Sealed with a promise (10 page)

  Lon quirked a two-toned eyebrow. “So what’s the plan here?”

  Do- Lord ginned at the skillful double entendre. A man who’d been a chief as long as Lon didn’t miss much. Yes, indeedy. The vibe that he and Emmie were an item was already working. Emmie didn’t know it yet, but she was toast.

  “Pickett’s not going to eat the whole cake, is she?” Lon asked once Do-Lord had explained their rationale for switching the cakes. “Which tier will she take a slice from?”

  “The second one.” Emmie supplied.

  “Then we don’t have to dismantle the whole cake. We lift off the top, slide the new layer in, transfer the decorations, and we’re done.”

  “That’s brilliant.”

  “Right. That’s why I’m the senior chief.” Lon grinned.

  “If I’d realized it, I could have saved a lot of money.”

  “What does a cake like this cost?” Davy asked.

  “A couple of thousand.”

  Davy looked at the cake and then Emmie with new respect. “You spent two grand to keep Pickett from eating something she shouldn’t?”

  “I didn’t pay that much. I found a specialty baker who’s trying to get started. But it still cost plenty.”

  “Let’s get to work.” Lon shed his sport coat, and the other men followed suit.

  In a minute the men were gathered around the cake, examining it from all angles and analyzing its construction. Laughing but serious, the air around them shimmered with the intensity of their focus. They were all men for whom leadership was natural, and though there was a competitive edge to the freely traded joking insults, they tossed leadership back and forth as if it were a basketball.

  “Well?” Emmie asked, “do you think you can do it?”

  Lon propped an elbow in one hand and stroked his chin. “There’s good news and bad news. The good news is we don’t see any trigger mechanisms. This cake’s not going to explode if we dismantle it.”

  Emmie grinned but played the straight man. “What’s the bad news?”

  “It won’t be near as much fun to take apart.”

  The other men shared the joke, but the way their eyes gleamed with almost wolfish intensity made her think they weren’t entirely kidding.

  “What do you want me to do?” Emmie asked when they finished laughing.

  “This is an immobilization sling.” Davy pointed to the band that went around her rib cage and anchored her arm close to her chest with Velcro. “How did you hurt your shoulder?”

  Talking about it made her uncomfortable. She preferred to let people think she was a just a klutz. After all, it was the truth. She offered the simple version.

  “A student slipped, and I grabbed her to keep her from falling. She fell anyway, and my arm got jerked out of the socket.”

  “But you hung on, anyway? That must have hurt like hell. You didn’t let go?”

  “I couldn’t. It was a twenty-foot drop onto concrete. She might have been killed.”

  “And you might have gone over with her,” Caleb said in flat disapproval.

  Emmie didn’t know who he thought he was to take that tone with her, but she wanted the topic to go away, so she agreed. “Yeah, it was pretty stupid. I just reacted. Two of the male students saw what was happening and lifted her up before she fell all the way.”

  The three men traded a look Emmie couldn’t interpret.

  “How long ago did this happen?”

  Emmie’s cheeks felt on fire. She wished he would stop with the questions. “Almost two weeks ago.”

  He made no pretense that he wasn’t visually examining her. In that odd way they had of passing leadership around, she understood that Davy was in charge, and the other two would back him up.

  “You know, you’re going to need physical therapy and exercises to strengthen the shoulder, or it will be likely to happen again.”

  Finally coming to Emmie’s rescue, Do-Lord explained, “Davy’s our hospital corpsman. He’s not happy unless he investigates every injury and hands out advice. He’ll leave you alone if you promise to do everything he says.”

  Emmie threw him a grateful look and solemnly promised.

  “All right.” Davy grabbed a chair. “You can sit here.” He meant it kindly, but there wasn’t any doubt she had been excluded. A wistful sigh stabbed a red blade of pain into her shoulder, and she cradled her arm closer. She had no share in the bond these men experienced.

