You Only Love Twice

by Lori Wilde

  Joel had retrieved the measuring cup from the kitchen cabinet of the house he’d rented fully furnished and trotted over to carry out his new orders. Initially, his assignment had been simple. Keep her under surveillance. Then while on his jog he’d gotten a cell phone call from Camp Pendleton with additional instructions. Befriend the suspect and gain her trust. But under no circumstances was he to allow her to uncover his true identity.

  But of course. That was a given. You couldn’t exactly expect to get chummy with the daughter of the man your father had killed.

  Time for a new angle of attack. He wanted off this detail. The sooner the better. He opened his flip phone and gave the voice-activated command to call Camp Pendleton.

  “Special Agent Dobbs.”

  “Hunter here.”

  “Have you made contact?”

  “Sir.” Joel stalked into the kitchen and set the measuring cup down on the counter. “If I may speak freely, I don’t believe I’m the right agent for this particular assignment.”

  “You haven’t made contact yet? What’s the matter, Hunter?” Dobbs scoffed. “You’re male, she’s female. Your charm slipping?”

  “My charm isn’t the issue, sir.” Joel headed for the bathroom.

  “No? Then why aren’t you out there getting her to fall head over heels for you and spill all her secrets?”

  “Honestly, sir?”

  “Speak your mind.”

  Joel swapped the phone from one hand to the other as he wrestled out of his sweaty T-shirt. “This assignment is a waste of time.”

  “How so?”

  “The woman is no more subversive than Little Orphan Annie. She stays to herself, gets very few visitors, and rarely goes anywhere except to the grocery store and her bowling league on Wednesday nights. She’s downright mousy, and I’ve seen no signs of seditious activities. In fact, I think she may be agoraphobic.”

  “I get it,” Dobbs said. “You’re bored because she’s not a hottie with an interesting sex life.”

  “I’m wasting my time and my talent. I don’t even know why I’m here. If you could give me a little more to go on, that would help.” Joel tossed his shirt in the laundry hamper and toed off his sneakers. “What is it that Marlie Montague is supposed to be up to? Why is she under such close scrutiny? What exactly am I supposed to be finding out?”

  “Sorry. Top secret info. You don’t have the clearance.”

  “So reassign me and get someone with the right clearance.”

  “No.” Dobbs’s tone was anything but friendly.

  “Look, I know her. Or at least I knew her when I was a kid. Don’t you think that’s some kind of conflict of interest?”

  “Would she recognize you if she saw you?”

  He sighed. “I doubt it.”

  “Then you’re not getting out of it.”

  “Come on, Dobbs, cut me some slack. I do a good job for you.”

  “No can do.”

  “Why not?”

  “You were personally requested for this mission by someone very high up.”

  “Let me guess. Admiral Delaney stuck me with this crappy babysitting gig.”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not yours to reason why, but to follow orders. Now, quit your bellyaching and get back to work.”

  “Do I have to?” He gritted his teeth.

  “Either that or you can hand in your resignation. Take your pick.” Without another word, Dobbs hung up.

  Well, fuck me running.

  Joel had the urge to punch something hard, but managed to satisfy himself with savagely kicking his sneakers across the bathroom floor and into the bedroom, wishing it were his ex-father-in-law’s head instead. He was certain Chet Delaney was behind this.

  Joel’s ex-wife Treeni was due to return to Washington any day and she’d been calling him, hinting at getting back together. He would rather set his hair on fire than reunite with Treeni, but he didn’t appreciate Chet’s running interference for his precious daughter, shipping him out of D.C. on some bullshit job.

  He was stuck with being the stringed marionette to Chet’s puppeteer. And there was nothing Joel hated more than being beholden to someone with power over him.

  After Joel had been expunged from the Navy SEALs following a sordid incident in Iraq involving Treeni, one of Saddam Hussein’s top-ranking officials, and the search for weapons of mass destruction, his ex-father-in-law had pulled strings and gotten Joel the job at NCIS. It had been a bribe of course, to keep him from telling the truth about what had gone down over there.

