“Ric’s a police detective and you know it,” she responded just as hotly. “He’s not just some stranger.”
Max nodded. “Great. So you got lucky. This time.”
“You want to know what happened?” she said. “I got scared. He was all ready to come home with me, and I got scared. So I told him. Everything. And then he got … you know. The way guys get when it’s too heavy and they’d rather go home and watch Comedy Central. But he was going to do it anyway. I was going to be his pity fuck for the month—I’m real lucky, huh? But it felt really, really wrong, and I knew that it’s always going to feel wrong, unless you change your mind, because the only time anything feels right is when you’re with me. But I know you’re not going to, so God! Why do I even bother?”
Max felt his insides ripping open as she started to cry, as she got out of the car.
“Gina, wait—”
But she slammed the door and hurried toward the building.
Don’t follow. He couldn’t follow. But he also couldn’t let her go. He couldn’t leave her like this. He got out of the car, too, and followed her, because it seemed like the lesser of two evils. “Gina.”
“I’m sorry,” she cried. “I’m so sorry, Max.” She was standing there, trying to unlock the door to her room, fumbling with the key. She dropped it, and he cracked heads with her as he tried to pick it up.
“Sorry!” He moved her aside. “Let me get it.”
He picked up the key, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. Her room was dark, and he stepped inside, looking for the light switch.
He found it, but when he flipped it, only one lamp went on. It must’ve had a twenty-five watt bulb in it, because it barely lit the shabby room. Which was probably just as well, since the last time this place had been redecorated was back in 1975, and seeing it in bright light would have been too awful.
“Oh, Christ, Gina,” he said. “You sure know how to pick ’em.”
“I am sorry, Max,” she said. “Because I do understand. I do.”
The door closed behind her, and Max realized that he’d somehow ended up exactly the last place he should be. In Gina’s room.
He had to get out of here.
“I know you blame yourself for what happened to me,” she told him, “and I wish you wouldn’t, because, really, the fault was mine. I pushed them—Babur and Al—on the plane. You told me not to. You told me to be careful, not to go too far. But I was trying to be Wonder Woman. I was trying to save the day.”
“No,” Max said. Damn it, did she really think …?
“I was trying to give you as much information about them as I could,” Gina told him, tears running down her face. “I thought they were asleep, but they weren’t and they heard me, and I gave away the fact that there were microphones planted and that you didn’t need the radio to hear me. It was my fault—”
“No.” He reached for her, but she pulled back.
“Yes. You told me not to provoke them, but I did. I provoked them, so they raped me, and the captain tried to stop them, so they killed him and it was my fault.”
She sank to the floor, and he followed her there, afraid to touch her, afraid not to. “No, Gina, you can’t think that way!”
“You told me,” she said, looking at him with such heartbreaking grief in her eyes. “You warned me. But I didn’t listen. And now you can’t even look at me without being haunted by it, by my mistake. It was my mistake, my fault, Max, not yours.”
Oh, God. Oh, almighty, vengeful, terrible God. Had she really been carrying this around for years?
“Gina, it was not your fault. Do you honestly think that?”
She did. She honestly did.
He put his arms around her and this time she didn’t resist. This time she clung to him, still sobbing that she was sorry.
She was sorry for provoking her rape.
It was all Max could do not to cry, too.
But he’d wait and do that later. Right now, as quickly as possible, he had to correct this terrible misconception Gina had been living with for so long.
“Listen to me,” he said, working hard to make his voice calm. Soothing. Christ, he’d managed to sound matter-of-fact and unperturbed when he’d talked to the terrorists on the plane while they were raping her. Surely he could do it again now. But his voice broke. “Gina, you need to listen to me.”
“Don’t leave me,” she sobbed. “Please, Max …”
He would have promised her anything. “I’m not going anywhere,” he told her, holding her tightly, his cheek against the top of her head. “I’ll stay as long as you need me.”
He heard the words leaving his lips, and part of him stood off to the side and lifted his eyebrows at such an obvious error in judgment.
But the rest of him took note in the fact that his promise seemed to work quite well in calming Gina down, and he actually said it again. “I’ll stay as long as you want me to. You just have to take a couple of deep breaths and listen to me. Really listen, okay?”
She nodded and breathed.
“Okay,” he said, smoothing her hair back from her face. “I’m going to tell you something that I’ve learned from years of negotiating and from years of dealing with people who are as desperate as the terrorists were who hijacked flight 232. I need you to listen carefully, and I need you to believe me. You trust me, right?”
Gina nodded again.
“I was straight with you about the jazz, right?”
Another nod. This one came with half of a laugh, too. Okay, good. She was listening.
“Can you sit up a little?” he asked. “I want you to look into my eyes when I tell you what I’m going to tell you. Can you do that?”
She lifted her head, and the sight of her face, pale and tear-streaked and weary with grief and the weight of responsibility she’d been carrying for so long, broke his heart.
She was much too close, dangerously close, her mouth only inches from his, but he was the one who was unwilling to let her move back any farther. He wanted his arms around her.