  Because she had been out of the country, she had missed being in on all stages of Pickett’s romance. She and Pickett had talked late into the night on Thanksgiving, but it wasn’t the same. Since then, the days had been crammed so full they’d had little time together. Nothing could alter the love they had for each other, but there was no doubt henceforward their relationship was changed. To her surprise she missed the togetherness she and Do-Lord had established. It had been nice for a while to feel as if she were sharing something with someone.

  Do- Lord listened to the other men as they verbally rehearsed while a portion of his mind stayed with Emmie. The version of her injury was a lot different from the impression he’d gathered listening to gossip. Apparently, Emmie preferred people to think she’d hurt herself through clumsiness rather than heroism.

  He reassessed her extreme plainness and her cool stiffness. She was an odd combination of asser-tiveness and shyness. Except when displaying her formidable intellect, she didn’t like to call attention to herself.

  In a way her contradictions made her a more interesting challenge. She was neither cold nor disinterested in him, but a frontal assault wouldn’t work. A woman who didn’t find his attentions flattering was a novel experience. Women came easily to him. In truth, he hadn’t encountered many women who interested him enough to pursue them.

  Everyone has a secret fantasy. There’s a clich? of the bad boy in black leather who longs for the school princess. That wasn’t Caleb. He’d had a chance at the princess and turned it down. She collected boys the way other girls collect charms for their bracelets. He hadn’t been naive enough to believe he meant anything to her, and he hadn’t been flattered.

  His fantasy lay outside the bounds of possibility. For a girlfriend, he had wanted one of the serious, studious girls with their books cradled beneath their soft breasts. Clean girls with shiny hair, who smelled of innocence, for whom an evening in the library was a date. The girls who asked the thought-provoking questions in class. Girls who were president of the honor society and the science club. These were the girls he couldn’t have. A girl like that you’d have to go out with for a couple of weeks before she’d let you hold her hand. The teenage fantasy had dwelt so far beneath his consciousness he’d scarcely acknowledged it at the time and forgotten about it since. A boy from the wrong side of the tracks, from the wrong side of everywhere, who worked the hours he wasn’t in school, didn’t dream those dreams.

  Those girls had always been off-limits. He had no place in their lives, nor they in his. It wasn’t that he thought they were above him in the great scheme of things. Some essential part of him had always rejected the surface divisions of class. The problem was that girls like that required time, and time was exactly what he didn’t have-either then or now.

  And though he had felt the tug of attraction when he met them, they couldn’t offer him what life as a SEAL did.

  These girls symbolized what he sacrificed to stay on the course he had chosen. He wasn’t one to whine about playing the hand he had been dealt. He accepted his choices and all that went with them. And there were compensations. At an age when most boys are permanently horny he had all the sex he wanted.

  But not with girls like Emmie.

  Hot longing surged under his breastbone, rocking him.

  “This is your gig, Do-Lord.” His attention snapped back to the present and the senior chief’s curious look under shaggy eyebrows. “Don’t go to sleep on us.”

  Quickly, he replayed all that had been said while his thoughts were elsewhere, a skill he’d discovered early and found useful, especially after he learned other people couldn’t do it.

  “The two of us lift off the top layer.” Do-Lord summarized their strategy. “I hold the bow ends out of the way. Davy removes the second layer and replaces it.”

  “Right. Davy’s got the best hands,” Lon went on, “so he will transfer the little fruit doodads.”

  “The marzipan,” supplied Emmie, speaking from where she sat observing the process.

  “What
is
marzipan?” Davy asked.

  “A paste made from ground almonds, sugar, and a binder like egg white,” Do-Lord answered, still visualizing the steps needed, “which can be modeled and painted with food dye. Come on, let’s get into position.”

  Still surveying the cake from all angles, Do-Lord wasn’t aware he’d spoken aloud until Davy laughed.
Crap.
Jax knew he had something close to an eidetic memory, and Lon suspected. With the others he carefully maintained his slow-talking, country-boy disguise. Over the years Do-Lord had relaxed his vigilance, but still he shouldn’t have let something that… frivolous… slip out.

