Even Vampires Get the Blues: A Deadly Angels Book (16 page)

A voice in his head asked,
What island?

“Um.”

Thou art a fool.

“A fool in love?” he jested, a lame attempt to divert attention away from his careless mention—rather thinking—about the island.

Can anyone say Siberia?

Archangels had no sense of humor.

Wet T-shirts, wet panties, same thing!

B
y Friday evening, Camille was alternately bone-weary with physical exhaustion and pumped with adrenaline about the upcoming mission.

Also, scared spitless.

A person would have to be brain dead not to fear these radical extremists. What they did with women captives didn’t bear imagining. What they would do with an American girl would probably be even worse.

The answer is, don’t get captured, Camille
, she told herself. She was sitting at the desk in her bedroom of the small cottage she shared in Coronado with her WEALS roommates Marie Delacroix and Bobby Jo Franklin. Marie, a Cajun from Louisiana, was a former Marine who’d joined WEALS after 9/11. Bobby Jo was a lesbian bodybuilder and looked like it. Entering the service under its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy a few years back, Bobby Jo rarely discussed her sexual orientation, and, as far as Camille knew, she didn’t date, but the SEALs, known for their political incorrectness, liked to tease Camille and Marie about apples in a shared barrel and nonsense like that. They even had the nerve to give Bobby Jo the nickname Butch. The women just ignored the teasing, most of which was harmless. Besides, Bobby Jo could probably arm wrestle a few of them to the ground.

Following a late-afternoon dismissal back at the base, Camille showered, ate a quick dinner, and packed her bag for the trip. While her red hair dried into a frizzy mess, she sat at her desk “taking care of business,” as special ops soldiers were told to do before any mission. Last wills and testaments updated, bills paid, family good-byes, that kind of thing. She’d even called her parents, who were blissfully happy and planning a cruise. A themed cruise with some academic purpose. Instead of shuffleboard, there would be lectures. Yippee!

They hadn’t seemed worried about Camille, but then she’d made it sound like this was a routine mission. In fact, she might have said she was going to France, not Nigeria.

Tomorrow morning, Camille would board a military transport to Dallas with K–4 and Nicole. From there, they would take a commercial flight to Nigeria. All day in the air! She’d downloaded
Game of Thrones
onto her Kindle and planned to start the series, if she didn’t conk out and sleep. Sunday they would settle into the embassy housing, and Monday morning, Camille’s “parents” would take her to the boarding school. She was on her own after that, except for Sly, Donita, and Omar, who should already be in place, having arrived over the weekend.

“Hey, get a move on it, darlin’. Good times t’night down on the bayou . . . uh, bay.” A head popped into the half-open doorway. It was Marie who hadn’t lost her Cajun accent even after all these years on the West Coast. And, yes, she was dressed for a night out, in her favorite skinny jeans and scoop-neck T-shirt.

“I don’t think I want to go out tonight,” Camille said.

“C’mon,
chère
, the Wet and Wild is callin’ your name.”

Camille laughed. The Wet and Wild was a bar that catered to military personnel from the naval base, including SEALs and WEALS. It was traditional to down a few the night before a live op, for the single folks, anyway.

“Look at me,” Camille said, waving a hand toward her wild hair. “The only way I could tame this frizz is by putting it into pigtails.”

In the end, Camille agreed to join both Marie and Bobby Jo for a few hours, and she didn’t look too bad, if she did say so herself. She’d managed with a little gel to draw all of her hair up onto the top of her head, where she held it all together with one of those claw thingies. This only drew attention to the semipermanent freckles on her face (they would wear off in time, or by using some potent chemicals), but a little makeup covered them. Mascara and red lip gloss, and she was good to go. She, too, wore jeans. Not skinnies, in her case. She had a little too much butt for those. But they were tight and black, like her tank top. With her red high heels and hair piled atop her head, she looked taller than her five-eight.

“I’m going to lose my gay creds by hanging out with you two,” Bobby Jo complained as they crossed the parking lot. Camille and Marie had talked her into ditching her cargo shorts and man’s dress shirt for a “Walking Dead” T-shirt and white capri pants and sandals. There wasn’t much that could be done with her short, short hair, but she had agreed to a small amount of blue eye shadow, which made her eyes look huge.

The three of them opted out of the politically incorrect, wet T-shirt spraying machine at the entrance, a longtime fixture at the Wet and Wild, which meant they had to pay a small cover charge. Friday nights meant a live band, and this was how the owners paid for it. Plus it was a big attraction for certain folks.

