“Sorry,” he said. His voice was gruff, but the roguish grin that she loved was back. “I just had to do that.”
Jenna struggled to recall why she had pulled away. When it looked as if he might actually reach for her again, she put her hands up to forestall him.
“Whoa. Stop.”
“What’s going on?” He spread his arms out, but that only drew her attention to his amazing biceps and shoulders. Her mouth began to water.
“I don’t know what game you’re playing,” she finally managed, dragging her gaze upward to his face, “but I am not going to be your dirty little secret. So if you think you can pretend not to know me in front of your guys, and then go all sweet on me when we’re alone, you are so out of luck.”
She saw the puzzlement in his eyes. “What are you talking about? If you hadn’t hightailed it out of the gym so fast, I would have come over to you and demonstrated to anyone who cared to watch just how well I do know you. As it is, the guys think I’ve lost my mind, chasing you outside in this shit.” He scrubbed a hand over his hair, sending renewed puffs of dust into the air. “Jesus. For a moment there, I thought I was hallucinating. I still can’t get my head around it. When did you get here?”
Jenna narrowed her eyes and studied him. “Don’t screw with me, Chase. You know damn well when I got here.”
As she watched, his face altered and his expression grew shuttered. When he spoke, his voice was cold. “What did you just call me?”
Jenna frowned. “Chase.”
She gave an audible gasp of surprise when he grabbed her by the upper arms and pulled her so close that their faces were mere inches apart and she could feel the warmth of his breath fanning her face.
“What’s my name?” he growled.
“What?”
“Tell me my name,” he repeated in a hard tone, his fingers biting into her shoulders.
“Chase Rawlins.”
“When did we first meet?”
Jenna shook her head, not understanding. “I don’t—”
“Answer the damned question, Jenna!” His voice was so tight with controlled fury that Jenna felt a frisson of fear tiptoe its way up her spine.
“Technically, we met that night at Shooters, when you drove me out to the airfield. But I ran into you at the supermarket before that.”
He relaxed fractionally, but didn’t release her. “Apart from that night by the airfield, you’ve never been with me? Never kissed me or had sex with me?”
“What?” She pushed weakly against his chest. “You know I haven’t!”
He gave her a slight shake. “You called me Rawlins that night at the club. How did you know my name?”
Jenna stared at him, bewildered by his interrogation. Maybe he’d suffered a head injury and had some kind of short-term memory loss. Why else would he be acting so strangely?
“My roommate told me,” she explained carefully. “She saw me watching you at the club that night and said you were special ops. She knew your name. Don’t you remember that night?”
His eyes grew hot, and she knew that he remembered everything. Then he swore under his breath and released her, dragging his hands over his face before he pinned her with a calculating look. “Come with me. There’s something I need to show you.”
Before she could protest, he wrapped her towel around her face and opened the door, pulling her out into the storm. She stumbled to keep up with him as he practically dragged her across the base, seemingly oblivious to the choking dust that whipped around them. She knew he was agitated, since he hadn’t bothered to cover his own face. The blowing sand and grit made it impossible for her to speak, and nearly impossible to see where they were going.
He finally pulled her to a stop in front of a containerized housing unit, or CHU, which was nothing more than a shipping container that had been prefabricated into living quarters. An air conditioner was mounted into the wall beside the door, and hummed noisily. Chase hammered on the door with his fist until finally it was yanked open. Jenna found herself pulled into a tiny living area sparsely furnished with a desk and a couple of chairs.
Unwinding the towel from her head, she used it to wipe the grit from her eyes before she turned to face Chase. A second man stood by the door, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, and it was clear they had roused him from sleep. Jenna blinked, convinced that the dust was making her see double. Stunned, she stared at the man, taking in the scruffy beard and the hard eyes that watched her warily. Her gaze flicked to Chase, who stood with his arms crossed over his chest, waiting.
“What the hell…?” Jenna was only vaguely aware that she had uttered the words aloud. Except for the beard, the two men were identical in every respect.
“Jenna, I’d like you to meet my brother, Chase Rawlins,” said the man who had kissed her just moments before. “My twin brother, Chase. He’s special ops.”
Jenna felt her mouth fall open as she gaped first at the real Chase, who had the grace to give her a sheepish grin, and then at… Who was the man she’d just kissed, and hadn’t been able to stop thinking about?
“So if you’re Chase,” she said weakly, before switching her gaze to the other man, “who are you?”
“I’m Major Chance Rawlins, call sign ‘T-Rex.’ Apache helicopter pilot and the guy you…met at Shooters. Pleased to meet you.”
Jenna didn’t miss the hesitation in his words. Not only was he the guy she’d met at Shooters, he was the guy she’d screwed blind mere hours later. A guy she’d believed to be a special ops soldier, when in fact he was a helicopter pilot.
A pilot.
“Oh, my God,” she breathed with dawning horror.
She’d broken her own number-one rule: she’d slept with a pilot! Worse, after they’d had sex, she’d talked trash about male pilots and their inability to have any kind of meaningful relationship. No wonder he’d ended their evening so abruptly.
“I, um, I need some air,” she finally said, and fled.
