Jenk turned off the TV, frustrated with Izzy for dropping off the edge of the earth.

He was frustrated with himself, too-with his goddamn overly creative imagination. It had come up with this scenario where, coming back from putting gas in the two SUVs they'd used today, Izzy wandered over to Lindsey's room. Just to say hi.

Right.

Jenk threw on his jacket, telling himself that as long as he couldn't sleep, he might as well see who was awake and hanging in the restaurant, over by the bottomless supply of coffee.

Sure, that's where he was going. Which was why he ended up standing outside of Lindsey's room, shoulders hunched against that bitch of a north wind.

A light was on inside. He could see it through the curtains that covered the window. It was nothing too bright, and he found himself thinking of the way she'd covered that lamp on his bedside table with a pillowcase, creating a soft, romantic glow. He could hear the murmur of her voice. The musical sound of her laughter.

Fuck it. He knocked, jamming his hand back into his pocket as he stood and waited for the door to open.

Which it did, almost immediately.

She'd changed out of the clothes she'd worn to dinner. Instead she wore workout gear-gym pants and one of those form-fitting bra tops that left her arms and most of her shoulders completely bare.

And there they were, standing and staring at each other. For a moment, it was as if all the harsh words and hurt and disappointment of the past few days had vanished. She was looking at him much in the same way she had when he'd first brought her into his apartment.

"I'm looking for Izzy," Jenk said, because they weren't back there. They were here. In the Land of Suck. A journey for which she'd been on point.

"Damn, Izzy," she called in a voice that would have reached the tiny bathroom. "Jenk's onto us. Better put your clothes back on, stud." She turned back to Jenk, jerking the door wider open. "No, he's not here, but by all means, come in and search."

"There's no need to get hostile." Jenk started to back away, but she grabbed his arm and pulled him into the room, slamming the door behind him. "I was just looking for him and thought-"

"Lindsey's a slut, maybe he's in her room," she said, lifting the bedspread so he could see beneath it.

"You don't like yourself very much, do you?" he said.

Her laptop was out on the bed, along with the room phone. She'd been calling the members of the TS Inc team, making sure everyone knew the revised start time for tomorrow's exercise. Jenk had gotten a similar call from the senior chief.

Instead of answering, Lindsey marched over to the bathroom, slapping on the light and pulling the shower curtain back with a screech. "Of course, Izzy's a SEAL. He might be hiding in the toilet tank. Izzy, are you in there?"

"Look, he's been gone too long," Jenk foolishly tried to explain. "It was nice for a while, you know, to have the privacy-"

"Yeah, how is Tracy?" Lindsey came back out of the bathroom to ask. "What'd you two do all evening? Watch Animal Planet?"

"What?" Jenk couldn't believe what he was hearing. Lindsey actually thought that..."Privacy as in solitude. God damn it, are you really-" This was not going to help. He took a deep breath. "Can we hit pause for a second here?" The jealousy they were both guilty of feeling was surely a sign that the relationship they'd had was more than friendship and casual sex. Why couldn't she see that?

But Lindsey was still stuck on the details. "Tracy wasn't with you?" she clarified. "Starting around eight?"

"No."

"Not at all?"

Jesus. "No."

Any jealousy she might have been feeling had been completely replaced with concern. "Because I just spoke to Sophia, and Tracy's still not back in their room."

"Aw, come on, Tracy. It's going to be all right, I promise," Izzy said as the wicked-ass fun part of the evening morphed seamlessly into the far soggier regrets and recriminations part. He tried to cheer himself up by thinking that it could have been way worse. At least both of them weren't shit-faced and crying.

To her credit, Tracy was trying hard to stanch the flow, searching for her clothes, scrambling with them into the backseat where she got dressed. "I'm sorry," she kept saying, as he zipped his pants.

He'd spotted a trash container out by a picnic table when he'd first pulled off the road, and he turned up the heat and defroster before he opened the car door and stepped into the bracing night air. Shit, it was cold. He dashed to the trash can, ditched the condom they'd used, and...

Something made him pause. Was someone actually out there, in the woods?

He listened for a moment, but the night was silent. It was just his overactive imagination. Give me back my leg. Yeah, right. If he and Tracy were going to be killed by a deranged ghoul, it would've happened well before they'd climaxed.

Izzy dashed back to the car, climbing in behind the wheel. He hit the lock button though. Why not?

Tracy's sneakers were still on the floor in the front, so he picked them up. When he turned to hand them to her, she actually managed to give him a shaky smile.

"I was thinking," she said, almost shyly, "about that only one night thing...?"

Ding, ding, ding-ity ding. Izzy's notch in her belt was clearly vermilion. Thank you. Thank you very much. And he'd been wrong about the evening going south fast. It was, perchance, turning into a night for his "Best of" list. As in Best Unexpected Sex of His Life.

