Maverick Read online

  Right now, their best bet was to lie low, be prepared, and hope that whatever drama the Makongan Army and the Red Army had going would work itself out without involving the US.

  Claire drew up her legs, clasping them and laying her cheek against her knees. She heaved a huge sigh.

  “I just hope to God this all blows over soon before it hits the international news. My father will have a heart attack if he hears that there’s a revolution on the streets of Laka. He’ll be making arrangements to come over the instant he hears there’s trouble, which is not good. He’s almost eighty and has a heart condition. I just hope to reassure him I’m okay before he gets the news that he should be worrying. All the cell phone towers are down, otherwise I’d have called him already.” She looked up at him. “How about you? Who’s going to be worrying about you?”

  Worry about him? Jesus. No one. His job was to worry about the safety of the Ambassador and his family, the Embassy staff, and his men. In that order.

  The idea of anyone worrying about him was crazy. Even as a kid, he’d learned the hard way to be tough and self-sufficient. Dan couldn’t remember anyone worrying about him, ever.

  “No one. But that’s okay. I can handle myself.”

  “No one?” she persisted, her eyes searching his face. “Not a mom or a girlfriend?”

  Dan nearly snorted. The women he bedded were way more concerned about their own pleasure than his well-being. “Mom disappeared when I was two. I don’t remember her. And no—" He looked down at her, at the smooth, high cheekbones, long lashes, beautiful mouth. It was impossible to remember any other woman he’d ever been with while looking at her. “Don’t have a girlfriend. Being a Marine Embassy Security Guard isn’t conducive to relationships.”

  Dan was brave. He knew he was brave. He’d been tested under fire and had held. After this posting, he was going to be reintegrated into his unit and would probably be sent to the frontlines wherever he was needed and he was fine with that, fine. So nobody could say he was a coward.

  But right now, his palms were sweating, and he felt like a blowtorch had been applied to his throat at the thought of what he was about to ask. Had to ask. Because he simply had to know.

  “And—" his voice came out a croak. He coughed to loosen his throat. “And what about you? Is there, um—" Jesus. What to call the bastard she might be with? ‘Boyfriend’ sounded lame, like high school. Significant other? Nah. “Someone?” he ended lamely.

  This was a question he’d asked a thousand times in bars, because he had some hard-and-fast rules for his sex life, written in stone.

  No bareback sex, ever. No married women, ever. Or engaged women. Not even women who were going out with someone else.

  He didn’t need the hassle of fighting with another male over a woman. And most of all, anyone who cheated once with him would cheat again on him.

  So at around the third or fourth drink, if they’d gotten to the point where he knew they’d be heading out together, he made sure she was a free agent.

  Bars around military bases are full of chicks who want to party even when their men are away, and aren’t too particular whom they party with. It sickened him, to think of some man off defending his country, while his woman was out trolling for sex. If he got even a whiff of that, he was history.

  It was really hard to think of Claire not being with someone, or engaged. Or hell, even married. What the fuck were men thinking? How could any man be around her for even a minute and not want her for his own?

  And yet, scuttlebutt—and Dan kept his ear very close to the ground—had it she was single.

  God, he hoped so.

  If she was with someone, he’d just had himself posted to Laka for nothing, and was going to waste a year of his life in West Africa. If she was with someone, all these… things roiling around in his chest, all this obsessive thinking about her this past year, was bad news. Really bad news.

  Showdown time.

  But she only blinked and looked blank. “Someone?” she asked. “Me?” She gave a half laugh. “What you said was absolutely true, Gunnery Sergeant—"

  “Dan.” His heart had taken a leap in his chest at her blank look, and he had to breathe carefully to get it to steady out.

  “Dan. Okay, right. Well, Dan, I’ve lived in Durban, Singapore, and now Laka over the past six years. No man would put up with that.”

  I would, he thought.

  Her eyes seemed to glow in the room when she looked at him. “I guess it’s a little like being a Marine Security Guard.”

