Light Up the Night (10 page)

He didn't know he'd been hit and had peeked out to see what happened to Buddy—just in time to see his heart explode out the front of his chest as the bullet passed through him from behind. Must have been a hollow-point to do that kind of damage. A big one.

“Buddy didn't make it. I heard Old Ralph curse about ‘damn amateur punks' before he went back into his club.”

He'd also come up and put another round into the back of Buddy's head and hunted for Bill, finally kicking the garbage bag that was over Bill's chest in frustration before giving up. If Bill hadn't been holding on to it in sheer panic, he'd have been exposed and died that night as well.

“I got away. Mom patched me up.”

“What did she say to you?” Trisha still hadn't moved a muscle, but she'd spoken.

“She told me to be more careful.”

“Be more careful?” The strain still filled her voice.

“Yeah. There wasn't a whole lot of her left by that point. She always did honest work, but you don't get far without even a high school diploma. The income on a couple part-time, minimum-wage jobs in Detroit sucked, even when they did pay her what she was due.”

They'd never spoken of what else might have happened to her at those jobs. They'd both been trying just to survive.

“Can't say as she had to tell me. It wasn't being shot that woke me up. That fixed itself well enough after she sewed it up. It was that someone had shot me and there hadn't been a damn thing I could do. In one moment I went from indestructible to wholly powerless. I couldn't save Buddy, though I could have reached out and touched his hand. He'd fallen that close to me. Couldn't help him any more than I could save my mother.”

A slight movement of the rocket pod against his shoulders, one he barely registered before a hand rested on his arm. It was a small hand with long, slender fingers. He'd never told anyone any of this. Not even his mother.

“What did you do about Ralph?”

A warrior's question. Deserved a straight answer, though he wondered how she'd take it.

“It took a while. But I made sure he wasn't around to kill anyone else. He'd never seen my face, so I went to work for him. I ran numbers and did other small stuff until he trusted me some. Got him drunk one night and we went for a walk along the train tracks. Seems he stumbled under a freight train.”

The small hand squeezed his arm rather than drawing away.

“Not something I'm real proud of, but I'd bet there was one helluva party the next day. Not a soul to miss him. I didn't touch his wallet so that it would look like an accident. But he kept a roll of bills in his pocket that no cop would ever miss. I bought us a fresh start. By the time they found him, Mom and I were on a train from Detroit to the south side of Chicago. Not any different really, but at least no one knew me. Done my best to go straight since.”

The words had exhausted him. Why did he think that was a comforting story? It made him feel like shit every time he even thought of it. Saying it aloud for the first time in his life had ripped it right out of his soul.

“Billy?” Her voice was so gentle.

How did women do that—speak like their heart was shared right out in the world?

“Billy the SEAL.”

Her voice was stronger. It made him face her.

She was looking right at him, so close that once again she filled his senses with her scent of fire and summer.

“I think you've got that going-straight bit all worked out.”

“What do you mean?” He'd never been around a woman who made him feel slow before.

She slapped him upside the head. Not hard, just a friendly cuff that left him blinking in surprise.

“Lieutenant William ‘Billy the SEAL' Bruce of the United States Navy, probably decorated a couple times, knowing you. More than a couple, looking at you. Tell me how that isn't overcompensation for your past deeds.”

He had to smile at that.

And he'd been the one trying to comfort her.

They hadn't talked any more. Trisha and Billy simply sat with their backs against the rocket pod and watched the night beyond the stern of the aircraft carrier.

Trisha considered being amused that they were in the same position, both with their feet flat on the deck and their knees up with their arms rested atop them. She'd left her one hand resting lightly on his forearm, and he'd covered her hand with his big, enveloping grasp. They didn't interlace their fingers, but they were holding hands anyway. Not something she did much. Couldn't think of when she ever had.

They shared the quiet for a long time.

She'd have to thank Billy someday. It felt as if she was coming back into her body so that it fit once again. She'd been hit, which had been news to her.

But she hadn't watched friends die.

It wasn't hard to hear the parts that Billy left out. He'd seen Buddy die. He'd executed Ralph. His mother had undoubtedly been… Trisha shivered, trying not to think about it.

Oddly enough, that was how she'd come to run with the street gangs. At thirteen, she'd jumped ship on yet another of her mother's endlessly planned endless parties. She'd set out walking across Boston, any direction that was away.

By the time night fell, and not knowing any better, she'd wandered into Southie. She had been grabbed and half her clothes torn away before a gang, a rival to the one that had grabbed her, used the distraction to conquer some turf. She hadn't seen the actual deaths, but she'd hidden in her room for a month afterward. But she'd eventually gone back. She wasn't sure why. Maybe to say thanks. Vinny, the gang leader, had given her some clothes and the fare for a ride on the T to get her home.

