With dry eyes, she gazed one last time at the back of his beloved head and the width of his strong shoulders. If he had turned and looked at her, she wasn’t so sure she would have had the strength to walk out the door. “Good-bye, Max,” she said.

But he didn’t look at her, and with her knees quaking and her hands shaking, she walked out of his townhouse. She placed her bag and Baby into the passenger seat of her BMW, then climbed in and fired it up. Without a backward glance, she drove away. She didn’t cry until she’d driven half a mile. She didn’t fall apart until Fredericksburg.

She had to pull her car off the highway into the parking lot of a Best Western. As tears streamed down her cheeks, she placed her arms on the steering wheel and let go. Big sobs racked her chest and pinched her heart.

Until that moment, she’d never known that love could feel so bad. She’d been in love before, but not like this. Not the kind that felt as if she’d been ripped apart.

Lola didn’t know how long she sat in her car before she realized that she couldn’t make the four-hour drive home. Her head pounded and her eyes were scratchy yet watery at the same time. She pulled her dark sunglasses out of her purse and headed into the lobby of the Best Western. She and Baby checked into a room, near the ice machine, and she turned on the television, hoping for a distraction. But nothing distracted her from the pain of losing Max. If she’d thought he’d still be at home, she might have called and told him she didn’t mean it. That she’d changed her mind, that she’d take him under any circumstances for however long it lasted. But she knew he wasn’t home, just as she knew that if she didn’t get out now, this scene would play out again and again and again.

Baby whined and licked her face as if he, too, mourned the loss of Max. As if he, too, felt lost and empty inside. Lola lay on the bed and wrapped her arms around herself. The horrible emptiness ate a hole in her stomach and she reached for the telephone book, flipped to the yellow pages, and dialed.

“Delivery, please,” she sobbed into the receiver. “I’d like a medium meat lover’s pizza, an order of bread sticks, and a small order of chicken wings. Do you have diet Pepsi?”

Within thirty minutes, she sat at the small table by the closed curtains, gorging on fat, greasy comfort food. She’d eaten two pieces of pizza, three bread sticks, and half the wings when she pushed the food aside. It wasn’t helping. Just making her feel worse. An old and familiar voice urged her to purge all that fattening food, but she tuned it out. Baby jumped up on the table and snitched some pepperoni. Lola didn’t have the heart to scold him. She understood his pain.

There was nothing to make her feel better.

Nothing to take away the pain and emptiness she felt clear to the depths of her soul.

The C-130 banked port and descended to thirty thousand feet. The interior lights shut off, pitching the craft into darkness. The pilot cracked the hatch, and from inside his wet suit, flight coveralls, life vest, and fifty pounds of gear, Max felt the temperature plunge about a hundred degrees in less than five seconds. He took steady breaths through his oxygen mask and could sense his fog-proof combat goggles frosting over as the C-130’s ramp lowered.

Three other men stood within the aircraft with Max. All of them former SEALs, all of them tethered to the bulkhead with yellow safety harnesses. Max had worked with two of the men before, and they both were seasoned warriors. The third, Max had only heard about by reputation. His name was Pete “Boom-Boom” Jozwiak, and he was supposedly the best demolitions expert around. He was Max’s swim buddy on this trip, and Max hoped like hell the kid was as good as his reputation. Five miles below, on an island south of Soledad, a group of anti-American terrorists where holed up with two nuclear warheads they’d appropriated from the former Soviet Union. The U.S. government wanted those warheads out of terrorist hands, yet in order to keep relations with the world on an even keel, they could not do anything overt. They had to retain deniability, and they figured the wisest choice was to send in black operatives. For five days, Max and the other men had met with the powers that be and had come up with a tactical operations plan that would make the warheads disappear. At least that was the objective, and as always, failure was not an option.

The four men pushed the rubber combat raft toward the end of the ramp. A parachute, communications package, and the team’s assault gear were lashed to the assault raft, as were the engine and fuel that would take them to the island. Max checked the GPS on his chest to make sure it was working and waited for the green cargo bay lights to blink, indicating that they were over the area and it was time to go. He double-checked the Velcro closures on his assault vest and felt for the Heckler & Koch 9mm semiautomatic pistol strapped to his thigh.

