By Break of Day (The Night Stalkers)

by M. L. Buchman

  “Let me take care of it. I’ll get you there.”

  Again the clap on the shoulder, but not crash-worthy this time. The man wasn’t moving off. Clearly he was worried about what Justin might say, despite the encrypted channels.

  “Jane to AMC Moretti.” He hoped she caught the formality.

  “Roger, Jane. Go ahead.” Kara missed nothing and simply made it all so easy.

  “Could you find the closest carrier? I need to be there before daylight. We’ll need a C-2 Greyhound and a bare deck for a cross-load of cargo.”

  “Uh, roger that. Head three-four-seven. Two hundred klicks out. I’ll let them know.”

  “Appreciate it, AMC.”

  “Everything okay up there, Justin?” she whispered. Which was kind of sweet. Made him think of what he’d like to be whispering into her ear.

  “Roger that. And,” he whispered, just as if they were flirting side by side rather than him already flying away from her as he turned toward his new heading, “thanks.”

  * * *

  Justin had The Activity and whatever secret was hidden inside the Humvee on the deck of the USS George W. Bush an hour before sunrise. Per request, the crew on the carrier’s deck was minimal.

  Instead of landing up forward along the starboard rail, Justin circled to land close behind the waiting twin-propeller C-2 Greyhound. It was parked, tailgate lowered, pilot and loadmasters standing by. As soon as a green-vested deck officer had guided him down, blue-vested deckhands chocked his wheels and white-vested ones double-checked that everything was safe.

  Only after they’d all evaporated did Raymond drop the rear gate.

  Justin twisted in his seat as the unranked and still unnamed Activity agent backed out of the Jane’s cargo bay, down the ramp, and up onto the C-2’s ramp. The fit was so tight that Justin would have inched it along, the Greyhound being several inches narrower than the Chinook. By their frantic arm waving, the C-2’s loadmasters would have preferred that as well. The driver backed onto the Greyhound with all the confidence and speed that most people showed backing out of their garages.

  Even if someone on the carrier’s deck was watching, there hadn’t been much to see. A dark night, minimal deck lighting, and an American Humvee visible for seconds at most.

  The two ramps began swinging back up cutting off his view.

  Ingrates. Not a word of thanks. Not a—

  There was a sharp rap on the pilot’s window by his right shoulder. Outside stood the main agent from The Activity. He’d hopped up on the Chinook’s aerial refueling probe that was mounted several feet below Justin’s window so that they were eye to eye.

  The guy stuck his hand in and Justin shook it. “So fuckin’ tired I forgot to say thanks. Plucking us up like that was a really sweet job you and yours did back at the air base. Make sure it gets added to the SOAR training. Not many could do that. Name’s Tom…” Then he flashed a big smile. “At least I’ll answer to that name.”

  “Justin.” He returned the man’s crushing grip.

  “See you, buddy.” And he was gone.

  Justin checked in with the green-vested helicopter landing signal personnel who had rematerialized once more straight ahead of him. Since he hadn’t cycled down his engines, he took the finger-pointed-at-the-sky signal and headed aloft.

  Even as he pulled up off the carrier’s deck, the C-2 was firing up its engines. It had already been in position at the catapult when Justin had landed behind it. Less than a minute later, the Greyhound ripped past him, waggled its wings in a greeting, and turned north toward Germany before he had a chance to respond.

  He decided it would be better if his curiosity about what The Activity had found at Ramon Airbase was never answered.

  Who was he kidding?

  He flew with the 5D. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that he’d find out exactly what was going on. Two months in, and he still wasn’t used to that.

  All he wanted right now was to get home.

  A small flash of reflected sunlight drew his eye upward. High enough above him to catch the first light of the unrisen sun. Kara had kept watch over him as he flew to the aircraft carrier. Now, at long last, she would be turning her Gray Eagle Tosca back toward Incirlik.

  He liked that she had watched over him.

  * * *

  Kara finished shutting down control consoles. She’d shooed Santiago off to dinner and bed a couple hours earlier and flown Tosca back to Incirlik on her own. She enjoyed the peace and quiet. It had been a day of many impressions.

  Maybe she’d skip food and simply hit the shower and the rack.

  Maybe she’d skip the shower too.

  The last radio transmission she’d heard from the Calamity Jane was Justin calling in to the Peleliu for permission to land, which had been an hour ago, maybe two. There’d been no rap on the coffin’s door. He’d probably been as exhausted as she was, but still it hurt.

  She slipped out of the GCS coffin and secured the door. The hangar deck was a world of bright sunlight and hard shadows. It was always disorienting to come out of the coffin and reenter the real world where there was temperature, weather, wind…and people. Except under extraordinary conditions like the last four days, her world usually included only her and Tago.

  For Kara the world was kept at a radio or long-range imaging distance.

  She was about to duck into the shadows and head for her berth when she spotted a blaze of white at the other end of the hangar deck.

  A cowboy hat shining in a shaft of sunlight. Its owner stood with his back to her, his arms crossed, watching the technicians swarming over his helicopter. The rotor blades had been folded up, six massive blades each ten meters long and a meter wide lined up over the fuselage. There were several mechanics swarming over the craft.

  Kara hovered for a moment in indecision. She’d been focused on sleep…and being ticked that Justin hadn’t come to find her. Three sixteen-hour days had taken it out of her…yet there he was. Whether waiting for her or hovering over his craft, he was there.

  She meant to turn away but she began walking forward, as if her body was moving of its own volition, until she came to a stop close beside Justin.

