Her heart beat against her chest wall, echoing his, for several long seconds. He didn’t look like a criminal. Or a practical joker type. As she studied him closer, she realized something didn’t add up.
He righted himself released his hold on her, then sat crouched, covering his exposed groin with the throw rug. He seized her purse and turned it inside out in seconds by pulling apart the lining and dumping the contents on the floor.
“Hey! That’s a Coach bag, you…”
He gave her another glare, reminding her she was physically outmatched. She closed her mouth mid-sentence, choking down renewed anger. He sifted through the contents, opened a lipstick tube and sniffed the pink shaft, then carefully retracted it and replaced the top.
“Sorry.” He directed his apology to the floor and didn’t glance up.
That’s it? Can’t even look at me, you horrible son of a bitch? She decided it was still unsafe, so kept her thoughts to herself.
He’s a crazy. A psycho. A sociopath. No wonder he has financial issues and has to sell his house.
Christy sat up, her spine ramrod straight, and held out her hands, encumbered by the torn pantyhose that hung like moss from a tree. It was not a beg but a demand to be released of her bonds. To her surprise, he gently leaned over and untied her. She buttoned her blouse, noting before she could finish that his last-minute stolen peek gave him a good view of her lacy beige bra.
She returned a poisonous look she hoped would stop any ideas from forming on his part, then noticed a tiny trickle of blood coming from the pinprick in his chest. A much larger ribbon of blood dripped to a small puddle on the floor where her heel had done damage to his knee. Below that was a tattoo of thorns ringing his bulging calf. As if she had asked, he raised his palm, showing her a nice bloody semicircle of teeth marks.
“You’re lethal.” His voice was soft but measured. He arose, all six-foot something of him, then fisted the throw rug to his groin. He turned, exposing his muscled buttocks, and looked over his shoulder at her. He shook his head and smirked as he watched her stuff the lining back into her purse and replace the spilled contents.
“I don’t think it’s funny at all,” she huffed. “Get someone else to hold your damn open house.”
He didn’t say anything but continued staring down at her as he offered a hand, which she refused. She clamored to stand up, barefoot.
“And if you think this is a good way to meet a girl,” she said as she wedged her bare feet into her heels, “well, I hope the bank takes your house and I hope your wife finds out what kind of sick games you play.”
She headed to the door. She was relieved he was going to actually let her go. Without looking back, she swung the door wide open.
“This isn’t my house, and I’m not married,” she heard him call just before she slammed the door behind her, finally free at last.
Chapter 2
Navy SEAL Kyle Lansdowne threw down the rag rug and stalked naked to the place where the woman’s nametag had landed next to the wall. He traced the letters again and examined the nametag’s construction, looking for—what?
“Christy Nelson,” he said as he focused on the indentations the letters made in the smooth white plastic tag. He had the funny feeling he’d met this woman before. Or maybe she reminded him of someone he’d known in his past.
He dropped his shoulders and arched backward to give his spine a good crack. Holding the light plastic badge in his fingertips, he was careful not to let it puncture him again. He leaned forward, aimed for the dining table, and tossed the nametag so it landed in one bounce at the center.
He checked the front window, confirming that the car he’d heard leaving had been hers and that he was now alone. He locked and shot the dead bolt on the front door and made his way back to the bedroom.
I’m losing it, man. He cursed himself for his carelessness. The naked meditation he engaged in usually heightened his senses, but this time he’d fallen asleep. Next thing he knew he was smelling her perfume. Still could smell it. Had she not been a woman, he could have hurt her, or worse. On the other hand, if she’d been hired to neutralize him, she could have taken him out in an instant.
His Team buddy, Armando Guzman, was missing. Gone. Never showed up at ProDev. He’d made it out of Afghanistan with the rest of SEAL Team III, but instead of doing the five days decompression in Hawaii with the rest of the guys, he’d booked a flight to Puerto Rico for some family emergency.
Where the fuck are you?
