“I would’ve just left you to sleep,” she told him, “but the sun was right on your face. I was trying to, you know, pretend I was a tree or something.”
He stared at her as if she’d just spoken in Greek. “A tree?” He wasn’t quite glowering, but it was close.
“For shade,” she explained. “You know, from the sun?” Great, she was babbling. “I didn’t want you to get burned.”
Stan touched his peeling nose. “Too late.”
“You should really use sunblock.” What was she doing? She should really just stand up and walk away. He obviously didn’t want to deal with her right now.
“Why bother? With this face?” He pretended to laugh, but he was serious. And a little embarrassed by the topic. He actually thought he was . . .
“You have a wonderful face,” she said before she stopped to think. “When you smile . . . You should smile more.”
Great, now she’d completely embarrassed him. Or maybe she’d just totally embarrassed herself. Again. It was definitely time to run away. She shifted her weight, intending to push herself up and off the ground.
“My father looks like Marlon Brando,” Stan told her. He didn’t sound at all embarrassed. He sounded like Stan. “You know, before he got fat. Brando, I mean. Not Stan Senior. He’s not fat. He can still run an eight-minute mile.”
Despite being tired, despite wanting her gone, he was talking her down from the ledge again in that easygoing way he had.
“And no, I don’t look anything like him,” Stan continued, as if he knew that she’d glanced at him to try to see if there was any resemblance. “Aside from basic body type—height and weight, you know, standard gorilla build. Lots of upper body strength with twigs for legs. I got that direct from Stan Senior.”
Twigs for legs. He actually thought . . . Teri kept her mouth tightly shut, afraid to tell him that she thought his legs were as perfect as the rest of him.
“As far as looks go, though, I don’t take after my mother either—except for the fair skin. And I certainly didn’t inherit her patience, that’s for damn sure.” Something in his voice had changed. It was almost imperceptible, but Teri heard it. He was telling her things he didn’t usually tell people. Or maybe she just wished he was.
“She was really something,” Stan said, with that same little trace of . . . wistfulness? Yes, wistfulness in his voice. Teri wasn’t imagining it. Big, bad Senior Chief Wolchonok had loved his mother deeply. “She was from Denmark—she lived there as a kid, came over after the war with her older sister. Do you know, the envoy from Israel—Helga Shuler—she knew my mother in Denmark. It’s the weirdest thing—she has the same accent when she speaks English that my mother did. It’s nice, you know? After this is over, I’m going to sit down with her and talk.”
This man wanted to be friends with her, Teri realized. Nothing more than friends. Stan couldn’t have been more clear about that if he’d taken out a full page ad in the New York Times to accompany his body language. But he didn’t have to. She could take a hint.
Stan liked her. He’d said so. But when he’d said it, he was using the adult definition of the word liked, not the seventh grade definition. In fact, he probably thought of her the same way he thought of Mike Muldoon—she was just another young clueless kid to watch out for, to take under his badass protective wing. And Stan had one hell of a protective wing, there was no doubt about that.
He’d continuously gone way out of his way to be kind to her. Helping her get away from San Diego and Joel Hogan. His attempts last night to start desensitizing her to confrontations.
He’d spent over an hour and a half with her last night—time he could have been sleeping. He’d made sure she wasn’t alone by sitting with her on the airplane, and then arranging for her to have dinner with Mike Muldoon.
Teri owed him, big time. And since he’d made it rather clear that his interest in her was nothing more than that of mentor or some variation of Sea Daddy, he certainly wouldn’t appreciate the complications of a full body massage leading to a night of blazing hot sex. Which would lead to shared quarters for the rest of this operation, which would lead to her moving into his charming little bungalow back in San Diego . . .
Yeah, dream on, Teresa.
What are your goals for your personal life? She hadn’t answered Stan’s question last night because in truth, she didn’t know the answer.
She knew she wanted to spend more time laughing. She wanted to feel more relaxed and at peace. She wanted to be happy. She wanted to stop being afraid. But what kind of a goal was that?
Stan had stopped talking about his mother. They were sitting there, Teri realized, in silence. But it was a companionable silence. His glower was gone. He was just looking at her, and as she met his eyes, he smiled that smile that made the world seem to shift beneath her feet.
The smile that made her want to kiss him.
Instead she held out the last of the freezer bags she’d brought with her. “I made some iced coffee. I figured you could probably use both the caffeine and something cold to drink.”
He had the funniest look in his eyes as he opened the bag.
“There’s not really ice in it,” she quickly explained. “I put the coffee in the hotel freezer for most of the morning. And I made sure it was brewed with bottled water, so it’s definitely safe to drink. You don’t have to worry.”
He took off the lid, took a sip. “Holy God. It’s—”
“More like a Slusheee than an iced coffee, I know. I got lucky—the power didn’t go off while it was in the freezer.”
