by Lori Wilde
But there had been other memories as well.
Dark, moody memories. The secrets Daniel’s job forced him to keep. The months he was away on missions, leaving Penelope alone with Marlie.
Ah, dear sweet Marlie, who was just a little bit strange. The girl lived too much inside her head. She had always been an introvert, preferring to make up imaginary friends rather than playing with real kids. She and Daniel had wanted other children. Penelope knew that having a brother or sister would cure Marlie’s flights of fantasy, but they’d tried and failed to get pregnant a second time.
Then Daniel had been killed.
His death had affected their daughter in irrevocable ways, and Penelope despaired that Marlie would ever stop being at odds with the world around her. She was afraid to trust people she hadn’t known for a very long time, and even then, her allegiance was hard-won.
And yet Marlie always seemed to be searching for a hero. Someone that she could look up to. Someone she could believe in. Penelope watched her daughter’s beliefs play out in comic books she created. The lone, strong woman fighting against the masculine tenets of power and authority. She wanted to be like Angelina Avenger, but she was too scared to trust herself, too blinded to her own inner strength. She couldn’t seem to see that if she would just dare to look inward instead of outside herself for validation, she would find the hero that she was searching for right there in her own mirror.
And if Marlie didn’t learn to trust others, she was never going to find the unity that only love could bring. And how could she love if she couldn’t trust?
Penelope knew she nagged Marlie too much about finding a man. Of course, she didn’t want her to have just any man. What she wanted for her daughter was the grand, sweeping passion that she’d had with Daniel.
A violent, headlong rush of emotions stormed her, stomped her heart. Guilt and grief, pity for herself, for the happiness that had slipped through her fingers. Anger, betrayal, hurt, loss.
Throbbing, aching, burning, raw loss.
It was too much to bear.
Penelope broke down. Crushed underneath the racking sorrow, she drew her knees to her chest. Wave after wave besieged her until she was left limp and shaking. Finally, when she could cry no more, Penelope wiped her eyes, polished off the wine, and poured herself a second glass. From the middle drawer of her bedside table she took out a bottle of sleeping pills.
How many times in the past fifteen years had she seriously considered taking her own life?
A dozen? Two dozen? Only her love for her daughter had kept her from swallowing those pills.
But Marlie was grown now and no longer needed her as much as she once had, and Penelope missed Daniel so desperately. How easy it would be to slip into a deep, dreamless sleep and embrace death.
What bliss.
Silence.
She opened the bottle and poured the fifty white oblong pills into the palm of her hand. They were so small it would only take a couple of mouthfuls to get them all down. Hand trembling, she brought the tablets to her mouth.
The telephone rang.
Penelope closed her eyes. Swallow the pills, ignore the telephone. Do it. End your misery. Go be with Daniel at last.
But what if it was Marlie on the other end of the line?
The phone rang again.
Penelope couldn’t do it. Reluctantly, she put the pills back in the bottle and reached for the telephone.
“Hello?”
At first she heard nothing except an odd crackling as if there was disturbance on the line.
Or as if it was bugged. Her daughter wasn’t the only one with a suspicious mind.
“Who’s there?” Penelope demanded.
More crackling.
Static. Like a ship-to-shore call. Daniel had made enough of them for Penelope to recognize the sound. She pressed the flat of her hand against her heart and held her breath.
The crackling continued and sudden fear swept through her. She started to hang up when she heard someone inhale sharply.
“Yes? Hello? Who is this?”
And then the caller said the word that no one had spoken to her in fifteen years. A word resonant with double meaning. The sound of it dropped Penelope to her knees.
“Rendezvous.”
Their eyes met over the smashed glass of the broken pane from his back-door window.
Time stopped.
They were locked, frozen in the moment. Her startled. Him stunned.
It was like they recognized each other in a significant but inexplicable way. In that suspended second, their eyes spoke, saying what a man and a woman don’t say until they’ve known each other for years . . . things a man and a woman might never tell each other, not even in the bliss of their marriage bed after decades together.
It was as if they’d known each other beyond forever, beyond time.
Hogwash.
What in the hell was wrong with him?
Joel had been caught with his pants down. That’s what had happened, and he was furious with himself. He’d had one job. Keep a close eye on Marlie Montague. And he’d fucked up.
Major.
For a fraction of a second, Marlie stared at him as if he’d just saved her life. Her eyes overflowed with gratitude and relief that barely hid a lurking dread. The pallor of her cheeks, her rapid shallow breathing, and her quivering bottom lip told him something terrible had just happened.
But what?
“I . . . I . . . ,” she stammered and swayed.
And that’s when Joel noticed the blood and realized her knees were about to crumple.
She was in shock.
He moved toward her, barely recognizing that the knot at his towel could come unraveled at any minute, and he caught her just before she plowed face-first into the broken glass.
His lingering high school football locker-room fear of athlete’s foot had instilled in him the habit of wearing rubber flip-flops whenever he got out of the shower. Otherwise, his feet would have been shredded. He scooped her into his arms, carried her into the living room, and laid her on the davenport. She looked up at him, wide-eyed and terrified.