“When Babur Haiyan gave the order to Nabulsi to attack you,” Max told her, “he said, among other things, ‘You know what to do.’ Your attack, your rape, was something that they planned before they even got onto the plane. They thought you were the senator’s daughter, remember? Your rape was symbolic as well as a literal retaliation. It was a political statement, believe it or not. It was going to happen, Gina, no matter what you did.”
He could see her listening, see her struggling to understand what he was saying. He held her gaze, willing her to believe him.
“And it was also their means of provoking us,” he continued. “They wanted our troops to rush the plane. They had a bomb on board that was set to blow after the Navy SEALs had come into the plane, after the hijackers were dead, after we thought we’d won. You know this. They were tired of waiting—they were ready to die for their cause. So they attacked you, knowing that if they did, we’d probably stop stalling and send in our men.
“They knew we’d put those microphones and cameras in place. It was SOP—standard operating procedure—for a hijacking. You didn’t give anything away, I swear it. And if you really want to know the reason that you’re alive today, it’s because that pilot rushed to save you. Because they killed him, they had a body to throw off the plane. If no one had tried to help you, they probably would have killed you.”
He could still see a glimmer of disbelief in her eyes. She trusted him completely. He could see that, too, but she’d been living with another truth for so long. “But Haiyan was so angry when he caught me telling you about their machine gun clips.”
Okay. How could he make her understand? “I’m going to tell you what would have happened that morning if he hadn’t caught you feeding us that information,” Max told her. “You ready for this?”
She nodded.
“They would have said something like, ‘Don’t look at me when you speak to me. Don’t you know it’s disrespectful in our country f
or a woman to meet a man’s eyes?’ And you would have looked down at the floor and said you were sorry. And they would have said, ‘Are you smiling? Do you think the way our people have been murdered is funny?’ And you would have said no, and maybe you would have glanced up at them when you said that, and Haiyan would have hit you across the face for your disrespect, and you would have apologized, and it really wouldn’t matter what you said or what you did, because Haiyan would eventually have said to Nabulsi, ‘You know what to do.’ ”
Max pushed her hair back from her face. “You provoked none of that, Gina. Do you understand?”
If it was anyone’s fault, it was his for not insisting that the SEALs take down the plane the night before.
She nodded, and then, as if she could read his mind, she said, “If it wasn’t my fault, if it was destined to happen the way you said, then it can’t be your fault, either.”
It was Max’s turn to nod. “Yeah.” Right.
Gina settled deeper into his arms, her eyes distant, lost in her own thoughts, processing everything he’d told her.
“You should go back to that doctor,” Max told her, resting his cheek against the top of her head. “Talk it out some more.”
“I will.” She lifted her head to look up at him. “Do you have someone to talk to about it?”
He thought of Alyssa. He’d talked more to her than to anyone. But there was still so much he couldn’t say to her. Wouldn’t say.
And he’d just practically wrapped her up and put a bow on her and thrust her into Sam Starrett’s eager hands.
“You should find someone,” Gina said softly. “Someone you can be absolutely honest with. About everything.”
“Yeah, I should,” Max said, even though he knew damn well he’d never do it. Because before he could be honest with someone else—a friend or even a shrink—he first had to be honest with himself.
Jazz Jacquette touched Tom’s knee.
Tom looked up to see the nurse who had helped take Kelly to surgery coming into the hospital waiting room.
He got to his feet. This was good, right? They wouldn’t send the nurse down to tell him that Kelly had died in surgery.
Would they?
He searched the woman’s face but saw only fatigue.
Stan was sitting to his right, and he stood, too, putting his hand on Tom’s shoulder. It was the cosmic equivalent of a full body embrace from the nondemonstrative senior chief.
“The doctor would like you to come upstairs,” the nurse told him.
She’s out of surgery.
So far so good.
She’s going to be okay.
That’s what Tom had wanted to hear. Instead, he’d been summoned because … why? The possibilities that leapt to mind were all bad. Kelly was dying. Kelly was already dead.
Fear hit him so hard, the room spun and blackened, and he nearly hit the deck.
Jazz and Stan pushed him back into his seat, jammed his head down between his knees.
“Is she alive?” he heard Jazz ask through the roaring in his ears.
Please God, please …
“You haven’t gotten a status report?” The nurse’s distant voice got only slightly louder as she knelt next to him. “Oh, Commander, I’m so sorry—”
That was it. Sorry. The word he was praying that he wouldn’t hear. Kelly was dead.
Tom stopped fighting the tunnel vision and checked out.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
“Yo, sleeping beauty.”
Tom opened his eyes to see Stan Wolchonok frowning down at him. “Your wife’s out of surgery, sir,” the senior chief chided him, “the doctor needs you upstairs to hold her hand, and you decide it’s time to take a nap?”
“Kelly’s alive?” Tom sat up too fast, and his head spun.
Jazz was there, too, and he helped steady him. “See, I told you he didn’t hear that,” the XO said. “Nurse Sunshine over here goes ‘I’m sorry,’ and Tom didn’t stick around long enough to hear the part that went, ‘that no one came to tell you that Kelly’s out of surgery.’ ”
The nurse was actually crying and laughing, both at the same time.
“She’s alive?” Tom asked again, needing to hear it from her. “Is she all right?”