  Chet had just stepped down as director of ONI so he could declare his candidacy for President of the United States. He was considered by many as his party’s front-runner to secure the nomination in the upcoming primary, although his warmongering and hard-line stance had earned him almost as many detractors as supporters. At this point, Chet’s main concern was keeping all his skeletons locked up tight.

  Joel was one of those skeletons.

  But his ex-father-in-law needn’t have worried. Joel’s lips were forever sealed. It hurt too much to think about what had happened, much less speak of it. He’d taken the blame for what Treeni had done and he’d accepted the consequences, but losing his place in the brotherhood was like losing a chunk of his soul. Being a SEAL was the first time he’d ever felt like he’d truly belonged anywhere. He’d been with like-minded men who pushed themselves to extremes.

  Joel twisted the shower faucet to a tepid temperature, climbed inside the tub, and yanked the shower curtain closed. He didn’t know the real reason why the Navy wanted Marlie under surveillance, but he felt sure they were barking up the wrong tree. The hush-hush, top secret instructions just didn’t jibe with what he’d learned about her.

  For God’s sake, Montague looked like somebody’s wide-eyed kid sister. The kind of wholesome girl-next-door so valued in 1950s and ’60s sitcoms. Gidget and Donna Reed and Father Knows Best. She even wore her hair in a ubiquitous ponytail.

  A dissident innocent?

  Was there such a thing? The only time he’d seen her act the least bit feisty was when he had spied on her at the Starlight Lanes. She mowed down bowling pins as if they were dandelions and she were a John Deere lawn tractor, racking up strike after strike with deadly precision. So what if she’d written a couple of conspiracy theory comic books with antigovernment themes. Big deal. It was fiction.

  Joel lathered his hair. See, that’s where he kept getting hung up. If her comic books were strictly fictional, why did the Navy consider her a threat to national security?

  It made no sense.

  He blew out his breath. Like it or not, he was stuck with his circumstances. He’d already gotten kicked out of the SEALs over one woman. He wouldn’t lose this job over another. For whatever reason, his orders were to get friendly with Montague, and that’s what he would do.

  But Joel sure as hell didn’t have to be happy about it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Aw, hell, Marlie thought, what a day to get whacked.

  She needed a shower, her Visa bill was three weeks overdue, and worst of all she hadn’t had sex in the past two years. I’m going to die broke, manless, without clean underwear on, and living in a house that I rent from my mother.

  “Step back,” the man said and kicked the door closed.

  In a weird way, she’d been waiting for something like this her entire life. As if deep down inside she’d always known she would come to a disastrous end.

  She felt at once both calm and panicked. She was terrified, but being a worst-case-scenario kind of gal from way back, she’d frequently planned out how she would react in just such a situation.

  Yeah, well, best-laid plans. She’d always imagined she’d smack a male attacker in his man parts and run like hell, but this guy wasn’t standing within gonad-smacking distance.

  He was a bland, nondescript sort of fellow. Young but with blond hair already thinning at the temples, ordinar
y features, medium build, steady hands. A perfect killer. Calm, cool, and unmemorable.

  “Who are you?” she squeaked.

  He casually tossed the box aside and raised the gun. “I’m your assassin.”

  Had he actually said that? This couldn’t really be happening. It seemed too surreal. Too laughably Hollywoodesque.

  He stood there, as deadly as a coiled rattlesnake, staring at her with absolutely no expression on his face, but his blue eyes . . . dear God . . . his calculating eyes were unforgiving.

  Marlie’s heart pounded and her lungs felt white, squeezed of air, constricted by fear, dread, and oddly enough, curiosity. Her head throbbed and her ears rang with Madonna’s version of “American Pie,” telling her that this would be the day that she died. Great. She didn’t even care for Madonna. She was much more of a Sheryl Crow fan, but she didn’t think Sheryl had done any songs about dying.

