Into the Storm (25 page)

Still, even though he was far from right, his holier-than-thou implication pissed her off.

“So what if it is?” she countered. “Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve never had sex with someone, and then decided right then and there that that was enough.”

He skidded to a stop. “So that’s what happened? You decided enough was enough? Despite the incredible sex, I’m just, what? Too annoying?”

Oh, my God. “No,” she said.

“Or maybe I got it completely wrong, and you were just faking it—”

Men could be so predictable. “Yeah.” Lindsey let sarcasm drip from her voice. “You’re not man enough for me. Come on, Jenkins, what’s up with the childish insecurity? I
told
you what happened—
nothing
happened. I’m just not looking for a heavy relationship right now, period, the end. It has nothing to do with…with…penis size, or endurance, or lack of originality in bed. And no, you have no problem with any of those things. God! It’s also not about my insatiable man-eating appetite. Any longing looks I’ve been casting toward Izzy or Lopez or freaking Dave Malkoff are completely your own craziness. For your information, I’m not scheduled to have sex again until 2008, although after this fiasco, it’s going to be 2010!”

Jenk was standing there, his cheeks pink, shivering from the cold. The reason he’d been moving at such a brisk pace was to keep warm.

There was no real haste needed in their quest to get blankets and dry clothing. After Izzy and Dave had sandwiched Sophia between them, sharing body heat, skin to skin, her dangerously low temperature had finally begun to rise. She was going to be okay.

“Come on,” Lindsey told Jenk. “You’re freezing.”

But he didn’t move. “I don’t believe you.”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course you don’t. Okay. You want a troglodyte reason for why I don’t want to be with you? You’re too short for me. Happy, or do you need more? You’re too short, and I’m a slut—I’ll never be satisfied with just one man. Is that what you want me to say? Does that fit your narrow little worldview?”

“I think I scared you,” Jenk said.

Lindsey started down the road at a jog. “Believe whatever you want. Just…Let’s keep moving.”

He caught up with her easily. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Look,” Lindsey said. “I know you’re disappointed. I know it’s a hard concept for you to grasp—the idea that I’m not secretly waiting for true love to ride up on a white stallion and sweep me away to a life of casseroles, PTA meetings, and sitting in traffic as I go to pick up the dry cleaning. Maybe I don’t fit with your antiquated idea of how women should behave. I suspect your struggle comes from the fact that I actually managed to have sex like a man. Like you, as a matter of fact. You didn’t invite me home because you thought I was great—”

“Yeah, actually, I did.”

She rephrased. “But it wasn’t because you thought I would make a great life partner. You wanted to have sex, and you thought it might be fun to have sex with me. Look me in the eye and tell me that if I’d turned into some kind of nightmare—a crying drunk, or some kind of high-maintenance perfectionist—you wouldn’t have just faded into the night afterwards and never called me again.”

“I would, too, have called you,” he insisted. “Considering we’re working together…”

“Yeah, but at the time you didn’t know we’d be working together again, so soon,” she pointed out. “But that’s not the point. You keep focusing on the tangents. The point is, when we hooked up, you wanted exactly what I did. You can’t accuse me of being a slut unless you admit that you’re one, too.”

“I never said you were a slut,” he said. “That was your word.”

“Hello, you’re doing it again,” Lindsey said. “Let me make it simple. On the night we had sex, did you or did you not have Tracy’s ringtone set to ‘Here Comes the Bride’?”

“We keep coming back to this,” he said. “Obviously it matters to you a great deal—”

“Hey! I asked you a simple yes/no question. So, yes or no?”

“Yes, but—”

Lindsey spoke loudly over him. “So what were you doing with me, if you wanted to marry Tracy?”

Jenk shook his head. “That was just a stupid fantasy.”

“Oh, yeah? I saw you sitting with her on the plane—it didn’t look like you thought it was a fantasy, even then.” Great, now he had her doing it—getting totally off point.

And he was looking back at her as if she were nuts. “I only sat with her because you dumped me.”