It was eight o’clock and the place was already crowded and loud with laughter and conversation and the clinking of glasses, not to mention the country music band, which was just tuning their instruments, about to start playing. Camille was glad she’d come, suddenly. It would be nice to relax with friends. Morbid as the thought was, you never knew who might be missing the next time they met.

They were wending their way train-style through the crowd toward a table on the far side where Marie recognized some people. Being the caboose, Camille couldn’t see much.

But then she did.

Two tables had been pushed together. Sitting there were several WEALS, and SEALs: K–4, JAM, Geek, F.U., an FBI agent who was part of the Deadly Wind mission, and several others.

Including Harek Sigurdsson.

All week she’d been pretending that they were just pals, that the mind-blowing (and other body parts–blowing) night she’d spent with him hadn’t meant anything. How was she going to keep up the pretense when he stood and stared at her like she was the answer to his prayers? Or at least the answer to his lust.

He wore a pure white T-shirt, untucked, over faded jeans. His dark blond hair had been spritzed into that ridiculous designer disarray. A gold watch on his left wrist sparkled with richness (could that be a Rolex?) against his tan skin. His blue eyes sparkled with something else. And even from ten feet away, even with the stale beer/perfume/body heat stink of the dive, Camille smelled chocolate.

She was wet before he even said hello.

And she hadn’t needed any frickin’ spray machine to get that way, either. Just a hot-as-hell Viking with chocolate body odor.

Then he smiled.

One!

Two!

Three!

She was down for the count.

Chapter 14

Love was in the air, or something . . .

H
arek knew Camille had arrived before he saw her. Those fucking roses!

And he meant that literally. He got a hard-on every time he smelled roses these days. Case in point: He’d been ready to jump the bones of a woman coming out of the supermarket the other day before she turned and he realized she was eighty years old and carrying a jumbo bouquet of cellophane-wrapped roses.

Talk about embarrassing. And, just his luck, Trond had been with him at the time. They’d stopped on the way home to buy some feta cheese for the Greek salad Nicole was making. (Yes, Harek was still staying at Trond and Nicole’s house, but he’d bought a pair of earplugs to wear at night.) Trond had been calling out older woman/younger man jokes and ribald limericks ever since, some of them rather creative. “There once was a youth with big feet, who had a taste for old meat . . .” That kind of nonsense. Trond must be getting them from the Internet. And the gossip hound told every vangel in the world about the incident. Vikings did love to gossip, being confined together for months at a time in a longship when they went a-Viking. Vangels were even worse, having so much spare time between missions.

But no mistake this time. It was Camille arriving in a cloud of essence of roses, apparent even in a room more noted for essence of stale beer.

Camille had that silly red hair piled on top of her head and the silly freckles, but she didn’t look silly to him, and not at all like a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. Not in skin-tight black jeans and a tank top, both of which outlined every curve of her luscious body. And he knew just how luscious it was—lucky him!—from personal experience. The interesting thing to Harek was how Camille could change her appearance so dramatically. It was an aspect of her persona that would always keep a man on his toes. Among other things.

His only saving grace at the moment was that he probably smelled, too. Like a bleepin’ chocolate bar. Forget that. He was a whole supersize Whitman’s Sampler, and Camille didn’t have a clue what she was going to get. Yet.

He smiled.

And she tripped, just catching herself.

Good! No, bad. Bad, bad, bad! Holy smokin’ clouds! Did she have to wear those sinfully sexy red high heels? Roses and red high heels. Sounded like the title of a romance novel. He might as well throw in the towel right now.

Without being asked, Henry, his new FBI friend, moved over a seat to make room for Camille. When Harek raised his brows in question, Henry, who was closing in on forty, twice-divorced, and as cynical as an atheist at a revival meeting, sang in a quite good baritone, especially considering he was on his fourth beer, “Love Is in the Air.” Then added, “Or something.”

“Or something,” Harek muttered. But he wasn’t so sure.

He waved for Camille to come sit beside him. He saw her hesitate for a second, then sigh with resignation and head his way.

He wasn’t going to get bent out of shape over that hesitation. He’d been waiting all week to corner her, and his window of opportunity here might be too short for quibbling over small stuff.
Pick your battles, soldier
, he told himself. “I was hoping you’d come tonight so I could say a proper good-bye,” he said when she sat down.

“Were you?”

He had always been of the opinion that sarcasm ill-suited women, but perhaps he shouldn’t share that sentiment with her just yet, or ever.

She nodded when JAM asked if she wanted him to fill a glass for her from the pitcher of beer on the table. “A proper good-bye, huh?” she asked after taking her first sip of beer and licking the foam off her upper lip.

