Harvard found his voice. “But not all men are losers.”
“I know that. As I got older, my scope of experience widened, and I met men who weren’t drug dealers or thieves. I made friends with some of them. But only friends. I guess old habits die hard. Or maybe I never really trusted any of them. Or maybe I just never met anyone I’ve wanted to get with.” Until now. P.J. didn’t say the words aloud, but they hung between them as clear as the words in a cartoon bubble.
“I’m not telling you this to create some kind of challenge for you,” she added, as if she’d been able to read his mind. “I’m just trying to explain where I’m coming from and why now probably isn’t the best time for me and you.”
Probably isn’t wasn’t the same as just plain isn’t. Harvard knew that if he was going to talk her into inviting him upstairs, now was the time. He should move closer, touch the side of her face, let her see the heat in his eyes. He should talk his way into her room. He should tell her there was so much more for them to say.
But he couldn’t do it. Not without really thinking it through. Instead of reaching for her, he rested his elbows on the railing. “It’s okay,” he said softly. “I can see how this complicates things—for me as well as for you.”
The look in her eyes nearly killed him. She managed to look both relieved and disappointed.
They stood together in silence for several long moments. Then P.J. finally sighed.
Harvard had to hold tightly to the railing to keep from following her as she backed away.
“I’m, uh, I guess I’m going to go back up. To my room. Now.”
Harvard nodded. “Good night.”
She turned and walked away. He stared at the reflected lights dancing on the surface of the swimming pool, thinking about the life P.J. had had as a child, thinking about all she’d had to overcome, thinking about how strong she must’ve been even as a tiny little girl, thinking about her up there in that tree, getting the job done despite her fears, thinking about the sweet taste of her kisses….
And thinking that having a woman like that fall in love with him might not be the worst thing in the world.
CHAPTER TEN
THE FIRST RING jarred her out of a deep sleep.
The second ring made P.J. roll over and squint at the clock.
She picked up the phone on the third ring. “It’s five forty-five, I’ve got my first morning off in more than four weeks. This better be notification from the lottery commission that I’ve just won megabucks.”
“What if I told you I was calling with an offer that was better than winning megabucks?”
Harvard. It was Harvard.
P.J. sat up, instantly awake. She had been so certain her blunt-edged honesty had scared him to death. She’d been convinced her words had sent him running far away from her as fast as his legs could carry him. She’d spent most of last night wondering and worrying if the little news bomb she’d dropped on him had blown up their entire friendship.
She’d spent most of last night realizing how much she’d come to value him as a friend.
“I was positive you’d be awake,” he said cheerfully, as if nothing even the slightest bit heavy had transpired between them. “I pictured you already finishing up your first seven-mile run of the day. Instead, what do I find? You’re still studying the insides of your eyelids! You’re absolutely unaware that the sun is up and shining and that it is a perfect day for a trip to Phoenix, Arizona.”
“I can’t believe you woke me up at five forty-five on one of only two days I have to sleep late for the next four weeks,” P.J. complained, trying to play it cool. She was afraid to acknowledge how glad she was he’d called even to herself, let alone to him.
But she hadn’t scared him away. They were still friends. And she was very, very glad.
“Yeah, I know it’s early,” he said, “but I thought the idea of heading into the heart of the desert during the hottest part of the summer would be something you’d find irresistible.”
“Better than winning megabucks, huh?”
“Not to mention the additional bonus—the chance to see my parents’ new house.”
“You are such a chicken,” P.J. said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with me wanting to see the desert. This is all about you having to deal with seeing your parents’ new house for the first time. Poor baby needs someone to come along and hold his hand.”
“You’re right,” he said, suddenly serious. “I’m terrified. I figure I could either do this the hard way and just suck it up and go, or I could make it a whole hell of a lot easier and ask you to come along.”
P.J. didn’t know what to say. She grasped at the first thing that came to mind. “Your parents have barely moved in. They couldn’t possibly be ready for extra houseguests.”
“I don’t know how big their house is,” Harvard admitted. “I figured you and I would probably just stay in a hotel. In separate rooms,” he added.
P.J. was silent.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said.
“Oh, yeah, what’s that?”
“You’re thinking, the man is dogging me because he wants some.”
“The thought has crossed my mind—”
“Well, you’re both wrong and right,” Harvard told her. “You’re right about the fact that I want you.” He laughed softly. “Yeah, you’re real right about that. But I’m not going to chase or pressure you, P.J. I figure, when you’re ready, if you’re ever ready, you’ll let me know. And until then, we’ll play it your way. I’m asking you to come to Phoenix with me as friends.”
P.J. took a deep breath. “What time is the flight?”
“Would you believe in forty-five minutes?”
P.J. laughed. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’d believe that.”
“Meet me out front in ten minutes,” he told her. “Carryon bag only, okay?”
“Daryl!”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks,” P.J. said. “Just…thanks.”
