If A Man Answers

by Merline Lovelace

  “Okay, okay, I got the picture.” She scrunched up her nose impatiently, dislodging a small storm of brown flakes. “What happened?”

  “Walters hit on one of the lieutenants at the base.”

  Molly shoved her knees under her and surged upright. “No kidding?”

  “I shrugged the story off at the time because...” She jumped in, excited and indignant. “Because you couldn’t believe your paragon of virtue, your defender of truth, justice and the American way could step off the narrow path of righteousness.”

  “Because the lieutenant in question is well known around the squadron for her ability to lay a first-class lip lock on the unsuspecting and unwary,” he finished dryly.

  “Oh!” Chagrin and curiosity fought a short, fierce battle. Curiosity won. “Did she lay one on you, Sam?”

  Molly could have sworn she heard him grinning.

  “We’re talking about Josh Walters here,” he reminded her. “I thought I’d go out to the base tomorrow and, uh, feel this lieutenant out a little more.”

  She refused to rise to that obvious bait. “Let me know what you find out.”

  “I will.” His voice dropped to a slow, rough caress. “’Night, Mol.”

  “’Night, Sam.”

  With the sun beating down mercilessly from a cloudless sky and the dust from a fitful breeze stirring lazy swirls across the desert, Sam drove out to Nellis Air Force Base the following afternoon.

  Located eight miles northeast of Las Vegas, the sprawling military reservation covered more than eleven thousand acres. In addition to the base proper, restricted test air space ate up another three million acres of desert, with five million more set aside for shared use with civilian aircraft. One of the busiest air facilities in the world, Nellis was home to the Air Warfare Center, the USAF Thunderbirds, and a host of composite strike forces containing Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force elements. Sam felt its pulsing vitality the moment he drove through the front gate and returned the guard’s snappy salute.

  The forest green Blazer he drove every day in lieu of his cherished Mustang slowed to a crawl, its powerful engine growling a protest to the base’s twentyfive mile per hour speed limit. Behind the row of tan-and-brown hangars, twin-tailed jets thundered down the runway and streaked into the air. The gutwrenchingly familiar scent of jet engine exhaust drifted across the shimmering afternoon heat. Sam drew it into his lungs like another man might the scent of a woman.

  He swung off the main boulevard and headed for the maintenance complex in an isolated sector of the base, where First Lieutenant Patricia Donovitch supervised a crew of highly skilled munitions handlers. After a long drive along the perimeter road, Sam pulled up at the gate to the restricted area and waited while the guard put in a call to the lieutenant.

  The young security guard returned a moment later to inform him that she’d be with him as soon as her crew finished loading a batch of missiles. Sam climbed back in the Blazer and stretched out his legs. He squinted through his gold-framed sunglasses at the F-15 soaring into the sky at the far end of the runway. From this distance, the fully armed fighter seemed to move at a slower speed than the six hundred miles an hour Sam knew she was capable of.

  He waited, mentally bracing himself for the kick to the gut he knew was coming. It slammed into him just as the sleek, twin-tailed jet spiraled into a sky so vast and so blue that a poet might describe it as a playground for the gods.

  Christ, he missed it. All of it. Strapping himself into a cockpit and hearing the first whine of the engines revving. Wing tips tilting into the face of the sun. The soaring climb and dizzying drop. The brotherhood of arms, stripped to its barest essentials. Even the endless flight safety briefings and boring staff meetings. Would he ever get back to it?

  The F-15 disappeared into a puffy white cloud, and Sam admitted the truth.

  He wouldn’t be climbing back into a cockpit in the foreseeable future. It was time he accepted that fact and got on with the rest of his life.

  He was still sprawled in the Blazer, staring through the open window at the puff of cloud, when a dusty maintenance vehicle passed through the gate and pulled up nose-to-nose with the Blazer. Pat Donovitch spilled out, cheerful, bubbly, and packing her own load of lethal armament under her baggy battle fatigue shirt, Even with her thick curls stuffed under a navy ball cap and her feet encased in dusty web boots, she exuded an earthy sensuality that had made her so popular at the Officers’ Club on Friday and Saturday nights.

