Navy Orders

by Geri Krotow

  “And that you shall do.”

  He put his helmet on only after he’d gingerly helped with hers.

  “I’ll go as easy as I can back to your place.”

  “Thanks.”

  Roanna didn’t even bother trying to hold on to the bike’s back handle. It had been a long day, and if it foreshadowed the way the rest of their assignment went, it could be a long few weeks. She hooked her arms around Miles’s waist and rested her head against his back.

  She resisted his hard-core EOD demeanor, but in this moment it meant the world to her to be able to trust him to get her home as smoothly as he’d promised.

  And he did. He seemed to possess a magic ability to hit all the stoplights just right so the most he had to do was slow down. He coasted them up to the front of her house and cut the engine.

  “Thanks for the ride. Next time, I’ll drive.” She slowly rose from the bike’s seat and eased her helmet off. She hissed, but didn’t see the stars she had when Anita hit her.

  “You don’t like the way I drive?” Miles slid off the bike and hung his helmet on the handlebar.

  “No, that’s not what I mean. It’s only fair we divvy up the driving responsibilities and whatever other tasks show up.”

  “Sure. But if we get into any kind of trouble, I’m driving.” His authoritative tone should have annoyed her but she didn’t care—whether from acceptance that he had more experience at high-risk driving than she did or plain exhaustion.

  “Trouble? I’m the one who got punched in the face, remember?” Keeping things light wasn’t difficult. It was a nice change from the heavy conversation at the Perezes’.

  “How’s it feeling?” He laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “Sore. It’ll be brighter than any eye shadow I have by morning. I’m so tired right now I don’t give a mouse’s butt.”

  Miles’s laughter reached across the night to her. It was warm, rumbling, genuine. In spite of herself, Ro smiled back at him.

  “Oww.” She involuntarily winced at the sharp jab of pain in her cheek.

  “You’re a surprise around every corner, Ro.” He released her shoulder and let his arm hang down at his side.

  “I am so sorry you took that hit tonight. You have no reason to believe me, but I do have your six on this, Ro. I won’t let you take the brunt of anything again.”

  “Chill out. We’re not in the field. There aren’t any bombs or mines to defuse.” She heard her words too late.

  “Crap, I’m sorry, Miles.” How obtuse could she be?

  Miles held up his hands.

  “Whoa, drop it, Ro. This won’t work if you’re constantly walking on eggshells about my mishap. I almost stepped on a mine. If not for my dog, who got the worst of the explosion, I’d be dead. As it is, I lost a leg below the knee. Do you realize how lucky I am to be alive and functioning at full capacity?”

  She couldn’t speak. How could he talk calmly about such a devastating event?

  “Ro, you with me?” He took a step toward her and grasped her upper arms.

  “Focus on me for a minute.”

  She tilted her face up, peering at him with her uninjured eye, and saw the mirth in his.

  “I can still get it up, if that’s what’s concerning you.”

  Ro shook off his hold and placed her hands on her hips.

  “You can still be a pig, Warrant.”

  He moved so fast her only impression was of his face near hers before he kissed her. Unlike the kiss in front of Perez’s house, this wasn’t hurried or such a shock. She already knew his lips, and her own lips responded before her mind could click into gear.

  When the kiss ended she stepped backward and he dropped his arms but continued to hold her hands. They let the silent night weave between them, their breath visible in the cold air.

  “I think we need to keep our noses to the grindstone on this, Ro. The trail’s still hot. Hopefully we’ll get into the coroner’s office tomorrow.”

  “Are you kidding me? We’ll never get in there, and really, why would we want to?” She had no desire to observe an autopsy.

  “You don’t have to be a doctor to know if someone was murdered, necessarily. We can learn a lot by listening to the coroner and his team while they do their job.”

  “No, but you have to be a doctor, LEA or at least NCIS, to get that kind of access.”

  “We managed at the beach this morning. Surely a coroner’s office will be a piece of cake, especially if we let Detective Ramsey know that we had an interesting meeting with Mrs. Perez today.”

  “I don’t like this tit-for-tat stuff. Nothing is worth our careers.”

  “You don’t have to worry about it, Ro. I’ll call Ramsey in the morning. I owe you, remember? You took a hit for the team tonight.”

  His words met her silence.

  “Doing the right thing is always worth it, Ro. Navy orders are to be carried out to the best of our abilities. Sometimes it doesn’t happen in black-and-white.”

  Her breath caught as she realized that he was talking about his time downrange.

  “I’m sorry about your leg, Miles.”

  “Me, too. But I’m used to it now, and besides―” he waved his hands around him “—I’m getting to do administrative work at a P-3 wing in the remote Northwest.”

  She opened her mouth to offer some kind of consolation, but he raised his hand again.

  “Contrary to what that sounded like, I’m not about to have a pity party for myself. Been there, done that. And I’m honored to be on this case, to fight for Perez and find out how he died. Perez, while I didn’t know him, deserves as much effort from me as any of my wartime missions did.”

  Of course Perez deserved their full attention. Of course Miles had his priorities straight—he’d had the toughest training the navy had to offer, survived the war minus a leg and still remained on active duty. He certainly could have opted out on a medical disability discharge, but he’d stayed.