“I’m the one who should be thanking you for coming with me,” he said, just as quietly. He took a deep breath. “Okay,” he added much more loudly. “We all done with this heartfelt mushy stuff? Good. Let’s go, Richards! Clock’s ticking. Downstairs. Nine minutes! Move!”
“I always think about wind shear.”
Harvard looked over to find P.J.’s eyes tightly shut as the huge commercial jet lumbered down the runway. She had her usual death grip on the armrests. “Well, don’t,” he said. “Hold my hand.”
She opened one eye and looked at him. “Or I think about the improbability of something this big actually making it off the ground.”
He held out his hand, palm up, inviting her to take it. “You want to talk physics, I can give you the 411, as you call it, complete with numbers and equations, on why this sucker flies,” he said.
“And then,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him at all, “when I hear the wheels retract, I think about how awful it would be to fall.”
Harvard pried her fingers from the armrest and placed her hand in his. “I won’t let you fall.”
She smiled ruefully, pulling her hand free. “When you say it like that, I can almost believe you.”
He held her gaze. “It’s okay if you hold my hand.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Friends can hold hands.”
P.J. snorted. “Yeah, I’m sure you and Joe Cat do it all the time.”
Harvard had to smile at that image. “If he needed me to, I’d hold his hand.”
“He’d never need you to.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Look, I’m really okay with flying,” P.J. told him. “It’s just takeoff that gets me a little tense.”
“Yeah,” Harvard said, looking at her hands gripping the armrests. “Now that we’re in the air, you’re really relaxed.”
She had small hands with short, neat, efficient-looking nails. Her fingers were slender but strong. They were good hands, capable hands. She ma
y not have been able to palm a basketball, but neither could most of the rest of the world. He liked the way his hand had engulfed hers. He knew he’d like the sensation of their fingers laced together.
“I am relaxed,” she protested. “You know, all I’d have to do is close my eyes, and I’d be asleep in five minutes. Less.”
“That’s not relaxed,” he scoffed. “That’s defensive unconsciousness. You know you’re stuck in this plane until we land in Phoenix. There’s no way out, so your body just shuts down. Little kids do it all the time when they get really mad or upset. I’ve seen Frankie Catalanotto do it—he’s getting into that terrible-two thing early. One second he’s screaming the walls down because he can’t have another cookie, and the next he’s sound asleep on the living room rug. It’s like someone threw a switch. It’s a defense mechanism.”
“I love it when you compare me to a child going through the terrible twos.”
“You want me to buy you a beer, little girl?”
She gave him something resembling a genuine smile. “On a six-thirty-in-the-morning flight…?”
“Whatever works.”
“I usually bring my Walkman and a book on tape,” P.J. told him. “And I listen to that while I catch up on paperwork. Can’t do too many things and maintain a high level of terror all at the same time.”
Harvard nodded. “You cope. You do what you have to do when you have no choice. But every now and then you can let yourself get away with holding on to someone’s hand.”
P.J. shook her head. “I’ve never felt I could afford that luxury.” She looked away, as if she knew she might have said too much.
And Harvard was suddenly aware of all the things he didn’t know about this woman. She’d told him a little—just a little—about her wretched childhood. He also knew she had huge amounts of willpower and self-control. And drive. She had more drive and determination than most of the SEAL candidates he saw going through BUD/S training in Coronado.
“Why’d you join FInCOM?” he asked. “And I’m betting it wasn’t to collect all those frequent-flyer miles.”
That got him the smile he was hoping for. P.J. had a great smile, but often it was fleeting. She narrowed her eyes as she caught her lower lip between her teeth, pondering his question.
“I don’t really know why,” she told him. “It’s not like I wanted to be a FInCOM agent from the time I was five or anything like that. I went to college to study law. But I found that achingly boring. I had just switched to a business program when I was approached by a FInCOM recruitment team. I listened to what they had to say, taking all the glory and excitement they told me about with a grain of salt, of course, but…”
She shrugged expressively. “I took the preliminary tests kind of as a lark. But each test I passed, each higher level I progressed to, I realized that maybe I was onto something here. I had these instincts—this was something I was naturally good at. It was kind of like picking up a violin and realizing I could play an entire Mozart concerto. It was cool. It wasn’t long before I really started to care about getting into the FInCOM program. And then I was hooked.”
She looked at him. “How about you? Why’d you decide to join the Navy? You told me you were planning to be some kind of college professor right up until the time you graduated from Harvard.”
“English lit,” Harvard told her. “Just like my daddy.”
She was leaning against the headrest of her seat, turned slightly to face him, legs curled underneath her. She was wearing a trim-fitting pair of chinos and a shirt that, although similar to the cut of the T-shirts she normally wore, was made with some kind of smooth, flowing, silky material. It clung to her body enticingly, shimmering very slightly whenever she moved. It looked exotically soft, decadently sensuous. Harvard would have given two weeks’ pay just to touch the sleeve.
“So what happened?” she asked.
“You really want to know?” he asked. “The real story, not the version I told my parents?”
