Heart Strike (5 page)

Reeves wasn't tall, little more than her own five-eight. He wore a maroon-and-white jersey—“Venezuela's national soccer team colors,” he'd told her—and had dark-haired good looks. He fit right in at the airport, and he fit right in beside her in the hall. Handsome enough to make her think some thoughts she definitely wasn't going to be thinking.

She, on the other hand, stood out like a runway beacon with her height, blond hair, and white skin. Operators weren't supposed to stand out. Though there were enough foreign tourists in Venezuela that it wasn't totally horrid; it just wasn't good. What idiot had assigned Melissa to—

The hotel door swung open…and there she was.

There was no mistaking Carla Anderson. She might be in a sundress rather than combat clothes, but her dark beauty and that same impossible poise she'd exhibited in the shoot-room six months ago were completely present. She also displayed a scowl of complete distrust that would have made Melissa feel even more disoriented if that was still possible.

“Hey, Wild Woman.” Kyle stepped forward and kissed her.

Which actually did manage to create a new degree of disorientation for Melissa. She'd never seen a Delta-Delta relationship before. Of course she was only the second woman to make the grade, and she sure hadn't had one. She couldn't imagine any other unit that was crazy enough to let such a thing happen so openly. Next thing you knew they'd be repealing gravity.

The Wild Woman looked as if she wanted to attack Melissa.

“Ease off.” Kyle backed Carla into the hotel room with his hands around her waist.

Carla neither stumbled nor stopped glaring.

Kyle tipped his head to invite Melissa in from the hall. Once in the room, luxury suite or not, she knew she was in the right place. Now that they were together, she recognized the room's occupants as the graduates of the prior Operator's Training Course class. Individually she might not have, like she hadn't recognized Kyle at the airport. But together they were such an incongruous bunch that you couldn't miss them.

There were three other guys waiting, two at a table, one on a short couch. There was a second, longer couch that showed signs that Carla Anderson had been sitting there alone, a couple of tasteful armchairs, a big-screen television, and a sweeping tenth-story view of Lake Maracaibo and the five-mile-long bridge that crossed it just south of the hotel.

Then it struck her.

They
had gotten to stay together after OTC, while Mutt and Jeff—who she'd been missing during the entire flight down—were now on the other side of the world. That pissed her off almost as much as the discovery that she'd been assigned to Carla Anderson's team.

Two of the three guys stumbled to their feet when she entered; they'd been playing cards at the dining table which had the remains of a large breakfast shoved off to one side.

The smooth one, a blond guy who looked about as dangerous as a farm-boy hamster, was already heading in her direction with a woman-eating smile.

The quiet one, darker and sleeker than his blond friend, reached across the table they'd been sitting at and peeked at his opponent's cards. He smiled slightly before setting them carefully back down exactly as he'd found them.

And the… Melissa couldn't quite tag what the third one was just by looking at him.

The guy sitting on the two-person couch surrounded by a small pile of radio gear and a tablet computer simply gawked at her. He looked like he was about twelve with his mouth hanging open like that. He had straight, light brown hair and lighter brown eyes. Melissa had to remind herself that if he wasn't Delta, he wouldn't be in this room.

Then he closed his mouth and suddenly he looked far more the part. He also aged from a ridiculous twelve to the seriously good-looking boy-next-door in his late twenties. He didn't look like a typical Delta—the overly serious, intensely dedicated hard-ass. He looked like a…nice, decent guy. So what the heck
was
he doing here?

“I remember you.” Carla had sidestepped Kyle and was once again right in front of Melissa, effectively blocking her last step into the room. “You're from the new class.”

Melissa nodded sharply. After graduating yesterday and traveling overnight, she was ready for a fight. “And you're the bitch from the class before mine.”

Carla quirked up an eyebrow.

“Darn it! Sorry.” That was a bit much, way too much for her. “Didn't mean to say that.”

But the four guys burst out laughing, even the nice one, and oddly, Carla's scowl shifted easily to a considering smile.

Melissa couldn't make sense of it as Carla held out her hand. Her shake was as solid and powerful as any guy's.