  And, dang it, he was in better shape than she was, hands down. Not just because he was a guy, either. His dedication to his physical fitness made her six-mile runs look like sandbox play.

  “I’ve never been in the kind of danger you have.”

  “No, but that was a mean punch you took back there. You don’t seem to have a concussion, but some symptoms can lie low until they broadside you. Your body needs rest.”

  “Spoken from experience, I take it?”

  He shrugged. “There’s a risk of injury in every navy job.”

  Just like that, he was humble Miles. She’d seen his beribboned uniform. Under his gold EOD warfare insignia, a torpedo with lightning bolts crossed through it, he wore some of the rarest combat awards, including a Bronze Star. He was a war hero, for heaven’s sake. She’d never know it from anything he ever said. Typical of the nation’s greatest heroes, Miles was silent when it came to his wartime achievements.

  “So how did you lose your leg, exactly?”

  “Like so many others—an explosive I wasn’t expecting.”

  “IED?”

  “No, a field mine. I was clearing the area for the team to go in and do their mission.”

  He’d lost his dog. She couldn’t imagine the feeling of hopelessness.

  “Do you miss it?”

  “The adrenaline? The fear? Or the glory?” His grin belied the harshness of his words. He sighed. “I miss the team. The sense of accomplishment. I miss my dog.”

  Compassion gripped Ro.

  “I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “I’d be a mess if I’d lost my pet, even though I don’t have one right now.”

  “Yes, you would. We all are when it comes to our pets. But Riva wasn’t a pet—she was a working member of the team as much as you and I are.”

  Silence settl
ed around them in the darkness. The lights in her front room glowed through the tree line, and Whidbey’s winds sighed overhead.

  “You handled yourself well back there with Anita Perez.” She owed it to him to tell him that.

  “You would have, too, if you hadn’t gotten your eye bashed in.”

  She was as surprised by the laughter that bubbled up her throat as she was delighted.

  “Trust me, I didn’t plan it.” She grasped at her composure, swollen face and all.

  She had to ask him the question she didn’t want to contemplate on her own.

  “What do you think about the idea of Perez having an affair with Master Chief Reis?”

  Ever since Anita told them that Perez had confessed to being involved with the “most senior female on staff,” Ro couldn’t get Master Chief Reis, the most senior enlisted woman, out of her mind.

  Miles gazed up at the stars and let out a breath. He still had her hands in his and she marveled at the warmth of his rough palms.

  “Anything’s possible. People never reveal themselves fully at work, especially in a shore duty command like ours. But I have to admit I’d never have expected it from Master Chief Reis. She’s never been anything less than the epitome of a great command master chief around me.”

  “She’s great at motivating the young sailors, too.”

  “Now I have to wonder exactly how she motivated them.”

  Ro grimaced. “Wait a minute—maybe this is the one time she’s ever screwed up. Maybe she is a great professional who got involved in a bad scene.”

  “Come on, Ro, you don’t believe that, do you? If she was junior to Perez, sure, but she’s...she was―” he corrected himself “—his superior. She’s been around forever, a lifer. She knows the deal and if she indeed had an affair with him, she knew exactly what the hell she was getting into.”

  “I doubt she expected to find her lover dead, though.”

  “How do you know she didn’t push him over the edge?”

  “What edge—do you mean mental, so that he’d kill himself, or literal?”

  Miles was silent. Ro absorbed his words, his determined stance.

  “You really think MC Reis could have killed Perez?” She gaped at him with her good eye. “Holy crap, I sure hope you’re way off on this.”

  “And if I’m not?”

  “We have a lot of work to do to see that justice is served. And to protect the wing and the commodore from any blowback.”

  “I’m not saying it happened that way. But we can’t rule it out. Unless Anita was right the first time.”

  “What?”

  “That it was you having the affair with Perez.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  MILES WATCHED HER good eye under the streetlight as it first widened in shock before it narrowed in total agitation. He wanted to hug her, to calm her down and tell her it was all going to work out. But why did he want to do this? He wanted to date her, have sex with her. Not become her freaking boyfriend. Boyfriends comforted. He was more the hook-up-and-enjoy-the-ride type.

  Sure you are.

  “You have to know how ridiculous that accusation is. Or did the land mine blow some of your brains out along with your leg?”

  He sucked in his breath. Damn, she played hard.

  “I’m such a jerk,” she muttered.

  “Yes, that was a shitty thing to say. But I deserved a good hit. Of course I don’t think you were having an affair with Perez.”

  Because I would have found out about it. I’d sense it.

  He couldn’t explain why but he was always aware of Ro whenever she was near him. He’d have a gut feeling she was at the gym and bam! He’d see her there twenty minutes later. He’d let his mind drift to his thoughts of her and she’d show up on the same jogging path as if she’d materialized from his dreams. She wasn’t ready to admit it, but there was some kind of connection between them. Something drew him to her fire. Even though she did her damnedest to smother that fire under layers of naval officer bravado.

  “We need to verify that a) he was having an affair and b) that it was with Master Chief Reis...or whomever. Then we need to find out where they were last night.”

