Tall, Dark and Dangerous Part 1

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Joe shook his head. “No,” he replied. “I get called and ordered to report to the base at Little Creek. There’s some kind of emergency. They’re calling in all of SEAL Team Ten, including the Alpha Squad.”

  Veronica felt faint. “What kind of emergency?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But even if I did know, I couldn’t say.”

  “If we were married, could you tell me?”

  Joe smiled ruefully. “No, baby. Not even then.”

  “So you just pack up and leave,” Veronica said tightly, “and maybe you’ll come back?”

  He reached for her. “I’ll always come back. You gotta believe that.”

  She sat up, moving out of reach, keeping her back to him so that he couldn’t see the look on her face. This was her worst nightmare, coming true. This was what she didn’t want to spend the next twenty years doing. This fear, this emptiness was exactly what she didn’t want to spend the next two decades feeling.

  “I either have to officially take leave, or go check in with the rest of the team. What do you think?” he asked again. “Can you get time off, too?”

  Veronica shook her head. “No.” Funny, her voice sounded so cool and in control. “No, I’m sorry, but I have to be on the cruise ship with Prince Tedric, starting tomorrow.”

  She could feel his eyes on the back of her head. She sensed his hesitation before he turned back to the telephone.

  He picked it up and dialed. “Yeah, it’s Joe Cat again. I’m in.”

  Veronica closed her eyes. He was in. But in for what? Something that was going to get him killed? She couldn’t stand it. Not knowing where he was going, what he’d be doing, was awful. She wanted to scream….

  “Right,” he said into the phone. “I’ll be ready.”

  He hung up the phone, and she felt the mattress shift as he stood.

  “I have to take a quick shower,” he said. “There’s a car coming in ten minutes.”

  Veronica spun around to face him. “Ten minutes!”

  “That’s how it works, Ronnie. I get a call, I have to leave. Right away. Sometimes we get preparation time, but usually not. Let me take a shower—we can talk while I’m getting dressed.”

  Veronica felt numb. This wasn’t her worst nightmare. This fear she felt deep in her stomach was beyond anything she’d ever imagined. She wanted to tell him, beg him to take the leave. She would quit her job if she had to. She would do anything, anything to keep him from going on that unnamed, unidentified, probably deadly emergency mission.

  And then what? she wondered as she heard the sound of the shower. She stood and slipped into her robe, suddenly feeling terribly chilled. She would lose her job, her reputation, her pride, for one measly week of Joe’s company. But after that week of leave was up, he would be gone. He’d go where duty called, when duty called, no matter the danger or risk. Sooner or later it would happen. Sooner or later—and probably sooner—he was going to kiss her goodbye, leaving her with her heart in her throat. He would leave her alone, watching the clock, waiting, praying for him to return. Alive. And he wouldn’t come back.

  Veronica couldn’t stand it. She wouldn’t be able to stand it.

  The water shut off, and several moments later Joe came out of the bathroom, toweling himself dry. She watched silently as he slipped on his briefs and then his pants.

  “So,” he said, rubbing his hair with the towel one last time, glancing over at her. “Tell me when you’ll be done with the Ustanzian tour. I’ll try to arrange leave.”

  “It won’t be for another two or three weeks,” Veronica said. “After the cruise, we’ll be heading back to D.C., and then to Ustanzia from there. By then, Wila will have had the baby, and—” She broke off, turning away from him. Why were they having this seemingly normal-sounding conversation, when every cell in her body was screaming for her to hold him—hold him and never let go? But she couldn’t hold him. A car was coming in five minutes to take him away, maybe forever.

  “Okay,” Joe was saying. She could hear him slipping his arms into his jacket and buttoning it closed. “What do you say I meet you in Ustanzia? Just let me know the exact dates and—”

  Veronica shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Okay,” he said again, very quietly. “What is a good idea, Ronnie? You tell me.”

  He wasn’t moving now. Veronica knew even without looking that he was standing there, his lean face unsmiling, his dark eyes intense as he watched her, waiting for her to move, to speak, to do something, anything.

