And as for anyone else, besides Jenn, who might also have Maria’s key … ?
She knew Maria paid a cleaning service to come in once every few weeks, usually while she was in Albany. And that meant that someone from the service must have a key. Plus the building’s superintendent could always get in—but not while the night lock was on, of course.
As they all took one last look around, Jenn overheard the youngest of them, Tony Vlachic, comment to Jay, sotto voce, about how small Maria’s place was.
With two bedrooms, a real eat-in kitchen, and a thirtieth-floor panorama of the city’s skyline from its floor to ceiling windows, it was palatial compared to Jenn’s studio.
Where they all now stood, squeezed in together.
Her apartment was a single tiny room, cramped even when the air mattress was deflated and folded back into the sofa. The view from her window was of the air shaft. In a city that was constantly changing, the ugly, claustrophobia-inducing brick and the rows of other people’s windows was a seasonless mix of 1890s tenement and 1960s thank-God-someone-finally-invented-the-window-air-conditioner.
And yes, to be fair, sometimes—rarely—in the winter, falling snow would settle romantically on the battered and acid-rain-scarred tops of her many neighbors’ air conditioners. But Jenn could miss seeing it if she blinked. It melted quickly in the heat from the building and the humanity within.
“Nice and cozy, huh?” she said to the SEALs now as she turned on another lamp.
Dan pushed free of the others and stepped into her tiny galley kitchen. He turned around, took another few steps, which put him into the munchkin-sized bathroom. He then came back out, and opened the door to her overstuffed closet, as if expecting to find another room, or maybe an alternative universe awaiting him there.
“Jesus,” he said as he stared at her jammed-in organizational system of shelves and baskets, of which she was pretty darn proud. “You could crew on a submarine.”
Jenn looked up from trying to squeeze the last of the air from her mattress, so she could fold it up and turn it back into her couch, which would turn her bedroom back into her living room. “Is that some kind of Navy insult? Your mother wears combat boots, you could crew on a—”
“No,” he said with laughter, as he turned to look at her. His smile was really quite lovely up close like this. “It’s not. It’s … impressive. Those guys fit their entire lives into, like, a shoe-box. Talk about close quarters—both for living and working. I couldn’t do it. But you probably could.”
“I bet there’s not a big demand, though, for executive assistants on the USS Depthcharge.”
He laughed again. “I don’t think Depthcharge is on any Navy shortlist for names for submarines,” he pointed out. “Depth charges are what you drop from a surface vessel to find and sink a sub.”
“I knew that,” she said as the metal bedframe finally folded back into the sofa with a boing. “I was being ironic. I’d be fine with the tight living conditions. It’s the part where the sub might sink that would be problematic for me.”
“Speaking of problematic,” Jay pushed back his hood to say. “I’m pretty sure Ms. Locke intends for two of us to, um, camp out here with you tonight. Maybe you should leave the bed open so we can see how much floor space there is.”
“There isn’t,” she said. “Floor space. I mean, unless we move my coffee table. We could store it over at the office, I guess, but even then …”
“You’ll have to get sleeping bags,” Dan told Jay. Interesting, his use of you, as if he’d already assigned himself to guarding Maria. “One in the kitchen, one kind of halfway under the pullout part of the sofa-bed—”
“And I would step where, if I needed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night?” Jenn asked.
“Yeah, that’s not going to work,” Tony said.
“You know, I really don’t need anyone to stay,” Jenn said. “Let alone two of you. I mean, let’s be realistic here. It’s Maria who’s being threatened. She’s the one who needs protection—”
“I know that’s what it seems like,” Dan interrupted. “But that thing was in your desk.”
“Ms. Locke is thorough,” Jay Lopez chimed in, terminally polite beneath his parka. “Until Margaret Thorndyke is found—”
“I’m sure she’s out shopping,” Jenn said. “She shops like she’s single-handedly attempting to stimulate the economy. She’s got a walk-in closet the size of my entire apartment.”