  Dan looked at her hands, long-fingered, fragile, soft, with small wrists. Her shoulders and torso were narrow, the line of her collar-bones delicate. The long, pale-blonde hair completely unlike his own dark brown high-and-tight.

  She spent her days—and more hours in those days than she was supposed to—in a windowless secure room doing God knows what on computers. Everything she did, she did with her head. And pretty as it was, he knew she was smarter than she was beautiful, which was saying a lot.

  He thought of his men. Ward, Martinez, Buchan, Harvey, and Lopez. Tough bastards, hell with a rifle, hard drinkers, good to have at your back, but light years away from being like Claire Day.

  No, she wasn’t anything like a Marine Security Guard.

  He scrolled back in his head to what she’d said earlier. “Tell me about your father.”

  “Dad?” The thought of her father made her smile. Good. Dan sure couldn’t smile at the thought of his own father, the bastard. He still had the scars.

  “Yeah. You smile when you mention him. That’s nice.”

  “He’s a great dad,” she mused, picking at a thread of her tan cotton pants. In the rush to hustle her into the safe quarters of Post One, her pants had caught on a protruding nail from one of the billion unfinished or botched restructuring projects going on in the Embassy. There was a big rip just above the knee.

  Underneath, Dan could see smooth white skin. He closed his eyes for a moment. He was here to protect her, not to get all hot and bothered because he saw several square inches of skin. No matter how soft and beautiful.

  “Yeah?” he prodded. Get the conversation back to something that would cool him down, like her father. “What’s he do?”

  “He’s a—he was a professor of French literature. At University of Massachusetts Boston. He’s retired. Has been for a long time.”

  “I thought I heard some Boston in there.” Dan frowned. He had a pretty good ear for accents, and could usually pick out where new recruits came from. “Not much, though. A Boston accent is usually a pretty strong regional accent, but yours isn’t very strong.”

  She nodded. “You’re good. Got a good ear. We lived in Boston until I was thirteen, but we spent all our summers in France, where Dad did his research. Well… research.” She wrinkled her nose. “Research coupled with eating our way through the country while he was doing it.” She smiled, obviously thinking of happy memories, then her face clouded over. “We had a pretty good time until my… my mom was killed. In a mugging. Just one of those wrong-time, wrong-place things that make no sense whatsoever and rip your heart out. It was really… hard. I think my dad went a little crazy for a few years afterwards. He took early retirement when I was fifteen, and we moved down to Florida, to a town called Safety Harbor.” The smile was back, only sadder. “I think he chose the town for its name, but it’s a pretty place and it is quite safe, which was exactly what Dad was looking for. A place where nothing bad would ever happen again. My dad, he’s—he’s overprotective. He couldn’t stand the thought of losing me after mom was killed, and I understood what he was trying to do, so I just went along with him. I was studious anyway, so basically, I went to school and then came home, where I was always doing extra homework. I took a correspondence course from a French Lycée and got my baccalaureate at the same time I graduated from high school. Then I buried myself in my studies at college, with a double major in French and Political Science. When I graduated, I sort of took a deep b
reath, looked up from my books, and realized that I hadn’t done much else but study since I was 15 years old. And I realized I wanted more out of life. I wanted to travel. I wanted to stretch myself. I wanted to do something exciting, something adventurous, you know?”

  She looked up at him and he nodded. He knew, though that wasn’t why he’d joined the Marines. He’d joined because it had been either military service or juvie or an early, violent death. Still, joining up was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  A lot of his men, however, had joined out of boredom and a sense of adventure. Which made them smart because you never got bored in the Marines and if you could stay alive, it was a hell of an adventure.

  Another burst of gunfire, louder and longer. They were bringing out the heavy artillery. Dan could hear the deep, sharp sounds of a .50 calibre machine gun, probably mounted onto the back of a Jeep.

  “Fifty cal,” he said, just as she said, “Sounds like a .50 calibre machine gun.”

  Fifty cals were bad news.

