Tall, Dark and Devastating

“I don’t want to talk.”

“Okay,” she said matter-of-factly. “Then we’ll just walk.”

They walked in silence for an entire mile, then two. But right around the three-mile marker, she took the boardwalk right-of-way that led to the beach. He followed in silence, watching as she sat in the sand and began pulling off her sneakers.

She looked at him. “Wanna go for a swim?”

“Yeah.” He sat next to her and took off his running shoes.

P.J. pulled off her T-shirt. She was wearing a gray running bra underneath. It covered her far better than a bathing suit top would have, but the sight of it, the sight of all that smooth, perfect skin reminded him a hundredfold that he wasn’t taking a walk with one of the boys.

“Look at this,” P.J. said. “I can practically wring my shirt out.”

Harvard tried his best to look. He purposely kept his gaze away from the soft mounds of her breasts outlined beneath the thick gray fabric of her running top. She wasn’t overly endowed, not by any means, but what she had sure was nice.

Her arms and her stomach glistened with perspiration as she leaned forward to peel off her socks. It didn’t take much imagination to picture her lying naked on his bed, her gleaming dark skin set off by the white cotton of his sheets, replete after hours of lovemaking. He tried to banish the image instantly. Thinking like that was only going to get him into trouble.

“Come on,” she said, scrambling to her feet. She held out her hand for him, and he took it and let her pull him up.

He wanted to hold on to her, to lace their fingers together, but she broke away, running fearlessly toward the crashing surf. She dove over the breakers, coming up to float on top of the swells beyond.

Harvard joined her in that place of calm before the breaking ocean. The current was strong, and there was a serious undertow. But P.J. had proven her swimming skills many times over during the past few weeks. He didn’t doubt her ability to hold her own.

She pushed her hair out of her face and adjusted her ponytail. “You know, up until last year, I didn’t know how to swim.”

Harvard was glad the water was holding him up, because otherwise, he would have fallen over. “You’re kidding!”

“I grew up in D.C.,” she told him matter-of-factly. “In the inner city. The one time we moved close enough to the pool at the Y, it was shut down for repairs for eight months. By the time it opened again, we were gone.” She smiled. “When I was really little, I used to pretend to swim in the bathtub.”

“Your mother and father never took you to the beach in the summer to stay cool?”

P.J. laughed as if something he’d said was extremely funny. “No, I never even saw the ocean until I went on a class trip to Delaware in high school. I meant to take swimming lessons in college, but I never got around to it. Then I got assigned to this job. I figured if I were going to be working with Navy SEALs, it’d be a good idea if I knew how to swim. I was right.”

“I learned to swim when I was six,” Harvard told her. “It was the summer I…”

She waited, and when he didn’t go on, she asked, “The summer you what?”

He shook his head.

But she didn’t let it go. “The summer you decided you were going to join the Navy and become a SEAL,” she guessed.

The water felt good against his hot skin. Harvard let himself float. “No, I was certain right up until the time I finished college that I was going to be an English lit professor, just like my old man.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

She squinted at him. “I’m trying to picture you with glasses and one of those jackets with the suede patches on the elbows and maybe even a pipe.” She laughed. “Somehow I can’t manage to erase the M-16 that’s kind of permanently hanging over your shoulder, and the combination is making for quite an interesting image.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Harvard treaded water lazily. “Laugh at me all you want. Chicks dig guys who can recite Shakespeare. And who knows? I might decide to get my teaching degree some day.”

“The M-16 will certainly keep your class in line.”

Harvard laughed.

“We’re getting off the subject here,” P.J. said. “You learned to swim when you were six and it was the summer you also made your first million playing the stock market? No,” she answered her own question, “if you had a million dollars gathering interest from the time you were six, you wouldn’t be here now. You’d be out on your yacht, commanding your own private navy. Let’s see, it must’ve been the summer you got your first dog.”

“Nope.”

“Hmm. The summer you had your first date?”

Harvard laughed. “I was six.”

She grinned at him. “You seem the precocious type.”

They’d come a long way, Harvard realized. Even though there was still a magnetic field of sexual tension surrounding them, even though he still didn’t want her in the CSF team and she damn well knew it, they’d managed to work around those issues and somehow become friends.

