She reached with the hand that had been holding the sheet, and- he was so screwed-it dropped to her waist, exposing her breasts. She took the gun from his frozen hand, cradling it with both of hers.

"Tell me about it." She brought the gun closer to her. "I saw you and Bryce talking all night. Talk to me."

"Uh," Wilder said, trying to think of something besides breasts.

"What he did with the knife today. That was stupid, wasn't it?"

"Bryce. Well." Breasts. Right here. "You know. No harm, no foul."

"He could have cut someone."

"But, hey, he didn't." Wilder was starting to sweat.

"Tell me about the gun." Althea cradled it in her slender hands, the muzzle pointing, well, damn, toward her face, her mouth. He'd just handed his gun to someone. Fuck. His buddies at the Special

Warfare Center would be kicking his ass up and down Bragg Boulevard if they knew.

Althea now had one hand cradled around the pistol grip and the other one on the barrel. Stroking it. Not subtle, but Wilder didn't care.

Maybe his buddies wouldn't give him shit. Not if he told them who he'd given the gun to and under what circumstances. LaFavre would be buying him beers. And wanting to hear about it. Not that he would ever tell. There were some things you just didn't talk about. Wilder hated guys who talked. Which was just as well because right now, he was having a hard time forming words.

Althea brought the gun closer to her body, between her breasts, still stroking it, and Wilder made no pretense of not staring. Everything he wanted to see was now in one tight shot.

"Tell me about your gun," Althea said again.

Wilder swallowed. "It holds fifteen rounds of ten millimeter. That's the diameter of the bullet."

"Is that a big bullet?"

Just throw a knife in my throat and have it over with. "It's a good-sized round. Most people carry nine millimeter." He was still staring at her breasts and the gun. "So I went one larger. Like Spinal Tap. You know, the amp turns up to eleven."

Shit, he was showing his age. Get out of the fucking kill zone.

"It's got an integrated laser sight built into the recoil spring guide assembly, uh, there-" He pointed, his hand less than six inches from the gun and her breasts. He was definitely sweating. "-Just below the barrel."

"Oh, you mean the red dotty thing you see in the movies?"

"Yeah. Touching the trigger activates the laser."

"Can I do that?"

Touch the trigger? "Sure. It's safe. I've taken the bullets out." He forced his mind to focus. Had he cleared the chamber?

Althea turned the gun in her hands. She put her finger on the trig-aer. A red dot appeared on the far wall. She pointed the gun at Wilder. The dot was on his chest. "Neat."

Never point a weapon at anyone unless you're going to shoot him. Wilder bit back the words. It would be bad timing. And he had told her it was safe. And he had taken the round out of the chamber, right? Shit. He tapped his pocket and felt the magazine and extra round and resumed breathing.

''What was that double-tap thing you talked about?"

Wilder put two fingers to his forehead. "When you shoot someone, you always fire twice. You want them to go down permanently. So this is the spot."

She nodded.

"You know, the gun is only half the equation." He reached out and retrieved it from her. She looked slightly disappointed and he got a much better look at her breasts. He knew they weren't real, but so what? They were here. In his bed.

He took the magazine and round out of his pocket. He pulled the slide back and put the round in the chamber, letting the slide go forward. Then he put the magazine in. A round in the chamber, not approved for police departments or gun clubs, but Wilder had never been a cop or a member of a gun club.

"I load the rounds myself," he said as he put the gun back in the holster.

"Why?"

"They're hot loads."

Althea laughed and he was mesmerized by the way that made her breasts jiggle. "And what's a hot load, Captain Wilder?"

The way she said his name reminded him of Armstrong. Well, why the hell should he give a shit what Armstrong would think? Bryce said she was doing that asshole Nash. Bryce was doing the makeup girl. Nobody had any morals in this place. When in Rome…

Althea leaned back on the pillows, her nipples pointing up at an im-possible angle, straight at Wilder, her version or designating a target. She had him, he was resigned to it. She might even know something about Finnegan.

She smiled at him.

Although now was not the time to ask. Well, if he had to take one for the team, so be it. He'd been worse places and in worse situations. Plenty of them.

"J.T.?" she said. "Hot load?"

"Hot loads. They're, um, designed for max muzzle velocity, able to punch through body armor, and then disintegrate inside the body for maximum damage." Geez, he sounded like some lame-dick instructor on the range at Bragg.

"Oooh."

Was that a coo? He'd heard the term; he wasn't sure he'd ever heard the reality.

"Maximum damage." Althea leaned forward. Her breasts jiggled but they didn't droop. It wasn't natural but at the moment Wilder didn't give a shit. "Where did you learn that?"

"Uh, Fort Bragg. Special Forces training."

She touched her lip with her tongue. "I bet you've seen a lot of action."

Wilder swallowed. "Some."

She shivered a little and that looked good, too. "Where?"

"Iraq," Wilder said, trying to remember. "Afghanistan." Here.

"Oh." She blinked at him. "Dangerous places. Are you working now?"

"I'm on leave," he said.

She smiled. "So what else do you have? I liked the gun."

Damn. Wilder mentally ran through the weapons he had strapped to his body, trying to figure out how he could get his clothes off without revealing them all.

"J.T.?"

"A man has to have some secrets," he told her, and turned out the light.

Lucy was halfway through the script and completely confused when Connor knocked on the door of the camper and opened it. She dropped the script and it slid off the table as he came in, smiling at her, his bulk filling the camper.

