Marlie Montague was right smack dab in the middle of exposing a massive government cover-up when her front doorbell chimed, playing the theme from Mission: Impossible.
Although she heard the bell, Marlie was so deeply engrossed in the comic book that she was illustrating the sound didn’t really register in her brain. She sat tailor style at her white drawing board, black charcoal pencil in hand, surrounded by a bank of computer equipment, some ivory, some ebony, all Macs. She drew Angelina Avenger with her eyes blazing and her guns drawn as she confronted a top ranking CIA agent about his part in a global oil conspiracy.
Her pencil hollowed the lines of Angelina’s cheekbones, accentuating her haunting beauty and steely inner toughness. She employed the eraser to perfectly arch her heroine’s auburn eyebrows. Angelina might be the most kick-butt, crime-fighter in the comics, but she never neglected her grooming. The woman was serious trouble in high heels.
Quite unlike Marlie.
She glanced down at the rumpled black track suit that she’d never once run track in. It was two o’clock in the afternoon and she realized she’d been toiling for almost nine hours without a shower or anything more to eat than her morning bowl of Froot Loops and only her trusty tweezers knew for sure the last time she’d plucked her eyebrows.
The doorbell played Mission: Impossible again.
Irritated by the interruption, Marlie sighed, laid her pencil down and pushed back from the story board.
Maybe it was UPS with a box of free author copies of her twenty-eighth comic book CIA Zombies Recruits, the upcoming March issue of her heroine’s exploits, in which Angelina uncovers a secret government brainwashing experiment using the news media to subliminally program the masses.
When she reached the front door, she had to go up on tiptoes to peer through the peephole. Being five-foot-two was a hindrance at times, little wonder she had created Angelina as a six-foot Amazon.
It was a man.
A stranger.
The hairs on her forearm lifted. Who was he?
He stood with his back to the door, gazing out at the moderately priced homes that comprised her cozy little corner of Oleander Circle just a mile from the Gulf of Mexico. He looked displaced in suburbia. Like a cactus in a petunia patch.
Pushing her glasses up on the end of her nose, she squinted to get a better view. He wore a sweat stained navy blue T-shirt and gray cotton workout pants that in spite of their bagginess did not camouflage his strong, muscular butt.
In one hand he held of all things a Pyrex measuring cup. Could this be her new next door neighbor come to borrow a cup of sugar?
More likely a cup of egg whites. Cleary, this guy, with his no-flab body, never put a bite of the sweet stuff in his mouth.
If this was indeed her new neighbor, then she had watched him from her office window two weeks earlier when he’d moved in next door. Her imagination went off the chain as she remembered him lifting those boxes with bulging biceps, stripping off his shirt when he got overheated and dazzling Marlie with a righteous view of his late-night-infomercial abs.
He wore his hair cropped close to his head. Not quite a buzz cut, but almost. More like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman. She knew the look.
Precision military.
Was he military? She hoped he wasn’t military. She didn’t trust military men. Not even ex-military. Not even sexy ex-military.
Don’t sweat it, babe, Angelina whispered inside her head. He’s much more my type. You should have hooked up with Cosmo when you had the chance.
But she had never been physically attracted to Cosmo. They’d been best friends and close confidantes, that is before Cosmo sold out his scruples and left Corpus Christi to go to work as a civilian computer cryptologist for the Office of Navy Intelligence in Suitland, Maryland. She still missed her buddy and wished she could have been more accepting of his career path.
The riveting man on her doorstep pivoted, giving her a breathtaking view of his ruggedly handsome profile. He looked like he should be gracing the cover of one of those outdoor adventure magazines. A provocative five-o’clock shadow encircled his angular jaw and his hooded eyes were an intriguing shade of blue-gray-green, the Gulf-of-Mexico in turbulent weather. And like a storm-swept sea, he looked both demanding and resilient.
And as treacherous as a downed power line on a schoolyard playground.
She was mesmerized.
Her fingers tingled to draw his face, to capture his effigy in charcoal. Her eyes studied him as if she was actually seeing him on canvas and tracing his exquisite form with her art pencil, forever trapping him on the page. Her brain cast him in geometry, a circle for his head, an inverted triangle for his torso, a right side up triangle for his lower body and squares for his legs that she mentally lengthened and shaded until they were long, strong pillars.
Leaning in, he rapped hard against the door.
Caught off guard by the unexpectedness of the sharp sound, Marlie gasped. She jumped back and almost fell over her black lacquered coffee table. He was persistent. She’d give him points for that.
But what if she was wrong? What if this guy wasn’t her next-door neighbor?