“Lopez has got a walk-in closet the size of your apartment,” Dan pointed out.
“You’re in New York City now,” she told him. “You’ve got to readjust your definitions of small and large.”
“You’d be okay if it was just one of us staying here with you?” Tony asked her. “Because, you know, some women might feel threatened by that, or be afraid some of the neighbors might think, you know, something inappropriate.”
“And my bringing two Navy SEALs home won’t make them think something inappropriate? Especially since their apartments are the same size as mine?” She looked at them. “Guys. I have brothers. You don’t scare me. You don’t offend me. If one of you really has to sleep on my kitchen floor tonight, I’m not going to feel threatened—I’m going to feel sorry about the fact that you obviously pulled the short straw. Just do us both a favor and don’t eat dinner at the Mexican place that’s down the street? When the heat finally kicks on in here, which it’ll do in”—she looked at her watch—“about two hours, it’s going to make the office seem chilly. FYI, my AC unit is winterized. We can’t turn it on, we can’t open the window. The window, singular. So bring shorts and ix-nay on the eansbay, boys, because I will make the lucky winner go out into the hall to fart.”
“It’ll be rank and rating,” Tony told her.
“I’m sorry … ?” Jenn didn’t understand.
“We’ll use our rank and rating,” he explained, “instead of drawing straws—to determine who sleeps on your kitchen floor. Which means it’s probably going to be me.”
“Sorry,” Jenn told him as she led the way back into the hall and locked her door behind her.
“It’s okay,” he said with a smile. “I’m not a big fan of beans anyway.”
He remembered the day when the plan became crystal clear.
Not the details—just his goal and the potential outcome. The details came later. They always did.
He’d researched for months, every moment he could spare spent locked in his room, surfing the Internet, finding out all that he could about her, about Alyssa Locke.
He made lists of her friends, her family, her acquaintances, even her clients at Troubleshooters Incorporated, and he googled them all regularly, too.
He found out that Alyssa was born in Washington, D.C., that she had two sisters. Only one still lived—Tyra. Lanora, her youngest sister, had died while giving birth.
He knew that her mother had been the victim of a violent crime when Alyssa was only thirteen, that her estranged father had died in a car accident several years earlier, and that she and her sisters had gone to live with an aunt.
He discovered that, like her mother before her, Alyssa was married to a white man. Her husband’s name was Roger “Sam” Starrett, and he was a former Navy SEAL who didn’t deserve her, who worked beneath her, who’d planted his seed inside of her …
The news of her pregnancy had made him reel with anger, with disgust, with seething hatred for this man who had the audacity to touch her, to make love to her, to defile her so completely and permanently. Swept up by his rage, he’d come to his senses in his car, driving west, toward California.
His blind urge to destroy had taken him as far as Utah, where he stopped because the certainty inside of him warned that he could not kill the husband—a Navy SEAL—without getting caught or killed himself.
And he didn’t want justice half as badly as he wanted the ultimate satisfaction of gazing into Alyssa’s eyes as he took out his knife.
So instead, he’d tried to r
elieve the pressure by killing a woman in the parking lot of a mall just south of Salt Lake City. He killed her husband, too, just to see what that would feel like, but none of it was any good. The certainty inside told him that it wouldn’t be, until it was Alyssa—so he didn’t extract any of their teeth or leave behind a note of any kind.
He did linger, though, and when the police came as they always did, she wasn’t with them and he knew that they didn’t connect the murders to those he’d done before.
They didn’t know it was the Dentist. She didn’t know it was him, either.
Because if she’d thought it was, she would’ve come, regardless of her pregnancy.
She would have come. She wanted him as badly as he wanted her. He was counting on that fact.
So he drove back east even though he wanted to go to San Diego, to catch just a glimpse of her. But he knew his anger at her swollen belly and his hatred of her husband would overwhelm him, so he kept himself away.
