Tall, Dark and Daring. Suzanne Brockmann

CHAPTER FIVE

      ZOE KICKED OFF HER SHOWER slippers as she came inside her RV. She’d cranked the heat before she’d left for the bath house, and it was now close to roasting in the small trailer. But that was nice. She hadn’t been truly warm in what felt like hours.

      And she felt warmer still when she saw that Jake was, indeed, waiting for her in the small living area. He sat somewhat stiffly on the cheap foam seats of the built-in couch, three mugs of coffee on the table in front of him, and …

      Three?

      Mitch Shaw was sitting across the room, his medical kit on his lap.

      Jake had brought a chaperone. He was probably going to pretend he’d only brought Mitch along as a medic, to make sure Zoe’s elbows were cleaned and bandaged properly, but she knew better. He was afraid to put himself in a position in which he might kiss her again.

      She smiled at Jake to make sure he knew that she knew better.

      But he was in heavy team-leader mode, frowning slightly and very intense as he handed her one of the mugs and gestured toward Mitch. “I’ve asked Lieutenant Shaw to take a look at your elbows, Doctor.”

      Zoe gave the darkly handsome lieutenant a smile as she sat down next to him. “Mitch and I are on a first-name basis, Admiral.”

      That one actually got her the ghost of a smile. “Any time you’re ready,” Jake said, “I’m ready to hear your report.”

      She took a sip of her coffee and pushed back the sleeves of her robe.

      “First things first—I accomplished my mission this afternoon,” she said as Mitch looked closely at her left elbow and then her right. His hands were warm, his touch gentle, almost soothing. “Hal Francke offered me the job.”

      “Great,” Jake said. “When do you start?”

      “I didn’t take it.”

      As she watched, Jake struggled to understand. “Why not? Because of what happened at the party? I mean, don’t get me wrong, if you don’t think it’s safe for you to be there, or—”

      “I didn’t take the job because I didn’t want to seem overeager,” she explained. “I told Hal I’d think about it. I’ll go into Mel’s in a day or so and let him ask me again. I’ll make sure a ton of people overhear, and I’ll make him beg. Ouch.” She involuntarily jerked her arm free from Mitch. Holy Mike, that had hurt!

      “Sorry,” he murmured, his dark hazel eyes apologetic. “There’re still a few pieces of dirt—something that looks like very fine gravel—that I should remove. I don’t think I can do it without hurting you at least a little. But if I don’t get it out …”

      “Just … try to do it quickly.” She gave him her arm, aware that she was perspiring from the anticipated pain, sweat beading on her upper lip. “Admiral, can you do me a favor and shut off the heat?”

      “What, you changed your mind? You no longer want to simulate the conditions on Venus?”

      “Ha, ha. You try getting dumped into a fifty-degree swimming pool and then driving fifteen miles in some trash heap of a car that doesn’t have a working heater.” She clenched her teeth against the pain.

      Jake smiled as he turned down the heat. “Someday we’ll have to tell her about BUD/S Training, huh, Mitch?”

      Mitch was completely focused on cleaning her arm. “If you can’t handle cold, don’t become a SEAL.”

      “A major portion of Hell Week—the fifth week of SEAL training—is spent freezing your butt off,” Jake told her. “You get wet early on and stay wet for the entire week.”

      “Yeah, I’ve heard about that.” Zoe closed her eyes. Damn, whatever Mitch was doing hurt like hell. “I read in some magazine article about Hell Week that you guys pee on yourselves to stay warm while you’re in the water.”

      “Yeah, sure.” Jake snorted. “That’s what reporters find important. That we pee on ourselves. Forget about the hours and hours of training we go through, the endurance tests, the underwater demolition, the HALO training. That’s not half as interesting as peeing on ourselves. Jeez.”

      Zoe sensed more than felt Jake sit down beside her. But she opened her eyes when he took her other hand.

      “Squeeze,” he told her. “And keep your eyes open. If you close your eyes and shut everything else out, it’s just you and the pain. And that’s never good.”

      “I’m really sorry,” Mitch murmured. “You must’ve landed on this arm pretty hard to get this stuff embedded so deeply.”

      Zoe took a deep breath and let it out in a whoosh. Jake’s eyes were so blue and so steady. She held his gaze as if it were a lifeline.

      “What happened at this party?” he asked. “Keep talking.”

      “I arrived a little after noon,” she told him, gripping his hand more tightly and biting back the urge to shriek as Mitch probed particularly deeply. “Everyone was drinking pretty hard. Mostly just beer. But about five people went into the house, and when they came out, it was pretty obvious they’d done a few lines of cocaine. Hal Francke was one of them. This other guy, Wayne, Monica’s boyfriend—God, what a jerk! He’s one of those former high-school football-star types—he used to be big man on campus, but now he’s just big and fat and mean. He went inside, too. A few different times.”

      She squeezed Jake’s hand harder. “Ow. Ow, ow, ow!”

      And just like that, the pain let up.

      “Got it.” Mitch was done. He was perspiring nearly as much as she was, his eyes filled with apology and an echo of her pain.

      “I just have to put some antibacterial ointment on it and bandage it up. The other one looks clean.”

      Zoe tried to hide that she was shaking. “Well, that was fun. Thanks so much.”

      “So how’d this happen?” Jake asked. She had to give him credit. He was obviously trying really hard not to look as if he wanted to go out and hunt down Monica’s boyfriend, Wayne.

      The stupid thing was, she liked it. She liked the idea of this man being her hero. God knows there was a point this afternoon where she would have been plenty thrilled to see Jake parachuting down from the sky, coming to save the day.

      She wasn’t used to working in a team, like the SEALs. In her job, she often had herself, and only herself, to rely on.

      She gently pulled her hand free from his grasp. “I went further out in the back of the yard,” she told him as Mitch bandaged her arm, “looking for Monica. There was a path that led down to a stream, and some of the party had moved in that direction. I was getting ready to leave—I wanted to tell her I was taking off. But she must’ve been inside the house—everyone else who’d gone down to the stream was gone, too. Except for Wayne, who’d followed me. Like I said, he was on something nasty, and he got a little rough.” It was an understatement, and she could tell from his eyes that he knew it. “But it was no big deal,” she continued. “I handled it, I handled him.”

      She was stretching the truth pretty thin there. Because it had been a big deal. Zoe could still feel the man’s hands on her breasts, still smell the alcohol on his putrid breath. He’d been a behemoth of a man, and when he’d tackled her, when the weight of his body had crushed her against the grass and gravel, for one awful moment she’d been afraid he’d actually be able to overpower her.

      It was an awful feeling, that helplessness.

      But he was stoned and stupid, and she’d used her brain and her ability to aim with a solid knee kick and she’d gotten away.

      Hal Francke had been with a group of men by the pool, and they, too, had had far too much to drink. Zoe had picked up her towel