He’s my godfather.”
Godfather, huh? That was almost as weird as the idea of Montgomery having siblings. That Montgomery could form an emotional attachment to others was . . . wow. Mike found it hard to wrap his head around it.
There was something so wrong about her expression, like that of a unicorn in the forest wounded by a hunter’s arrow. Sad and stricken.
Man, she was too beautiful to be sad. Beautiful women were nature’s aristocrats. They held the world in the palm of their hands. It was unnatural for someone who looked like her to be melancholy.
Then Mike kicked himself in the ass. The world was big and bad and it bit. What the fuck did he know about her? Nothing. There might be real tragedy there.
And that’s when he remembered the second half of her little info-dump. She’d walked away from a plane crash at the age of seven.
“Where?” he asked sharply. “Where did you crash?”
It wasn’t an idle question. Ever since his baby sister had required sedation at the age of five for a routine flight, he’d paid close attention to any plane accidents in his never-ending quest to help Kathy cope with her phobia. He thought he knew every crash-survivor story there was, though there weren’t many.
He couldn’t recall any plane crashes where a seven-year-old had walked away.
She looked him full in the face, gauging something. Coming from a man, that blatant study would have indicated aggression and he’d have bristled. But he wasn’t bristling. She was clearly studying him to see whether she could tell him.
And, well, it wasn’t exactly a hardship having Lucy Merritt stare at him, because then he got to stare right back.
It was as if he’d never seen a female face before. All that soft, pale skin. Pretty, dark eyebrows that had a lovely, flowing, arching shape like little wings, instead of being a smudge on the forehead. And, of course, that perfume someone had designed to mess with men’s heads . . .
“Nicaragua,” she said softly, and his entire notion of her turned upside down.
“Fuck,” he breathed, shocked. Then—“Sorry.”
She dipped her head.
Lucy Merritt was a fucking SpecOps legend. No one had ever known the name of the little girl, but the story had made the rounds.
The daughter of American academics in Nicaragua had been sent from Jalapa to Managua, where she was supposed to be bundled onto a plane for the States as the contracomandos war was heating up.
The plane crashed in the primeval jungle four hundred miles south of Jalapa. The pilot’s Mayday signal had been picked up by everyone and his cousin. Government Sandinista forces and two ragtag competing rebel armies converged on the plane, all intending kidnap and rape. The Sandinistas to punish the capitalist Yanquis, the contras to show their displeasure with the Senate hearings on Iran-Contra up north. The other rebels just because.
Mike’s first XO, Larry Gabriel, had been training troops in southern Honduras and was sent in with his men on what was considered a hopeless rescue mission. Gabriel told Mike he’d fully expected to bring home either a small burned corpse or a small burned, tortured and raped corpse. But the four groups wandered in the tropical forest for seven days and seven nights without finding anything but the shell of the plane and the charred body of the pilot.
Gabriel was about to call it quits when a slip of a girl walked into his camp at dusk. She was rail-thin, filthy, dehydrated and had burns all over her body, but she was, by God, alive. And she’d avoided all the bad guys combing the jungle for her. Once an entire platoon of Sandinistas had passed less than five feet from her, she told the captain. She hid and kept quiet, and they’d continued on down the trail.
“Brave little thing,” Captain Gabriel had said. “Pretty, too, under all that grime.”
She was still pretty.
“My former commander was Larry Gabriel,” he said, and her head whipped around to him from where she’d
Godfather, huh? That was almost as weird as the idea of Montgomery having siblings. That Montgomery could form an emotional attachment to others was . . . wow. Mike found it hard to wrap his head around it.
There was something so wrong about her expression, like that of a unicorn in the forest wounded by a hunter’s arrow. Sad and stricken.
Man, she was too beautiful to be sad. Beautiful women were nature’s aristocrats. They held the world in the palm of their hands. It was unnatural for someone who looked like her to be melancholy.
Then Mike kicked himself in the ass. The world was big and bad and it bit. What the fuck did he know about her? Nothing. There might be real tragedy there.
And that’s when he remembered the second half of her little info-dump. She’d walked away from a plane crash at the age of seven.
“Where?” he asked sharply. “Where did you crash?”
It wasn’t an idle question. Ever since his baby sister had required sedation at the age of five for a routine flight, he’d paid close attention to any plane accidents in his never-ending quest to help Kathy cope with her phobia. He thought he knew every crash-survivor story there was, though there weren’t many.
He couldn’t recall any plane crashes where a seven-year-old had walked away.
She looked him full in the face, gauging something. Coming from a man, that blatant study would have indicated aggression and he’d have bristled. But he wasn’t bristling. She was clearly studying him to see whether she could tell him.
And, well, it wasn’t exactly a hardship having Lucy Merritt stare at him, because then he got to stare right back.
It was as if he’d never seen a female face before. All that soft, pale skin. Pretty, dark eyebrows that had a lovely, flowing, arching shape like little wings, instead of being a smudge on the forehead. And, of course, that perfume someone had designed to mess with men’s heads . . .
“Nicaragua,” she said softly, and his entire notion of her turned upside down.
“Fuck,” he breathed, shocked. Then—“Sorry.”
She dipped her head.
Lucy Merritt was a fucking SpecOps legend. No one had ever known the name of the little girl, but the story had made the rounds.
The daughter of American academics in Nicaragua had been sent from Jalapa to Managua, where she was supposed to be bundled onto a plane for the States as the contracomandos war was heating up.
The plane crashed in the primeval jungle four hundred miles south of Jalapa. The pilot’s Mayday signal had been picked up by everyone and his cousin. Government Sandinista forces and two ragtag competing rebel armies converged on the plane, all intending kidnap and rape. The Sandinistas to punish the capitalist Yanquis, the contras to show their displeasure with the Senate hearings on Iran-Contra up north. The other rebels just because.
Mike’s first XO, Larry Gabriel, had been training troops in southern Honduras and was sent in with his men on what was considered a hopeless rescue mission. Gabriel told Mike he’d fully expected to bring home either a small burned corpse or a small burned, tortured and raped corpse. But the four groups wandered in the tropical forest for seven days and seven nights without finding anything but the shell of the plane and the charred body of the pilot.
Gabriel was about to call it quits when a slip of a girl walked into his camp at dusk. She was rail-thin, filthy, dehydrated and had burns all over her body, but she was, by God, alive. And she’d avoided all the bad guys combing the jungle for her. Once an entire platoon of Sandinistas had passed less than five feet from her, she told the captain. She hid and kept quiet, and they’d continued on down the trail.
“Brave little thing,” Captain Gabriel had said. “Pretty, too, under all that grime.”
She was still pretty.
“My former commander was Larry Gabriel,” he said, and her head whipped around to him from where she’d
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