She nodded, wiping her eyes. “Dr. Kenyon stopped the bleeding. The first twenty-four hours after surgery can be touch and go, but we’re very hopeful. I’m so sorry, I thought you knew.” She laughed, covering her mouth with her hand. “I can’t believe you fainted.”
“He didn’t faint,” Jazz said. “He was just a little dizzy.”
“It happens to the best of us,” Stan chimed in. “A shortage of oxygen to the brain.”
Tom closed his eyes. Kelly’s bleeding had stopped. Thank God. “Thank you,” he told the nurse.
“A little uneven on his feet,” Jazz said.
“Lack of sleep combined with excess stress.” Stan nodded. “A big guy like the commander stands up too fast, he’s gonna get a little dizzy.”
“I fainted,” Tom told them.
“Passed out,” Jazz corrected him at the same time Stan said, “Blacked out, sir.”
Tom started to get up, and his former XO and senior chief helped him to his feet.
“Take me to her,” Tom ordered.
“This way, gentlemen,” the nurse said.
“Hey, Sam?”
He didn’t lift his face out of the pillow, too happily exhausted and perfectly relaxed to move. “Mmph?”
“I need you to tell me something.” Alyssa was lazily running her fingers up and down his back, which was just about the nicest feeling in the world. “About Mary Lou.”
Sam sighed and lifted his head, propping himself up on one elbow, chin in his hand so he could look down at her. “Do we really have to bring her into the room right now?”
Alyssa nodded, her eyes so serious. “She’s already here. I was kind of hoping to kick her out, once and for all.”
“What do you need to know?” Sam asked. He’d already told her a great deal about his marriage, about why he’d picked up Mary Lou in that bar in the first place—because she was so different from Alyssa in so many ways.
“I need you to tell me that you had sex with her only once—that one time you got her pregnant—and that you were drunk when it happened and you ejaculated prematurely and then passed out so she didn’t get to come.”
Sam laughed and kissed her. “I wish I could, Lys, but I’m not going to lie to you. Not ever.”
Alyssa nodded and touched his hair, pushing it back from his face, combing it and arranging it with her fingers, making him look like Elvis or Mickey Mouse or the devil or God knows what. He let her play—it kept her from having to look into his eyes. He knew this conversation had to be hard for her.
“Did you sleep with her every night?” she asked.
Ah, boy. “I was away an awful lot,” Sam said, “so no. We didn’t have sex very often. And not at all during the last few months before she left. And when we did … it was just sex, Alyssa.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve had ‘just sex’ with you,” she said. “So I’m afraid that doesn’t make me any less jealous.”
She was jealous. Sam kissed her again. Maybe this was a good time to say it. Maybe it wasn’t too soon. He could start by saying, Well, I never had “just sex” with you … and go from there.
“I have to confess that my feelings about Haley are pretty mixed,” Alyssa told him. “If Mary Lou goes to jail, you’ll get custody. I don’t know how you’ll manage that with your career—”
“What career?” Sam said. She knew as well as he did that his career with the SEALs had ended when Mary Lou’s fingerprints showed up on that automatic weapon used in the Coronado attack. There was no one up the chain of command who would let him continue to work in Spec Ops after something like that. It might seem unfair for him to lose his job and his status over his wife’s—ex-wife’s—mistake, but that was the way it worked. SEALs had to be careful who th
ey married, who they let into their lives.
And he hadn’t been. Chances were that he’d walk away from all of his years of service with a dishonorable discharge. Man, the idea of that really hurt. And not just because it would affect his future employment.
“I was thinking maybe I could work for Noah,” Sam told her. “Move back to Sarasota, be near Haley …” He cleared his throat. “Maybe you could, I don’t know, transfer down?”
She was very silent. He was pushing too hard, as usual.
She finally spoke. “That would be a solid step backward in my career.”
Jesus. He wasn’t even thinking about that. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, I guess it would be. Sorry, I’m an idiot sometimes—”
“Maybe we’re moving a little too fast,” Alyssa said. “I mean, Sarasota to D.C.—that’s not that far.”
Yes, it was. It was close to a thousand miles. But Sam kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to scare her. She was clearly feeling discomfort at the turn this conversation had taken.
What was he actually hoping? That she’d agree to marry him?
After a comfort fuck in a cheap motel?
Marriage so wasn’t on her agenda.
Sam had to keep his eye on his goal. Dinner. Lots of dinners. A real relationship, based on real emotions.
He had a bazillion options—or at least he would after he got kicked out of Team Sixteen—including moving to D.C., if that was what he needed to do.
Telling Alyssa that the mere thought of her continuing to work for Max—who, last he’d heard, wanted to marry her—was driving Sam out of his flipping mind, wasn’t going to help right now, either. Honey, give up your career with the best CT team in the Bureau, because I’m screamin’ jealous of your boss, despite the fact that you never actually slept with him.
Not the way to make her love him.
“Sam.” Alyssa was shifting beneath him. “Oh, God, I think … Is the condom leaking?”
Holy shit. He reached between them. But it was still on, and it wasn’t leaking. “No, it’s okay.” Just to be sure, he held it in place as he pulled out of her, and …
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