  “Shhh.” His voice was low and steady. “Don’t worry. It won’t hurt.”

  Reality slapped her hard. This guy wasn’t bluffing. He was going to kill her. Game on.

  Everything happened so rapidly.

  In a rolling dive, Marlie hit the floor at the same time the gunman fired.

  Keep moving, get behind something. It was Angelina’s voice, firm, commanding.

  Marlie scrambled behind the coffee table. Rapid-fire bullets decimated it. Wood chips flew everywhere. Amazingly, she hadn’t been hit.

  But you soon will be if you don’t do something. Move it!

  That’s when Marlie’s gaze locked on the bowling ball. There was no time to think. One-handed, she stuck her fingers in the holes and raised the ball up to her head just in time to block the shot.

  The bullet struck the bowling ball and ricocheted off.

  The force of the impact vibrated all the way up Marlie’s arm and into her shoulder. For a moment she was dazed, unsure what had happened.

  The gunman yelped, dropped his weapon, and clutched his hand. Apparently the stray bullet had struck him.

  All rightee, if she couldn’t kick him in the balls, she’d hit him with one. Marlie leaped to her feet and slung it as if she were bowling a perfect game. The ball bounced once and caught him in the shins.

  He went down hard, turning the air blue with a string of vile curses.

  Blindly, she ran, bracing herself for the earth-splitting pain of a bullet slicing off the top of her head. She flew across the kitchen floor, threw herself out the back door. The brick patio was rough and cold beneath her stocking feet.

  As she sprinted around the corner of the house, her shirt caught on the bare branch of a peach tree. Chilly January air bit into the skin of her armpit as the material ripped. Her breath came in raspy gasps and her heart hammered like a NASCAR piston. The fifteen extra pounds she was wagging around suddenly seemed like a hundred and fifteen.

  She panted, her mouth dry. She ran full throttle, her lungs crying out in pain, and yet it was as if she were moving in slow motion, her feet mired in invisible syrup, her life flashing before her eyes.

  Marlie, age three, the first Christmas she could remember, clutching the little red wagon that Santa had brought and crying because the handle had flown up, struck her in the nose, and broken it. Proving that you couldn’t even depend on old St. Nicholas to bring a safe toy.

  Marlie, age eight, at her very first dance recital, tripping and falling on her chubby white tutu-clad butt in front of a tittering audience, thus figuring out early on that she simply wasn’t prima ballerina material.

  Marlie, age eleven, dressed in black at her father’s funeral, clinging to her mother’s hand. Learning for the first time that the man who’d killed her daddy had been his best friend, teaching her you couldn’t trust anyone. Ever.

  Marlie, age nineteen, tearing open the envelope containing a check from Underground Press for three hundred fifty dollars for her first Angelina Avenger comic book. She’d been so proud of herself, so happy.

  It was all there in a microsecond; her memories tumbled in and then were gone quicker than the time it took her to blink. Any second her world would go black forever. Her life cut short at twenty-six.

  And she’d never really lived.

  Why had she been so scared to live?

  She could hear the hit man thrashing around the peach tree behind her. She heard him grunt. Heard the deafening sound of her own blood whooshing in her ears.

  Something hot and fast and quiet whizzed past her head.

  Another bullet.

  Yipes!

  It ricocheted off the bricks on the house and a piece of mortar struck her cheek.

  Get moving. Over the fence.

  Marlie didn’t exactly know how, but she managed to scale the six-foot wooden privacy fence and fling herself into the yard next door without getting killed. Up and over. A mindless plunge. It was a tough scramble and wood splinters scraped her knees, but she negotiated it in one piece.

  Dizzily, she stumbled, fell down in the straw-colored grass but quickly jumped up again. She risked a glance over her shoulder and saw that the hit man wasn’t climbing the fence after her.

  He must be hurt.

  A perverse sense of glee overtook her. Woo-hoo. She charged up the steps of her neighbor’s porch. Inside her head, Madonna had abandoned “American Pie” for “Die Another Day.”

