Kiss of Surrender (12 page)

One thing was clear, though. She would have to adjust her behavior toward he-who-was-driving-her-crazy.

Eleven

Angel flying too close to the ground, or
something . . .

I
f Nicole
was already confused by Trond, she was stunned speechless the next morning when
she finished her morning run and was walking toward the chow hall where she
intended to have a big breakfast. She’d earned it.

As she approached the small, nondenominational
chapel that served all Navy personnel, including the SEALs, she saw a small
crowd outside, just standing about with the oddest expressions on their
faces.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Listen,” one young sailor said.

The most glorious male voice was singing “Amazing
Grace” inside the chapel. No, it was two male voices.

“Amazing Grace” was a wonderful hymn, and had been
sung by some of the best singers in the world. Aretha Franklin’s rendition on
Oprah’s last show had brought the audience to tears.

This was different.

She stood, transfixed, as did the others, when the
choir moved from one song to another, including some in Latin, like “Sanctus,
Sanctus, Sanctus,” that Nicole remembered from her childhood in a neighborhood
Greek Catholic church.

Finally, she couldn’t resist and stepped through
the open doors, even though she wasn’t appropriately dressed for church. She
shouldn’t have been shocked at what she found, but she was. Trond stood in the
front row with his friend Karl and they were singing their hearts out like
. . . like angels. Jeesh! With voices like those, they could get music
contracts, especially singing Christian music.

Just then, she noticed a man sitting at the
opposite end of the last pew where she’d plopped down. He was staring intently
at Trond and Karl, giving her an opportunity to study him.

Beautiful
, that’s the
only word that fit. He wore a plain white T-shirt and denims with white athletic
shoes. Nothing unusual there. And although he was tall and well-built, that was
the norm here on the base. His face was sculpted out of pure, cream-tinted
marble, or so it seemed. A strong nose. Full lips. Thick, dark eyelashes. His
black hair hung smoothly to his shoulders. The sunshine filtering through the
stained glass window cast a light that seemed to hover above his head like a
halo.

Inexplicably, Nicole’s heart was racing, and her
hands trembled in her lap.

Then, as if sensing her perusal, the man’s head
turned, and he stared directly at her through eyes of an ethereal silvery blue
color. Mesmerized, she couldn’t have looked away if she tried.

The most incredible sense of peace came over her,
and in her head flashed vignettes of her entire life up to this point. And then
it was as if an eraser wiped the slate clean of all the bad things in her past.
All this happened in the blip of a moment.

The man nodded at her and smiled.

She blinked.

And between one blink and the next, he was
gone.

Nicole found that tears welled in her eyes, but
they weren’t tears of pain or hurt. They were tears of joy.

That’s how Trond found her when the service ended
and he was exiting the church.

“Are you following me?” he accused. “More stalking?
There aren’t any closets here as far as I know.”

Now, there was a mood killer if she ever heard one.
Not that she’d been expecting sweet words after their bout of near-sex. Oh wait.
Could it be that he was aware that she’d complained about him to the commander
again? Still—

“No, I was out running when—”

“You were running? On a Sunday when you could have
slept till noon, or lazed about doing nothing?” He sighed as if those were
activities to be desired. Or nonactivities.

“Trond, Trond, Trond! You really do need some of my
motivational books.
Peak Performance
comes to mind.”
The commander had warned her about pursuing Trond’s “secrets,” but that didn’t
mean she had to accept his lazy attitude.

His lips twitched with humor. “You really want to
know how I perform when peaking? Methinks you already know that.”

At first, she was confused. “Oh you! That’s not
what I meant.” She felt her face heat with embarrassment. “How about this other
tape,
Life Is Passing You By
? It’s been a huge
best-seller for years.”

“Believe you me, I do not need a book to teach me
that.”

“Maybe you just need to be more organized.” Okay,
if she was going to be more cooperative with the guy, per the commander’s edict,
she could try being helpful. “I have some extra daily planners if you’re
interested. If you write down what you want or need to do for every hour of the
day, you’d be surprised how much more productive you can be. I could show you
how.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” He shook his head
with incredulity. “Do you write down times for visiting the latrine or doing
laundry?”