Once she'd come back, Vinny had showed her many things beyond the reckoning of a girl with a big family home out in Milton. The first place he'd taken her was a tae kwon do dojo he belonged to. There she'd learned to defend herself, though it was on the streets that she'd learned to fight. Their relationship had ended with a very private celebration on her sixteenth birthday. It had been a sweet sixteen indeed.

She was never sure why they'd drifted apart so soon after. Trisha figured that maybe she just didn't like being “someone's girl,” even if that someone was Vinny. By seventeen, she rarely saw him. By eighteen, she was heading off for college in New York and had gone to see him one last time before leaving.

Vinny's was another funeral that she'd missed. No one in his gang except Vinny had known how to track her down, so they couldn't find her to tell her. He'd guarded her true identity right to his death. Didn't want her to be treated any differently than if she'd just walked in off the streets. Once he found out who her parents were, he also didn't want her to be at risk for kidnapping and ransom. She'd run enough with Vinny's gang that there was probably no danger for her there, but if another gang got wind of it, she could have been in real danger.

Vinny hadn't even been put in the ground, so there was nowhere to visit him. Cremated, but no ashes to collect. She'd looked it up. There had been ashes, always were, but if no one claimed them, they were just poured into some common grave, typically in a churchyard corner. She wished she could plant them in the orchard out behind the main house, but maybe it was just as well. Vinny wouldn't have known what to do there. He'd never been outside of Boston. Never went to her house even once.

And it didn't matter. Vinny was gone. She went to college and then the Army, never looking back.

With a final squeeze of Billy's arm, she extracted her hand from his. Rising to her feet, which stung bitterly from being so long in the same position.

He loomed up in the night beside her.

“Thanks, Billy.”

“Bill.” His voice a rough rumble that she could really get to like.

“Sure, Billy.”

He grunted but didn't say anything more.

She began going over her chopper again, partly making sure it was okay, partly looking for where the two other bullets had skipped off her armor.

Soon she was explaining the Little Bird's capabilities to Billy. Just what her chopper could and couldn't do in varying conditions. He was an attentive audience, asking intelligent questions that showed a broad knowledge base and often pushing her to find a clear answer. Finding some way to explain what had become instinct.

Trisha found one bullet wedged between the center console and the windscreen. She managed to recover it with the back edge of her combat knife at a moment when Billy wasn't watching.

She never found the third round.

A week. For seven whole days Trisha had been avoiding him, and Bill wasn't sure why.

She hadn't been obvious about it, so it had taken him a while to notice. She'd take the last open seat at a mostly occupied table at meals. Or be finishing a run on the hangar deck just as he was starting. She'd go straight from briefings to maintaining her machine, often conferring closely with a mechanic.

He'd found her more than once sitting out in the morning sun, discussing the aerodynamics of dragons with the Air Mission Commander's kid. It was as if the girl had acquired a second mother. Kee doted on the girl but was terribly adult about it all. Trisha was different, maybe more like a big sister than a mother. She and Dilya were always laughing together, a wondrous sound that no sane man would interrupt. A child's laughter was not something he'd had much experience with. But when she and Trisha were going at it, it did something to his heart—just the best sound on the planet.

It wasn't as if he'd expected something from Trisha O'Malley, but he'd expected…something.

The nightly missions were nothing much to write home about, even if the team had been allowed to write home about an active operation. Twenty-three vessels of varying sizes and a dozen navies trying to patrol from the Gulf of Aden down to the Seychelles, over fifteen hundred miles south and a thousand east. Even across such an impossible expanse of ocean, attacks were down.

The problem was that ransoms were up. Seven years ago, insurance companies had paid out six million dollars total. Last year, the total had crossed a hundred and fifty mil.

“The average ransom has jumped from half a million to five,” Bill told a briefing of the officers during the daily senior staff meeting in Lieutenant Commander Ramis's conference room. “And the individual dangers have risen sharply over that time. Back in the 2000s, the piracy was being run by the fishermen. Due to the lack of any unified government, other nations' vessels arrived and began fishing out the rich Somali waters. Korea, North and South; Japan; and the Taiwanese are the worst offenders, though they aren't alone.”

It was hard to believe that he felt empathy for the Somali fishermen, but he did.

“They armed to protect their fishing rights and discovered that it was a lucrative occupation. So they started taking bigger prey. But their rule of the sea,
Uruf
Alba'hr
, respects the lives of other mariners, even in hostage situations. Then the inland tribes heard about the money, armed up, and set out upon the sea. Most of this second wave of pirates failed miserably because they knew nothing about the sea. But they learned. They are now not only effective, but often lethal as well. A true criminal class.”