Mysteriously, Armando had met them at the airport in San Diego when they arrived from Hawaii. Had been strange but talking about seeing everyone at ProDev the next day. And then he didn’t show. Timmons, their chief, was freaked, worried to hell. It just wasn’t like Armando to do this. No way would he disappear voluntarily without alerting Kyle and the chief.
Day before yesterday, when Timmons told him Armando had never checked in, Kyle had thought perhaps he’d just found himself a lady to share a little time with, disappear for a day or two. Something they were trained to do: get lost. Wouldn’t have been the first time Armando had gone to dark. And Kyle couldn’t blame him. He’d done it a time or two himself, but never without checking in with his buddy first.
Something is very wrong.
Armando was known all over Coronado as the Latin Lover of SEAL Team III. So good looking he could capture a girl’s attention simply by walking down the street. His linguistic training allowed him to sound Aussie, French, Brit, Eastern European Spanish, Pashtoon or Afghani. He could charm the pants off anyone on the phone as well as in person. He’d even been “captured” by a Marine unit who mistook him for a foreign interpreter trying to infiltrate the US forces. Some of TEAM III still called him “Tarjumah,” translator.
There were more than a couple of Senior Officers’ wives who took long dangerous looks at him when he wore his dress whites. He was the Antonio Banderas type of good looking, with a fashion sense and love of stylish clothes that made him look more like a cover model than a SEAL. The Team guys had nicknamed him “Armani.”
But when Timmons told Kyle his buddy had never checked in before he left base, Kyle had known some serious shit had hit the fan. Nobody ever did that unless there was an attitude issue. Attitudes didn’t last long on the Teams. Armando had a history from his youth, growing up with a Puerto Rican gang, but the Navy had pretty much drummed that out of him. Legendary for his nerves of steel, Kyle had seen Armando disarm a bomb while blowing bubbles with his bubblegum. Armando could save the whole team from extinction while thinking about what he would have for dinner that night.
So, Mr. Cool and Lethal wanted to be followed, and found. It was as obvious as if Armando sent him a registered letter.
“What the hell are you up to, Armani?” Kyle whispered.
He’d spent days buried in sand with the man. They’d put their lives on the line for each other as well as for the rest of the team. Having spent three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq together, he and Armando had survived the battle of Fallujah together when their unit reported record kills without losing many of their own. He could practically read Armando’s mind. They’d been scared shitless together. They’d cried over a fallen team guy and still had the presence of mind to jump in and save someone else the next minute. That kind of brotherhood couldn’t be taught. It had to be lived.
Without Armando as his swim buddy, Kyle knew he never would have completed the grueling BUD/S training, the qualification all Navy SEALs had to pass in order to begin their real training. He owed his gold Trident, the insignia of a SEAL, to this man. Armando’s problem, whatever it was, would now become Kyle’s problem.
Armando swam like a fish with the explosive strength of a bull. He used to joke with the members of his unit how he could bring a cruise ship to port in his native Puerto Rico by holding the tie line with his teeth.
Kyle and a couple other teammates had been granted ten days leave, and he intended spending every day of it searching for Armando. He knew deep in h
is soul that the guy would do the same for him. Kyle and his chief had a silent understanding. If he needed more time he would have to ask for it, and the request would be denied. If Kyle couldn’t find Armando, no one could. But the Navy could hardly afford to have one AWOL SEAL; two missing men could get a commander stripped or booted.
His thoughts wandered to the girl.
The scent of her perfume lingered on his skin. He couldn’t get the little hellcat out of his mind. No denying his body liked what Christy felt like under him; his erection had never fully settled down, even with the pain above his knee. His traitorous body part now started rising again, as if it had been summoned.
Damn. It had been too long since he’d held a woman that close. Was his training such that consorting with females ended up posing a danger to their health? He hated how he’d treated her. He shook his head, thinking of how the woman seemed to be one of those feisty, angry types who wouldn’t allow herself to become a victim. This woman, a stealth survivor of the love wars, did a damn good job at self-defense.