He didn’t care at all about her licking the foam off her upper lip. He wasn’t even looking there.

“Would that be as a friend?” She was circling the rim of her glass with a forefinger as she asked the question.

He wasn’t watching the movement of that finger. He wasn’t imagining it circling something else.

“Because friends are all we are, right?” she added.

“Not a chance,” he muttered.

“What did you say?”

“Not a thing.” He took a sip of his own beer and asked, “What’s with all this friend crap? Ever since we returned from New Orleans you’ve been giving me the cold shoulder.”

“Have I? I didn’t mean to.”

Liar!

“Don’t you want to be my friend?” She batted her reddish-brown lashes at him.

He wondered irrelevantly if she’d dyed them, as well as her hair. She must have. Which, of course, made him wonder if she’d dyed her nether hair, too? Of course she had. And freckles . . . oh damn! She’d probably painted freckles on other parts of her body, besides her face. Would she have some on her chest, near her breasts? On her belly? And how about her butt?

“Am I boring you?” she asked, interrupting his fantasy.

Not even a little.

“You didn’t answer me. Don’t you want to be my friend? I figured after spending a weekend in my home, and all you did for my parents, and everything we know about each other now, well, you know. We should be friends, at least.”

He could tell that she realized her mistake with those last two words, and he immediately pounced, before she had a chance to retract them. “At least, sweetling. At the very least.”

“Let’s cut the crap here, Harek. What do you want from me?”

“Do you have to ask?” He put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed.

“And that’s all?”

Jeesh! Women! Did they have to make a big deal out of everything? “For now,” he said, which was a load of bullshit. All he had was now. Already, he could sense Mike moving in. Any second he would be pulling the plug, and Harek didn’t mean
that
plug. He meant the end to any contact with Camille. Like, “Siberia, here I come!”

Any further conversation was postponed by F.U. and Geek getting into an argument over bombs versus intelligence in combating terrorism. F.U. claimed that the military needed to give the tangos more “shock and awe,” as in blowing their asses to smithereens, and he was just the explosives expert to do it, while Geek said intelligence gathering and covert operations were the way to go. No need for a big-bang show of force. JAM, who had been a Jesuit in training at one time, said that a little prayer helped, too.

“That’s the problem,” Marie interjected. “Everyone thinks that God is on their side.”

Harek knew whose side God was on, but he wasn’t about to call attention to himself with that kind of religious discussion.

“Are you ready to deploy on Monday?” Camille asked him, while around them people were giving food orders to the waitress. Hot wings, nachos, pretzels, that kind of thing.

He nodded. “How about you? You leave in the morning, don’t you?” He knew that because Nicole would be traveling with her, and Trond had started saying good-bye to his wife at three this afternoon. Can anyone say “horny Viking”?

“Yep. At five a.m.,” she said, and licked the salt off a pretzel stick that she took from a basket placed in front of them.

That lick was appreciated by his chocolate stick.

Between the beer foam and the salt, he felt like he was being assaulted. By licking. He groaned.

She smiled.

The witch!

“I’m worried for you,” he blurted out . . . without thinking, obviously.

“Why?” She cocked her head to the side and crunched on her pretzel. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Who knew crunching could be sexy? “The danger.”

“I won’t be out in the field, like you and the others.”

“Just as dangerous. More so, in some ways.”

“Harek, this is what I do.”

“I know.” Didn’t mean he had to like it.

“Besides, I’m not your concern.”

“I beg to differ. Unfortunately. I suspect Mike sent me here to protect you, as well as kill some Boko Haram Lucipires and save those who can still repent.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you saying that Boko Haram are demon vampires?”

“Some of them are.”

She rolled her eyes. “And you’ll try to save them?”

“Those that are not entirely black of soul have to be offered the opportunity. Most, if not all, will be too far gone, though.”

“Un-be-freakin’-lievable!”

“It is what is.”

“And you think the archangel had me in his crosshairs, too, when he sent you here?”

“It would seem so.”

“What? You gonna save me, like you did my father?”

Between the sarcasm and now the scoffing, he should have been put off. He wasn’t. “You don’t need that kind of saving.”

“What kind of saving, then?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’ll come to me eventually.”

“Pfff! Let me know when you figure it out.”

“You’ll be the first to know.” He grinned.
Best to show her my sunny side when she continues to jab at me with her snide remarks. Olaf Hairy Arms had the right idea. Cut off his wife’s nagging tongue. No, that wouldn’t be a good idea. No licking then.

“Just out of curiosity, is your brother Trond a vangel, too?”