  She clasped her hands around her knees again, bringing her legs up closer to her torso in an unconscious move to protect herself. It was the animal in her wanting to present a smaller target, but however great her instincts were, they were absolutely useless against a .50 cal bullet.

  Everything in the building was useless against a .50 cal, including the thick stucco walls of the Embassy and the bullet-resistant walls of Post One. They’d crumple in a heartbeat. If the machine gun was close enough, a .50 cal could go right through the building, front to back, smashing through everything in its way. One 120-lb female would be no barrier at all. She’d simply explode.

  Claire blew out the breath she’d been holding while the burst lasted. “Yeah, well, this is kind of Dad’s nightmare. If we make it, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  That he could help her with. “You’ll make it,” he said quietly. “As long as I’m alive, you’ll make it. That’s a promise.” Certainly he wouldn’t let her fall into the rebel army’s hands. That was a promise too, though he made it to himself, not her.

  She swivelled her head towards him so fast a little cloud of her perfume puffed out from her skin. Another long, thick lock of pale blonde hair fell out of the French braid, curling along her shoulder.

  Without thinking about it, because if he had let what he was about to do rise up to the thinking part of his brain, he would never have had the nerve, Dan lifted his hand to curl the lock around her ear. The back of his knuckles brushed against the soft skin of her neck and he wanted to close his eyes to savor the feeling. But if he closed them, he’d miss what was flaring in her eyes.

  Clear, crystalline, the silvery color of sun on sea. And startled, as if seeing something she’d never noticed before. In that second, Dan knew, she saw him as a man, not a Marine.

  He’d been in uniform all his adult life, and was used to people seeing the uniform, and not the man underneath.

  If you were a civilian, he was a faceless, generic soldier—a useful tool to keep you safe. Tucked away in the shitholes of the world so things could go smoothly at home.

  And if you were a bad guy, well, hell—with the full force of the Corps behind him, he represented a world of hurt behind a rifle.

  Women came in two types. Military groupies, who got off on the uniform and the weapons—how many men have you killed? was a question he got all the time from the groupies—and women who thought soldiers were loudmouthed roughnecks, totally unsuitable as dates.

  Women like Claire—beautiful, sophisticated, smart—well, women like that just steered around him as if he were invisible, like a glorified servant. Women like Claire rarely saw him, the man inside.

  She was seeing him now, no doubt about it. They were in a situation that could turn desperate in a heartbeat. They were holed up inside a building that was breachable, while what sounded like an army of thousands was shooting up the streets outside.

  So far, no one appeared to be targeting Americans but the Red Army soldiers could turn on a dime and decide to storm the Embassy and then… well, then they’d be lost. He’d go down fighting because that was what Marines did, but he couldn’t stand alone against an army.

  His men were a mile away and might just as well have been on the dark side of the moon. He couldn’t get to them and they couldn’t get to him. And even if he had his men with him, six soldiers, however well-trained, however well-armed, couldn’t beat an army, even the drugged-up, ill-disciplined, and badly-trained Red Army.

  All of that she knew. She was a defense analyst, after all.

  But right now, it looked like she was seeing him and not the uniform. Or rather, the Delta pants and a green tee, since he’d taken his jacket off.

  He was still holding a lock of her hair, his hand against the warmth of her neck. And she wasn’t moving her head away. Which meant…

  He ran the back of his hand lightly against her neck. God, she felt so friggin’ soft. She didn’t move, was hardly breathing, watching him carefully with no expression on her face. But some more of her scent billowed up from her, which meant that her skin was warming.

  Slowly, wondering if he was going to be slapped down, Dan uncurled his hand, sliding it around until he was cupping her neck.

  She wasn’t saying no. She wasn’t saying yes, but she wasn’t saying no. Actually, she wasn’t saying anything at all, but whatever she was feeling, looked like no wasn’t part of it.

  O-kay.

  Watching her eyes, ready to back off any second, Dan bent his head. He watched her until she filled his entire field of vision, until there wasn’t anything at all in the world but Claire, and then he closed his eyes because his mouth was on hers and he wanted to just concentrate on the kiss.