  “I don’t have any good ideas.”

  “You don’t want to marry me.” It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.

  Veronica didn’t move, didn’t say anything. What could she possibly say?

  Joe laughed—a brief burst of air that had nothing to do with humor. “Hell, from the way it sounds, you don’t even want to see me again.”

  She turned toward him, but she wasn’t prepared for the chill that was in his eyes.

  “Boy, did I have you pegged wrong,” he said.

  “You don’t understand,” Veronica tried to explain. “I can’t live the way you want me to live. I can’t take it, Joe.”

  He turned away, and she moved forward, stopping him with a hand on his arm. “We come from such different worlds,” she said. His world was filled with danger and violence and the ever-present risk of death. Why couldn’t he see the differences between them? “I can’t just…pretend to fit into your world, because I know I won’t. And I know you won’t fit into mine. You can’t change any more than I can, and—”

  Joe pulled away. His head was spinning. Different worlds. Different classes was more like it. God, he should have known better. What was he thinking? How could he have thought a woman like Veronica St. John—a wealthy, high-class, gentrified lady—would want more from him than a short, steamy affair?

  He’d been right—she’d been slumming.

  That was all this was to her.

  She had been slumming. She had been checking out how the lower class lived. She had been having sex with a blue-collar man. Officer or not, that was what Joe was, what he would always be. That was where he came from.

  Veronica was getting her hands dirty, and Joe, he’d gone and fallen in love. God, he was a royal idiot, a horse’s ass.

  He took the ring box from where it still sat on the bedside table and dropped it into his pocket. Damned if he was going to let her walk away with a ring that had put a serious dent into his life savings.

  “Try to understand,” Veronica said, her eyes swimming with tears. She stood in front of the door, blocking his exit. “I love you, but…I can’t marry you.”

  And all at once Joe did understand. She may have been slumming—at first. But she’d fallen in love with him, too. Still, that love wasn’t enough to overcome the differences between their two “worlds” as she called it.

  He should walk away. He knew he should walk away. But instead he touched her face and brushed his thumb across her beautiful lips. And then he did something he’d never done before. He begged.

  “Please, Ronnie,” Joe said softly. “This thing between us…it’s pretty powerful. Please, baby, can’t we try to work this out?”

  Veronica stared up into Joe’s eyes, and for a second, she almost believed that they could.

  But then his pager beeped again, and the fear was back. Joe had to go. Now. Reality hit her hard and she felt sick to her stomach. She turned and moved away from the door.

  “That’s your answer, huh?” he said quietly.

  Veronica kept her back to him. She couldn’t speak. And she couldn’t bear to watch him leave.

  She heard him open the bedroom door. She heard him walk through the hotel suite. And she heard him stop, heard him hesitate before he opened the door to the corridor.

  “I thought you were tougher than this, Ron,” he said, a catch in his voice.

  The door clicked quietly as it closed behind him.

  20r />
  The guys in Alpha Squad were avoiding Joe. They were keeping their distance—and it was little wonder, considering the black mood he was in.

  The “emergency” calling them all back to Little Creek had been no more than an exercise in preparedness—a time test by the powers that be. The top brass were checking to see exactly how long it would take SEAL Team Ten to get back to their home base in Virginia, from their scattered temporary locations around California and the Southwest.

  Blue was the only man who ignored Joe’s bad mood and stayed nearby as they completed the paperwork on the exercise and on the Ustanzian tour operation. Blue didn’t say a word, but Joe knew his executive officer was ready to lend a sympathetic ear, or even a shoulder to cry on if he needed it.

  Early that evening, before they left the administration office, there was a phone call for Joe. From Seattle.

  Blue was there, and he met Joe’s eyes as the call was announced. There was only one person in Seattle who could possibly be calling Joe.

  Veronica St. John.

  Why was she calling him?

  Maybe she’d changed her mind.

