Into the Crossfire

by Lisa Marie Rice

  However, having a very sick father wreaked havoc on her love life. One whiff of what she was dealing with, and a lot of men who’d been very interested in a date suddenly lost interest.

  It was her little test. As her philosophy professor in college would have put it, being able to deal with her father was a necessary but not sufficient condition for her to think of hooking up with a man.

  If the man in question could deal with her life and all its troubles, fine. They might just take it a step or two further. If not…good-bye. If you wanted her, she came with her father. They were a package deal.

  She’d had a lot of good-byes before the relationships even started, and now that her father was deteriorating so rapidly, she wasn’t open to dating at all.

  Not that tonight was a date, of course. It was a thank-you.

  Blue, black, blue, black…

  Blue, she finally decided. The periwinkle blue polished cotton sheath paired with a black linen jacket. After ten years of Swiss winters, San Diego’s mild climate never failed to delight her.

  Makeup! My God, there was no way she could go down with a naked face.

  She glanced at her watch and shuddered. Twenty minutes late, unheard of for her. Nicole dressed and made up in record time and started descending the stairs when she suddenly stopped, transfixed.

  There was her father downstairs, facing her, sitting in the fabulous wheelchair she’d bought with part of her severance pay from the UN. It did everything but make coffee and sing. He had a celebratory finger of whiskey in a crystal glass on the occasional table at his elbow and Sam had his own glass of twenty-year-old Talisker. Guests were few and far between and her father rejoiced at visits.

  Sam Reston was sitting across from her father—she couldn’t see his face but she could see his shoulders, so broad they over-shot the chair back—clad in an expensive midnight blue suit.

  But what had her blocked at the top of the staircase, one foot up, one foot down on the first step, was the expression on her father’s face. He was…happy. He looked animated and there was color in his cheeks. His eyes—the color so like her own—sparkled. No doubt he’d been telling one of his wicked jokes.

  She hadn’t told Sam Reston that she lived with her father and that her father was ill. She hadn’t told him anything, in fact. So when he came to the door expecting to find a woman to take out to dinner, he’d been confronted with a visibly very ill man. An ill man he’d made smile.

  Sam Reston just kept on moving up the scale. Lowlife to security company owner to guy who made her father smile. That last attribute was the best one.

  Her father’s gaze shifted and his smile broadened. “Hello, darling.”

  “Hi, Pops.” Smiling at her father’s expression, she walked down the staircase. If he was happy, even for a fleeting moment, then so was she.

  Sam turned in his seat and their eyes met.

  Nicole stopped. Everything in her stopped—head, lungs, legs. It was like taking a punch to the stomach. All the air left her system. His dark eyes were so intense, it was as if they were hands, reaching out to touch her. She could hardly breathe, hardly think.

  She’d always seen him looking grim and dirty and dangerous. Now he still looked deadly serious, two hundred plus pounds of male potency, completely focused on her. His eyes made a quick trip down to her feet then back up to her face. With anyone else, she would have bridled at the blatant male once-over. Somehow Sam Reston managed to make it not insulting but…arousing.

  At any rate, he was certainly aroused. Those dark eyes were full of heat; under the olive-toned skin of his sharp cheekbones was a faint wash of red, and it wasn’t a blush of shyness.

  There was pure sex in his look, powerfully potent, stronger than anything she’d ever felt from a man before. It sapped the strength right out of her knees and her hand went reflexively to the railing for support. She stood there for a long moment under his heated gaze.

  It was only a lifetime’s intense training in diplomatic circles where you never, ever showed your true feelings that got her feet moving again. She barely felt them as she descended the stairs, watched by the big dark man sitting across from her father.

  It didn’t help that he cleaned up fantastically well. During the course of the day he’d managed to make it to a barber. An expensive one. His hair—long, unkempt and greasy—was now shiny clean and beautifully cut, showing off the elegant shape of his head.

