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.