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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.
Whoa. Jack climbed out. Looked up. “Nice place you’ve got here.”
Christina’s face got that frosty look he was beginning to realize covered self-consciousness. “The house was one of my father’s conditions for my remaining at the university. It has a state-of-the-art security system.”
He bet it did. Not that that would stop a terrorist. Not that it could stop him or Merlin or Crack or any of the SEALs, if they had time and the inclination to break in. Jack followed her up a hill landscaped with ferns and wild-flowers. She had a nice…walk. The soaring windows overhead reflected back the red and gold of the afternoon sun.
Once upon a time there was a princess who lived in a tower….
She unlocked the massive door. The foyer was flagstone, paneled in some light wood and pierced with windows. She pressed a security code into the keypad by the door.
“No armed guards at the gate?” Jack asked dryly.
Her eyes gleamed with humor. He liked that, liked that she was able to laugh at herself. “The only communities in Montana with armed guards are survivalist compounds. Even my father drew the line at my living in one of those. Please.” She stepped forward briskly, like a White House tour guide. “Make yourself at home.”
He grimaced. “Right.”
Home had never looked like this.
It wasn’t that the Daltons didn’t have money. Jonathan Dalton may have been a lousy husband and father, but he was a great provider. His wife, Clara, had filled her empty days with shopping, her empty home with velvet sofas and walnut tables and china doodads.
Jack parked his seabag at the bottom of the curving staircase and pivoted slowly, taking in Christina’s wide-open living room: cordovan leather couches and deco lamps, bleached wood floors and rich carpets. Paintings hung like jewels on the high white walls. He didn’t know a whole lot about art, but that one over the fireplace, all curving blues and greens, looked like a Chagall. And he’d bet the ranch it wasn’t a copy.
Oh, yeah. Out of his league and in over his head. He stuck his hands in his pockets.
“I’m sorry if it’s not…” Christina hesitated. “I don’t have time to spend on housekeeping. And my cleaning service won’t be in until Monday.”
She wasn’t serious. Was she? What did she think—that he was going to order her to stand inspection?
“I left the white gloves behind with the uniform, princess. But if you’re looking for compliments, you’ve got a really nice place here. Classy. You want me to take off my shoes?”
She tipped her chin up. “Of course not. I…the phone’s in the kitchen,” she said, and escaped across the Oriental carpet.
The red sun bled through the tall windows on either side of the fireplace. Jack glanced out on a tumble of rocks and plants. Plenty of cover for a sniper there. He wondered if her glass was bulletproof.
“Can I get you something to drink?” she asked.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Whiskey? Wine? Tea?”
He cradled the receiver between his neck and shoulder, fishing in his wallet for his father’s number. “Got any beer?”
“I’m sorry. No.”
For a princess, she sure was quick to apologize. He shook his head. “Never mind. Water is fine.”
He listened to the phone ring on the other end of the line.
And ring. Jonathan Dalton wasn’t home. Well, that figured. For sixteen years, the old man had never been around when Jack wanted him. Of course, a couple of months after Jack’s mother died, the major had decided to take a stab at fatherhood, and that had been even worse.
Jack depressed the phone hook and dialed again, aware of Christina pulling glasses from the cupboard behind him.
“Global Enterprises,” the receptionist chirped. “How may I direct your call?”
“Jonathan Dalton, please.”
“May I tell him who’s calling?”
“Jack Dalton.”
“Who?”
He heard his teeth snap together. “His son.”
Christina put his water on the counter by his hand. Her warm fingers left imprints on the cold glass. He nodded thanks and picked it up as a different female voice came on the line.
“Mr. Dalton? This is Elizabeth Landry, your father’s executive assistant. He’s not available to take your call right now. May I help you?”
Jack put the water down untasted. “No. Thanks. Tell him he can reach me at this number, please.” He rattled off the number on Christina’s phone. “Got that? Yeah. Anytime tonight. Thanks.” He hung up the phone and found Christina watching him, her mermaid hair and wide blue eyes like something out of a sailor’s fantasy.
His fantasies. Smooth, dark water around long, pale thighs…
Don’t go there, Flash.
“I can’t reach the old man. Looks like we’ll have to wait for him to call us.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“No.” He couldn’t decipher the faint question in her eyes. Surprise? Disapproval? “We’re not exactly close,” he said.
“Why is that?”
He didn’t want to go into it. Not ever, and especially not with Princess Perfect here. But given that he’d just been drooling over the illustrated story of her life, it seemed only fair to give her a quick and dirty rundown on The Daltons: the Dysfunctional Years.
“When my father decided he’d finally had enough of selling his services to the highest bidder, I was sixteen years old and full of myself. I was used to being the man of the house. Nobody was going to tell me what to do, especially not some guy I didn’t set eyes on more than once a year. We had a couple of years with him playing the heavy father and me acting like the jerk son before he decided to ship me off to West Point and let the army turn me into an officer and a gentleman.”
She regarded him steadily. Her interest warmed him, made him awkward. “And was your army up for this enormous task?”
He shrugged. “We’ll never know. I ran off and enlisted in the navy.”
“Your father—he was upset?”
“He was a hypocrite. He was enlisted. Went mustang in Korea.”
Her blond brows drew together. “What does that mean? ‘Mustang’?”
“It’s a term for an enlisted man who comes up through the ranks and makes the jump to officer. It doesn’t happen often.”
“And because he did it, you wanted to do the same. You wanted to make him proud of you.”
