Virginia Kantra - Born To Protect

Okay, not like one of the kids, Jack acknowledged. Those were bona fide adult female curves under that plain T-shirt in an expensive fabric blend. But she was no less off-limits than one of the munchkins.

Yeah, she was a blonde, and he dug blondes. Her legs, in tailored khaki, tempted a man to imagine them naked or wrapped around his waist or resting on his shoulders.

But Jack knew his limitations. He didn’t “do” good girls. He didn’t go after the chardonnay and postgraduate degree type. And if he’d ever had any fantasies about making it with a princess, they hadn’t gone beyond tenth grade, when he’d wrestled off Valerie Hardison’s bra after the Boone High School production of Once Upon a Mattress.

Christina Sebastiani was a job. Maybe not even that, if he didn’t like the look of the intelligence packet the old man put together.

Still, Jack could watch and admire and, in his own fashion, pay tribute.

He eased his camera from his pocket. It was a nice little Nikon, light and compact. Nothing like the sleek, inconspicuous numbers he’d carried on missions, with their high-speed film and low-light capabilities, but he’d left his toys, his cameras and guns, behind. Now he shot pictures with a thirty-five millimeter aperture and shot targets with a nine.

He played for a moment with framing and focus and then let his lens see for him. Whir and click on Christina, her profile sharp and perfect as a queen on a silver coin. Click on the slant of sunlight drifting through the trees. Whir and click to catch Eric, fingers cramped and tongue stuck out in concentration as he printed on a chart. Click on Christina again, her blond head bent forward as she conferred with two girls. Click on a willow, leaning down from the bank to trail pale leaves in the dark water. On Christina, laughing. Christina, stretching. Christina… glaring at him.

He lowered his camera.

She stalked toward him, her long legs making a statement of their own. “What are you doing?”

He couldn’t figure what had tweaked her tail. But she was definitely upset. He answered honestly. “Taking pictures.”

“Why?”

“Habit?” When she didn’t smile, he shrugged and elaborated. “I used to be a photographer’s mate. Only then it turned out the Teams needed a photography specialist, so I graduated to intelligence ops.”

Her eyes widened. “You were spying on me?”

“Princess, if I were spying on you, you wouldn’t catch me at it. I was taking pictures, that’s all.”

“What kind of pictures?”

“Trees. Water. Kids. What difference does it make?”

Her gaze slid sideways toward Eric, hunched over the clipboard a few yards away. His right ankle was stretched in front of him, propped on Jack’s jacket and draped with a cold, wet sock.

“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I don’t like having my picture taken.”

So, maybe now was a bad time to confess that he had more than one shot of her. “Yeah, I could have guessed that,” Jack drawled.

She blushed. He didn’t know many women who still did that. He would have bet princesses didn’t. “How is he?” she asked.

Jack tore his attention from the pretty pink color in her cheeks. Who? Oh, yeah. The kid. Eric.

“Not bad,” Jack said. “Hard to tell how much damage was done until the swelling goes down. It hurts, and his toes are getting cold, but that’ll teach him not to mess around near water.”

“Will he be able to walk back to the bus?”

“Comfortably? Probably not. We’ll see how he does once we get some ice on that ankle.”

She nodded absently, her smooth, blond brows drawing together.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Jack said. “It was an accident. Could have happened on anybody’s watch.”

“I know that. It’s just the children are my responsibility, and I feel…”

“Guilty?”

She frowned. “Concerned.”

Jack leaned against the tree trunk at his back, satisfied he’d provoked her into forgetting all about his camera and her worries. “I didn’t want you to fret about what I was thinking, that’s all.”

She looked at him like he was something scraped off the bottom of her royal shoe. “I am completely indifferent to what you think.”

He grinned. “You don’t look indifferent. You look—” he paused, enjoying her frost “—annoyed.”

Another woman would have blown up at him. But Princess Cupcake held it together, held it in. Training, he thought. Not his kind of training, but he could still respect her discipline.

“Not at all. I appreciate your help with Eric.” Her smile glinted, cool as water over rock. “And if he can’t walk, I’ll appreciate it even more.”

An hour later, it was time for the kids to return to the bus for lunch and the ride back to school. And Eric couldn’t walk.

Shouldn’t walk, Jack told Christina. The pain was his body’s way of warning him against putting weight on that ankle.

“All right.” She didn’t argue. He liked that about her, too. “Can you get him to the parking lot?”

Jack wanted to tell her it would be a piece of cake. He used to run holding a one-hundred-seventy-pound rubber boat over his head. He used to do sit-ups cradling a two-hundred-pound section of telephone pole. But then he’d been able to rely on his swim team. Then he’d been able to rely on his shoulder.

He looked at the white-faced Eric. One hundred thirty pounds, tops. “I can try.”

“What can I do to help?”

“Stay out of our way.”

Jack dumped ice by the side of the stream and retrieved his jacket from the ground. The kid couldn’t hobble half a mile, even with support. A piggyback ride was out of the question. The docs who had stitched Jack together had carved a nice chunk from his back to replace the missing muscle in his left shoulder. But if he took the kid in a fireman’s hold, he wouldn’t need to rotate the shoulder. He could distribute the weight over his back and hips.

He lowered himself to one knee. “You’ve got to put your arms around my neck.”

Standing behind him, Eric hesitated. “Maybe I could walk.”

“Don’t be a hero, kid. You’ll regret it in the morning.”

He heard his own tone, harsher than he intended, and saw Christina’s eyes narrow. Watch it, Flash. Christina was sharp. Too sharp. He didn’t want her guessing what was wrong with him. He didn’t like her knowing there was anything wrong.

“Tell you what, next time you can carry me,” he suggested lightly.

He was rewarded when Christina relaxed and Eric leaned against his back. Jack gripped the boy’s arms against his chest and pushed to his feet.

And the first part of the trail was easy. He’d been working out, hadn’t he? Lifting weights, just like the physical therapist had told him. Developing his damn range of motion. His legs were strong. And he was pumped to be in action again.

After they passed the quarter-mile mark, though, he could hear Eric puffing in discomfort. The hold put pressure on the boy’s chest. It had to be pulling on his arms, too. He hung, a dead weight on Jack’s back, his left foot occasionally bumping Jack’s legs. Jack felt the stretch reach deep into his shoulder as scar tissue gave. Despite the cool temperature under the trees, he tasted sweat on his upper lip and felt it at the base of his spine.

Don’t quit. Don’t be a quitter. The words had kept him going during weeks of training on the beach at Coronado, during months of physical therapy in a well-lit room that stank of antiseptic and pain. And they’d worked then, because then he had believed that if he didn’t quit he could be everything he wanted to be. He could be a SEAL.

He knew better now. He wasn’t working for anything now. But he still didn’t quit.