She watched as he took two tall glasses from a cabinet and filled them with ice.
"So," she said, mostly to fill the silence. "What do you do in that situation?"
He turned to look at her. "We don't fail."
She had to laugh. "You want to be a little more specific?"
"I'm inside, right?" he said, pouring the tea over the ice in the glasses. "Alone. But I've got radio contact with my men outside. I guess what I do is, I use stealth and I find the enemy's points of vulnerability from inside. And then I let my team know when and where to attack. Then I find and protect the hostages, and wait for the rest of my team to come get us all out." He handed her the glass. "Lemon? Sugar?"
"Black is fine," she said. "Thanks."
God, this was weird. This man leaning against the counter in his kitchen had spent a good portion of the evening exploring the inside of her mouth with his tongue. And now they were having a refreshing glass of iced tea and a casual, impersonal chat about military strategies.
She wondered if he knew how badly she was dying for him to kiss her again. For real, this time. Inwardly she rolled her eyes. Like that would ever happen.
It was amazing really. It had only been a matter of days since Luke had first kissed her, just a few feet away from where they were standing, on the deck outside this very kitchen. They'd stood there as virtual strangers, and he'd made the wrong choice. Instead of trying to win her friendship, he'd tried to control her through his powerful sexual appeal. Little did he know that would almost entirely ruin his chances at ever becoming her friend.
Almost, but not entirely.
And somewhere, somehow, over the past few days, Luke had redeemed himself.
So now they stood here as friends. And now Syd actually wanted him to kiss her.
Except now that they were friends, he had no reason to kiss her.
"So," she said, trying desperately to fill the silence. “Tell me...why did you join the SEALs?"
Luke didn't answer right away. He finished stirring lemon and a small mountain of sugar into his iced tea, rinsed the spoon in the sink and put it neatly into the dishwasher. Then he picked up his glass, and went back into the living room, gesturing with his head for Syd to follow.
So she followed him. Right over to a wall that was filled with framed photographs. She'd noticed them the last time she was here. Pictures of Luke as a child, his sun-bleached hair even lighter than it was now. Pictures of young Luke with his arms around a chubby, dark-haired little girl. Pictures of Luke with a painfully thin blond woman who had to be his mother. And pictures of young Luke with a dark-haired, dark complexioned man.
He pointed now to the pictures of the man.
"This," he said, "is Isidro Ramos. He's why I joined the SEALs."
Syd looked more closely at the photograph. She could see the warmth in the man's eyes, one arm looped around young Luke's shoulder. She could see the answering adoration on the boy's smiling face. "Who is he?" she asked.
"Was," he told her, sitting down on the couch, taking a sip from his iced tea and stretching his legs out on the coffee table.
Syd knew him well enough by now to know his casu-alness was entirely feigned. In truth he was on edge. But was it the topic of conversation he was having trouble with—or her presence here?
"Isidro died when I was sixteen," he said. "He was my father."
His...? Syd did a double take. No way could a man that dark have had a son as fair as Luke.
"Not my biological father," he added. "Obviously. But he was my father far more than Shaun O'Donlon ever bothered to be."
Syd sat down on the other end of the couch. "And he's why you joined the SEALs?"
He turned and looked at her. "You want the long or the short story?"
"Long," she said, kicking off her sandals and tucking her feet up underneath her. "Start at the beginning. I want to hear it all. Why don't you start when you were born. How much did you weigh?"
As long as they kept talking, they wouldn't have to deal with such awkward topics as where she should sleep. Or rather, where she should pretend to sleep. She couldn't imagine being able to sleep at all, God help her, knowing Luke was in bed in the next room.
"You're kidding, right?" She shook her head and he laughed.
"Nine pounds, fourteen ounces. My mother was five feet two. She used to tell me I was nearly as big as she was at the time." He paused for a moment, looking up at the photographs. "My mother was pretty fragile," he said quietly. "You can't really tell from these pictures, because she was so happy with Isidro. The day he died, though, she pretty much gave up. She pretended to keep going, to try to fight her bad health for Ellen's—my sister's—sake. But it was a losing battle. Don't get me wrong," he added. "I loved her. She just...she wasn't very strong. She'd never been strong."
Syd took a sip of her tea, waiting for him to continue.
"Nineteen sixty-six wasn't a good year for her," he said, "considering her choices were to marry Shaun O'Donlon or have a baby out of wedlock. She was living in San Francisco, but she didn't quite have the 'flowers in her hair' thing down—at least not in '. So she married Shaun in the shotgun wedding of the year, and I got the dubious honor of being legitimate. And—" he turned slightly so that he was facing her on the couch. "Are you really sure you want to hear all of this?"
"I'm interested," she told him. "A lot can be revealed
about a person simply by listening to them talk about their childhood."
"If that's the case, then where did you grow up?" he asked.
"New Rochelle, New York. My father is a doctor, my mother was a nurse before she quit to have us. Four kids, I'm the youngest. My brothers and sister are all incredibly rich, incredibly successful, with perfect spouses, perfect wardrobes and perfect tans, cranking out perfect grandkids for my parents right on schedule." She smiled at him. "Note that I don't seem to be on the family track. I'm generally spoken of in hushed tones. The black sheep. Serves them right for giving me a boy's name."
