by Lori Wilde
He plucked a pressure bandage from the first-aid kit and applied it to her wrist. He looked up and caught her staring.
It was only then that Marlie realized her bloody T-shirt was still bunched around her wrist and she was naked from the waist up except for her white cotton bra, her plumpness exposed for this stranger to see.
Her cheeks blazed hot.
She felt vulnerable and nervous and incompetent. The exact opposite of tough, cool, accomplished Angelina Avenger. She wished she could stop feeling so faint of heart and be more like her cartoon heroine.
Marlie’s saving grace was that he looked as disconcerted as she felt. She covered her chest as best she could with her hands as he leaped to his feet. She cut them both some slack and squeezed her eyes tightly closed. She heard him pad away into another room and return a moment later.
He cleared his throat.
Tentatively, she opened one eye to find him wearing snug-fitting blue jeans, a colorful Magnum, P.I., Hawaiian-print shirt, and a pair of old running shoes without socks. Over his arm he carried a man’s long-sleeved white dress shirt.
She opened her other eye.
“Put this on,” he said without preamble—she’d already noticed he was pretty bossy—and tossed the shirt to her. His face was inscrutable.
Scrambling to sit up, Marlie poked her arms through the sleeves and quickly buttoned it closed. The garment was overly starched—more indication he might be military—and scratchy against her skin, but at least she was covered.
The stiff hem of his shirt hung well past her knees, and she had to roll up the sleeves that extended a good five inches below her fingertips.
“Who are you?” he demanded sternly, coming to stand right in front of her so that she was forced to stare at his waist. “And why did you break into my house?”
He was covered up now, but Marlie remembered all too vividly exactly what the man looked like underneath that garish hibiscus-and-parrot-print shirt.
She gulped. Forcing a smile, she did a Princess Di, ducking her head while casting a surreptitious glance up at him. She had trouble socializing with good-looking men under the best of circumstances, and this most certainly was not that.
“I’m your next-door neighbor, Marlie Montague,” she said, trying to sound chirpy. “And you are . . .”
“Joel . . .” He hesitated, scowling. “Joel . . . Jerome. And please don’t try to tell me that knocking the windowpane out of someone’s back door is how you folks in the ’burbs welcome new people into the neighborhood, because I’m not buying it.”
Was that a joke? She cut her eyes to his face. With him it was impossible to tell.
Marlie opened her mouth to explain that she’d been chased by a hit man, and then closed it again. How did you explain something like that?
The reality of what had happened finally hit her. She couldn’t explain it, because she couldn’t talk about it. That was why she had allowed herself to get sidetracked by Joel’s sexiness.
She was in serious denial.
It had been so much easier to ogle Joel than to face what had just happened. The notion that someone had tried to kill her—hell, had nearly killed her—was too much to bear. She wasn’t ready to ask herself the hard questions that needed asking.
Like who? And what? And why?
“Lady,” he growled, “you better start talking, because I’m this close to calling the cops on you for breaking and entering.” He measured off an inch with his thumb and index finger. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and he scared the bejeebers out of her. His eyebrows were pulled downward in a dark frown. From his point of view he had every reason to be angry and suspicious, but the last thing she needed right now was his disapproval.
“I . . . I . . .” Tears pushed against the corners of her eyes.
Oh, swell, Angelina muttered inside Marlie’s head. Here come the waterworks. Suck it up, Montague. Don’t bawl, for God’s sake. He’ll think you’re a big baby.
Marlie tried so hard not to cry that the tears backed up into her sinuses and burned her nose. She’d been able to block out the UPS man’s face (although she was seriously beginning to doubt that he really worked for UPS), replacing it instead with the sight of Joel’s handsome mug, but now she could not stop remembering.
She trembled, from the top of her head to the tip of her socks still embedded with pieces of Joel’s window glass, but to her credit, she did not cry.
Nah, nah, Angelina.
