Chapter 1
Chapter 1
F ound the girl I’m going to marry.
Jones tapped out the email and sent it to his friend, Frog. He missed texting almost as much as he missed the people he usually texted. He had always sent messages as he thought of them, providing his friends a running commentary on his day. But that was impossible now, as it had been the last year. Roaming charges were too expensive. At least he still had email.
Again? Frog returned.
Serious this time, Jones replied.
Have you talked to her yet?
Jones paused. Working on it. Perfection couldn’t be rushed, especially not when it looked the way his future wife looked. Tall. Blond. Gorgeous.
What color are her eyes? Frog persisted.
They’re, Jones began and paused. He hadn’t exactly been looking at her eyes. Not that he was some kind of gross, creepy loser who ogled women. It was just that her figure had been so arresting; it was hard to look past it. Shut up, he sent instead.
Frog spared him the obvious reply. The guys liked to razz him about his shallow tastes in women, but he’d never seen any of them go for a girl because she had a “good personality.” Why should he be any different?
The phone in his office buzzed and he lunged for it. He was and had always been a people person, something that worked out well as a Navy SEAL. Now, tucked away in an office alone, he felt like he was withering, like a plant deprived of sunlight.
“Sir, this is Stuart. You asked me to let you know when Miss Seymour came back.”
Yes! “Thank you, Stuart. I’ll be there shortly.” Showtime, Jones thought, standing to check his reflection in the window. Absently, he rubbed a finger over his nose, wishing not for the first time it would work to erase the freckles away. It was hard to be taken seriously as a commando with freckles and a button nose.
Quickly, he made his way from the resort’s inner sanctum to the front desk. There was a queue of people waiting to either check in or talk to the clerk about some issue. Jones let his eyes skim over them, assessing for any threat, before allowing them to rest on the true object of his desire: Victoria Seymour. She stood at the front of the line, a smile lighting her beautiful features. She seemed like the kind of woman who smiled often. Jones liked that. Currently she and Stuart were conversing in fluent French. Jones had no idea what they were saying, but he didn’t need to in order to appreciate the way her lush mouth formed the words.
“Excuse me, can you help me?”
The voice seemed to be coming from Victoria. Jones stared at her, confused. How could she be speaking French with her mouth and yet English at the same time? He craned his neck, looking around her, and saw another woman hidden from view, this one shorter and plumper.
“No,” he said.
“No?” she repeated, annoyed now.
“I don’t work the desk,” he explained.
“Then why are you at the desk?” she said.
Normally Jones would have had a difficult time not rolling his eyes at her can-I-speak-to-your-manager tone. Six months of working at a hotel had taught him to pick out the difficult people almost on sight. This one would complain about everything, would make the staff’s life miserable until her departure. At the moment, however, her hair diverted his attention. Up top, where there should have normally been a calm mane, was instead a giant clump standing on end, clearly matted together by some foreign object.
“Uh,” he said.
She gave an impatient sigh. “Gum.”
“What?” he said, reluctantly bringing his eyes to her face.
She pointed back to her head. “It’s gum. In my hair. I fell asleep on a window and got gum in my hair, so as you can see I’m a bit anxious to check in here.” Still annoyed, her eyes darted to Victoria, who was now leaning forward, touching Stuart’s forearm with delicate fingers. Stuart, who was usually immune to pretty faces, looked in danger of stroking out and keeling over. Lucky idiot. Gum Lady cleared her throat pointedly, drawing Jones’s attention reluctantly back.
“I don’t work the desk,” he repeated carefully. “You’ll have to wait.” Like everybody else, he mentally added. Gum Lady’s lips pressed together. She’s going to ask for the manager in 3, 2, …
“At a five star resort with a three thousand a night price tag, waiting in line is unacceptable,” she said and crossed her arms over her chest. A couple of people behind her began to murmur their agreement. Jones could see he was going to have to do something about it, but what? He was the head of security for the resort, not front desk management. He left the front, returned to the back, and dragged someone who knew how to do the check in along with him, hand delivering her to Gum Lady with a fake smile.
“There you go, enjoy your stay,” he said, wondering if she would catch the subtle sarcasm in his tone. It wouldn’t do to be all out hostile, but neither could he tamp down his dislike. Entitled rich people were all the same, in his view. Not that there weren’t occasional nice people who stayed at the hotel. It was just that most of them enjoyed treating the resort staff as if they were cockroaches, as if it somehow made them bigger people to belittle the people who were barely making ends meet in order to help them enjoy their frivolous stay at a luxury resort. Make the money and then get out, Jones encouraged himself. All of his friends went into further government work after life in the SEALs. Jones was the only one who went into the private sector. The guys liked to give him a hard time about his soft life on the lush tropical isle. The truth was that he worked too much to appreciate it. Running security for such a large resort with so many visitors in a country not his own was turning out to be more challenging than he’d first realized, at least from a bureaucratic point of view. It seemed he spent half his day filling out incident reports and the other half reading reports written by other people. It was mind numbingly tedious, but the pay was amazing, the same as what he’d be making as a surgeon in DC. And his room and board was included, saving him a mint on rent. All he had to do was stick it out a few years and he’d be set financially. Having money would be a nice change from his time in the military when he’d been average, the same as everyone else. And, really, there were a lot of things to love about resort living. He’d met a lot of wonderful people so far, too many to let the rude ones like Gum Lady get to him.
Dismissing her purposely from his mind, he turned and searched for Victoria, ready to make his move, but too late. She was gone. With a sigh, Jones grabbed a bottle of water and returned to his office.