Except she shouldn’t have experienced this today. She was an innocent. She didn’t deserve to be tied and treated like a suspect. The honor in Kyle’s chest, the vow he made to protect the innocent even if it meant his own life, was wounded. He’d have to make it right somehow. He’d caused her the fright of her life, and he needed to make amends. Later.
But maybe she was somehow involved. Otherwise, why would she break into Armando’s house? And why had she mentioned something about a bank and a wife?
Would Armando be losing his house? Kyle didn’t think this was possible. Armando was frugal as all hell, even managing to send money home to parts of his family still in Puerto Rico. Kyle also doubted he would sell it.
Who is this Wayne guy? Does he know Armando?
Kyle stepped into the shower and washed the glorious smell of her off his skin, pouring over the other questions in his mind.
Enough of that.
That kind of lapse in concentration could get a good squid killed. He needed to stay sharp, not distracted by the fantasy of a woman he barely knew. A woman who he didn’t believe was involved in his friend’s disappearance. He’d been trained to challenge other warriors, and if his time came, trained to take several bad guys with him. Not like this, mistreating an innocent.
He shut the water off and thought of his deep admiration for Armando. It made no sense the man would just walk away from his country, his proud heritage, his family, and his SEAL community. Kyle doubted any one man would be able to take Armando down without a big fight, something so high profile it would alert one of their friendlies.
Even on leave, his team would email or text or run into several of their buddies every day. They hung out in the same bars owned by former members, got their tattoos at the same parlors, even picked the same beaches in San Diego to hang out—away from the base, of course—but never far away from another team member. The community was their family, and the blood in their veins pumped to protect it. They never even considered the cost.
So something very wrong happened, he thought as he dried off. A quick sniff to the towel told him a tiny amount of her perfume remained a scented shadow. Yeah, he’d wait a day or two before washing that towel. He hung it on the back of the door.
Staring at his image in the bathroom mirror, he didn’t see the face of a killer. It was his warrior persona, his part of an exclusive brotherhood. Hesitation had been drummed out of him. Was he succumbing to fuzzy judgment of the female kind? Thank God he’d been able to accurately assess the danger she didn’t pose to him before he’d caused her unintentional harm. Other than scaring the wits out of her, of course.
He decided to shave tomorrow. He straightened the bed, then threw on some mid-calf khakis and a green T-shirt. Today was a flip–flop-out-of-uniform kind of day, as it usually was whenever he was home. He had one pair of non-military dress shoes and they hurt his feet. His BUD/S trainers told him he’d develop webbed feet eventually, and although it was a big joke, it had a ring of truth to it.
He completed his dress by adding a sweatshirt hoodie, then took the dark wire-rimmed sunglasses from the pouch in his duty bag and smoothed them across his eyes.
As he left, he noted the two red sandwich signs leaning against Armando’s front porch. Then he spotted the one in the front lawn, and added it to the other two, leaving all three of them there. He knew it would be a mistake to try to track her down.
Let the poor woman alone. He hoped she would come by when he was gone.
Kyle hit the button on his key fob and his black Hummer squawked. It reminded him of a greeting a good horse would make. As if saying the machine was ready to do his master’s bidding. He hardly washed the beast, and knew the salt air wasn’t a friend, but just couldn’t bring himself to drive something clean and sanitized and smelling like hospitals, the one place he tried to avoid.
He’d parked across and down the street from Armando’s house. He’d intended to bring the Hummer inside the garage after dark, erasing evidence he was there in case bad guys watched the house. He’d checked the garage when he’d first arrived. It smelled like it had been a couple of days since a gas-fired engine had turned over there. Armando’s Land Rover was missing.
Not a good sign.
Kyle hopped in the Hummer and headed toward Coronado.
He came to the strip, one block off the beach, and passed familiar haunts, cruising past a couple of team guys watching girls and drinking a beer at an open-air cafe. He honked and was rewarded with two three-finger salutes, which he returned. His anxiety lessened somewhat by that quick check-in with fellow team guys..
Up and down the strip he looked for Armando’s Rover, but without any luck. He headed to Gunny’s gym.