“Just remember that and we'll get along fine.”

* * *

Richie watched the new arrival as Chad did one of his smooth, so-glad-to-welcome-the-pretty-lady moves. He always envied Chad that skill. Despite being Scandinavian blond, he could charm his way right into a Bolivian coca operation run only by darker-skinned, darker-haired natives as if he was their long-lost cousin.

Richie managed to talk to pretty women; he just always completely mucked it up. So this time he'd keep his mouth shut.

But the new arrival was really something. He'd noticed her during his own graduation exercise, sitting on the couch and looking more like a model than a soldier.

Even in the eye-blink moments of time after they'd cleared the shoot-room, he'd been aware of her intense, blue eyes and light, blond hair that hung almost to her shoulders. It was straight but fluffed out with just enough curl to catch every hint of light. It was longer now, pulled back in a short French braid.

His team had unleashed havoc in the shoot-room and this woman—her name went by in an introduction and he missed it, crap, typical for him—had watched with open eyes and an eagerness to do the same things his team had just done.

Richie had recognized the hunger of it because it rang so clearly inside him. It wasn't about the battle for people like them; it was the challenge.

People like them.

What did he actually know about her? Yet he knew he was right. There was a drive—all of The Unit's operators were driven or they wouldn't be here—but the drives were all different. Carla fought; Chad and Duane hammered; Kyle outsmarted. And Richie…

He'd never tried to define it for himself.

He…played. Not that he didn't take the job seriously, but the last year had been the most fun of his life.

Prior to Delta, Richie had always been the outsider. Sure, he'd been valued as the top technician back with 82nd Airborne's combat engineers, but all his time in Eagle Battalion he'd never really fit in. Once he'd proven that he was a good enough soldier to make The Unit's grade, he'd simply belonged.

That first time he'd seen the newbie, she'd been wearing the ubiquitous black T-shirt and gray-green camos of most Special Operations Forces.

Now she was clad in what he guessed were fashionably tight jeans, which looked amazing, and a white T-shirt at least two sizes too small, which was right off the charts incredible. It clung to every shape, showing off her complete fitness and perfect curves. A little too short, it kept offering intriguing flashes of her flat stomach, and the “I (heart) Aruba” was stretched across her chest to the limits of the thin material.

She gave Chad the brush-off, not something Richie had seen many women do. Of course, that would only egg him on, but Richie liked that about her.

She, Kyle, and Carla moved from the entryway, farther into the suite's central living room.

“You guys have it rough.” She looked around the room.

“Pacific Northwest,” Richie said without thinking. “Say something else.”

The blond looked down at him strangely. “I'm not a puppet ready to perform.”

“Washington State, west side of the mountains. No, that's not quite right. Say something else.”

Her blue eyes narrowed and suddenly he could see the dangerous, Delta operator side of her. Perhaps not as wild as Carla, but there, deep behind that incredible face. “How the heck did you—”

“I was wrong. You're too polite. Canada. British Columbia. Vancouver Island, though it's pretty well buried, probably by the years of military service.”

Her jaw went slack as she stared at him.

“Q does shit like that.” Chad punched him in the arm hard enough to hurt, communicating a clear
Shut up, Man!

Richie ignored him.

“You're the team geek.” She nodded as if he somehow fit into place.

“Proud to be. What are you?”

She laughed. “I'll be damned if I know.”

It was a sudden, simple laugh, not angelic or calculated. It was the honest kind that happened around the dinner table with family. It also made him decide something.

“Here.” He moved his gear farther down the coffee table he'd been using for a desk then shifted so a spot opened up between him and the arm of the two-seater sofa. His tablet computer had a classified Unit-internal report on a new stealth drone, so he closed that just in case she wasn't cleared for it. “Have a seat. It will protect you from, you know”—Richie nodded toward Chad who was still hovering—“man-apes.”

She nodded agreeably and dropped down beside him.

