Navy Justice (Whidbey Island, Book 5) (3 page)

The curtains moved a fraction, enough for her to see him, make positive identification. She’d remember him—but not like this, all muddy, wet, cut up and bruised.

It’d been a rough morning.

“What do you want?”

Her voice was clear despite the door between them.

“Joy, it’s me, Brad Iverson. From Norfolk.”

The door opened.

“I know who you are, Brad.”

He didn’t give himself a chance to absorb the freshness of her beauty, or to register the wariness of her eyes as she looked at him. With moves he’d employed countless times, he wedged his foot in the door before he reached in, twisted the fire extinguisher out of her hand and clamped a hand over her mouth—her very soft mouth. Then he pushed himself inside the house and maneuvered her up against the nearest counter. It took every bit of his focus, every ounce of his strength, to make sure he treated her as gently as possible.

He had one arm wrapped around her waist, confining her arms against her torso, with her hands on his chest. His other arm was across her chest, his hand over her mouth.

As soon as he looked into her eyes, he removed his hand. If she was going to scream—and she had every right—it would be now. There were law enforcement agents, all over the area and certainly within hearing distance. It’d taken him almost half an hour to climb up the cliff.

Joy stayed silent except for the shaky
whoosh
of her breath. It smelled sweet and minty, as if she’d just brushed her teeth. His palm seemed to burn where her lips had pressed against it, and he couldn’t stop looking at her full lips, her face. Her eyes were the same color he remembered. Cinnamon brown. They watched him with unnerving steadiness, missing nothing.

He lowered his arm but kept her in his embrace. This was the only time he’d ever felt her so close. Why rush it?

“I can’t explain everything, but I need to know if you’re willing to trust me. I’m in the middle of an undercover op, and I can’t get caught by the police right now. You’re my last hope before I get hauled away and blow the case.”

She blinked. He felt the tension in her legs, her thigh muscles. She wanted to kick him, to knee him. He got it—and had anticipated her tactics. He held her tight and secure.

“Odd habit you have, Brad. Getting yourself into serious trouble that isn’t your fault.”

God, he’d missed her honesty, the unshakeable confidence that bordered on sheer nerve.

And her beauty.

“You can say no and I’ll be gone. You can deny ever seeing me. I’m in a load of trouble and I need your help, Joy.”

CHAPTER TWO

“I
WAS
SUPPOSED
to report to work twenty minutes ago. It’s my first day.” She hadn’t been able to take her gaze off Brad since he’d forced himself into the kitchen. And pressed his body against hers. She still hadn’t told him that she was waiting for the police.

He groaned. “
Of course
it’s your first day. It’d be too easy if you could’ve taken a day or two off.”

“A day or two?” She clutched the granite counter at her back. It was the only way to keep her hands from shaking because of the mini-shocks of awareness coursing through her veins.

Brad stood in the middle of the kitchen, his hands bloodied. His face was scraped and his clothing had dirt and sand on it. A briar stem clung to one arm of his torn black jacket, and his dark cargo pants were nothing like his Navy fatigue uniform. These pants fit him more tightly; they had to have a lot of stretch to let him move as well as he did. She could all too easily imagine the steely muscles beneath.

“Wait. How did you get here? Were you in my backyard?”

“Something like that, yeah.” He absently picked off some of the brambles.

“I never saw you. Are you hurt?”

“No. I’m fine. I’m on a tight timeline here, Joy. I don’t suppose you still have base access?”

“No, I mean yes—for two more days before my ID expires. I’ve been on terminal leave for the past two months. I got out, Brad.”

“I know. We’re Facebook friends, remember?”

How could she forget? Whenever she wanted to torment herself with the whys and why nots of her love life, she looked at his profile, which he’d made under a fake name. He’d messaged her when he requested she friend him on Facebook to make sure she knew it was him. He’d only ever posted one photo—of a sunset over the view of the Atlantic from Dam Neck, Virginia. She’d imagined them there, together, in different circumstances hundreds of times since they’d wrapped up Farid’s case.

Since she’d helped Brad stay out of trouble.

“What good will having my military ID do? Aren’t you still in the reserves? What about your ID?”

“I don’t have it. Truth is, I haven’t got any ID on me.”

Interesting.

“Any reason why?”

His green eyes revealed very little, but his slumped shoulders put the fear of God into her.

“Brad, what happened? Please tell me you weren’t involved in the explosion.”

His head snapped up.

“You know about it?”

She pushed away from the counter and crossed her arms. “I saw it. From my sunroom.”

“Did you see the aircraft?”

“I saw two F-18 Growlers, followed by a P-3 and a P-8. They flew west for a minute or two before I saw the fireball. I was worried it was one of the planes at first.”

“Did you see anything else that seemed suspicious?”

