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The arrogant, eat-my-dust noise got louder.
And louder.
Zoe lifted her right hand and shaded her eyes, uncomfortably conscious of a sudden acceleration in her pulse. A moment later a massive black motorcycle vroom-vroomed into view.
The bike was ridden by a veritable behemoth of a man. He was blue-jeaned, booted and sported a bushy beard. He was also naked from the waist up except for a thicket of coal black chest hair and a leather vest. The brightly colored insignias on the vest suggested that he maintained a closer fellowship with the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang than the Boy Scouts of America.
Zoe stared, stunned.
Could it be? she wondered. Could the lean, mean military operative she’d known more than a decade and a half ago have metamorphosed into a hairy, masculine hulk whose appearance strongly suggested that he might rank high on the FBI’s Most Wanted list or low on the evolutionary chain, or both?
She’d realized that the passage of time would have altered him, of course. Flynn had only been a few years into his twenties when she’d met him. He was now pushing forty. But even so—
Zoe’s mind suddenly jumped back to a grainy black-andwhite photograph that had appeared in the Washington Post a little more than two years ago. It had accompanied an article about Gabriel Flynn’s successful transition from military man to roving troubleshooter for an ad hoc network of international aid organizations. The picture had shown him hunkered down, talking with a pair of bone-thin, big-eyed children. Both youngsters had been staring at him with something akin to awe.
He’d had a beard in the photograph, she remembered with unsettling clarity. His thick brown hair had been sun streaked, shoulder length and shaggily unkempt. His clothing—a bizarre combination of jump boots, military-style khaki pants and what appeared to be a garishly flowered Hawaiian shirthad been filthy. He’d looked as though he’d smelled, maybe even stunk, to high heaven.
The motorcycle pulled up at the curb in front of the church. It was then that Zoe realized there was a second rider on the bike. He was about the same height as the bearded behemoth but a lot less bulky. He was clad in tight, faded jeans, a grubby white T-shirt and a badly stained khaki jacket. His eyes were shielded by a pair of mirror-lensed sunglasses.
She knew him.
Utterly.
Absolutely.
Without a shadow of a doubt.
The second rider was Gabriel James McNally Flynn.
A half a lifetime’s worth of carefully cultivated emotional equilibrium tilted into confusion in the space of a single, thunderous heartbeat. The poise that had held firm during encounters with presidents, princes and potentates—to say nothing of movie stars and international moguls—threatened to crack like an empty eggshell.
Time spun backward. Suddenly Zoe Alexandra Armitage was sixteen years old again…and terrified.
She shivered as Flynn dismounted from the motorcycle with fluent athleticism. After raking a hand carelessly through his short-cropped hair and slinging the strap of a battered leather duffel bag over his left shoulder, he traded high-five palm slaps with his jumbo-size companion. There was a brief conversation. The bearded man grinned broadly, revealing a goldsheathed front tooth.
A few more words were exchanged. Flynn jerked a thumb toward the church. The other man grinned a second time but shook his head. Flynn spread his hands, palms up, apparently acquiescing to the refusal. The movement pulled his khaki jacket taut across his well-muscled back.
The motorcyclist gunned the engine of his gleaming black bike. Then, astonishingly, he squared his brawny shoulders, raised his right hand and snapped off a textbook-perfect subordinate-to-superior salute.
The gesture was returned, quick and clean.
A moment later the motorcycle roared off down the street.
Her chest tight, her fingers plucking at the sleekly expensive fabric of her dress, Zoe watched as Flynn pivoted away from the curb and strode up the walkway to the church with the fine, feral grace of a jungle predator.
Luc Devereaux’s best man came to a halt a step or two away from her. He lifted his right hand and shoved his wire-rimmed sunglasses up on top of his head. He squinted against the lateafternoon light. Zoe had the fleeting impression that he was having trouble focusing.
“Immature” was not an adjective she ever would have used to describe the Flynn she’d known nearly sixteen years ago. Still, it had been possible back then to discern in his face a few traces of the boy he’d once been. Those traces were gone now, obliterated by age, exposure and experience. In appearance and attitude, he was implacably adult, insistently male.
