In the midday heat, the fishermen were sitting in the shade of their boats, mending nets or chatting. Maybe they’d been out for the morning fishing and were now waiting for an evening cast.
She was so busy admiring the boats that she missed when Luke was no longer visible in the gaps between them.
Zoe spun the wheel, sliced up the beach in the narrow alleyway between two boats—barely missed snarling her tires in a piled-up fishnet—and prepared to gun off in hot pursuit before she spotted the red Renault. It was parked high on the beach in front of a single-story beige concrete block building. She eased up through the thick sand and parked alongside it as Christian and Luke climbed out.
Luke smiled at her over the roof of his car. He actually smiled. It was like a gut punch. No, bad analogy. It was like a gut punch by a comfy pillow. It said, You done good.
Coming from a Team 6 SEAL officer, it didn’t need to say a single word more than that. She couldn’t tell if it did say more because it made her look away. Luke Altman smiling was just…wrong. And smiling at her was downright confusing. It hadn’t taken a genius to read what he thought of her at the airport.
The Many Grimaces of Lieutenant Commander Luke Altman. They had all too frequently been aimed at her in the past. Even on the Honduras mission where she’d thought she was doing important work, she could now see that he’d barely tolerated her presence.
Fine. After this mission she’d swear to never have a good idea again.
Except he was smiling at her.
Why did the man have to be so damn confusing? If he would only remain a mere macho jerk, she’d know what to do with him.
Speaking of which…Christian opened her door as she killed the engine and shed her helmet. At least he was a smooth and well-mannered macho jerk. That she absolutely knew how to deal with. He was close enough that she could see the look in his eyes. Except rather than avaricious desire, it was…pain.
“Are you okay, Christian?”
“I am fine. Fine!” He brushed it off but she didn’t quite believe him. “The way you drive, my darling Zoe. Incroyable!”
“Christian?”
“It was a fantastic drive. You have the gift. Your assistant is surprisingly good as well…”
Luke had come up beside Christian and was actually grinning again. Or still. Or something.
“…and with a little practice, he could be almost as good as me.”
Luke’s smile grew. He remained half a step behind Christian and she knew that Luke’s ego was really enjoying this.
“But you Zoe. The way you flew,” he slapped one hand off the other and arced it to the sky, but winced hard and didn’t complete the gesture, drawing his arm back slowly.
Luke had noticed it too, his smile turning off like a light switch. He caught Christian’s arm as he stumbled and helped him to stand upright once more. Then he probed Christian’s back with his other hand. It earned him a spectrum of winces and one deep grunt.
“Doc was right. You screwed your back, my friend,” Luke rumbled out.
“It was during your recovery after Zoe’s first jump. Not your fault; I don’t know how you saved it.”
“Almost didn’t,” Luke continued in a surprisingly friendly tone as he massaged Christian’s lower back.
Zoe had been certain that Luke utterly despised Christian. Guy bonding must have happened in the car—like a cloud of shared testosterone or something. If they were bonding over her, she was going to take them both down. She didn’t care if they both towered over her.
“Might not have saved us from a swim except for some of that advice you gave me when we first started out,” Luke was turning downright loquacious. Maybe he was the one who needed to go see a doctor.
Nikita would never believe it. Zoe wished she’d taped the moment so that she could prove it had happened.
“Let us sit and eat and drink. Then my back will be better.”
Zoe looked around and didn’t see where they would go.
Christian pointed. “Mama Odette makes the best ceebu jen in Senegal.”
An old woman sat out on a patio overlooking the beach. She was wizened in a country where fifty was old and sixty was ancient. In her hand was a heavy, meter-long stick and she was beating it into a large wooden bowl placed between her feet with the energy of a twenty-year-old. It took a moment for Zoe to figure out that it was a giant mortar and pestle.
