Authors: Suzanne Brockmann
Although the true reason Jennilyn LeMay was awkward was because she refused to embrace her extra-largeness. She tried to hide it by slouching and hunching—or by trying to make herself invisible, always jockeying for the spot in the back of the room, against the wall or over in the corner.
She didn’t wear very much makeup. She didn’t try at all to emphasize her eyes, which were, by far, her best feature, beneath her glasses. They were a really nice shade of light brown. Although her mouth was nice, too. It was generously wide with a default upward curve. She was quick to turn that into a real smile, which made dimples appear in her cheeks.
The dimples were pretty damn cute.
Her sense of humor was rock solid, and she clearly had a very big brain in that gigantic head of hers.
Her clothes were horrific, though—like something his older sister would’ve worn to the bank after getting dressed in the dark. The outfit was way too somber, as if Jenn—like Sandy—were compensating or apologizing for holding down what had once been, traditionally, a man’s job.
Dark tailored skirt, starchy blouse that was buttoned uncomfortably to the neck, not-quite-matching black suit jacket over the back of her chair, ugly yet worn-out flat shoes—absolute proof that she was embarrassed to be so tall.
A little more effort, and a whole lot more daring, in bright and flowing clothes that celebrated her height, and she could’ve looked good. Well, interesting and strikingly eye-catching, at least.
She didn’t try all that hard with her hair, either. It was shoulder length, tucked behind her ears, an almost colorlessly bland shade of light brown, and not particularly well cut. It looked, though, as if it would be baby fine and super soft to touch, but that also made it prone to getting stringy at the end of a long day.
Which this one had definitely been.
It was funny, but the fatigue that Danny had felt yesterday at the airport was … well, it was far from gone. But it wasn’t quite fatigue anymore, either. It was hard to define, exactly, what it had turned into—this heaviness that had grown like a tumor inside of him when that kid—the private—had died from a piece of shrapnel to the throat.
It was mixed together with his current solutionless family problem with his little brother, Ben, leaving Dan angry and frustrated and depressed.
All of it had further metastasized into something that choked him from within, which, last week, had made him lose it, in front of
not just his teammates, but his team’s CO. Or so he was told, because he didn’t remember any of it, which scared the bejesus out of him.
Back in Coronado, the senior chief had called him in to his office and tossed around words like
battle fatigue
and
stress
, and phrases like
it happens to the best of us
. And Dan had obediently scheduled a session with the team’s shrink for a week from next Friday.
But he knew the truth: that the heaviness inside of him, inside of his very soul, had been there long before the goatfuck in Kabul. It had been there long before 9/11. In fact, he couldn’t remember it ever
not
being there, even back when he was a little boy, entering kindergarten.
He knew what he had to do to control it, to shrink it into something that he could compartmentalize and ignore. He had to focus on the immediacy of the moment. He had to stay out of the murky shit inside of his head and instead live in the right-here and right-now.
Sex would help.
Sex always helped. Sex, and the promise of even more sex.
Unlike some of the other guys in his SEAL team, Danny had never been into one-nighters. His thing had always been the one-or two-weeker, and better yet, the always lovely vacation fling. He loved having sex with a woman for the first time while knowing that there was going to be a second, third, and fourth coming right on its heels. Best yet was experiencing this abundance of pleasure while knowing there was a concrete end date in sight.
As Dan realized that Jenn’s definition of “a few minutes” was considerably different than his, he lowered himself into a chair at the conference table. He was hungry, but he’d purposely waited to eat so that he could have dinner with her. Because on his way back to this office, after picking up his gear at the hotel, he’d realized the truth.
Yes, Izzy fucking Zanella had, yet again, gotten the job that Dan had wanted—to guard Maria. But because of this, because Dan had instead gotten assigned to guard Jenn, the odds of his actually getting laid in the near future had risen drastically higher.
Because life wasn’t like some stupid romance novel, or that movie with what’s his name, Kevin Costner, where he was the bodyguard and Whitney Houston sang that song.
Ah-ee-eye, will always love …
Yeah.
That shit didn’t happen in real life.