Chad didn't counter the insult or even offer a riposte. He just looked at Richie as strangely as if he'd grown another head like Zaphod Beeblebrox in
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

It would be cool to have a second head, kind of like an outboard processing unit. But he knew he didn't. So it didn't explain why, not just Chad, but all of them were looking at him like that.

Honestly, he'd spoken to women before.

“No, seriously, I don't know what role I fill in a team's structure.” And Melissa felt even more awkward for repeating it. She'd been trained well enough to walk into a city alone, extract or remove a target, and disappear with no one the wiser. But her only specialty in OTC had been coercing a group of nonconformists to function as a well-oiled machine. As that was clearly Kyle's role in this team, she decided against bringing that up.

Outside of that one skill, she could use explosives, but she wasn't a breacher. She could easily cover for a med or comm tech, but she'd never been focused on either. Mutt had been a hell of a breacher and Jeff a top paramedic. All Delta were good shooters, but she wasn't a sniper. She was… Melissa honestly didn't know.

“I speak four European languages.”

“Including Spanish, I hope.” Carla sighed from where she sat with her back against one arm of the other sofa with her bare legs draped over Kyle's lap. “Or you're gonna be a real pain in the ass.”

“
Sí
.” Melissa kept it short and sweet.

“Richie has seven.” Carla put it down as a challenge.

“Four,” Richie corrected her. “Six if you count both English and bad English.”

“Bruce Willis,
The Fifth Element
.” Melissa knew the reference.

“Wasn't that a great movie?” Richie's smile went brilliant and for a moment she wondered just how alone he'd been to light up so. Or was that something he simply did in the joy of a moment? Either way, she could definitely relate to the movie. Then they both looked around the room and the four others were looking at them blankly. He leaned in close. “Don't mind them. They're total heathens when it comes to good film.”

Calling
The Fifth Element
a good film was something of a stretch, but it had been filled with any number of good one-liners.

Richie started tapping out the diva's aria with a couple of small screwdrivers on the coffee table's surface.

“I made it through OTC yesterday,” Melissa continued to the room at large. “Which means I haven't slept in a seriously long time.”

That got her groans of sympathy and a little drum roll finish from Richie.

“I'm a good shooter, but not the best.”

“That would be me.” Carla made it sound like a brag. But by the others' nods, Melissa could see that it wasn't.

“She was afraid you were coming in to take over the team,” Richie told her. Mr. Techie was acting as interpreter for what was going on. While it was odd, she appreciated knowing the subtext of the dynamics, and she was especially glad she hadn't mentioned her typical leadership role. “She's also much nicer when she hasn't been caged up in a hotel room in a city for a week.”

“It's been less than twenty-four hours,” Chad offered with a hard-suffering sigh. “It only feels like a week.” He was being outwardly charming, but he was so transparent that she wondered if he ever succeeded with his act. Were women really that desperate?

Hopefully she hadn't ever been.

Far stranger would be Carla Anderson having even a sliver of nice. Melissa would believe that when she saw it. “I'm a good hiker in any terrain.”

“That's me again.”

Melissa was starting to take Carla's jibes personally and had to remind herself that Carla had admitted she was a bitch. Well, Melissa might be Canadian, but she could bitch right back.

“Number One in every hike or march event from the first day of Delta Selection.”

“That,” Kyle said and patted his wife's knee to stop her before she could speak, “would be me.”

“Except once,” Carla insisted.

“Except once,” he agreed. Kyle was as amiable as she was prickly. Did that balance them out to make them one complete person, or were they always bro and bitch to the team?

“I walked his ass into the ground on the forty-miler.”

Melissa looked at her again.

The forty-mile, rucksack hike.

It was the final exercise of Delta Selection before the Commander's Review Board. After thirty brutal days of endless hikes and orienteering, it all came down to that moment. An individual—with a bloody heavy pack—crossing forty miles of mountainous, trackless forest at night with a compass and a flashlight. After thirty days of tests and challenges thinning the class, that one hike had still cut the remaining quarter of her class in half again. And it had nearly killed her to hold her lead. Her strength wasn't actually hiking under a heavy load; it was that all of her years of backcountry hiking had made her exceptional at orienteering. Add that to her ability to visualize a topo map like a museum exhibit laid out before her, and she never wasted a step.

