Chapter 2 #2
Harry tried looking nonchalant, bony shoulder pressed hard against the doorjamb for balance, but his legs were trembling.
Sam knew better than to protest. His brother had a head as hard as the titanium that held his hip, right thigh and left shoulder together.
Harry ragging on him was brand new, though. Maybe it meant he was healing some. He’d come back from a secret mission in Syria with barely a pulse, and had completely lost his sense of humor.
Sam and Mike were Harry’s only family, down in Harry’s file as the persons to contact in case of death. When Sam and Mike had flown to Ramstein to take him home, Harry had been more dead than alive.
Worse than the damage to his body had been the damage to his spirit. Like Sam and like Mike, Harry had come through a brutal childhood intact. Whatever had happened in Syria—and so far he wasn’t talking—had crushed his spirit.
So Harry taking the piss out of him was new and good.
Sam sat up, shuffled papers, wiped the smile off his face. “Wasn’t smiling,” he muttered. He rarely smiled. No one knew that better than his brother.
“Was, too.”
Sam looked up into his brother’s light brown eyes, as fierce as an eagle’s, and just as warm. “Was not.”
“Was, too.”
“Was not.” Sam’s jaw clenched at how childish they sounded. “Don’t you have work to do? Weren’t you supposed to prepare the McIntosh report?”
“Mmm.” A corner of Harry’s mouth lifted. “Did that last night, while you were having fun along the docks.”
A joking Harry was good, but there were limits. “It wasn’t fun,” Sam snapped.
Harry’s slight smile faded. He knew how heavily this two-week wait had weighed on Sam and he knew the reason why.
Who knew how many girls were being hurt while Sam had to wait?
“No,” Harry said soberly. “I know it wasn’t.
I was just trying to get a rise out of you, God knows why.
You’ve been walking around looking like the Grim Reaper lately. ”
“Not anymore,” Sam said. “Job’s done. I notified the client, who’s already contacted the authorities. I’ll write up the report today. It’s over.”
“Christ.” Harry straightened. He put his crutches under his arms and hobbled into the room. “Wow, that’s…that’s great news. Did you get the evidence to back you up?”
“Damn straight,” Sam said with satisfaction. “Photos and digital recordings and even some paperwork. Put those fuckers away for the rest of their natural lives. Which I suspect will be cut tragically short by a shank between the ribs in the prison showers. Nobody likes child rapists.”
“Hey, man. Congrats. I’ll call Mike and we can go celebrate tonight. On me. Bonus on that sucker’ll keep us in tall corn for the next quarter.”
“Can’t.” Sam’s eyes slid to the computer monitor, staring into it. There was nothing there he had to see right now, but it kept his face away from Harry’s intelligent, perceptive eyes. “Busy tonight.”
“So cancel. The three of us need to celebrate.”
Sam didn’t share blood with Harry, or with Mike, but they were his brothers in every sense of the term. That didn’t mean he’d miss his shot at dinner out with Nicole Pearce for Harry or Mike. Tonight was off-limits.
“Can’t,” he said, bending his head over a piece of paper, pretending to scrutinize it like it was a peace treaty between warring tribes. “Not tonight.”
Harry jerked the paper out from under his hands and held it up. “Okay, I get it, you can’t talk because you’re way too busy with”—he glanced at the paper—“orders for paper and photocopy toner. Uh-huh. Okay, what’s going on tonight that’s so special?”
Sam glared at him. His very special Death Glare, guaranteed to terrify recruits.
Harry put his crutches to one side and carefully sat on the corner of the desk and looked at him, eyebrows lifted. Sam crossed his arms and set his jaw.
“Not talking, eh?” A corner of Harry’s mouth lifted, Harry body language for a full-out grin.
“That means I’ll have to guess. Okay. I like guessing games.
It’s obviously not work-related, or you’d have told me all about it, so we’re talking a date with a dame.
And just as obviously that dame’s someone you don’t want to blow off, but if you don’t want to talk about it, that means it’s…
” He snapped his fingers. “I know! That looker across the hall! The one you’ve been mooning over.
Christ, how’d you swing that one? Who’d you have to kill? ”
Damn! Sam hated it that Harry was so smart. He hunkered down in his chair, knowing he couldn’t take Harry on. Harry’s bones were just now resetting, Sam couldn’t go breaking any new ones.
But, shit, he didn’t want to talk about this.