Tracy Shapiro wanted a replay. Or four. Or nineteen. Hello, hello, the places they could go.

Izzy played it casually, nodding instead of grinning at her like a fool. "Makes sense to me," he said. After all, payback was a tricky thing. It could take a while to really set. To take hold. Besides, Tracy had said Lyle had cheated on her way more than one time. "I mean, why shouldn't you have some fun, right?"

She was frowning at him, a furrow of confusion on her gorgeous brow. "Fun?"

"Or, it doesn't have to be fun at all," he quickly backpedaled. "It could be very, very hard work. A strenuous schedule works well for me. Three, four times a day. Twice each night. I'm ready and able and extremely willing."

Now she was staring at him as if he were a hypnotist, or speaking Japanese.

"I'm quite the conscientious worker," Izzy continued, resisting the urge to snap his fingers in her face, to see if maybe that would make her blink. Clearly, she was not in a joking mood, or maybe the tequila was clouding the issue, so he brought it to the bottom line. "Just tell me where and when, and I'll be there." He sang it for emphasis. "Don't you know, baby, yeah, yeah, I'll be there..."

That was obviously the right thing to do, because she finally smiled. "Sometimes I don't get your jokes at all," she told him.

No shit.

Izzy patted the front seat. "Come on, Sherlock, let's get back to the motel, where I'll climb into my lonely bed and dream of you."

He was on a roll with the saying-the-right-thing thing, because after Tracy scrambled into the front, she kissed him. It was the kind of kiss that made him glance at his watch and calculate just how late they'd return to the motel if they got supercrazy and took another condom out for a test run.

But all of his numbers jumped immediately to zero, as if Tracy hit his recalibration button by whispering, "I think I've totally fallen for you, too."

Come again?

Okay, she'd probably meant that in a sex with you puts the va-va-voom in vermilion, so let's fuck like bunnies until I return to New York to marry Lyle way.

But Izzy found himself looking into Tracy's Disney-blue eyes as she smiled almost shyly up at him.

"I think I've been willing to settle for Lyle," she said, "because, well, you know that expression-the devil you know?"

Izzy nodded.

"Lyle's the devil I knew," Tracy said. "But now, God, I can't believe I found you."

Um.

"I can't believe how perfect we are together. It was like...magic."

He'd put the car into gear, but now he put it back to park and turned slightly in his seat to face her. "The sex, you mean."

Tracy nodded. Some people got way too intense when they were drunk. Clearly she was in that subset. "The sex is definitely part of it, but I'm talking about all of it. The way you feel about me."

"The way I feel about...?"

She kissed him again, her fingers in his hair, which really felt very nice despite his unease. And then she said, "Your fate is sealed."

He'd told her if they made love, his fate would be sealed, and...She'd believed him?

Oh, fuck. Izzy caught her hands. "Tracy, whoa. Time out. When I said that, I was, you know, trying to special-deliver your personal fantasy-heavy on the fairy-tale romance with a little tragedy thrown in? Remember when we talked about that? Moulin Rouge and Stay alive whatever you..." He frantically tried to remember all that he'd said to her. God, I could fall for you so easily. This is going to kill me...letting you go... Oh, double fuck. "Babe, none of that was real. It was just a game."

She struggled to understand. "A game?"

"We were playacting." At least he had been. "Prince Charming and Princess Tracy. You know. Haven't you ever done that before? The divorcee and the pool boy? Or the prom queen and the...the cowboy? A little role-playing to make the encounter more exciting?"

"More exciting," she repeated. She looked as if he'd just killed her puppy.

"You were so tense," he said, even though he knew he was totally screwed. "I guess I was trying to get you outside of your own head. I mean, shit, I was up for anything, but I thought it would be better for both of us if Lyle wasn't sitting directly on your shoulder." There was nothing Izzy could say now to make her think of him as anything but the most loathsome villain. From her perspective, he'd lied to her. Repeatedly. "Tracy, seriously, I thought you understood. I thought..."

How could he not have known that she was taking him seriously? Except, damn, how could he have known? The things she'd said back to him had been so totally cornball, he'd been certain she was role-playing merrily along.

"Bullshit," she said. She had tears in her eyes, but she was fighting to keep them back. "That's what you meant when you said that it wasn't just bullshit-that you'd remember tonight forever. Unlike the rest of what you told me, which was bullshit. Oh, my God."

"Tracy, I am so, so sorry-"

"What was your fantasy?" she asked. "You said something about it...It was something about me not taking off your sweater, right?"

"You naked, me not," Izzy admitted. "You know, full-service treatment from an incredibly hot naked woman. I think it's probably got elements of love slave and master."

