Freefall (25 page)

If there was one thing being in the SEALs had taught Zach, it was how to bluff. More than once, when he'd gone undercover in what the government euphemistically called "trouble spots" all over the world, his life had depended on it.

Trouble was, except for Nate Spencer, the other guys sitting at John Tremayne's kitchen table had been SEALs too.

Normally he could watch for tells. Those little signs that gave away what hands his opponents drew. But in this crowd, except for the former Marine occasionally scratching his right thumbnail when he drew a good card, there were no damn tells to read.

"So," he asked as he shuffled the cards, "how's the investigation going?"

"Nowhere." Nate frowned. And not, Zach figured, because of the cards he'd picked up. "I called in the FBI, but they're all tied up with terrorism shit, so a guy slashing throats apparently didn't come real high up on their official hit parade."

He tossed a chip into the center of the table. "One of them was an asshole. The other, Special Agent Cavanaugh, did at least make some calls for me. And seems to care about the case."

"Cavanaugh?" Quinn, who'd come over from Somersett for the game, glanced up from his cards. "Caitlin Cavanaugh?"

"Yeah," Nate said. "You know her?"

"Irish milkmaid skin, eyes as blue as a County Kerry lake, legs that go all the way up to her ears, red hair, and a temper to match?"

"I don't know about the temper. But you called the rest right."

"Wow. Cait Cavanaugh a fed." Quinn rubbed his unshaven jaw. "Who'd have thunk it?"

"You know her?" Nate asked.

"I went out with her roommate a few times when I came back here on leave over the holidays a few years ago." He glanced over at Nick. "I recall setting you up on a blind date with her for New Year's Eve."

"Yeah, I remember." Nick grinned. "I also remember that while she and I got along fine, she hated your guts."

"Yeah." He shrugged. "Some women have no taste."

"Are we playing cards, ladies? Or talking about women who got away?" John Tremayne complained.

"I'll call." Quinn tossed a chip into the pot, then added two more. "And raise. And for the record, Cait didn't get away."

"Because you never had her in the first place." Zach drew a card. Three kings and two sixes.

"What makes you think I wanted her?"

Liking his full house, Zach raised the ante two chips more. "Wasn't a guy who met Cait Cavanaugh who didn't wonder if she'd be as much of a firecracker in bed as she was out of it."

"Sounds like a man who found out," Nate said.

"I've never been one to kiss and tell." Zach flashed a grin.

"Jesus." John lit up a cigar and puffed out his frustration in clouds of acrid smoke that Zach figured would really go over well when he showed up at Sabrina's later tonight. "I don't know what the hell's wrong with your generation. Whatever happened to guys talking about guns, sharing war stories, and telling lies about the size of fish?"

"Because the war stories are too fresh, guns have pretty much lost their appeal once you've had some turned on you, and women smell a whole lot better than fish?" Quinn suggested.

"Along with the fact that women are a lot more of a challenge." Zach looked across the table at his father and tried to read the bluff.

"That's for fucking sure," Nate grumbled as the pile of chips in the center of the table grew.

"What's the matter?" Zach asked. "Titania got you reading bride magazines and pushing you toward the altar?"

"For your information, frog boy, I've never read a bride magazine yet and hope to hell I can die saying that," Nate shot back. "But as it happens,
I'm
the one pushing
her
."

"You
want
to get married?" Quinn looked poleaxed by that idea.

"Yeah. I do. But she's dragging her feet."

"Women." Zach shook his head. "Just when you think you've got them figured out, they turn around and act like guys."

"I'm out." Quinn threw down his cards, got up from the table, took another beer from the refrigerator, and unscrewed the cap. "Speaking of acting like guys," he said to Zach, "have you given any more thought to my proposition?"

"No."

"What proposition?" John asked.

"I offered him a job," Quinn said.

"I've got a job," Zach said, his jaw tight.

"Working as a carpenter?" Quinn countered with obvious disbelief.

"Something wrong with construction?" John challenged.

"Hell, no. It's just a little—" Quinn paused, as if seeking the right word. "Staid," he decided.

"I like staid," Zach said mildly. He gave his father another hard stare. As good as he was at the bluff, his pop had always been better. "It suits me."
What the hell
. He tossed another pile of chips into the center of the table. "I'll raise."

"This has gotten too high for my blood." Nate laid down his cards.

"What job?" John pressed for an answer.

"It's for this international security firm you've probably never heard of—the Phoenix Team."

"Sure, I've heard of them." John pursed his lips as he studied his cards, puffed a bit more. "Done some work for them from time to time, too."

"Fuck that." Zach blinked, his mind momentarily yanked off the game. "Where? When?"

"Here and there. Off and on."

"Your dad happens to be one of Phoenix Team's favorite operatives," Quinn offered around a piece of pepperoni pizza.

Cards momentarily forgotten, Zach narrowed his eyes. "You never said a goddamn thing."