Actually, sometimes she did.

“Amazing!” he said when she didn’t respond, her
nonresponse screaming,
Guilty as charged
, and he
didn’t mean it as a compliment. “Anyhow, if you weren’t stalking . . .
uh, following me, why are you here?”

She ignored his implication that she wasn’t a
churchgoing person, which she wasn’t. Not anymore. But he had no way of knowing
that.

“I was out running,” she repeated, “when I heard
the singing. Remarkable singing. So, I came in. You’re very talented. Both of
you.” She nodded to Karl, who gave her a little salute as he approached and then
walked on, following the rest of the congregation, leaving her and Trond
alone.

Each of the men wore golf-type shirts with wing
icons instead of little alligators or polo ponies on their left chests, tucked
into neatly pleated khaki pants, with sockless loafers. Church clothes.

How could she reconcile the lackadaisical,
seemingly lazy special forces guy who could kiss like sin on the hoof with a man
who attended church and sang hymns? Well, her ex-husband used to attend Mass,
too. For show. “Are you religious?” she blurted out.

“You could say that,” he surprised her by saying.
“Is that why you’re misty-eyed? Because I sing so well? Or might be religious?”
He smiled at her.

She hated when he smiled at her. Rather, she hated
how his smiles made her feel. “If I’m misty-eyed, whatever the hell that is,
it’s because I just had the most remarkable experience.”

“Oh?”

“I think I just met an angel.”

Trond studied her for a moment, glanced over to the
end of the pew where there was, incongruously, a small white feather, and said,
“Uh-oh!”

Up close and way too
personal . . .

Trond was taking a shower that evening, a cold
shower, in the one of the private stalls in the bachelor officers’ quarters
. . . probably something set aside for visiting dignitaries wanting to
brag that they’d jogged with the SEALs, ate with them, even slept in their
barracks, in essence participated in the total SEAL experience. Hah! The real
experience involved total lack of privacy and communal showers where everyone
got to view each other’s goodies. He’d like to see some white-haired politicians
put their drooping gonads out on display.

When he raised his face toward the showerhead to
rinse off the shampoo, Trond noticed a bare leg hanging over the top of the
stall. A hairy leg. He jerked back, slipped on the soapy tiles, and fell on his
ass, cracking his skull on the tiled wall.

When his vision began to clear, he saw that the man
was climbing into the shower stall with him. First, he got an up close and
personal view of a man’s butt . . . a nice butt, if he did say so, not
that he usually noticed that kind of thing on men. Good grief! Had word of his
gayness spread already? Who else had that witch blabbed to?

The man, a tall man equal to Trond’s height, was
standing now, his long hair plastered to his head by the watery spray
. . . the shower head having a wide spray span.

Trond wished he had his sword with him. As it was,
he would have to use his hands, or maybe that washcloth could serve as a
garrote.

But then the man turned.

“Oh my God!” Trond said, before he could bite his
tongue.

Two things occurred to Trond then.

He was sharing a shower with St. Michael the
Archangel.

He had seen St. Michael’s bare ass.

Whoa! Hold the chariots! He was also seeing
something else on the angelic being.

He scrunched his eyes shut so that he wouldn’t go
blind.

“What are you doing in here?” he asked as he
reached for the shower doors and stepped out. A quick peek showed that St.
Michael had stayed inside and seemed intrigued by the cool water spraying over
him.

“I’ve never taken a shower before. I was
curious.”

Trond reached for a towel, thankful that he was the
only one in the showering chamber at the moment. But then, he wasn’t sure if
anyone would be able to see the angel. He wasn’t taking any chances, especially
considering the fact that the archangel must have been in the chapel today,
sitting near Nicole, and he’d obviously been visible to her.

“Why didn’t you just open the door?”

“There’s a door?”