An obscenely beautiful woman like Maria Bonavita didn’t just sit around, hopelessly single, waiting for some sailor to show up. And when he did, she was not breathlessly eager to lead him into her bedroom and lock the door.
Real life was never that ridiculously easy.
Dan knew that, firsthand. He’d gone after a fairy-tale, happily-ever-after ending with the woman of his dreams—gorgeous and mysterious Troubleshooters operative Sophia Ghaffari.
She’d actually had dinner with him a few times. He’d been certain that it was destiny, that he and Sophia belonged together, that theirs would be a love affair for the ages, that their love would last a lifetime.
She, on the other hand, disagreed, and delivered the
let’s be friends
speech, fairly early on. More recently, she’d married a Trouble shooters co-worker—a kind of dweeby former CIA operative named Dave—with whom she was now expecting her first child.
Jesus Christ. It still pissed Danny off to think about it. It still made his inner petulant two-year-old pout and rant, because it was so goddamn unfair.
But real life was rarely fair.
And yes, here in this current configuration of real life, where there truly was no such thing as a love affair for the ages, Izzy and Lopez were going to hang out in mind-blowingly gorgeous Maria
Bonavita’s tiny apartment, trying to stay out of her way while she did whatever state legislators did at home in the evening.
If they were lucky, she’d say goodnight to them before she turned in.
The idea that she would stop to have a real conversation with either of them was ridiculous. And even if she did, what of it? Like she was going to risk her entire career to hook up, even for just one night, with some SEAL?
That was
not
going to happen.
The odds were better that one of them would be struck by a plummeting piece of space debris.
But the odds, on the other hand, of Dan nailing Jennilyn LeMay, and having a hell of a two-week vacation with her…
That was definitely do-able.
He knew he could be exactly what she needed, exactly what she wished for and dreamed of, exactly what she never got with her classically beautiful boss always hanging around.
And it was going to be just Dan and Jenn tonight in her closet-sized apartment. They’d have a little dinner, do a little talking and a lot of laughing, lose a few clothes due to the overactive heater that she’d warned him about…
If he played this right, he wouldn’t even bother opening that sleeping bag.
His stomach growled, and Jenn laughed and said, “I take it you haven’t eaten yet—oh!”
She cut herself off when she looked up and saw it was Dan, not Tony, sitting there.
And there he was, staring into Jennilyn’s pretty eyes, and everything he’d intended to say to make her laugh and get them moving toward the night’s inevitable conclusion vanished. It was gone, clear out of his head.
So he sat there in silence, just staring back at her, like the village fricking idiot.
She looked away first, as if embarrassed by the extensive eye contact. “I’m sorry, I thought …”
“Yeah.” Danny found his voice, but his brain was still set on totally stupid and lame. “But I’m it. I’m your, you know …”
“Bodyguard,” she supplied the word. “Wow. I’m so sorry.”
“No,” he said. “It’s… why I’m here, you know? In New York. To work and, um … Vlachic—Tony—actually had plans for tonight, so … That’s how we’re going to do it until the security systems are in place. Three of us on, one off. At night. During the day we’ll … probably do two off, two on, because Sam and the team leader will be around.”
She nodded as she shut the top of her laptop. “Well, that was … really very sweet of you,” she said. “To let Tony have the first night off.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Dan said. In truth, he had nothing to do with it. It was entirely Alyssa Locke’s decision. But sure, if Jenn wanted to give him credit for it… He’d take it.
She laughed with both derision and genuine amusement. “Tell me that again, later, when you’re trying to sleep on my kitchen floor.”
“Trust me, I’ve slept in plenty worse places,” he told her.
“I bet,” she said, and behind her glasses, her eyes softened. “Tony told me you just got back from … well, he didn’t say
exactly
where, but…”
“Yeah, we can’t…” He shook his head. “Talk about that, but… Hey, I was thinking,” he said, “that if you haven’t eaten, we could, I don’t know, get some take-out. Maybe … rent a movie?”
He’d said it in a manner that was completely casual and totally friendly, but the look she gave him was a mix of amazement and disbelief, with a little bit of disgust thrown in, as if he’d instead suggested take-out followed by her dancing naked for him, culminating in a BJ.