“See? She is already grinding the spices for our meal.” It was more the right size for grinding an entire pumpkin than the scant quarter-cup of spices she scooped out of the bowl as they settled in the cool shade of the tin-roofed awning. As a young servant girl served them tiny glasses of mango juice, Zoe could only look out at the strangeness of it all.
Close by her chair, Mama Odette was cooking on a small propane tank—smaller than for most BBQ grills at home—with a single burner fitted directly on top of it. The large steel wok there appeared to be her only cooking vessel.
In front of them was a line of traditional fishing boats baked in the midday sun, looking as if they’d been little changed in centuries.
And off to the side were parked two vehicles at the peak of exotic motor sports—world rally cars.
It was a land of such sharp contrasts.
Luke wondered what had happened to him.
Actually, he knew the answer: Zoe DeMille had happened to him. But that didn’t make the feeling any more familiar.
This morning the flighty girl in her lemon-yellow jogging clothes had proved that she had stamina and skills. Six times up ten stories of stairs, he’d been able to see that she improved rather than flagged the more she ran. He had to respect that—even if it was so unexpected that he wondered if he was remembering it wrong. No, her athleticism couldn’t be denied. Just because a SEAL’s mission field pack could weigh more than DeMille herself didn’t change how fit she was.
Next he tried to discount how the small of her back had fit against his palm, but it had preoccupied too much of his thoughts since then to question that either.
In the garage she’d been playing Miss Sexy Airhead, which had been news on its own—the sexy part. The blonde airhead part he’d already known about—or had always assumed before. Christian certainly believed it.
He kept an eye on Zoe and Christian sitting at either end of a small, battered sofa, talking about racing. It was a technical conversation of car handling that he could barely follow, yet he knew that Christian still only saw his Tweety Bird target.
But the way she’d driven.
Luke had initially wondered if she could even navigate the streets of Dakar. The Renault that he’d been driving was an eager car, severely hot to trot. It wanted to dig in and go like a woman in her prime. He’d kept waiting for DeMille to be overpowered by the car and crash it into some banana stand or cream a faded-orange taxi.
But Zoe hadn’t just tamed the Citroën, she’d dusted his ass with it!
That jump hadn’t been the final trigger for him. Not that it wasn’t about the sexiest thing he’d ever seen a woman do—it was. But as she’d outsmarted him for kilometer after kilometer, he’d learned to respect her as well.
He could count the number of people who’d done that to him on a single hand—with most of his fingers folded.
Zoe DeMille had outmaneuvered him at the juncture of the two coves—then kept doing it for two hundred kilometers. Even Nikita couldn’t do that. She was an awesome SEAL, but to be so endlessly creative—that wasn’t skill, it was a gift.
Some of it was driving skill; Zoe had clearly driven these kinds of vehicles before. But it didn’t matter how much of a feel he got for the car—or how many underhanded plans Christian cooked up for him because Christian knew the terrain—Luke couldn’t get past Zoe’s guard.
The woman who climbed out of the car on the beach of Saint-Louis wasn’t the same one who’d settled behind the wheel in the dim Dakar garage. Her hair was matted with sweat from the helmet she’d worn. She’d unzipped that leather
jacket, again revealing the tightly clinging shirt beneath, sweaty and dusty now. The immaculate Zoe DeMille looked slightly disheveled for the first time since he’d met her. Even when they’d crash-landed a helicopter into that jungle river in Honduras, she’d surfaced more like a cartoon mermaid than anything else.
Sitting beneath the tin-metal awning, her eyes hidden by her yellow-framed dark wraparounds, she looked stunning. Her easy confidence as those slender hands arced like a bird in flight when she was describing her approach to a jump. The heat-heavy midday breeze managing to tease her hair into soft ripples as she leaned forward and slammed back to imitate a hard-landing, punctuated by a happy laugh.
She might be entertaining Christian, but now she stood tall in his mind. The woman had skills—real world skills that he understood. Escape and evasion tactics that had never been taught by any SEAL course, she’d displayed at the wheel of her car. No wonder she was a top RPA pilot. If she could fly like that when bound by the restrictions of terrain and gravity, what she could do aloft must be seriously next-level shit.