He liked this girl. And he liked talking to her. He would’ve liked going to bed with her even more, but he knew women well enough to recognize that when this one shied away from him, she wasn’t just playing some game. As far as P. J. Richards was concerned, no didn’t mean try a little harder. No meant no. And until that no became a very definite yes, he was going to have to be content with talking.

But Harvard liked to talk. He liked to debate. He enjoyed philosophizing. He was good with words, good at verbal sparring. And who could know? Maybe if he talked to P.J. for long enough, he’d end up saying something that would start breaking through her defenses. Maybe he’d begin the process that would magically change that no to a yes.

“It was the summer you first—”

“It was the summer my family moved to our house in Hingham,” Harvard interrupted. “My mother decided that if we were going to live a block away from the ocean, we all had to learn to swim.”

P.J. was silent. “Was that the same house your parents are moving out of today?” she finally asked.

He froze. “Where did you hear about that?”

She glanced at him. “Joe Cat told me.”

P.J. had been talking to Joe Cat about him. Harvard didn’t know whether to feel happy or annoyed. He’d be happy to know she’d been asking questions about him. But he’d be annoyed as hell if he found out that Joe had been attempting to play matchmaker.

“What, the captain just came over to you and said, guess what? Hot news flash—Harvard’s mom and pop are moving today?”

“No,” she said evenly. “He told me because I asked him if he knew what had caused the great big bug to crawl up your pants.”

She pushed herself forward to catch a wave before it broke and bodysurfed to shore like a professional—as if she’d been doing it all of her life.

She’d asked Joe. Harvard followed her out of the water feeling foolishly pleased. “It’s no big deal—the fact that they’re moving, I mean. I’m just being a baby about it.”

P.J. sat in the sand, leaned back against her elbows and stretched her legs out in front of her. “Your parents lived in the same house for, what? Thirty years?”

“Just about.” Harvard sat next to her. He stared at the ocean in an attempt to keep from staring at her legs. Damn, she had nice legs. It was impossible not to look, but he told himself that was okay, because he was making damn sure he didn’t touch. Still, he wanted to.

“You’re not being a baby. It is a big deal,” she told him. “You’re allowed to have it be a big deal, you know.”

He met her eyes, and she nodded. “You are allowed,” she said again.

She was so serious. She looked as if she were prepared to go into mortal combat over the fact that he had the right to feel confused and upset over his parents’ move. He felt his mouth start to curve into a smile, and she smiled, too. The connection between them sparked and jumped into high gear. Damn. When they had sex, it was going to be great. It was going to be beyond great.

But it wasn’t going to be today. If he were smart he’d rein in those wayward thoughts, keep himself from getting too overheated.

“It’s just so stupid,” he admitted. “But I’ve started having these dreams where suddenly I’m ten years old again, and I’m walking home from school and I get home and the front door’s locked. So I ring the bell and this strange lady comes to the screen. She tells me my family has moved, but she doesn’t know where. And she won’t let me in, and I just feel so lost, as if everything I’ve ever counted on is gone and… It’s stupid,” he said again. “I haven’t actually lived in that house for years. And I know where my parents are going. I have the address. I already have their new phone number. I don’t know why this whole thing should freak me out this way.”

He lay back in the sand, staring at the hazy sky.

“This opportunity is going to be so good for my father,” he continued. “I just wish I could have taken the time to go up there, help them out with the logistics.”

“Where exactly are they moving?” P.J. asked.

“Phoenix, Arizona.”

“No ocean view there.”

He turned to face her, propping his head on one hand. “That shouldn’t matter. I’m the one who liked the ocean view, and I don’t live with them anymore.”

“Where do you live?” she asked.

Harvard couldn’t answer that without consideration. “I have a furnished apartment here in Virginia.”

“That’s just temporary housing. Where do you keep your stuff?”

“What stuff?”

“Your bed. Your kitchen table. Your stamp collection. I don’t know, your stuff.”

He lay down, shaking his head. “I don’t have a bed or a kitchen table. And I used the last stamp I bought to send a letter to my little sister at Boston University.”