  Blue turned away, sympathy in his eyes. Damn it, Joe thought. Were his feelings, his hope for the impossible that transparent?

  There was no real privacy in the office, and Joe had to take the call at an administrator’s desk, with the man sitting not three feet away from him.

  “Catalanotto,” he said into the phone, staring out the window.

  “Joe?” It was Veronica. And she sounded surprised to hear his voice. “Oh, Lord, I didn’t think I’d actually get through to you. I thought…I thought I’d be able to leave a message with your voice mail or…something.”

  Terrific. She didn’t actually want to speak to him. Then why the hell had she called? “You want me to hang up?” he asked. “You can call back and leave a message.”

  “Well, no,” she said. “No, of course not. Don’t be silly. I just…didn’t think you’d be there. I thought you’d be…shooting bad guys…or something.”

  Joe smiled despite the ache in his chest. “No,” he said. “Yesterday I shot the bad guy. Today I’m doing the paperwork about it.”

  “I thought…”

  “Yes…?”

  “Aren’t you shipping out or…something?”

  “No,” Joe said. “It was an exercise. The brass wanted to see how fast SEAL Team Ten could get our butts back to Little Creek. They do that sometimes. Supposedly it keeps us on our toes.”

  “I’m glad,” she said.

  “I’m not,” he stated flatly. “I was hoping they were sending us down to South America. We’re still no closer to nailing Diosdado. I was looking forward to tracking him down and having it out with him once and for all.”

  “Oh,” she said very softly. And then she was silent.

  Joe counted to five very slowly, then he said, “Veronica? You still there?”

  “Yes,” she replied, and he could almost see her shake her head to get herself back on track. But when she spoke, her voice was no less tentative. “I’m sorry, I…um, I was calling to pass on some news I received this afternoon. Mrs. Kaye called from Washington, D.C. Cindy died this morning at Saint Mary’s.”

  Joe closed his eyes and swore.

  “Mrs. Kaye wanted to thank you again,” Veronica continued, her voice shaking. She was crying. Joe knew just from the way her voice sounded that she was crying. God, his arms ached to hold her. “She wanted to thank both of us, for your visit. It meant a lot to Cindy.”

  Joe held tightly to the phone, fighting to ignore the six pairs of curious eyes and ears in the room.

  Veronica took a deep breath, and he could picture her wiping her eyes and face, adjusting her hair. “I just thought you’d want to know,” she said. She took another breath. “I have to run. The cruise ship sails in less than an hour.”

  “Thanks for calling to tell me, Veronica,” Joe said.

  There was another silence. Then she said, “Joe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said falteringly. “About…you and me. About it not working out. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  Joe couldn’t talk about it. How could he stand here in the middle of all these people and talk about the fact that his heart had been stomped into a million tiny pieces? And even if he could, how could he admit it to her—the woman responsible for all the pain?

  “Was there something else you wanted?” he asked, his voice tight and overly polite.

  “You sound so…Are you…are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” he lied. “I’m great. I’m getting on with my life, okay? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to it, all right?”

  Joe hung up the phone without waiting to see if she said goodbye. He turned and walked away, past Blue, past the guard at the front desk. He walked out of the building and down the road, heading toward the empty parade grounds. He sat in the grass at the edge of the field and held his head in his hands.

  And for the second time in his adult life, Joe Catalanotto cried.

  Standing at the pay phone, Veronica dissolved into tears.

  She hadn’t expected to speak to Joe. She hadn’t expected to hear his familiar voice. It was such a relief to know that he wasn’t risking his life—at least not today.

  But he’d sounded so stilted, so cold, so unfriendly. He’d called her Veronica, not Ronnie, as if she were some stranger he didn’t know. He was getting on with his life, he’d said. He clearly wasn’t going to waste any time worrying about what might have been.

  That was the way she wanted it, wasn’t it? So why did she feel so awful?

  Did she actually want Joe Catalanotto carrying a torch for her? Did she want him to be hurt? Did she want his heart to be broken?