When he found out that she’d had the baby, and that it was a boy, he knew, absolutely, his destiny.
He would take her, as he’d planned, regardless of his chances of survival.
But if he did survive—which he was becoming more and more determined to do—he would then track down and kill the husband, and take and raise the child—her child—as his very own.
Jenn didn’t look up from her computer as Dan went into the assemblywoman’s office. Everyone else had gone for the day—she was the last one to leave.
“Hey, Tony, I’ll be ready to go in … just a … few more minutes,” she said, her fingers flying across her keyboard.
Danny slipped his bag off of his shoulder and put it on the floor with the sleeping bag that Lopez had picked up from some sporting goods store. He didn’t bother to correct her, instead taking the opportunity to really look at her while her attention was elsewhere.
She was actually kind of pretty, in a supersized way. Not that she was fat. She was just… sturdy. Strapping. Statuesque.
Goddess-like—if there was a Goddess of Awkwardness.
Although the true reason Jennilyn LeMay was awkward was because she refused to embrace her extra-largeness. She tried to hide it by slouching and hunching—or by trying to make herself invisible, always jockeying for the spot in the back of the room, against the wall or over in the corner.
She didn’t wear very much makeup. She didn’t try at all to emphasize her eyes, which were, by far, her best feature, beneath her glasses. They were a really nice shade of light brown. Although her mouth was nice, too. It was generously wide with a default upward curve. She was quick to turn that into a real smile, which made dimples appear in her cheeks.
The dimples were pretty damn cute.
Her sense of humor was rock solid, and she clearly had a very big brain in that gigantic head of hers.
Her clothes were horrific, though—like something his older sister would’ve worn to the bank after getting dressed in the dark. The outfit was way too somber, as if Jenn—like Sandy—were compensating or apologizing for holding down what had once been, traditionally, a man’s job.
Dark tailored skirt, starchy blouse that was buttoned uncomfortably to the neck, not-quite-matching black suit jacket over the back of her chair, ugly yet worn-out flat shoes—absolute proof that she was embarrassed to be so tall.
A little more effort, and a whole lot more daring, in bright and flowing clothes that celebrated her height, and she could’ve looked good. Well, interesting and strikingly eye-catching, at least.
She didn’t try all that hard with her hair, either. It was shoulder length, tucked behind her ears, an almost colorlessly bland shade of light brown, and not particularly well cut. It looked, though, as if it would be baby fine and super soft to touch, but that also made it prone to getting stringy at the end of a long day.
Which this one had definitely been.
It was funny, but the fatigue that Danny had felt yesterday at the airport was … well, it was far from gone. But it wasn’t quite fatigue anymore, either. It was hard to define, exactly, what it had turned into—this heaviness that had grown like a tumor inside of him when that kid—the private—had died from a piece of shrapnel to the throat.
It was mixed together with his current solutionless family problem with his little brother, Ben, leaving Dan angry and frustrated and depressed.
All of it had further metastasized into something that choked him from within, which, last week, had made him lose it, in front of not just his teammates, but his team’s CO. Or so he was told, because he didn’t remember any of it, which scared the bejesus out of him.
Back in Coronado, the senior chief had called him in to his office and tossed around words like battle fatigue and stress, and phrases like it happens to the best of us. And Dan had obediently scheduled a session with the team’s shrink for a week from next Friday.
But he knew the truth: that the heaviness inside of him, inside of his very soul, had been there long before the goatfuck in Kabul. It had been there long before 9/11. In fact, he couldn’t remember it ever not being there, even back when he was a little boy, entering kindergarten.
He knew what he had to do to control it, to shrink it into something that he could compartmentalize and ignore. He had to focus on the immediacy of the moment. He had to stay out of the murky shit inside of his head and instead live in the right-here and right-now.
Sex would help.
Sex always helped. Sex, and the promise of even more sex.