“No more from me, Brad. You said you needed help. If you want my help, you have to cut me in.”

He rubbed his hands across the back of his head and neck, much as she’d seen countless military men do after they removed their uniform covers. It was a habitual reaction for him, a sign of his stress, perhaps. His dark hair was longer than he’d worn it as a sailor, longer than Navy regulation by far. The lustrous curls at the nape of his neck made her grip her upper arms to keep from reaching across and touching him.

He was her idea of beautiful, if the adjective could be applied to a man.

“I’m FBI now. I’ve been working undercover trying to break up a cell.”

FBI. That was the “government job” he had. On Facebook he never got specific.

So he’d been out of the active-duty Navy this entire time. She’d thought his murky job description was because of his SEAL designation.

You could have gotten together.

No. She’d dismissed her attraction to Brad. Or rather, locked it away. Months ago.

Hadn’t she?

He shook his head. “Damn, it wasn’t supposed to go down like this.”

His profile was achingly familiar. Yet instead of the hardened strength she remembered, he gave off an air of uncertainty. Brad, vulnerable?

“How about some coffee?” She asked for him as much as for herself. She needed an immediate task to keep her thoughts where they belonged. If she was going to help Brad she needed to listen to his story instead of thinking about how sexy he looked standing in her kitchen.

* * *

“Y
OU
’
VE
GOT
UNTIL
the police officer shows up. You can shower after I leave for work, wash and dry your clothes, make whatever food you need.” She handed him her largest mug, the one with the Navy JAG crest on it.

He raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement.

This was the man she’d come to understand first briefly in Cuba, and then Norfolk. He missed nothing; no detail was too minute to him.

“The cops?”

“I reported the explosion. They asked me to wait here until someone can take my report.”

“So I’m not safe here.”

“You’re safe for now. Tell me what you know, Iverson.”

“I’m working an undercover op. Let’s just call it against the bad guys for now. My job is to infiltrate them and monitor any suspicious activity. I assumed I was bringing in the suspects today. Things didn’t go according to my assumptions.”

He took a long pull of his coffee. The dirt under his fingernails made her wonder if he’d had to climb up from West Beach to get here.

Was that possible? The cliff was a straight drop.

Brad was a trained SEAL and now an undercover agent for the FBI. Scaling a cliff was all in a day’s work for him.

“You climbed up the cliff, didn’t you?”

He ignored her and continued his explanation. “This morning I was supposed to monitor the Sound from West Beach, as instructed by the suspects. I think, and so does my team at the Bureau, that they may want to hit the Naval Air Station since they’ve been surveilling the area for a month. Last night one of the suspects called and told me I should watch the horizon from West Beach very closely this morning.”

“And?”

“I had my team figure out what was on the docket for the squadrons on NAS Whidbey for the next several days. This morning is the start of a major West Coast Fleet exercise. When I put it together with what the suspects were feeding me, I took the initiative and decided to be out on the water instead of on the beach.”

Dread seemed to wrap itself around her.

“With the Navy? On a Navy ship?”

She knew the answer before he said it. “No. I was in a small inflatable powerboat. That’s all I’m going to tell you about it.”

“What did you see, Brad?”

He quietly tapped the side of his mug. “One of the suspects I’m familiar with was out there in a fishing boat. I stayed as far away from him as I could, as long as I could, but then I saw what looked like a SAM in his arms.”

“A surface-to-air missile?” She knew enough to realize there was always the possibility of terrorists smuggling in war weapons. The reports she’d read over the years had discussed shipments being stopped by US Customs at the border or sooner.

“Yes. I had a feeling something wasn’t right about the way they’d told me to watch from the shoreline. After putting it together with the Fleet exercise—it all pointed to trouble of the biggest kind.”

She had a feeling that the “something not right” was directly related to the explosion.

“Go on.”

“I took him, and the weapon, out.”

“Who’s
him
, and what exactly do you mean by
I took him out
?”

His shifted his eyes, his expression no longer readable.

“I had to stop him from firing the SAM, Joy.”

The gravity of the situation,
his
situation, hit her like a Puget Sound gale in November. “You killed a man out there today?”

“I disabled his weapon. The resulting explosion did the rest.”

“Okay. So now all you have to do is call in to FBI headquarters, to your team, and report what happened.” Honestly, did he
have
to play the dramatic SEAL part? Weren’t those days supposed to be over?

“I can’t. I blew my cover by blowing their mission. No pun intended.”

“Do you think they—the terrorists, whoever they are—know you’re the one who stopped the SAM?”

As she asked, she couldn’t believe that Brad’s cover would be compromised by anything he did or didn’t do. He was a professional who’d completed umpteen missions in the most hellish places on earth. He knew how to keep his cover.

“I have to assume they do, or at the very least they’ll figure it out soon enough.”