“What’s wrong?” Immediately he was beside her on the sofa. “Are you sick?”
She shook her head. For a minute Marlie thought he was going to slide his big strong arms around her and hold her tight, and she found herself praying that he would, but then his tone turned suspicious and she was glad that he hadn’t.
His eyes narrowed. “Is this just a ploy to keep me from calling the police?”
“Call them,” she whispered. “Call them now.” Marlie looked into the depths of his dark eyes and was desperately relieved to see compassion reflected back at her. He wasn’t such a hard-ass after all. “Please.”
She kept shaking. Why couldn’t she stop shaking? It was over. She’d survived. To distract herself, she picked at the bandage on her wrist.
“Leave that alone,” he scolded. “I don’t think the cut is deep enough for stitches, but the pressure dressing will keep it from bleeding.”
“It’s too tight.”
“That’s the point of a pressure dressing.”
“So go ahead, call the cops.” She reached up to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear, but her hand was quivering so much she couldn’t accomplish even that simple task.
“Something traumatic happened to you. That’s why you broke in. To get help.”
Marlie nodded. “I tried knocking, but you must have been in the shower.”
Suddenly those big strong arms did go around her. She appreciated his comfort and yet hated her need for it all at the same time.
“What happened?” His lips were pressed close to her ear. She felt his speech vibrate deep inside her. The clean, fresh, soapy scent of him filled her nose.
“It . . . he . . .” Her teeth chattered, not from cold, but from fear.
“Take your time. No rush.” He tightened his arm around her and pulled her closer.
She clung to him. It felt both scary and exhilarating to be held in a stranger’s embrace. She’d actually had a few sexual fantasies about him as she had watched him move his stuff into his house. Once or twice she’d lain awake thinking about all the ways they could pleasure each other. It had been a titillating dream.
But there was nothing titillating about the way Joel was holding her now. Nothing erotic or sensual. It was a comfort hug and nothing more, and it was exactly what she needed.
Empowered, she pulled from his arms and met his eyes again. “The UPS dude tried to snuff me.”
“What?”
Joel wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly, but he wanted answers and he wanted them now. Someone had tried to kill her? On his watch? Impossible.
Don’t push. Wait for details. Act first and ask questions later might have served him well as a SEAL, but he was with NCIS now. He was learning the hard way that patience went much further in this job than aggression. It was a hard lesson for a man with a deeply ingrained belief that a good offense is the only defense.
Solemnly, Marlie nodded, her big brown eyes growing wider, the tiny flecks of green catching the light and making her look even more like a 1950s ingenue.
Regardless of his briefing, Joel couldn’t reconcile her wholesome poodle-skirted-bobby-soxer image with the antiauthoritarian extremist who penned the Angelina Avenger comic books.
“He tried to snuff you?”
“You know, bump off, waste, send to meet your maker, dispatch, do in, slay, murder, kill.” She sounded irritated.
“Someone tried to kill you?”
“I know it’s hard to believe,” she said. “I wouldn’t even believe it myself if he ha
dn’t shot at me.”
“He shot at you?”
“Is there an echo in here, or do you have an obsessive-compulsive disorder where you have to repeat everything someone says?” she asked tartly.
“Oh-ho, so you’re something of a brat,” he teased.
He’d never suspected she had a smart mouth. That tidbit hadn’t been included in her dossier, and he’d been studying it nightly for the past two weeks because he hadn’t had anything else to do. The file listed her birthday. She was a Pisces. It detailed her education, which included a bachelor’s degree in graphic design from the University of Texas. It described her medical history. She’d broken a wrist falling out of a tree while reading a book when she was twelve, and her blood type was A-positive. But there hadn’t been a word about a tart tongue.
Joel eyed her.
Was her story true? Or was she merely a superb actress putting him on? But why would she do that? Besides, he knew real fear when he saw it, and this woman had been terrified. Even though she was struggling to hide it by giving him lip and sitting on her trembling hands.
