Next To Die

by Marliss Melton

  He returned to his desk and thumped down into his wheeled chair. He found where he’d left off in the manual he was perusing, but after reading the same line three times, he accepted that he’d lost focus.

  Joe slapped the book shut. He rubbed his aching eyes. Behind closed lids, he envisioned Penny the way she’d looked with her legs wrapped around him, her head thrown back, lost in ecstasy. Longing surged through him. He wanted her again, and not just physically. He hadn’t spoken to her in days. He missed the sound of her voice.

  Glancing at his watch, he wondered if she was home from work yet.

  But he needed a reason to call.

  While leaving his house at dawn this morning, he’d noticed that the police who were supposed to be guarding Penny were gone. He could inquire into that.

  Butterflies swarmed Joe’s stomach as he punched an outside line. A minute later, her cell phone was ringing and his heart was doing an inexplicable jog.

  “Hello?”

  Pleasure broke over him. “Hey, it’s Joe,” he said, as casually as he could manage.

  “Oh, hello.” She sounded startled.

  “Are you home from work already?” he inquired.

  “No, I’m sitting in my office doing paperwork. I usually keep my phone off at work. I guess I forgot to.”

  “I’m at the office, too,” he said.

  “You’ve been putting in long hours,” she observed. “I hardly ever see your Jeep in the driveway.”

  Did that mean she’d been looking for him? “I’m still trying to get my bearings,” he admitted.

  “So how’s it going?”

  He gave a grunt. “My XO’s been great—you met Lieutenant Renault at the party.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “He’s taught me a lot. The dynamics are different from what I’m used to, though—kind of laid-back. At the same time, we’re short-handed with men in the field and the rest of us scrambling to get the paperwork done.”

  She hummed sympathetically. “How’s Senior Chief McGuire?”

  A sensation similar to jealousy snaked through him. “Fine,” he said shortly.

  “There’s no tension between you two?”

  Joe hesitated. “We’re professionals,” he said finally.“We don’t let personal stuff drive our working rela-tionship.”

  “Well, that’s good,” she said.

  Silence filled the phone lines before Joe remembered the purpose of his call. “I noticed your watchdogs weren’t out front this morning.”

  “Oh, yeah, they got tired of watching the house and tailing Ophelia. Nothing’s happened, so they’ve left us to our own devices.”

  “Does Hannah Lindstrom know that?”

  “I assume so.”

  “But Eric’s killer is still on the loose,” Joe pointed out.

  “I know,” said Penny. “They left us a number to call if something happens. At least we’ve made headway in another area. Get this, you know the military men who’ve died without any visible cause over the past few years?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “A deputy Chief of Staff member was the latest one,” she added helpfully.

  “It rings a bell,” Joe admitted.

  “Hannah told me last Monday that they were poisoned by ricin,” Penny said excitedly, “in different ways, though, so that the cause wasn’t noticed until recently. She thinks it’s the same ricin that Eric sold five years ago.”

  “Damn,” said Joe, growing more concerned by the moment. “Obviously the victims had something in common, besides how they were killed, I mean.”

  “Yeah, Hannah hasn’t figured that out yet. But she’s working with a bigwig from D.C. headquarters. I’m sure they’ll catch this nut sooner or later.”

  “Yeah, but in the meantime, no one’s guarding you,” Joe pointed out. Uneasiness gnawed at him.

  “I’m thinking of installing an alarm system,” she said, sounding only halfway serious.

  “I could, uh, camp out at your place,” Joe suggested, “if you want some protection.”

  “Oh . . .” That obviously caught her off guard. “You’re busy enough, don’t you think?” she hedged.

  Did she want him or not? He couldn’t tell. “Look,” he said, opening himself to rejection, “I wasn’t expecting what happened the other night to be a onetime thing,” he confessed. “I want some more, Penny,” he added in a voice that betrayed his eagerness.

  She was silent for way too long. “Come over tonight,” she finally agreed.

  Anticipation flared like a Bunsen burner. “What time?”

