Authors: Vicki Hinze
“What’s going on over there, Cap?” Should he mention the PUSH call? Probably not, until he had some kind of credible verification. If she were dead, Cap would know it.
“I haven’t been briefed on anything. If I am, you’ll be the first to know”
“Thanks.” Still stinging and embarrassed about his reaction to seeing the senator inject himself, Sam made small talk for a few minutes and then left the office.
Cap had lied to him, of course. He knew exactly what was going on, he just hadn’t wanted to share it at that moment. If running true to form, that translated to his having uncovered something interesting about Sybil Stone, though not her death. Cap wouldn’t be able to contain himself on that. He guarded “deniability” with a vengeance that bordered on religion. He never relayed negative information on the veep or anyone else directly to Sam. He filtered it through Jean. So if Jean stopped Sam on his way out, then he could be sure that whatever was happening had Sybil Stone front and center in it.
She was on the phone in the outer office. Sam smiled and waved, then moved on. He was about to step into the elevator when she called out from her office door. “Sam, wait.”
Ah, a message from Cap
. Pleased with himself, Sam walked back to her. “Did you need something?”
Jean dropped her voice. “There’s an unconfirmed rumor going around you might want to check out.” Fear burned in her eyes. “They’re saying Ballast has jeopardized Sybil Stone’s peace-seeking mission in Geneva.”
Oh, man. The PUSH rumor wouldn’t be far behind. If Sam sat on it, which he had to do until he’d checked it out, the terrorists would just phone other reporters until one ran
with the story. PUSH was bad, but Ballast was a hundred times worse. Gregor Faust and his hired thugs just kept stacking up crises. No UN member could target him for assassination without committing an agreement violation, and, frankly, he greased too many political palms and financed too many campaigns for anyone legitimate to take him out. But why hadn’t some zealot spared the world and killed the twisted bastard?
Jean lowered her voice to a whisper. “If what I’m hearing is right, Ballast is doing a lot more than making vicious threats this time, Sam. They think Faust himself has contacted the White House and blamed PUSH. He’s predicted casualties.”
That phone call was significant. No one knew exactly what Faust looked or sounded like, though several months ago PUSH had released an artist’s sketch of a man purported to be he.
“How many casualties?” No wonder they had been frenzied, canceled the briefing, and Barber had been in squelch mode. Sam didn’t like the sound of any of this. Faust had no scruples. He was loyal only to money and power; capable of doing anything to anyone, anywhere.
“Some say a handful,” Jean hedged.
The White House wouldn’t be in an uproar over a few casualties. Not even if the few were highly placed officials or one of them was Sybil Stone. There would be upset, but not like this. “What do others say?”
She blinked hard and whispered. “Millions.”
The word ricocheted through his brain and echoed. His blood drained from his face, the heat seeped out of him, and he swallowed hard. “Damn, Jean. I need to talk to Cap.”
“But his fundraiser—”
“Jean.” Sam clasped her arm. “PUSH called me. They said they killed her.”
“Killed whom?”
“Sybil Stone.”
She couldn’t be dead; every bone in her body ached.
Unsure whether to curse or rejoice, Sybil lay sprawled atop Agent Westford in a patch of rain-soaked muddy ground. He lay motionless, his eyes closed, his breathing labored.
“Westford?”
Startled conscious, he gasped in a deep breath that rocked her and raised a hand that brushed against her breast. She instinctively slapped at it. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Probably. Jumping out of a plane without a parachute doesn’t seem sane to me.” Mud splotched his rugged face; clods clung in his hair. He flexed his fingers, then his wrists, testing them for sprains or breaks. “But I don’t think I’ve lost anything else.”
Assessing her own condition, Sybil saw a flash and flinched. A lightning bolt streaked a jagged path across the
twilight sky. Windblown rain beat through the leafy trees and thunder rolled, echoing vibrations across the earth that jarred her to the marrow of her bones.
The briefcase.
Panic ripped through her chest and she looked down. Mud-splashed and wet but intact, and still attached to her arm.
Thank heaven.
Jonathan grunted, claiming her attention. “Are you hurt, Agent Westford?” When they had hit the ground, he had cushioned her with his body and taken the brunt of the impact. He’d known how to position himself and had instructed her in falling with minimal injury. She had expected their every bone would crunch or snap. Instead, she was sore and scraped and bruised but nothing felt broken.
He shielded his eyes with a cupped hand at his brow. “No, I’m fine.” He reached down between them, trying to get a hand into his pocket. “You okay?”
“I think so.” Between the aches from the jerk of the chute opening and the bruises from their rough landing, she couldn’t be sure. Not yet. “Exactly why did you do that?”
He slid her a blank look.
She tried again. “Why did you jump out of the plane without a parachute?”
He stared at her a long second, as if her not knowing seemed incomprehensible to him, then scanned her face. “You’re shaking. Are you really all right?”
“Yes,” she insisted, his breath warming her face. “I’m furious with you, actually, but fine.” She tried to slide off of him, but what looked like miles of twisted parachute cords held their bodies together. She couldn’t move, and that infuriated her more. “Would you
please
get me out of this damn thing?”
She spoke through clenched teeth and struggled to untangle herself, but the cords wouldn’t give. Westford’s entire body felt hard, and, even in this situation, she had been celibate too long for a hard body to feel anything but good.
Strange, but until Gabby had started her matchmaker-from-hell routine, Sybil had never thought of him as a flesh-and-blood man, only as an agent. That felt comfortable to her. Safe. She had trusted the agent and confided in him, but then he had requested reassignment and left her. She had no idea why, and she wasn’t brave enough to ask, but his leaving proved once again that when it came to men, she had lousy judgment. So this seeing-him-as-a-man business didn’t feel comfortable or safe, and she resolutely avoided feeling anything she didn’t want to feel. It fractured her control.