Carla was not that tall a woman and her legs weren't long and sinewy. Below the hem of her dress, they looked like the legs of a workout queen, not someone who had walked everyone else into the ground on such a brutal hike. That meant a lot about what had driven her to succeed.

Carla being a cast-iron bitch probably covered it.

“That's impressive,” Melissa finally offered, not knowing what else to say.

“Warned you.” Carla tapped her own chest. “Total bitch.”

“And mind reader,” Melissa agreed as pleasantly as she could.

Richie snorted out a laugh.

Melissa didn't mind that Richie had shaved Chad off for the moment. He'd saved her from being truly rude to a new teammate. But Carla was really testing her resolve on that point.

“Got a name?” Chad asked from where he'd returned to the dining table and was fooling around with the cards that Duane had managed a look at upon her arrival.

“I already told you my name—Melissa.”

She saw Richie repeat it a few times subvocally, as if memorizing it deep, like it was important.

“Not that. What did they call you, honey?”

She glared at Chad. “You try
honey
again and you'll find you have trouble walking for a while.”

“I could get to like her,” Melissa could hear Carla saying softly to her husband.

But Melissa had something else she had to straighten out at the moment and didn't dare look away from Chad.

He was grinning in a wolfish way that he seemed to think was amiable and charming. He tried again. “So, what did they call you…sweetheart?”

“The Cat. You won't hear me coming, and I'll scratch your eyes out.”

“Ooo, I'm so scared.” Chad pretended to cower.

Duane rolled his eyes at his buddy. At least he could see how much Chad had misread his own charm.

She was just about to move in for the kill—

“But why ‘The Cat'? The name had to come before the description,” Richie asked her with simple curiosity, missing all of the dynamics of the moment.

Melissa was ready to unleash The Cat on someone—Chad for being a jerk, Carla for being a bitch, or Kyle for being so content with the mayhem the other two were trying to unload on her. At this point, she'd even take a swipe at the silent Duane for not speaking up at all.

But she couldn't take it out on Richie; he'd actually been nice to her. She took a deep breath, looking for steady even if calm was long gone.

“This guy in my OTC class named Jaffe had a cat with too many toes. I have too few.”

“Cut them off during a pedi?” Carla tossed out, but it was more of a tease than a jibe, and Melissa let it pass.

“Lost them during a winter hike just below the summit on Mount Rainier during an ice storm.”

“Shit, man.” Duane spoke for the first time. “I've been up there. That's harsh.”

“Same storm I lost my brother.”

It was finally too much; she hadn't meant to say that. The anguish, so carefully suppressed, had built up inside her and her exhaustion and the stress of this unknown situation had caught up with her. She turned to face Carla Effing Anderson.

“You happy now, bitch?”

But Carla's face had gone white despite her dark complexion. She swung her legs free of Kyle's lap and leaned forward.

After a long moment, Carla spoke in a whisper, “The worst pain in the world.” She didn't make it a question; she knew.

Melissa swallowed hard. Of all the stupid things to have in common with Carla Anderson: The Unit and a dead brother.

All she could do was nod her agreement. It had changed her entire world. If not for that, right now she'd happily be working at the Royal BC Museum and playing auntie to her brother's kids.

* * *

Richie looked down at his hands. He knew that this was exactly the sort of moment when he was supposed to know what to do with them—reach out and console the woman beside him. But how did you do that when she was a Unit operator?

She wasn't crying, which would have made it easy to offer a gentle pat like James always did with the wimpier Bond girls.

Instead she looked…hard, like Melina Havelock in
For Your Eyes Only
. The pain was there, right on the surface for all to see, but she had it a hundred percent in control—he sat close enough to see that her eyes weren't even tearing up. Melissa The Cat stared across at Carla with conflicting emotions crossing her face, like she was pissed and sad at the same time.

“Uh…” Richie didn't know what to do with the sound now that he'd made it.