  “Whenever you get home. I’ll cook dinner for you. Ophelia’s working late,” she added.

  He grinned at the underlying message that they would be alone. “Great. I’ll be there around six.”

  “Okay. See you then,” she said, sounding breathless.

  Yeah, she was trying to sound nonchalant, but she wanted the same thing he did.

  Joe hung up the phone and glanced at his watch. It showed bad form when a commander left work before his men. He punched the interoffice button connecting him to his XO’s office. “Gabe,” he said.

  “Sir.”

  “What’s it going to take to get everyone out of here by seventeen hundred?”

  “Not a problem, sir. When do you want the halls cleared?”

  “Holy shit! Change the channel back,” Vinny commanded, forgetting the Diet Coke that was stuck in the vending machine.

  The two men watching TV in the lounge at Guantanamo Bay’s airstrip ignored him. They’d found a comedy show instead.

  Vinny lunged for the remote control, snatching it out of Haiku’s hands. “I said change the fucking channel,” he repeated, flicking through the stations.

  He groaned out loud. There she was. The woman who occupied his every waking thought was clutching a microphone and reporting the news.

  “Hey, come on!” Haiku protested. “We’re watching TV here.”

  “You come on. That’s my girlfriend,” Vinny boasted, nodding at the TV.

  The other two SEALs eyed Ophelia with skepticism. Wearing a snug yellow sweater, her copper hair cascading over her shoulders, she looked hot enough to make Vinny break into a sweat. He focused his hungry gaze on her berry-colored lips and let her husky voice wash over him.

  “—from this laboratory at BioTech five years ago,” she was saying. “Ricin is listed on Homeland Security’s National Terror Alert as a toxin attractive to terrorists. It is a stable but lethal substance, deadly if inhaled, ingested, or injected into the bloodstream. This is exactly what happened to Sergeant Master Ernest Aimes, U.S. Marine Corps; Colonel Luis Powell of the U.S. Army; Navy Commander Jonathan Pruitt; and most recently General Casey Fripp of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, four men who for reasons unknown were poisoned, possibly by the very ricin that disappeared from BioTech in 2002.

  “Whoever murdered these four men is also believed to have killed two of BioTech’s technicians. Danny Price died in a hit-and-run in 2002, soon after the ricin’s disappearance.” The photo of Danny Price made Vinny’s nape prickle. Was it his imagination, or did Ophelia look exactly like the man?

  Danny Price. He even had the same last name as her.

  Stunned by the possibility, he processed little about the murder of the second lab tech, other than the fact that it’d happened just recently. The conviction that Lia was invested in this news story kept him from hearing another word. He could read it in her body language, in the way she clutched the mike.

  She’d never indicated to him that her father had been murdered. But apparently he had, by some freak who was now targeting military officers.

  “Oh, man,” Haiku exclaimed, oblivious to Vinny’s racing thoughts. “She is on fire, brother! You go!” He turned to give Vinny a high five, but Vinny was digging for change in his pocket. He needed to call Ophelia and find out what this was all about.

  Fuck! Here he was, ass-deep in a mission that would take him back to Haiti shortly, and his woman was stateside
embroiled in a murder scandal. He looked down at his hand. He had twenty-six cents.

  “Let’s go, Echo Platoon!” shouted a voice from the end of the hallway. “Helo’s waiting.”

  Vinny swore out loud. He glanced longingly at the pay phone even as he snatched up his rucksack.

  There were times that he really hated being a SEAL, and this was one of them.

  Damn it to hell, he hadn’t even gotten his soda out of the vending machine!

  Buzz Ritter had known this moment was coming. He was counting on it, calculating how much he could get away with asking for this time.

  His cell phone vibrated within five minutes of the news broadcast. He smirked as he recognized the number. “Ritter here,” he purred.

  “Did you watch the news—Channel Ten?”

  “Yes, I did,” said Ritter. Nor was he the least bit concerned. By terminating Tomlinson, he’d tied off what he considered to be the last loose string. Should’ve happened five years ago, as far as he was concerned.

