Over the Edge

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “Shame on you,” Helga said. “Who are you to decide what is or isn’t going to make this young lady happy? Don’t you think enough of her to allow her to make that decision for herself?”

  Stanley laughed. “Well, yeah, but—”

  “But, but, but! There’s always a but to be found if you want one. Here’s your sign from God,” Helga said, holding out her hands. “I am your sign from God. God is telling you to listen to your aunt Helga and learn from Hershel and Annebet. Seize the day, young Stanley. In matters of love, seize the day!”

  The ring box was burning a hole in Stan’s pocket.

  It was amazing, though, how ever since Teri had returned to London, he’d had exactly zero time alone with her.

  Back in London, whenever he’d thought they finally had some time to themselves, some nurse had come in with some pain in the ass final test. His blood pressure, for God’s sake. How many times did they need to take it to know that yes, he was alive? His temperature, for crying out loud.

  Then they needed a urine sample.

  Yeah, that one really set the appropriate romantic mood.

  It was the same thing on the plane. Nurses checking his pulse. It had been easiest just to close his eyes and go to sleep.

  And now he and Teri were being driven to his house from the airport by Mike Muldoon. Yeah, that would be just about perfect. He should ask Teri to marry him in front of Mike Muldoon.

  “Need help getting out?” Muldoon asked.

  Stan gave him his death glare.

  “Right,” Muldoon said.

  Teri was carrying his seabag and her own little overnight duffel. She stood back and let him get out by himself. Let him walk up his own goddamn stairs on his own goddamn feet.

  Christ, he needed to sit down.

  She unlocked the door, but didn’t open it. “Don’t freak,” she said. “If I overstepped the bounds, it can all go back.”

  She swung the door open.

  And his house had furniture. Holy shit, it was filled with original Stickley pieces. It was gorgeous, and it had to cost at least . . .

  Now he really had to sit down. And damn, if there wasn’t a turn of the century sofa right there, four steps away.

  He sat on it.

  He had to ask. “Where did you get the money?”

  “I had some left over from my inheritance,” she told him. “You know, from Lenny? I’ve been investing. I had a couple of good years and . . .”

  “I’ll say. Christ, Teri. This furniture’s almost worth more than the house.”

  Teri set his seabag down. Tried to make a joke. “I figured as long as I was planning to spend a lot of time over here . . .”

  He tried to make a joke out of it, too. “For that kind of money, you better be planning to stay forever.”

  “Well,” she said. “Yeah. Actually forever sounds about right.” She looked him in the eye, squared her shoulders, and he realized suddenly that she was forcing herself to confront him. She didn’t realize . . .

  “I’m giving you another day or two,” she told him staunchly. “But that’s all you’re going to get. After that, I’m just going to go ahead and ask you. You know. To marry me.”

  Stan laughed. This must be what Dr. Frankenstein had felt like. Like, holy God, look at this beautiful monster he’d helped create.

  His laughter threw her and she looked around the room. “You were right about this furniture,” she told him. “It’s really beautiful. It turns this house into a real home.”

  “The furniture’s great,” he said. “Have I said thank you yet?”

  Silently she shook her head.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ve never been given a gift like this before.”

  “You really like it?”

  He reached for her. Tugged her down so that she was sitting next to him. “I love it,” he said. “But what I really love is you. You make this house a real home. Please, will you stay forever?”

  He put the ring box into her hands.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “You already got me a ring?”

  “Will you marry me, Teresa?” Stan asked. “I can’t promise you that it’s going to be a constant ball of fun being a senior chief’s wife, but I can promise that I’ll love you and be faithful to you until the end of time.”

  Teri was looking at him with so much love in her eyes, he thought he might be the one who was going to start to cry here. “Yes,” she breathed. “I’ll marry you.”

  She kissed him and he kissed her, and they both pretended he wasn’t crying.

  And then she opened the ring box. Stan told her Hershel and Annebet’s story in between long, slow kisses, and she didn’t bother to pretend not to cry.

