by Julie Miller
“Ashton, Virginia.” The general rose, tucking his khaki shirt into his green gabardine slacks.
Damn, Kyle thought. That’s where the traitor lived.
Anticipating the general’s every need, Kyle retrieved his gold-trimmed, flat-topped hat from the stand beside the door. “Down on Chesapeake Bay?”
“You’re familiar with the place?”
Judging by the general’s questioning squint, Kyle must have revealed something in his own expression. Handing over the hat, Kyle held the smile on his face as if the mention of Ashton, Virginia, hadn’t just twisted like a hot knife in his back.
“I’ve been there before.” Twice, to be precise. The first time had been with his buddies during their first leave from Officers Training School at Camp LeJeune. He’d learned who his real friends were then. And who his real competition was.
Travis McCormick had walked around as if he were in a spotlight 24/7. The others in their unit had looked to the Action Man, not Kyle, for leadership, even though he’d earned just as many ribbons and points of distinction. Because he’d been flashier, drawn more attention to himself, McCormick had received the first promotion, drawn the coveted assignment to Special Ops—gotten the girl.
But because he was all about precise planning and perseverence, Kyle had returned to Ashton a second time. With a purpose. On a very personal mission.
He’d been shot down in flames. Made a fool of. Because of Travis McCormick. Again. Damn, what he wouldn’t give to make that right.
But instead of venting any history, Kyle scratched his fingers across the back of his coal black crew cut and feigned nothing more than a passing knowledge of the place. “It’s one of those quaint little towns on the southern coast, right off the Atlantic. They have a big fair and celebration there every summer, don’t they? Is that where you’re headed?”
Craddock tucked his hat beneath his arm and headed toward the door. “The Summer Bay Festival. Starts Monday. Frankly, I’m hoping to avoid all the hoopla. I’m going down to hang with an old buddy of mine, Hal McCormick. I hear the fish are biting.”
“McCormick?” The knife in Kyle’s back twisted down to the hilt.
Craddock paused and glanced over his shoulder. “You know the Brigadier?”
The brigadier. Right. Kyle resumed his veneer of indispensable efficiency and shrugged. “By reputation only, sir. I was aide to his son, Ethan, until his transfer to Quantico. Then I came to your office.”
“That’s right. Lieutenant Colonel McCormick’s recommendation is why I selected you for this assignment.”
At least one brother had done right by him. “I appreciate that, sir. Did you and General McCormick serve together?”
His superior’s craggy face eased into a smile. “For a lot of years. Hal owes me at least one trip on his boat.”
Travis McCormick owed Kyle a lot more than that. But Kyle had no intention of letting anything but friendly respect show in his face and posture. “Then I’ll say, ‘Bon voyage.’ You’d better hit the road unless you enjoy the rush hour traffic out of D.C.”
The general strode through the doorway. Kyle paced after him, turning toward his desk. But Craddock’s curse stopped him before he reached his chair. “Did Eileen leave already?”
“She was taking those files down to the JAG’s office on her way out.” Kyle reached for the phone on the corner of his desk. “You want me to page her?”
“No, if she just left, I’ll run her down.” The general hesitated at the door. “If my wife calls, tell her…hell, I was supposed to talk to Eileen before she left. Tell her—”
“—You’re heading straight home after you touch base with Mrs. Ward? I’ll call the JAG’s office to detain her, just in case.”
Craddock smiled. Point scored. “You’re a good man, Black. You got plans this weekend?”
Kyle nodded. He always had a date.
“Enjoy it.”
“Thank you, sir.” They traded salutes and the general left. As soon as he finished the call to the JAG office, Kyle was pulling up a duty assignment on his computer.
Kyle scanned the information on the screen, memorizing every detail. Captain Travis McCormick had been assigned a six-week medical leave, following six months in hospital and six months on light duty at Quantico. Six weeks? Medical? Someone was worried. If he knew McCormick, he’d be bustin’ his butt to turn that leave into four weeks, or even two.
