She sighed and turned to face him again. “Quickly, Ken,” she begged. “We’ve got a seven o’clock meeting scheduled at the police station. I’m not a morning person, and I’m even less of a morning person when I get fewer than six hours of sleep.”
“I’m going to follow you home,” he told her. “When you go up to your apartment, flash your light a few times so I know everything’s okay, all right?”
Syd didn’t get it. “You don’t even like me. Why the concern?”
Lucky smiled. “I never said I didn’t like you. I just don’t want you on my team. Those are two very different things.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“SIT ON THE COUCH—or in the chair,” Dr. Lana Quinn directed Sydney. “Wherever you think you’ll be more comfortable.”
“I appreciate your finding the time to do this on such short notice,” Lucky said.
“You got lucky,” Lana told him with a smile. “Wes called right after my regular one o’clock cancelled. I was a little surprised actually—it’s been a while since I’ve heard from him.”
Lucky didn’t know the pretty young psychologist very well. She was married to a SEAL named Wizard with whom he’d never worked. But Wizard had been in the same BUD/S class with Bobby and Wes, and the three men had remained close. And when Lucky had stopped Wes in the hall to inquire jokingly if he knew a hypnotist, Wes had surprised him by saying, yes, as a matter of fact, he did.
“How is Wes?” Lana asked.
Lucky was no shrink himself, but the question was just a little too casual.
She must have realized the way her words had sounded and hastened to explain. “He was in such a rush when he called, I didn’t even have time to ask. We used to talk on the phone all the time back when my husband was in Team Six, you know, when he was gone more often than not—I think it was because Wes and I both missed Quinn. And after he transferred back to California, back to Team Ten, Wes kind of dropped out of touch.”
“Wes is doing good—just made chief,” Lucky told her.
“That’s great,” Lana enthused—again just a little too enthusiastically. “Congratulate him for me, will you?”
Lucky was not an expert by any means, but he didn’t have to be an expert to know there was more to that story than Lana was telling. Not that he believed for one minute that Wes would’ve had an affair with the wife of one of his best friends. No, Wes Skelly was a caveman in a lot of ways, but his code of honor was among the most solid Lucky had ever known.
It did make perfect sense, though, for Wes to have done something truly stupid, like fall in love with his good friend’s wife. And if that had happened, Wes would have dropped out of Lana’s life like a stone. And Lucky suspected she knew that, psychologist that she was.
God, life was complicated. And it was complicated enough without throwing marriage and its restrictions into the picture. He was never getting married, thank you very much.
It was a rare day that went by without Lucky reminding himself of that—in fact, it was his mantra. Never getting married. Never getting married.
Yet lately—particularly as he watched Frisco with his wife, Mia, and Blue with Lucy, and even the captain, Joe Cat, who’d been married to his wife, Veronica, longer than any of the other guys in Alpha Squad, Lucky had felt…
Envy.
God, he hated to admit it, but he was a little jealous. When Frisco draped his arm around Mia’s shoulder, or when she came up behind him and rubbed his shoulders after a long day. When Lucy stopped in at the crowded, busy Alpha Squad office and Blue would look across the room and smile, and she’d smile back. Or Joe Cat. Calling Veronica every chance he got, from a pay phone in downtown Paris, from the Australian outback after a training op. He’d lower his voice, but Lucky had overheard far more than once. Hey babe, ya miss me? God, I miss you….
Lucky had come embarrassingly close to getting a lump in his throat more than once.
Despite his rather desperate-sounding mantra, Joe and Blue and Frisco and all of the other married SEALs made the perils of commitment look too damn good.
As Lucky watched, across the room Sydney perched on the very edge of the couch, arms folded tightly across her chest as she looked around Lana’s homey office. She didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to be hypnotized. Her body language couldn’t be any more clear.
He settled into the chair across from her. “Thanks for agreeing to this.”
He could see her trepidation in the tightness of her mouth as she shook her head. “I don’t think it’s going to work.”
“Yeah, well, maybe it will.”
“Don’t be too disappointed if it doesn’t.”
She was afraid of failing. Lucky could understand that. Failure was something he feared as well.
“Why don’t you take off your jacket,” Lana suggested to Sydney. “Get loose—unbutton your shirt a little, roll up your sleeves. I want you to try to get as comfortable as possible. Kick off your boots, try to relax.”
“I don’t think this is going to work,” Sydney said again, this time to Lana, as she slipped her arms out of her jacket.
“Don’t worry about that,” Lana told her, sitting down in the chair closest to Sydney. “Before we go any further, I want to tell you that my methods are somewhat unconventional. But I have had some degree of success working with victims of crimes, helping them clarify the order and details of certain traumatic or frightening events, so bear with me. And again, there’s no guarantee that this will work, but we’ve got a better shot at it if you try to be open-minded.”
Syd nodded tightly. “I’m trying.”
She was. Lucky had to give her that. She didn’t want to be here, didn’t have to be here, yet here she was.
“Let’s start with you telling me what you felt when you encountered the man on the stairs,” Lana said. “Did you see him coming, or were you startled by him?”
“I heard the clatter of his footsteps,” Syd told her as she unfastened first one, then two, then three buttons on her shirt.
Lucky looked away, aware that he was watching her, aware that he didn’t want her to stop at three, remembering with a sudden alarming clarity the way she had felt when he’d held her in his arms. She’d tasted so sweet and hot and…
Lucky was dressed in his summer uniform, and he resisted the urge to loosen his own collar. He was overheating far too often these days. He should have called Heather after following Syd home last night. He should have called and groveled. Chances are she would have let him in.
But he’d gone home instead. He’d swum about four hundred laps in his pool, trying to curb his restlessness, blaming it on the fact that Alpha Squad was out there, in the real world, while he’d been left behind.
“He was moving fast,” Syd continued. “He clearly didn’t see me, and I couldn’t get out of his way.”
“Were you frightened?” Lana asked.
Syd thought about that, chewing for a moment on her lower lip. “More like alarmed,” she said. “He was big. But I wasn’t afraid of him because I thought he was dangerous. It was more like the flash of fear you get when a car swerves into your lane and there’s nowhere to go to avoid hitting it.”
“Picture the moment that you first heard him coming,” Lana suggested, “and try to flip it into slow motion. You hear him, then you see him. What are you thinking? Right at that second when you first spot him coming down the stairs?”
Syd