“I was trying to get you out,” Westford said. “You ordered me to stop.”
Angry at herself for panicking at physical contact with him, she swallowed a sharp retort. She
had
ordered him to stop. His touch had been unintentional and, like it or not, she had mixed feelings about that. Disconcerting, mixed feelings.
The mid-August heat seeped through the downpour, creating a horrendous steam bath. Drawing breath was like trying to breathe through a hot, wet washcloth. She began to sweat and clenched her jaw. “Where are we?”
“Florida.” On his back in shallow water, he wriggled beneath her, creating eddies and rocking her against him, breasts to chest and thigh to thigh. Finding the sensation more pleasant than wise, she felt her face warm.
Naturally, he noticed her blush. “I’m just trying to get a knife out of my pocket, okay?”
She managed a crisp nod and hoped to heaven he hurried. It was hard for a woman to hold on to her dignity while wallowing all over a man on the wet, marshy ground. Determined to beat the odds, she lifted her chin. “I’m going to be patient, Agent Westford. I’m not going to lose control.” Even as she voiced the denial her control slipped into jeopardy. “But when you get me out of this monstrosity”—she paused to glance down at the bird’s nest of parachute lines,
then glared back at him—“you’d better be able to give me a damn good reason for dragging me out of that airplane.”
The rain pattered an unnerving staccato beat on the bent grass, spattered in ankle-deep pockets of brackish water and on the fallen leaves scattered over the swamp’s earthen floor. Heavy drops tapped against the spiky-leafed palmettos and ran in rivulets down Westford’s face. He sawed at the corded lines with his knife. “I have an excellent reason right now, ma’am.”
She watched him hack at another nylon cord. “Well, I’d love to hear it.”
The last of the cords binding her fell slack. She rolled off of him, stood up, and then primly smoothed her skirt. Her bare feet sank into the rank muck and it squished between her toes. She’d lost her shoes. Her stomach fluttered. There was a distinct, unwelcome vulnerability in standing before a man rain-drenched and barefoot in mud.
“Yes, ma’am.” He sat up and stretched to cut his legs free. “The pilot asked for cream in his coffee.”
“What?” She couldn’t believe her ears; she had to have missed something. Maybe Westford had hit his head. She swiped at the raindrops gathering on her lashes and double-checked. Methodically slicing himself free of the ropes, he didn’t look dazed or woozy, though he certainly sounded both. “The pilot wanted cream?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m seeing myself passing along that rationale to the president, and the cream isn’t rising to the top, Westford. You’re going to have to give me more than that to take to him.”
“President Lance wouldn’t ask me why” Westford spared her a glance. “He’d trust my judgment.”
Chastised, she conceded that David did have an enormous amount of respect for Westford, and he probably wouldn’t ask. She had trusted him once. Should she again?
Wondering spawned an internal debate that seemed hell-bent on not being resolved.
Okay, Sybil, this is it. You’ve got one life and a choice. Define what kind of person you want to be. One who dares to trust, or one who doesn’t. Courage or cowardice. It’s that simple.
Simple? There was nothing simple about it. It was an obvious life-defining moment.
In the past, some life-defining moments had crept into her life through little, seemingly inconsequential incidents. Others had blown in with all the subtlety of a hurricane. This life-defining moment appeared to be a category-five hurricane spawning killer tornadoes.
Logically, everyone had times where they wondered if their judgment was up to snuff and it would make the grade or survive the cut. No one escaped self-doubt. But when a woman was the sitting Vice President of the United States and she was confronted with a situation that threatened to escalate to a global crisis, it was a bitch of a time to have to fight the battle.
Westford spared her from making a decision. He shoved the cut cords into his pockets, gathered the parachute, and then buried it in short order under a clump of sour-smelling bushes. “Let’s get away from here.” He clasped her arm.
“Oh, no.” Sybil twisted and stepped back, out of his reach. “The last time you grabbed me like that, you took an eight-thousand-foot swan dive out of a plane and dragged me with you. I’ll pass on your next adventure.”
Tense and wary, he scanned the marsh and the thicket of woods to the east, then inspected the swirling gray clouds. “We’ve got to move, ma’am.”
She had seen that look on him before. It drew down the corners of his mouth, narrowed his eyes to slits, and had never been the harbinger of good news. “Could you please call me Sybil while we’re out here? At the moment, your ‘ma’ams’ are driving me a little crazy”
“Certainly. We’ve got to move, Sybil.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you explain yourself.” She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t risk trusting him again.
Coward.
Damn right.
“I told you, the pilot asked for cream.”
A clap of thunder rumbled through the swamp. At least it sounded more distant than the last one. “So, because he wanted cream in his coffee, you shoved me out of a plane and jumped out yourself—without a parachute?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Tell me, Agent Westford. What would you have done if he had wanted sugar, too?”
Instead of answering, he caught her by the arm and started walking.
“I can walk on my own, thank you.” His hand on her arm was gentle, but his grim expression left no doubt; the man was furious, and that irritated Sybil. She was a little less than pleased herself. After all, he had walked out on her, not she on him, and now he demanded her unconditional trust? Not bloody likely.
He let go and backed off a step. “You do know the plane was under siege.”
Under siege?
“Did you hit your head when we landed? There was no siege on that plane.”
Ignoring her remark, he asked a question of his own. “Why did you bump everyone off the flight?”
“Intuition.” The one thing her critics used against her at every opportunity—real or implied.
“You dumped Grace and the others on women’s intuition?”
Here it came. The putdown for considering her intuition as valuable and accurate as any man’s instincts. She turned and looked him in the eye, daring him to laugh at her. “Yes, I did.”