Kathleen Creighton: Secret Agent Sam

“How do you know what she looks like?” Cory’s voice sounded idly curious, remote and far away.

“I saw the wedding pictures you guys sent Mom and Dad. She looked…happy. So did you.” She looked over at him, chin lifted in defense against the suffocating pain in her throat and chest. “So, what happened, anyway?”

He was maneuvering himself carefully around the controls and out of the copilot’s seat and didn’t reply.

“Hey,” she said in mock dismay, “we’re still a half hour out. You don’t have to go back to your seat yet.”

“Yeah, I do,” he said flatly. “If you think I’m going to discuss my failed marriage with you, you’re crazy.” With one hand on the back of the right-hand seat, the other on hers, he paused as if listening to a replay of what he’d said inside his own head. Then he added in a softer tone, “Not now, anyway. I guess we are going to have to talk, but this isn’t the time or the place.”

It wasn’t until he’d left the cockpit and was on his way back to his seat that Sam realized her heart was pounding. And that she felt shivery inside-a purely feminine kind of weakness she hadn’t felt in…oh, years and years. Well, two, to be exact. Which happened to be the last time she’d spoken face-to-face with Cory Pearson.

Feminine weaknesses-or any other kind, for that matter-she surely did not need. Lord help her, especially not now.

Well, hellfire and damnation-as Great-Grannie Calhoun might have said-what was she supposed to do? She hadn’t expected to feel so much, not after all this time.

Tony’s stare followed Cory down the aisle and into his seat.

“Don’t even think about asking,” Cory warned in a hard, flat voice that carried over the loud click of his seat belt.

Tony promptly closed his mouth. A moment later, though, he opened it again to say, jabbing a finger at Cory for emphasis, “Okay, but just so you know, the minute we get to Zamboanga, it’s the brews first, then the buzz. I mean it, man. The whole story. Or you can find yourself another cameraman. Swear to God.”

Cory put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

He wasn’t worried about losing his photographer. In addition to being a close personal friend, Tony’d have to be comatose and chained to a bunker before he’d miss this assignment. But he was right-the three of them were going to be depending on each other for a lot during the next week or so, including, possibly, their lives. They were a team, for better or worse. Tony deserved to know about his history with the third member of the team-some of it, anyway.

Definitely not everything.

God, how it all came back to him, the way things had been with Sam and him. Every laugh, every tear, every heart-thumping, gut-twisting, sweaty detail. The chemistry-the fireworks-had been there from the first moment for both of them, although he’d done a pretty good job-heroic, he thought, considering what he was up against-of holding it at bay for as long as he had.

There’d been the age thing, of course, but Sam hadn’t wanted to hear about that. Far as she was concerned she was a grown-up woman of legal consenting age, and that was that. Didn’t help matters, either, that her mother had been the same age when she’d met and fallen in love with her dad.

Then there’d been Cory’s friendship with Tristan, forged during those hellish days spent together in an Iraqi prison. Tris hadn’t been happy when his baby girl, the daughter he still remembered as a ponytailed tomboy, had declared her intention of dating a thirty-two-year-old friend of her father’s. Cory had been fighting a strong sense of guilt about that the weekend he’d gone to visit Tris, Jessie and Sam at the lake house. Memorial Day weekend, it had been. Lord, how well he remembered that terrible day…

It’s been a beautiful day. Last night’s thunderstorms have moved on, and the skies have cleared to a typically hot, hazy, sun-shiny summer afternoon. The lake is crowded with boats of all kinds, shapes and sizes: pontoons loaded with partying lake-dwellers waving to neighbors on their docks, flat-bottomed bass boats with solitary fishermen stoically riding out the chop in quiet coves, lots of other ski-boats, and of course the Wave Runners and Jet Skis, zipping illegally in and out amongst them all.

In the midst of all the chaos, Sam is determined to teach me to water-ski. I’ve never considered myself particularly talented when it comes to sports, but she’s patient-or stubborn-and it seems as if I might be getting the hang of it, finally. I’ve gotten up-again-and this time it feels like I might stay here awhile. Tris is driving the boat, while Jess sits watching me from the spotter’s seat in the rear, and Sam rides beside me on her knee board. Above the hiss of the water’s spray I can hear her shouting encouragement and praise.

He remembered the feel of the goofy grin on his face, the breathless exhilaration when he successfully jumped the wake.

He remembered the two kids on the Jet Ski, a boy and a girl riding tandem, cutting in close…too close.

I hit the water with that stinging thump that’s become all too familiar to me this day, and I hear Sam’s yell and Jessie’s whoop, and the sound of the boat’s motor throttling down, then circling slowly back to me. Jess leans over the back of the boat, calling to me, asking if I’m ready to call it quits.

That’s when it happens.

I don’t see the accident, none of us do, except maybe Tristan. But we all hear it-that terrible grinding crunch. I hear Tris shout as he guns the boat, and then he’s heading away from me toward the mouth of a nearby cove. Far off across the roiling surface of the water I can see the teenagers’ Jet Ski floating at a crazy angle next to a capsized bass boat.

Then I’m swimming, swimming toward the wreck, swimming as hard as I’ve ever swum in my life before, and my heart feels like it’s on fire in my chest.

I hear Jessie screaming at Tris, and the sound of a splash as Tris hits the water. And after what seems an eternity, I see Tris’s head reappear, and next to it that of the unconscious fisherman. I feel an awful jolt of adrenaline shoot through me a moment later when I see both Tris and the fisherman slowly sink back beneath the surface of that muddy water.

A thought flashes through my mind: No! No way he survived eight years in an Iraqi prison to die in this godforsaken pond. No way!

That’s when I haul in air and dive.

Things become confused…I’m operating on instinct.

I’m underwater, I feel something…I grab hold of it. It’s Tris, and I grab hold of him and try to fight my way back to the surface. And I realize I’m fighting a losing battle because Tris still has a death grip on the bass fisherman and isn’t about to let go.

I think, God help us, we’re all going to drown.

And then…my head’s above water, and I see Sam, plowing toward us through the water on her knee board, digging hard with both arms and yelling and cussing like a maniac, and she’s shoving life preservers at me, and her strong hands are everywhere, helping me, lifting Tris, pulling them both up out of the water.

There’s a lot of yelling and thrashing around, and everything is gasping, coughing, choking, sobbing pandemonium…

In spite of the confusion, some images stayed clear in his mind: Sam treading water while breathing into the fisherman’s mouth. Jess doing the same for the teenaged boy in the bottom of the boat while she sobbed and swore furiously at Tris between breaths. Tris clinging to the side of the boat, gasping for breath and glancing over at Cory with haunted eyes.