“How about your books?” P.J. ventured. “Where do you keep your books?”

“In a climate-controlled self-storage unit in Coronado, California.” He laughed and closed his eyes. “Damn, I’m pathetic, aren’t I? Maybe I should get a sign for the door saying Home Sweet Home.”

“Are you sure you ever really moved out of your parents’ house?” she asked.

“Maybe not,” he admitted, his eyes still closed. “But if that’s the case, I guess I’m moving out today, huh?”

P.J. hugged her legs to her chest as she sat on the beach next to the Alpha Squad’s Senior Chief.

“Maybe that’s why I feel so bad,” he mused. “It’s a symbolic end to my childhood.” He glanced at her, amusement lighting his eyes. “Which I suppose had to happen sooner or later, considering that in four years I’ll be forty.”

Harvard Becker was an incredibly beautiful-looking man. His body couldn’t have been more perfect if some artisan had taken a chisel to stone and sculpted it. But it was his eyes that continued to keep P.J. up at night. So much was hidden in their liquid brown depths.

It had been a bold move on her part to suggest they go off alone to walk. With anyone else, she wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But with everyone else, the boundaries of friendship weren’t so hard to define.

When it came to this man, P.J. was tempted to break her own rules. And that was a brand-new feeling for her. A dangerous feeling. She hugged her knees a little tighter.

“There was a lot wrong with that house in Hingham,” Harvard told her. “The roof leaked in the kitchen. No matter how many times we tried to fix it, as soon as it stormed, we’d need to get out that old bucket and put it under that drip. The pipes rattled, and the windows were drafty, and my sisters were always tying up the telephone. My mother’s solution to any problem was to serve up a hearty meal, and my old man was so immersed in Shakespeare most of the time he didn’t know which century it was.”

He was trying to make jokes, trying to bring himself out of the funk he’d been in, trying to pretend it didn’t matter.

“I couldn’t wait to move out, you know, to go away to school,” he said.

He was trying to make it hurt less by belittling his memories. And there was no way she was going to sit by and listen quietly while he did that.

“You know that dream you’ve been having?” she asked. “The one where you get home from school and your parents are gone?”

He nodded.

“Well, it didn’t happen to me exactly like that,” she told him. “But one day I came home from school and I found all our furniture out on the sidewalk. We’d been evicted, and my mother was gone. She’d vanished. She’d dealt with the bad news not by trying to hustle down a new apartment, but by going out on a binge.”

He pushed himself into a sitting position. “My God…”

“I was twelve years old,” P.J. said. “My grandmother had died about three months before that, and it was just me and Cheri—my mom. I don’t know what Cheri did with the rent money, but I can certainly guess. I remember that day like it was yesterday. I had to beg our neighbors to hold on to some of that furniture for us—the stuff that wasn’t already broken or stolen. I had to pick and choose which of the clothing we could take and which we’d have to leave behind. I couldn’t carry any of my books or toys or stuffed animals, and no one had any room to store a box of my old junk, so I put ’em in an alley, hoping they’d still be there by the time I found us another place to live.” She shot him a look. “It rained that night, and I never even bothered to go back. I knew the things in that box were ruined. I guess I figured I didn’t have much use for toys anymore, anyway.”

She took a deep breath. “But that afternoon, I loaded up all that I could carry of our clothes in shopping bags and I went looking for my mother. You see, I needed to find her in order to get a bed in the shelter that night. If I tried to go on my own, I’d be taken in and made a ward of the state. And as bad as things were with Cheri, I was afraid that would be even worse.”

Harvard swore softly.

“I’m not giving you the 411 to make you feel worse.” She held his gaze, hoping he would understand. “I’m just trying to show you how really lucky you were, Daryl. How lucky you are. Your past is solid. You should celebrate it and let it make you stronger.”

“Your mother…”

“Was an addict since before I can remember,” P.J. told him flatly. “And don’t even ask about my father. I’m not sure my mother knew who he was. Cheri was fourteen when she had me. And her mother was sixteen when she had her. I did the math and figured out if I followed in my family’s hallowed tradition, I’d be nursing a baby of my own by the time I was twelve. That’s the childhood I climbed out of. I escaped, but just barely.” She raised her chin. “But if there’s one thing I got from Cheri, it’s a solid grounding in reality. I am where I am today because I looked around and I said no way. So in a sense, I celebrate my past, too. But the party in my head’s not quite as joyful as the one you should be having.”

