Secret Agent Sam

Sam glanced back at him as he stepped through the radio operator’s compartment, lips curving in a smug little Sammi June smile he remembered well. He couldn’t see her eyes because of her sunglasses. He wished he could have seen them, though he wasn’t sure why. Was he remembering the way they’d once lit up at the sight of him, wondering if the glasses were hiding that same glow now?

Wishful thinking, he told himself.

She tilted her head toward the right-hand seat. “Hey, Pearse—have a seat.”

He eased past the controls and settled himself gingerly, his fascinated gaze sliding over the bewildering array of gauges and levers and dials to the view through the wide rectangular windshield. “Wow,” he said.

Sam said lightly, “I guess this is a first.” She threw him a smile. “You’ve never flown with me before.”

“With you at the controls, you mean. No,” he said, gazing once more at the hazy horizon, remembering other times when she’d seemed unknowingly to echo his thoughts. “I guess not.”

There was a pause before she asked, with a slight edge of impatience, “Well, what do you think?”

He hedged, naturally, since there wasn’t any way he could have told her the truth. Which was that he’d lost the ability to think the moment he’d set eyes on her, standing there beside the old World War Two airplane, wearing the arrogance that had always captivated him so, that was like her very own signature perfume.

In that first moment, the years since he’d last seen her had evaporated and it was as if she’d never been gone from his life or his mind, not for an instant. It was all there, in total recall—her face, her body, her voice, her laugh…the way her skin felt, its texture and heat…its softness and its tiny imperfections…the freckles, the way she smelled, the way her hands felt touching him…the way she tasted.

“Of the airplane,” he dryly asked, “or you?”

She laughed, that husky chortle he’d always liked. “The plane, of course.” Once again her smile quirked sideways. “Me being a pilot isn’t exactly news.”

“I never had a problem with you being a pilot. You know that.”

“Yeah, right.”

He shifted in his seat and changed the timbre of his voice, the way driving a car he might have shifted gears to gain traction through a muddy patch. “Somehow I never would have pictured you flying World War Two prop planes for a dumpy little back-water charter outfit in the Philippines, though. The last I heard, you were crewing on passenger jets to China. How in the hell did you wind up here?” He let go of an incredulous huff of laughter. “I’m still trying to get my mind around the coincidence of that.”

She shrugged and said lightly, “Long story,” as she reached to tap some dials and gauges, an activity that, as far as Cory could tell, produced no changes whatsoever in the plane’s behavior.

“We’ve got time.”

Sam felt herself tensing up; she couldn’t help it. It was the calm, almost gentle way he said it that got to her—hadn’t it always?

As the old resentment flared, she fought the urge to glare at him, kept her eyes fixed on the horizon and said sweetly, “I don’t know, I guess it must have been my ‘childish lust for adventure.’ Isn’t that what you called it?”

And she couldn’t help the little glow of satisfaction she got from the silence that followed, even though voices were hissing and moaning in dismay in the back of her mind. Ooh, what did you wanna go and say that for, Samantha June? You don’t wanna dredge up all that old stuff again. That’s water under the bridge, honey-child…you should just leave it be.

She could feel his eyes on her again, that quiet, steady gaze that made her squirm because it seemed it must see right inside her.

“You could have warned me,” he said mildly.

Now she looked at him, her lips curving in an evil grin. “Deprive myself of the look on your face when you saw who your pilot was? No way.”

He chuckled and shook his head, and his eyes found hers even through the shielding lenses of her sunglasses. “Same old Sammi June. Always got to be on top.”

Something thumped hard in her belly. She kept the smile, but it no longer felt like part of her face. More like the clay mask again. “You used to like that about me.”

He held her eyes for a long, intense, awful moment, then eased his shoulders back in the copilot’s seat and exhaled, sounding weary. “I used to like a lot of things about you, Sam.”

Damn you, Pearse. Damn Will, too, for requesting me for this assignment. And damn me for being stupid—no, arrogant—enough to think I could handle it. What was I thinking?

What were you thinking, Sam? How about that you’re a highly trained professional, with the skills and guts it takes to do this job?

So, do it already. Focus, Sam. Do your job. So you had an affair with the man once upon a time. Forget it.

