Tall, Dark and Devastating

CHAPTER SEVEN

P.J. WAS LATE.

A truck had jackknifed on the main road leading to the base, and she’d had to go well out of her way to get there at all.

She grabbed her gym bag from the back of her rental car and bolted for the field where SEALs and FInCOM agents met to start their day with an eye-opening run.

They were all waiting for her.

Farber, Schneider and Greene had left the hotel minutes before she had. She’d seen them getting into Farber’s car and pulling out of the parking lot as she’d ridden down from her room in the glass-walled elevator. They must’ve made it through moments before the road had been closed.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said breathlessly. “There was an accident that shut down route—”

“Forget it. It doesn’t matter,” Harvard said shortly, barely meeting her eyes. “We ready to go? Let’s do it.”

P.J. stared in surprise as he turned away from her, as he broke into a run, leading the group toward the river.

To Harvard, tardiness was the original sin. There was no excuse for it. She’d fully expected him to lambaste her good-naturedly, to use her as yet another example to get his point about preparedness across. She’d expected him to point out in his usual effusive manner that she should have planned ahead, should have given herself enough time, should have factored in the possibility of Mr. Murphy throwing a jackknifed truck into her path.

She’d even expected him to imply that a man wouldn’t have been late.

But he hadn’t.

What was up with him?

In the few days since the poker game, P.J. had enjoyed the slightly off-color, teasing friendship of the men she’d played cards with. Crash had been there, although she suspected he was as much a stranger to the other men as she was. And the quiet blond lieutenant called Blue. The team’s version of Laurel and Hardy had anted up, as well—Bobby and Wes. And the captain himself, with his angelic-looking baby son asleep in a room down the hall, had filled the seventh seat at the table.

P.J. had scored big. As the dealer, she’d chosen to play a game called Tennessee. The high-risk, high-penalty, high-reward nature of the game appealed to the SEALs, and they’d played it several times that evening.

P.J. had won each time.

Now she tossed her bag on the ground and followed as Joe Cat hung back to wait for her. The other men were already out of sight.

“I’m really sorry I was late,” she said again.

“I pulled in about forty-five seconds before you.” The captain pulled his thick, dark hair into a ponytail as they headed down the trail. “I guess H. figured he couldn’t shout at you after he didn’t shout at me, huh?”

They were moving at a decent clip. Fast but not too fast—just enough so that P.J. had to pay attention to her breathing. She didn’t want to be gasping for air and unable to talk when they reached their destination. “Does the Senior Chief shout at you?” she asked.

“Sometimes.” Joe smiled. “But never in public, of course.”

They ran in silence for a while. The gravel crunching under their feet was the only sound.

“Is his father all right?” P.J. finally asked. “I didn’t see Harvard at all yesterday, and today he seems so preoccupied. Is anything wrong?” She tried to sound casual, as if she were just making conversation, as if she hadn’t spent a good hour in bed last night thinking about the man, wondering why he hadn’t been at dinner.

They’d only gone about a mile, but she was already soaked with perspiration. It was ridiculously humid today. The air clung to her, pressing against her skin like a damp blanket.

“His father’s doing well,” Joe told her. He gave her a long, appraising look. “H. has got some other personal stuff going on, though.”

P.J. quickly backpedaled. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“No, your question was valid. He was uncharacteristically monosyllabic this morning,” he said. “Probably because it’s moving day.”

She tried not to ask, but she couldn’t stop herself. “Moving day?”

“H.’s parents are moving. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I think he feels bad that he’s not up there helping out. Not to mention that he’s pretty thrown by the fact that they’re leaving Massachusetts. For years his family lived in this really great old house overlooking the ocean near Boston. I went home with him a few times before his sisters started getting married and moving out. He has a really nice family—really warm, friendly people. He grew up in that house—it’s gotta hold a lot of memories for him.”

“He lived in one house almost his entire life? God, I moved five times in one year. And that was just the year I turned twelve.”

“I know what you mean. My mother and I were pros at filling out post office change of address cards, too. But H. lived in one place from the time he was a little kid until he left for college. Wild, huh?”

“And on top of that his parents are both still alive and together.” P.J. shook her head. “Doesn’t he know how lucky he is? Unless he’s got some deep, dark, dysfunctional secret that I don’t know about.”

“I don’t think so, but I’m not exactly qualified to answer that one. I think it’s probably best if Harvard got into those specifics with you himself, you know?”

“Of course,” she said quickly. “I wasn’t looking to put you on the spot.”

“Yeah, I know that,” he said easily. “And I didn’t mean to make it sound as if I was telling you to mind your own business. Because I wasn’t.”