Unlike some of the other guys in his SEAL team, Danny had never been into one-nighters. His thing had always been the one-or two-weeker, and better yet, the always lovely vacation fling. He loved having sex with a woman for the first time while knowing that there was going to be a second, third, and fourth coming right on its heels. Best yet was experiencing this abundance of pleasure while knowing there was a concrete end date in sight.
As Dan realized that Jenn’s definition of “a few minutes” was considerably different than his, he lowered himself into a chair at the conference table. He was hungry, but he’d purposely waited to eat so that he could have dinner with her. Because on his way back to this office, after picking up his gear at the hotel, he’d realized the truth.
Yes, Izzy fucking Zanella had, yet again, gotten the job that Dan had wanted—to guard Maria. But because of this, because Dan had instead gotten assigned to guard Jenn, the odds of his actually getting laid in the near future had risen drastically higher.
Because life wasn’t like some stupid romance novel, or that movie with what’s his name, Kevin Costner, where he was the bodyguard and Whitney Houston sang that song. Ah-ee-eye, will always love …
Yeah.
That shit didn’t happen in real life.
An obscenely beautiful woman like Maria Bonavita didn’t just sit around, hopelessly single, waiting for some sailor to show up. And when he did, she was not breathlessly eager to lead him into her bedroom and lock the door.
Real life was never that ridiculously easy.
Dan knew that, firsthand. He’d gone after a fairy-tale, happily-ever-after ending with the woman of his dreams—gorgeous and mysterious Troubleshooters operative Sophia Ghaffari.
She’d actually had dinner with him a few times. He’d been certain that it was destiny, that he and Sophia belonged together, that theirs would be a love affair for the ages, that their love would last a lifetime.
She, on the other hand, disagreed, and delivered the let’s be friends speech, fairly early on. More recently, she’d married a Trouble shooters co-worker—a kind of dweeby former CIA operative named Dave—with whom she was now expecting her first child.
Jesus Christ. It still pissed Danny off to think about it. It still made his inner petulant two-year-old pout and rant, because it was so goddamn unfair.
But real life was rarely fair.
And yes, here in this current configuration of real life, where there truly was no such thing as a love affair for the ages, Izzy and Lope
z were going to hang out in mind-blowingly gorgeous Maria Bonavita’s tiny apartment, trying to stay out of her way while she did whatever state legislators did at home in the evening.
If they were lucky, she’d say goodnight to them before she turned in.
The idea that she would stop to have a real conversation with either of them was ridiculous. And even if she did, what of it? Like she was going to risk her entire career to hook up, even for just one night, with some SEAL?
That was not going to happen.
The odds were better that one of them would be struck by a plummeting piece of space debris.
But the odds, on the other hand, of Dan nailing Jennilyn LeMay, and having a hell of a two-week vacation with her…
That was definitely do-able.
He knew he could be exactly what she needed, exactly what she wished for and dreamed of, exactly what she never got with her classically beautiful boss always hanging around.
And it was going to be just Dan and Jenn tonight in her closet-sized apartment. They’d have a little dinner, do a little talking and a lot of laughing, lose a few clothes due to the overactive heater that she’d warned him about…
If he played this right, he wouldn’t even bother opening that sleeping bag.
His stomach growled, and Jenn laughed and said, “I take it you haven’t eaten yet—oh!”
She cut herself off when she looked up and saw it was Dan, not Tony, sitting there.
And there he was, staring into Jennilyn’s pretty eyes, and everything he’d intended to say to make her laugh and get them moving toward the night’s inevitable conclusion vanished. It was gone, clear out of his head.
So he sat there in silence, just staring back at her, like the village fricking idiot.
She looked away first, as if embarrassed by the extensive eye contact. “I’m sorry, I thought …”
“Yeah.” Danny found his voice, but his brain was still set on totally stupid and lame. “But I’m it. I’m your, you know …”
“Bodyguard,” she supplied the word. “Wow. I’m so sorry.”
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