An affair. She cringed at the word. It made the whole thing with Cory sound…frivolous. Fleeting. Bittersweet and nostalgic—rather old-fashioned, really. Like something you’d read about in an old diary.

But it wasn’t just an “affair,” dammit. I loved you, Cory Pearson. You were the love of my life. And you broke my heart. No—you tore out my heart, tore it into itty-bitty pieces and stomped them in the dirt! God, how I hate you for that.

She did—oh, she did. But most of all she hated that she’d never known if she’d succeeded in hurting him back. She’d tried—you’d better believe she’d tried—but if she had managed to hurt him, he’d never let her see it. Not once.

And for that, more than anything, I swear I am never gonna forgive you.

She cleared her throat, took a deep breath. “Look, Pearse…I know this is probably awkward for you—”

“Awkward?” She heard the smile in his voice, and irony that was gentle, not bitter. “Like…hell is awkward, you mean?”

So, he thinks seeing me again after two solid years is hell? Well, good. I’m glad.

She was glad. So why did she feel a need to grit her teeth and swallow hard before she could answer him?

“Yeah, well…I’m gonna need to know if you’re okay with it. If you’re not, just say the word. When we get to Zamboanga—”

“Of course I can handle it,” he said softly.

Of course he can handle it, she thought, sarcastically. He’d handle it the way he handled everything. Like a journalist, clear-eyed and objective, but careful to keep himself one step removed from the messy stuff. Stuff like…emotional turmoil. And pain. It was the way he’d handled Iraq and its aftermath, wasn’t it? And probably all sorts of stuff that had happened to him in his distant past he’d never been willing to talk about to anyone, not even her.

Seconds ticked by in silence, while the farmlands and forests of Mindanao unfolded slowly below them.

“So, tell me,” Sam said in a falsely bright, conversational voice, shaking off the strangling sense of futility that had coiled around her, “how’s Karen these days?”

She heard his sharp hiss of exasperation and felt her cheeks heat with a weird mixture of triumph and shame. What was it that made her want to needle him? The forlorn hope he might lose his cool? That was never going to happen. And even if it did, what would that accomplish?

At least I’d know he cared. That I’d hurt him, maybe a fraction as badly as he hurt me.

Okay, the devil made me do it….

“For God’s sake, Samantha,” he said in a weary voice.

“What?” She threw him a wounded look. “She was your wife for…what was it, a whole year? Knowing you, I’m sure the divorce was amicable. You probably keep in touch, exchange Christmas cards…all that stuff, right?” She lifted a shoulder and turned her eyes back to the horizon. “I was just wondering how she was doing. She looked like a nice person. I wish her well.” Sure you do. You wish her in hell, is what you mean.

“How do you know what she looks like?” Cory’s voice sounded idly curious, remote and far away.

“I saw the wedding pictures you guys sent Mom and Dad. She looked…happy. So did you.” She looked over at him, chin lifted in defense against the suffocating pain in her throat and chest. “So, what happened, anyway?”

He was maneuvering himself carefully around the controls and out of the copilot’s seat and didn’t reply.

“Hey,” she said in mock dismay, “we’re still a half hour out. You don’t have to go back to your seat yet.”

“Yeah, I do,” he said flatly. “If you think I’m going to discuss my failed marriage with you, you’re crazy.” With one hand on the back of the right-hand seat, the other on hers, he paused as if listening to a replay of what he’d said inside his own head. Then he added in a softer tone, “Not now, anyway. I guess we are going to have to talk, but this isn’t the time or the place.”

It wasn’t until he’d left the cockpit and was on his way back to his seat that Sam realized her heart was pounding. And that she felt shivery inside—a purely feminine kind of weakness she hadn’t felt in…oh, years and years. Well, two, to be exact. Which happened to be the last time she’d spoken face-to-face with Cory Pearson.

Feminine weaknesses—or any other kind, for that matter—she surely did not need. Lord help her, especially not now.

Well, hellfire and damnation—as Great-Grannie Calhoun might have said—what was she supposed to do? She hadn’t expected to feel so much, not after all this time.

Tony’s stare followed Cory down the aisle and into his seat.

“Don’t even think about asking,” Cory warned in a hard, flat voice that carried over the loud click of his seat belt.