“You’re not Superman anymore, are you?” he taunted the computer monitor in lieu of McCormick’s face.
Kyle had plans, all right. But the model he’d been seeing the past two weeks held little interest for him at the moment. He was too busy typing in the necessary info to request a temporary leave himself. Just a few days. The Summer Bay Festival and its draw of military personnel from up and down the East Coast would provide the perfect cover. Once General Craddock returned, Kyle would hit the road for Ashton himself. He could do a few scouting jaunts beforehand, learn McCormick’s routine, devise a plan.
To Kyle’s way of thinking, this wasn’t about striking a man while he was down. It was about locating the enemy’s vulnerability and using that weakness to his advantage to ensure victory.
It was about payback.
4
“A LITTLE HELP?” Tess grabbed Travis’s unshaven jaw and turned his appreciative gaze away from Robin, the brunette ward clerk who’d retrieved his signed consent form with a wink and an encouraging smile. With the door to the otherwise empty PT room closing on the distraction of Robin’s backside, Tess pointed to her own eyes. “Right here, McCormick. Concentrate.”
“Come on, T-bone. I haven’t had a chance to play for twelve months.” He offered up a “poor me” look as he leaned back against the weight machine’s padded seat. “Don’t begrudge a wounded man the chance to get out and see the sights. The hospital’s new PT wing really does have nice scenery.”
“So does the Grand Canyon. Which I’m tempted to shove you into if you don’t start taking this seriously.”
“I had a drill sergeant like you once.”
Tess ignored the teasing gibe. “Screwing around could get you hurt.”
“I think my mother gave me the same advice back in high school.”
“Travis,” she snapped. He could joke around about this all he wanted, but she’d seen his X-rays. She knew how far he’d come and how far he still had to go. It was a precarious balance of strengthening the right muscles while protecting weaker ligaments and knitted bones. Healing was dead serious business, and if he truly wanted to return to hazardous duty as a Marine in just a couple of weeks, then it was her responsibility to keep him from doing any more damage to himself on the homefront. “If we don’t do this right, there’s no sense doing it at all.”
“Yes, sir.” He snapped her a salute. “Doing it right, sir.”
Tess rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
Securing Travis’s feet beneath the T-bar, she tested the resistance on the machine to make sure the pressure rested on his thighs and calves instead of his rebuilt knee and ankle. She braced her hand against the muscles beneath his nylon workout pants.
“I’m still in pretty good shape, right?” Though couched as a taunt, Tess knew him well enough to hear the underlying need for validation in his tone.
She adjusted the machine, then repositioned his leg and guided him to try the weight. “Robin seemed to think so.”
“Yeah, but she never saw the before picture.”
“Trust me. I knew you before the accident, and you are still…”
Hot got stuck in her throat when she lifted her face and met his gaze. She’d intended to give him a reassuring smile, but snapping shut her mouth, which had fallen open at the look on his face, was all she could manage at the moment. There was nothing teasing in the deep blue eyes that focused on her now. The veil of laughter had disappeared, revealing a raw need in the depths of those cobalt irises. They were as complex and unfamiliar as they’d been yesterday afternoon, ogling her with
a hungry intensity that made her hair sweat.
If she’d been another woman, Tess might have interpreted the rare glimpses of serious emotion as some sort of intimate, passionate, man-woman connection.
But she was Tess Bartlett. Trusty sidekick. Go-to woman when a friend needed a favor.
He was Travis McCormick. The Action Man. A nickname that had as much to do with his reputation with the ladies as it did his heroics for his country.
All he’d ever wanted from her was a bud to listen to him, to back him up, to have fun with—someone to give him a boost behind the scenes so he could still face the world with a charming smile whenever things fell apart.
That’s what the searching glance, the glimpse of vulnerability, was all about. It was a silent plea to the friendly ally she’d always been. He needed someone to bolster his ego as he learned to cope with limitations he’d never had to face before.