It was only looking at her, shining in the sun as she fluffed her hair with her fingers, that he finally figured out what she was doing.
She actually had a new plan. A Plan B.
Plan A she’d cooked up while he was standing in Hathyaron’s Pakistani compound. And its death notice was the question she’d asked in the garage: Why aren’t your cars on the way to the Dakar Rally in South America?
He’d caught that she’d hoped to attach herself to Christian’s team. It would have been a great chance to hide in plain sight while they hunted for Hathyaron.
But when that got shot down because of Christian’s screwed-up back, he’d thought she wanted to go for a drive just for her social media thing.
Then, when he saw her drive, he’d decided it was a joy ride. He’d rarely had as much fun in a car—front or back seat—as chasing after DeMille. Maybe it was chasing the pretty woman—
Whoa! Had his head really gone there?
It had.
Except that wasn’t what she’d been up to at all.
It wasn’t the jump that gave away her Plan B—something she might have mentioned that she had, rather than leaving it to him to figure out.
He watched her bend and twist to work out the kinks from two hard hours of driving. Fantastic flexibility that was a joy to watch.
But after racing her for two hundred kilometers over incredibly challenging terrain, her Plan B was so goddamn obvious she could have posted a billboard along Maine Route 1.
It was also brilliant. With all of the cues she’d given, he didn’t need to ask what it was—now that he’d gotten his head out of his ass.
If they could convince Christian to take a car to the Dakar Rally and let Luke drive it, he could still chase after Hathyaron. She’d gone out of her way to force Christian into the car with him so that Luke had the opportunity to demonstrate that he had the skills.
Her ploy also forced him to look at DeMille in a new way. She wasn’t some overbuilt bitch like Marva. Her apology this morning had sounded sincere and heartfelt—even if she hadn’t really done anything wrong except slash open a scar so old that he’d forgotten it was there.
And she had Christian eating out of her palm—he was positively lapping up the crap DeMille dished out. Maybe in addition to being smart, she was also reliable. Novel idea.
She’d slid so smoothly from Plan A to Plan B back at the garage that he could still barely see the transition in memory—not a chance that Christian Vehrs had caught on.
Not going to The Dakar? Can we please take the cars out anyway? Then that whole frenetic pitch where she hadn’t given Christian time to refuse.
She made Luke feel slow.
No one did that! But DeMille had.
They needed Christian’s willing cooperation. And she’d seen how to get it from the very first second.
How could he help but smile at her. A great driver, funny, cute as hell, and smart to boot. Climbing out of that car and fluffing her hair in the sunlight, what wasn’t there to smile about.
She’d befriended Christian. No problem for DeMille—apparently every person with a Y chromosome was her instant friend. No, that wasn’t it. Nikita also liked her, as had DeMille’s commander. He and Sofia had spent much of their abortive date talking about DeMille. And her flock of rabid fans were mostly women—plus at least one very essential guy named Christian Vehrs.
Luke had better do the same. Being nice to a man who deserved a sharp slap upside the head for how he thought about Zoe wasn’t easy, but Luke had found a way there when Christian’s back had acted up. He had done plenty of missions with guys who’d screwed up their backs on the infiltration and completed the mission anyway.
Doing a second undercover assignment with DeMille was shaping up to be very interesting.
11
After dinner, Christian’s back was so bad that he could barely get up from the battered sofa. With Mama Odette’s guidance, Zoe had raced to a local pharmacy and then dosed Christian with prescription strength codeine, which apparently didn’t require a prescription in Senegal.
“Sure! Anything you need: Schedule II narcotics, Cipro antibiotic, cough drops. No problem. All at the pharmacy. Doctors in Senegal are only for when you break something. You go to the hospital if your only other option is dying, otherwise we don’t waste the time. And most times, if it is time to die, people just do that rather than fighting it. Let’s go! I’ll race you back, dearest Zoe. This time I will drive.”