Tony promptly closed his mouth. A moment later, though, he opened it again to say, jabbing a finger at Cory for emphasis, “Okay, but just so you know, the minute we get to Zamboanga, it’s the brews first, then the buzz. I mean it, man. The whole story. Or you can find yourself another cameraman. Swear to God.”

Cory put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

He wasn’t worried about losing his photographer. In addition to being a close personal friend, Tony’d have to be comatose and chained to a bunker before he’d miss this assignment. But he was right—the three of them were going to be depending on each other for a lot during the next week or so, including, possibly, their lives. They were a team, for better or worse. Tony deserved to know about his history with the third member of the team—some of it, anyway.

Definitely not everything.

God, how it all came back to him, the way things had been with Sam and him. Every laugh, every tear, every heart-thumping, gut-twisting, sweaty detail. The chemistry—the fireworks—had been there from the first moment for both of them, although he’d done a pretty good job—heroic, he thought, considering what he was up against—of holding it at bay for as long as he had.

There’d been the age thing, of course, but Sam hadn’t wanted to hear about that. Far as she was concerned she was a grown-up woman of legal consenting age, and that was that. Didn’t help matters, either, that her mother had been the same age when she’d met and fallen in love with her dad.

Then there’d been Cory’s friendship with Tristan, forged during those hellish days spent together in an Iraqi prison. Tris hadn’t been happy when his baby girl, the daughter he still remembered as a ponytailed tomboy, had declared her intention of dating a thirty-two-year-old friend of her father’s. Cory had been fighting a strong sense of guilt about that the weekend he’d gone to visit Tris, Jessie and Sam at the lake house. Memorial Day weekend, it had been. Lord, how well he remembered that terrible day….

It’s been a beautiful day. Last night’s thunderstorms have moved on, and the skies have cleared to a typically hot, hazy, sun-shiny summer afternoon. The lake is crowded with boats of all kinds, shapes and sizes: pontoons loaded with partying lake-dwellers waving to neighbors on their docks, flat-bottomed bass boats with solitary fishermen stoically riding out the chop in quiet coves, lots of other ski-boats, and of course the Wave Runners and Jet Skis, zipping illegally in and out amongst them all.

In the midst of all the chaos, Sam is determined to teach me to water-ski. I’ve never considered myself particularly talented when it comes to sports, but she’s patient—or stubborn—and it seems as if I might be getting the hang of it, finally. I’ve gotten up—again—and this time it feels like I might stay here awhile. Tris is driving the boat, while Jess sits watching me from the spotter’s seat in the rear, and Sam rides beside me on her knee board. Above the hiss of the water’s spray I can hear her shouting encouragement and praise.

He remembered the feel of the goofy grin on his face, the breathless exhilaration when he successfully jumped the wake.

He remembered the two kids on the Jet Ski, a boy and a girl riding tandem, cutting in close…too close.

I hit the water with that stinging thump that’s become all too familiar to me this day, and I hear Sam’s yell and Jessie’s whoop, and the sound of the boat’s motor throttling down, then circling slowly back to me. Jess leans over the back of the boat, calling to me, asking if I’m ready to call it quits.

That’s when it happens.

I don’t see the accident, none of us do, except maybe Tristan. But we all hear it—that terrible grinding crunch. I hear Tris shout as he guns the boat, and then he’s heading away from me toward the mouth of a nearby cove. Far off across the roiling surface of the water I can see the teenagers’ Jet Ski floating at a crazy angle next to a capsized bass boat.

Then I’m swimming, swimming toward the wreck, swimming as hard as I’ve ever swum in my life before, and my heart feels like it’s on fire in my chest.

I hear Jessie screaming at Tris, and the sound of a splash as Tris hits the water. And after what seems an eternity, I see Tris’s head reappear, and next to it that of the unconscious fisherman. I feel an awful jolt of adrenaline shoot through me a moment later when I see both Tris and the fisherman slowly sink back beneath the surface of that muddy water.

A thought flashes through my mind: No! No way he survived eight years in an Iraqi prison to die in this godforsaken pond. No way!

That’s when I haul in air and dive.

Things become confused…I’m operating on instinct.

I’m underwater, I feel something…I grab hold of it. It’s Tris, and I grab hold of him and try to fight my way back to the surface. And I realize I’m fighting a losing battle because Tris still has a death grip on the bass fisherman and isn’t about to let go.