"We're good to go tomorrow," he told her, collapsing into one of the chairs. He looked beat, lines around his eyes, gray smudges under them, his five o'clock shadow making him look like a Hollywood bandit. "Late start, easy day. Nothing to worry about."

"Good," Lucy said, trying to stay businesslike. It was too much like old times, both of them bone tired way past midnight and Connor smiling at her.

Except that there was something wrong with the shoot. And something wrong with Daisy.

"Why aren't you back at the hotel?" he asked. "No reason for you to still be here."

"I was reading." A script that makes no sense. "Connor, what's going on here?"

He sighed. "We're trying to finish a movie, love. By contract it has to be done by six a.m. Friday, so we're pedal to the metal."

"No, we're not," Lucy said. "I've seen the shooting schedules. We're not even doing full days. And this stuff that we're shooting doesn't make sense. The crew is uninvolved, the actors don't care, and my sister… there's something wrong with Daisy, Connor. She's taking something, some prescription-"

"You're overreacting," Connor said, sounding as tired as Daisy. "As far as the movie goes, name me an action movie made in the past twenty years that's made sense. Don't worry about it, just finish shooting it. It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be done."

"Then why'd you get me to finish it?" Lucy said, exasperated. "You know I don't do 'good enough for government work.' If you just wanted it finished, you could have gotten any hack."

He smiled at her. "I wanted to see you." He leaned forward. "Look, I know we got off to a bad start today, but it doesn't have to stay that way. I really wanted you here, Luce. I want you back."

"Oh, Connor," Lucy said, shaking her head, but he held up his hand.

"Just hear me out, babe. I didn't appreciate you when I had you, I was young and stupid and not ready to settle down, you should never have married me. But now I'm older and I'm tired and I just want to sit on a deck someplace with a good woman and watch the sun set over the ocean. This is my last job, I'm retiring after this, finding one place to stay, one woman to stay there with."

Oceanfront property? Expensive fantasy, Lucy thought, but that didn't mean it was a bad one. Except that he must have been making a hell of a lot of money if he thought he could pay for it. Or he was working one of his schemes. Was that what was dragging Daisy down?

"And you've always been the best woman I've ever known," he went on. "Daisy said you weren't with anybody. She said you hadn't really had anybody serious since me. And I thought that maybe you still-" He swallowed hard. "I was better when I was with you. Things went better. You made my life better. You were the best time I ever had, Lucy. And I think maybe I've been looking for you ever since." He stretched his hand across the table and took hers, and she fought a sudden urge to pull it away.

"Connor. Listen-"

"I know." Connor let go of her hand. "Too much too soon." He grinned at her. "That's your specialty, rushing in too fast to fix things, and now here I'm doing it. But I have four days, well, three now, to show you that I've changed."

She bit her lip. "Look, I drove down from New York today, and then shot all night, and I'm worried sick about Daisy, so this is not the time-"

"I know, I know." He stood up and held out his hand. "Come on.

I'll take you back to the hotel and you can sleep on it and then we'll talk tomorrow."

She took his hand and let him pull her up. "I'll drive the camper. I need it to take Pepper to the comics store tomorrow."

He smiled again, his face softer than she'd ever seen it. "You're great with her. You should have kids of your own. Maybe that's something we should talk about, too."

"Kids?" Lucy said, dumbfounded.

"I want it all, Luce," Connor said. "It's time. And you're the woman I want to have it with. You make it all make sense." He leaned forward, so handsome, smiling at her, and kissed her, and she kissed him back to see what it felt like.

Nothing. Out of nowhere she thought of J. T. Wilder and shivered.

"There's a king-size bed in my hotel room," he whispered to her. "Gets awful lonely in there."

Right. Lucy thought of Stephanie and her excuse: I was helping Connor. And then there was Althea. "I find that very hard to believe," she said, and he grinned.

"Well, I'm going to be lonely in there now that you're back. There's nobody else for me from now on, Luce."

She pulled away. "Go back to the hotel. I'll follow you."

He nodded, not pushing. "Tomorrow we talk, okay?"

"I'm not going to be any less distracted tomorrow." She met his eyes. "Connor, what's wrong with Daisy?"

The light went out of his eyes. "There's nothing wrong with Daisy."

"She's taking something-"

"She's a single mother working long hours and trying to home-school her kid," Connor said. "She's just tired."

"No," Lucy said, "she's taking something."

"You know what? This is none of my business." He opened the door and looked back at her. "You shouldn't be talking about your sister with anybody, Luce. You want to know something, ask her."

"Hey," Lucy said and then he was gone. You bastard, she thought. Making taking care of Daisy sound like a betrayal. Anything to get her off his back. Yeah, we'll talk tomorrow. And not about you and me getting together, either. The last thing I need in this mess is a man to deal with, too.

J.T. Wilder came back to mind, and she tried to shove him away, thinking, How pathetic is that? If ever a man had shown no interest in her, it was Wilder. Forget him, forget all men until she finished the damn shoot and fixed her sister's life.

She began to clear off the table and saw the script where she'd dropped it. She picked it up and remembered why she'd been confused; she was sixty pages in and there was nothing in there but a basic romance plot. Where were the helicopters going to come from? The armored car? And that damn SEAL. In this script, Bryce's character was a stockbroker.