  And their kisses got longer. Slower. And he pulled her shirt free from her pants. She drew in a long breath as he touched her. “Did the doctor say you could . . . ?”

  Stan smiled at her. “The doctor said I should listen to my body. My body says oh yeah.”

  Teri smiled back at him. “In that case, I have something else to show you.”

  She slid out of his arms, unbuttoning her shirt and kicking off her boots. Her pants, underwear, and socks followed in record time.

  “Very nice,” Stan said. “I’ve noticed that about you. You’re very good at getting naked. I think that’s an excellent skill for a wife to have.”

  She laughed. “This isn’t what I want to show you.”

  He laughed, too. “Bad plan, then, because I’m completely unable to look at anything but you. Damn, you’re beautiful.”

  “Follow me,” she said.

  He stood up. “Is there any doubt in your mind that I won’t?”

  She laughed as she disappeared into . . . the kitchen?

  “Bedroom’s upstairs,” he called. “I was kind of hoping what you wanted to show me was my beautiful new Stickley bed frame. . . .”

  God damn, as he got to the kitchen, Teri opened the back door and walked outside. Naked.

  He was moving slowly, but he was definitely moving. He pushed open the back screen and . . .

  There was a hot tub in his backyard.

  Teri’d put up very tall wooden fences on the two sides of his property, providing privacy from his neighbors. The view out to the ocean, however, was still wide open.

  “We can probably be seen by someone on the bridge with a telescope,” she told him from her perch on the side of the tub. “I figure if they go to that much trouble, they deserve to see us naked.”

  Stan lowered himself into one of the new lounge chairs that had appeared on his patio, courtesy of his fiancée—who clearly had had more than a few good years with her investments. “My body’s telling me no hot tub for me—not yet. But I’m going to sit here and enjoy watching you.”

  And he did.

  And it wasn’t too much longer before someone—provided they managed to stop their car on the bridge and set up a telescope—would’ve gotten quite an eyeful as the senior chief of SEAL Team Sixteen’s Troubleshooters Squad and his bride-to-be seized the day.

  By Suzanne Brockmann

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group:

  HEARTTHROB

  BODYGUARD

  THE UNSUNG HERO

  THE DEFIANT HERO

  OVER THE EDGE

  PRAISE FOR SUZANNE BROCKMANN

  The Defiant Hero

  Selected by the Doubleday Book Club

  “A smart, thrilling keeper . . . This is one to recommend heartily to friends. . . . While heating tension and passion to the boiling point, Brockmann firmly squashes the cliché of military men with hearts of stone and imbues her SEALs with honest emotional courage.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  The Unsung Hero

  Chosen by the Romance Writers of America as the #1 Romance of the Year

  “[Brockmann] takes a quantum leap forward with a novel that is richly textured, tenderly touching, and utterly exciting. This is one book you will be unable to put down or forget!”


  —Romantic Times

  Bodyguard

  Winner of the RITA Award

  “Count on Ms. Brockmann to deliver a thoughtful and tightly woven plot with plenty of action.”

  —The Romance Journal

  Read on for a sneak peek at

  OUT OF CONTROL

  the next book from

  Suzanne Brockmann

  Coming in Spring 2002

  At about 0530 that very morning, Ken “WildCard” Karmody became a terrorist.

  It wasn’t a career move he would normally have made, especially on such short notice, with no time properly to prepare. But seeing how it was a direct order, he had no choice but to embrace it completely.

  “You believe you’ll be rescued in a matter of a few short hours, don’t you, Mr. Bond?” he asked his hostage—an SAS enlisted man named Gordon MacKenzie who was sitting, tied up, on the sagging floor of the hut they’d chosen as Tango HQ. “But such an easy escape—no, it is not to be.”