There was a fine network of wrinkles at the outer corners of his eyes. A pair of deeply etched lines bracketed his long, clever mouth. His tanned skin fit hard over sharply angled cheekbones. The nose she recalled as having been ferrule straight canted slightly to the right, as though it had been broken and left to mend on its own. His left temple bore an old two-inch scar. A barely scabbed cut bisected his stubborn chin.
The hair on his head was still plentiful and predominantly brown, but the lightest strands were silver rather than sunbleached gold. The stubble that shadowed his jaw showed touches of gray, too.
He was a rootless adventurer. The absolute antithesis of the settled, civilized kind of man with whom she hoped to make a life. Yet Gabriel James McNally Flynn impacted on Zoe Alexandra Armitage like an explosion, blowing what she’d cherished as certainties about who she was and what she wanted to smithereens.
Was this what she’d been afraid of? she asked herself desperately, trying to keep her expression neutral. Had something deep within her somehow known that seeing Flynn again—just seeing him!—would threaten to overturn the stable existence she’d worked so assiduously to establish for herself?
Zoe felt her one-time rescuer’s hazel gaze travel down her body and back up. The assessment was intimate, as proprietary as the stroke of a palm against naked skin. For one mind-blowing moment she thought her legs might buckle beneath her. While she was scarcely an innocent, she’d never experienced such a powerful tug of sexual attraction.
And then Flynn’s emerald- and amber-flecked eyes met her blue ones.
There was a sizzling pause.
“You’re…late,” Zoe finally managed to say. While she seemed to have regained a modicum of control over her lower extremities, her ability to breathe had been severely compromised.
“Who—” he began in a husky-hoarse voice that sandpapered her tattered nerves. “Finally!”
Zoe’s lungs emptied abruptly in a sickening rush of air.
“Terry?” Flynn questioned, shifting his attention to a point behind her. He blinked several times, like a man not quite certain whether he should believe what he thought he was seeing.
“Well, it’s not the queen of England,” Peachy’s self-styled wedding organizer retorted, gliding forward. He winked at Zoe as he moved by her. She just stood, too shaken to respond. Too shaken to do much of anything. “So what’s your excuse, soldier? Did some nasty old civil insurrection mess up your travel plans?”
The question provoked a dry laugh. “Try a small monsoon.”
“Mother Nature can be such a bitch,” Terry quipped, then wrinkled his nose in disgust as he came within sniffing distance of the latecomer. “Ugh! Flynn! Making a dramatic, last-minute entrance is one thing. But that stench! I mean, what have you been doing? Swimming in sheep dip? Wrestling with rotting yak carcasses?”
“Don’t ask,” Flynn advised trenchantly. He slanted an odd glance at Zoe. She thought for a moment that he was on the verge of addressing her. Instead, he returned his gaze to Terry and said, “When I told Luc I’d get here, I warned him there was a good chance I wouldn’t be coming first class. He said he’d arrange—”
“There’s hot water, cold beer and a clean tuxedo waiting for you,” Terry interrupted. “To say nothing of a whole church full of people and an organist who’s going to be reduced to playing the love theme from The Terminator if you don’t get yourself in gear right this second.”
Zoe stepped aside as the two men headed into the church. Her heart was thudding, her head throbbing. She was trying to make sense of Flynn’s response to her. Granted, it had been a long time since their previous encounter. And granted, she’d changed a great deal since then. Still. The man had acted as though…as though…
“Thanks for your help, sweetie,” Terry called over his brocade-covered shoulder.
“No problem,” she answered numbly, grappling with a turn of events that unraveled every scenario she’d spun about having a second meeting with the man who’d saved her life.
The possibility had never occurred to her.
Never. Ever. Not once.
But there it was, and she had no choice but to face the reality of it.
Gabriel James McNally Flynn didn’t remember her.
The instant he’d caught sight of the coolly elegant blonde standing in front of the church where his best friend was going to get married, Flynn had known with visceral certainty that he knew her. But it wasn’t until the last few moments of the wedding ceremony—right after the presiding minister had informed the groom that it was time to kiss the bride, to be specific—that he finally figured out who the hell she was.
Zoe.
Zoe Alexandra Armitage.
Goldilocks.
The realization hit him with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow to the skull. Flynn hid his reaction to it, but just barely. His normally ironclad self-discipline had been undermined by weeks of physical hardship and emotional stress. He passed a swift prayer of thanks that he’d had the good sense to forgo the well-chilled bottle of beer Luc had offered him when he’d finished toweling off after his first indoor shower in nearly a month. Coupled with a dangerous lack of sleep, the ingestion of alcohol on an almost empty stomach probably would have destroyed his ability to disguise the shock that was resonating to the core of his soul.
