She could see Harvard way up ahead on the trail, still in the lead. He’d taken off his T-shirt, and his powerful muscles gleamed with sweat. He moved like a dancer, each step graceful and sure. He made running look effortless.
As Joe Cat cranked their speed up another few notches, P.J. found that it was getting harder to talk and run at the same time.
The captain kept his mouth tightly shut as they raced past first Schneider and Greene, then Tim Farber, but it wasn’t because he couldn’t talk. Once out of the other agents’ earshot, he turned to grin at her.
“My grandmother could outrun those guys.”
“How far are we going today?” P.J. asked as they passed the five-mile mark. Her words came out in gasps.
“However far H. wants to take us.”
Harvard didn’t look as if he were planning on stopping anytime soon. In fact, as P.J. watched, he punched up the speed.
“You know, I used to be faster than H.,” Joe told her. “But then he went and shaved his head and cut down on all that wind resistance.”
P.J. had to laugh.
“So I asked Ronnie, what do you think, should I shave my head, too, and she tells me no way. I say, why not? She’s always talking about how sexy Harvard is—about how women can’t stay away from him, and I’m thinking maybe I should go for that Mr. Clean look, too. So she tells me she likes my hair long, in what she calls romance-cover-model style. But I can’t stop thinking about that wind resistance thing, until she breaks the news to me that if I shaved my head, I wouldn’t look sexy. I’d look like a giant white big toe.”
P.J. cracked up, trying to imagine him without any hair and coming up with an image very similar to what his wife had described.
Joe was grinning. “Needless to say, I’m keeping my razor securely locked in the medicine cabinet.”
Harvard heard the melodic burst of P.J.’s laughter and gritted his teeth.
It wasn’t that it sounded as if she were flirting with Joe Cat when she laughed that way. It wasn’t that he was jealous in any way of the special friendship she seemed to have formed with Alpha Squad’s captain. It wasn’t even so much that he was having one bitch of a bad day.
But then she laughed again, and the truth of the matter smacked him square in the face.
She did sound as if she were flirting with Joe Cat. Harvard was jealous not only of that, but of any kind of friendship she and the captain had formed, and he couldn’t remember ever having had a worse day in the past year, if not the past few years. Not since that new kid who transferred from SEAL Team One had panicked during a HALO training op. The cells of his chute hadn’t opened right, and he hadn’t fully cut free before pulling the emergency rip cord. That second chute had gotten tangled with the first and never opened. The kid fell to his death, and Harvard had had to help search for his remains. That had been one hell of a bad day.
He knew he should count his blessings. No one had died today. But thinking that way only made him feel worse. It made him feel guilty on top of feeling lousy.
He took a short cut to the base, knowing he could run forever today and it wouldn’t make him feel any better. He ran hard and fast, setting a pace he knew would leave the three male finks in the dust.
He had no doubt that P.J. would keep up. Whenever she ran, she got that same look in her eye he’d seen in many a determined SEAL candidate who made it through BUD/S to the bitter end. Like them, she would have to be dead and buried before she would quit. If then.
It was almost too bad she was a woman. As she’d pointed out to him, she was one of the best shooters in all of FInCOM. She was good, she was tough, but the fact was, she was a girl. Try as he might, he couldn’t accept that there was a place for females in combat situations. The sooner she got promoted up and out of the field, the better.
He ran faster, and as they reached the home stretch, Lucky was cursing him with every step. Bobby and Wes were complaining in stereo by the time Harvard slowed to a stop. Even Blue and Joe Cat were out of breath.
P.J. was trying not to look as if she were gasping for air, but she doubled over, head down, hands on her knees.
Harvard backtracked quickly, hoisting her into a more vertical position by the back of her T-shirt. “You know better than to stick your head down lower than your heart after running like that,” he said sharply.
“Sorry,” she gasped.
“Don’t apologize to me,” he said harshly. “I’m not the one whose reputation is going to suffer when you live up to everyone’s expectations by blacking out and keeling over like some fainthearted little miss.”
Her eyes sparked. “And I’m not the great, huge, stupid he-man who had to prove some kind of macho garbage by running the entire team as hard as he possibly could.”
“Believe me, baby, that wasn’t even half as hard as I can get.” He smiled tightly to make sure she caught the double entendre, then lowered his voice. “Just say the word, and I’ll give you a private demonstration.”
Her eyes narrowed, her mouth tightened, and he knew he’d gone too far. “What’s up with you today?”
He started to turn away, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm, unmindful of the fact that his skin was slick with sweat. “Are you all right, Daryl?” she asked quietly. Beneath the flash of anger and impatience in her eyes, he could see her deep concern.
He could handle fighting with her. He wanted to fight with her. The soft warmth of her dark brown eyes only made him feel worse. Now he felt bad, topped with guilt for feeling bad, and he also felt like a certified fool for lashing out at her.
Harvard swore softly. “Sorry, Richards, I was way out of line. Just…go away, okay? I’m not fit to be around today.”
He looked up to find Joe Cat standing behind him. “I’m going to give everyone the rest of the morning free,” the captain told him quietly. “Let’s meet at the Quonset hut after lunch.”