Blather, blather, blather.
“He is.”

“And Nicole.”

“No. She is just his mate for life . . .
his
life. No, I don’t want to explain now. Let’s dance.”

The band, which had been playing rowdy country songs, like “I Love This Bar,” and “Boot Scootin’ Boogie,” segued into a poignant, slow ballad, something about, “I Need You Now.”

For sure.

“Do you think this is a good idea?” she said, even as she stood and dusted pretzel salt off her shirt.

Add salt dusting to licking as carnal triggers.

As to her question, dancing was the best idea he had, barring sex in the backseat of Trond’s Jeep, which he’d driven over here and which was outside in the parking lot. “Do you have any better ideas?” he asked, following her to the tiny dance floor and opening his arms to her.

Camille put her arms around his shoulders and nuzzled her face into his neck. He put his palms on her buttocks and yanked her tight into the cradle of his hips, then looped his hands loosely around her waist. With her high heels, she fit perfectly against him.

Harek wasn’t crazy about dancing. Seemed a wasted form of foresport to him. Why not just do the real thing? But he liked dancing with Camille. Especially when she snuggled closer and made a little kittenish mewl against his ear. Especially when his denim-clad crotch brushed her denim-clad crotch with every sway of the dance. Especially when the aura of roses surrounded them, as if they were all alone, swaddled in an erotic cocoon, not in the middle of a crowded dance floor with a bunch of horny sailors.

They danced and danced, saying nothing, to one “crazy”-themed song after another. Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings’s version of “I Wish I Was Crazy Again,” the more recent “Redneck Crazy” by Tyler Farr, and then the far-from-country Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” He knew because the singer made an announcement before each song. Maybe he was going a little crazy himself. He knew he was when he realized he was slow dancing with Camille to that fast, very fast song, “The Devil Came Down to Georgia.” The band must have moved on from crazy to frenzied. Folks around them were laughing.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, and began to lead Camille off the dance floor. Thankfully, she didn’t protest. In fact, she muttered, “You better buy me a chocolate bar real soon, or I’m going to start nibbling on your skin.”

“Damn, I hope so!”

Between the front door and the Jeep, about fifty feet, he must have kissed Camille twenty times, sometimes not even stopping as they kissed. It was a wonder they didn’t trip over the gravel or bump into a vehicle. When they were in the car, he asked, “Where to? Can’t go to Trond’s house. He and Nicole started saying their good-byes this afternoon, and they’ll probably still be going at it by the time you leave in the morning.”

Camille laughed. He’d already told her, back in New Orleans, what living with Trond and Nicole was like.

“How about that Motel 6 down the road? It doesn’t look too bad,” he said.

“No, let’s go back to my place. Marie and Bobby Jo probably won’t be back until two, and you’ll be gone by then. I have to get up by four. We go boots off the ground at five.”

He glanced at his watch . . . a Rolex his brothers had given him for Christmas, sort of a joke related to his sin of greed. He loved the watch, which Mike would no doubt confiscate once he got a gander at it. Harek enjoyed the luxury while he could.

It was only ten p.m. Hah! Camille had another think coming if she thought they’d be nearly satisfied in less than four hours. He was no dummy, though. He kept his mouth shut, and just nodded.

When they got to the cottage on a Coronado side street, he grabbed his backpack from the rear seat. It contained his laptop that he didn’t like to risk, even in a locked car; his secure cell phone; and some other items.

Once inside the small house, whose ceilings seemed almost too low for his six-foot-four frame, Camille asked, “Would you like something to eat, or drink?”

He shook his head and just stared at her. She knew what he wanted.

“C’mon,” she said, taking his hand and leading him upstairs.

He wanted to ask her why she’d changed her mind about having sex with him. He didn’t, though, fearing she would give him that friends-with-benefits crap. He didn’t know why, but he resisted the idea of mere friendship with Camille.

At the end of the hall, they entered a small bedroom that held a double bed, a bedside table with a low-wattage lamp, a dresser with a mirror on top, and a desk. There was an adjoining bathroom that appeared to be small, too. A packed suitcase stood on the floor at the foot of the bed. She closed and locked the door, then leaned back against it.

He liked the sound of that lock. It gave a sort of mental high five to what was to come.

“I wondered where you slept,” he said.

“I pictured you here,” she said.

“What was I doing?”

“Just what you’re doing now, staring at me with smoldering blue eyes and a hard-on that could drill cement.”

Smoldering eyes and a hard cock, what more could a guy ask for?
He laughed and shook his head at her. “Have I told you that you have a way with words?”