"Maybe that's why they call them
clandestine
operations," John said dryly. "And it's not like I'm running around some jungle with an automatic weapon. I mostly work in logistics."

"Logistics." And here he'd been working like hell to follow in his father's outwardly settled-down footsteps. "Christ. I can't believe I didn't know about this."

"You weren't around when I signed on with them."

"I've been back home six effin' months."

"Well, yeah. But you had, as they say these days,
issues
to deal with, so I decided the time wasn't right to bring it up. You gonna play? Or fold?"

"You're bluffing," Zach determined. Apparently about a lot more than cards. "The thing is, whether you've got enough guts to act on your convictions."

"I always do."

John Tremayne's eyes were as flinty as blue steel. Looking at them, Zach realized that despite the lines fanning out from them and the gray scattered at his temples that hadn't been there last time he'd been home, his old man was, deep down inside, that same hardened Navy SEAL who'd done three tours in 'Nam and had, if the rumors he'd heard while at BUD/S training were even halfway true, gained a reputation for leading night raids into Cambodia.

"Hell." Zach folded.

"Good move." John put the cigar down on a saucer he'd been using as an ashtray and began scooping up the pile of chips. "If you'd have kept it up, you would've lost your shirt and I'd have probably ended up having to give you an advance on your salary."

"I've got money," Zach grumbled.

"Yeah." His father's smile flashed beneath his gray mustache. "But the night's still young, buddy boy."

Misty Mannington checked her makeup one last time in the rearview mirror. Fluffed her hair, frowning as she remembered what Titania Davis had said about her.

"Like that bitch would know anything about getting a man."

After all, Titania was all of what, twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old and still hadn't caught herself a husband. Oh, everyone back at Swann Island High School had known Nate Spencer would crawl naked on his hands and knees over broken glass from one end of the island to the other for the girl.

But had she given him so much as a tumble?

Hell, no. Full of big ideas, after sending him off to the Marines without so much as accepting an engagement ring, she'd gone off and gotten herself some sort of fancy culinary degree from the Art Institute of Charleston.

But apparently even that wasn't enough, because after six months making pastry at the Somersett Wingate Palace hotel, she'd gone to Paris, France, of all places, where she'd attended the Ritz Escoffier Culinary School, which to Misty sounded like a froufrou name for one of those technical schools, like the ones that were always advertising on daytime TV about how to become a dog groomer or air-conditioner repairman, but everyone sure seemed to act all impressed by that degree she hung on the wall of her tacky little restaurant.

And so what if she'd come back home speaking, la-di-dah, French? Why, Misty didn't know a single solitary soul on the island she could talk it with.

All that time Titania hadn't seemed to give any men a tumble, which had more than a few people, including Sissy down at the market—who usually could be counted on to know just about everything about everyone—wondering if she might be one of those lesbians.

Like Ellen DeGeneres. Or Rosie O'Donnell.

Gus Melton, who'd run the Gas and Go since before Misty was born, thought that would be a purely pitiful loss.

Which was when Sissy had passed on what she'd heard about one argument that had supposedly taken place at The Stewed Clam. Leon Foster, who cut hair down at Leon's Clip Joint, offered the opinion that he wasn't sure black girls could even
be
lesbians, a suspicion that Pete Sullivan, who'd been given a job by Nate Spencer's daddy after getting out of prison, had declared flat-out crazy, claiming that being black or white didn't have a dad-blamed thing to do with which way a person swung.

To which Leon countered that he guessed Pete probably knew a lot about the subject, being as how he'd spent all those years taking prison showers.

Well, hadn't that caused a ruckus? Which had ended up with both Pete and Leon spending a night at the same jail Pete spent his days sweeping up.

Shortly after that, Nate Senior had retired and Nate had come home from the Marines to take over being sheriff, and damned if he hadn't grown up to be one fine hunk of a male specimen.

And, it appeared, still crazy as a damn loon about Titania, who, it turned out, apparently wasn't a lesbian after all, but heaven knows what filthy habits she'd picked up from all those foreigners.

Fortunately, Nate had the good taste to understand that there's the kind of women you just have sex with.

And the other kind you marry.

Thank the good Lord Misty's mother had brought her up to be the second kind.

The problem was, even with the best plastic surgeon in Charleston on her speed dial, Misty knew that the little preventative nips and tucks she considered along the same lines as having a pedicure or her roots done at the salon weren't going to be enough to hold back the clock forever.

She was, after all, coming up on thirty, and while the alimony from her second, and third, husbands kept her in the style to which she'd become accustomed (unfortunately, husband number one had been a love match and poor as dirt, and hadn't she learned that lesson the hard way?), she didn't have any money put away for her old age.

Like thirty-five.

Or, and oh, God, she didn't even want to contemplate it,
forty
.

Which was what tonight was all about.