  “Hey, Major Henderson. How’s the head?”

  Sam shouldered open the Blazer’s door. “Still there, Donovitch. How’re you doing?”

  Her lively face twisted into a wry grimace. “As well as can be expected with Red Flag kicking off in two days. You remember how that is.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Sam shoved aside vivid memories of those grueling training exercises when the “red” forces assigned to Nellis attacked and tried to prevent “blue” forces—U.S. and NATO units from all over the world—from penetrating their target. The simulated air battles in the skies over southern Nevada honed the Air Force’s fighting edge and wrung every last ounce of emotion and energy from all participants, air crews and support personnel alike.

  “I know you’re busy, Pat. I won’t keep you. I just wanted to ask you about Josh Walters.”

  “Congressman Walters?”

  Sam caught the surprise that flickered in her blue eyes, followed instantly by a shadow of wariness. Her bright, cheerful smile dimmed. He hooked a thumb in his jeans, trying to think of any way to wrap the next question up in clean linen. There wasn’t any.

  “I remember hearing your name linked to the congressman’s a year or so ago. I know it’s none of my business and you can tell me to go to hell if you want to, but I need to know if there was anything more to that rumor than squadron scuttlebutt.”

  The lieutenant’s face lost all trace of its former open friendliness. “You’re right, Major. It’s none of your business. Look, I have to go. We’ve got another load of SAMS to arm and...”

  “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

  His quiet comment cut through her tumbled excuses. Even more wary, she threw him a nervous glance. “Important how?”

  “A friend of mine thinks she heard Walters’s voice in connection with a crime.”

  “What kind of a crime?”

  It was Sam’s turn to hesitate. He was reaching here, really reaching. He didn’t want to start rumors flying around the base, or slander a man he’d always respected. Yet he couldn’t discount Molly’s on-target identification of Walters, any more than he could dismiss this sudden reluctance to talk on the part of a young woman not particularly known for her reticence.

  “A man was murdered a week ago, a small-time drug dealer and occasional pimp.”

  “Murdered!”

  Donovitch sucked in a quick breath. Under the bill of her ball cap, her face went stark white.

  “There’s no proof that Walters was involved,” Sam said quickly. “I just came out to talk to you on a hunch. What can you tell me about the man?”

  The lieutenant rubbed her palms down the sides of her fatigue pants. She looked everywhere but at Sam.

  “Not much. He came through on a tour of our facilities and sort of, well, singled me out. He asked me what I thought about women in combat, and I got in a few good shots before his handlers hustled him off.”

  Sam kept his voice even. “Rumor has it he did more than just single you out during his tour.”

  “Yeah, well, he called me.”

  “At work?”

  “At home.”

  Obviously on edge, she drew a line in the sand with the toe of her boot. Sam waited, his own edginess growing by the second.

  “He said he wanted to hear more on my views about women warriors,” she continued slowly, reluctantly. “He suggested that we have dinner. He also suggested that I keep it quiet, as the Air Force wasn’t exactly pro-women-in-combat at the time, but
, well, I was flattered. I guess I mentioned the call to a friend or two.”

  That’s all it would take, Sam knew. The jungle beat would pick up that juicy morsel instantly and broadcast it all across the base. Donovitch confirmed his supposition with a disgusted shake of her head.

  “Somehow word of the call got back to the General. From there, the tale shot straight up the chain to the Legislative Liaison office at the Pentagon.”

  “Ouch!”

  “Ouch doesn’t begin to describe it. The air staff went bananas. Some poor captain was even tasked to prepare issues papers for me to use in discussions with the congressman. My commander passed them to me with instructions to make sure that I understood the official Air Force position. God, what a mess!”

  There was more. Sam heard it in her voice. Saw it in the way her gaze slid sideways and fixed on the scrub beside the road.

  “What did Walters have to say about the whole thing?”

  Still she wouldn’t look at him. “Publicly, he dropped it right in my lap. In that easy, cultured way of his, he implied that the little lieutenant had her own agenda about women in the military and was certainly going to extreme lengths to press it.”