Who would have thought it? he asked himself, trying to focus on the blissfully oblivious couple whose first marital embrace was provoking an affectionate outpouring of laughter and applause from the gathered congregation. Who in the name of heaven would have imagined that the flat-chested, pixie-haired girl who’d demonstrated she had more guts than a lot of professional warriors would blossom into a champagne and sherbet beauty who looked as though the toughest task on her daily agenda was deciding what to wear?
Not he!
Which wasn’t to say he hadn’t thought about the sky-eyed Zoe Armitage now and again during the past decade and a half. Because he had. Memories of her courage had surfaced in his consciousness more times than he cared to count. Likewise, regrets that he’d never told her how brave she’d been or explained why he’d behaved so brutally.
About three years after their jungle ordeal, an impulse he still didn’t fully understand had prompted him to make a few discreet inquiries about Zoe’s situation. He’d learned that she was attending the University of Virginia. Her scholastic record was brilliant. Socially, she seemed remarkably settled for a young woman whose relentlessly nomadic parents—Griffin Armitage and Alexis Fitzpatrick, two of the world’s foremost anthropologists—’had never married, much less provided their only child with a permanent home.
Flynn had gathered this reassuring information at a distance, never seriously considering the possibility of making personal contact with Zoe. He supposed he might have acted differently if he’d felt the girl was in trouble. But since all indications had been that she was doing just fine—
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the minister suddenly intoned, derailing his train of thought. “Please welcome our newlyweds. For the first time, I give you Mr. and Mrs. Lucien Devereaux!”
There was another wave of applause as the wedding guests rose to their feet. While most of them were lit up with sunbeam smiles, more than a few were blinking back happy tears.
Flynn experienced a sharp pang of emotion as he watched Luc link hands with the ethereal, green-eyed redhead he’d vowed to love, come what may, for the rest of his life. He’d never seen his friend look so happy. So whole. So…at peace with himself.
His mind flashed back nearly twelve weeks to the night he’d confronted a drunken, despairing Lucien Devereaux across a small wooden table in a dingy French Quarter bar.
“Wallowing in self-pitying gloom” had been his sardonic diagnosis of his former comrade-in-arms’ condition. He’d intended the words to flick on the psychological raw and it had been plain to see that they had. In much the way he’d once prodded Luc into making his first parachute jump, he’d goaded his friend out of the emotional mire and gotten him talking about why he believed his relationship with Peachy was doomed.
Flynn had received an incredible earful, starting with an inebriated explanation of how the shock of an emergency landing during a flight back from a wedding in Atlanta—to wit, the realization that if the plane she was on had crashed, she might very well have died without ever having “done it"—had prompted Peachy to ask her landlord of two years to deflower her.
Luc had become increasingly lucid as he’d recounted how he’d initially resisted this lunatic proposal, then changed his mind and decided to pretend to accept the one-time-only offer in order to protect his temporarily traumatized tenant from her own impulses. He’d been nearly sober when he’d bitterly declared that it was his unruly impulses about which he should have been concerned.
“That first morning, I was thinking commitment,” Luc had confessed rawly. “Commitment, as in marriage. Commitment, as in making a home and having a family.” He’d given a humorless laugh. “You know my history. Can you honestly see me—me!—playing the loving husband and adoring daddy?”
“Playing?” Flynn had echoed. “No. Being? Yeah. Sure. No problem.”
His friend’s expression had gone stark with disbelief at that point. His response to this had been predicated on a conviction that had been growing within him for a number of years.
“You haven’t figured it out, have you?” he’d said.
“Figured out, what?”
“That if you really were the alienated son of a bitch you seem to think you are, you would have bedded your little virgin without a second thought and moved on. That you would’ve spent every dime of the money you’ve earned from your books on yourself instead of using a big chunk of it to bankroll the dreams of people like that high school buddy of yours who always wanted his own restaurant. And that you’d be holed up in solitary splendor in some Manhattan bachelor pad instead of landlording over an eccentric old apartment building that’s stocked with folks you’ve made into the family you never had.”
