The Midnight Hour - Brenda Jackson [10]
His breath suddenly caught when she walked over to the checkin desk, tugging a piece of luggage behind her. There was something about her walk… that for a minute he couldn't move. Maybe it was the way her hips swayed with each step she took, or it could have been the way she held her head with such a proud tilt to it.
For a brief moment, she had reminded him of Sandy. He blinked and breathed in slowly, telling himself that Sandy was dead. In five years, this was the first woman who reminded him of her; not in her looks-she looked nothing like Sandy-but there was something about the way she moved…
She was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a tank top and carried a cased tennis racket under her arm, giving an outsider the impression she was a vacationer who intended to play a few games of tennis. But he knew that the majority of the people who walked through Diamond Bay doors worked as operatives for the CIA under one operation or another. He wondered if she was an agent and if so, what department she worked for. He had never seen her before ^d could only assume she was a new recruit.
His eyes were drawn to her legs and he wanted to release a slow whistle of admiration, but doing so would have drawn attention. She had a gorgeous pair of legs, the kind that had always driven him crazy on Sandy. He slowly shook his head, again not believing he was comparing this person to the woman he had loved almost to distraction.
His gaze slowly moved back to her face and when she removed her sunglasses, an odd sensation hit him right in the gut, almost knocking the air out of him. He couldn't understand the sudden jolt that went through his body, but her eyes were a gorgeous shade of dark brown… just like Sandy's had been. They were so dark it seemed they were creamy dark chocolate, and totally complemented her cocoa complexion and dark brown shoulder-length hair. Then there were her lips, full and luscious, and painted a sultry red. A total turn-on.
For the first time in five years, he had had such a powerful and immediate reaction to a woman, and he quickly decided his reaction to her was purely a male response to a beautiful woman and had nothing to do with the things about her that reminded him of Sandy.
He thought about the other women he'd been involved with over the past few years. He hadn't been celibate, but he had remained emotionally detached. Any woman he slept with had understood up front that whatever they shared in the bedroom stayed in the bedroom, and after a day or night of good mind-boggling sex, it didn't matter to him if their paths never crossed again. They'd scratched each other's itches.
And he didn't see that changing anytime soon. All he wanted now, all he had wanted for the past five years was to find Solomon Cross and personally put the bastard out of his misery. Drake knew Cross was out there somewhere and it would be just a matter of time before the agency or the boys over at DEA tracked him down. And when that happened he was determined to make sure Cross never lived to spend even one stinking day in jail. He would not be satisfied until he avenged Sandy's death.
Drake's hand tightened around the cup he held, trying to rid his body of the anger that seeped through his veins whenever he thought of Sandy and how she had perished in that explosion. For a long time he had blamed himself for allowing her to go on the mission and not keeping a closer eye on her. No amount of therapy and counseling the marines had mandated that he undergo had been able to erase the sounds of her screams in that burning building just moments before he'd been knocked out cold by a flying piece of wood when the place had exploded. They were screams that he could not erase from his mind no matter how he'd tried.
Afterwards, he hadn't wanted to see a therapist as Hawk had suggested. He hadn't wanted to talk to anyone about the tragic event