Tracy nodded. "Of course. Silly me for not realizing. Although, you know, I suspect it's also got elements of you not wanting me to see your horrible rash."

His laughter was clearly not welcome.

"Or your two-inch toothpick of a penis."

He shot her a look. "Hey, now."

She wouldn't look at him, focusing on tying her sneakers, her movements jerky with anger. But anger was good. It was better than those big blue eyes brimming with tears and hurt. "God, I'm stupid. I actually thought I'd done something right for a change, that I'd found someone special, but you're not. You're just like Lyle. Only with way less money." She glared at him. "If you so much as breathe a word about any of this to anyone, I will-"

"I won't," he said. "I promise."

She snorted at that-clearly his promises weren't worth much to her anymore. "And if you think you're ever touching me again," she told him, "you are so delusional." She fastened her seat belt. "I have to go back to my room now."

Good idea. Izzy put the SUV in gear.

"We've got to wake up Tom," Lindsey said, following Jenk into the motel parking lot.

"It was somewhere over here," Jenk said, holding his cell phone out and open, like Mr. Spock with his tricorder on Star Trek, exploring the class-M planet Nocellzonius. "I actually got a signal this morning. When we first arrived."

After discovering Tracy was MIA, Lindsey had gone to the room that the receptionist shared with Sophia, while Jenk had knocked on the doors of some of the usual suspects among SEAL Team Sixteen.

Going through Tracy's personal belongings had been somewhat...interesting. But she and Sophia had found nothing obvious cluing them in to Tracy's whereabouts, such as a journal entry with the words, I can't take this anymore. I'm going back to New York underscored, with four exclamation points.

Tracy didn't have a journal.

She did, apparently, have a slight fungal problem. As well as questionable taste in music, and a brightly colored shower-safe aid to assist her in self-entertainment.

And yet she'd gone to seek entertainment elsewhere. With Izzy Zanella, apparently, who was also still conspicuously absent.

That conclusion, taken straight from the Detecting 101 textbook-if two people were missing late at night from a low-budget New Hampshire motel, chances that they were together were high-made Jenk extremely pissy.

He had been jealous at the thought of Lindsey with Izzy, but he was mondo-mega-jealous of Tracy and Izzy.

Every time he opened his mouth it was Tracy this, Tracy that. Tracy, Tracy, Tracy.

"I understand the reasons why we train for situations in places where phone and radio coverage is nonexistent, but why do we actually have to go to the fucking dark side of the moon?" Jenk now vented his frustration as his cell phone continued not to work. "Can't we just hand over our radios and cell phones and promise not to use them? I mean, yeah, okay, when it's just the team, fine. But when civilians are involved...?"

"I'm getting concerned that Izzy might've had some trouble on the road," Lindsey said. Tracy had left her room without her winter coat, wearing little more than a sweatshirt over her pajamas. "If Tracy's with him, and they broke down-"

"If Tracy's with him," Jenk said, "I'm going to fucking kill him."

Apparently, he was no longer self-censoring his language around her. "You know," she said, her own temper sparking, "nothing quite says I love you like I'm going to fucking kill him, so frankly, I don't know why you bothered to come pounding on my door before, oozing with jealousy. Unless it's Izzy you're obsessed with..."

Jenk laughed. "Yeah, Linds, I'm gay. That's our big problem here."

"Our problem," she said, "would probably be solved if we just got the keys to one of the other trucks, and-"

"Our problem," he said, snapping his phone shut, "is that you care about me. I've been watching you grind your teeth every time I mention Tracy's name. I've been doing it on purpose, you know. Just to watch you squirm. You are jealous."

"Oh, yeah, right," she said, "like you're completely fine with the idea of Tracy and Izzy-"

"No, you're right, I'm not fine," he fired back at her. "Have you talked to Tracy? Because she's going back to Lyle-it's not a question of if, but when. Izzy acts like he's a player, but I really don't think he is. I mean, he pretends to be an asshole, but I've seen the way he looks at Tracy. If he hooks up with her, she's going to do to him what you did to me, and he's going to get his heart broken."

"I didn't break your heart," Lindsey said, and as the words left her lips, she realized how stupid she sounded.

"Oh, well, good," Jenk said. "I was worried that you might have. I'm glad to get a more accurate read on what I'm feeling-from someone who's too terrified to feel anything at all."

"Hey, I'm not the only one with intimacy issues," Lindsey countered hotly. "If I broke your heart, well then, you're guilty of giving it away much too soon. What are you, fourteen? Dear Burger King cashier girl, I know we've only spoken once, but when you told me '$4.68 please,' I knew you felt it, too-this bond that ties us together. A love to last throughout all time."

"Great, Lindsey. Make a joke. That's real mature."

And there it was. Salvation in the form of headlights out on the road.