“The point is, damnit, that you were supposedly in love with her—
while
you were in bed with me. What exactly does that say about you, huh?”

“You’re jealous that I was sitting with Tracy even though you dumped me,” Jenk said slowly, realization in his eyes. “That’s crazy, unless…you dumped me because I scare you. And I scare you because…you like me too much.”

“Yeah, right,” Lindsey scoffed. “I dump you because I like you. What am I, a total head case? And hello. I didn’t even dump you. You can’t be dumped after only one night. There was no dumping. We had a thing, and it ended. A little early, but it was always going to end.”

“You like me too much,” Jenk said again. “You’re afraid that I’m going to screw up
your
carefully planned life, spent all alone with your TiVo, doing penance for your guilt about your dead mother and your dead partner—he
was
your partner, right, when you were with the LAPD? The friend who nearly killed you? Not to mention all the other dead people in your past that you didn’t get around to telling me about.”

How dare he…? Lindsey stopped, and he jogged back toward her, moving in a circle around her to stay warm.

“How’d I do? Close, huh?”

She couldn’t speak. It was as if he’d hit her with a two-by-four, square in the gut.

“You’ve figured out what you deserve,” Jenk told her with a jab of his finger in her direction, “because of some bullshit that you’ve brainwashed yourself to believe, and since you don’t think you deserve to be happy, you dumped me.”

She stopped herself from saying the words she desperately wanted to say. The anatomically impossible directive, or even a less obscene request that he take up permanent residence in the underworld. She wanted to instruct him to take his overinflated ego with him and never darken her door again.

And why on earth had she told him anything about Dale and the shooting? And shame on Jenk for using that against her. She’d told him things she never told anyone, and this was what he did with it. That would teach her. God, she wanted to cry.

Instead, she made herself laugh. “Believe what you want, if it helps you cope.”

“Back at you, babe. Although I wouldn’t have pegged you as a coward.”

Them was fightin’ words, but she knew that her nonchalant shrugs pissed him off more than any angry outburst ever could. “Whatever.”

“You know what, Lindsey? It turns out you’re right. You
don’t
deserve me.” Jenk jogged away from her. “You’re not worth my time.”

She had to lean over, pretending to catch her breath, trying to regain her equilibrium.
Good riddance, good riddance
…

They were almost at the SUV, almost done with this nightmare. Back at the motel, she’d go see Tom. She’d tell him she had a family emergency, and she’d catch a bus down to Boston. Fly home to California from there.

She just got the first season of
Rescue Me
on DVD. She’d marathon it. Ten straight hours of Dennis Leary, popcorn, and ice cream would make her feel better. And then she’d go visit her father so the family emergency excuse wouldn’t be a total lie.

Lindsey straightened up and made herself follow Jenk down the road, one foot at a time, picking up speed as the cold numbed her face.

And then there it was, the SUV, the last of the daylight gleaming off its front windshield.

Jenkins didn’t say anything to her as he unlocked the doors, as they climbed inside, as he turned over the engine. He couldn’t manage turning at that point in the narrow road, so he ran the vehicle in reverse until he could maneuver it around.

It took several moments for the heat to come up, and when it did, Lindsey blasted it.

It was possible, though, that she was too numb ever to feel completely warm again.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

T
his was pretty durn weird.

It wasn’t as if Izzy had never helped warm up a teammate with hypothermia before.

It was a lot like hugging an ice cube.

Since a tub of warm water wasn’t available, skin-to-skin contact had been the only available way to increase Sophia’s body temperature.

Her proximity to the fire hadn’t helped, so Izzy and Dave had stripped to their briefs and crawled under a pile of jackets and clothes to cradle Sophia between them.

Maybe the fact that made it so weird was that his SEAL teammates who’d suffered hypothermia in the past tended not to have breasts.

Or perhaps it was the Arabic writing carved into the small of Sophia’s back that was freaking him out.

She had about a half a dozen thin, fading scars on the trunk of her body that had at first shocked him because he’d thought they were self-inflicted.