  “How the hell does he know these things?” Davy asked Lon, his bland tone belied by the wicked sparkle in his brown eyes. Among SEALs, teasing was an art form and a lubricant, a sublimation of the natural aggressiveness of alpha males forced into a cooperation that wasn’t wholly natural.

  A muscle in Do-Lord’s cheek tightened. Do-Lord had been hiding his brain power since he was ten years old. Duty demanded that if he had data impacting an operation, he had to share it, so most of the guys like Lon, who’d worked with him for years, had some idea. He didn’t make a big deal of it, and neither did they. SEALs were expected to be competent within their area of expertise. He didn’t usually let that kind of factoid, which his brain picked up as effortlessly as stuff he
tried
to learn, slip out. Davy was as friendly and eager to interact with everyone he met as a puppy. The marzipan story would be all over the base by lunchtime Monday. He’d be lucky if everybody didn’t start calling him “Marzipan.”

  “How do
you
know he’s not making it up?” Lon continued to study the construction of the cake. He indicated a marzipan apple. “These could be made of molded pigeon shit.”

  
Saved.
Do-Lord let his diaphragm relax as he made a mental note to return the master chief’s favor. He sighed gustily. “I shoulda known I couldn’t put one over on you, Lon.”

  Uncertain if he was the one now being teased, Davy looked from one to the other, then at Emmie, who had stopped taking pictures to listen. “Do you know what these things are made of?”

  Emmie. She’d probably
eaten
marzipan. She could blow the whole thing sky high. Do-Lord held his breath.

  With the compassion of someone who must tell a child there is no Easter bunny, she nodded to Davy.

  “Lon guessed right. I believe they are made of pigeon shit. Refined, of course. But Caleb was partly right- they have been painted with a food-grade dye. So don’t worry. They’re still edible.”

  “Come on, come on, everybody in position.” He pretended to ignore the byplay. “We’ll pick up on three.” He didn’t see the intrigued look that widened Emmie’s eyes.

  Lon studied the photo of the cake taken before they’d dismantled it. “If we move the pumpkin three degrees to the left, I think we can cover the dent.”

  “That’s going to widen the angle to the peaches.”

  “Right. But if we rotate the entire cake, the shift in triangulation will move the discrepancy into occlusion.”

  Davy carefully placed the marzipan pumpkin where Lon indicated using forceps from his medical kit.

  “That’s it. Now we rotate the cake. Three degrees. Everybody get in position and mark.”

  The three men stationed themselves around the cake. Coatless, the extraordinary depth of their chests was apparent. All three had a smoothness about the way they moved, totally at one with their bodies and each other, which gave their every action a balletic choreographed feeling-although Emmie was willing to bet they’d never done anything like this before.

  Their coordination really was supra-human, transcendent of human limitation, and when separated they must feel-she couldn’t really imagine how it would feel-truncated, even oddly crippled to be back in mundane reality.

   This was the source of their arrogance. They really had experienced something beyond the capability of most people, and she suspected it bonded them more than a taste for danger and a love of living on the edge.

  They were jocks. She didn’t doubt it. All three were well-built, extraordinarily good-looking men, and the irrepressible Davy was certainly full of himself. Jocks though, who had taken their physical gifts from competition to purpose. Lon’s attitude contained mountainous dependability. His very presence offered shelter and sustenance. Wherever he was you knew everything was going to be taken care of. In cocky, uncomplicated Davy she sensed a sweetness that was the true source of his charm. Larger than life though they were, what you saw was what you got.

  Caleb. Caleb was different. He matched them, and yet, he didn’t. He was several inches taller than the others. Every bit as well-muscled, his build was more rangy than compact. He erected a persona that would fool many into believing he was the least complicated of them all.

  Had she not spent time in the company of men who were
like
Caleb, she probably wouldn’t have seen that his wily charm was only one layer of his personality, not the whole. Emmie loved discovery. She loved to push to the very edge of what was known, then take that edge further. Now she knew there was more to learn about him. She could not turn back.

  “Gentlemen, I think our work is done. Bump up!” The men knocked their fists together in mutual congratulation.