Chapter One
Payback time had come for U.S. Marine Captain Sam Wilder.
And Cassandra Jones was just the woman to give it to him.
Watching him walk toward her, Cassie could see why he was
so popular with women - with those blue eyes, chiseled
features and dark hair, he was real nice eye candy.
"I'm sorry I was delayed, ma'am," Sam said as he joined
her.
She noted the way his eyes gleamed with male appreciation
as his gaze lingered on her. From her whiplash-blond looks
to her Tough Chick T-shirt, Cassandra Jones was a force to
be reckoned with. This had not always been the case. Far
from it.
But that was irrelevant now. She was here at Marine Corps
Headquarters, Quantico, Virginia, for one reason and one
reason only. Her career.
Cassie loved being a journalist. She loved the fact that
her editor had enough confidence in her work to select her
for such a high-profile feature series as "A Week in the
Life of an American Hero." She didn't love the fact that
the current American hero selected was U.S. Marine Captain
Sam Wilder.
Although she was certain he had no memory of it, this
actually wasn't the first time she and Sam had crossed
paths, and the truth was that Cassie would rather chew
glass than have to deal with him again. But she had totake
the good with the bad in life. It was a lesson she'd
learned as a small child and had never forgotten.
At that time there had often been more bad than good in
her life. But things had changed since then. She was now
an up-and-coming journalist with Capital Magazine and she
had a job to do.
So here she was. Stuck with him. That didn't mean she had
to be ecstatic about it, however. She'd been waiting
almost half an hour for him to show up. "I thought Marines
had a thing about being punctual."
Sam noted the slight hint of underlying hostility in her
voice and wondered if this was another liberal left-wing
reporter with a chip on her shoulder about the military.
Sure, patriotism had come back into fashion lately, but
that didn't mean that everyone had jumped on the
bandwagon. And this woman definitely didn't look like
someone who went along with the crowd.
The black slacks and white T-shirt she wore might have
been conservative attire were it not for the glittery
words Tough Chick strategically emblazoned across the
cotton covering her breasts. Her blond hair framed her
heart-shaped face and curved beneath her chin. She had an
incredibly lush mouth and wide jungle-green eyes that
reflected a certain amount of impatience.
Sam wasn't accustomed to a woman reacting this way to him.
Usually their smiles reflected feminine appreciation or
awareness or something ... not impatience.
As the only remaining Wilder brother who was still a
bachelor, Sam had taken his duties of continuing the
family tradition of being a charmer as seriously as he
took anything. While he was no womanizer, he had always
been confident of his effect on the opposite sex. He'd
never had to work at it before. The skill had simply been
a part of him, like his blue eyes or dark hair.
This woman, however, showed no signs of being the least
bit impressed ... and that intrigued rather than irked
him.
Sam had always been a man who enjoyed a challenge. In
fact, after being stuck in Quantico instead of returning
to active duty as he'd wanted, he was itching for a good
challenge and a little excitement.
"We Marines do pride ourselves on punctuality, ma'am,
among other things," he belatedly replied. "I was
unavoidably detained." He gave her one of his trademark aw-
shucks smiles that had always worked wonders on the female
population in the past. "If I'd known such a lovely lady
was waiting for me, I can assure you that I would have
done everything in my power to get here faster."
"I'm sure you would have," Cassie drawled. She already
knew from past experience that Sam paid attention to a
woman's looks. "So how does it feel to be the Marine
Corps's poster boy?"
"Excuse me?"
"Ever since you flew that surveillance mission and landed
safely despite the fact that your plane had serious engine
trouble, you've been hailed as an American hero, saving
the lives of your crew."
"It was engine failure, not engine trouble, and I was just
doing my job, ma'am."
"Come now, don't be modest. How does it feel having an
entire country talking about you?"
"I doubt they're still talking about me. The incident to
which you're referring occurred almost three months ago."
"Actually it was exactly two and a half months ago."
He narrowed his eyes. "You appear to have been counting
the days. I wonder why that is?"
"A good reporter knows the facts." And the fact was that
the press conference upon his return to the States had
been a major event. One that she'd covered. Or attempted
to. But she felt that Sam had ignored her attempts to have
her questions answered, and had instead called on a pert
blonde for his final question instead of her.
It was her photographer, Al, a grizzled pro of decades in
the business, who had pointed out the fact that the
blondes were the winners, getting all the attention, all
the coverage. Feeling that Sam had looked right through
her, ignored her waving hand, was the final straw. So
she'd accepted Al's half-kidding dare for her to become a
blonde.
Cassie had been tired of being ignored, of being the quiet
brunette with the tiny-framed smart-girl glasses who'd
never been called on in high school, who'd been overlooked
in college, who was continuously trying to get her editor
Phil to give her a chance at some of the bigger stories
for the past six months only to be told her time would
come.
Someone who came from a regular middle-class background
might believe that. Might still believe in happy endings.
But Cassie knew better. She believed in making your own
luck.
Her earliest memory was of being hungry, of her mother
lying on the couch with a bottle of liquor on the floor
beside her. Her mother never meant to get drunk again.
Something or someone else had always caused it. The blame
always started with Cassie's father, who'd died when she
was a baby, leaving her mother alone to cope. "Your father
left us," she used to say, as if he'd died in a car
accident on purpose, just to make her mother's life
miserable.
As the years went by, Cassie had quickly learned to be the
responsible one, the one who bought the groceries from
what was left of her mother's meager waitress salary. Her
mother had a bad habit of buying alcohol first. They'd
moved often, skipping out in the middle of the night when
they lacked the money to pay the rent, and they often went
without electricity or a phone.
Cassie had started working when she was fifteen but she'd
always made sure to study hard, realizing that an
education was her ticket out. She wasn't about to let a
man derail her the way her mother had been derailed by
Cassie's father's death. In those days Cassie had hid her
vulnerability beneath a quietly serious exterior.