His shirt went up and off, revealing bronzed man and the cut of shoulder blades. She shook with the need to stand, wrap her arms around his waist and lean her cheek against his bare back. What she wouldn't give to soak up the warm comfort of his skin against hers. To inhale the spicy musk of sweat and Jack.
His thumbs hooked on his boxers.
She bolted to her feet and spun away. Palms flat on the window ledge, she stared at the canvas of
heavy blue curtains blocking early morning sun. Counted to ten while straightening the part in the coarse fabric. Then to twenty while evening out the cord pulls.
He always did this to her, damn him. Muddled her world by never acting as she expected. Like with the rescue mission. Part of her wanted to kiss every inch of his beard-stubbled face in gratitude, while the rest of her wanted to scream in frustration because he hadn't told her.
Fears for her sister quivered through her, threatened to spill free, but she contained them with an airtight will. Ziploc tight. She'd looked for comfort in Jack's arms before and landed herself in an Elvis wedding chapel, for God's sake.
How humiliating. And yet the humiliation was nothing in comparison to the burn of betrayal. He'd known how she'd felt about waiting to be sure before committing. She'd shared her deepest fears with this man and yet he'd pushed her the minute she'd let her guard down.
Not again.
Bracing herself for the image of him—naked— she turned, finding a tanned back and taut flank moving toward the bathroom.
Gulp.
"Jack, will you please be reasonable." And could her voice please, please not crack next time she tried to talk?
"Mon, I'm taking a shower." Muscles flexed and rippled as he continued walking away. "And in case you were wondering, you're not invited."
"I wasn't—" The bathroom door clicked closed. She steamed. "—wondering."
Damn, that man chapped her hide.
She stood alone, cinder block walls closing in like a cell. A cell with Froot Loops. She scooped the box off the floor and folded down the bag inside before replacing it on top of the minifridge. The shower started, louder, shooshed a different tune with the intrusion of a body.
Options?
Wait. Leave. Go after him. All stunk.
She should have stood her ground in the first place. So what if he stripped bare-ass na*ed in front of her? She'd seen him before. Often.
Her hand gravitated to his flight suit slung over the back of the chair. With one finger she traced the patch on his sleeve still warm from his body. Anything. Anywhere. Anytime. His squadron motto encompassed well a larger-than-life man when she was a down-to-earth woman.
Monica nudged his boots straight, correcting their haphazard landing on the carpet. She should have blocked the path into the bathroom and made him talk. Would have served him right to battle it out all vulnerable in the nude.
Except she'd wager Jack Korba had never been vulnerable for one second of his slow-walking life. Her hand fell away from his uniform. Even at times when anyone else would have looked like an idiot, he managed to laugh it off. Nothing rattled him.
Not even losing her.
And that hurt. Which chapped her hide even more.
Monica swiped the wrinkles out of her own flight suit. If he wanted to play the bravado game, then fine. Her boots weren't all that steady under her, but her resolve was strong enough to compensate.
Praying the bathroom door wasn't locked, Monica strode across the room. Wouldn't that take the oomph out of her game to be stuck rattling the knob? Ugh!
She twisted. Turned. The door gave way. So did a sigh. Up and out her mouth air went before she could snatch it back.
The tinted-glass doors muted her view but left a picture no less appealing as Jack worked soap across his chest. He whittled away her resistance on a good day and today her defenses ranked low. Her mouth dried, worse than peanut butter sticking to the roof of her mouth.
His scrubbing slowed with an awareness that she'd joined him, but he didn't speak. Finally he resumed his bathing. The dinky cubicle crackled with the knowledge that a few short months ago she would have held his washcloth. Hell, her body would have been his washcloth as she rubbed herself against him to work up a lather and more.
Monica closed the toilet lid and plopped her hormone-riddled self down on the John before she fell on her face. Or on him. "Just so you're clear, I'm not here about the divorce." Man, that last word bit on the way out. "I know about your mission to Rubistan, and no way in hell are you dodging this conversation even if you stay in there until you're a prune. The best you did with your shower stunt was buy yourself ten extra minutes, tops."
"I'm sorry I didn't know my bathroom was cleared for classified discussions."
Always quick with a comeback. Another sigh slipped, exasperated this time, but just as frequent as the turned-on sighs around Jack.