He liked the iron smell from rusty, well-used equipment that assaulted his nostrils the instant he pushed his way through the glass door and tinkled the bell. But he hated bells.
The DOR, or Drop On Request, bell they used during their BUD/S training didn’t survive the class. He’d had his share of looking at that damned thing, tied to the back of a pickup truck that headed down the beach as some poor team hopeful tried to catch it to end his torment and pain. There was no shame in quitting. Not everyone was cut out to do this job. Even at the beginning of Hell Week, the new class of recruits were one in ten thousand regular Navy guys who would gladly trade places with them for a shot at becoming a SEAL. But, in order to drop out, the instructors didn’t make it easy. DOR guys had to chase the damned thing a mile down the beach, catcalls being shouted at them from the back of the pickup, like these hopefuls were sissies.
Not a surprise to anyone that he and Armando had given that bell a really good deep-sea burial. Out of the 190 who started their class, they were part of the twelve who’d successfully graduated. That bell was homage to the 178 brave souls who’d given it a shot. God bless them for trying.
He and Armando worked out at Gunny’s almost every day when they were home. The smell of sweat and the ancient equipment suited him just fine. No Nautilus stuff here, no digital anything except a scale that couldn’t be rigged. The house rule reigned: when you finished with the dead weight, you had to throw it on the black rubber matted ground so it would bounce, not just place it carefully at your feet. That part he liked best about the place. And of course, he could always spot a team or former team guy there.
Gunny had been Marine Recon, a Gunnery Sergeant. He’d gone in just as troops were pulling out of Viet Nam, but saw a little combat at the tail end. He called himself a serial husband, and had a pack of ex-wives and kids littering the whole globe. Some of them didn’t even speak English.
Everyone knew, including his ex-wives and their lawyers, that Gunny didn’t have anything but his pension and this crusty, run-down gym that barely broke even. Gunny had told Kyle if any of his kids wanted to see him, they’d have to come to San Diego. There were no birthday or Christmas cards exchanged, and as far as Kyle knew, Gunny had never met any of his progeny,
except one.
Gunny was known for rescuing team guys at bars in the middle of the night if they were too drunk to drive. He’d get them home safe, keeping them from the local or military police looking to make a trophy bust. Gunny made sure no one got booted for a DUI or Acts Unbecoming, and called the MPs and even regular police who were also ex-military “Rent-A-Cops.” He held them with about as much respect as he had for security guards. Kyle guessed there would be some interesting reading if he ever got his hands on Gunny’s personnel jacket.
Gunny was violating his own sign, a cigarette full of ash protruding out the right side of his mouth. But the gym was empty today.
“Thought you’d have quit by now. You got that scare last year, Gunny.”
“Nah, I’m gonna burn it out.” Gunny’s grizzled grey chin stored a line of sweat in the deep crease under his lower lip.
“But you dodged the bullet, right?” Kyle knew the gym had closed for a week when Gunny went in for lung surgery. Later, Gunny had gotten a tattoo over the scar that read, I Already Gave, just in case anyone would have some crazy idea to harvest his lungs and heart upon his demise.
“What do you think, kid?” Gunny gave Kyle a wary look and continued. “Not one of us gets out of this tour alive.”
So Kyle knew the rumor was true. They’d opened Gunny up and then put him back together again. No cure. That’s why he’d never lost his hair. No further treatment. Team guys had been making bets on what Gunny would look like—maybe pink and hairless like a newborn, since his normal pelt made him resemble a grizzly. Kyle and Armando just figured Gunny’s system was too ornery for the chemo to affect him.
“I’m not happy to hear this, Gunny.”
“Hear what? I never told you nothing.” Gunny grinned, showing his stained teeth, then removed the cigarette and put it out in the palm of his hand. He shook the ashes into a wastebasket by the entry glass display case filled with Gunny’s Gym T-shirts bearing the picture of Popeye holding up a barbell with an anchor tattoo prominent on his forearm.
Accidental SEAL (SEAL Brotherhood #1) Page 2