P.J. had to laugh. “Whew—I’m glad we got that settled.”

“It’s just… I’m speculating here. I don’t want to mislead you in any way.”

“I know—and you’re not.” As he glanced at her again, P.J. felt compelled to add, “The Senior Chief and I are just friends.”

Joe Catalanotto just smiled.

“I’ve known H. almost as long as I’ve known Blue,” he told her after they’d run another mile or so in silence.

“Yeah, you told me you and Blue—Lieutenant McCoy—went through BUD/S together, right?” P.J. asked.

“Yeah, we were swim buddies.”

Swim buddies. That meant Joe Cat and Blue had been assigned to work together as they’d trained to become SEALs. From what P.J. knew of the rigorous special operations training, they’d had to become closer than blood brothers, relying on one man’s strengths to counter the other’s weaknesses, and vice versa. It was no wonder that after all those years of working side by side, the two men could communicate extensively with a single look.

“H. was in our graduating class,” Joe told her. “In fact, he was part of our boat team during Hell Week. A vital part.”

Funny, they were talking about Harvard again. Not that P.J. particularly minded.

“Who was his swim buddy?”

“Harvard’s swim buddy rang out—he quit—right before it was our turn to land our IBS on the rocks outside the Hotel Del Coronado.”

“IBS?”

“Inflatable Boat, Small.” Joe smiled. “And the word small is relative. It weighs about two hundred and fifty pounds and carries seven men. The boat team carries it everywhere throughout Hell Week. By the time we did the rock portage, we were down to only four men—all enlisted—and that thing was damn heavy. But we all made it through to the end.”

Enlisted? “You and Blue didn’t start out as officers?”

Joe picked up the pace. “Nope. We were both enlisted. Worked our way up from the mail room, so to speak.”

“Any idea why Harvard didn’t take that route?” she asked. She quickly added, “I’m just curious.”

The captain nodded but couldn’t hide his smile. “I guess he didn’t want to be an officer. I mean, he really didn’t want to. He was approached by OCS—the Officer’s Candidate School—so often, it got to be kind of a joke. In fact, during BUD/S, he was paired with a lieutenant, I think in an attempt to make him realize he was prime officer material.”

“But the lieutenant quit.”

“Yeah. Harvard took that pretty hard. He thought he should’ve been able to keep his swim buddy—Matt, I think his name was—from quitting. But it was more than clear to all of us that H. had been carrying this guy right from the start. Matt would’ve been out weeks earlier if he hadn’t been teamed up with H.”

“I guess even back then, Harvard was a team player,” P.J. mused. The entire front of her T-shirt was drenched with sweat, and her legs and lungs were starting to burn, but the captain showed no sign of slowing down.

“Exactly.” Joe wasn’t even slightly winded. “He hated feeling like he was letting Matt down. Except the truth was, Matt had been doing nothing but letting H. down from day one. Swim buddies have to balance out their strengths and weaknesses. It doesn’t work if one guy does all the giving and the other does nothing but take. You know, even though Harvard saw Matt’s ringing out as a personal failure, the rest of us recognized it for the blessing it was. God knows it’s hard enough to get through BUD/S. But it’s damn near impossible to do it with a drowning man strapped to your back.”

She could see Harvard way up ahead on the trail, still in the lead. He’d taken off his T-shirt, and his powerful muscles gleamed with sweat. He moved like a dancer, each step graceful and sure. He made running look effortless.

As Joe Cat cranked their speed up another few notches, P.J. found that it was getting harder to talk and run at the same time.

The captain kept his mouth tightly shut as they raced past first Schneider and Greene, then Tim Farber, but it wasn’t because he couldn’t talk. Once out of the other agents’ earshot, he turned to grin at her.

“My grandmother could outrun those guys.”

“How far are we going today?” P.J. asked as they passed the five-mile mark. Her words came out in gasps.

“However far H. wants to take us.”

Harvard didn’t look as if he were planning on stopping anytime soon. In fact, as P.J. watched, he punched up the speed.

“You know, I used to be faster than H.,” Joe told her. “But then he went and shaved his head and cut down on all that wind resistance.”

P.J. had to laugh.

“So I asked Ronnie, what do you think, should I shave my head, too, and she tells me no way. I say, why not? She’s always talking about how sexy Harvard is—about how women can’t stay away from him, and I’m thinking maybe I should go for that Mr. Clean look, too. So she tells me she likes my hair long, in what she calls romance-cover-model style. But I can’t stop thinking about that wind resistance thing, until she breaks the news to me that if I shaved my head, I wouldn’t look sexy. I’d look like a giant white big toe.”