  “And privately?”

  She hesitated so long Sam didn’t think she’d answer. Finally, she lifted her face. Defiance and an unmistakable note of fear threaded her voice.

  “Privately, he called me at home again and warned me to keep my mouth shut. If I didn’t...” She swallowed. “If I didn’t, he had friends who would make me sorry... even sorrier than the last whore who tried to embarrass him.”

  The Blazer churned up a trail of dust. Sticking to the speed limit more by instinct than by conscious effort, Sam tooled the vehicle along the perimeter road. He barely noticed the two-ship flight of fighters lifting off at the end of the runway. The past no longer pulled at him. His whole being was focused on Molly Duncan and the immediate future.

  His eyes slitted behind his sunglasses, Sam put Lieutenant Donovitch’s short, bitter tale through a dozen different spins. With every twist and tumble, his lingering doubts that Molly had pegged the right man as the killer lessened and his uneasiness grew.

  Damn! Josh Walters! Sam’s knuckles whitened on the leather-wrapped steering wheel. Most of Nevada believed the congressman would breeze into the governorship after his next term in the House of Representatives. Even now, he was being touted as a possible presidential candidate after a stint as governor. Street-smart and highly educated, Walters possessed the necessary charm to propel him right to the top. The fact that he’d married into big money certainly hadn’t diminished his prospects, either. He was a shoo-in for re-election and a luminous political future... unless a stubborn, green-eyed blonde with an ear for accents and a splatter of freckles across her nose fingered him for murder.

  The skin at the back of Sam’s neck tightened. The thought of Molly standing in Josh Walters’s way to the governorship and perhaps the presidency made his pulse skitter and stop, then restart with a kick.

  He took a quick look at the functional, stainless steel watch strapped to his wrist. He’d head downtown and talk to Kaplan, he decided. Then he’d wing by the Las Vegas Convention Center and see what time Molly got off work. Maybe he’d wait and follow her home. They might even, he thought with a sudden, swift stab of need, pick up where they’d left off yesterday, before Molly’s morning-after doubts and Josh Walters’s campaign ad had complicated matters considerably.

  It was only after he’d left a thoughtful Detective Kaplan that Sam realized his protective instincts had kicked into overdrive. Keeping his pesky, irritating, seductive neighbor in his bed for the foreseeable future now ranked a distant but compelling second to keeping her safe. He was still thinking about his priorities when he pulled into the parking lot that skirted the visitors’ bureau. He spotted Molly’s sporty white Trans Am a few moments later... at almost the same time he spotted a hulking figure in a black collarless shirt and gray sharkskin suit jimmying the lock on her car door.

  Chapter 10

  “What the hell?”

  With a squeal of brakes, Sam whipped the Blazer into park. He lunged out of the vehicle and across the asphalt at the same moment the individual bent over the Trans Am spun around.

  If Sam had harbored any doubts about the man’s intentions, the way he dropped into a fighter’s crouch resolved them instantly. He was big, a real bruiser, and a street fighter. Sam didn’t know whether he carried a weapon, but if he moved one of his hands a half inch toward his ankle or the inside of his suit coat, Sam would push his face into the asphalt. He approached slowly, keeping those huge, balled fists in his line of sight while he held the gorilla’s gaze with his own.

  “You want to tell me why you’re trying to get in this car?”

  Under a cap of glistening black curls, the intruder’s narrowed eyes took his opponent’s measure.

  “Perhaps I shall tell you...if you tell me of what business it is to you?”

  Sam didn’t have Molly’s ear for accents, but even he could tell the bruiser didn’t hail from around these parts. What’s more, someone had hand-tailored his double-breasted jacket to make it lie so smoothly over those bulging biceps. The suit must have set its wearer back a thousand bucks or more.

  The realization that he wasn’t dealing with a local punk raised the hairs on the back of Sam’s neck. A dozen possibilities rifled through his mind, not the least of which was that Josh Walters had hired some big-time muscle to take care of Molly. The lieutenant’s disclosures had planted more than a seed of doubt, he realized grimly. Adrenaline shooting undiluted through his veins, he curled his hands into fists.