I think, God help us, we’re all going to drown.

And then…my head’s above water, and I see Sam, plowing toward us through the water on her knee board, digging hard with both arms and yelling and cussing like a maniac, and she’s shoving life preservers at me, and her strong hands are everywhere, helping me, lifting Tris, pulling them both up out of the water.

There’s a lot of yelling and thrashing around, and everything is gasping, coughing, choking, sobbing pandemonium….

In spite of the confusion, some images stayed clear in his mind: Sam treading water while breathing into the fisherman’s mouth. Jess doing the same for the teenaged boy in the bottom of the boat while she sobbed and swore furiously at Tris between breaths. Tris clinging to the side of the boat, gasping for breath and glancing over at Cory with haunted eyes.

Later that evening, after paramedics had flown the three accident victims off to the hospital in a medevac chopper, after Tris and Jess, Sam and Cory had all showered and eaten and calm had been restored, Sam and Cory took the boat and went out again onto the now-serene and all but deserted lake. To watch the sunset, Sam said, but Cory had known her real reason for wanting to get out of the house was to give her mom and dad some privacy. They’d been having a rough time of it since Tris’s return from the dead, Cory knew. It was Jess’s concern about her husband that had led her to call Cory, to ask for help from the one person she felt might understand what Tris was going through.

How well he remembered that night, too, and what a strange contradiction there seemed to be between the peace and quiet of tranquil water reflecting sunset clouds…the first and brightest star of evening…and the sense inside himself that something profound had happened to him this day. That being here with this woman, a milestone had been passed in his life, one equal in import and magnitude to his parents’ death and his sojourn in Iraq, one that would change the direction of his life irrevocably.

“Look,” Sam says, “there’s the Wishing Star.”

She tells me, then, how she wished on that star when she was a little girl, and she tells me the poem and we recite it together: “Starlight, star bright, first star I’ve seen tonight…”

“What did you wish for?” I ask her, smiling, thinking how very young she is.

“Uh-uh. You’re not supposed to tell. Otherwise, it won’t come true.” And she smiles and tilts her face up to mine.

It was then, in that moment, that he’d forgotten any thoughts he’d ever had about how young she was. He’d remembered instead her strength and her courage. He’d remembered her intelligence and sensitivity, her stubbornness and arrogance and husky, sexy laughter. And he’d lowered his head and kissed her.

Oh, how he remembered that kiss.

What do I expect—something sweet and innocent and virginal, maybe? Instead…I find myself lost. Lost in a sensual jungle…lush, humid, beautiful, exhilarating…terrifying. I’m afraid I may never escape; I don’t want to, really. But at the same time I’m afraid, as inside me I feel battlements I’ve spent a lifetime erecting begin to shiver and quake.

It takes all my wits and will, but I fight my way free, and I’m thinking, How am I ever going to hold out against this?

And I think, Tristan, my friend, I’m sorry—forgive me—but I’m afraid I’ve fallen in love with your daughter….

He had held out for a lot longer than he’d believed possible, though he hadn’t been able to make Sam understand why, even with her long, silky body warm and soft against his, her strong fingers tracing paths on his skin for her eager mouth to follow, when all her woman’s instincts and the evidence of her senses told her how much he wanted her, he could still refuse to take her to bed.

Sam hadn’t understood, that night on the lake…a night and a kiss so beautiful, so full of sweetness and hope and promise it had made his soul ache. It was only the first of God-knew-how-many times he’d disappointed her.

Chapter 3

“Okay, I just wanna know one thing.” Tony wiped beer from his lips with the back of his hand and leaned back in his chair. “If you still had a thing for this Sam chick, why in the hell did you marry Karen?”

Cory watched the waiter in his white tunic and black slacks weave his way between tables on his way back to the bar. “Boy, you don’t mess around, do you?” he said mildly. “Straight for the throat.”

“Whatever works,” Tony said, burping agreeably.

Cory picked up his beer glass and sipped, then reconsidered and took a couple of hefty gulps. Talking about personal stuff—his personal stuff—never had come easy for him; he figured priming the pump a little couldn’t hurt.

He coughed, frowned and said, “It’s not that simple.”

“Never is.” Tony nodded at him in a so-go-on kind of way. “Quit stalling.”

