As Jake watched, Zoe climbed into bed, turned on her side and clutched the blankets to her chin.
"Come on, Admiral," Wes said to the screen. "No self-respecting man would just stand there and watch his plans to get it on go up in smoke."
"Any self-respecting man caught in this situation would
definitely drop to his knees and beg," Lucky agreed. "Honey, I'm so sorry. Of course I want to go to your crazy parents' house on the one weekend I have off this year...."
Wes nodded. "Of course I want to sell my racing boat and buy a washer and dryer."
"Of course I want to poke myself in the eye with this sharp stick. I don't know what I was thinking...."
"Zoe." On screen, the admiral sat down on the other side of the bed.
Zoe was absolutely silent.
"I'm sorry, babe. I thought you knew what this place was all about."
Nothing.
"Come on, Admiral Amazing. Down on your knees. Climb under the covers and get to work. Do something or this glacier's gonna freeze you to death."
Jake just sighed. "We can talk about this more in the morning." He stood up and tiredly went into the bathroom, closing the door behind him.
"He's just giving up," Lucky said.
"That's the point. He doesn't want to touch her," Bobby said.
"He's nuts. Why the hell doesn't he want to touch her?"
"He doesn't want to touch her because he wants to touch her," Bobby explained.
Lucky looked at Wes. "They're pretending to be married. So instead of pretending to get friendly, they pretend to have a fight, because he doesn't want to touch one of the ten most beautiful women in the world. That make any sense to you?"
"Nope." Wes shook his head. He looked at Bobby. "But you understand this, don't you? I am seriously worried about you, Robert Taylor."
Zoe clung to the edge of the bed, listening to Jake Hi-withe in the darkness, wondering if he'd fallen asleep yet.
She heard him draw in a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, and she knew he was as wide awake as she was.
She had a plan that she hoped would get her inside of Christopher Vincent's private office. As soon as the restrictions on her were lifted, she would go to him—alone—and request a private meeting. She would tell him she didn't realize the nature of the hard work involved in being a regular CRO wife. She would imply that she was much more suited to other tasks.
And if Jake knew she was planning to do this, he would have an absolute cow. No, not a cow, a full-grown stego-saurus.
Not that any of this would get that far. She would never put herself into a situation where she'd actually have to sleep with the CRO leader. She'd never compromise her sense of self that way, despite the fact she'd done everything but told Jake she would.
She sighed. This afternoon, she'd all but promised Jake she'd back away from him, and keep backing away. And she'd come up with that idea to stage a fight when he'd been out talking to Chris. Fight, and then go into a major pout. It had kept them from touching, kept him even from having to kiss her good-night.
Kept them from pretending to make love.
She'd seen the flare of intense relief in Jake's eyes when he'd realized what she had been doing—and why. He wasn't the only one who had been relieved. She wasn't sure how much more close contact she could take.
"Zoe."
His voice was so quiet in the darkness, at first she thought she'd imagined it.
But then Jake touched her. Reaching across the grand canyon in the middle of the bed, he touched her, his fingers light against her arm.
Zoe's heart nearly stopped.
"I think we should stop fighting," he said.
.
Were his words purely for the microphones, or did he actually intend them to have double meaning?
"Come here," he whispered. "We'll both sleep much better if you let me hold you."
She turned to look at him. His face was dimly lit, his eyes colorless in the darkness.
"Come on," he said, pulling her toward him, meeting her in the middle.
His arms felt so good around her, tears stung her eyes. He wore no shirt, and his skin was so warm, his chest so solid. She could smell just a hint of his delicious cologne and the mint of his toothpaste.
She held on to him tightly, knowing she should push him away, knowing she'd virtually promised him she would.
She could feel his legs against her and Zoe looked at him. He was still wearing his jeans. Denim. The ultimate in protection.
He smiled that crooked smile she'd come to know so well. "This'll be nice," he breathed. "We both really need to sleep, and..."
And he'd not only remembered what she'd told him this afternoon on the roof, but he'd also read between the lines. He'd figured out one of the things that she'd wanted so badly was for him to hold her in his arms all night long.
Zoe kissed him. She couldn't help it.
He sighed as he met her lips in a kiss that was impossibly sweet. It was filled with desire, but coated in something else, something wonderfully warm, something so much stronger than mere passion.
"Good night," she whispered.
His voice was like velvet in the darkness. "Night, babe."
Zoe closed her eyes and, with her head tucked safely beneath his chin, she fell asleep listening to the steady beating of Jake Robinson's heart.
Chapter 13
Do you ever think about Vietnam?"
Jake leaned his head against the concrete block wall, lifting his face to catch the weak rays of the afternoon sunshine. "Nope. Never."
"Are you lying?"
Zoe was sitting next to him. They were sitting on the deck that overlooked the waterfall again. Killing time.
They'd spent the morning wandering around the CRO fort, searching for closed-off areas and locked doors that they might've missed. But they'd had to stop, afraid of being too conspicuous.
They'd then spent about an hour collecting as much information as they could about the CRO work teams—finding out what Zoe would have to do to be assigned to the team that cleaned Christopher Vincent's private rooms, including his office.