She shifted, fidgeted, stared at herself in the mirror as if her reflection above Jack's twisted tube of toothpaste might offer aid. She couldn't afford to misstep, and she wasn't giving up. Still, it hurt that he could be so unmoved by seeing her when she had a lump in her throat the size of a gauze roll.
Her reflection blinked back at her. She frowned. Cocked her head to the side...something niggling, not right about the mirror. She reached. Touched. Found.
No steam.
A smile creased her oh-so-clear reflection. He'd been in the shower for at least five minutes and the mirror was fog-free. Well, hell. He wasn't unaffected by her after all.
Jack was taking a cold shower.
The Rubistanian desert was cold at night, and Yasmine Halibiz hated being cold. Standing outside the temporary military installation, she wrapped an arm around her waist. Pitiful protection against the plunging temperatures.
For once she missed the stifling robes that had been mandatory garb for women in her country. Western clothing might be more flattering to the figure, but it definitely did not help fight a chilly breeze against the back.
Cooking rated low on her list of preferences, as well, but hacking up a beheaded goat carcass proved a small sacrifice in exchange for keeping herself alive.
Stars, sand and rock stretched for miles with a reminder she could not survive on her own. Yasmine scraped the blade of the butcher knife against the block, swiping entrails into a bin on the ground, then the remaining roasts into an industrial-size bucket. Hefting up the meat, she made her way back toward the kitchen door leading into the converted airport soon to be overflowing with American soldiers.
A small team had already arrived, military personnel sent in as—what did they call it?—an advance element. People to ready the cooking facilities. Set up security. All of which offered her time to ease into her role as a local girl hired as a mess hall cook, the perfect task to bring her into contact with the American contingent so she could select the best target.
Her arms straining, she shuffled up the cement steps toward the light slanting through an open door. The weight competed with the grit in her sandals to rub blisters and irritation. She did not doubt her ability to pick wisely. She had spent the first seventeen years of her life covered in public, often having to gauge other females as friend or foe by only their eyes.
The cultural customs might have loosened, but even six years later, her skills stayed honed. Good and evil scripted across the eyes if only a person looked. Not many looked, always too busy running or dreaming.
She had no dreams. Just a goal. Survival.
Her sandals slapped the tile floor inside, echoing with the mingled languages and bustle of activity in the cavernous kitchen. She stifled a rebellious smile over the pleasure of making noise with her shoes. Of course she could still move with stealth if she chose, a hard-learned legacy, especially during the past year.
Yasmine slung the goat roasts onto the counter beside a steaming pot of boiling water. One by one, she pitched the clammy meat hanks into the roiling cauldron. She had her orders from her uncle. She knew the price if she failed. She shivered even as the steam popped sweat along her brow.
Jamming a long-handled spoon into the water, she stirred, her gaze skipping from worker to worker until it landed on a lone serviceman with his head stuck in the pantry. Military. Air Force. She would have to establish a connection with someone. Certainly she could not be lucky enough to settle the issue with her first try.
Women made their own luck.
Wearing a wrinkled desert-tan flight suit, the man backed out of the pantry empty-handed and frowning. Her mind categorized him.
Messy. Careless even? But no, sharp intelligence lurked beneath his uncombed hair. As if he sensed her evaluation, he shoved a hand along his head. His wedding ring flashed. Ah, a safer male to approach, perhaps.
Except not all men honored vows.
And she most definitely did not want to fend off questing hands. So she tested him. With just a shy smile.
Not interested, his eyes broadcast.
The wedding ring seemed to glow brighter. She sighed her relief. Maybe he would be a safe contact after all, even if he was a man. And the fact that she did not find his boyish looks attractive only added to his appeal as a potential target.
No formal name scrolled across the name tag on his flight suit, just one of those irreverent call signs Americans seemed to enjoy so. Crusty.
Crusty? Yasmine resisted the urge to roll her eyes. His poor wife.
He stepped closer. Close enough for her to look past the easy smile, deeper into his eyes to find...anger. Hatred. The desire for vengeance.
She backed against the stove. Steam soaked her dress, but she did not dare move.
He reached past to select a sugared fig off the counter beside her. "Do you speak English?"
Not that she would be admitting just yet. Why should she make it easier for him to trap her?