  She’d never seen him in anything other than torn, grungy jeans and filthy tee shirts. Now he seemed like another man entirely, dressed in a well-cut midnight blue suit, white cotton shirt and burgundy silk tie. Now he looked like the businessman he was, and a highly successful one at that.

  And that businessman watched her intently, step by step.

  Her father, normally so astute and alive to the ways of the world, wasn’t paying attention. He’d been caught up in the conversation and was excited at the company. Thoughtlessly, he reached for his whiskey and sideswiped the glass.

  Oh no!

  Nicole ran the few steps to her father, catching the glass just as it was about to shatter on the table.

  Her father looked appalled, the high color of joy gone from his face. Nicholas Pearce, so graceful all his life, with an athlete’s build and coordination, which had been a pure gift from the gods because he never exercised, had become clumsy. The tumors were robbing him of his fine motor control. The loss had come so quickly, he often forgot he couldn’t control his muscles. He pulled his shaking hand back, stricken. He hated making a mess when it was just the two of them. In front of company it was even more humiliating.

  Nicole’s heart gave a hard squeeze in her chest. She knew very well how crushed he felt inside, to have almost spilled a drink in front of a perfect stranger, a stranger whose company he was enjoying. Company was a real treat these days.

  How lonely her father must be. He spent his days alone in a wheelchair, with the housekeeper for company during the day and a tired daughter in the evenings.

  Losing weight, growing weaker, day by day.

  Dying was so hard.

  She put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, picking up the glass, curving his hand around it. “Sorry to be so late,” she said to Sam Reston.

  He’d instinctively started to rise to help her father, but a fleeting touch of his shoulder as she passed by and he subsided. Smart man.

  “That’s fine,” he said easily. “It gave me an opportunity to talk to your dad, here. We were both in Jakarta at the same time.”

  She casually held the whiskey glass to her father’s lips, watching him out of the corner of her eye. A slight tilt and he took a sip. She placed the glass back on the table next to him, movements natural and unobtrusive. Her father had his sip without making a mess, and without being humiliated.

  “Doing slightly different things,” her father said.

  “Yes, sir, that we were.” An unexpected smile broke out on Sam Reston’s hard face, the first she’d ever seen from him. She nearly did a double-take. It didn’t soften that hard face but it did highlight the strong features, making him look almost…handsome. “Our doings were less respectable than yours, sir, but we were still serving the same guy. Uncle Sam.”

  Oh God, he shouldn’t smile, Nicole thought. No, no, no. She had schooled herself to get through this evening purely as a thank you for opening her door when she was so desperate, and because she’d given her word.

  She didn’t want to be attracted.

  She didn’t want this to be a date, not in any way. This wasn’t a date, not at all. She’d dithered over the dress simply because…because she always tried to look as good as possible, it was in her nature. And the sucker punch to her stomach when he’d turned to look at her? Surprise at seeing him in businessman mode.

  She was perfectly prepared to spend a very boring couple of hours with Mr. Muscle as a thank you, to pay off a debt. Drive with him to some bland restaurant, eat white-bread food, listen to him talk about himself—in her
experience, men’s conversations ranged from their jobs to their latest toys and back, seldom deviating—lock her jaw so she wouldn’t yawn, be driven back home, fend off the gropes, say good night, be back in the house with a sigh of relief before ten.

  Nothing she hadn’t done hundreds of times before. Her standard date.

  Spending an evening with a man who made her father laugh, and who had a charming, rakish smile in him—no, that wasn’t in the program at all.

  Not to mention a man who could punch all the breath out of her body with a mere look.

  Nicole had no time for a man in her life. None. She had a very sick father. He was deteriorating almost daily. Each day brought some new heartbreaking loss.

  Keeping a serene façade for him while she watched him die, slowly, inch by inch, was eating her alive.

  Her entire life revolved around her father’s illness, as she tried to keep them afloat.

  There was no time for a man, for a love life. The only things she could allow into her life were caring for her father and work.