“I—”
“Think about it.” He’d shifted into his “Shut up, Soldier, and listen” mode without hesitation. While self-control had been something he’d had to work hard to develop, the knack of commanding other people had always come easily to him. “You’ve got a surrogate mother in Laila Martigny. A surrogate father in Francis Smythe. A pair of doting great-aunts in May and Winnie Barnes. So what if the dynamics are a little kinky? You care about the people back at Prytania Street. Deep down in that place you seem to think is so incapable of making a connection, you care about them. And they sure as hell care about you.”
He’d watched Luc absorb the words and slowly begin to. accept their meaning. Finally the younger man had asked, “What about Terry Bellehurst?”
Flynn had allowed himself a grin. “He’s a twofer. A big brother and a big sister.”
“And…Peachy?”
“I think you’ve known the answer to that since the day she walked into your life.”
He’d carted Luc back to Prytania Street shortly before dawn and dumped him on the couch in the living room of his apartment. Before he’d departed, he’d pledged to his friend that if— no, when—things worked out, he would stand up as the best man during the “I do’s.” Had he known then how complicated keeping his word was going to turn out to be—
“I’m glad you were able to make it, Mr. Flynn,” a dulcetly feminine voice said, suddenly bringing him back to the present.
The assertion came from his right. Wondering uneasily how long he’d been meandering down memory lane, Flynn turned to face its source—a classically pretty woman who’d been one of Peachy’s three bridal attendants. Dressed in blush pink silk, she had chestnut-colored hair and crystalline gray eyes. She was somewhere in her early thirties and she was very obviously expecting a child.
Some long-suppressed lesson in etiquette prompted him to offer the woman his arm. She accepted it with a charming smile and they started down the aisle behind the newlyweds. The other two bridesmaids—the May Winnies, vivacious in raspberry lace and pearls—brought up the rear.
“It’s just Flynn,” he corrected after a second or two. “And I apologize for holding up the proceedings, Mrs…”
“Powell,” she supplied, giving him a look he couldn’t interpret. He had the peculiar feeling that something about him had surprised her. That he wasn’t what she’d expected. Although why this woman would have expectations about him, he had no idea. “Eden Powell. I’m Peachy’s sister. And considering that Luc mentioned you probably had to risk life and limb to get here, I’m willing to cut you a little slack vis-a-vis your late arrival.”
The name Eden rang a bell somewhere in the distant recesses of his mind. Had he not been half-dead on his feet, he probably would have pursued the matter. He didn’t like loose ends.
“Ah,” was all he said, glancing to his left.
It was a bad idea. A very bad idea. Because he shifted his attention at precisely the same moment he reached the row of pews in which Zoe was seated.
She was on the aisle. Close enough so that for one crazy instant he imagined he could smell the scent of her smooth, feminine flesh and fair, silken hair. Certainly close enough so that he could have touched her if he’d chosen to do so.
Again Flynn was buffeted by the changes he saw, and sensed, in her. The difference between Zoe’s appearance now and the way she’d looked nearly sixteen years ago was extraordinary enough. But the rest of it…
Her eyes met his. Her gentian blue gaze was cool. Selfcontained. Politely curious.
Nothing more.
After a moment she cocked her well-shaped chin upward a fraction of an inch. The long, lovely line of her throat arched, ever so slightly. Some fragment of his exhaustion-hazed brain registered that she was wearing a delicate silver chain and locket. He wondered with a surge of savagery whether the dainty piece of jewelry was a token from a lover.
Her brows lifted. Her expression clearly communicated the message that she was not the kind of female who was likely to be flattered by a stranger’s stare.
Flynn’s muscles clenched.
A stranger?
“Mr. Flynn, are you all right?” he heard the woman who’d identified herself as Eden Powell ask through the sudden pounding of his pulse. He was dimly conscious of the anxious pressure of her fingertips against his forearm.
“Never better,” he lied through his teeth, struggling to come to terms with what seemed to be the only possible explanation for Zoe’s distant manner.
Damn her!
She didn’t remember him.
Two (#ulink_4956354b-2dd1-5e29-8942-1bc86de8353a)
“So that’s the infamous Flynn, hmm?” Annie Powell said several hours later, her long-lashed brown eyes sparkling as she watched the celebratory swirl on the dance floor. Among those coupled for a waltz were the bride and the best man. “You never mentioned he was such a hunk.”
