Tall, Dark and Devastating: Harvard's Education

“Believe me, baby, that wasn’t even half as hard as I can get.” He smiled tightly to make sure she caught the double entendre, then lowered his voice. “Just say the word, and I’ll give you a private demonstration.”

Her eyes narrowed, her mouth tightened, and he knew he’d gone too far. “What’s up with you today?”

He started to turn away, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm, unmindful of the fact that his skin was slick with sweat. “Are you all right, Daryl?” she asked quietly. Beneath the flash of anger and impatience in her eyes, he could see her deep concern.

He could handle fighting with her. He wanted to fight with her. The soft warmth of her dark brown eyes only made him feel worse. Now he felt bad, topped with guilt for feeling bad, and he also felt like a certified fool for lashing out at her.

Harvard swore softly. “Sorry, Richards, I was way out of line. Just…go away, okay? I’m not fit to be around today.”

He looked up to find Joe Cat standing behind him. “I’m going to give everyone the rest of the morning free,” the captain told him quietly. “Let’s meet at the Quonset hut after lunch.”

Harvard knew Joe was giving them free time because of him. Joe knew Harvard needed a few hours to clear his head.

He shouldn’t have needed it—he was too experienced, too much of a professional to become a head case at this stage of his life. But before Harvard could argue, Joe Cat walked away.

“You want to take a walk?” P.J. asked Harvard.

He didn’t get a chance to answer before she tugged at his arm. “Let’s go,” she said, gesturing with her chin toward the path they’d run along. She grabbed several bottles of water from her gym bag and handed one to him.

Damn, it was hot. Rivers of perspiration were running down his chest, down his legs, dripping from his chin, beading on his shoulders and arms. He opened the bottle and took a long drink. “What, you want to psychoanalyze me, Richards?”

“Nope. I’m just gonna listen,” she said. “That is, if you want to talk.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“Okay,” she said matter-of-factly. “Then we’ll just walk.”

They walked in silence for an entire mile, then two. But right around the three-mile marker, she took the boardwalk right-of-way that led to the beach. He followed in silence, watching as she sat in the sand and began pulling off her sneakers.

She looked at him. “Wanna go for a swim?”

“Yeah.” He sat next to her and took off his running shoes.

P.J. pulled off her T-shirt. She was wearing a gray running bra underneath. It covered her far better than a bathing suit top would have, but the sight of it, the sight of all that smooth, perfect skin reminded him a hundredfold that he wasn’t taking a walk with one of the boys.

“Look at this,” P.J. said. “I can practically wring my shirt out.”

Harvard tried his best to look. He purposely kept his gaze away from the soft mounds of her breasts outlined beneath the thick gray fabric of her running top. She wasn’t overly endowed, not by any means, but what she had sure was nice.

Her arms and her stomach glistened with perspiration as she leaned forward to peel off her socks. It didn’t take much imagination to picture her lying naked on his bed, her gleaming dark skin set off by the white cotton of his sheets, replete after hours of lovemaking. He tried to banish the image instantly. Thinking like that was only going to get him into trouble.

“Come on,” she said, scrambling to her feet. She held out her hand for him, and he took it and let her pull him up.

He wanted to hold on to her, to lace their fingers together, but she broke away, running fearlessly toward the crashing surf. She dove over the breakers, coming up to float on top of the swells beyond.

Harvard joined her in that place of calm before the breaking ocean. The current was strong, and there was a serious undertow. But P.J. had proven her swimming skills many times over during the past few weeks. He didn’t doubt her ability to hold her own.

She pushed her hair out of her face and adjusted her ponytail. “You know, up until last year, I didn’t know how to swim.”

Harvard was glad the water was holding him up, because otherwise, he would have fallen over. “You’re kidding!”

“I grew up in D.C.,” she told him matter-of-factly. “In the inner city. The one time we moved close enough to the pool at the Y, it was shut down for repairs for eight months. By the time it opened again, we were gone.” She smiled. “When I was really little, I used to pretend to swim in the bathtub.”

“Your mother and father never took you to the beach in the summer to stay cool?”

P.J. laughed as if something he’d said was extremely funny. “No, I never even saw the ocean until I went on a class trip to Delaware in high school. I meant to take swimming lessons in college, but I never got around to it. Then I got assigned to this job. I figured if I were going to be working with Navy SEALs, it’d be a good idea if I knew how to swim. I was right.”

“I learned to swim when I was six,” Harvard told her. “It was the summer I…”

She waited, and when he didn’t go on, she asked, “The summer you what?”

He shook his head.

But she didn’t let it go. “The summer you decided you were going to join the Navy and become a SEAL,” she guessed.

The water felt good against his hot skin. Harvard let himself float. “No, I was certain right up until the time I finished college that I was going to be an English lit professor, just like my old man.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

She squinted at him. “I’m trying to picture you with glasses and one of those jackets with the suede patches on the elbows and maybe even a pipe.” She laughed. “Somehow I can’t manage to erase the M-16 that’s kind of permanently hanging over your shoulder, and the combination is making for quite an interesting image.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Harvard treaded water lazily. “Laugh at me all you want. Chicks dig guys who can recite Shakespeare. And who knows? I might decide to get my teaching degree some day.”

“The M-16 will certainly keep your class in line.”

Harvard laughed.

“We’re getting off the subject here,” P.J. said. “You learned to swim when you were six and it was the summer you also made your first million playing the stock market? No,” she answered her own question, “if you had a million dollars gathering interest from the time you were six, you wouldn’t be here now. You’d be out on your yacht, commanding your own private navy. Let’s see, it must’ve been the summer you got your first dog.”

“Nope.”

“Hmm. The summer you had your first date?”

Harvard laughed. “I was six.”

She grinned at him. “You seem the precocious type.”

They’d come a long way, Harvard realized. Even though there was still a magnetic field of sexual tension surrounding them, even though he still didn’t want her in the CSF team and she damn well knew it, they’d managed to work around those issues and somehow become friends.

He liked this girl. And he liked talking to her. He would’ve liked going to bed with her even more, but he knew women well enough to recognize that when this one shied away from him, she wasn’t just playing some game. As far as P. J. Richards was concerned, no didn’t mean try a little harder. No meant no. And until that no became a very definite yes, he was going to have to be content with talking.

But Harvard liked to talk. He liked to debate. He enjoyed philosophizing. He was good with words, good at verbal sparring. And who could know? Maybe if he talked to P.J. for long enough, he’d end up saying something that would start breaking through her defenses. Maybe he’d begin the process that would magically change that no to a yes.

“It was the summer you first—”

“It was the summer my family moved to our house in Hingham,” Harvard interrupted. “My mother decided that if we were going to live a block away from the ocean, we all had to learn to swim.”