P.J. cracked up, trying to imagine him without any hair and coming up with an image very similar to what his wife had described.

Joe was grinning. “Needless to say, I’m keeping my razor securely locked in the medicine cabinet.”

Harvard heard the melodic burst of P.J.’s laughter and gritted his teeth.

It wasn’t that it sounded as if she were flirting with Joe Cat when she laughed that way. It wasn’t that he was jealous in any way of the special friendship she seemed to have formed with Alpha Squad’s captain. It wasn’t even so much that he was having one bitch of a bad day.

But then she laughed again, and the truth of the matter smacked him square in the face.

She did sound as if she were flirting with Joe Cat. Harvard was jealous not only of that, but of any kind of friendship she and the captain had formed, and he couldn’t remember ever having had a worse day in the past year, if not the past few years. Not since that new kid who transferred from SEAL Team One had panicked during a HALO training op. The cells of his chute hadn’t opened right, and he hadn’t fully cut free before pulling the emergency rip cord. That second chute had gotten tangled with the first and never opened. The kid fell to his death, and Harvard had had to help search for his remains. That had been one hell of a bad day.

He knew he should count his blessings. No one had died today. But thinking that way only made him feel worse. It made him feel guilty on top of feeling lousy.

He took a short cut to the base, knowing he could run forever today and it wouldn’t make him feel any better. He ran hard and fast, setting a pace he knew would leave the three male finks in the dust.

He had no doubt that P.J. would keep up. Whenever she ran, she got that same look in her eye he’d seen in many a determined SEAL candidate who made it through BUD/S to the bitter end. Like them, she would have to be dead and buried before she would quit. If then.

It was almost too bad she was a woman. As she’d pointed out to him, she was one of the best shooters in all of FInCOM. She was good, she was tough, but the fact was, she was a girl. Try as he might, he couldn’t accept that there was a place for females in combat situations. The sooner she got promoted up and out of the field, the better.

He ran faster, and as they reached the home stretch, Lucky was cursing him with every step. Bobby and Wes were complaining in stereo by the time Harvard slowed to a stop. Even Blue and Joe Cat were out of breath.

P.J. was trying not to look as if she were gasping for air, but she doubled over, head down, hands on her knees.

Harvard backtracked quickly, hoisting her into a more vertical position by the back of her T-shirt. “You know better than to stick your head down lower than your heart after running like that,” he said sharply.

“Sorry,” she gasped.

“Don’t apologize to me,” he said harshly. “I’m not the one whose reputation is going to suffer when you live up to everyone’s expectations by blacking out and keeling over like some fainthearted little miss.”

Her eyes sparked. “And I’m not the great, huge, stupid he-man who had to prove some kind of macho garbage by running the entire team as hard as he possibly could.”

“Believe me, baby, that wasn’t even half as hard as I can get.” He smiled tightly to make sure she caught the double entendre, then lowered his voice. “Just say the word, and I’ll give you a private demonstration.”

Her eyes narrowed, her mouth tightened, and he knew he’d gone too far. “What’s up with you today?”

He started to turn away, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm, unmindful of the fact that his skin was slick with sweat. “Are you all right, Daryl?” she asked quietly. Beneath the flash of anger and impatience in her eyes, he could see her deep concern.

He could handle fighting with her. He wanted to fight with her. The soft warmth of her dark brown eyes only made him feel worse. Now he felt bad, topped with guilt for feeling bad, and he also felt like a certified fool for lashing out at her.

Harvard swore softly. “Sorry, Richards, I was way out of line. Just…go away, okay? I’m not fit to be around today.”

He looked up to find Joe Cat standing behind him. “I’m going to give everyone the rest of the morning free,” the captain told him quietly. “Let’s meet at the Quonset hut after lunch.”

Harvard knew Joe was giving them free time because of him. Joe knew Harvard needed a few hours to clear his head.

He shouldn’t have needed it—he was too experienced, too much of a professional to become a head case at this stage of his life. But before Harvard could argue, Joe Cat walked away.

“You want to take a walk?” P.J. asked Harvard.

He didn’t get a chance to answer before she tugged at his arm. “Let’s go,” she said, gesturing with her chin toward the path they’d run along. She grabbed several bottles of water from her gym bag and handed one to him.

Damn, it was hot. Rivers of perspiration were running down his chest, down his legs, dripping from his chin, beading on his shoulders and arms. He opened the bottle and took a long drink. “What, you want to psychoanalyze me, Richards?”

“Nope. I’m just gonna listen,” she said. “That is, if you want to talk.”