Instead of replying, Cory shifted around in his chair, ran a hand through his hair and swore under his breath.

“Okay,” Tony said, sitting forward and planting his forearms on the table, “I’ll get you started. You met this…”

“Samantha.”

“Yeah. You met Samantha right after you came back from Iraq, right? And it was love at first sight. Dyn-o-mite. So that’d make it…” he counted on his fingers “…six—no, seven—years later you married Karen. I have to assume you dated the lady some before you popped the question. So, what were you doing during the previous six years? Were you and Samantha together all that time?”

“We dated,” Cory hedged, scrubbing a hand over his eyes. “Off and on…”

“Dated…as in, dinner and a movie? Or dated…as in, you give her a drawer in your apartment and she keeps your aftershave on her sink?” Cory glared at him. “Hey, you were sleeping with her, right?” Tony waggled a finger back and forth like a tiny windshield wiper. “Look, man, the kind of sexual tension I been pickin’ up here, that doesn’t come from nothin’. So gimme a break, okay?”

There was a pause while Cory drank more beer, then pursed his lips, steeling himself. “There were long periods when we didn’t see each other,” he said at last, in a voice Tony had to lean closer to hear. “She was in school in Georgia, I was working out of New York, on assignment a lot of the time. When we did manage to get together, it was like we’d never been apart. Couldn’t keep our hands off each other. It was…” he waved a helpless hand “…like touching a match to fireworks. Like dropping a torch in dry tinder. Like that. We couldn’t seem to help ourselves.”

Tony stared at him for a moment—probably in shock, Cory thought, to hear him give up so much personal stuff at once, and so easily. Then belatedly he nodded, as if in sympathy. Cory glanced at him, shifted in his seat and forced himself to go on.

“Then, the time together would end, she’d go back to Georgia, I’d go back to New York, we’d resume our lives. She had hers, I had mine. Not,” he said wryly, “that I didn’t spend a lot of my time thinking about her when I wasn’t with her. I’d like to think she spent some time thinking about me.” He paused for an absentminded sip of beer. “I never asked her whether or not she dated anyone else when we were apart. I have to assume she did.”

“Tough way to run a relationship,” Tony offered, shaking his head in sympathy.

Cory nodded, then shrugged. “We both had other things on our minds, I guess. For me, I think it was a case of…I was just biding my time, keeping busy, traveling a lot, waiting for her to finish school. In the back of my mind was always the thought that once she graduated, we’d find a way to work things so we could have a more…I don’t know, steady relationship.” Once again the wry grin stretched the unwilling muscles in his face. “As it turned out, she had other ideas.”

Tony was nodding, hunched over his beer, apparently staring at the front of Cory’s shirt. “Things to see…places to go…people to…uh.”

“Something like that.” Cory lifted his beer glass, discovered it was empty and signaled the waiter with it instead. “Her big thing was, she had her heart set on being a pilot, like her dad. Her mom wasn’t going to hear of her joining the military, so off she went to flight school. Didn’t take her long to get her private pilot’s license, and again I thought…okay, maybe now. But after that…” He frowned, distracted by the waiter’s approach. When their order for two more of the same had been taken and the waiter had gone away again, he resumed. “After flight school, she pretty much disappeared for a while.”

“Wait a minute. Disappeared? As in…went missing? That’s kind of freaky.”

“As in, dropped out of sight. Out of my life. Oh, I’d get phone calls from her. Sometimes she’d e-mail me. Always full of how much she…how much she missed me. But also how much she loved what she was doing, how exciting it all was, and that it was what she’d always wanted to do. And if I happened to have some free time, let’s say, and suggested we get together, she was always off somewhere ‘training.’ Well, hell,” he added bitterly as the waiter arrived with two fresh glasses of beer, “a man can only take so much.”

“You got that right,” said Tony stoutly, lifting his new glass in a salute.

When the waiter had been disposed of, Cory claimed his glass and leaned in, in a companionable sort of way. He’d been right about the beer; telling his story was definitely getting easier. “I mean, I’d been waiting for the woman for five years. Then, too, I wasn’t getting any younger. You know, I was in my late thirties, approaching middle age, and I’m feeling like there’s something missing in my life. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to be settling down, cut down on the travel, have some kids before I’m too old to enjoy ’em. You know?”