Actually Somalia was never that simple, and the more time he spent studying the situation, the more aware of that he became. The fishermen had suffered, their livelihood fished out from under them due to the political squabbles of the combined clans. Then the criminal elements had arrived to take over. And the fourth kingdom of Somalia, if any of it could be called a kingdom, was made of the nomadic tribes who were affected by almost nothing beyond the extent of each year's drought. Somalia was so dry that even a good year was still a drought.

Every day he spent an hour, sometimes two, briefing the officers. But that never included Lieutenant O'Malley.

They'd fly together on different choppers at night on wide-area sweep missions. Occasionally, they'd stop a pirate. Typically with less gunfire than the first crew had demonstrated.

Word was getting out that the patrols were hammering the long coast harder, and the pirates were turning tail more easily. At least the ones they saw. Twice tonight he'd seen Trisha do the same thing. They'd been coming toward each other when she'd abruptly turned and headed in the opposite direction or engaged someone in conversation who Bill was sure had merely been passing by a moment before.

Bill finally descended to guerilla tactics after one particularly long and messy flight along the edge of a growing tropical storm. It had turned into a plain old, though very drawn-out, rescue mission before the idiot pirates drowned themselves in the twenty-foot swells building beneath a thirty-knot wind.

He didn't want to embarrass O'Malley in front of any of the crew, but he was getting pissed about her avoiding him. That, in turn, was starting to mess with his head, which he couldn't afford.

He stripped off his gear, skipped a shower, and switched into civilian clothes. He'd smell of flight suit, but he was past caring about that.

Bill arrived at Trisha's cabin while the water was still running in the shared shower between her and the Maloneys' cabins.

Her cabin door was open. He considered staying out but was annoyed enough to ignore such niceties.

It wasn't much, even if it was private. Bed, chair and small desk, locker and hanging closet. Whole room was a fathom and a half by two. The Navy still thought in six-foot chunks. At nine by twelve feet, it was a very comfortable space, typically reserved for the top dozen officers aboard. But without Marines, Harrier jets, or service squadrons on board, they could afford to be generous.

O'Malley had unpacked into the locker drawers; he could tell because she'd left one open with a pant leg sticking out of it. Her dirty clothes were scattered across the single bunk, which had been made military fashion. He almost wished he had a quarter to see if it bounced when flipped onto the top blanket.

He looked for anything personal.

No pictures of family or, he was cheered to see, any man taped to the small mirror. No jewelry hanging on one of the handy hooks meant for an officer's cap. Not even a “girlie” jacket on any of the mounted hangers. The only thing dangling there other than a thick jacket and a rain slick was a set of immaculate and untouched Army Service dress blues.

He tweaked aside the lapel on the jacket to look at the awards pinned there and tried to suppress a whistle of surprise. Multi-tour Iraq and Afghanistan, sharpshooter, parachutist. Both Commendation and Air Medals with the
V
signifying that the exceptional service had been in battle and the number 5 on the Air Medal indicating this was far from her first one. Weapons specialist in addition to Aviator and Air Assault, which was why she flew the attack version of the Little Bird. Carrier certified, of course. The woman had clearly never hesitated when the call came to join battle.

So why in hell was she avoiding him? Well, he was ready to engage in at least a serious skirmish right now.

The collar device was the single golden bar of a second lieutenant. The sleeve bore Special Ops and Ranger tabs, and a Night Stalkers insignia of a white, sword-wielding, winged centaur beneath a crescent moon.

He still couldn't make any sense of her at all.

“See anything you like?”

He let go of the lapel of her jacket as if he'd been burned and turned to face her.

Damn. The answer to her question was a very definite yes.

Lieutenant Patricia O'Malley in nothing but a towel and a hot temper choked his breath in his chest. Her short hair was still dark red with water. Her shoulders showed muscle, the long lean muscle of fitness, but still looking incredibly feminine with no adornment but her dog tags and some of the creamiest white skin he'd ever seen. And beyond the dark-blue towel a deceptively long length of leg on a woman so short. Either the towel was dangerously short, or her legs were dangerously long. They certainly were seriously good.

“Yep. See a whole lot I like.” He aimed a leer in her direction.

She scoffed.

“Do you mind waiting while I get dressed?”

“Not a bit.” He settled into the chair in front of the desk, which was barely big enough to fill out a two-page report.

Trisha's glare was intense, and her eyes were incredibly blue with her temper.

“Eyes not turned purple yet. Guess I'm safe for now.”

“Don't tempt me, sailor.”

He leaned the chair back against the cabin bulkhead behind him and folded his hands over his stomach. “I'm wondering to myself, ‘William…' I call myself William when I'm wondering about things. ‘William,' I ask, ‘is she going to have to drop that towel in order to beat the shit out of you?'”