“Stay put,” he commanded. Storming into the bathroom, he retrieved his first-aid kit.
Joel felt slightly off balance, as if his brain were a little sticky, but he couldn’t say why. He’d been trained to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances and not only survive, but thrive. Was he losing his touch already? Only eighteen months after leaving the SEALs? He didn’t like thinking that might be the case.
He returned to the living room to find Marlie staring blankly off into space. She was definitely in shock. He knelt on the floor next to the davenport, opened his first-aid kit, and then gently reached for her injured hand. Her skin felt cold beneath his fingers. She sucked in her breath.
“I’m sorry to hurt you,” he said, “but this needs attention.”
“I know,” she mumbled.
She’d sliced a two-inch-long gap from the fleshy part of the pad underneath her thumb to the top of the wrist, very narrowly missing the artery. A fraction of a millimeter in the wrong direction and the wound could have been life-threatening.
Joel felt something fierce build inside him. He recognized his internal drive to protect a woman in need. He didn’t like feeling this way, but there it was.
Whenever a vulnerable woman’s face beseeched, “Can I get a hero?” Joel could never refuse the call.
Tightening his jaw, he relied on his basic first-aid training and tried not to notice that her T-shirt was wrapped around her arm and not her lush body. But while his fingers applied pressure to the wound, he couldn’t help casting a quick glance at her chest.
Wow.
Ashamed of himself, he snapped his gaze back to her face.
She was much prettier than he’d initially thought. From a distance and on the surveillance camera all he’d seen of her were those oversized black-framed glasses and baggy clothes. But up close and personal, Joel could see beneath th
e surface facade.
Her cherubic cheeks gave her the appearance of a friendly angel, the kind on Christmas plates that old ladies collected. Her skin was flawless, her hair a silky dark brown mass, and her eyelashes long and thick. Her lips were small, but shaped in a perfect bow.
Only her nose seemed out of place.
It crooked at the bridge as if she might have broken it once upon a time. Yet it was that crooked little honker that lent an air of unexpected pride and dignity to her face.
Their gazes met again. He spotted a mixture of emotions behind her glasses. Confusion, worry, fear, and something else.
Awe? Curiosity?
No, that wasn’t quite it. Rather, it was more like she’d looked into his eyes and knew him instantly both inside and out.
Weird. Joel shook off the unsettling thoughts. Suddenly he felt winded, exposed, his nerve endings raw. Yep, he’d been caught with his pants down all right, and there was nothing to be done about it. Except ignore the feeling and find out why the woman who wouldn’t let him into her house minutes before had just come crashing through his back door.
CHAPTER THREE
Admiral Augustus Hunter had gotten everything he’d ever wanted. An oversized office at the Pentagon. Fancy house in Maryland. Two top-of-the-line Mercedes Benzes. A pretty young trophy wife sporting bought-and-paid-for tits twice the size of her waist. And a second chance to be a better father to his three-year-old daughter Amy than he had been with his son Joel. Although at Gus’s age, taking into account his heart condition, it was unlikely he would live to dance at Amy’s wedding.
Gus had come up the ranks the easy way, covering his bosses’ asses, keeping secrets, playing politics. He’d just finished a three-hour lunch that included Russian caviar at a five-star restaurant with two of the most powerful men in Washington. He retrieved his tailor-made overcoat from the cloak-check girl, flipped up the collar, and shrugged into it as he stepped through the revolving door.
“Silver SL500,” he said, palming his claim ticket and a twenty-dollar bill to the valet who greeted him on the sidewalk. “Careful with her.”
Beaming, the valet bustled away.
Gus stuck his hand in his pocket in search of a cigar and found instead a rolled-up magazine. Aw, hell. Nobody could get anything right these days. He went back inside, the magazine still clutched in his hand.
“You gave me the wrong coat,” he said to the cloakroom girl, who had a blowsy Monica Lewinsky look.
“No, I didn’t,” she denied.
“Yes, you did,” he argued. “I found this in the pocket.” He shook the magazine at her. “It isn’t mine.”
“One,” the girl said, raising a finger to tick off her points. “Yours was the only navy blue coat I’ve had in the cloakroom all day, so no mix-up there.”
Gus stared at her hands. At first he thought she must have shut all her fingers in a car door, but then he realized she wore black nail polish, her petulant Goth attitude barely covered by her crisp maroon-and-white work uniform. Young women hadn’t been so sassy in his day. He hoped Amy would have more respect for her elders when she was twenty.
“And two,” she continued. “The comic book was in your pocket when you gave your coat to me. I know because as I was hanging it up, the comic fell out, and I remember thinking how weird it was that an old Republican geezer would be reading Angelina Avenger.”
Gus ignored the old-geezer part and unfurled the magazine. It was indeed an Angelina Avenger comic book.
He frowned. There was a paper clip marking a particular page. He flipped it open and read the cartoon frame. And then his greatest fear was upon him.
For fifteen years he’d been looking over his shoulder, waiting for disaster to strike, and now it was happening. The sins that he’d thought he had buried deeply enough that no one would ever find them had risen from the grave.
