Jen glanced at the machinery, and thought, Greek isle. Right. “I guess your island is wall to wall archeologists digging up ruins?”
Nikos smiled. “As it happens, my island is in better shape than many, in that it has few ruins and fewer visitors.” His smile was so warm, his black eyes glinting with reflections from the sparkling sea below.
“Well, I should go,” she forced the words out—and then, to her horror, It happened again. “ . . . though I will say your island is probably as beautiful as the few I saw when I was there once, some years ago, for a story—of course I can’t pretend to know all the islands in the Aegean, as I know there are many, and maybe even people who live there can’t count them all, but one of the things I remember most are the goats bleating everywhere—not that the people weren’t great, but it’s just, in California there aren’t goats wandering in and out of houses and pooping right and left—”
Rubber chicken! She clashed her teeth together in a heroic effort to shut down the inane word tsunami.
Now she should really leave.
But he spoke, with quiet seriousness, as if she hadn’t just been blathering about goat poo. “There are many islands on which only animals live, and some that are bare of any life except very hardy grasses. Everything comes down to water.” He lifted a hand. “I understand that Southern California has something of the same sort of climate conditions?”
She stared, astonished he wasn’t running for the hills. “We can go six months and more without a drop of rain—”
The sound of a loud engine nearly drowned her voice. She turned, wondering what sort of a rattletrap that student was driving—and blinked as a big car pulled up much too fast. It barely stopped before all the doors swung open and burly guys ran out, straight toward them.
Jen stared. What the heck was going on? The next thing she knew, Mikhail charged at them. Voices rang out, but the sense of the words escaped as years of habit took over. For some reason, these guys were attacking Joey and Mikhail!
But she wasn’t going to just stand by.
Neither was Nikos.
Fighting at fifty-five means conserving your strength. Even with jogging to work every day and working out with the students, Jen didn’t have the speed and stamina she’d had at twenty-five, much less thirty-five, and bruises took longer to heal.
That meant keeping her moves to a minimum, calculated to have maximum effect: early on one of the men turned on her, apparently with the idea of taking her hostage against the others. Two feints, one side-kick to a knee, and a palm-heel strike to the solar plexus convinced him to curl up on the ground around his knee, gasping for breath, instead.
That gave her a moment to catch her own breath as she cast a quick look around. Joey had snapped out both ends of what she’d taken to be a metal measuring tool. It was now staff length, and he wielded it with humming expertise, sending three would-be assailants backpedaling so fast they kicked up rubble. Mikhail whirled with deceptive slowness between two big thugs, his movements even more economical than hers. And effective—one guy dropped, howling over a broken arm.
Ann seemed to have vanished like smoke. Jen had time to sweep once more, in case the professor had fallen and was hidden by stone slabs, but she was definitely gone.
And then a big brute with surfer hair turned a sneering grin toward her and charged. She sidestepped at the last moment, kicking his knee. He pivoted to deflect the power of the kick, bringing around a haymaker, but Nikos was right behind her, delivering a punch that spun the man around before he dropped.
“Nice work,” she breathed—and there was no more time for more than that, as a fresh set of attackers leaped at them.
Nikos took up a stance beside Jen, and once again they fell into a rhythm as if they had fought side by side all their lives. She kicked a guy twice her size to Nikos; a short time later, whirling between two assailants, he spun one of them her way, who she put out of action with a sidekick to the jaw. The second one tried to bash a rock over Nikos’s head from behind. She took him down with headbutt to the chin, followed by a palm heel strike powered from the hip that snapped a bone in his forearm. She and Nikos backed one another, keeping the menacing circle from flanking Joey.
While it was going on the fight seemed endless, and then it was suddenly over, with three guys running for the nearest car. Others picked up the ones who had fallen, and—snarling threats and curses—slammed back into the two other cars.
“We know where you live, Hu,” one bellowed, then they peeled out, leaving the stink of burning tires.
“I didn’t even see the second car arrive,” Jen said, as she leaned her hands on her knees and concentrated on taking deep, slow breaths.
Nikos stepped up, his cheeks glowing with color, his breathing fast. “You all right?”
“Yes. Thanks. You?”
/> “Fine, thanks to you.” He spread his hands, the ring glinting on his little finger as he smiled, then said, “I would be honored to have you backing me in a fight any time.”
“Same,” she said, breathless with the rush of after-battle adrenaline. That threat was still echoing in her ears. “Who are they? What’s going on?” She turned to Mikhail and Joey, who were talking in an urgent undervoice.
The two faced her, glanced at one another, then away.
“Thank you for the backup,” Joey said, more serious than Jen had ever seen him. “That was . . . unfortunate.”
“It was crazy,” Jen said. “Did they want to steal that digging thing over there? How would they even drive it through the streets without the police being after them in ten seconds flat?”
“Speaking of . . .” Suddenly Ann was back, her short hair ruffled as if she’d been running. Jen hadn’t even seen her arrive. “The police are on their way—should be here in seconds.”
As she finished speaking, they heard the wail of a siren. It was a few blocks away.