“This is . . . I’m . . . Thank you, Lieutenant. Very much.”
Oh, my God, the funny look in his eye wasn’t because he’d been afraid she’d unknowingly made the iced coffee with tainted hotel ice. It was because he thought she was hitting on him, like this was some kind of Starbucks-style come on—drink my coffee now, hot stud, and do me later.
His response was to call her by her rank, to retreat from their still shaky, newly formed friendship. God, was the thought of a more intimate relationship with her really that repulsive?
“It’s good, isn’t it?” she said as brightly as she could manage. “The other guys—Mike and WildCard in particular—really liked it, too. I brought, you know, some for everyone.” Thank God that she had. Teri stood up, not wanting to see his relief. “Well, I better let you get back to—”
“Did you just finish a shift?”
She’d spent the morning ferrying SEALs and other U.S. personnel back and forth from the airport, to the airfield, to the hotel. The trip from the hotel to this airfield took about fifteen minutes each way. But she could make it from the hotel to the Kazabek airport in about three minutes flat.
“I’m not exactly finished. I’m on standby. I’m here in case you or Lieutenant Starrett need a helo on short order.”
“You know, if you don’t sit down, I’m going to have to stand, too,” he told her. “It’s one of those crazy lieutenantsenior chief things. Do you mind? I mean, as long as you’re not going anywhere in a hurry . . . ?”
Teri sat down, both glad and resentful as hell that he’d gone back to talking to her as if they were friends. Unless . . .
Maybe he was seeing someone. Maybe he had a girlfriend back in San Diego. Maybe he was attracted to Teri, but he was too honest and loyal, too upstanding and decent even to think about being unfaithful.
“You wanna help?” he asked her. “As long as you’re not needed to fly anywhere, we need a few more terrorists to shoot.”
To . . . shoot?
He smiled at the look she knew was on her face.
“The bullets aren’t real. We use training gear. Computer controlled lasers. You’ll have a weapon, too. It’s fun—you get into the mock-up and wait for us to storm the plane, try to shoot us before we shoot you.”
“I’m not a very good shot,” she admitted. Sure, she’d had weapons training, but . . .
“You’ll have an assault weapon. Point and spray
. I’ll remind you how to use it. It’ll come back to you.”
“Still, it’s hardly fair. Me against a team of SEALs?”
“It’s not going to be a fair fight against the real tangos,” Stan told her. “They’re amateurs, while we’ve been training for scenarios like this for years. Come on, at this point we really just need warm bodies.”
“Gee, when you put it that way, how can I say no?”
“Terrific.” He smiled again.
And she was lost.
Teri discharged her laser weapon gingerly. Stan knew that she’d had weapons training to be a helo pilot, but there was no doubt about it. Teri Howe was not a natural when it came to handling weapons.
But that was okay. To give her credit, she was up for the challenge. And he’d managed to live through reminding her how to hold the weapon. He’d had to touch her, move her arms and hands into a less awkward position. It had been a job and a half making sure his touch came across as impersonal, businesslike. But he’d done it.
“Any other questions?” Stan asked her now.
“When did your mother pass away?”
He stared at her.
“When you spoke of her, you said was,” she added.
Stan picked up one of the training weapons the team would be using in the next few minutes for this exercise. As he checked it, he sensed more than saw Teri start to back away.
“I’m sorry, it’s none of my business. It’s just . . . I got the feeling that you had been particularly close and . . . I apologize for overstepping—”
“Twenty-one years ago,” he told her quietly. “She died the summer after I graduated high school.”
He glanced at her, saw her doing the math. Yeah, that’s right. He was only thirty-nine years old. Just a little too young for the father figure she was searching for.
And that’s what this was all about—the dinner last night, the coffee today. All of the elements of a healthy dose of hero worship had fallen neatly into place.
Teri was looking for guidance and approval, but she also wanted more. She wanted more than for him to fill her former SEAL friend Lenny’s long-empty shoes.
It was the stupidest thing. Stan had given her Muldoon, in all of his shining, Boy Scout, good-looking glory. And she liked the kid—he knew she did. Stan had seen the two of them together, seen her holding the ensign’s hand. There was something between them—or at least there would be if only she’d let it develop.
But she’d been in Stan’s room last night, making sure he had something to eat. She’d brought him coffee today—and despite what she’d said about bringing some for everyone, he knew the truth. She’d brought it for him. She’d shaded him from the freaking sun, for Christ’s sake.
If that wasn’t hero worship, he didn’t know what was.
Maybe he could twist it to his advantage—this blatant admiration he could see in her eyes. He could touch her again, let his hands linger. Let her know that he’d welcome her showing up in his room again tonight.