She'd been stringing husband candidate number four along now for the past two months. Teasing him enough to keep him interested, but not going all the way because she knew she wasn't the only woman he kept on the side, and the one thing she didn't want to do was to give him the impression that she was like all the others—the kind of girl he could fuck, then feel free to walk away from.

After all, as her mama had drilled into her, why would a man buy a cow if he could get the cream for free?

Some women might consider the fact that he was married a bit of a roadblock to an engagement, but having maneuvered her way around that very same roadblock on two previous occasions, Misty didn't view it as any more of a bother than those asphalt bumps the island council had stuck down on Oceanside Avenue last year to keep drunk spring breakers from speeding and crushing those darling baby turtles as they went crawling out to sea.

Misty didn't believe the man she was meeting tonight truly loved his wife. Oh, she'd been through enough breakups and signed enough pre-nups to understand it was hard on him to make the choice, given how tangled their finances were and such.

And, of course, there was the inevitable scandal.

But these days scandals were a dime a dozen. Why, how many wives and mistresses had Donald Trump gone through? And the networks even gave him his very own TV show.

Money was the perfume that made the stink of scandal go away.

And Lord knows, the man she was going to be spending the next few days in bed with had bushels of it.

And, soon, so would she.

Fortunately, her girls were visiting their father—and his new wife, aka the tacky bimbo slut secretary—in London, which meant Misty didn't have to deal with tedious explanations to the nanny about where she was going or how to reach her in case of an emergency.

She pulled her sporty Mercedes convertible into the designated meeting spot.

His car was already there, which she took as an indication that he'd been waiting for her.

Which showed he was anxious. And wasn't that just the way she wanted him?

Which was also why she'd shown up ten minutes late.

The driver's door opened as she parked next to him.

She opened her own door and swiveled her legs out in a way designed to capture his attention. Although there weren't any streetlights, enough moonlight was filtering through the clouds to cast a silvery sheen on long legs shown to their best advantage in a pair of stiletto hooker heels, and a strapless, skintight black dress that stopped bare inches below her crotch.

He let out a long, low whistle.

"Did you put on that dress you're barely wearing for me?"

She glanced around as she took his hand and let him help her out of the low-slung car.

"Do you see anyone else around here, sugar?" she asked, on the same mint julep drawl that had captured the fancy of husband number three. Of course, he'd been an oilman from Denver, where a Southern accent was more of a sexy novelty.

"Just you, darlin'." He pulled her close, letting her feel how effective the dress was proving to be.

Misty went up on her toes and gave him a kiss brimming with promises of things to come. Then dangled the keys in front of him. "My suitcase is in the trunk."

He clicked the trunk and lifted out the pretty blue and chocolate polka-dot Hartmann bag she'd bought in Charleston for this occasion. "No one could ever accuse you of packing light," he said with an indulgent smile.

"Well, since you wouldn't tell me where we're going, I wanted to prepare for any contingency," she purred as he transferred the bag to his own trunk.

"Ah, but I seem to recall telling you that you wouldn't be needing any clothes."

He squeezed her breast roughly. Hard enough to make her flinch.

Well. Wasn't this a surprise?

Apparently she'd miscalculated. Just a bit. He'd always been such a smooth, gentlemanly type. Far more Ashley Wilkes than Rhett Butler.

Still, Misty could handle this. After all, her second husband had been into Atlanta's underground S&M scene. Which had paid off quite handsomely, since the cardiologist to the city's rich and influential wouldn't have wanted his Buckhead neighbors to know that he got off having his trophy wife dress up in black leather and thigh-high boots and whip him with a cat-o'-nine-tails in front of all those other perverts during parties in the home's soundproofed basement dungeon.

"Oh, dear," she said, on a sexy, tremulous whimper she figured he wanted to hear. "How ever did you know?"

"Know what?"

"That I've been a naughty girl." She was trapped between the car door and his increasingly aroused body.

"Have you now?" His free hand delved beneath her skirt, cupping her already moist panties. "What would you suggest I do about that?"

"I don't know."

This time her whimper was for real as he pinched her nipple, the pressure painful enough to bring tears to her eyes.

So there'd been a change in plans. Obviously she was going to have to work for her reward.

Still, she reminded herself what her physical trainer was always telling her:
No pain, no gain
.

Her teeth, which had cost her a fortune in caps, worried a bottom lip still stinging a bit from yesterday's collagen injection.

"Perhaps punish me?"

He smiled. A slow, feral flash of white that did not meet his eyes.

"That can be arranged."

Her tremor, as he reached past her and opened the passenger door, was only partly feigned.

Misty was so busy giving herself a little pep talk, assuring herself that she could handle this unexpected situation, and him, the same way she'd handled all the other men in her life, that as she slid into the bucket seat with another seductive flash of thigh, she failed to notice that the overhead dome light had not come on.