“I am telling you the truth,” she declared belligerently, crossing her arms over her chest.
How had this happened? If someone really had tried to kill her in the few minutes between the time he’d walked away from her house and the moment she’d burst into his, then that meant someone had him under surveillance.
But who?
He was pissed.
His gut squeezed, a visceral and immediate response to this new information. He wanted to hunt down the bastard who’d tried to kill Marlie and strangle him with his bare hands.
Carefully, he schooled his features. He hated lying, even when his job necessitated it, and he had to concentrate in order not to inadvertently give himself away. How would a civilian respond under similar circumstances? What would a normal next-door neighbor do?
He would call the cops.
Without another word, Joel stalked to the phone mounted on the wall between the living room and the kitchen. He cocked his head so he could watch Marlie while he dialed 9-1-1.
She huddled on his sofa, shivering like a wet French poodle. Post-traumatic stress, he diagnosed. He had seen this reaction in inexperienced soldiers in Iraq.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
He told the dispatch operator where and why he needed a patrol car and then Joel hung up. He went back to stand beside Marlie.
Nervously, she worried the hem of the shirt he’d given her to wear, furling and unfurling the material around her index finger. He also noticed she’d bitten her thumbnail to the quick.
“The police are on their way.”
“Thank you for believing me. I know it sounds far-fetched. But it’s what happened.”
“Why would anyone want to kill you?”
“I write controversial comic books. I’ve had death threats.”
“And you didn’t hire a bodyguard?”
“I never really took the threats seriously.”
“And now you’re in trouble.”
“You believe me?”
“It’s obvious something disturbing happened to you,” Joel replied.
So far he’d fooled her. He had acted like an offended home owner in the process of being burgled and then he’d adopted the concerned neighbor act at just the right time, but where did he go from here?
His mission was covert and much more complex than it had seemed on the surface. He had been careful to give her his middle name instead of his last. When she’d known him he’d been ten years old and he’d gone by his initials. Clearly she didn’t remember him at all, and to be honest, he barely remembered her. But while Joel Jerome hadn’t provoked a response in her memory banks, he knew the name Hunter certainly would. It’d be like telling a Hatfield that she was face-to-face with a McCoy.
“You’ve been very kind. I appreciate you bandaging my wound.” Marlie held up her right wrist. She looked so damned vulnerable that it was all he could do not to wrap his arms around her again.
“You’re welcome.”
“May I have something to drink?”
“I’ve got whiskey.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of a glass of water,” she said.
“I’ll get you whiskey,” he said. “It’ll help.”
“Okay.”
Joel went to the kitchen. Chilly wind whistled through the broken windowpane in the back door. Droplets of Marlie’s blood lay drying on his floor. The evidence of what had just happened to her hit him like a brick to the head. As soon as he could, he would review those surveillance tapes and find out exactly what had gone on over at her house.
He turned to get a tumbler from the cabinet and jumped a good six inches when she reached out and touched his shoulder. Some spy he was. He hadn’t even heard her pad into the kitchen behind him.
“What do you want?” Joel knew he sounded testy, but she’d sneaked up on him and caught him off guard again. She was developing a really bad habit of messing with his equilibrium.
Her ink-black lashes fluttered behind the lenses of her glasses as she struggled to hold his gaze. He could see the tug-of-war in her face. She was scared of him, but she didn’t want him to know.
“I didn’t want to be alone,” she murmured.
He felt like an ass. Her nervousness touched a soft spot deep inside of him that he didn’t want to think about. He couldn’t help remembering what she’d looked like stretched out on his sofa with no shirt on. She had a womanly body, curvy and full, and she made him feel hot and edgy inside.
Why?
She was not his type. She was too quiet, lived too much in her head. He liked his women rowdy, physical, and adventuresome.
Like Treeni.
Yeah, and that had worked out so damn swell.