From what Jake could gather, the first thing she had to do was to be a part of the CRO for at least five years.
That meant they had to find another way in, another way
6 6
to get the information they needed. And that way was going to be through Jake pledging his loyalty to the CRO and Christopher Vincent.
And that brought them here, to the roof of the factory, where they sat out of range of the cameras, their voices covered by the rush of the water. Killing time until their "honeymoon" officially ended.
Zoe had her hair pulled into a ponytail, and without any makeup on, she looked about eighteen years old. "You are lying," she said. "Aren't you?"
Jake opened his eyes and looked at her. "Yep."
"You probably never talk about Vietnam, right?" She had taken off her boots and socks and sat with her bare feet stretched out in front of her, legs crossed at the ankles. She had small, elegant feet—quite possibly the nicest feet he'd ever seen.
He went back to looking at the sky. It was much safer.
"A lot of the guys who were over there don't want to talk about it," he told her. "And people who weren't there, well... It's not something that's easy to explain. But you know what that's like. You probably never talk about the assignments you've been on."
"Most of my assignments have been top-secret."
"Mine, too. But I meant the ones that weren't."
Zoe sighed. "Yeah, you're right. Peter could be pretty flip and, well, sarcastic. He was so jaded and cynical, I just never told him anything that really mattered." She glanced at him. "The bad stuff or the good stuff."
"I never wanted Daisy to get upset," Jake said. "I did talk to her about some of the really bad voodoo that went down in Nam. We both needed me to talk about that, just to get past it, you know? But it would really upset her when I talked
about the reasons I'd kept going back—the reasons I stayed in the Navy. She didn't understand why I needed it. She didn't understand what I got out of it."
"That sense that you're actually doing something, you're actually taking action, instead of just being a bystander."
Zoe nodded. "There's so much hand-wringing that goes on in the world while nobody does a damn thing. I joined the Agency because I wanted to do more than compile frightening statistics about chemical and biological weapons. I wanted to track the suckers down and destroy them."
"And then there's the rush, too," Jake said. "She really didn't understand the adrenaline rush."
"I'm not sure I understand it myself." Zoe sat up, putting her socks and boots on as the late afternoon got colder. She pulled her legs underneath her to sit tailor style. "It's weird, isn't it? I was once... some where I shouldn't have been, in a country that would not have welcomed me with open arms under any circumstances. I was checking out reports that a pharmaceutical factory was cooking up anthrax. I went into the factory covertly, found what I needed to prove those reports were accurate and came back out— but not quite as covertly, after I nearly knocked over a security guard." She laughed, her eyes shining as she remembered. "It was insane. I was being chased by about twenty soldiers across the rooftops of the city in this amazing thunderstorm. Wind, lightning, hail—it should have been terrifying, but it wasn't. It was so exhilarating. So amazing. I can't explain it. I couldn't explain it then, either."
"You don't have to," Jake said, sitting up, too. "I know exactly what you mean. It's like, you're not just alive, you're beyond alive. It's..."
"Incredible," she finished for him, laughing. "It seems crazy. You look at a situation and there are all these risks, and you think, I should be running away from this as fast and as far as I can. You think, This time this could kill me."
"But then you think, But I bet I know how to beat this..."
"Yeah." She smiled. "I know how to win."
"So you do," Jake said. "You win, against all the odds, and it's so damn great."
"It's beyond great," she said.
She was sitting there, completely lit up, her eyes sparkling as she smiled at him.
Jake knew he was grinning at her, but he couldn't stop. "You must've been one of those kids who tried to parachute off the roof with a bedsheet."
"I had four brothers," she told him. "I had to learn to fight just so they'd let me tag along. And I had to prove— almost daily—that I was tough enough and daring enough to get inside the hallowed walls of their clubhouse. So, yeah, I did my share of roof walking. It drove my father nuts." She laughed. "I think I still drive my father nuts."
Her father had been in Nam. He was one of Jake's peers. A man whose life he'd helped save. A man who would definitely disapprove of the kind of thoughts Jake had been regularly having about his daughter.
Jake had woken up this morning with Zoe in his arms, and for about four very long seconds, his brain had played one hell of a trick on him. The extremely erotic dream he'd had about making love to her just moments before was still shockingly vivid in his mind, and he'd temporarily confused fantasy with reality, confused that dream with real memories. For a few endless seconds, he'd believed he truly had kissed her last night, her body arching eagerly up to meet his as he'd driven himself deeply inside of her.
But then reality intervened and he'd remembered what had really happened. Nothing. Nothing had happened.
Yet the thought of actually making love to Zoe had taken his breath away.
Yesterday, he'd told her that their relationship was going nowhere. He'd started to tell her that he couldn't imagine making love to any woman besides Daisy. He'd started to tell her he didn't see himself with anyone else—he just couldn't picture it.
But he hadn't been able to finish his sentence, because it wasn't the truth. Not only could he imagine making love
to Zoe, but he could see it in his mind's eye in shockingly intimate detail.
"What made you decide to join the Navy?" she asked, pulling him back here, to the roof, where they both were fully dressed.