Izzy had once picked up this Goth chick at a Renaissance fair. It turned out that she had some serious issues that she’d tried to handle by taking a razor blade to her arms and stomach. Coming face-to-face with
that
had been an instant soft-on. He’d made some lame excuse—he was coming down with the flu—and boogied out of her ramshackle RV. He’d kicked himself for his cowardice though, for not being honest and telling her that he had issues with her method of dealing, so to speak, with
her
issues. He’d even gone back to find her several days later, to urge her to get help, but the entire fair was gone, leaving an empty, trampled field.

Here in the haunted hunting lodge’s former smokehouse, Izzy had seen that none of Sophia’s cuts were recent. But as he’d gotten closer, he’d realized that there were more than six of them, but most were almost entirely faded. Those would, eventually, become all but invisible. There
was
one, though, that she’d carry with her to her grave.

Izzy’s Arabic was limited to barely more than the standard phrases in the talkee-pointee booklets he’d found in a Marine camp in Iraq.
Put down your weapons, and no one will get hurt.
Or
Would you like some chocolate for your son?
Still, he knew enough to recognize not just that Sophia had Arabic writing carved into her very flesh, but also that it was in a spot that she could not have reached by herself. Even if she were a very nimble ballet dancer.

And he wasn’t sure, but he was pretty sure it said
slave.

Sophia had finally stopped shivering. She no longer felt like an ice cube—with breasts—but more like a side of beef.

With breasts.

Dave Malkoff frowned across the top of Sophia’s head, as if he could read Izzy’s mind.

Like, what? Izzy was going to cop a feel? Well, okay, so he already had, but it was totally by accident. There wasn’t a lot of wiggle room here, wedged in between the stone wall and the fire, jammed in tight against Sophia and Dave, beneath a pile of clothing and jackets.

For the record, he’d also managed to grab Dave’s ass during the past few hours. And that was absolutely not on purpose.

But then he realized that Dave’s glare had been to warn him that Sophia was waking up. She’d fallen asleep, but now she stirred.

“You’re okay, you’re safe,” Dave murmured to her. “We’re just here with you like this to keep you warm. I know it must seem inappropriate, but, really, this was the only way to get your temperature back up.”

She tensed, as if the close contact was more than she could handle.

Izzy tried to imagine someone having the word
slave
carved into the small of their back for shits and giggles. But he couldn’t. Whoever had written that there hadn’t had Sophia’s permission. No doubt about it, those memories were not fond ones.

“It’s okay,” Dave told her again and again, his voice calm, reassuring. “You’re safe.”

And she slowly relaxed as Izzy pretended he was a warming brick—nonthreatening and purely functional.

Lopez came over wearing only his long underwear. The rest of his clothes were either on top of them or beneath them. He tried to hide the fact that he was shivering despite the fire. “How you doing, Sophia? You want to try to get something warm inside of you?”

Izzy was on his best behavior, so all he did was close his eyes. But oh, how he could have commented. Instead, he just silently let Lopez continue.

“I’ve got some MREs heating up. I’ve also purified some of the water from that spring you and Dan found. I’ve got tea brewing.”

“Is Danny okay?” Sophia asked.

Danny-Danny-Bo-Banny was over on the other side of the fire, no doubt steaming like a fresh yak turd as his wet clothes dried. Izzy had been there, done that, a time or two. Wearing wet wool wasn’t on his top ten list of fun ways to spend an evening. The fragrance, at least that of his own sweaters, was decidedly barnyard-like. Still, Izzy was willing to bet that Dan Gillman was warmer than Lopez, thanks to his multiple layers.

“I’m fine,” Gillman called. He pushed himself to his feet and came to stand looking down at them. Lopez had cleaned up the gash on his forehead, but it was developing into quite the egg-shaped bruise. His eye was starting to rainbow, too. “Sophia, I am
so
sorry. This was all my fault. My actions were inappropriate—”

Lopez was getting Sophia some of that tea, pouring it into an MRE wrapper, for lack of a hot cup. “This isn’t the time or place for recriminations or—”

“What actions?” Dave asked Gillman, clearly not climbing into Lopez’s boat floating gently on the sea of tranquillity. In fact, the ship he was boarding was the U.S.S.
Pop-a-Vein,
despite his deceptively mild voice.