And his only son was caught in the cross fire.
The sins of the father.
Gus gritted his teeth and stared at the comic book again. It was put out by some cheesy underground press and written and illustrated by Daniel’s daughter, Marlie Montague.
The young woman had no idea what she’d wrought.
His pulse beat erratically. Son of a bitch, he’d forgotten to take his Inderal that morning.
Unwittingly, Joel had been dropped into the middle of a complex cover-up fifteen years in the making, and he would have no inkling what he was up against.
Agitated, Gus spun away from the cloak-check girl and hurried back outside to find his Mercedes waiting at the curb. He climbed in but did not put the car in gear. Instead, he whipped out his cell phone and called his assistant on his private cell number rather than the office extension. Gus knew well enough the CIA bugged the Pentagon land lines, and he rarely used his office phone for anything more than phoning home. He also changed his cell phone number often and made sure his assistant did the same. Call him paranoid, but he had too much insider knowledge not to be ultracautious when discussing sensitive matters.
Petty Officer Third Class Abel Johnson answered on the second ring. “Yes, sir?”
“You picked up my coat at the cleaners yesterday.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you notice if there was anything in the pocket?”
“No, sir. I did put your cigars and lighter in the right-side pocket as usual after I brought it into the office.”
“And you didn’t see anything else in the pocket?”
“No, sir.”
Gus cursed and flung the comic into the backseat. Who and where had the damn thing come from?
“Are you all right, Admiral?”
“Fine.” He was anything but fine. He felt desperate and unwell. Someone knew his secret, and they had sent him the comic to let him know that they knew.
“Is your heart acting up?”
“I said I’m fine, dammit.” Gus had made some bad choices in his life, and they were coming back to haunt him. The Navy had cost him not only his best friend, but his first marriage and his relationship with his son.
And it wasn’t over yet.
Mentally, Gus closed down his emotions. His ex-wife, Deirdre, claimed he was a master at shutting off his feelings, and she was right. The ability to do just that had made him the consummate commander. In his job, with the secrets he kept, he had no option. Feelings were for females and fools.
Luckily, Amber didn’t care if he expressed his feelings or not, just as long as he kept her in designer clothes and Amy in a chichi private preschool. But the grinding in his gut was caused by much more than just strong coffee and rich food. Gus Hunter was afraid.
Very afraid.
He couldn’t undo the past, but he could definitely change the future. He had to warn Penelope Montague.
They hadn’t spoken since Daniel’s funeral when she’d spit in his face and called him a heartless murdering bastard. He’d never blamed her. He understood how she felt. Things couldn’t have played out any other way. He just prayed she would listen to him now.
“I have to leave D.C.,” Gus said to Abel. “Right away.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about your afternoon appointments?”
“Reschedule them.”
“Until when?”
“Until I tell you otherwise.” Gus switched off his cell and drove to the nearest pay phone. He called information for Penelope’s number. Her phone rang. Once, twice, three times.
Finally, her voice mail answered. Gus hung up when it occurred to him that her phone might be bugged as well. Dammit. His pulse beat a couplet. Where had he put that Inderal?
He searched in his glove compartment, found the bottle of heart medication, and dry-swallowed a tablet. Penelope was in Corpus Christi, Texas, and he had to get to her before the wrong people did. He had to find her.
Today.
He would take the next flight to Corpus. He’d tell Amber he was going out of town on business
. She never questioned him. In fact, he’d tell her to take Amy and visit her mother in upstate New York for a few days. Get them out of the vicinity. Just in case there was any collateral damage.
Because Penelope’s very life depended on him. As did the lives of his son and her daughter.
And, quite possibly, the fate of the free world.
Momentarily, Marlie forgot all about what had brought her to this man’s house.
Assassin? What assassin?
Who could even think rationally with such a big, strapping, handsome man nestled so close?
The flat of his masculine thumb was pressed against the cut at her wrist. Her heart thumped and her stomach flip-flopped, heat pulsating beneath her flesh. Oddly enough, his presence made her feel secure in a way she hadn’t felt since her father had died.
Watch out.
She knew better than to blindly trust anyone. She didn’t even trust her own ability to tell if a man was a good guy or not. It was always safer to assume the worst. That way you were never surprised or disappointed by anything or anyone.
His head was down, his attention focused on tending her cut. His lean jaw was clean-shaven now, and there was a small dot of blood on his upper lip where he’d nicked himself shaving.
Beads of water from his interrupted shower clung to his earlobes like dewdrops. His broad shoulders were tensed, his mouth sensual, and his breath tickled deliciously warm against her heated skin. Her gaze fixed on his long, strong fingers, the heavy tendons, the etching of thick blue veins.
Pulling her gaze from his hands, she peeked at his face.
The minute beginnings of smile lines feathered lightly out from his eyes, giving him character. He probably wasn’t much more than thirty, although the severe haircut made him seem older. His lips were softly curved, full but not girlie voluptuous.
Naughtily, she lowered her lashes and allowed her gaze to rove downward past the uncompromising lines of his chin to the taut column of his throat to his angular collarbone and beyond.
She caught her breath.