Her jacket was open and she was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt tucked neatly into equally snug-fitting blue jeans. She seemed comfortable in her clothes, though, comfortable in her body. And why shouldn't she?
For most of his life, Jake had had the kind of good looks that most people made a big fuss over. But when he gazed into a mirror, he'd only seen himself. No big deal.
In the same way, Zoe had lived with herself all her life. She'd seen herself naked, washed that body every day in the shower, brushed her hair while looking into those liquid brown eyes in the mirror.
Like him, she was probably well aware that her package was wrapped in ultra-high quality paper, but—also like him—she had plenty of other, more important things to think about.
She was looking at him, waiting for him to answer her question about the Navy. Why had he joined the SEALs?
"My father was a UDT man in the Second World War," he told her. "He was part of the underwater demolition teams, the precursors to the SEALs."
"Was he career Navy, too?"
Jake had to laugh at that. "No. He was about as non-regular Navy as anyone I've ever met. He was a diver before the war, spent most of his time doing salvage ops in the Gulf of Mexico, living on a boat down in Key West, pretty much being a beach bum. He was tapped to join the teams after the disaster at Tarawa, when the Navy really started developing underwater navigation. He served in the Pacific until V-J day, and then he hunted down my mother in New York. He'd met her when she was a nurse in Hawaii. He went all the way to Peekskill and grabbed her out of the arms of her extremely boring fiance, literally hours
before the wedding, and pretty much immediately got her pregnant with me." He laughed again, "Frank, my father, was something of an underachiever, but when he finally decided to take action, he was extremely thorough."
"So you grew up in Peekskill, New York?"
Jake looked at her. "You planning to write up an article on me for Navy Life magazine?"
She laughed. Damn, she was pretty when she laughed. "Am I being too nosy?"
"Do I get to grill you after you're done with me?"
She smiled into his eyes. "You've read my Agency profile—probably the Top Secret-eyes-only version. So you know pretty much all there is to know about me."
"And you're telling me you didn't manage to get hold of my profile from the Agency?" he asked.
"Your Agency profile contains your full name, your date of birth and only a very brief sketch of your naval career, my mysterious friend. Most of what I know about you is from Scott Jennings's book. And he doesn't say anything at all about your childhood. I'm just..." She shrugged expansively. "Curious."
She was curious. But was it a professional or personal curiosity? Jake wasn't sure which alarmed him more.
He was silent so long, Zoe began to backpedal. "We don't have to talk about this," she said. "We don't have to talk at all. I just... I wanted..."
"We lived in New York until I was about three," Jake told her quietly. "I don't really remember it, but apparently we were poor but happy."
"Jake, you really don't have to—"
"I had an extremely unconventional—but incredibly happy—childhood," he said. "You want to hear about it or not?"
"Yes," she said. "I want to hear about it. Please."
"This is completely off the record," he said. "We're talking as Jake and Zoe. Not Admiral Robinson and Secret Agent Lange. Is that understood?"
"As Jake and Zoe," she said. "As friends. That's understood."
Friends. They were friends. That was why he felt so warm inside whenever she smiled at him. That was why he felt good just sitting here, next to her. It was why he could hold her in his arms all night long and wake up having slept better than he had in months. Years, even.
"Good," he said, letting himself get lost for a moment in her eyes. Friends. Yeah, they w
ere friends.
"Are you waiting for a drumroll before you start?" she asked, eyebrows lifting slightly.
"Do you have a problem with me taking my time?" he countered.
Zoe smiled sheepishly. "Sorry. It's hard to break the habit of always being in a hurry. I'm not the most patient person in the world." She took a deep breath, letting it slowly out. "Please," she said. "Whenever you're ready."
Jake laughed. "I love it when impatient people think they can fool everyone and pretend that they're in control. Meanwhile, they're wound tighter than a yo-yo and ready to go off in twenty different directions from tension."
"I'm more than willing to discuss the causes of my tension—and potential ways to reduce a little of my stress. But something tells me you might want to stick to a safer topic right now."
Jake cleared his throat. "Yeah," he said. "Okay. Let's see. Where was I? Peekskill. Right. I was about three, and Helen and Frank—my parents—both had jobs teaching at a private school, that is, until my great-uncle Arthur died."
Jake could think of three or four really powerfully excellent ways to relieve a little of his own stress, and he desperately tried to push them far, far from his mind. Friends.
"Artie had just a little less money than God, and he left it all to Frank. Frank being Frank, both he and Helen handed in their resignations on the spot. Helen being Helen, they stayed until the end of the school year. But in May,
we all packed our things, put our furniture in storage and
spent the next fifteen years traveling. We went all over the
world—London, Paris, Africa, Australia, Hong Kong, Peru.
If we found a city we liked, we stayed for a few weeks.
But if it had a beach, we stayed much longer. We spent
about two years in the Greek Islands. Another two in South
east Asia, not too far from Vietnam. It wasn't always safe,
the places we went, but it was always exciting. Frank taught
me to dive and Helen homeschooled me. Instead of being
poor and happy, we were rich and happy—not that you
could tell we were loaded from looking at us."
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