“Damn,” Harvard said. “Compared to you, I grew up in paradise.” He swore. “Now I really feel like some kind of pouting child.”

P.J. looked at the ocean stretching all the way to the horizon. She loved knowing that it kept going and going and going, way past the point where the earth curved and she couldn’t see it anymore.

“I’ve begun to think of you as a friend,” she told Harvard. She turned to look at him, gazing directly into his eyes. “So I have to warn you—I only have guilt-free friendships. You can’t take anything I’ve told you and use it to invalidate your own bad stuff. I mean, everyone’s got their own luggage, right? And friends shouldn’t set their personal suitcase down next to someone else’s, size them both up and say, hey, mine’s not as big as yours, or hey, mine’s bigger and fancier so yours doesn’t count.” She smiled. “I’ll tell you right now, Senior Chief, I travel with an old refrigerator box, and it’s packed solid. Just don’t knock it over, and I’ll be all right. Yours, on the other hand, is very classy Masonite. But your parents’ move made the lock break, and now you’ve got to tidy everything up before you can get it fixed and sealed up tight again.”

Harvard nodded, smiling at her. “That’s a very poetic way of telling me don’t bother to stage a pissing contest, ’cause you’d win, hands down.”

“That’s right. But I’m also telling you don’t jam yourself up because you feel sad about your parents leaving your hometown,” P.J. said. “It makes perfect sense that you’ll miss that house you grew up in—that house you’ve gone home to for the past thirty years. There’s nothing wrong with feeling sad about that. But I’m also saying that even though you feel sad, you should also feel happy. Just think—you’ve had that place to call home and those people to make it a good, happy home for all these years. You’ve got memories, good memories you’ll always be able to look back on and take comfort from. You know what having a home means, while most of the rest of the people in the world are just floating around, upside down, not even knowing what they’re missing but missing it just the same.”

He was silent, so she kept going. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked so much. But this man, this new friend with the whiskey-colored eyes, who made her feel like cheating the rules—he was worth the effort.

“You can choose to have a house and a family someday, kids, the whole nine yards, like your parents did,” she told him. “Or you can hang on to those memories you carry in your heart. That way, you can go back to that home you had, wherever you are, whenever you want.”

There. She’d said everything she wanted to say to him. But he was so quiet, she began to wonder if she’d gone too far. She was the queen of dysfunctional families. What did she know about normal? What right did she have to tell him her view of the world with such authority in her voice?

He cleared his throat. “So where do you live now, P.J.?”

She liked it when Harvard called her P.J. instead of Richards. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. She liked the chill she got up her spine from the heat she could sometimes see simmering in his eyes. And she especially liked knowing he respected her enough to hold back. He wanted her. His attraction was powerful, but he respected her enough to not keep hammering her with come-on lines and thinly veiled innuendos. Yeah, she liked that a lot.

“I have an apartment in D.C., but I’m hardly ever there.” She picked up a handful of sand and let it sift through her fingers. “See, I’m one of the floaters. I still haven’t unpacked most of my boxes from college. I haven’t even bought furniture for the place, although I do have a bed and a kitchen table.” She shot him a rueful smile. “I don’t need extensive therapy to know that my nesting instincts are busted, big-time. I figure it’s a holdover from when I was a kid. I learned not to get attached to any one place because sooner or later the landlord would be kicking us out and we’d be living somewhere else.”

“If you could live anywhere in the world,” he asked, “where would you live?”

“Doesn’t matter where, as long as it’s not in the middle of a city,” P.J. answered without hesitation. “Some cute little house with a little yard—doesn’t have to be big. It just has to have some land. Enough for a flower garden. I’ve never lived anywhere long enough to let a garden grow,” she added wistfully.

Harvard was struck by the picture she made sitting there. She’d just run eight miles at a speed that had his men cursing, then walked three miles more. She was sandy, she was sticky from salt and sweat, her hair was less than perfect, her makeup long since gone. She was tough, she was driven, she was used to not just getting by but getting ahead in a man’s world, and despite all that, she was sweetly sentimental as all get out.