Izzy was close enough to hear the sound of Dave’s teeth grinding together.

“Or accusations.” Lopez surely knew that he was talking to himself, and he sighed.

“I came on too strong. I didn’t realize…” Gillman didn’t notice Dave’s displeasure. He was wrapped up in his own ball of guilt, no doubt feeling bad for treating Sophia like a normal woman, when it was clear to all of them, after eyeballing those freaky scars, that she was anything but.

“It’s not your fault,” Sophia tried to reassure him.

Dave wasn’t convinced. Still, he kept his voice even. Calm. Deceptively matter-of-fact. “So you were, what? Groping her? She tries to get away, you give chase and take her with you through the floor and into the water?” He climbed out from beneath the pile of clothing.

“Pretty much,” Gillman admitted. “Although groping is a little strong.”

Dressed only in his briefs, Dave was not a formidable-looking man. He was one of those guys who managed to be both skinny and fat, and Izzy was betting he’d been rope-thin until recently. He’d probably crossed that invisible age line where his metabolism changed and, much to his dismay, he suddenly had love handles. That had to suck.

“Dave,” Sophia said. “It wasn’t—”

“Nearly killing both you and Sophia.” Dave clarified as he sauntered over to Gillman.

Sophia turned to Izzy. “Give me some space. Please.”

He didn’t respond. He was just an inanimate object, a warming brick that could only be moved by Lopez. But Lopez was elsewhere, ready to intercede should Dave start throwing punches instead of words.

“Guys,” Lopez said, as Dave crossed well into Gillman’s personal space.

And kept going.

Fighting in a small space that also contained a pit fire was Darwinism in action. Getting one’s nuts seared off made procreation highly unlikely. Of course, there was also the element of Darwinism that suggested that the fittest who survived probably didn’t hang around with monkey-minded morons who fought in a small space that contained a pit fire.

Instead of shifting away from Sophia, Izzy shifted toward her. Away from the fire.

“You want to hit me?” Gillman asked Dave, not at all belligerently. He actually sounded hopeful. “Go ahead.”

“How about taking this outside?” Izzy suggested. So okay, he was now a warming brick that talked.

But apparently Dave wasn’t the hitting kind. He was the threatening kind. “If you ever touch her again,” he told Gillman, right up in his face, “I’ll kill you.”

Izzy couldn’t see Dave’s eyes from his position on the floor, but he had a clear shot of Gillman. The SEAL would have stood there, absorbing a blow without retaliation, but words like that could not be ignored. So he bristled. And he started to get back in Dave’s face, with one of the snappiest comebacks known to mankind. “Oh, yeah?”

Sophia was wriggling around beside Izzy, which was about as distracting as anything he’d ever experienced, except maybe the thought of getting his nuts seared off.

Aha, she was getting dressed. She’d been rummaging around, apparently searching for something, anything to put on, and now she was doing just that. “Zanella, get your hands off me!”

For the record, Izzy’s hands had been nowhere near her. She, in her wiggling, had connected with him. She’d nearly kneed him in the groin, and he’d executed evasive maneuvers, period, the end.

Of course, both Dave and Gillman combined their anger and turned, aiming it now at Izzy. Except it had morphed into disgust. “Zanella…” Even Lopez joined in on the familiar chorus, adding a descant of “Izzy, come on.”

Sophia, meanwhile, scrambled to her feet. She was wearing one of his sweaters, and what looked like Dave’s pants, holding them up with one hand. But then she swayed, as if she’d stood too fast, and everyone—Izzy included—jumped to support her, helping her sit on the remaining pile of clothing.

Lopez leaped to get his tea, helping her take a sip from the MRE wrapper. “It’s not too hot,” he told her. “I couldn’t heat it too much or I wouldn’t’ve been able to pour it into this. But it should be warm enough.”

