The Defiant Hero (27 page)
And there he was. Completely, gloriously naked and gleamingly soaking wet, clinging to the front of her car, like some surreal hood ornament.
The approaching car looked as if it had lights mounted up on the roof, as if it might be a police car.
Meg looked at John, looked at her gun. If she didn’t let him into the car, if that was a cop and he came over to find out what the hell the naked man was doing on the hood of her car, she’d have to kill Razeen. Right now. In the next few minutes. Seconds, maybe.
She couldn’t breathe.
And John knew what she was thinking. “Don’t do it, Meg,” he said. “Don’t go past the point of no return. Let me in.”
Meg opened the driver’s side window, cursing the entire time. She said words she didn’t even know she knew how to pronounce as she scrambled over the parking brake and into the passenger seat. As John Nilsson, dripping wet, slipped into car, as naked as the day he was born.
“Drive,” she ordered him. “South on 95. I swear to God, John, you pull any tricks—like driving to the police station or heading back toward DC—I’ll kill Razeen.”
He put the stick shift in gear and pulled out, past the oncoming car.
It was a roof rack, some kind of ski rack, not a cop car’s lights.
John handed Meg something and it wasn’t until she took it from him that she realized it was his briefs. They were soaking wet and he’d wadded them up in an attempt to wring them out.
“Check them,” he said. “I want you to be sure I haven’t attached one of those tracking hoo-ha’s to the elastic band.”
She sat there, completely numb, holding tightly to his underpants and her gun as he pulled onto Route 95 heading south.
This was absurd. She was in a car with the one man who’d played a part in nearly every one of her fantasies for the past three years, he was buck naked—and she couldn’t bring herself even to take a peek.
“The faster you do it,” he said, squeegeeing the water from his face and hair, “the faster I can put ’em back on.”
He turned on the defroster, turned the fan up high. The rain plus his body heat was steaming up the windows. The cool air felt good against her flushed face.
How had this happened? How had this gotten so completely out of control?
“You’re in an awful big hurry to get these back,” Meg said. “It would be just like WildCard to hide some kind of homing signal in a pair of underpants.”
John laughed. “Yeah, it would be. I’ll have to suggest it to him. He’ll like the idea.”
“Maybe I should just throw them out the window.”
“Be my guest. I brought ’em in here for you. You’re the one who won’t even look at me.”
“I’m not looking at you because I’m mad at you,” Meg countered. “I’m furious. I’m . . .” Her voice broke. “Terrified,” she whispered. And then she said the unthinkable. “If Amy’s dead . . .” She felt bile rising in her throat, felt her stomach churn, her blood turn to ice.
“Life goes on,” John said quietly. “Believe it or not, Meg, life does go on. It takes a while. Sometimes years. Sometimes longer.”
But it didn’t. It wouldn’t. Not for Meg.
“I won’t let her be dead.” Meg fought the urge to vomit, cursing herself for being weak. She had to stay focused. She had to believe that she could save her daughter. She had to be strong. “I won’t. I won’t think it, I won’t believe it.”
“I was only seven when my mother died,” John told her.
She turned to look at him in surprise, then turned quickly away.
Oh, my God.
She’d made the mistake of looking at him. It was dark in the car, thank goodness, and he was mostly in shadow, but, oh, my God.
“I know I kind of led you to believe I was older than that when it happened,” he continued, “but I wasn’t. So, see, I know what it feels like to lose someone irreplaceable, to lose someone you need as much as you need air to breathe. If you want me to be completely honest, I’d have to tell you that I’m still not over her death. I’ll never be over it. But I learned to live with it. And that’s what you’ll do, too—if you have to.”
“No,” she said. He was wrong. If Amy were dead, yes, she’d have a chance to go on living, but she wouldn’t want to. And if Amy weren’t dead . . . Please God, let Amy still be alive.
She looked down at the wet wad of fabric she held in her hand. “I can’t take the chance that you’re lying to me about this.”
“Fair enough.” He reached over and took the briefs and threw them out the window.
He could have just as easily done the same thing with her gun. She tightened her grip on it as she turned slightly to face him. She had to watch him, and oh, Lord, in the greenish light from the dashboard, all his muscles seemed to glow, like some exotic living anatomy textbook. “Keep both your hands on the steering wheel,” she ordered him.
“You’re the boss.”
Was she? It didn’t feel that way. Meg kept her eyes carefully on his face. Only his face. Now what?
It wouldn’t be long until the sun came up, until truckers going past could look down, into her car and see—her gaze drifted—that.
Oh, my God.
She was going to have to find him something to wear. Some of the truck stops sold T-shirts and running shorts. But how was she going to get them? Leave John and Razeen in the car while she went inside? No way. Even if she took the keys, John would probably be able to hot-wire the car in the time she was inside the store. She’d come out, and he’d be gone. With Razeen.
But she certainly couldn’t send John in, naked. Not that he’d ever willingly get out of the car.
Unless he took the car keys . . .
She was going to have to figure something out. And soon.
Meg took off her jeans jacket using the method she’d seen John use to take off his jacket while out on the hood. One arm at a time, the other hand firmly holding on—in this case to her gun—while she finally shook the jacket free.
She held it out. “Take this.”
He glanced at her, and wisely didn’t make any kind of comment about the fact that she’d told him to keep both hands on the wheel. He took her jacket and covered himself.
It didn’t help.
Five miles wasn’t enough.