  He didn’t know what he was thinking. Man, he wasn’t thinking at all. The instant his hand touched her, every neuron in his head shorted, because being under siege with a rebel army not 100 yards away, firing live rounds— well, that wasn’t the time or the place to get all hot and bothered over a woman.

  That had never happened before. An op was an op, and though usually being a Marine Security Guard was a softer duty than most, and served mainly to see the world and get a stronger grip on geopolitics, every single Marine who had ever been stationed in an Embassy was fully equipped and fully prepared to engage in the case of threat.

  On duty, Dan was a walking, talking mission, as focused as a laser beam. Once, during a firefight, he was so adrenalized he hadn’t even felt a bullet crease his forearm. It was the medic afterwards who pointed to the blood on his sleeve. He’d ceased to exist as a man and had turned himself into a weapon.

  Not now. Now he wasn’t focused on the danger outside, he was totally swamped with sensations, all of them good. Amazingly good. Nothing whatsoever to do with the dangers outside the Embassy walls.

  God, just the feel of her, warm and soft against him. He’d never felt anything like it. It was like plunging into a warm sea. He let himself float, drifting lazily, her lips moving lightly under his. Everything was suspended. They were in a world without time, no past and no future, just an endless now.

  Every sense he had was focused on where he was touching Claire. He couldn’t hear anything but her breathing, now slightly speeded up. Couldn’t see anything when he cracked his eyes open but her—now-rosy skin, long lashes on her cheekbone, another coil of pale blonde hair curving around to fall between her breasts. Couldn’t feel anything but her—soft and smooth.

  He didn’t even feel the gravity anchoring him to earth. Couldn’t smell anything but Claire. And her taste—ah God. She tasted fresh and slightly minty and absolutely wonderful.

  Then she shifted slightly, opening her mouth more for him and the warmth turned into electric heat, sharp and shocking. His hand on her neck tightened, mouth open against hers, as the kiss turned hot, demanding.

  Dan tried to follow the woman’s lead during sex—and though this was just a kiss, it was sex, too. And way hotter than most of the sex he’d ever
had. If the woman liked it slow, he took it slow. If she liked it hard, then he gave it to her hard. But no matter what, he was always in control.

  Control had just been whipped out of his hands. His heart raced and his hands shook as he turned to deepen the kiss, fisting one hand in her hair, the other, still holding his weapon, braced on the floor, caging her.

  He was coming on too strong, he knew it. He’d taken it from zero to a hundred in a second—there was no way she could keep up, but he was helpless to stop himself as he leaned forward, backing her against the wall.

  He’d been here a thousand times before, in his dreams. During the day, he kept his mind focused on the job and on the fact that she didn’t even know he existed. But during the night, with all restraints hemming in his conscious mind blasted off—ah, his nights were full of her.

  Every time he saw her, he greedily sucked up impressions, so that his dreams were utterly realistic. He knew she rarely exercised—she spent 12 hours a day underground, after all—but still moved with an incredibly lithe grace. He knew that she didn’t take the sun well and just stayed out of it, so she had the faintest of tans over mother-of-pearl skin.

  The rest he extrapolated.

  He knew how she kissed because he kissed her endlessly in his dreams, waking up in a sweaty tangle of sheets and blankets in his small, spare room, aching and hard, with a boner that took a cold shower to get rid of.

  Well, he thought he knew how she kissed and what he would feel kissing her, but he’d been wildly off the mark. The real thing was ten thousand times better. Off-the-scale better.

  Fuck, there was nothing like this. He’d never had this reaction before, utterly helpless to stop himself or to moderate the kiss. If he could have crawled inside her, he would have. His mouth pressed against hers, his whole torso crushing her against the wall behind them, his entire heavy weight leaning into her while he ate at her mouth…

  Shit, this wasn’t good.

  She was whispering to him, trying to say something… God, how could she be talking while his mouth was on hers? Fuck, he shouldn’t be expected to have to think while he was on sensory overload, every sense he had completely taken up with her.