She turned to meet his gaze, and as if she could somehow read his mind, she laughed. “God, I sound like a sap.” Her eyes narrowed. “If you tell anyone what I said, you’re a dead man.”

“What, that you like flowers? Since when is that late-breaking piece of news something you need to keep hidden from the world?”

Something shifted in her eyes. “You can like flowers,” she told him. “You can read Jane Austen in the mess hall at lunch. You can drink iced tea instead of whiskey shots with beer chasers. You can do what you want. But if I’m caught acting like a woman, if I wear soft, lacy underwear instead of the kind made from fifty percent cotton and fifty percent sandpaper, I get looked at funny. People start to wonder if I’m capable of doing my job.”

Harvard tried to make her smile. “Personally, I stay away from the lacy underwear myself.”

“Yeah, but you could wear silk boxers, and your men would think, ‘Gee, the Senior Chief is really cool.’ I wear silk, and those same men start thinking with a nonbrain part of their anatomy.”

“That’s human nature,” he argued. “That’s because you’re a beautiful woman and—”

“You know, it always comes down to sex,” P.J. told him crossly. “Always. You can’t put men and women in a room together without something happening. And I’m not saying it’s entirely the men’s fault, although men can be total dogs. Do you know that I had to start fighting off my mother’s boyfriends back when I was ten? Ten. They’d come over, get high with her, and then when she passed out, they’d start sniffing around my bedroom door. My grandmother was alive then, and she’d give ’em a piece of her mind, chase ’em out of the house. But after she died, when I was twelve, I was on my own. I grew up fast, I’ll tell you that much.”

When Harvard was twelve, he’d had a paper route. The toughest thing he’d had to deal with was getting up early every morning to deliver those papers. And the Doberman on the corner of Parker and Reingold. That mean old dog had been a problem for about a week or two. But in time, Harvard had gotten used to the early mornings, and he’d made friends with the Doberman.

Somehow he doubted P.J. had had equally easy solutions to her problems.

She gazed at the ocean, the wind moving a stray curl across her face. She didn’t seem to feel it, or if she did, she didn’t care enough to push it away.

He tried to picture her at twelve years old. She must’ve been tiny. Hell, she was tiny now. It wouldn’t have taken much of a man to overpower her and—

The thought made him sick. But he had to know. He had to ask. “Did you ever… Did they ever…”

She turned to look at him, and he couldn’t find any immediate answers in the bottomless darkness of her eyes.

“There was one,” she said softly, staring at the ocean. “He didn’t back off when I threatened to call my uncle. Of course, I didn’t really have any uncle. It’s possible he knew that. Or maybe he was just too stoned to care. I had to go out the window to get away from him—only in my panic, I went out the wrong window. I went out the one without the fire escape. Once I was out there, I couldn’t go back. I went onto the ledge and I just stood there, sixteen stories up, scared out of my mind, staring at those little toy cars on the street, knowing if I slipped, I’d be dead, but certain if I went back inside I’d be as good as dead.” She looked at Harvard. “I honestly think I would’ve jumped before I would’ve let him touch me.”

Harvard believed her. This man, whoever he’d been, may not have hurt P.J. physically, but he’d done one hell of a job on her emotionally and psychologically.

He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “I don’t suppose you remember this son of a bitch’s name?” he asked.

“Ron something. I don’t think I ever knew his last name.”

He nodded. “Too bad.”

“Why?”

Harvard shrugged. “Nothing important. I was just thinking it might make me feel a little better to hunt him down and kick the hell out of him.”

P.J. laughed—a shaky burst of air that was part humor and part surprise. “But he didn’t hurt me, Daryl. I took care of myself and…I was okay.”

“Were you?” Harvard reached out for her. He knew he shouldn’t. He knew that just touching her lightly under the chin to turn her to face him would be too much. He knew her skin would be sinfully soft beneath his fingers, and he knew that once he touched her, he wouldn’t want to let go. But he wanted to look into her eyes, so he did. “Tell me this—are you still afraid of heights?”