He’d never been one to blab about his sex life, mostly because there’d never been much to talk about.
He had sex—lots of it in fact, though lately, work had gotten in the way—but it was never with anyone special.
The sex he had was mainly a way to scratch an itch, like eating when hungry.
Who wanted to talk about food once you’d eaten your fill?
Mostly, one woman was just like another.
They satisfied an appetite, and that was about it.
But…Nicole Pearce was different. He couldn’t really get a handle on why, but there it was. And he wasn’t talking about it.
They stared at each other mutely, Sam not talking, Harry trying to crack him open but failing. Finally, Harry gave a big martyred sigh.
“Okay. This is what’s going to happen. Right now, you look like a dockworker who’s been scamming goods and you smell like one, too.
No way in hell you’re gonna get lucky with that babe looking and smelling like that.
So you’re going to get a shave and a haircut and take a long shower.
Two of ’em, because man—” He waved the air in front of him as if someone had just let rip a massive fart.
“You read me? And I’m going to go out with Mike for a beer and we’re gonna wait for your report tomorrow morning on your evening out with Ms. Luscious. ”
“Out,” Sam growled, rolling his eyes. “Get out now before I break your bones all over again, and I’ll do a better job of it than some fucking Syrian RPG, trust me.”
Harry gimped his way out of the office, a half smile on his face.
It had been almost worth it being teased, to see Harry smiling.
Sam wasn’t much of a smiler himself, but Harry had been to hell and back.
This was the first lighthearted exchange he’d had with Harry since he’d been blown up in Hasakah.
Maybe it was the Nicole Pearce Effect. God knows, she had an effect on him, a massive one. Harry said he’d been mooning over her, which was crazy. Sam didn’t moon. But he had been…interested. Real interested.
He’d timed his comings and goings to get a glimpse of her. Christ, just watching her walk down the hallway toward him had been enough to give him a boner he could use to hammer a nail into the wall.
He knew the basics about her, thanks to her website and Google. Daughter of an ambassador, grew up all over the world, attended the University of Geneva School of Translation, translated from French and Spanish, knew basic Russian and some Arabic.
That really impressed him. Language training was intense in SpecOps. Sam had aced just about everything in training except languages. He had a tin ear for languages, and it had been a real drawback. Still was, as he was starting to have foreign clients.
Though she was an ambassador’s daughter, Nicole Pearce didn’t live like a woman of privilege.
She lived in a house that was worth about half the value of Sam’s condo on Coronado Shores.
Her income was one twentieth of his. She had founded her company only a year earlier, when she had moved to San Diego to live in the house her maternal grandmother had left her, operating the business out of her home until she’d moved into his building a month ago.
Before opening her own business, she’d worked as a translator for the UN in Geneva.
When, out of curiosity, Sam had looked up the job description, there’d been the income for her UN civil service pay grade. He’d whistled. In Swiss francs, tax free. It was an enormous amount of money. Why had she quit that to open a small business in San Diego, taking a huge cut in income?
She was single, which floored him. Never been married, either, which was even harder to believe.
Actually, it seemed insane to him. Had she only lived in places where they put saltpeter in the water?
What was wrong with the men she came across?
Because if he hadn’t first seen her in the middle of an op when he couldn’t break opsec, he’d have been on her tail the instant he caught sight of her moving in across the hallway.
Grew up abroad, owner of new business, single. Those were the facts he was able to find on her in public records. But what the facts on file didn’t say was how mind-blowingly beautiful she was. She was the kind of woman who should probably come with a warning sign—danger ahead.
The Googleable facts didn’t hint at just how fucking classy she was, either.
The lady packed a double whammy Sam had never seen before.
Throw-on-the-bed sexy and ice princess classy.
Elegant, graceful, poised. He’d had to make a cage of his neck muscles not to swivel his head every time she walked by and had had to stop himself, through sheer will power, from sniffing after her like a dog, she smelled that good.
And shit, did she have the princess-to-peon thing down pat.
One fulminating look out of those large, uptilted cobalt eyes with the ridiculously long dark lashes, and she could reduce any male to a whimpering mass of protoplasm.
On days when he’d looked particularly reprehensible, he got looks that would have killed a lesser man.
But Sam was a tough guy. He liked challenges.
A corner of his mouth tilted upward.
Mostly because he always won.
Grand Port Maritime
Marseilles, France
June 28