She believed him.

“Let me clarify. They may suspect I’m not legit when I don’t meet up with them again. They have no way of knowing which LEA I belong to. I’ve been playing the part of the disillusioned émigré who wanted to help quell the American Imperialists. These are all domestic terrorists. None of them speak Pashto or Dari—I threw in a few words here and there to test them. They’re all homegrown wannabes. My team was alerted that they were trying to leave the country to join a terrorist group overseas.”

“But they decided to get some credibility by doing one of those sleeper-type actions?”

“Yes. This is more than a sleeper cell, though. They have contacts with the bad guys overseas. That’s certain now that I identified the SAM. I just don’t know who that contact is yet.”

Brad’s wide range of skills, including his ability with more than one foreign language, was a big part of what had made him such a valuable asset to the Navy SEALs. All SEALs had intensive training in weapons identification and employment. If he said he saw a SAM about to be launched, it was true.

And the explosion left no doubt.

“The thing is, I think they’re also targeting an individual here on Whidbey. They’ll lie low if they have to, until the LEA presence lessens, but they’re going to go after him sooner or later.”

She ran her fingers through her hair. “Terrorists who are so bold they’ll try to shoot down a US Navy aircraft just offshore, in US territory, don’t care about the LEA all over the place, Brad. They won’t wait.”

His appreciation of her accurate observation gleamed in his eyes. The instant warmth that flushed her cheeks was impossible to control.

“Exactly.”

* * *

T
HE
DOORBELL
RANG
,
and Brad saw her shoulders tense, her mouth tighten in a grim line.

“That’s the OHPD or sheriff’s deputy. Coming over in the respectable way.” She tried to keep it light by poking fun at his entrance via her side door earlier, but her anxiety was palpable.

You’ve done this to her.

“OHPD?”

“Oak Harbor Police Department. Keep up, Mr. FBI.”

“Are you going to tell them I’m here?”

“Why can’t I? You’re FBI. Don’t all LEA talk to each other?”

“You know damn well they don’t. I’m undercover, Joy. I can’t be seen.”

He knew he was asking her to trust him with little reason. He’d made no attempt to contact her since he’d been free to do so. Only now, when he was in serious trouble, had he sought her out.

“You don’t have to do this, Joy. Say the word and I’ll go out the back and disappear. Just give me thirty seconds lead time.”

“No, don’t go. I’m not going to say anything to them other than what I reported on the phone. There’s no need, not legally.”

He saw the inner war play out in her expression. She had a beautiful face, capable of distracting the most hardened criminal. Sometimes her face revealed what she was thinking, what she was feeling. But she was capable of hiding her emotions, too. Her poker face had let her get what they needed to set Farid free from the hell he’d been condemned to. He felt a rush of warmth.

“You trust me,” he said quietly.

“That’s a discussion for later. Go into my bedroom and stay there until I come and get you.”

* * *

“I
WAS
STANDING
right here, looking out through my binoculars. That’s when I noticed the explosion. The vibration hit a few seconds later.”

“Roger.”

The Oak Harbor police officer wrote more notes, her face noncommittal.

“Have you gotten a lot of witness accounts this morning?”

Officer Katie Dade looked up and shook her head.

“Not as many as you’d think. Most of your neighbors were either in the shower or already at work, and the others heard just the explosion. You’re the only one who saw it from here. But we had other witnesses who were walking their dogs farther down the beach.”

By
farther down
Officer Dade meant the stretch of coastline miles from Joy’s house, closer to the Naval Air Station.

“I thought they’d send a sheriff’s deputy.”

“Normally, yes. Your home’s in the county’s jurisdiction. They’re swamped at the moment, so they sent me. Mind if I look through your binoculars?”

“No, go right ahead.”

As Officer Dade focused the binoculars, Joy prayed they were almost done with the interview. She’d never hidden a potential fugitive before and didn’t like being on the wrong side of the law, regardless of the situation or her motives. Regardless of the fact that she trusted Brad.

Motives
.

Were they centered on a belief that Brad was telling her the truth, or did he still hold some kind of crazy sway over her? Or both? It would help if she knew that all her fantasies about him weren’t unrequited—that he at least shared her physical attraction.

Not that it made a difference now.

“These are pretty good. You get them in the Navy?” Officer Dade motioned at her with the binoculars.

“No. They were a gift from my parents. I got used to good binoculars when I was aboard an aircraft carrier.”

“So you drove an aircraft carrier?”

“No, not really.” JAGs didn’t stand bridge watches, although she’d observed some of the tactical operations. Not typical for a JAG, but she’d wanted to spread her professional wings a bit.

Why was she telling a strange police officer about her Navy career? Officer Dade was nice and all, and obviously a polished professional. Still, she hadn’t asked for the information.