  “It’s my business,” he growled, “because I say it is.”

  “I think, perhaps, I do not like this way you talk with me.”

  “Tough.”

  “Tough?”

  The curly-haired behemoth chewed on that for a moment. When he’d finished ruminating, delight sprang into his calf brown eyes.

  “You wish to have the fight with me? Bueno!”

  It didn’t look too bueno from where Sam stood. The intruder outweighed him by some twenty or thirty pounds and had arms like giant sequoias. Sam had survived four older brothers, though, and every self-defense and escape and evasion course the Air Force had to offer. He knew how to fight dirty.

  “We are of a size, you and me!” the brawny man exclaimed. “Only wait while I take off this so wonderful coat which Davinia has bought for me. Then we shall have the sport, yes?”

  While his eager opponent attacked the two buttons on his sharkskin jacket, Sam eased out of his own half crouch.

  “Davinia bought you that suit? Davinia Jacobbson?”

  “Yes, she is most generous.” Still smiling, he flexed an Olympic-sized set of muscles under the collarless black silk shirt. “I have not had the sport since I come to this country. Do we follow the rules, or do we most simply see who goes down first?”

  Blood still rushed through Sam’s veins at the speed of sound. The worry that had built during the drive in from Nellis and spiked right off the charts when he’d spotted this hulk fiddling with the door to Molly’s car still knotted his gut. He craved an outlet for his tension, had pumped himself for knuckle-splitting violence, but a free-for-all with Davinia’s lover in the Convention Center’s parking lot wasn’t the release he was looking for. He was about to tell the man so when a scolding feminine contralto floated across the parking lot.

  “Hey, sweetcakes, you promised to get the car opened and the air-conditioning going before Molly and I...”

  The svelte blonde halted, her turquoise eyes widening in undisguised pleasure.

  “Hel-lo, Major. How convenient! Molly just called your place to see if you wanted to cash in that rain check you took last night. I see you’ve met Antonio.”

  “Not officially,” Sam drawled.

  “You are friends? You and Davinia?”

  “He’s Molly’s neighbor,” the blonde put in. “Major
Sam Henderson.”

  “The one she fights with, then does not fight with?”

  “Something like that.”

  He put out a hand, which the curly-haired Hercules regarded with undisguised disappointment.

  “So, we do not have the sport?”

  “Maybe next time,” Sam replied, trying not to wince as his almost-opponent ground his bones together.

  Molly’s boss wrapped both her hands around her lover’s arm and rubbed up against it like a cat.

  “Can you join us, Major? We just finished the teleconference from hell and decided to let ’Tonio treat us to margaritas at the Hard Rock Cafe. Molly’s on her way down. She’ll want to hear about your trip out to Nellis. So do I, incidentally.”

  Sam fought to keep a frown from sketching across his brow. “She told you about that?”

  “About Josh Walters, you mean?” Davinia waved a perfectly manicured set of nails. “She was pretty closemouthed about his identity at first, but I spent a few years as an attorney in a former life. I broke her down during cross-examination.”

  Before Sam could react to that, she organized matters with cool efficiency.

  “Oh, good. Here comes Molly now. ’Tonio, you drive her car. I’ll take mine, and she can go with the Major.”

  “I could not open the door of Molly’s car,” Antonio confessed with a shamefaced look. He uncurled his beefy paw to display a key ring. “I had not the right key.”

  “It’s this one, sweetie. This one.”

  With a kiss that left her lover grinning foolishly, Davinia informed her surprised employee that they’d see her and Sam at the Hard Rock and climbed into her own two-seater Jaguar.

  Molly looked from the Jag to the departing Trans Am to the Blazer planted sideways across three parking slots, its engine humming. Her brows lifting, she turned to Sam.

  “Did I miss something here?”

  “Almost.”

  Still pumped from his near brawl, Sam shoved a hand through his hair. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this kind of twisting, mounting tension. He had to get himself under control.