  Sam needed to know that, as soon as possible. That look he’d given her meant business. He had to know that there was no possibility of anything between them.

  He stood, bent over her father and briefly held his hand, pretending not to notice that her father’s hand shook in his.

  “It was a pleasure to meet you, Ambassador Pearce. I look forward to talking to you again.”

  Her father’s cheeks were pink again with pleasure.

  “The p-p-pleasure was a-all m-m-mine, I assure y-y-you.” Pops was tired. When his scarce physical resources ran down, he started stuttering. Nicole went quietly into the kitchen and signalled to Manuela that it was time for dinner and then bed.

  Manuela came into the room with a broad smile, wiping her hands on her apron.

  Sam waited until Manuela was bent over her father and, with a nod of his head and a murmured “ma’am” to Manuela, he took Nicole’s elbow and walked her out the door.

  They descended the stairs and walked down the driveway in unison. Nicole realized he was shortening his strides for her. He seemed to be somehow attuned to her movements, though he wasn’t looking at her at all. He was scanning the street ahead. Still, she got the distinct impression that though his attention was focused on the road ahead, he’d catch her if she were to trip on her very pretty and very impractical sandals.

  Across the street, the curtains of the window of the living room opened and Creepy peeped out, then Creepier. She suppressed a shudder.

  When her grandparents had bought this house in the early sixties, it had been an upper-middle-class area, the perfect place for a couple to bring up a family during the Kennedy years. Safe and ordered and prosperous. Nicole had heard her mother talk often and affectionately about life on Mulberry Street, among families that knew one another and socialized often.

  But something had happened to the street after Meredith Loren grew up to marry Nicholas Pearce and spend the next thirty-five years abroad. Nicole didn’t know whether it was because of demographics or economics or whether someone had put a hex on the area. Whatever had happened, it had turned the whole area into a receptacle for the lost and the hopeless, people on the last rung before falling into the void.

  The big house across the street where her mother’s best friend had once lived had changed hands twenty times and was now a run-down rooming house owned by an absentee landlord and inhabited by the saddest people imaginable. Poor single mothers barely scraping by, shabby middle-aged divorced men who had just lost their tenth job in a year, the odd illegal immigrant keeping his head down.

  And, worse, it seemed to be Club Drifter—a place where angry, unbalanced young men congregated and spat their rage at the world. There were two in particular, one black and one white, both dreadlocked and heavily pierced, both with pant crotches down to their knees, both either high or drunk at all hours.

  Both fixated on her.

  If they happened to see her, it was like some inaudible signal had been beamed to dogs. They’d stiffen, start whistling, calling out obscenities. Nicole’s only defense was to get into her car as quickly as possible, hit the locks, and pull out, fast. The other day, horribly, the blond had moved fast and knocked on the passenger-side window of her car just as she was getting in. She’d closed the locks with a whump and taken off as quickly as she could, heart pounding.

  The whole thing was incredibly…unpleasant, to say the least.

  And there they were, both of them. Just her luck. As if the door closing behind her were a secret signal, Creepy came out on the porch followed by Creepier.

  Sam felt her stiffen, followed her gaze, and tightened his hand on her elbow.

  They started with the cat calls and whistles, loud enough to pierce eardrums. Nicole watched her feet and walked as fast as she could. Experience had taught her that looking at them, acknowledging their existence, only made things worse.

  She and Sam walked down the street together as he calmly escorted her to his car, a late-model, dark blue BMW. He seated her in the passenger seat and walked around to the driver’s side. He stopped for a second before getting in, looking out over the roof at the two creeps grinning and whistling from the porch.

  She knew what they were seeing. A guy dressed like a businessman who…wasn’t. When he’d seen the two, he had instantly morphed into the soldier he’d been. Amazing. She’d been standing next to him, thinking he was so very big when the air around him became supercharged and he grew even bigger.