The cargo lights blinked twice and the four men shoved the rubber craft and pushed it out of the C-130. Max unhitched the safety lines, moved to the end of the ramp, and rolled into the night sky. Within seconds, the cells of his parachute opened and he was hauled upward by his harness. Then everything evened out, and he flipped on his GPS, corrected his heading with the steering line, and sat back to enjoy the ride. Or at least he tried to. For the first time since he’d joined the Navy, he didn’t feel the thrill of anticipation. The rush of adrenaline that let him know he was alive. For the first time, he wasn’t exhilarated by jumping out of an aircraft or pushing his physical and mental capabilities past the limit of endurance. For the first time, the thought of Mission Impossible did not pump him up. For the first time, he just wanted to get the job done and get the hell home.

He rolled his head back and looked up at the stars. Normally, this was the part of the mission he enjoyed the most. The calm before the storm. Not this time. He was too angry to be calm, and he’d been angry since the day he’d told Lola he loved her, and she’d walked out the front door. No, anger was too mild a word. What he felt churned in his gut like acid and filled him with impotent rage. He’d always known that any involvement with her was going to cause him pain. He’d fought against loving her, but in the end, it had been like fighting not to breathe. After a time, it just proved impossible.

I won’t ask you to stay, Max. I won’t ask you to stay for me, she’d said. I know you wouldn’t anyway.

In the end she’d done exactly what he’d always known she’d do. She’d wanted him to give up his government work for her. For a life in the suburbs. He’d been right about her, but being right brought him no comfort.

I won’t go through this time after time so that you can go off and feed whatever need you have that makes you risk your life for people you don’t know and a government who had you arrested for a crime you didn’t commit just so they could get rid of you.

At the moment, his need to risk his life for an ungrateful government paled in comparison to his desire to hightail it to North Carolina and rip her heart out, just as she’d ripped out his. Jesus, she was evil. She’d waited until there wasn’t a thought in his head that didn’t revolve around her, then she’d walked out. She’d waited for him to fall in love with her before she’d plunged the knife deep in his chest. Then she’d waited for him to tell her he loved her to twist it for good measure. Evil and vicious.

Max checked his altimeter and tore off his oxygen mask. He sucked in a breath of fresh air, but it did nothing to clear his troubled mind.

I deserve more. I deserve a man who loves me enough to want to grow old with me.

He’d always thought she deserved more. Always thought she could do a hell of a lot better than him. Again he’d been right, but again it brought him no comfort. The thought of her with another man embedded the knife so deep, he didn’t think he’d ever get it out again. Evil, vicious, and vindictive. If she’d wanted to get back at him for the Dora Mae fiasco, or anything since, she’d done a good job. Brilliant. The first time in his life he tells a woman he loves her, and she tells him it’s not enough. Well, that would teach him to lead with any part of his body but his head.

Twenty-five feet above the surface of the water, he cut away his parachute. He wore enough hardware to drag him to the bottom, and he felt for the pull-tab that would inflate his CQC vest. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and prepared to plunge into the ocean.

For thirty-six years, he’d lived without Lola Carlyle. He would live without her for thirty-six more.


* * *

Lola stuck her pencil behind her ear, then massaged the back of her neck. Seated around the conference room table to her right were four members of sales and marketing, along with her lead designer, Gina. To her left sat her creative director, and together they were endeavoring to brainstorm a new name for the seamless line of Lola Wear, Inc.

Barely There was their thirteenth idea of the afternoon. And the thirteenth idea that failed to blow Lola’s socks off.

“The new line is as comfortable as a second skin,” she said. “Soft and smooth and very sexy. We want the advertisement to reflect that. We need something short and snappy. Something that says I’m comfortable but sexy.”

The faces around her looked as tired as she felt. They’d been at it for over three hours and no one was coming up with anything that closely resembled anything brilliant.

“What if we use something with your name in it, Lola? Something fun and sexy,” Gina said, and everyone threw out their ideas, no matter how off-the-wall.