  “Ah, Christ.” Gordie rolled his eyes along with his Rs, sounding as if he were doing an excellent imitation of Scotty from Star Trek, except, hot damn, Jim, the Scottish accent was for real. “Here we go, on the move again, is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  Kenny slipped neatly from evil overlord to Yoda. “Try not,” he told Gordie solemnly as he untied the rope that held the Scots’feet. “Do. Or do not.” He grinned. “And in this case, my friend, what I need you to do for me is strip.”

  Gordon sighed. With his dark hair cut close to his scalp, his dark brown eyes, and his lean build, he looked more like George Clooney than the rather portly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise. “Kenneth. Be reasonable, lad. It’s a training op. You’re only supposed to pretend to be the bad guys. Don’t you know if you let my boys catch you and liberate me, you’ll be home in your girlfriend’s bed before 2230?”

  His girlfriend’s bed.

  The rest of the SEALs who were playing the part of Ken’s merry band of nasties got very quiet. Too quiet.

  Did they honestly think those three words—his and girlfriend’s and bed—would set him off? He could feel their uncertainty bouncing around the rough-hewn walls of the shack.

  Yup. No doubt about it.

  Jenkins and Gilligan and Silverman and even Lopez were all expecting him to go postal.

  Ken laughed. He supposed it served him right. Once upon a time, he would have lost it at the merest whisper of Adele’s name.

  But, come on. That was then, this was now. Hadn’t they noticed how fricking serene, how absolutely Buddha-like he’d been lately?

  Imperturbable. Oh, yeah. That was him, all the way. In fact, his picture had gone up next to that word in the dictionary.

  He unfastened Gordie’s hands. “Kinda crowded in my girlfriend’s bed these days, considering she got married to some rich dickhead last weekend.”

  Gordie winced. “Shite. We’re in for a night of it then, are we boys? Up till dawn’s early light?” He glanced at Jenk, at Lopez, at Gilligan, at Silverman, sending them each a silent individual apology for having said the wrong thing. As if Kenny were some kind of special-needs child who had to be handled with extra care—instead of the imperturbable son of a bitch he’d worked hard to become.

  He let the flash of annoyance roll off him as he shook his head. “Naw, it won’t take until dawn. We’ll take ’em out long before midnight.”

  The Scot laughed aloud. “You’ll take them out? Is that what I heard ye say?”

  “You bet your pointy ass. Now strip,” Ken ordered.

  “No focking way.” Gordie was still chuckling to himself. “A fully outfitted SAS team—they’re youngsters, true, and fresh out of . . . No, I won’t bet any body parts, but I will wager a crisp hundred dollar bill that if there’s any taking out to be done, my boys will be the ones doing it.”

  Ken knew what MacKenzie was thinking. The men from SEAL Team Sixteen were playing the part of the tangos—terrorists—as the six-man SAS team from England trained, practicing the rescue of a hostage. That hostage being, of course, the one and only Gordie MacKenzie, so freaking full of himself it was a wonder he wasn’t bobbing against the ceiling like a helium balloon.

  MacKenzie was thinking about the fact that his SAS boys were dressed for a rescue mission. They had the gear and the MREs in case they got hungry. They had the firepower.

  So to speak.

  The automatic weapons both teams were using didn’t shoot real bullets. They were part of a kickass computer program that worked like a state of the art, hightech paintball game. Except instead of covering the other players with bright colored paint, a direct hit was registered, via satellite, in the mainframe computer. A hit severe enough to “kill” disabled an individual player’s ability to use any of the weapons—even one stolen from the enemy.

  The weapons Ken and his SEALs had been given—only two to split between the five of them—didn’t work quite as well as the seven pseudo­machine guns and sidearms that the SAS team had in their posession. Nah, unless tangos were bankrolled by a patron such as Osama Bin Laden, they often couldn’t afford anything but cheap-as-shit, rusty, or obsolete weapons. And the computer program, in an attempt to make the Ts weapons seem as rusty, obsolete, and cheap as shit as possible, would occasionally and randomly cause them to jam.

  That program was a neat little piece of training software. Ken knew it inside and out.

  He ought to, he’d helped design it.