“What's your answer?” She shifted her weight, cocking a hip in a way that the towel did nothing to hide but also caused the lower edge to ride an interesting inch higher.

“My guess is yes. And my conclusion is that it would definitely be worth the risk considering the potential side benefits.”

If he hadn't been expecting it and prepared for it, he'd have been on the floor when she kicked the chair out from under him. Instead of laying him flat on his back, he hung there because he'd braced his feet on the floor and shoulders against the wall as if sitting on air.

“Damn!” She stormed the two steps away that the cabin allowed. He leaned down to retrieve the chair without leaving his “sitting” position. As he relaxed back onto it, he refocused on her legs.

“What are those?”

She looked down at herself, then tugged down the lower edge of the towel. “They're called legs.”

“No, I'm talking about the two bruises on your right leg.” He narrowed his eyes to inspect them more closely. Mid-thigh, and another just peeking below the lower edge of the towel, a fading yellow edge of what must be a much larger bruise farther up on her hip.

“They're nothing. I bruise easy. Comes with the fair skin you seem so intent on staring at.” She gathered some clothes. “I'll get dressed next door since you're such a rude son of a bitch.”

“Mom's a nice lady. You'd like her. But I am her son. You got that much right.” Now why had he said that? He'd never found a girl worth taking home to meet his mother. Not ever.

Trisha scoffed again and left the room clutching her clothes and her towel.

He'd never stayed long with a girlfriend anyway. They hated that he disappeared on assignment with no notice and never wrote. Never knew what to write even when he thought to. His longest span before a Dear William email had been about six months.

He kept a mixture of prewritten letters and postcards in the hands of his SEAL team adjutant to send to his mother each week when he was on a black ops assignment, like being undercover in Somalia. He never wanted her to worry. For the first time he was thinking that Patricia O'Malley was a woman he wouldn't mind writing home about.

Trisha had two bruises. Almost faded. If they'd started out really intensely black and blue, they would be about a week old, based on the coloration. A chill went down his spine as he imagined the line of them: lower thigh, hip…ribs.

She returned minus the towel, but not looking one bit less fine in khakis and an Army-green T-shirt. Or one bit less pissed. Was it angry or was it defiant?

“You were shot three times, not once.”

“So?”

Defiant. Holding hard onto her pride. Bill clunked the chair legs back onto the deck. “Did you think that I'd think less of you because you were in shock over being shot? Never mind three times?”

“Maybe.” A slight softening of her expression told him that he'd hit the problem on the head. Or at least part of it. She moved to hang up the towel, then bent down to pull socks out of one of the locker's drawers. Everything in the drawer inspection ready. He'd expected her to have messes instead. Again, that constant contrast versus expectation.

“Shit, O'Malley. I've seen guys who never made it past the sound of the first bullet going by, never mind three hitting them. Have you missed a single mission this week?”

“No.” Her voice was soft and she wasn't facing him. Instead she was straightening the dress uniform jacket on its hanger as if by touching it he had soiled it.

“Have you held back or hesitated even the least little bit on a single mission that you've flown since then?”

“Never! I wouldn't do that.”

“Didn't think so.” He rose to his feet and, taking her by the shoulders, turned her to face him.

She looked up at him with an expression he still couldn't read. He'd had months of training, like any other SEAL, in reading what another's unspoken thoughts, or at least what their mood, might be. But he couldn't read her and it was frustrating the hell out of him.

“Then why in blazes are you avoiding me?”

“I would think that would be obvious.”

He racked his brain again to no avail. “Well, it isn't to me.”

***

Trisha looked up at Billy. His narrowed eyes revealed that he was indeed totally perplexed.

It was perfectly clear to her, and she just figured that meant she was too damn stupid to live. She shrugged to herself, feeling the warm weight of his large hands still resting on her shoulders.

Well, stupid is something I'm really good at
, she had to admit to herself. With one foot, she shoved the door to her cabin closed until the latch clicked. Then putting a hand on either side of his neck, Trisha pulled his face down to hers.

His hesitation didn't last long, then the kiss became everything she remembered from the first one. Power, heat, strength.

And then it became more. When he folded his arms around her and held her tight against him as they teased each other's lips, she was just gone.

She'd never felt such a thing before. In Billy's arms, Trisha O'Malley felt…safe. As if someone else would take care of the world, just for awhile. That was so foreign, she almost pushed away. Then she changed her mind and leaned closer because it felt so damn good.

Trisha wished she was still wearing the stupid towel, so that she could just let it slide ever so slowly to the floor like some heart-fluttering romance heroine. But she was dressed now, so she went for plan B.

Sliding her hands down to his waist, she tugged Billy's T-shirt free and dragged it off over his head. If she could have shredded it with her teeth, she would have.