Tess swallowed hard and looked away to focus her attention on the movement of his leg. She couldn’t keep it casual and supportive when she wanted that look to mean something else.
“You’re lookin’ pretty fine,” she assured him, saying what he needed to hear. It wasn’t a lie. Despite the ribs of scar tissue she felt through his pant leg, the shape and dimension of the muscles underneath were the same grade-A prime that had always set countless female hormones, including her own, into overdrive. Sure, his obvious pain—past and present—triggered her compassion. But there was no reason to feel sorry for this man.
His fingers brushed across the back of her knuckles. Nerves jumped. Muscles tightened. Her mouth went dry. “You’re sure ’bout that? You had to think about it.”
Did she imagine that low-pitched husk in his voice? Or had he always had that sexy rumble?
“I’m positive,” she croaked, then snatched her hand away and cleared her throat. “You are all that, and a bag of chips. And not that cheap store-brand stuff, either. You’re name brand, all the way.”
If her playful comeback sounded forced, Travis didn’t seem to notice. Of course, Tess didn’t really bother to check. She smoothed her damp palms on her khaki shorts and turned away to fiddle with the weights before the static charges zipping from his body to her brain completely short-circuited her ability to perform her professional duty. At least one of them needed to keep track of why they were here. Resolving to ignore both the intensity of those eyes and the seduction of that voice, she patted the top of his thigh. “Let’s try it again, nice and slow this time so I can gauge your range of motion.”
“Yes, sir.” Now that was the smart-ass tone she’d come to expect from him. Still, touching him made it hard to concentrate. His thigh tightened like a rock beneath her palm as he extended his legs. “I noticed Robin wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Is that a job thing? So she doesn’t catch a finger in one of these machines or scratch a patient?”
“Subtle, McCormick.”
Like the ebb and flow of the tide, the muscle thinned as he relaxed his thigh back into place. He repeated the motion. Flexed. Hard. Filling her hand. Relaxed. She caught her breath, waiting in subconscious anticipation for the hard muscle to swell into her palm again. “So, is she unattached?”
“Travis.” She swatted the provocative flesh and stepped back to prop her hands at her hips. She didn’t need this kind of interrogation to taunt her ego while he tempted her libido. “You’re the one who insisted we start physical therapy this weekend. You know, as impossible as it is for you to believe, I do have a life. I don’t normally give up my Saturday afternoons. Even for a friend.” She flipped her ponytail from inside the collar of her uniform polo shirt, begrudgingly admitting to herself that she didn’t really have that much of a life to back up her argument. Pathetic. “Robin’s not married. And she isn’t seeing anyone exclusively that I know of.”
“Interesting.”
Tess concentrated on her breathing, in and out, so she wouldn’t stand there holding her breath, waiting for Travis to ask her to set him up on a date with Robin. The clerk had certainly sent out signals that she would be interested in getting better acquainted with the captain.
Travis unhooked his feet from the T-bar and dropped them to the floor so he could turn and fiddle with the machinery behind him. “I can handle more weight, you know.”
Tess frowned at the back of his head. She was as perplexed by his abrupt change in subject as she was relieved. The Action Man she knew would never have passed on such an easy opportunity to hook up with an attractive woman.
But then, the flirtatious hero she once knew had been an unpredictable man since coming home from Quantico. This man got angry. This man hesitated. There was a chink in the confidence that had once exuded from every pore. A chink that revealed an edge to Travis she’d never seen before. When she’d sent him off to college, to basic training, to officer candidate school, to assignments across the country and across the world, he’d always been cocky but in control—a man who knew who he was, knew what he wanted, knew what he was capable of. He was a man who delivered each and every time—and took pride in that fact.
Had his brush with death really changed him? Or was this version of Travis merely the golden boy finally growing up and learning that he was human like everybody else?
