Born To Protect

She was surprised. “No.”

“Because a portrait is supposed to engage the viewer with the subject. This shot is dead. You look like you’re posing for the five-dollar bill.” He turned the glossy over. “No wonder you don’t like having your picture taken.”

He didn’t know the half of it, she thought ruefully. He had no idea how hard she worked on that invulnerable, plastic, public pose. She didn’t want him to know.

“I’ve got your bio here,” he said. “You don’t need to see that. Transcripts—UCLA, Montana, very impressive—physical description, distinguishing marks…” He grinned suddenly. “No tattoos?”

Reluctantly, she smiled back. “No. But I have a scar on the inside of my elbow from playing Saracens and Crusaders with my brother.” She twisted her arm for him to see. Concentrating on an old hurt to conceal the fresh pain of her brother’s disappearance.

“Nice,” Jack said. “When we get to know each other better, I’ll show you mine.”

She wondered where under his clothes he carried his scars. And blushed again. She cleared her throat. “You were wounded?”

“Yeah.” He riffled through more papers.

“Recently?”

“Four months ago.”

“Where?” she asked, and then held her breath at the inappropriateness of her question.

But Jack didn’t appear to notice. “Philippines,” he answered briefly as he continued to scan the contents of the envelope. “Here we go.”

She breathed again. “What?”

“An account of the bombing. This guy they caught in conjunction with the embassy bombing, this Muhammad Oman, is some kind of freelance terrorist.”

“And?”

“And when he was interrogated, he fingered Sheik Ahmed Kamal as his boss. Which means your father has good reason for his suspicions.” He fell silent, eyes and fingers skimming the page.

“What are you reading now?”

“Background on the feud between Montebello and Tamir…real soap opera stuff, isn’t it?”

She drew herself up. “You can say that. But Sheik Ahmed’s claim to our land raises issues of natural resources and regional stability. And your government in Washington agrees, or they would not be so anxious to keep the peace.”

“Plus there’s the little matter of a U.S. military base on the southeastern end of the island,” Jack drawled.

She didn’t back down. “Precisely.”

“Look, I’m not getting paid to worry about national security anymore. I’m supposed to worry about yours.”

“Unless there’s a connection, you’re wasting your time.”

He flipped over another page. “Time’s one thing I’ve…” His voice failed.

“What? What is it?”

He was staring at the portfolio on his lap. The angle of the cover hid its contents from her, but she saw a corner of newsprint and knew, suddenly, sickeningly, what he had found.

The other picture taken the year she turned twenty-one.

She couldn’t see the headline. It didn’t matter. The same enlarged, grainy image had appeared on the front cover of every tabloid and on the inside pages of every entertainment rag in the world. Six years later, it still had the power to freeze her stomach and make a man look at her with hot speculation in his eyes.

Jack didn’t look at her at all, and that was almost worse. “More background,” he said tersely, and closed the folder.

Damn, she was beautiful.

Even when she was swathed in a white lab coat, with her hair pulled back and plastic goggles around her neck, Christina had what it took to make Jack sweat.

But the image he’d just seen—Christina topless, emerging from a lake at dawn, with every fantasy-inspired curve gilded by the sun—was enough to make him drool.

To make him ache.

To make him beg.

The shot must have been snapped with a zoom from a distance and then blown up to meet tabloid requirements. But picture quality wouldn’t have been the first thing on the photographer’s mind, or the mind of any man who saw the final product. Christina stood knee-deep in the dark water, proud head lifted, legs apart. She looked like a pagan goddess rising from the lake to claim a human lover. Her full, proud breasts glistened. Her wet hair poured down her back like sunshine. Her wet bikini bottoms clung to her like skin. And the water was obviously cold.

Jack’s tongue felt too big for his mouth. His jeans felt too tight.

Christina was saying something. Asking him something. “What is it?”

“More background.” He closed the folder before he embarrassed himself.

Confronting Christina’s sheer physical perfection made him sharply aware of how much he had lost. The sniper in the Philippines had blown away more than his shoulder and his career. The terrorist bastard had hacked at his confidence.

He could still walk away, he thought. He was just passing through.

“Let’s go to your apartment,” he said. “I need to call my old man.”

Chapter 4

It figured that the exiled princess of Montebello didn’t live in an apartment. Jack realized his mistake as soon as Christina swung her new-model pickup truck onto a private road flanked by stone columns. A discreet plaque identified the entrance to Eagle’s Nest Residential Community. No Soliciting, the sign said. Not Welcome.

The truck swooped down curves and up hills. Through stands of tall, dark trees, wide windows flashed. Jack glimpsed piles of rock and spires of wood, some natural, some man-made.

They sure didn’t look like any graduate student digs he’d ever seen.

He was way out of his league here, he thought grimly. What had Christina called it? Some ill-judged sexual attraction. Yeah.

And yet every time he looked at her—hell, even when he didn’t—he got this brain-fog image of her rising out of the lake, her magnificent body covered with water and sunshine and not much else. She had great breasts. He looked across at her aristocratic profile and imagined her wearing one skimpy nylon triangle. He looked out at the scenery and imagined her naked.

And the pictures in his head were making him cross-eyed.

He rubbed the back of his neck, where the muscles cramped as his shoulder stiffened. Focus, he ordered himself. Before he’d left the SEALs, his survival and the survival of his team had depended on his ability to concentrate. Now…well, hers might.

That realization cleared his brain, at least temporarily. He sat up as Christina maneuvered into a sunken driveway and shifted the truck into Park. Her garage was buried in the side of a hill. A stone walk wound from the drive to the house, all angles and cedar and glass.