years fell away. For a moment, he caught a glimpse in her stricken face of the trusting, passionate girl she’d once been.
He’d come so close to loving that girl. Closer than he’d ever come to loving anyone who didn’t wear khaki. Until Ellie, the Marines had been his life. Until Ellie, the Corps had constituted the only family he’d ever wanted or needed. He’d never known his father’s name. He’d long ago buried the memory of the mother who left her four-year-old son in the roach-infested hotel room and drove off with some poor slob she’d picked up in a bar. After years of being passed from one foster home to another, Jack had walked into a recruiting office on his eighteenth birthday, signed up and found a home.
He shot up through the ranks, from private to corporal to gunnery sergeant in minimal time. He learned to follow and to lead. Because of his outstanding record, he was selected for the elite Marine Security Guard Battalion. His first tour was at the U.S. Embassy in Gabon, Africa, his second at the plush post in Mexico City.
The debacle in Mexico City had ended his career and destroyed all sense of family with the Corps. Thankfully, he’d found another home in OMEGA. This one, he vowed savagely, he wouldn’t jeopardize by tumbling Ellie into the nearest bed.
“I also want a copy of your list of missing items.”
The dismay left Ellie’s face. Stiffening at his curt tone, she gave him an equally succinct response. “I’ll print you out a copy. It runs to more than fifty pages.”
“Fifty pages!”
The exclamation earned him a condescending smile. “My team’s been on-site for almost a week now. We’ve recorded hundreds of digital images, cross-indexed them and made copious notes concerning each. The data was all stored in the external FireWire drive that was stolen. Thank God I backed the files up via the university’s remote access mainframe!”
With that heartfelt mutter, she led the way down the hall to the new set of rooms the hotel had assigned her. Jack followed, forcing himself to keep his gaze on her back, her hair, the stiff set to her shoulders under her top. On anything, dammit, but the seductive sway of her hips.
A swift prowl around the spacious corner suite she showed him to had him shaking his head. “Pack your things.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’ll call the front desk and get them to move us.”
“Why?”
He dragged back the gauzy curtains covering the corner windows. One set of wavy glass panes fronted the street. The other set faced the brick wall of the River Center complex next door.
“See the roof of that building?”
“Yes.”
“It’s on a direct line with these windows. Anyone with a mind to it could get a clear bead on a target in this room. Or climb up on the roof of that IMAX theater across the street and stake you out.”
The color leached from her cheeks. “If you’re trying to scare me, you’re doing one heck of a good job.”
“You should be scared. That wasn’t a valentine your visitor left on that mirror, you know.”
“Of course I know! To paraphrase your earlier remark, the viciousness of that threat is the reason, the only reason, I agreed to the nuisance of a bodyguard.”
Hooking his thumbs in his jeans pockets, Jack tried to get a handle on the woman who’d emerged from the girl he’d once known.
“So why are you hanging around San Antonio, Ellie? Why offer yourself as a target to the kook or malcontent who issued that warning?”
“Because I refuse to let said kook or malcontent interfere with my work. In all modesty, I’m good at what I do. Damned good.” She speared him with a hard look. “You predicted I would be. Remember, Jack? Right about the time you and Uncle Eduardo jointly decided finishing college was more important to me than my… Let’s see, how did he phrase it? My passing infatuation with a hardheaded Marine.”
They’d have to scratch at the old scars sometime. Better to do it now and give the scabs time to heal again. If Jack was to protect her, he needed her trust. Or at least her cooperation. He wouldn’t gain either until he’d acknowledged his culpability for the hurt she’d suffered all those years ago.
“You were only nineteen, Ellie. I thought… Your uncle thought…”
“That I didn’t know my own mind.” Her chin came up. “You were wrong. I knew it then. I know it now.”
She couldn’t have made her meaning plainer. Jack Carstairs wouldn’t get the chance to wound her again. He accepted that stark truth with a nod.
“Why don’t we get settled in different rooms, and you can tell me exactly what it is you’re so good at. I need to understand what you’re doing here,” he said to forestall the stiff response he saw coming, “and why it’s roused such controversy.”
The hotel staff moved them to adjoining suites two floors down. The rooms looked out over the inner courtyard of the hotel instead of the street. Like the rest of the historic hotel, they were furnished with a combination of period antiques and modern comfort. A burned-wood armoire held a twenty-seven-inch TV and a well-stocked bar. The wrought-iron bedstead boasted a queen-size mattress and thick, puffy goose-down comforter.
While Jack checked phones, door locks and ceiling vents, three valets transferred boxes of files and equipment on rolling dollies. Ruthlessly rearranging the furniture to meet her work-space needs, Ellie promptly turned her sitting room into a functional office. She’d already replaced the stolen computer and hard drive, which she now hooked up to an oversize flat LCD screen.
A smaller unit sat beside the computer. Jack studied it with a faint smile. Mackenzie Blair, OMEGA’s chief of communications, would light up like a Christmas tree if she caught sight of all those buttons and dials and displays. The palm-size unit was probably crammed with more circuitry than the Space Shuttle.
Evidently Ellie Alazar shared Mackenzie’s fascination with electronic gadgetry. She gave the small metal box the kind of pat a fond mother might give a child.
“This holds the guts of a technology I developed the summer after we…” Her brown brows slashed down. Obviously impatient with her hesitation, she plowed ahead. “The summer after I met you. I didn’t make the trip to Mexico City that year. I didn’t go down for several years, as a matter of fact.”
Jack wasn’t surprised. Elena’s emotions ran close to the surface. In the short months he’d known her, she’d never once reined them in. Looking back, he could see that was what had drawn him to her in the first place. Everything she thought or felt was all there, in her eyes, her face. Impatience, passion, anger—whatever emotion gripped her, she shared. Honestly. Openly.
She’d certainly shared her feelings the day her uncle sent his police to arrest Jack. She’d been furious with Eduardo Alazar. But not half as angry as she’d became with the Marine who refused to stand and fight for her.
“You didn’t go to Mexico that summer,” Jack acknowledged, steering the conversation to less volatile subjects. “What did you do?”
“I worked for the National Park Service on