And that was—okay, he’d admit it—the subtext of his suggestion,
because yes, he wanted her mouth on him, but in a vast variety of interesting and creative places.
“Or not,” he continued. “I just… don’t get a chance to see a lot of movies while I’m … overseas.”
Her suspicion and doubt was instantly erased, and he knew that all he had to do was whisper the word
Afghanistan
—or even imply it—and victory was within easy reach.
Because now she was apologizing to him. “Sorry. I’m just… I’ve got about an hour more of work to do,” she told him. “I’m writing this … Well, it’s going to take at least an hour to finish and … I lost a lot of my workday today, so …”
“Oh, right, of course,” he said.
“I’m
sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
“No,” she cut him off. “Please. If you rent something that I’ve already seen, then I can kind of do both at once.”
“If it’s only an hour,” Dan told her. “I can wait. You’ve got a lot of books on your shelves. I’ll borrow one”—women always liked men who read their books—“and stay out of your way.” He laughed. “Or at least try. You know, until you’re done. But I’ve really got to eat first. Or at least get something to tide me over if you’re not hungry—”
Her stomach growled, and she rolled her eyes. “There’s your answer to that.”
“Let’s get take-out,” Dan said again. “We can eat and then you can get back to work, and when you’re done, if there’s time—if we want—we can rent a movie.”
She smiled at him then, those dimples appearing. “How’s Chinese sound?”
“Sounds pretty perfect,” he told her, smiling back, testing his theory again by adding, “Not a lot of Chinese food where I’ve been lately, either.”
And oh, yeah. Sing alleluia and praise the Lord. He was
totally
getting some tonight.
“If we call ahead, it’ll be ready when we get there.” She pulled
a take-out menu from a file on top of her desk and held it out to him. “My treat.”
That
wasn’t going to work. “Not a chance,” he said as he glanced at it. It wasn’t too pricy, but still … “I’ve seen where you live, Jenn. This one’s definitely on me.”
She laughed, but she shook her head. “Dutch, then,” she said.
Dan glanced up from the menu and into her eyes, and he knew with the instinctive certainty that had rarely failed to guide him into a woman’s willing arms, that this was not a point to push her on. He’d let her win—this one. “Fair enough.” He reached for his cell phone. “You want me to call
…?”
“I
will,” she said, already dialing the office phone. Obviously the restaurant was on speed dial. “They know me. They’ll throw in extra rice.”
“Extra rice?” he scoffed. “Come on, LeMay. Get ’em to give you the good stuff. Extra fortune cookies. I want at least three.”
“You can’t have three fortune cookies,” she said in obviously mock outrage. “I mean, is that even legal? What do you do with three fortunes? Average them?”
“No,” he said, laughing, too, teasing her back. “You pick the best one and throw the others away. Didn’t your multitude of brothers teach you anything?”
“Apparently not,” she said. “Their brotherly advice handbook didn’t include a chapter on fortune cookies.”
“Then thank God I’m here,” he told her. “And not a moment too soon.”
“Believe me, I really don’t need another brother,” Jenn told him, but before he could respond, she turned her attention to the phone. “Yes, hi, Mrs. C., it’s Jenn. I’d like to place an order for takeout. No, I’ll pick it up. And oh, the gentleman I’m dining with tonight? He’d like
three
fortune cookies, so we’ll need four altogether.” She smiled at him, and those dimples reappeared. “He likes a choice when it comes to his destiny.”
M
aria Bonavita caught him getting all weepy.
It was embarrassing as shit, and he should have known better, because babies were total chick magnets. Izzy had learned
that
truth long before he’d learned the true value and power of actually having a chick magnet at his command.
Women loved to hold babies, to hug them, to smell them. It was, Izzy was pretty certain, a biological imperative, a brain-stem reaction—particularly among women in their early thirties, such as the assemblywoman.
Izzy had brought Ash into the kitchen to get out of Maria’s way. They’d come over—Maria lived just down the hall from Savannah’s condo, so it wasn’t much of an “over”—when Alyssa found out that Tony Vlachic had tickets to see
Avenue Q
. Tickets, plural. The kid had a date, too, with the same “friend” he’d been seeing off and on for the past year.