He had her full attention. She nodded, eyes wide and waiting.
“It was about a week and a half after college graduation,” Harvard told her. “I took a road trip to New York City with a bunch of guys from school. Brian Bradford’s sister Ashley was singing in some chorus that was appearing at Carnegie Hall, so he was going down to see that, and Todd Wright was going along with him because he was perpetually chasing fair Ashley. Ash only got two comps, so the rest of us were going to hang at Stu Waterman’s father’s place uptown. We were going to spend two or three days camping out on Waterman’s living room rug, doing the city. We figured we’d catch a show or two, do some club-hopping, just breathe in that smell of money down on Wall Street. We were Harvard grads and we owned the world. Or so I thought.”
“Uh-oh,” P.J. said. “What happened?”
“We pulled into town around sundown, dropped Bri and Todd off near Carnegie Hall, you know, cleaned ’em up a little, brushed their hair and made sure they had the Watermans’ address and their names pinned to their jackets. Stu and Ng and I got something to eat and headed over to Stu’s place. We knew Todd and Brian weren’t going to be back until late, so we decided to go out. I saw in the paper that Danilo Perez’s band was playing at a little club across town. He’s this really hot jazz pianist. He’d gotten pretty massive airplay on the jazz station in Cambridge, but I’d never seen him live, so I was psyched to go. But Stu and Ng wanted to see a movie. So we split up. They went their way, I went mine.”
P.J.’s eyes were as warm as the New York City night Harvard had found himself walking around in all those years ago.
“The concert was out of this world,” he told her. “What happened after it wasn’t, but I’ll never regret going out there. I stayed until they shut the bar down, until Danilo stopped playing, and even then I hung for a while and talked to the band. Their jazz was so fresh, so happening. You know, with some bands, you get this sense that they’re just ghosts—they’re just playing what the big boys played back in the thirties. And other bands, they’re trying so hard to be out there, to be on the cutting edge, they lose touch with the music.”
“So what happened after you left the club?” P.J. asked.
Harvard laughed ruefully. “Yeah, I’m getting to the nasty part of the story, so I’m going off on a tangent—trying to avoid the subject by giving you some kind of lecture on jazz, aren’t I?”
She nodded.
He touched her sleeve with one finger. “I like that shirt. Did I tell you I like that shirt?”
“Thank you,” she said. “What happened when you left the club?”
“All right.” He drew in a deep breath and blew it out through his mouth. “It’s about two-thirty, quarter to three in the morning, and I’d put in a call to Stu at around two, and he’d told me no sweat, they were still up, take my time heading back, but I’m thinking that a considerate house-guest doesn’t roll in after three. I figure I better hurry, catch a cab. I try, but after I leave the club, every taxi I see just slows, checks me out, then rolls on by. I figure it’s the way I’m dressed—jams and T-shirt and Nikes. Nothing too out there, but I’m not looking too fresh, either. I don’t look like a Harvard grad. I look like some black kid who’s out much too late.
“So okay. Cab’s not gonna stop for me. It ticks me off, but it’s not the end of the world. It’s not like it’s the first time that ever happened. Anyway, I’d spent four years on the Harvard crew team, and I’m in really good shape, so I figure, it’s only a few miles. I’ll run.”
Harvard could see from the look in P.J.’s eyes that she knew exactly what he was going to say next. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s right. You guessed it. I haven’t gone more than four blocks before a police car pulls up alongside me, starts pacing me. Seems that the sight of a black man running in that part of town is enough to warrant a closer look.”
“You didn’t grow up in the city,” P.J. said. “If you had, you would have known not to run.”
“Oh, I knew not to run. I ma
y have been a suburb boy, but I’d been living in Cambridge for four years. But these streets were so empty, I was sure I’d see a patrol car coming. I was careless. Or maybe I’d just had one too many beers. Anyway, I stop running, and they’re asking me who I am, where I’ve been, where I’m going, why I’m running. They get out of the squad car, and it’s clear that they don’t believe a single word I’m saying, and I’m starting to get annoyed. And righteous. And I’m telling them that the only reason they even stopped their car was because I’m an African-American man. I’m starting to dig in deep to the subject of the terrible injustice of a social system that could allow such prejudice to occur, and as I’m talking, I’m reaching into my back pocket for my wallet, intending to show these skeptical SOBs my Harvard University ID card, and all of a sudden, I’m looking down the barrel of not one, but two very large police-issue handguns.
“And my mind just goes blank. I mean, I’ve been stopped and questioned before. This was not the first time that had happened. But the guns were new. The guns were something I hadn’t encountered before.
“So these guys are shouting at me to get my hands out of my pockets and up where they can see them, and I look at them, and I see the whites of their eyes. They are terrified, their fingers twitching and shaking on the triggers of handguns that are big enough to blow a hole in me no surgeon could ever stitch up. And I’m standing there, and I think, damn. I think, this is it. I’m going to die. Right here, right now—simply because I am a black man in an American city.
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 115