If the former golden boy had been lust-worthy, this moodier, edgier Travis touched something deeper inside her. The old Travis had needed nothing. No one. This one needed…something.
And whether it was a friendly hug, a roll in the hay or a kick in the pants, she wanted to be the one to give it to him.
She wanted to be what he needed.
Burying her own pointless urges, Tess pulled his hand from the weights at the back of the machine. “We’re not pushing anything until I’m certain you won’t cause more damage to that knee.”
Travis stood, butting her shoulder as he moved past her. “The main reason I’m here is to keep Dad happy. He thinks I need a nursemaid.”
“So you’re here for your dad, not yourself?”
“There’s nothing you can do for me that I can’t do for myself.”
“I can monitor your progress.” She shook her head at the mark where he’d set the leg press. He’d locked in a weight that would challenge even a completely healthy man. “Keep you from hurting yourself.”
“I know what I did wrong,” he insisted. “I’ll be more careful this time.” He circled the weight-training equipment, eyeing each machine as if it were an enemy he’d defeated in battle who’d come back to haunt him. What was going on?
“Gee, and here I thought my license, two college degrees and a few years experience meant I was the expert.” She hoped sarcasm would snap him out of this weird funk. “Sounds like I’ve been working too hard.”
He raised his hands in apologetic surrender. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sure you’re good at what you do. It’s just…hospitals and therapy centers get pretty boring after a while. I need to be back at Quantico in two weeks when my unit returns stateside. Not even you can work a miracle in that time. I’m either ready now, or I’m out.”
Though she questioned his self-diagnosis, Tess smiled to show she’d taken no real offense. “You don’t want therapy, despite your doctor’s recommendation. So why are we here?”
As he stood facing her, she saw that the worn cotton of his gray USMC T-shirt clung just as snugly to the swells and planes of his chest and torso as it had to his broad shoulders and trim back. But the instant she let her admiration slide down to his legs, he turned away and resumed his pacing.
“I’m here so that my family will get on with their lives. Ethan took time off from work to haul me around, Caitlin and Sean rescheduled an appointment with her ob-gyn because she was worried I wouldn’t fix three meals a day for myself.” He jabbed at a punching bag, trailed his fingers up and down the railing on a set of practice stairs and wound up in front of one of the therapeutic massage tables. “They’ve all put their own lives on hold so that they can look after me. It’s damn embarrassing to still
feel like an invalid a year after that bomb…”
The tension radiating off his body demanded that she go to him. “They love you. Families worry. That’s what they do.”
“Mine worries too much. They…” Tess reached for his shoulders and dug her fingers into the cords of stress there. “Hell.” He jerked beneath her touch, then his posture deflated and he leaned forward, bracing his arms on top of the table. “Okay. We could do this for two weeks. God, you’re good.”
“Told you so.” She kneaded her thumbs into the knots of tension lining his shoulder blades. “Lie down. If you’re this tight all over, you’re bound to pull something.”
“I’ve been a bear. You don’t have to.”
“I’m in charge of this therapy session. Lie down,” she ordered.
Tess never broke contact as he settled, belly-down, on the table. As she worked along his spine, the soft cotton of his T-shirt provided little barrier between her hands and the hard skin that warmed beneath her touch. He was as beautiful to touch as he was to look at, and Tess found herself closing her eyes and savoring the discovery of heat and shape and textures.
“Maybe it’s counseling you need instead of physical therapy,” she suggested, massaging each muscle until she felt the tension break and relax. “I could recommend someone from the hospital staff.”
When her fingers found the hem of his T-shirt, she bunched it up and slid her palms across smooth, hot skin. He shivered, and she didn’t think it was entirely due to the room’s air conditioning.
“Oh, yeah, T-bone,” he murmured, pointedly ignoring her suggestion. “Just like that. Gives a man ideas.”
Touching him like this was giving her ideas, and none of them were of the Girl Friday, kid sister, trusty sidekick kind. Nah, she was thinking more along the lines of summer fling.