Luke laughed. She really liked making him laugh. The lines around his eyes crinkled in a way that was completely adorable. And his mouth...
She looked down into her tea to avoid staring at his mouth.
"Actually," she confessed, "my family is lovely. They're very nice—if somewhat clueless. And they're quite okay and very supportive about my deviation from the norm. My mother keeps trying to buy me Laura Ashley dresses, though. Every Christmas, without fail. 'Gee, thanks, Mom. In pink? Wow, you shouldn't have. No, you really shouldn't have,' but next year, the exact same thing."
Syd risked another glance at Luke. He was still laughing.
"So come on, finish up your story. Your father was a jerk. I think I know how it probably goes—he left before you turned two—"
"I wish," Luke said. "But Shaun stayed until I was eight, sucking my mother dry, both emotionally and financially. But the year I turned eight, he inherited a small fortune from old Great-Uncle Barnaby, and he split for Tibet. My mother filed for divorce and actually won a substantial amount in the settlement. She bought a house in
San Diego, and with the mortgage paid, she started working full time for a refugee center. This was back when people were leaving Central America in droves. That's where she met Isidro—at the center.
"We had an extra apartment over our garage, back behind our house, and he was one of about six men who lived there, kind of as a temporary thing. I remember I was a little afraid of them. They were like ghosts, just kind of floating around, as if they were in shock. I realize now that they probably were. They'd managed to escape, but their families had all been killed—some right in front of their eyes. Isidro later told me he'd been out trading for gasoline on the black market, and when he came home, his entire town had been burned and everyone—men, women and children, even infants—had been massacred. He told me he was one of the lucky ones, that he actually was able to identify the bodies of his wife and children. So many people never knew, and they were left wondering forever if maybe the
ir families were still back there, maybe their kids were still alive."
His eyes were distant, unfocused. But then the condensation from his glass of iced tea dripped onto his leg, and he looked down and then over at Syd and smiled. "You know, it's been a long time since I've talked about Isidro. Ellen used to like to hear about him, but I didn't tell her too much of this darker stuff. I mean, the guy essentially had an entire life back in Central America before he even met my mother. He married her—my mother, I mean—so that he wouldn't be deported. If he'd been sent back to his own country, he would've been killed.
"My mother sat the two of us—me and Isidro—down at the kitchen table and told us she was going to marry him." Luke laughed, remembering. "He was completely against it. He knew she'd had to get married before, when she was younger. He told her she'd gotten married for the wrong reasons the first time, and that he wasn't going to let her
do that again. And she told him that marrying him so that he wouldn't die was the best reason she could imagine. I think she was in love with him, even back then. She convinced him that she was right, they got married, and he moved out of the apartment over the garage and into our house."
His mother had been pretty damn shrewd. She'd known what she wanted, and she'd gone about getting it. She'd known if she could get Isidro into her home, it wouldn't be long before their marriage was consummated. And she'd been right on the money.
It was funny the way life seemed to go in circles, Lucky mused as he gazed at Syd, who was way, way down on the other end of the couch, as far away from him as she could possibly sit. Because here he was, playing the same game his mother had played. Pretending that he was acting out of some big-picture necessity, rather than from his own personal need.
Pretending that, oh, yeah, jeez, if he really had to, he'd cope with the inconvenience of having Sydney around all day and all night.
Yeah, right. Like he didn't hope—the way his mother had hoped with Isidro—that the pressure from being with Syd constantly would trigger some kind of unavoidable and unstoppable sexual explosion. That sooner or later—if not tonight, then maybe tomorrow or the next day—Syd would push open his bedroom door with a crash and announce that she couldn't stand it another minute, that she had to have him right now.
He laughed. Yeah, like that was really going to happen.
"What's so funny?" she asked.
He almost told her. Somehow he managed to shrug instead. "Ellen was born just about a year after their wedding. Their marriage turned pretty real pretty fast."
She nodded, understanding, glancing up at the wall, at his mother's picture. "The proximity thing. She was beau-
tiful, and if she was in love with him...he probably didn't stand a chance."
"He used to talk to me about his other family," Lucky remembered. "I think he probably didn't say much about them to my mother, but I asked, and he needed to talk about them. I used to go with him to meetings where he would tell about these horrible human rights violations he'd witnessed in his home country. The things he saw, Syd, the things he could bear witness to..." He shook his head. "He told me to value my freedom as an American above all else. Every day he reminded me that I lived in a land of freedom, every day we'd hang an American flag outside our house. He used to tell me that he could go to sleep at night and be certain that no one would break into our house and tear us from our beds. No one would drag us into the street and put bullets in our heads simply for something we believed in. Because of him, I learned to value the freedom that most Americans take for granted.
"Isidro taught me a lot of things, but that was something that really stuck. Because he'd lived with that fear. Because his other family had been murdered."
Syd was silent, just watching him.
"He became a naturalized citizen when I was thirteen years old," he told her, letting himself lose himself a little bit in the softness of her eyes. "That's one day of my life I'll never forget. He was so proud of becoming a real American. And God!" He laughed. "That November, on election day! He took me and Ellen to the polls with him, so we could watch him vote. And he made us both promise— even though El could barely talk—that we would vote every chance we got."