6
CHASE STEPPED ASIDE AS Jenna wrenched the door open and bolted into the swirling sandstorm.
“Jenna, wait!” Chance tried to sprint after her, but found his way blocked by a muscular arm.
“Let her go, bro,” Chase said quietly. “She needs some time.”
“It’s a goddamned duststorm,” Chance bit out. “I am not letting her lose her way out there.”
“She’s not stupid. She’ll be fine.”
Chance had never felt such impotent anger, and with a savage curse, he kicked at the open door, causing it to slam back on its hinges. “Goddamn it!”
“So that’s her, huh?” Chase mused, pulling the door closed. He turned to a coffeemaker on the shelf and began measuring out coffee and water. “The mystery lady from Shooters. The reason you missed my send-off party. I can see why you like her, although I have to say she’s a far cry from your usual type. Did I mention that I hitched a ride with her from Kalagush yesterday? She seemed interested in me when I climbed into the chopper, but I didn’t expect her to hit on me after we landed.”
Chance felt his chest tighten in an unexpected surge of jealousy. “She hit on you? Jesus, if you—”
“Relax,” his brother said with a rare grin. “Nothing happened. I was too beat to take her up on the offer.”
“Lucky for you,” Chance muttered. “I’d hate to have to kick my own brother’s ass.”
“Ha,” Chase scoffed good-naturedly. “You and whose army? If it makes you feel any better, she only did it because she thought I was you.”
“Yeah, well, I wish you’d told me about it last night. I might have put two and two together and realized she was here.”
Chase arched an eyebrow. “If I took the time to tell you about every chick who hits on me—”
/> “It’d be the shortest conversation in history,” Chance interrupted, aiming a friendly punch at his brother’s arm.
“Still, what are the chances, huh? It’s pretty hilarious when you think about it.”
Chance disagreed. While he and his brother had played their fair share of jokes on friends and teachers when they were kids, they’d drawn the line at switching identities to fool the opposite sex. Mostly because Chance had been unwilling to leave his girlfriend alone with his brother, even for a few minutes.
Although the two of them looked identical, there had always been something about Chase that drew girls to him like moths to a flame. He didn’t even need to do anything and girls hovered in his airspace, hoping to attract his attention. And it just seemed to annoy him. But right now, Chance didn’t find anything remotely funny about the fact that Jenna had actually hit on Chase. In fact, for the first time he could recall, he found himself feeling resentful toward his twin, and wishing that they weren’t located on the same base, even if it was just for a couple of days.
Chance flew with the 82nd Aviation Regiment, or the Wolf Pack, the army’s only airborne attack helicopter battalion. He’d arrived at Kabul Air Base a month earlier and had spent the past four weeks supporting ground troops. He knew that Chase and his special ops team had been sent to a forward operating base in northern Afghanistan, but his brother’s exact location had not been disclosed.
He’d been pleasantly surprised when Chase had knocked on the door of his housing unit last night to let him know he was at Kabul for a couple of days. This was Chance’s fourth deployment, and God only knew how many times Chase had been over here. Too many to count. He’d been one of the first special ops teams to put boots on the ground after the invasion, and Chance suspected his brother would continue to conduct operations long after the majority of troops were sent home.
Their deployments had overlapped before, but it was rare that they were both located on the same base at the same time. Kabul Air Base was so large, however, that Chance found himself running into people he’d served with years earlier and had never expected to see again. There was a saying that if you stayed at Kabul long enough, eventually you’d meet every soldier who served in the army.
Not knowing how long he might be at Kabul, Chase had gone straight to Chance’s quarters and the two brothers had stayed up late into the night, catching up on each other’s lives over the past two months. Chance had admitted that he’d missed his brother’s going-away party because he’d met a woman, but he hadn’t given Chase any details. It didn’t seem likely that the relationship would develop into anything meaningful. In fact, considering the things Jenna had said that night, the likelihood she would even speak to him again was about nil.
“Well,” Chase said when Chance was silent, “it isn’t the first time you’ve been mistaken for me.” He poured each of them a steaming mug of coffee.
“You’ve got it backward,” Chance retorted. “You said it yourself. The only reason she spoke to you is because she mistook you for me.”
“Did you know she was going to be here at Kabul?”
“Of course not. We were only together that one night and we didn’t exactly spend time talking about future deployments,” Chance added sourly. “In fact, I didn’t even know she was active duty until after we’d—” He broke off and stared moodily out of the window at the blowing sand.
Chase peered at his brother over the rim of his mug. “She looked seriously pissed off.”
Chance shrugged. “Apparently, she has a thing about sleeping with pilots.”
His brother raised his eyebrows. “As in…she likes to sleep with them?”
“Ah, no,” Chance said drily. “As in…she’d rather suffer all the scourges of hell than sleep with even one pilot.”
To Chance’s chagrin, his brother began to laugh. “So let me get this straight,” Chase said, when he could finally speak again. “She slept with you, thinking you were me.”
“No. She slept with me thinking I was special ops,” Chance clarified.