  She turned the door handle.

  Locked.

  No big bad tough macho man was at home to save her. Marlie cried out, but it was a small sound, soft and helpless.

  Don’t admit defeat, Angelina growled. Not yet. No matter what, you have to get inside. Have to find a phone and call 9-1-1.

  Stripping off her shirt, she bunched it around her fist and punched a hole through the paned glass of the upper part of the kitchen door. Heedless of the shards, she stuck her hand through the opening, twisted the lock, and pushed the door inward.

  Marlie shoved her way over the threshold. Her feet, covered only by black-and-white toe socks, glided over the glass, miraculously unscathed. Her heart was a smashing weight inside her chest, shooting blood through her body with the force of a pulsating projectile.

  At that very moment a disturbing notion occurred to her.

  What if her neighbor and the UPS man were partners in crime? They’d both been at her front door just minutes apart.

  Coincidence? Or design?

  There you go with the conspiracy theories again.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  Startled, Marlie raised her gaze and met the sharp-eyed stare of the muscular man standing in the kitchen entryway. Yep, this was her new neighbor, the one who’d been on her front porch just minutes earlier.

  And he was wearing nothing except a scowl and a skimpy bath towel cinched around his gorgeous waist.

  On what would have been her twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, Penelope Montague poured a glass of moderately priced merlot, collected the family photo albums and a box of tissues, and climbed into her lonely four-poster canopy bed for a prolonged sobfest.

  She missed Daniel. As much now as the day she’d learned he’d been murdered. Maybe even more so.

  Their love had been the real deal. Soul mates. Sweethearts. Truly each other’s better halves. There’d never been anyone else for either of them.

  Fifteen years ago a phone call had shattered her world forever. If it hadn’t been for Marlie, Penelope knew she would not have survived. She hadn’t wanted to survive, but her daughter had been only eleven years old and there’d been no one else to look after her.

  So Penelope had refused to give up. She’d put one foot in front of the other, gone to work in her job as head bank teller, cared for her daughter, done what had to be done, and miraculously enough, the time had passed.

  And while her aching heart had never fully healed, the pain had become more bearable.

  Except on days like today.

  She settled back against the pillows, took a sip of wine, and opened the first album.

  Their
wedding.

  Daniel’s smiling face hit Penelope like a fist to the gut. She would go to her grave missing that dashing grin. With a shaking hand, she traced an index finger over the couple in the photograph. They were so young, so far away. They looked so hopeful, so full of plans. It seemed now as if they’d hardly existed at all, those optimistic, idealistic youths.

  She remembered the day Daniel had asked her to marry him. He’d taken her out on his sailboat at sunset—how that man had loved the sea. They’d rocked on the water, talking, drinking champagne, and eating plump, sweet strawberries, feeding each other. Speaking of their hopes and dreams for the future. Holding nothing back. The moon had only been a thin sliver of cheese in the inky black night. Shooting stars hurled across empty spaces, burning themselves up, just for the fun of putting on a show.

  And when Daniel got down on one knee and asked her to be his wife, Penelope could have eaten the whole sky. She felt that damned happy.

  She flipped the pages.

  More smiles. More laughter.

  Their honeymoon on Maui. Their first home in Navy housing. The day, just a month later, when they found out she was pregnant with Marlie. A picture of the three dozen roses they could ill afford that Daniel had bought in celebration.

  She gulped back a mouthful of merlot. Inside her head, inside her heart, Penelope horded a storehouse of memories, a cache of bright, good times.

  Daniel holding her hand while they strolled through the park. Daniel gazing in awe at their newborn daughter, cradling her tiny body snug in his big burly arms. Daniel cooking her breakfast in bed on that first Mother’s Day and burning the eggs, and then taking her to brunch at the fanciest restaurant in town. Daniel, looking so handsome in his Navy uniform, his white shirt starched, his shoes polished until they gleamed.