There was a sharp knock on the hotel door that shattered the tableau. Not a coded tap, but the sharp rap-tappa-tap-tap of “Shave and a Haircut.” Carla and Melissa both jerked like they'd been slapped.

Chad and Duane were already on the move back into their rooms. They'd be out of sight with weapons drawn in case force was needed. Richie swept his radio gear and computer into a sack he'd kept handy and kicked it under the couch.

He brushed his fingertips across Melissa's shoulder, partly to get her attention and partly because he wanted to. There was a shock, like one of deep recognition. She felt…amazing, even from that light brush.

She spun to face him in surprise—whether at the touch or if she felt the same thing, he couldn't tell.

“There are a pair of silenced Glock 23s behind the sofa cushion you're leaning on,” he whispered. Then he stretched his arm along the back of the couch. It would look as if they were a couple, but it placed his hand ready to plunge down and grab a handgun if needed.

Melissa studied him for just a second, shook her head more like a wet dog than a surprised cat, and nodded. In that instant, Richie was overwhelmed by the blueness of her eyes. There was a depth there normally reserved for dark-eyed women. Her eyes said, “I've seen some shit,” then they turned calm and cool as the operator clicked into place.

As Kyle rose to his feet, checking the room with a single glance before heading to answer the door, Melissa did the strangest thing.

She turned and leaned back against Richie's chest as if they were indeed a couple.

Strategically, it was a good move. First, it provided her with a natural reason to turn and fully face the entryway that had been off her left shoulder. Second, it would look casual to anyone who entered. And third, it placed her hand close beside his, just above the hidden guns, without inhibiting his own line of fire.

And fourth, it totally overwhelmed him. If brushing his fingers along her shoulder had been a shock, having her lean back against his chest was a body blow. She was warm…hot…radiating, as if she was a part of his own bloodstream or nervous system or something. It felt as if she'd always been there, and if he were to place his arm around her waist instead of hovering it over a hidden Glock 23, they'd be just as they were meant to be.

Her head rested back against his shoulder, brushing half of his face with her hair. It was soft and smelled of shampoo and plane flights—also of icy mountaintops and warm fires on a dark night. He buried his face in her hair and breathed her in.

“Hey!” She tried to twist around to look at him and impacted his nose with her temple.

“Ow! Crap!” His eyes crossed at the sudden flash of pain.

“God damn it!” Carla was swiveling in their direction to see what was happening and had her own pistol drawn.

That, in turn, had Melissa grabbing for her hidden weapon.

Chad and Duane rolled into the room with the HK416 assault rifles raised to their shoulders and seeking a target.

Richie heard the distinct
snick
of the HKs' safeties coming off.

Everyone
was holding a weapon except for Richie, who was holding his nose.

Kyle stepped back in from the short front hall and stopped. A tall thin man peeked over Kyle's shoulder. He looked familiar, but Richie's eyes were still watering and he couldn't see clearly.

The man surveyed the tense situation.

“I don't think they're glad to see me.”

* * *

“You beast! I should shoot you!” Melissa sat bolt upright when she recognized the new arrival.

Richie grunted when she rammed an elbow into his gut to leverage herself upright, but right then she was too angry to care.

The man peeking over Kyle's shoulder had changed to wearing a loose, white, button-down shirt, khaki shorts, and Birkenstock sandals, but it was the same tall frame, thin face, and reddish-blond hair. There was no mistaking him.

Everyone in the hotel room turned to look at Melissa, and she decided that her next best step was to lose the weapon. She stuffed it back behind the sofa cushion.

“Any particular reason?” Kyle asked carefully. The others were being slow to stow their own weapons.

Brazen it out, girl. Besides, you've taken enough crap this morning.

“This is the jerk who sold me this stupid ‘I (heart) Aruba' T-shirt, insisting that I needed to wear it for you to find me.” She couldn't believe she hadn't seen through his ploy.

“You look damned good in it too,” the man replied.

“She does, doesn't she?” Kyle was smiling, in clear cahoots with the stranger in some guy-ness mode that tempted her to pull the handgun back out from behind the cushion.