  Or maybe she was afraid that by turning him down, she’d done the wrong thing, made the wrong choice.

  Veronica didn’t know. She honestly didn’t know.

  The only thing she was absolutely certain of was how terribly much she missed him.

  Joe sat in the bar nursing a beer, trying not to listen to the endless parade of country songs about heartbreak playing on the jukebox.

  “At ease, at ease. Stay in your seats, boys.”

  Joe looked into the mirror behind the bar and saw Admiral Forrest making his way across the crowded room. The admiral sat down at the bar, next to Joe, who took another sip of his beer, not even looking up, certainly not even smiling.

  “Rumor has it you survived your mission,” Mac said to Joe, ordering a diet cola from the bartender. “But it looks to me like you extracted without a pulse or a sense of humor. Am I right or are you still alive over there, son?”

  “Well, gee whiz, Admiral,” Joe said, staring morosely into his beer. “We can’t all be a barrel of laughs all the time.”

  Mac nodded seriously. “No, no, you’re right. We can’t.” He nodded to the bartender as the man put a tall glass of soda on the bar. “Thanks.” He glanced down the bar and nodded to Blue McCoy, who was sitting on Joe’s right. “Lieutenant.”

  Blue nodded back. “Good to see you, Admiral.”

  Forrest turned back to Joe. “Hear you and some of your boys had a run-in with Salustiano Vargas two days ago.”

  Joe nodded, glancing up at the older man. “Yes, sir.”

  “Also hear from the Intel grapevine that the rumor is, Vargas was disassociated from Diosdado and the Cloud of Death some time ago.”

  Joe shrugged, drawing wet lines with the condensation from his mug on the surface of the bar. He exchanged a look with Blue. “Vargas wasn’t able to verify FInCOM’s information after we had it out with him. He was too dead to talk.”

  Admiral Forrest nodded. “I heard that, too,” he said. He took a long sip of his soda, then set it carefully back down on the bar. “What I can’t figure out is, if Salustiano Vargas was not working with Diosdado, why did earlier FInCOM reports state that members of the Cloud of Death were unusually interested in Prince Tedric’s tou
r schedule?”

  “FInCOM isn’t known for their flawless operations,” Joe said, one eyebrow raised. “Someone made a mistake.”

  “I don’t know, Joe.” Mac scratched his head through his thick white hair. “I’ve got this gut feeling that the mistake is in assuming the reports are true about this rift between Vargas and Diosdado. I think there’s still some connection between them. Those two were too close for too long.” He shook his head again. “What I can’t figure out is why Salustiano Vargas—Diosdado’s number-one sharpshooter—would set himself up as a suicide assassin. He didn’t stand a chance at getting out of there. And he didn’t even hit his target.”

  Joe took another slug of his beer. “He had the opportunity,” he said. “I was on that stage, with my back to the bastard when he fired his first shot. It wasn’t until the second shot went into the stage next to me that I realized he was shooting from behind me and—”

  Joe froze, his glass a quarter of an inch from his lips. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.” He put his beer back on the counter and looked from Blue to the admiral. “Why would a sharpshooter of Vargas’s caliber miss an easy target in broad daylight?”

  “Luck,” Blue suggested. “You moved out of the way of the bullet at the right split second.”

  “I didn’t,” Joe said. “I didn’t move at all. He deliberately missed me.” He stood, knocking his barstool over. “I need the telephone,” he said to the bartender. “Now.”

  The bartender moved fast and placed the phone in front of Joe. Joe pushed it in front of the admiral.

  “Who am I calling?” Forrest asked dryly. “Why am I calling?”

  “Why would Salustiano Vargas deliberately miss his assassination target?” Joe asked. He answered his own question. “Because the assassination attempt was only a diversion, set up to make FInCOM’s security force relax. Which they immediately did, right? I’m out of the picture. The rest of Alpha Squad is out of the picture. Mac, how many FInCOM agents are with Prince Tedric’s tour now that the alleged danger has passed?”