rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_cb3433d5-ec07-589f-96e3-24ce69f0e486"> PROLOGUE
It was like being hit by a professional linebacker.
The man barreled down the stairs and bulldozed right into Sydney, nearly knocking her onto her rear end.
To add insult to injury, he mistook her for a man.
“Sorry, bud,” he tossed back over his shoulder as he kept going down the stairs.
She heard the front door of the apartment building open and then slam shut.
It was the perfect end to the evening. Girls’ night out—plural—had turned into girl’s night out—singular. Bette had left a message on Syd’s answering machine announcing that she couldn’t make it to the movies tonight. Something had come up. Something that was no doubt, six-foot-three, broad-shouldered, wearing a cowboy hat and named Scott or Brad or Wayne.
And Syd had received a call from Hilary on her cell phone as she was pulling into the multiplex parking lot. Her excuse for cancelling was a kid with a fever of one hundred and two.
Turning around and going home would have been too depressing. So Syd had gone to the movie alone. And ended up even more depressed.
The show had been interminably long and pointless, with buff young actors flexing their way across the screen. She’d alternately been bored by the story and embarrassed, both for the actors and for herself, for being fascinated by the sheer breathtaking perfection of their bodies.
Men like that—or like the football player who’d nearly knocked her over—didn’t date women like Sydney Jameson.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t physically attractive, because she was. Or at least she could be when she bothered to do more than run a quick comb through her hair. Or when she bothered to dress in something other than the baggy shirts and loose-fitting, comfortable jeans that were her standard apparel—and that allowed the average Neanderthal rushing past her down the stairs to mistake her for a man. Of course, she comforted herself, the dimness of the 25-watt bulbs that the landlord, Mr. El Cheap-o Thompkins, had installed in the hallway light fixtures hadn’t helped.
Syd trudged up the stairs to the third floor. This old house had been converted to apartments in the late 1950s. The top floor—formerly the attic—had been made into two units, both of which were far more spacious than anyone would have thought from looking at the outside of the building.
She stopped on the landing.
The door to her neighbor’s apartment was ajar.
Gina Sokoloski. Syd didn’t know her next-door neighbor that well. They’d passed on the stairs now and then, signed for packages when the other wasn’t home, had brief conversations about such thrilling topics as the best time of year for cantaloupe.
Gina was young and shy—not yet twenty years old—and a student at the junior college. She was plain and quiet and rarely had visitors, which suited Syd just fine after living for eight months next door to the frat boys from hell.
Gina’s mother had come by once or twice—one of those tidy, quietly rich women who wore a giant diamond ring and drove a car that cost more than Syd could make in three very good years as a freelance journalist.
The he-man who’d barrelled down the stairs wasn’t what Syd would have expected a boyfriend of Gina’s to look like. He was older than Gina by about ten years, too, but this could well be more proof that opposites did, indeed, attract.
This old building made so many weird noises during the night. Still, she could’ve sworn she’d heard a distinctly human sound coming from Gina’s apartment. Syd stepped closer to the open door and peeked in, but the apartment was completely dark. “Gina?”
She listened harder. There it was again. A definite sob. No doubt the son of a bitch who’d nearly knocked her over had just broken up with Gina. Leave it to a man to be in such a hurry to be gone that he’d leave the door wide open.
“Gina, your door’s unlatched. Is everything okay in here?” Syd knocked more loudly as she pushed the door open even farther.
The dim light from the hallway shone into the living room and…
The place was trashed. Furniture knocked over, lamps broken, a bookshelf overturned. Dear God, the man hurrying down the stairs hadn’t been Gina’s boyfriend. He’d been a burglar.
Or worse…
Hair rising on the back of her neck, Syd dug through her purse for her cell phone. Please God, don’t let Gina have been home. Please God, let that funny little sound be the ancient swamp cooler or the pipes or the wind wheezing through the vent in the crawl space between the ceiling and the eaves….
But then she heard it again. It was definitely a muffled whimper.
Syd’s fingers closed around her phone as she reached with her other hand for the light switch on the wall by the door. She flipped it on.
And there, huddled in the corner of her living room, her face bruised and bleeding, her clothing torn and bloody, was Gina.
Syd locked the door behind her and dialed 911.
All early-morning conversation in Captain Joe Catalanotto’s outer office stopped dead as everyone turned to look at Lucky.
It was a festival of raised eyebrows and opened mouths. The astonishment level wouldn’t have been any higher if Lieutenant Luke “Lucky” O’Donlon of SEAL Team Ten’s Alpha Squad had announced he was quitting the units to become a monk.
All the guys were staring at him—Jones and Blue and Skelly. A flash of surprise had even crossed Crash Hawken’s imperturbable face. Frisco was there, too, having come out of a meeting with Joe and Harvard, the team’s senior chief. Lucky had caught them all off guard. It would’ve been funny—except he wasn’t feeling much like laughing.
“Look, it’s no big deal,” Lucky said with a shrug, wishing that simply saying the words would make it so, wishing he could feel as nonchalant as he sounded.
No one said a word. Even recently promoted Chief Wes Skelly was uncharacteristically silent. But Lucky didn’t need to be telepathic to know what his teammates were thinking.
He’d lobbied loud and long for a chance to be included in Alpha Squad’s current mission—a covert assignment for which Joe Cat himself didn’t even know the details. He’d only been told to ready a five-man team to insert somewhere in Eastern Europe; to prepare to depart at a moment’s notice, prepare to be gone for an undetermined amount of time.
It was the kind of assignment guaranteed to get the heart pumping and adrenaline running, the kind of assignment Lucky lived for.
And Lucky had been one of the chosen few. Just yesterday morning he’d done a victory dance when Joe Cat had told him to get his gear ready to go. Yet here he was, barely twenty-four hours later, requesting reassignment, asking the captain to count him out—and to call in some old favors to get him temporarily assigned to a not-so-spine-tingling post at the SEAL training base here in Coronado, effective ASAP.
Lucky forced a smile. “It’s not like you’ll have trouble replacing me, Captain.” He glanced at Jones and Skelly who were both practically salivating at the thought of doing just that.
The captain gestured with his head toward his office, completely unfooled by Lucky’s pretense at indifference. “You want to step inside and tell me what this is all about?”
Lucky didn’t need the privacy. “It’s no big secret, Cat. My sister’s getting married in a few weeks. If I leave on this assignment, there’s a solid chance I won’t be back in time.”
Wes Skelly couldn’t keep his mouth shut a second longer.