Trond shook his head and quickly donned clean
underwear, shorts, and a T-shirt. Then he slipped his feet into a pair of rubber
thongs. The whole time he kept his back to the shower. “You better hurry up, or
someone might come in,” he warned.

“I’ll just disappear if they do.”

That answered that question.

“What is this substance in a bottle marked
Axe?”

“It’s liquid body wash. You can use it on your skin
or to shampoo your hair.”

“It smells heavenly.”

Trond sat down on a bench and put his face in his
hands, elbows braced on his widespread knees. Could his life get any more
peculiar than this? “Why are you here?”
Sorry if that
sounds rude, my angel friend, but you must admit this is not your usual
modus operandi.

Mike could read minds, and often did, but he must
not be “reading” him this time because Trond could hear him whistling.
My brothers will never believe me when I tell them about
this. They’ll say I was
drukkinn
or that I made
it up.

“Ouch, ouch, ouch!” he heard come from inside the
shower stall.

“What?” he asked. No way was he opening the door to
see his heavenly mentor in the nude again.

“My eyes are burning.”

“It’s the soap. You must have gotten soap in your
eyes.”

“Soap? You did not tell me it was soap.”

Trond rolled his eyes. “I thought angels knew
everything.”

“Only the important things.”

“Just let the shower wash over your open eyes for a
few seconds.”

Before he could blink, faster than any human
nanosecond, the archangel was sitting beside him on the bench, fully dressed
except for shoes in jeans and a white T-shirt with the logo “Beam Me Up,
Scotty,” and reeking of Axe’s Cool Mystic fragrance.

“You’ve been talking with Zebulan,” Mike said right
off.

So that was his reason for being here. “I have.
Once.”

“And you did not consider it important enough to
notify us.”

“I thought you saw everything.”

“That does not excuse your keeping secrets.”

“Hey, it wasn’t a secret. Nothing happened.
Besides, I notified my brothers of the presence of a high-level Lucipire in this
area.”

“I am more concerned with your impressions of
Zebulan.”

Trond hesitated to speak his mind, it was such an
outlandish notion. “I wonder if . . . I don’t think Zeb is all
bad.”

Instead of denying such a possibility, Mike nodded
as if Trond had affirmed something he’d already known.

“Is there any possibility . . . I mean,
has a demon ever turned?” Trond asked hesitantly.

“Turned what?”

Trond shrugged. “I don’t know. Good.”

“It has never happened in all the eons,” Mike told
him.

“What purpose would there be, after all?” Trond
remarked.

“Have you learned nothing, Viking? Good is its own
reward.”

Trond was so sick of motivational sayings. From
Nicole. From the SEAL instructors. And now from his heavenly mentor.

“Use him,” Mike advised. “If Zebulan has a weak
spot, bore in and take advantage.”

“That doesn’t sound very . . . um,
Christian.”

“Needs must for the greater good.”

Blessed stars! Another
proverb!
“Can I promise him anything?”

“It is not for you to barter with the devil.”

Okay, that put me in my place.
Not that I haven’t known exactly what my place is for oh, let’s say, one
thousand, one hundred, and sixty-three years.

“About the woman . . .” Mike started to
say and then just stared at him. An archangel’s stare was riveting. You couldn’t
look away. And with the stare, he saw everything.

“It was just a little playing.”

Mike made a scoffing sound.

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Even Trond
heard how pathetic an excuse his attempt at humor was.

And Mike wasn’t laughing. “You’ve been in Rome,
Viking, and did not like it. Fodder for the lions, you were, as I recall.”

Trond shivered with distaste. If he never smelled
lions’ breath again, it would be too soon. He couldn’t even go to a zoo, as Karl
had once wanted him to, when a special panda bear exhibit had arrived from
China. Too close to the lion cages.

“Temptation is a two-edged sword, Viking. You would
do best to remember that.”

Whatever that
means!

“It means that while the pleasure can be great, the
consequences can be greater.”

Oh, so Mike is back to reading
my mind? Just great! He could have given me warning.

“What would be the fun in that?” He almost smiled
at Trond then.

Which almost caused Trond to topple off the bench
with shock.