Her underground comic books were considered controversial by mainstream publishers. Just last week she’d gotten a death threat mixed in with her fan mail. It wasn’t the first. She’d received them a few times before and she’d even notified the police with the initial one. But they’d blown her off, pooh-poohing her fears as unlikely. She hadn’t bothered phoning again. In the best of times, Marlie wasn’t a fan of authority figures.
Seven years spent researching, writing and illustrating her conspiracy theory comic book series had given her suspicious mind. That and the fact her father had been a government whistleblower killed under mysterious circumstances by the naval officer who was supposed to have been his trusted friend. To top it off, the Navy had framed her father, proclaimed him a traitor, asserting that he’d been selling Mohawk missiles to terrorists.
You’re being paranoid again, Angelina chided. This guy has nothing to do with those death threats or what the Navy did to your dad. Open the door.
“Easy for you to say, you’re a fearless crime fighter.”
Don’t give me that b.s. You’re not afraid that Mr. Hunka Man came over here to do you harm. You’re just too chicken to talk to him.
There was that.
Marlie’s natural impulse urged her to slink back to her office and pretend she’d never heard the Mission: Impossible theme summoning her to the front door. She had a deadline looming and three pages left to illustrate before tackling the computer phase.
That’s right. Go ahead. Blame it on your work. Never mind that you’re hiding behind your shyness as an excuse to avoid getting a real life. And maybe, just maybe, a real man.
“I’m not sticking my head in the sand.” She knew she had a bad habit of talking to her own fabrication. It was one major drawback to living alone and working out of her home.
Prove it.
“I am not the slightest bit interested. He’s military.”
You don’t know that.
“Girlfriend, check him out. His posture is so perfect it looks as if someone nailed a two-by-four into his spine.”
What’s wrong with military?
“Come on, you of all people? Asking me a question like that.”
You think the dude’s got a submachine gun stashed down the front of his sweat pants? Then Angelina started humming the old Beatles song, Happiness is a Warm Gun.
“I can’t open the door looking like this.” Marlie’s hair was unkempt, she wore no makeup and there was a coffee stain on her white T-shirt at a strategically embarrassing spot.
Excuses, excuses.
“Hello? Anybody home?” The hypnotic sound of his voice, all sinful and chocolaty, lured her.
Double dare you to introduce yourself, Angelina challenged.
“Okay, fine, all right. Just give me a second to freshen up.”
Hurry before he leaves.
What suddenly compelled her, (besides Angelina’s big mouth), Marlie couldn’t really say. It was an odd sensation, pushing up from somewhere deep inside her, daring her to open the door.
Maybe it was nothing more than the urge to get a better look at the supreme hottie. Maybe it was because she’d been feeling a little too isolated since Cosmo left. Or maybe it was because if this man was going to be living next door she had to know exactly who he was and what he was about. When push came to shove, Marlie valued information over safety because the right kind of information could ensure her safety.
Stripping off her coffee-stained shirt as she went, Marlie dashed into her bedroom. She pushed back the black beaded curtain that served as a closet door and somehow, in the process, managed to dislodge her bowling ball from its place. The ball escaped, bumping away across the hardwood floor. She ignored the fugitive, snatched a clean T-shirt from a hanger and hurried into the bathroom.
He rang the door bell again.
This is your mission if you chose to accept it. Angelina snickered. Open the door to your mystery date.
Hush, she told Angelina and then sang out, “Coming, coming.”
Marlie rinsed her mouth with Scope, while simultaneously releasing the elastic band that kept her unruly brown hair pulled back. She ran a brush through the tangles and then dabbed on a subtle shade of pink lipstick. Semi-presentable.
She turned and rushed down the hall. She was so focused on her goal that she did not see the bowling ball. Her ankle clipped it and the ball rolled between her legs.
Marlie ended up sprawled face down on the floor, staring underneath the sofa. Ouch. That was gonna leave a mark.
Wow, Angelina said, check out those dust bunnies.
The doorbell rang again.
Hustle, hustle. This mission will self-destruct in seven seconds.
“Hang on!”
Dragging herself to her feet, she hobbled to the door and flung it open only to discover that her sexy neighbor had vanished. In his place stood the UPS man.
“Where’d he go?” She cocked her head, craning for a look around the man’s body, but all she could see was the boxy brown delivery truck parked at the curb.
“Where’d who go?” asked the UPS man.
“The guy who was just here.”
“What guy?”
Marlie sighed. At some point between the Scope gargle and the bowling ball mishap her neighbor must have given up and gone home and the UPS man had come up the sidewalk in the meantime.
Oh, well. Perhaps it was for the best. At least Angelina couldn’t accuse her of not trying. She blew out her breath, surprised to find she felt disappointed. Shaking her head to dispel the sensation, she reached out to take the box from the UPS man.
Only to discover that he was also clutching a wicked looking semi-automatic weapon.
With a silencer attached to the end of it.