Harvard knew Joe was giving them free time because of him. Joe knew Harvard needed a few hours to clear his head.
He shouldn’t have needed it—he was too experienced, too much of a professional to become a head case at this stage of his life. But before Harvard could argue, Joe Cat walked away.
“You want to take a walk?” P.J. asked Harvard.
He didn’t get a chance to answer before she tugged at his arm. “Let’s go,” she said, gesturing with her chin toward the path they’d run along. She grabbed several bottles of water from her gym bag and handed one to him.
Damn, it was hot. Rivers of perspiration were running down his chest, down his legs, dripping from his chin, beading on his shoulders and arms. He opened the bottle and took a long drink. “What, you want to psychoanalyze me, Richards?”
“Nope. I’m just gonna listen,” she said. “That is, if you want to talk.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Okay,” she said matter-of-factly. “Then we’ll just walk.”
They walked in silence for an entire mile, then two. But right around the three-mile marker, she took the boardwalk right-of-way that led to the beach. He followed in silence, watching as she sat in the sand and began pulling off her sneakers.
She looked at him. “Wanna go for a swim?”
“Yeah.” He sat next to her and took off his running shoes.
P.J. pulled off her T-shirt. She was wearing a gray running bra underneath. It covered her far better than a bathing suit top would have, but the sight of it, the sight of all that smooth, perfect skin reminded him a hundredfold that he wasn’t taking a walk with one of the boys.
“Look at this,” P.J. said. “I can practically wring my shirt out.”
Harvard tried his best to look. He purposely kept his gaze away from the soft mounds of her breasts outlined beneath the thick gray fabric of her running top. She wasn’t overly endowed, not by any means, but what she had sure was nice.
Her arms and her stomach glistened with perspiration as she leaned forward to peel off her socks. It didn’t take much imagination to
picture her lying naked on his bed, her gleaming dark skin set off by the white cotton of his sheets, replete after hours of lovemaking. He tried to banish the image instantly. Thinking like that was only going to get him into trouble.
“Come on,” she said, scrambling to her feet. She held out her hand for him, and he took it and let her pull him up.
He wanted to hold on to her, to lace their fingers together, but she broke away, running fearlessly toward the crashing surf. She dove over the breakers, coming up to float on top of the swells beyond.
Harvard joined her in that place of calm before the breaking ocean. The current was strong, and there was a serious undertow. But P.J. had proven her swimming skills many times over during the past few weeks. He didn’t doubt her ability to hold her own.
She pushed her hair out of her face and adjusted her ponytail. “You know, up until last year, I didn’t know how to swim.”
Harvard was glad the water was holding him up, because otherwise, he would have fallen over. “You’re kidding!”
“I grew up in D.C.,” she told him matter-of-factly. “In the inner city. The one time we moved close enough to the pool at the Y, it was shut down for repairs for eight months. By the time it opened again, we were gone.” She smiled. “When I was really little, I used to pretend to swim in the bathtub.”
“Your mother and father never took you to the beach in the summer to stay cool?”
P.J. laughed as if something he’d said was extremely funny. “No, I never even saw the ocean until I went on a class trip to Delaware in high school. I meant to take swimming lessons in college, but I never got around to it. Then I got assigned to this job. I figured if I were going to be working with Navy SEALs, it’d be a good idea if I knew how to swim. I was right.”
“I learned to swim when I was six,” Harvard told her. “It was the summer I…”
She waited, and when he didn’t go on, she asked, “The summer you what?”
He shook his head.
But she didn’t let it go. “The summer you decided you were going to join the Navy and become a SEAL,” she guessed.
The water felt good against his hot skin. Harvard let himself float. “No, I was certain right up until the time I finished college that I was going to be an English lit professor, just like my old man.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
She squinted at him. “I’m trying to picture you with glasses and one of those jackets with the suede patches on the elbows and maybe even a pipe.” She laughed. “Somehow I can’t manage to erase the M-16 that’s kind of permanently hanging over your shoulder, and the combination is making for quite an interesting image.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Harvard treaded water lazily. “Laugh at me all you want. Chicks dig guys who can recite Shakespeare. And who knows? I might decide to get my teaching degree some day.”
“The M-16 will certainly keep your class in line.”
Harvard laughed.
“We’re getting off the subject here,” P.J. said. “You learned to swim when you were six and it was the summer you also made your first million playing the stock market? No,” she answered her own question, “if you had a million dollars gathering interest from the time you were six, you wouldn’t be here now. You’d be out on your yacht, commanding your own private navy. Let’s see, it must’ve been the summer you got your first dog.”
“Nope.”
“Hmm. The summer you had your first date?”
Harvard laughed. “I was six.”
She grinned at him. “You seem the precocious type.”
They’d come a long way, Harvard realized. Even though there was still a magnetic field of sexual tension surrounding them, even though he still didn’t want her in the CSF team and she damn well knew it, they’d managed to work around those issues and somehow become friends.