“Christian. Your back?”
“Pfft!” he waved his hand airily as if dismissing the concern. Then he tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and would have gone down if Luke hadn’t caught his arm. Christian yelped as the motion pulled at his back hard enough to punch through the painkiller.
“A taxi, my friend,” Luke kept an arm around Christian’s shoulders, looking supportive, but also effectively trapping the man.
As far as she could tell, Luke was being sincere with his kindness. She still needed to find out what that was about. If he was being sincere about that, had he been sincere with his smile as well? As they’d eaten their triangular areas of the ceebu jen platter, she kept catching him watching her. A few times he was looking at her body—in such a thoughtful way that she could feel the heat rippling through her, and not as a blush to her cheeks.
But mostly he was looking at her as if he’d never seen her before. Sure he had—he’d simply looked through her, not at her. Luke’s new state of observation was decidedly unnerving.
“It will be a much smoother ride in a taxi,” she assured Christian. It would, but some part of her wanted Christian out of the way, and not just because of his habit of only looking at her body rather than at her.
She decided to trust the instinct, even if she didn’t know the cause.
“We’ll take the rally cars back to Dakar for you.”
Christian’s protests didn’t alter Luke’s actions in the slightest. Christian was soon tucked into the back of an orangish cab and was most of the way to asleep in the back seat by the time Luke had given the driver the address. The four-hour drive would cost him under a hundred bucks and he’d be thankful for it later. At least Zoe hoped so.
The cab had pulled away after Mama Odette gave the driver a lengthy lecture about this being a good friend of hers and she’d know if he wasn’t treated well or if he was ripped off or… That’s where Zoe’s high school French gave up the ghost.
Then Mama Odette had waved and headed inside her house without another word, leaving Luke looming over her until Zoe found herself shuffling her feet on the hot sand.
She tried looking up into Luke’s eyes, but the sun was close behind his head, blinding in the bright sky. Looking toward the house felt as if she was trying to stare at their hostess who had apparently had enough of them…or perhaps had enough sense to snooze through the midday heat. Looking at the sea felt like she was avoiding looking at Luke. And shifting so
that she could look at him clear of the sun still left her blinded by the sight of him. He’d always been handsome in a rugged, rough-and-ready way, but now he was…
Zoe was losing her mind. This was Lieutenant Commander Luke Altman and she was—
“What’s the prize?” He folded his arms over his beautiful chest and looked down at her with those equally lovely blue eyes.
“The prize?”
“If I beat you on the drive back?”
Zoe laughed, “You couldn’t even catch me getting here.”
“I’m light one passenger now.”
“Still won’t help you catch me.”
“What will?”
“Not being married, for one.” Zoe had no idea why she’d said that. That so couldn’t be what he was asking.
“Not married.” And by the thousand-and-first grimace of Lieutenant Commander Luke Altman she now knew exactly what button she’d hit this morning at the top of the African Renaissance Monument steps.
“But you were… And…” Zoe started piecing it together. “And she called you an asshole. And I said—” Suddenly the fish and rice that had tasted so good before twisted in her stomach like it had come back to life. “I’m so sorry, Luke. I’d never— I didn’t— I—”
“Not your fault, DeMille. I don’t talk about it much. Try not to remember it much.”
“You don’t talk much at all.”
He scoffed—maybe that was his version of a laugh, but he didn’t say anything else, and Zoe again found that she was shuffling her feet.
“Is it something you want to talk about?”
His face didn’t change, but she could see his arms tightening.
“I’ll take that as a big fat no.”
“Smart,” he nodded his approval and she felt fantastically tall…at least five-five.
And if he wasn’t married? And he’d smiled at her? Then he was thinking… “Whoa!”
He gave her another dose of silence. Maybe he’d meant the double entendre, What will let him catch me? Nope. Not answering that one. She’d stick with racing cars. Those she understood.
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