"So your stepfather is why you became a SEAL."
"Father," he corrected gently. "There was nothing step about him. And, yeah, the things he taught me stuck." Lucky shrugged, knowing that a cynical newspaper journalist probably wouldn't see it the same way he—and Isi-
dro—had. Knowing that she would probably laugh, hoping she wouldn't, wanting to try to explain just the same. "I know there's a lot wrong with this country, but there's also a lot right. I believe in America. And I joined the Navy— the SEAL teams in particular—because I wanted to give something back. I wanted to be a part of making sure we remained the land of the free and the home of the brave. And I stayed in the Navy for longer than I'd ever dreamed of because I ended up getting as much as I gave."
She laughed.
He tried to hide his disappointment. "Yeah, I know. It sounds so hokey."
"Oh—" she sat up "—no! I wasn't laughing because of what you said. God, you've just impressed the hell out of me—please don't think I'm laughing at you."
"I have?" Lucky tried to sound casual. "Impressed you? Really?" Yeesh, he sounded like a dork, pathetically fishing for more compliments.
She didn't seem to notice, caught up in her own intensity. Man, when she got serious, she got serious. "I was laughing because back when I first met you, I thought I had you all figured out. I thought you were one of those testosterone-laden types who'd joined the SEALs purely because they liked the idea of blowing stuff up."
"Well, yeah." Lucky needed her to stop looking at him like that, with those blazing eyes that seemed able to look right through him and see his very soul. He needed her to lighten up so that he wouldn't do something really stupid like pull her into his arms and kiss her. "What do you think I mean when I talk about getting something back from being a SEAL? What I get is to blow stuff up."
Syd laughed. Thank God.
"Tell me," she said, "about your sister. Ellen. She's getting married, right?"
"In about a week," he told her. "You better put it on your calendar. It'll look really weird if we're supposedly
living together but you don't attend my only sister's wedding."
"Oh, no." She made a face. "That really stinks. You can't possibly want to drag me along to your sister's wedding."
"I suppose we can make up some excuse for why you're not there," Lucky said. "I mean, if you really don't want to go."
"I'd love to go," she countered, "but I know what an important day this is for you. Bobby told me how you turned down a...what did he call it? A silver bullet assignment—something you really, really wanted—just so you could be in town."
"If I'm not there," he said, "who's going to walk her down the aisle? Look, just plan to go with me, okay? And if you could plan to wear a dress—something formal— while you're at it..."
"God." She gazed at him in mock horror. "You must think I'm a complete idiot. What did you think I'd wear to a formal wedding? A clean pair of jeans?"
"Well, yeah," he admitted. "Either jeans or your khakis. I've noticed a certain...repetitiveness to your attire."
"Great," she said. "First I'm an idiot, and then I'm boring?"
She was laughing, so he knew she wasn't completely serious, but he still felt the need to try to explain. "That's not what I meant—''
"Quit while you're ahead," she told him. "Just tell me about your sister."
It was nearly oh-one hundred hours, but Lucky wasn't tired. Syd didn't look tired either.
So he told her about his sister, ready and willing to talk all night if she wanted him to.
He wished she wanted more than conversation from him. He wanted to touch her, to take her to his bedroom and
make love to her. But he wasn't going to risk destroying this quiet intimacy they shared.
She liked him. He knew t
hat. But this was too new and far too fragile to gamble with.
He wanted to touch her, but he knew he shouldn't. Tonight he was going to have to settle for touching her with his words.
"Blade," Rio Rosetti said. "Or Panther."
"How about Hawk?" Thomas suggested, tongue firmly in cheek.
"Yeah, Hawk's good, too."
Rio was unhappy with his current nickname and was trying to talk his friends into calling him something else.
"Personally, I think we should be developing a kinder, gentler group of SEALs, with kinder, gentler nicknames," Michael Lee said with a completely straight face. "How about Bunny?"
The look on Rio's face was comical.
Thomas cracked up. "I like it," he said. "Bunny."
"Whoa," Rio said. "Whoa, whoa, whoa—"
"Works for me," Lucky said.
They were sitting in the office, waiting for Lucy's electronic transmission of a list she'd got from the police computer.
Out of all the many men and women who had served at the Navy base during the same few-month period four years ago, nearly thirty of them—all men—had gotten into trouble with law. Twenty-three had served time. Five were still incarcerated.
The police computer had spat out names, aliases and last-known addresses for all of them. They were going to cross-reference this list again with the information they had in the navy's personnel files.
"Lucky," Rio said. "Now there's a nickname I'd love."
"It's taken," Mike pointed out. "Whoops, here we go. List's in. I'll print out a couple of hard copies."
"It's not as if the luck comes with the name," Thomas told Rio. "According to legend, the lieutenant here has led a charmed existence, hence the name."
"Charmed indeed," Rio agreed. He glanced at Lucky, who'd gone to look over Mike's shoulder at the computer screen.
Suzanne Brockmann - Team Ten 09 - Get Lucky Page 14