She frowned, feigning dim-witted confusion.
"All right, we can speak this way, then." He switched to Arabic with too much ease.
This one would bear watching. She discounted him as an option for contact. But who? Already her mind scanned for possibilities while time trickled away.
She spun to stir her pot and gave him her back.
The man, Crusty, eased into her line of sight for another fig. "I'd like to ask you a few questions about this place." His tone left no room for negotiation.
"May I ask for what reason, sir?" she answered in her native tongue. Dim-witted humility did not sit well with her. But she had learned to curb her temper and mouth in the year since her parents' deaths in a flu epidemic had thrust her from pampered protection into a nightmare. Selecting a peppermill from the shelf above, she speckled the sheen of fat bubbling to the top of the pot.
"It's standard procedure for a representative from military intelligence to interface with locals during a deployment."
Military intelligence? Nerves churned like the roiling stew. She reassessed her assumption that he was merely one of those arrogant fliers and searched for a convenient kitchen accident that would take her away. "I have bread to make."
And she pitied the people who would eat it.
"Well, the thing is, if I don't talk to you, you might not get to stay on. That is if you want to continue working here."
Her eyes flew to the bubbling goat. "Of course."
Yet, if he was truly military intelligence, then he would have already seen her falsified papers—and could catch her in a misstep.
"What was your name again?"
"Bahijah Faris." A lie.
"And your parents?"
"Dead." Truth. Pain sliced in clean, relentless swipes, but she would not let it win. She rolled through her borrowed identity. "I live with my brother and his wives. Money is very limited, so I must help."
If only the real Bahijah had been bright enough to carry this off. Of course if Uncle Ammar had been smarter, he would not have sent his niece. How stupid to think she would be loyal to him—a man who was nothing more than a fourth cousin interested only in the inheritance of anyone with whom he could claim even a distant relationship.
Ridiculous since everyone in this small country was related somehow. Too bad Ammar had slipped away from justice once before.
She hated stupid mistakes. Of course, babbling stupidity could well drive this man away. "Faris is a very old and honored name here. It means 'wounded soldier on horseback,' which my grandfather says—"
"Where does your brother live?" His mouth smiled. His eyes didn't.
"Outside the capital."
"What are you here to do?"
Boil up goat and horse meat for servicemen who are told they are eating beef, you ignorant male. "I am on the cooking staff."
A pride-pinching duty given her true status, not that she could let that show.
She wiped her hands on her apron. "I need to collect the vegetables now or there won't be an evening meal."
The flyer intelligence contact scooped up a handful of dates and backed away. "By all means, then, don't let me keep you."
Making tracks toward the pantry, she scanned the sparse crowd. Searching. She would need to find another candidate, soon. And if her uncle's information was correct, she would have many, many more men to choose from by the week's end. Failure was not an option.
Only survival.
How much torture could one guy survive in a single night?
Icy shower pellets stung Jack's skin. Talk about caught between a rock and a hard place. Stay in the shower until his Johnson succumbed to terminal shrinkage or step out there and explain to Monica exactly why she wasn't going on the mission to Rubistan. Either way, he was dead meat.
At least the cold water worked enough numbing magic so he didn't have to face her with his Johnson saluting.
Jack opened the shower door. Monica's gaze flicked him like a brief brush of a flame before shifting away. She thrust a towel at him.
"Thanks." He tied it around his waist before grabbing a second towel and scrubbing his head.
"I don't want to fight with you anymore. I just want to get my sister back."
He peered at her through the fluffy white folds. The pain staining her eyes threatened to level him.
Draping the towel around his neck, he clutched the ends to keep from gripping her shoulders to pull her to him. "You'll see her soon. Just be patient a while longer."
"Oh, Jack, you know I don't do patient well, never have."
Her early graduation from college and med school attested to that. At thirty-four years old, Monica always lived life on fast-forward while he took his time.
Images blindsided him of how impatient she could be while he took his time stroking her to the edge, holding back. Now, Jack. Now. Her husky drawl reached to him through vivid memories.
Space. Pronto. He angled past her and out of the too damned small bathroom. Fishing in the top drawer, he yanked black sweats free. What a dumb-ass idea to strip down. What had he expected to accomplish?