  Its one major flaw was something that could be uncomfortable to train with in hot weather—something they didn’t have to worry about on a freeze-yer-balls-off winter day like today. The program required all the players in the training op to wear specially designed, long-sleeved uniforms made of fabric laced with a sensor grid.

  So, in actuality, the computer didn’t register the fact that a player died. It registered the fact that the player’s uniform died.

  “You know, it’s tempting,” Ken told Gordie, “but I’m not a thief. I’m not going to steal your money by taking that bet.”

  “Ach, but I have no problem stealing yours. Humor me, lad.”

  “If you insist. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Now, take off your focking clothes, Mackenzie, or we’ll take ’em off for you.”

  Gordie stared at him. “You’re serious.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You’re going to focking cheat, aren’t you, you bastard—”

  Ken nodded to Gilligan, Jenk, and Silverman, who wrestled the Scotsman to the ground. He hummed happily to himself as he untied his own boots and kicked them off to get his legs free from his pants. This was going to be fun. “Hey, Lopez, you got scissors in your medical kit?”

  “Absolutely, Chief.”

  Jenk tossed him Gordie’s pants, and Ken stepped into them. Yeah, the two men definitely had the same height and build. Gordie’s uniform shirt quickly followed, and he slipped that on, too. “You know how to cut hair?” he asked Lopez.

  The SEAL team’s hospital corpsman looked at him, looked at Gordie who was now being dressed in Ken’s uniform like a giant, uncooperative Barbie doll, and smiled. “How hard could it be?”

  “Let’s go with something nice and short today.” Ken sat down on a partially charred log someone had dragged inside, either to sit on or in an attempt to burn the place down. “I’d like the look that all the SAS boys are sporting these days. I think it would look smashing on me.” He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the hut’s only remaining window.

  With the exception of his hair—which grew much too quickly and tended to stand straight up when he ran his hands through it—in a certain light, especially when he tipped his head a certain way, Ken looked a little bit like George Clooney, too.

  “Captain,” he murmured to himself in a perfect imitation of Scotty, honed from years of watching way too much Star Trek—a lonely, dorky, smartass loser of a kid who longed for a father more like Mr. Spock, ruled by logic instead of the kind of raw emotion that could make a m
an put his fist through walls. “The warp engines cannae take anymore. . . .”

  It was the waiting that was the hardest part.

  Ken had been born without the patience gene. His biggest challenge in becoming a SEAL had been in learning to wait, learning to lie silently in ambush, constantly alert as the seconds became minutes became hours became days.

  Gilligan, Lopez, and Silverman were out there now, dug into the dirt, communing with the bugs that were still alive under the blanket of brown leaves and fallen pine needles.

  Somehow it was easier to wait in an ambush position. but Ken was here, waiting for a signal, sitting on his butt in this stupid hut.

  Ach, laddie, but he was nae Kenneth Karmody any longer. No, he was handsome Gordon MacKenzie now, and aye, he had the short hair and overinflated ego to prove it.

  The sun was low in the sky and the shadows nice and long when Gilligan—Dan Gillman—finally gave forth with one of his freakishly authentic turkey calls. Apparently, Gillman entered turkey-calling contests at county fairs and won first prize all the time. Ken wasn’t sure exactly what he won—a trophy of a turkey or a trophy of a grown man standing on a stage and acting like a turkey.

  But the signal was his heads-up. The SAS boys had finally moved into position outside the hut. What the hell had taken them so long to find this place?

  Ken ignored Gordie’s reproachful eyes as he tested the ropes that bound the man and checked the bandana he’d stuffed in his mouth as a gag. “Won’t be long now.”

  Gordie made a string of muted noises that might’ve been him trying to say, “You dumb focker, when I get free, I’m going to kick your bluddy arse.”

  “I’m sure you’ll try, me wee laddie,” Ken murmured back to him as he jammed his own favorite winter hat—the one with the ear flaps that completely covered his hair—onto Gordie’s head.