern California mall where a good number of people were wandering about, carrying big bags of stuff they'd accumulated in their afternoon of shopping hedonism. Unfortunately, no one looked particularly interested in wasting five minutes of their life to get fifteen seconds of local news fame by exploiting the secrets of their sex lives. (Or in this case, lack of sex lives—which was technically worse.)

  No one, that was, until an elderly woman with the stereotypical helmet of wispy blue hair hobbled over. "Can you interview me?" she asked, leaning on her knobby cane. "I want to be on television."

  Hmm. I gave her the once-over. It was funny how some people did anything they could to avoid going on air, while went all Kardashian selfie just at the thought of the insta-fame. (If I wasn't a reporter, I'd so be in the first category!) Of course, granny here wasn't our target demographic—at News 9 we only cared about the sex lives of twenty-five to forty-nine-year-old women with a lot of disposable income. But it was nearly three P.M., and I was getting desperate.

  "Okay," I said, giving her my Big Reporter smile. I pointed the microphone at her. "Do you ever feel you're too stressed for sex?"

  She stared at me a moment, her blue eyes wide, as if shocked at my brazen question. I felt my face heat. Of course. What was I thinking? Granny probably hadn't gotten it on in the last twenty years or so. Ever since her precious Wilbur died back when Reagan was president.

  Sigh. Too bad my story wasn't "Too Senile for Sex."

  "Too stressed for sex?" the old woman repeated, following the phrase with a tinkly laugh that sounded a little like Christmas bells, "My goodness, no. In fact, ever since I started using this female Viagra I got off the Internet, my sex life is great!" she informed the lens.

  Hmph. Evidently these days even Granny was getting more action than me. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

  "Okay," I said, lowering the microphone. She obviously wasn't going to help with my story. "I appreciate you taking the time to answer." Not that you gave us anything we could use, my little senior sex kitten.

  The woman gave me a disapproving look over her bifocals. "You young people," she scolded. "You need to stop working so hard. Start enjoying life. When you're on your deathbed, you won't look back on your life and think, 'Why didn't I work more?' Trust me. But you might wonder why you didn't have more orgasms."

  Ah. Even better. Not only was Granny boinking like a bunny, she was now offering up life lessons. Next thing you knew, Jenny was going to tell her the Nick story, and the two of them would be tag-teaming for a sex-filled reconciliation.

  Can we say, no thank you?

  "Thanks," I muttered, stepping backward to put as much distance as possible between me and the hot flash ho. "Now, if you'll excuse us…"

  "Good luck, Sweetie," the woman said, then smiled patronizingly. "You'll find your Prince Charming eventually."

  I swallowed hard and resisted the nearly overwhelming urge to tell her I'd already found him. And that when I'd kissed him, he'd turned into a total frog. I wanted to insist that relationships—while perhaps good for short-term, crazy, hook-ups—always ended in pain. Leaving you vulnerable and wounded and crying in your tomato alphabet soup. Alone.

  Instead, I channeled Self Protective Mode and turned to throw Jenny a smirk as Granny hobbled away. "Some people!"

  My photographer shrugged. "She does have a point, Dora."

  "Oh, don't start." I groaned. The last thing I needed was a lecture on relationships from an inexperienced twenty-two-year-old. The girl had been dating her boyfriend since the high school prom. She had no idea what was in store for her future love life.

  Jenny opened her mouth to speak, then looked behind me and closed it again. I whirled around to see what had caught her attention and actually achieved the nearly impossible task of shutting her up, crossing my fingers it was a twenty-five to forty-nine-year-old woman who looked way too stressed to do the wild thing with her hubby. Instead, my eyes fell upon a very tall man, dressed entirely in black, standing before me, arms crossed against his broad chest. He had mirrored shades, slicked-back black hair, and a shiny Rolex that peeked out from under his suit coatsleeve. The whole look screamed Men in Black.

  "Yes?" I asked, donning Indulgent Reporter Smile. He was probably from mall security and was about to ask us to leave the premises before he called the cops. Could this day get any worse?

  "Dora Duncan?" he asked in a clipped accent I didn't recognize. "Are you Dora Duncan?"

  I felt my face heat into a blush. Not a security guard. Maybe even a fan! A real, live fan!

  I always got a kick out of people recognizing me on the street. Of course, back in the old days when Nick and I rocked the national news, this was a more regular occurrence. We were network superstars then. A tag team everyone rooted for. Now, only a year after escaping the network to take this silly features reporter job in San Diego—where I was sure not to run face to face into a semiautomatic machine gun—nobody even knew my name.

  Nick, on the other hand, was still uber-famous. In fact, I didn't understand how any normal human being could manage to garner such a fan base without selling his soul to the devil. (Which, of course, I wouldn't put past him.) After leaving Baghdad and taking a job as a network news anchor in Los Angeles, he'd become more famous than ever. While I labored in local news obscurity, he walked the red carpet, schmoozing with starlets. While I covered craft fairs and dog
shows, he interviewed senators and got laws changed. While I lived my life scarred and ugly because of his mistake, he made People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People."

  And Jenny wondered why I wouldn't take him back?

  I realized the man in front of me had his hand outstretched and that I should be shaking it. Had to be gracious to the few fans I had left.

  "Yes. Hi. How nice to meet you," I said with a smile. I wondered if my hair was covering my scar. I hated that I always wondered that while meeting someone new, but I couldn't help it.

  "I'm Special Agent Fredricks," he said in response, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a badge encased in smooth black leather. He flashed it at me, and I raised an eyebrow. Not a fan. FBI. Figured. "We need your assistance, and I've been asked to have you come with me."

  I furrowed my brows. The FBI needed my assistance? My assistance?

  "What could you possibly need my assistance for?" I blurted, and then regretted it a moment later. After all, I didn't want to come off as rude and uncooperative to the FBI. But still…

  "It's classified," Fredricks replied, tossing a glance at Jenny. "Now, if you could just come with me…"

  I looked over at my photographer, then back to the special agent, trying to decide what I should do. I had a story to get on the air in a few hours, a story I wasn't exactly making much progress on. If I took time out to go with this man, I'd never make my slot. But, he was FBI. I couldn't say no to the FBI, could I? Plus, what if it was an important story he needed my assistance with? What if it were an inside scoop on a huge scandal? Even though I'd taken this job to get away from the danger I'd faced in Iraq, truth be told, lately I was getting a bit sick of covering sex and cellulite and celebrity C-sections for the evening news.