Sam had run hard, pushing the pace until Jenk and WildCard started to whine. They’d both been up too late the night before, WildCard surfing the Internet, and Jenk with some woman he’d met at the hotel, in town on a business trip—lucky little son of a bitch.
Sam had slept badly, too, but he didn’t have as good an excuse.
He hadn’t seen Alyssa Locke once since he’d left the hotel for PT with a small group of the other SEALs early this morning. Yet ever since he’d stepped out the door, he’d had this little jangly sixth sense buzz that made him believe she was out there, watching him.
Somewhere.
As Wolchonok led Jenk and WildCard back toward the hotel, Sam picked up his pace and headed out toward the Lincoln Memorial. On a hot, restless morning like this, with the humidity starting to build and the weather threatening to storm by the late afternoon, he was good for at least five more miles.
If he tried to go back to the hotel now, without running any farther, he’d jump out of his skin.
He ran faster and faster, with that little jangle still making the hair on the back of his neck twitch, before he realized what it was exactly that he was trying to do.
He was trying to shake Locke.
Not so that he could lose her, but just so that he could see her.
He was dying to see her.
No, he was dying to do more than that.
Yeah, like that was ever going to happen.
Still, a man could dream. He could talk to her, watch her face, look into her incredible eyes, and carry that memory with him when he went back to the hotel to take a shower.
But Sam lost her before he got close enough to see Lincoln looming over him. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he knew that she was gone.
He circled back, retraced his steps.
And there she was.
Sitting on a bench, bent over, head way down between her legs, like she was going to faint or barf or both.
Sam sprinted the last few hundred yards. “You okay?”
Her eyes were tightly shut, and she didn’t open them. “Go away.”
She was soaked with sweat. That was no big surprise, he was drenched, too. But she was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, while he wore only a pair of running shorts.
He touched her neck, checking her pulse. She was much too hot and her heart rate was too high. She was on the verge of overheating.
“What the hell are you doing wearing all these clothes?” He pulled her T-shirt up. She was wearing a colorful running bra underneath it, so he yanked the shirt over her head.
“Hey!”
A reaction. Thank God. It wasn’t time to call the ambulances. Yet.
He pulled at the waistband of her sweats and—Jesus—she had shorts on under there.
“What is wrong with you?” he asked, as he half lifted her up, peeling the sweats down her legs. Damn, she had gorgeous legs, with mocha-colored skin that was smooth as silk. He tried not to touch her, aware of how uncool it would be to take advantage of her that way, yet wanting to just the same.
“Get away from me!” She kicked him feebly in the leg.
“Then do it yourself.”
She struggled to get her sweatpants over her feet, and Sam impatiently grabbed her running shoes and pulled them off.
And there she was. Alyssa Locke. Dressed only in a barely there pair of running shorts and a yellow sports bra. “I don’t need your help.”
At least she’d had the good sense to sit on a bench that was in the shade.
“Don’t move,” he ordered her, and sprinted back to where he’d run past a hot dog cart. Four plastic bottles of water cost the entire ten dollar bill he carried in his shoe. Damn. He could practically guarantee that when this was over, she wasn’t even going to say thank you.
He opened one of the bottles, took a slug himself as he dashed back to Alyssa.
He shoved that bottle into her hands as he opened another and poured it on her.
“Hey,” she sputtered, “don’t get my cell phone wet!”
He took it from her, stuck it in her sneaker, then kept going. He used the third bottle to drench her T-shirt and wrap it around her head.
Then he sat next to her, opened the last bottle of water, and took a drink.
“Just answer one question,” he said. “Just one. You live in DC. You know how hot it can get. It had to be in the high seventies before we even left the hotel. Why the hell did you even think you’d need sweatpants on a day like today?”
She looked at him. And she leaned one arm along the back of the bench, stretching her legs out in front of her. Even with her T-shirt tied around her head, she was amazing to look at, with those five-mile-long legs and all that bare skin showing. She wasn’t stacked, not by any definition of the word, but in his book, huge breasts were way overrated.
Alyssa Locke managed to be both athletic looking and delicate.
Sam had a real thing for delicate.
She was all woman, and even though he knew she was going to smack him any minute, Sam couldn’t keep himself from looking at her. Somehow he managed to keep from drooling. But just barely.
“That’s why,” she said.
It took him a minute to realize what the hell she was talking about, but then he understood. She’d worn sweatpants even though it was promising to be a million degrees today because she didn’t want to stand out in the crowd.
Jesus. That was one hell of a problem to have.
“You should wear light colors,” he said, thinking aloud. “Shorts that are longer than those—the dorkier looking the better. And I’ve seen these lightweight T-shirts—they’re kind of like a really fine mesh. Air goes right through them.”
“I have that stuff,” she told him. “I just haven’t had time to do the laundry in about three weeks.” She reached down and picked up her cell phone, checking to see that the power was still on.
She was waiting for a phone call.
Sam looked at her closely. She looked exhausted, and not just from the heat. She had circles beneath her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept well in a long time.
He watched as she put her shoes back on, as she stared at her phone again.
He would have expected her to be talking up a storm, in self-defense. Explaining that she’d never let the heat get the best of her before, trying to turn this into no big deal, deflating the situation so that he’d have no story to tell when he got back to the hotel.
Instead, she was a million miles away.
Someone wasn’t calling her. Someone was keeping her from sleeping at night. It had to be a man. Some complete jerkoff who needed his head examined.
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