Joel clenched his jaw, forcefully shutting off his attraction. He swept his gaze over her, noticing that she’d stripped off her incongruous black-and-white toe socks and was standing barefooted beside the stove. He had the strongest urge to pick her up and carry her back to the davenport.
It irritated him that she provoked his caveman instincts. He was breathing too hard, reacting to her on a primal level. It had to be the damsel-in-distress thing she had going on.
“Be careful not to step in the broken glass,” he said kindly. Expressing concern for her feet was his way of apologizing for snapping her head off. He poured a splash of whiskey into the tumbler and passed it to her. “Drink this.”
Her lips were full and slick with a subtle salmon shade of lipstick. She licked them nervously, and then tentatively brought the tumbler to her mouth and took a timid swallow.
Immediately her face contorted. Sputtering, she raised a hand to her throat and thrust the tumbler back at him.
“Gawd, that’s awful.”
“It’s whiskey. Don’t tell me you’ve never had any before.”
“Okay, Chug-a-lug,” she said, her big brown eyes flashing with sudden feistiness. “Not everyone has spent their life in a bar.”
There was that smart mouth again. Joel grinned. “What makes you think I’ve spent my life in a bar?”
She waved a petite hand at him. “You’ve got that special missing-link quality about you.”
“Missing link?” Bemused, he arched an eyebrow.
“You know, the chest-thumping, cave-dwelling, bonking-women-on-the-head-with-a-club-and-dragging-them-off-to-your-lair troglodyte thing that you’ve got going on.”
The fire in her eyes stoked his inner Neanderthal. Damn if he didn’t have a sudden urge to drag her off to his lair. He took two quick steps toward her, hemming her in between him and the kitchen counter just to see how far she’d take the flirtation, and instantly her spunkiness evaporated as quickly as it had emerged.
She dropped her gaze, ducked her head, and shrank into herself. The woman talked a good game, but she rattled easy. Joel backed up, realizing he’d crossed into dangerous territory.
The sound of s
irens pulling onto Oleander Circle ended the awkward moment, but left Joel wishing he could provoke more of her spunk. Because if there really was a killer on her tail, she’d need all the spunk she could muster, and he’d need every bit of military cunning at his disposal. He wondered again about the true nature of his assignment and if Admiral Delaney was indeed the one who’d sent him here.
Was it just to get him out of Washington and away from Treeni? Or was there something else going on?
One thing was for sure, his boring babysitting assignment had suddenly morphed into a very dangerous mission and all bets were off.
CHAPTER FOUR
The minute Marlie spied Officer Kemp her heart sank to the soles of her feet. He was stocky, cocky, and walked like the Penguin from the old Batman television series. He had scars on his knuckles, and his face was something of a liability with a big thick nose and an unattractive cleft in his chin.
Out of all the cops in Corpus Christi, why did the patrolman who’d answered Joel’s 9-1-1 call have to be the same cop who’d arrested her three months earlier?
“I know you,” Officer Kemp said the minute he stepped inside Joel’s house.
“Yeah?” She acted like she didn’t know him from an ice hole in a fishing pond in eastern Siberia.
He pointed the tip of his pen at her. “You’re that hippy, dippy, freaky chick who tried to bite me at the Save the Shrimp rally last fall.”
“You maced me,” she protested.
The butthead. It had taken two days for her eyes to get back to normal. Well, actually, Angelina had been the one he maced. Marlie would never have bitten anyone, even if they were touching her inappropriately, the way Kemp had grabbed her butt.
“Only because you wouldn’t get out of the middle of the oncoming traffic,” Kemp said.
“I’m sick of shrimp habitats being destroyed just so greedy corporate restaurants can get rich.” She flipped her hair in a dismissive gesture.
The blue vein at Officer Kemp’s forehead bulged. “Hey, my old man is a shrimper, and you bleeding-heart liberals are ruining his business.”
“Excuse me,” Joel interrupted, “but we have bigger issues than your ongoing shrimp feud.”