  But the caller sounded panic-stricken. “I thought you had contacts at the Bureau. Are you going to tell me you didn’t know about this earlier? They’ve made the connection, damn it!”

  “I guess they have,” Ritter agreed, knowing that as yet they knew very little. “They must have stumbled onto something.”

  “Like what?” the caller demanded. “You said that lab tech you just took out told you nothing. I want answers, damn it!”

  “It won’t be easy,” Ritter mused, priming his request. “I’ll have to question more people.”

  “Don’t hurt them,” the caller pleaded. “That reporter implied that I’d killed those two lab techs. I don’t like that, Ritter. You know I don’t.”

  “Sometimes that’s the only way,” Buzz retorted.

  “Just . . . question people! Get some answers but leave them alive, for God’s sake. How hard can that be?”

  “Fifty thousand,” said Ritter, throwing out a number.

  “Jesus,” the caller complained. “What do you think I’m made of?”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  “If they catch me, Ritter,” the caller blustered, “I’ll make damn sure that you go down with me.”

  Ritter smiled. “I don’t think so,” he said, cracking his knuckles.

  An uncomfortable silence elapsed. “Fifty thousand dollars,” the caller agreed with defeat. “I’ll wire it as before.”

  Joe had beat her home, as revealed by the Jeep parked in his driveway. Penny let herself into her own house, eager to spruce up before he came over. To her astonishment, she found him sitting in her living room.

  “How did you get in?” she asked, startled, a little taken aback that he would do such a thing.

  His gaze was somber. “Penny, your back door was unlocked,” he said with disapproval and concern.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, crossing to the door to check it. “Oh, it is.”

  Joe stood up. He wore a checkered flannel shirt and familiar cowboy boots. Her heart beat faster as he joined her at the door. “I thought maybe somebody’d broken in, but I don’t see any sign of tampering.”

  “Did you . . . check upstairs?” she asked, distracted by how good he smelled. He’d gotten to take a shower—not fair.

  “No,” he admitted. “But I haven’t heard anything.”

  “Maybe we should check upstairs.”

  “Of course.” He sent her a suggestive smile, and her concerns faded at the realization that they weren’t going to make it downstairs to eat for a while yet.

  “I wanted to change first and fix my makeup,” she pleaded.

  “You look good just like that.”

  “In this old uniform?” She broke away, hoping for a head start. Joe chased her. Laughter erupted from her throat as she raced ahead of him, carefree in a way she hadn’t ever been.

  A glance into the office had her stumbling to a halt. She switched direction, approaching the open door in amazement and growing horror. The room was a mess, with file cabinets left open and papers and folders scattered all over. “Oh, my,” she murmured.

  Joe’s hands settled on her shoulders, and she sagged against him. “I don’t think Ophelia did this,” she decided.

  “We need to call Hannah,” Joe agreed.

  They were not alone again until ten o’clock that night. The house had been dusted for fingerprints and swabbed for trace DNA. But the intruder, whoever he was, was more than just a master picklock. He’d left little behind him to suggest his identity. Whether he’d found what he was looking for was entirely up to speculation.

  Hannah, who hadn’t known that the state police had pulled the plug, made a furious phone call to McCaully, only to be told that his men were too tied up to guard the Price sisters. They would need to hire bodyguards.

  Penny had reassured the FBI agent that she’d be fine. Joe was going to spend the nights at her house. And she’d managed to announce that without blushing, even when Hannah murmured a considering, “Oh, really?”

  But then, Joe wasn’t there. He’d popped next door to retrieve an MP5 semiautomatic rifle, which he’d then tucked under Penny’s bed. Even without police escorts and with her home recently broken into, Penny had never felt safer in her life.

  Although when she emerged from the shower in a silk teddy to find Joe nestled among her pillows without a stitch of clothing on, she had to admit to a sudden sense of vulnerability. Surrounded by flowery pillow shams, he struck her as ruthlessly masculine and potent, like a bad-girl’s dream come true.

  He smiled wryly at her attire. “Let me guess. Ophelia loaned you that.”