“Right. So you knew she had a thing about pilots, and yet you still did her? Why didn’t you tell her right then that you were one?”
“I had no idea how she felt about pilots, and by the time she let me know, the deed was done. I didn’t see any point in making her feel bad about it.” Not when she’d felt so good in his arms. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Besides, I didn’t think we’d ever see each other again.”
“But you’d hoped.”
Yeah, he had hoped. Despite the fact that she’d delivered a serious blow to his self-esteem with her remarks about pilots, once he’d gotten over his ego, he’d gone straight to Fort Bragg where her battalion was headquartered, intending to tell her the truth about himself. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her. He’d wanted an opportunity to prove to her that he wasn’t like the guys she worked with.
But he’d discovered that her entire unit had gone wheels up to Afghanistan, and would be stationed at Kandahar Air Base for the next six months. When his own unit had geared up for deployment a month later, he’d hoped like hell they would be sent to Kandahar, but they’d been assigned to Kabul, easily three hundred miles to the north.
“So now she knows the truth,” Chase said, sipping his coffee and watching Chance with a contemplative look. “What are you going to do about it?”
“What do you think?” Chance set his mug down on the shelf and stood, grabbing a pair of goggles and a scarf from a hook near the door. “I’ll return these.”
“Yeah, yeah. Better hurry, or the storm will be over and she’ll be gone.”
* * *
CHANCE KNEW WHERE the itinerant pilots were housed, but when he finally found the housing area for the female crew members and pounded on the door, it wasn’t Jenna who answered.
“This better be an emergency,” grumbled a small, dark-haired woman with a purple satin eye mask pushed up onto her forehead. She held a handkerchief over her mouth and stood well back from the doorway as she peered through the swirling dust at Chance. Then her eyes widened and she dropped the cloth away from her face. She looked panicked as she snatched the eye mask from her head and made an attempt to stand at attention. “Sir! Good morning, sir!”
“At ease, Soldier.”
She relaxed fractionally. “What are you doing here? Sir.”
“I’m looking for Jenna. Is she here?”
“No, she went over to the gym about an hour ago.”
Anxiety knifed its way through his gut. She should have been back to her quarters by now. Kabul Air Base was enormous. It would be all too easy to get disoriented or lost, especially with the reduced visibility. Frustrated and concerned, he shielded his eyes and scanned the surrounding area, as if he could will her into sight.
“Is she familiar with the base?” he asked.
The woman shrugged. “As much as any other itinerant pilot, I guess.” She opened the door wider and stepped back. “You’d better come in, or we’re both going to die of asphyxiation.”
Chance hesitated, then stepped inside the structure, resisting the urge to shake the sand out of his hair. There were rules against males entering a female’s living quarters, but he told himself this was a unique situation. Glancing around, he saw the B-Hut was outfitted with four small sleeping quarters, but the woman who had answered the door was the only occupant. She wore a pair of baggy sweatpants and an army T-shirt, and now she appraised him with open curiosity.
“We’ve been to Kabul before,” she said, planting her hands on her hips. “Which begs the question…what the hell are you doing here?”
Chance sharpened his gaze on her, a suspicion forming in his mind. “Have we met?”
She tossed the eye mask and kerchief onto a nearby chair and smiled at him. “No, but I remember
you from the club back home.” She extended her hand. “Warrant Officer Laura Costanza. I’m Captain Larson’s copilot.”
Chance shook her hand. “Major Chance Rawlins…I’m a pilot with the 82nd Aviation Regiment.”
He watched with grim satisfaction as her smile faded. “You’re a Wolf Pack pilot?” she asked, referring to the battalion’s call sign. “But I thought… I was told you were special forces.”
“That would be my twin brother, Chase.” He cocked his head. “Why? Is there a problem?”
Laura looked helplessly at him. “She’s sworn off pilots.”
“Yeah, I got that memo. Do you know why?”
“Because you’re all a bunch of self—”
“Yeah, I got that memo, too,” he interrupted tersely. “Was she involved with a pilot? Someone who hurt her?”
“No, not since I’ve known her. The only other pilot in her life is her dad, and he’s a freaking hero.”
Chance frowned. “Who’s her father?”
“Captain Erik Larson, Medal of Honor recipient.”
Chance gaped at her. “The Erik Larson? The Vietnam pilot?”
Anyone who flew a military helicopter knew about Erik Larson, and how he successfully completed fifteen missions into enemy territory to airlift injured soldiers out of war zones that were deemed too dangerous for medevac choppers. The guy wasn’t just a hero; he was a legend.
“The same,” Laura confirmed. “After the war was over, he left the army and started his own helicopter sightseeing business. From what I hear, he taught Jenna everything he knew about flying.”
“Does Jenna ever talk about him?”
Laura shook her head and mouthed the word nope. “That subject is off-limits.”
Which explained a lot.
“Okay, thanks,” he said. “Look, where would Jenna go if she was upset?”
Laura shrugged. “Somewhere private, where nobody would bug her, I guess.”
And just like that, Chance knew where she was.
Uniformly Hot! Volume 1 from Harlequin: Letters from HomeBreaking the RulesComing Up for Air Page 40