“Thanks,” Sophia said. Her eyes met Izzy’s, and he knew she was no more wobbly-legged than he was. Her goal—skillfully achieved—had been to distract and refocus, starting with her mention of his allegedly wayward hands. It was masterful—she had the poor little blond waif role down perfectly.

And he was king of the miscreants. “So that was a fun way to spend the afternoon,” he said. “Although—no offense Dave—I would’ve preferred the third in our little hypothermia-be-gone party be Lindsey.”

He got
Zanella-ed
again, as expected.

Dave and Gillman were now bonding in their revulsion of him. Well, not quite. But they no longer looked ready to get their calendars out, to schedule their impending duel to the death.

Sophia frowned. “Where
is
Lindsey?”

Dave looked at his watch. “Probably reentering radio range right about…now.”

Tracy had just gotten out of the shower when someone knocked loudly on the bathroom door.

There was no exhaust fan—probably because they hadn’t invented them back in the dark ages when this motel was built—and the mirror was completely fogged. So she opened the door, both to let the steam out and to greet her roomie, who had surely returned from her hike.

“I’ll be out in a sec, Sophia,” she said, only to find herself face-to-face with Lawrence Decker. She was so surprised to see him, she just stood there, gaping.

“Sorry to intrude,” he said. “But I need some help.”

She had a towel wrapped around herself, but the thin motel towels weren’t exactly generous. Certainly not as generous as her backside. She moved behind the door, peering out at him.

Had Sophia actually given Decker a key to their room? There was something going on between them—or there had been at one time. Tracy had thought, however, that the key-sharing phase of their relationship was over and done. But maybe not. Maybe they were as messed up as she and Lyle were.

Terrific. It would give her something to talk about with Sophia later tonight. God, she hated sharing a room, and wished, for the thousandth time, that her roommate could’ve been Lindsey. At least Lindsey liked her. Sophia was distant, reserved, mysterious, and a natural blond.

But really, out of everyone she’d met from Troubleshooters Incorporated, Lawrence Decker had to be the biggest mystery. From what Tracy had heard from nearly everyone in the office, Decker was like some kind of mythical warrior god. From the way they’d all talked about him, with awe and reverence in their voices, she’d expected someone like Sam Starrett, only taller, bigger, and ten times more handsome and charismatic.

Instead, Decker was one of those utterly forgettable men who blended into the background at parties or in bars. He was the guy whose name she’d forget ten minutes after he’d been introduced. With medium brown eyes, medium brown hair cut medium short, and a medium build, he was neither handsome nor not handsome. He just…was.

“Sophia’s not here,” she told him now.

“Yeah, I know,” he said in his mediumly modulated voice. “That’s why I need your help. There was an accident up at the hunting lodge.”

“Oh, my God,” Tracy said. Lindsey had gone up there. Mark and Izzy, too. “Was anyone hurt?”

“Everyone’s okay,” he reassured her. “But Sophia and one of the SEALs fell into some water. It’s cold out there, and getting colder.”

“No kidding,” Tracy said. “Which SEAL?”

“Dan Gillman. They need dry clothes as quickly as possible. Which drawers are Sophia’s?”

He wasn’t here because he was stalking Sophia. He was here to get some of her clothes. Of course, maybe he was here both to get her clothes and to stalk her. Stalkers were clever that way.

“The ones on the left,” Tracy told him. “No, right.” She closed her eyes, trying to picture the dresser.

“Just show me,” Decker said.

Tracy hadn’t brought her bathrobe, mostly because if she had, she wouldn’t have had room to pack anything else. But now, instead of taking the time to pull on her clothes, she pointed out the bathroom door to her winter coat that was hanging on the open closet rack. “Hand me that, will you?”

He did, and she slipped it on, letting her towel fall to the bathroom floor as she fastened the coat. Earlier that same afternoon, one of the buttons had come off, and she’d yet to find a sewing kit to reattach it. But she would be okay, as long as she didn’t lean over too far.