  The man had been a Special Forces soldier, a Navy SEAL, for God’s sake, and had won a chestful of medals. He beat Creepy and Creepier on the male scale, hands down.

  All she saw was a chunk of male torso through the driver’s window but the two creeps must have seen more, because the whistling and cat calls stopped, as abruptly as if someone had put a hand around their throats and squeezed.

  Males are, above all, animals. Herd animals, with a very keen instinct for the alpha male and when to keep out of his way.

  Just a minute’s look, and the creeps’ eyes were on the ground in subconscious submission, another minute and they sullenly turned and slouched back inside, slamming the front door closed.

  Never, ever, in a million years could Nicole have achieved that, not even with a gun in her hand, let alone with a look.

  Sam got into the driver’s seat, jaw muscles jumping. As soon as he was seated, he activated the locks.

  “It’s truly a man’s world,” Nicole said, sighing. “I could never quell them with a look.”

  “No, you couldn’t.” He shot a look at the front porch, then his gaze shifted back to hers. He reached over her, pulled down her seat belt, latched it. His shoulders were so broad they blocked out the evening light from the driver’s-door window when he turned to her. “Is that their usual MO? Standing on the porch, shouting and whistling at you as if you were a dog?”

  “Yes.” Nicole sighed. Tense muscles started relaxing again. It was almost impossible to feel afraid inside the big, safe, locked car with Sam Reston at the wheel. “I think that they have a very narrow behavioral repertoire.”

  His dark serious gaze met hers. “Are they escalating? Becoming more forward? Because that’s what punks like them do. Feel for the boundaries, then push until you push back. You’re not going to pull a gun on them. If you were, you would have already. So they take one step forward. Then another.”

  Were they escalating? They’d moved in a month ago. Or maybe not moved in. They just appeared, like mold, out of nowhere. The first week they’d stared out of the front window at her. Then they came out on the porch and stared. It was unnerving, but she dealt with it. By the time she got to the corner, she’d forgotten they existed. The second week the whistles and cat calls started, together with rude gestures. It took her the entire drive downtown to shake the disgust from her system. The other day, when Creepy knocked on the car window, well, that had been truly frightening.

  “I think—I think they m
ight be escalating,” she said quietly. There. She’d put it into words, that vague sense of unease hanging like a gray cloud in the back of her mind. “One of them knocked on the window as I took off the other day. I remember thinking that I could have been in trouble if the car hadn’t started.”

  He nodded. “I was afraid of that. There are things you can do to block the escalation. Even better, there are things I can do…”

  He left it hanging in the air.

  Nicole closed her eyes in relief. Oh God, yes.

  Let the Dreaded Dreadlocks problem go. Just tip it into those broad, tanned, very capable-looking hands. There was no doubt that Sam could deal with the punks with almost embarrassing ease, much much more easily than she could ever hope to. He’d frozen them literally with a look.

  The temptation to let him handle the two punks was so strong she had to dig her nails into the palms of her hands to bring herself back to reality.

  Having him take care of this problem for her was a huge temptation. But—she didn’t know Sam Reston at all. He wasn’t her partner in any way. If he warned off the Creeps by acting as her proxy, and she never saw him again, they’d notice and double the harassment.

  “No,” she said reluctantly. “I think I’d better handle it. Or try to.”

  He nodded, but didn’t switch on the engine yet. He sat, big hands curved around the steering wheel, looking at her.

  “Tell you what.” His gaze went past her to where two thuggish faces looked out the porch window. He gave a sharp punch to the horn and the faces disappeared, the dingy beige curtain fluttering back into place. “My brother Mike is a cop. I can have him drive by a couple of times in a patrol car. Stop in front of your house and say hello. That way they know you have the cops at your back.”

  “That would be wonderful. Thank you.” Nicole tried to keep the relief out of her voice. It was a perfect solution. Enough of a deterrent to keep the two thugs off her case, without it being directly linked to Sam Reston. It was an elegant solution. “That sounds great. I’m very grateful.”