Читать книгу Tall, Dark and Devastating - Suzanne Brockmann - Страница 16

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.”

“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?”

She didn’t need to answer. He saw the shock of the truth in her eyes before she pulled away. She stood up, moved toward the water, stopping on the edge of the beach, letting the waves wash over her feet.

Harvard followed, waiting for her to look at him again.

P.J.’s head was spinning. Afraid of heights? Terrified was more like it.

She couldn’t believe he’d figured that out. She couldn’t believe she’d told him enough to give herself away. Steeling herself, she looked at him. “I can handle heights, Senior Chief. It’s not a problem.”

She could tell from the look on his face he didn’t believe her.

“It’s not a problem,” she said again.

Damn. She’d told him too much.

It was one thing to joke around about her dream house. But telling him about her problem with heights was going way too far.

It would do her absolutely no good to let this man know her weaknesses. She had to have absolutely no vulnerabilities to coexist in his macho world. She could not be afraid of heights. She would not be. She could handle it—but not if he made it into an issue.

P.J. rinsed her hands in the ocean. “We better get back if we want to have any lunch.”

But Harvard blocked the way to where her sneakers and T-shirt were lying on the sand. “Thanks for taking the time to talk to me,” he said.

She nodded, still afraid to meet his eyes. “Yeah, I’m glad we’re friends.”

“It’s nice to be able to talk to someone in confidence—and know you don’t have to worry about other people finding out all your deep, dark secrets,” Harvard told her.

P.J. did look at him then, but he’d already turned away.