Tall, Dark and Deadly: Get Lucky

But she wasn’t. She wasn’t.

Having a man around was nice, but not a necessity.

Besides, she never took matters of the heart and all of their physical, sexual trappings lightly. Sex was a serious thing, and Luke, with his completely unplastic, extremely warm body, didn’t do serious. He’d told her that himself.

“I was okay,” she said, desperately trying to bring them back to a familiar place she could handle—that irreverent place of friendly insults and challenges, “until you hit me with a World Wrestling Federation-quality body slam, Earthquake McGoon.”

“Ho,” he said, almost as if he were relieved to be done with the dangerously sweet words and their accompanying illusion of intimacy himself, as if he were as eager to follow her back to the outlined safety of their completely platonic friendship. “You’re a fine one to complain, genius, considering you woke me up by sticking a gun barrel into my ribs.”

“A gun barrel!” She laughed her disbelief. “Get real!”

“What the hell was that, anyway?”

Syd picked up the magazine and tightly rolled it, showing him.

“It felt like a gun barrel.” He pulled himself to his feet and held out his hand to help Syd up. “Next time you want to wake me, and calling my name won’t do it,” he said, “think Sleeping Beauty. A kiss’ll do the trick every time.”

Yeah, right. Like she’d ever try to kiss Luke O’Donlon awake. He’d probably grab her and throw her down and…

And kiss her until the room spun, until she surrendered her clothes, her pride, her identity, her very soul. And probably her heart, as well.

“Maybe we shouldn’t leave,” she said tartly, as she followed Luke out the door. “It seems to me that the safest place for a Navy SEAL who fantasizes that he’s Sleeping Beauty is right here, in a psychologist’s waiting room.”

“Ha,” Luke said, “ha.”

“WHAT’S ON THE SCHEDULE for this afternoon?” Syd asked as Luke pulled his truck into the parking lot by the administration building.

“I’m going to start hanging out in bars,” Luke told her. “The seedier the better.”

She turned to look at him. “Well, that’s productive. Drinking yourself into oblivion while the rest of us sweat away in the office?”

He turned off the engine but didn’t move to get out of the truck. “You know as well as I do that I have no intention of partying.”

“You think you’ll single-handedly find this guy by going to bar after bar?” she asked. “You don’t even know what he looks like.”

He ran his hands through his hair in frustration. “Syd, I’ve got to do something before he hurts someone else.”

“His pattern is four to seven days between attacks.”

Luke snorted. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?” He swore, hitting the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “I feel like I’m sitting on a time bomb. What if this guy goes after Veronica Catalanotto next? She’s home all alone, with only a toddler in her house. Melody Jones is out of town with her baby, thank God.” He ticked them off on his fingers—the wives of his teammates in Alpha Squad. “Nell Hawken lives over in San Diego. She’s safe—at least until this bastard decides to widen his target area. PJ Becker works for FInCOM. Both she and Lucy are best qualified to deal with this. They’re both tough but, hell, no one’s invincible. And there’s you.”