  “Look, don’t ruin this,” she warned him. “I’m a novice at seduction, so bear with me.” She crossed to her bureau to light the rose-scented candles, a feat that almost proved impossible, given her trembling fingers.

  He sat up as she approached the bed. Without warning, he pounced.

  Penny found herself flat on her back, his hard, warm body pressing her into clean sheets. “You don’t need to seduce me,” he informed her gruffly. “I’ve obsessed about you all week. Tonight,” he added with a wicked glint in his deep green eyes, “I get to take my time.”

  A warm shiver went through Penny. His magnetic pull on her was visceral—she could feel it deep within her womb. But he was just obsessed, she reminded herself, and obsession was temporary.

  His breath was warm and sweet. He kissed her cheek, her chin, her nose, and finally her lips, with unhurried undulations of his tongue that went on and on, making her heart race, heating her from the inside out so that she melted like the candles on her bureau.

  He savored her, making her feel special, unique, the only woman in the world. Half an hour later, he grinned with predatory satisfaction as she moaned, thrashed, panted, and gleamed with desire-induced sweat. “Joe!” she cried, catching his head in her hands to stop him as he made to push her to the edge yet one more time. “Please!” she begged.

  “What?” he demanded. “This is payback for all those deep-tissue massages. I had to lie there hard as a rock and not make a sound. You can scream if you want to. That’s hardly fair.”

  Penny laughed. Joe had turned her bed into a playground. “You can’t make me scream,” she scoffed. “I’m not that kind of girl.”

  “Oh, I can’t?” That was all the warning she got before he hooked an arm around her waist, flipped her onto her stomach, and buried himself inside her in a single thrust.

  Penny screamed.

  “I hope I didn’t hurt you,” he said, instantly contrite.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “And don’t you dare stop, either.”

  He didn’t stop. He started and he kept on going until Penny screamed several more times.

  Why not? It was just the two of them. Joe was in her bed, doing all those things she’d imagined for so many lonely nights. Except Joe in the flesh was even more inventive than the Joe of her fantasies.

  He was magnificent. No wonder women flocked to him in droves.r />
  At last, they lay face to face, limbs tangled, and Joe still wasn’t done. Penny felt dreamy, sated, stretched, but content to keep this up all night. He lifted his lips from her neck and fixed her with a heavy-lidded gaze. “Hey,” he said, smoothing a lock of damp hair off her cheek.

  “Hey, what?” she murmured.

  “I want us to stay friends,” he said gruffly, “always.”

  After this is over. He didn’t say that, but she heard the words all the same. She blinked as reality overshadowed her joy.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Penny,” he added, looking remorseful for something he hadn’t done yet.

  “It’s okay, Joe. I went into this with my eyes wide open,” she reassured him. But her heart still constricted. Just the thought of Joe with another woman shredded her emotionally.

  He loosed a sigh and dropped his forehead onto hers. “See, I am a selfish person,” he reiterated, harking back to a conversation they’d had weeks ago. “Even when this is over, I’ll want to keep you for myself.”

  Her heart performed a funny flip. That almost sounded like monogamy; of course, he hadn’t meant it that way. Fortunately, Penny was a realist. Expecting Joe to go from bachelor extraordinaire to faithful lover overnight was just plain naive. If being Joe’s friend was all she could expect in the long run, then so be it. It was still more than she’d ever expected. “I promise,” she agreed, “that we’ll still be friends.” When this is over.

  He braced his weight on his elbows and gathered her closer. Putting his lips to hers, he thrust gently but with intent. Penny felt the difference right away. He wasn’t playing anymore.

  She clutched his neck and shoulders, driven by a desire that was as much emotional as physical. She could feel Joe’s pleasure overtaking him. With an indrawn breath and a muffled roar, it flowed out of him and into her. She cried out as it crashed over her, pulling them both into a perfect, timeless undertow.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Penny pushed through her front door at the end of a tedious Monday and paused in surprise. Ophelia was bearing an armload of clothing down the stairs. “What’s going on?” Penny demanded.