He liked this girl. And he liked talking to her. He would’ve liked going to bed with her even more, but he knew women well enough to recognize that when this one shied away from him, she wasn’t just playing some game. As far as P. J. Richards was concerned, no didn’t mean try a little harder. No meant no. And until that no became a very definite yes, he was going to have to be content with talking.
But Harvard liked to talk. He liked to debate. He enjoyed philosophizing. He was good with words, good at verbal sparring. And who could know? Maybe if he talked to P.J. for long enough, he’d end up saying something that would start breaking through her defenses. Maybe he’d begin the process that would magically change that no to a yes.
“It was the summer you first—”
“It was the summer my family moved to our house in Hingham,” Harvard interrupted. “My mother decided that if we were going to live a block away from the ocean, we all had to learn to swim.”
P.J. was silent. “Was that the same house your parents are moving out of today?” she finally asked.
He froze. “Where did you hear about that?”
She glanced at him. “Joe Cat told me.”
P.J. had been talking to Joe Cat about him. Harvard didn’t know whether to feel happy or annoyed. He’d be happy to know she’d been asking questions about him. But he’d be annoyed as hell if he found out that Joe had been attempting to play matchmaker.
“What, the captain just came over to you and said, guess what? Hot news flash—Harvard’s mom and pop are moving today?”
“No,” she said evenly. “He told me because I asked him if he knew what had caused the great big bug to crawl up your pants.”
She pushed herself forward to catch a wave before it broke and bodysurfed to shore like a professional—as if she’d been doing it all of her life.
She’d asked Joe. Harvard followed her out of the water feeling foolishly pleased. “It’s no big deal—the fact that they’re moving, I mean. I’m just being a baby about it.”
P.J. sat in the sand, leaned back against her elbows and stretched her legs out in front of her. “Your parents lived in the same house for, what? Thirty years?”
“Just about.” Harvard sat next to her. He stared at the ocean in an attempt to keep from staring at her legs. Damn, she had nice legs. It was impossible not to look, but he told himself that was okay, because he was making damn sure he didn’t touch. Still, he wanted to.
“You’re not being a baby. It is a big deal,” she told him. “You’re allowed to have it be a big deal, you know.”
He met her eyes, and she nodded. “You are allowed,” she said again.
She was so serious. She looked as if she were prepared to go into mortal combat over the fact that he had the right to feel confused and upset over his parents’ move. He felt his mouth start to curve into a smile, and she smiled, too. The connection between them sparked and jumped into high gear. Damn. When they had sex, it was going to be great. It was going to be beyond great.
But it wasn’t going to be today. If he were smart he’d rein in those wayward thoughts, keep himself from getting too overheated.
“It’s just so stupid,” he admitted. “But I’ve started having these dreams where suddenly I’m ten years old again, and I’m walking home from school and I get home and the front door’s locked. So I ring the bell and this strange lady comes to the screen. She tells me my family has moved, but she doesn’t know where. And she won’t let me in, and I just feel so lost, as if everything I’ve ever counted on is gone and… It’s stupid,” he said again. “I haven’t actually lived in that house for years. And I know where my parents are going. I have the address. I already have their new phone number. I don’t know why this whole thing should freak me out this way.”
He lay back in the sand, staring at the hazy sky.
“This opportunity is going to be so good for my father,” he continued. “I just wish I could have taken the time to go up there, help them out with the logistics.”
“Where exactly are they moving?” P.J. asked.
“Phoenix, Arizona.”
“No ocean view there.”
“Where do you live?” she asked.
Harvard couldn’t answer that without consideration. “I have a furnished apartment here in Virginia.”
“That’s just temporary housing. Where do you keep your stuff?”
“What stuff?”
“Your bed. Your kitchen table. Your stamp collection. I don’t know, your stuff.”
He lay down, shaking his head. “I don’t have a bed or a kitchen table. And I used the last stamp I bought to send a letter to my little sister at Boston University.”
“How about your books?” P.J. ventured. “Where do you keep your books?”
“In a climate-controlled self-storage unit in Coronado, California.” He laughed and closed his eyes. “Damn, I’m pathetic, aren’t I? Maybe I should get a sign for the door saying Home Sweet Home.”
“Are you sure you ever really moved out of your parents’ house?” she asked.
“Maybe not,” he admitted, his eyes still closed. “But if that’s the case, I guess I’m moving out today, huh?”
P.J. hugged her legs to her chest as she sat on the beach next to the Alpha Squad’s Senior Chief.
“Maybe that’s why I feel so bad,” he mused. “It’s a symbolic end to my childhood.” He glanced at her, amusement lighting his eyes. “Which I suppose had to happen sooner or later, considering that in four years I’ll be forty.”
Harvard Becker was an incredibly beautiful-looking man. His body couldn’t have been more perfect if some artisan had taken a chisel to stone and sculpted it. But it was his eyes that continued to keep P.J. up at night. So much was hidden in their liquid brown depths.
It had been a bold move on her part to suggest they go off alone to walk. With anyone else, she wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But with everyone else, the boundaries of friendship weren’t so hard to define.
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 109