  “True, but there’s a good chance the cops are already on it.”

  “Not necessarily. Anita said she hadn’t told them all the details. She didn’t see the point, at least not when she believed he’d had an accidental fall off the cliff.”

  She saw his thoughts play across his features, and a thrill went through her at the unexpected intimacy.

  As if sensing her awareness of him, Miles’s expression turned to concern.

  “Ro, I can’t tell you how much it kills me that you took that hit tonight. I’m dead serious. I will not let anyone hurt you again. Not while we’re in this together.”

  “I appreciate that, Miles. But you’re not responsible for me—I am.” The beginnings of a dull headache were made worse by her annoyance that she felt her arousal through the pain.

  She’d been smart to avoid him until now.

  “Ro, do you ever stop fighting?” He tugged gently on her hands.

  It would be nice to let the fight go, if just for a little while.

  When he leaned in this time, she was ready for him. His lips touched hers, and whether it was because she was too tired to resist or needed comfort after a hellish few hours, she wasn’t going to turn down another kiss from Miles.

  His hand cradled the side of her jaw, his touch gentle as spring rain. He had his other hand on the small of her back, making circles with his fingers at the base of her spine.

  Ro relished the contact of their hips, pelvis to pelvis. Miles was leaning into her and it felt so right, so safe. She marveled at the way he was able to keep kissing her so thoroughly while working magic with his hands and hips.

  She pulled back.

  “Miles, you have to be tired, too. It’s been a long day for both of us.”

  He laughed, a low rumble.

  “Save it, Ro.” His lips hadn’t moved more than a millimeter from hers. His breath was hot and she craved more. She wrapped her hands around his head and angled hers so that her eye wouldn’t get in her way as she kissed him back. Deeply and with lots of tongue. She’d been with other men but this was nothing like that. It wasn’t a simple attraction, a means to work out sexual frustration. She felt it in the hum of her skin at each touch of his fingers, in the way she longed for him.

  Twigs and brush crackled and popped just over Miles’s right shoulder, in front of the house. Before Ro could react, Miles was in front of her, standing with his feet apart, blocking her view.

  In an instant he sprang toward the source of the noise and Ro heard him grunt as he grabbed someone by the collar and whipped him around to the side.

  Ro’s stomach sank.

  “Whoa, hey, calm down, dude.”

  A rush of air blew out of Ro’s throat.

  “It’s okay, Miles.”

  “You know this guy?”

  “Yes. It’s just Dick.”

  “Dick who?”

  “Dick as in her former fiancé, dude. Back off.” Dick pulled out of Miles’s grasp and shook his shoulders as if he’d initiated the break-off. Ro forced down a giggle. If Miles had wanted to choke the crap out of Dick, he could have. With one hand.

  “Richard as in my half sister’s husband.”

  “You’re Krissy’s husband?” Miles was still in full interrogation mode. Ro didn’t see a need to ask him to chill.

  “Yes, I am. I take it you’ve met my wife. She’s hard to forget.” Dick turned his attention to Ro. “Your sister won’t let me in the house. I came three thousand miles only to have her say I can’t stay here without your permission. Will you please talk some sense into her?”

&
nbsp; “Former fiancé?” Miles’s gaze was on Ro, his hands at his sides.

  “Ancient history.” Ro was so not going to tell Miles about Dick or any other aspect of her personal life. Miles was too smart, too observant, and he made it too easy for her to forget how much she needed, wanted, solitude.

  “It wasn’t that long ago, Roanna.” He took a step closer. “What on earth did you do to your eye, girl?” His surgical instincts were evident in the angle of his head.

  “It’s been long enough since we split, Dick. My eye is fine. I’ve already seen a doctor about it.” Like she’d ever let Dick touch her again.

  She turned to Miles. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “I’ll meet you at the wing for our briefing with the commodore at 0800.” Miles had his helmet back in his hands, ready to slide onto the bike and drive off.

  “Fine.” She wasn’t going to fight him over who’d drive.

  “You.” She turned to Dick. “Come with me. You can stay here one night, then you’re out. I told Krissy the same thing.”

  She didn’t look at Miles again. She couldn’t. There was too much of a risk that he’d see the defeat, the regret, in her expression. Dick, however, seemed to be fascinated with Miles.

  “Watch out, dude. She’s a ballbuster.”

  “So I gather.” She barely heard Miles’s reply before he gunned his engine and sped off.

  “When did you start dating him?” Dick was beside her now, all buddy-buddy. Of course. He wanted a bed to sleep in tonight.

  With her sister.

  She opened her mouth to refute his assumption, and shut it so sharply her teeth clicked together. She owed Dick no explanation.

  “We have more important things to discuss, Dick. Like the kind of father you plan on being to my niece or nephew.”

  * * *

  RO KEPT HER conversation with Krissy and Dick short and to the point. She was exhausted and needed her wits about her for work. For honoring the memory of Petty Officer Perez.

  “You two, um, three, are your own family. Figure it out. Leave me out of it. Be gone by tomorrow.”

  Even as she issued the eviction notice she knew it wouldn’t be followed. No one in her family had ever respected her boundaries—why would they start now?