And maybe she’d go to bed with him because her own sense of normal was so warped, because she’d been some kind of hideous victim as a child. And he still didn’t know of what. God, it was driving him crazy.
Yes sir, he could take advantage of her trust, and wouldn’t he be proud of himself then?
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Teri whispered, as if he’d said it had been only twenty-one weeks or even days instead of years since his mother had died. As if the wound were still raw and painful. Her eyes were so soft, he thought he might go blind if he looked directly at her, like looking into the sun.
He focused on the next weapon, its cold weight in his hands centering him. It, too, was in working order. He picked up the next.
“It was lung cancer,” he said, more comfortable with the facts. “She made me quit smoking.”
“You smoked?”
“In high school, yeah. Told you I’ve done some stupid things in my life. But both my parents smoked while I was growing up, so . . .” He shrugged. “When she was diagnosed—and it was stage four; there was not a lot of hope that she would survive—she made both me and Stan Senior quit. It was not a fun time to be living in our house, you better believe that, both of us going cold turkey, her so sick. But we did it, you know?”
For her.
“Do you really think of your father as Stan Senior?” Teri asked. “That’s the second time you called him that.”
“What is this? Interrogate the senior chief day?” he countered with a laugh.
“It’s just . . . you know so much about me,” she said. “And I know hardly anything about you.”
He turned to face her. It had taken him only five weapons—all checked and ready to go—before he’d regained his equilibrium enough to look her in the eye again. Shit, he was in trouble here.
“I grew up in Chicago. Enlisted in the Navy out of high school.” After his mother’s long illness, there hadn’t been enough money to send both him and his sister to college, so he’d gotten his education via the Navy. “It was supposed to be temporary, but I got into the BUD/S program—SEAL training, you know? And it turned into my entire life. It’s what I do. It’s who I am. What you see is what you get. There’s not a whole lot of mystery here, Lieutenant.”
“Except for the four nieces and restoring the bungalow and the antiques . . .”
“If you know all that, you know more than most people know about me,” he pointed out. He was glowering at her, but she didn’t back down. Not one inch. Amazing. Figures she’d choose now to finally start using her backbone.
“Did your father ever remarry?” she asked.
“No.”
“What are you going to do after you retire?”
Oh, Christ. “I don’t know! Sleep late in the mornings for about five years. Jesus, Teri . . .”
“Hi, Senior, we’re two more of your terrorists. Can you set us up?” Alyssa Locke and her FBI partner approached, saving Stan’s ass before he did something stupid like telling Teri about his idea to furnish his house with antiques that he’d then turn around and sell.
Or his equally stupid-ass idea to sell the house to some bungalow lover who wanted the charm without the restoration work. With the money from the sale, he’d buy a sailboat and live like Jimmy Buffett for a year or two, floating around the Caribbean, at one with the ocean. Then he’d find another bungalow in need of serious repair, get a mortgage, and start all over again. Fix it and sell it. Sail around for a while. Again and again.
He could live all over the country, because the Arts and Crafts revival had spread like a weed from California at the turn of the century. He could find a bungalow in virtually any town in any state and restore it to its original simple charm. He could spend some time in Chicago, near his sister and his golden-haired nieces—enough time to finally learn to tell the four little girls apart.
Of course, they’d be in high school before he’d be ready to retire.
But he didn’t have to tell her any of that, thank you, Jesus and Alyssa Locke.
Locke and her partner didn’t really need more than a hand pointing in the right direction, but Stan stayed with them, scared to death of what Teri Howe’s next question for him might be, terrified of turning this game she was playing back around on her and asking her the too-intimate questions he was both dying and dreading to know the answers to.
When she was a child, did someone she trusted—her father, or a teacher or someone in a position of authority—take advantage of the adoration and hero worship they saw in those big brown eyes?
What had happened all those years ago to make her still so afraid?
Stan briefly closed his eyes, remembering the look on her face as she’d given him the coffee. Accept me. Encourage me.
He’d seen that look before—usually on the faces of young enlisted men who were just starting to discover themselves as SEAL candidates in the BUD/S training program. The men who’d been told too many times that they’d never amount to much. The ones
who’d been nearly completely brainwashed into believing that was true.
Nearly completely. There was still a spark left, though. The spark that made them push to get into BUD/S even though everyone told them they’d be the first to ring out. A spark of life. A spark of hope.
Love me unconditionally, so I can start learning to love myself, Senior Chief.
Expect only the best from me, and I’ll give it to you, Senior Chief.
Give me shit when I slip and deserve shit because that’s further proof that I matter to you, Senior Chief.
Be my hero, Senior Chief, and never let me down.
In the past, it had been a burden at times—his role of the infallible hero, the mighty senior chief—but it had never been so heavy as it was right now.
Troubleshooters 03 Over The Edge Page 18