  What to say to him? He’d flown like…nothing she’d ever seen. With the ScanEagle gone, she’d used her Gray Eagle to ensure his security, done nothing but watch Justin fly as he wove through the carved mountains of the Central Negev like he was threading a needle with a hundred feet of helicopter. It was…breathtaking. Sort of like standing so close beside him that she could see the slow rise and fall of his chest with his breathing.

  “You mess up the poor Calamity Jane? Bad cowboy.”

  “It seems that I scraped up the ramp a bit by dragging it down a runway somewhere. They also wanted to service the wheels, see the effects of high speed and the unexpected impact load.”

  Kara looked up at Justin watching the mechanics work on his helicopter. She noticed that Lola’s crew chief Connie Davis was right in the midst of them.

  “I thought she worked on Black Hawks.”

  “That and just about every other thing you can imagine. Heard tell if it’s a rotorcraft, she knows more than the folks who designed them.”

  Why were they… “Why are we standing here talking about helicopters?”

  “You mean since I’ve been standing here for seventy-three minutes wanting nothing more than to drag you off and investigate being inappropriate? Can’t rightly say, ma’am.”

  She thought about the GCS coffin close behind them, or any of the hundred other spaces a three-quarters-empty ship the size of the Peleliu offered as options. Any of those would have sufficed with any other man. But Justin Roberts wasn’t any other man; she wanted him in her actual bed. It was shockingly conventional of her, but it was no less true.

  She turned and led the way. He followed without further com
ment. Off the hangar deck and through the winding corridors and ship’s ladders of the Peleliu, there were no strained silences, no awkward moments. They both knew what they wanted, and to hell with the rules, they were going to get it.

  As they went along the corridors they chatted about the details of the most recent flight. What could they have done differently to save the ScanEagle? Could the timing have been better? Could…?

  Kara hesitated outside the door. She’d never had sex with a fellow officer. Hell, she’d only had sex with another soldier of any rank or branch of the service a few times. It wasn’t worth the risk, yet suddenly here she was.

  Perhaps reading her emotions, Justin leaned in and spoke softly though this stretch of the corridor was empty at the moment. “You just say so, Kara, and I’ll head back down the hallway. You got my word on it.”

  She studied those summer-sky eyes of his.

  He would too. Had used her name so that she’d know for a fact that he was completely serious about that.

  She breathed in and found that earth, sun, and man were thick on the air with him standing so close beside her in the bowels of the old steel ship.

  It was what finally tipped her across the threshold. She wanted to lose herself in the wilderness that was Justin Roberts. Once inside her berth, she flicked on a small reading light and held the door wide to show that he was meant to follow.

  He glanced once to either side, then looked her right in the eye as he stepped in. Not her chest, not even her face, but as if he could see her most clearly that way.

  * * *

  Justin couldn’t look away from so much trust. It wasn’t the heat, the need, or the desire; those were all mixed in there as well. Rather, she simply trusted him to be decent and honorable. Trusted he would be worth the risk.

  Well then, he would live up to that standard.

  He slipped his hands to either side of her face and let his fingers slide into the thick cascade of her dark hair. As thick as a horse’s mane and as soft as the tip of a horse’s muzzle.

  Justin wanted to…

  He dug his fingers into her hair and fluffed it outward. Reached back in and stirred it around until it was in total and absolute disarray.

  “What the—” She batted at his hands, but he didn’t stop until not a single hair was still in place.

  “I promised to be inappropriate. The proper thing to do was to kiss you until you melted into a little pile of Kara Moretti. So…”

  “So instead you mussed up my hair.”

  He shrugged easily.

  She opened her mouth to protest, and that’s when he kissed her. He might be all proper and decent, at least most of the time on the other side of the door. But once a woman entered his bedroom, or even more so when he was invited into hers, all bets were off.

  He muffled her squawk of surprise with a deep kiss. Keeping one hand dug into her hair, he pulled her in enough to practically devour her—he certainly wanted to. She tasted spicy, alive. She—

  Fisted his gut!

  Not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to surprise.

  He pulled back her head just far enough to recover his lower lip from her quick nip—not by the hair, but rather by sliding his other hand under her T-shirt and forcing her back with a hand on her breast.

  She reached to—

  But he’d been in enough tussles with a wild horse to protect his privates.

  He pivoted and dropped to the bunk with her lying back across his knees. He kept her head supported, but the rest of her was open to him, gloriously open. A magnificent terrain of hill and valley; breast, belly, and hip.

  He leaned down to pin her breast with his lips and cupped her hard through her pants with his free hand.

  She hissed and he felt the strength of her response buck through her as she arched against his palm. So he ignored the fist that bounced off his shoulder.

  “Damn you, Roberts!” But Kara also rolled to press her breast tighter against his mouth as she cursed.

  He drew her in and teased her until she quivered and cursed like a bronc gone mad. She finally got one of her arms wrapped around his head.

  All she had to do was grab his ear and she could pull him off her. Instead, she locked her arm about his head and dragged him in even harder. She clamped her thighs so tightly on his hand, he’d have been hard pressed to recover it.

  He drove her up. He’d never had a woman who so gave herself to him. She moaned and twisted and pleaded for more in rough whispers.

  He flew her body like the best helo ever made. She rose for him, rose until she soared, and then stayed there as if she’d never come down.

  When at last she fell back to earth, he started to wonder quite what he’d done. He’d never used a woman that way, nor been so fascinated seeing quite what he could make her do.

  Slowly her body settled, though aftershocks continued. She kept his one hand still clamped between her thighs as she slowly curled into him. She let her arm slide down across his neck, then his shoulder as she rolled, and he was nuzzling the side of her breast instead of attacking the tip.

  He still supported her head as she curled up around him.

  Justin began to worry about whether he’d hurt her. He hadn’t meant to, hadn’t ever wanted to do so much to a woman.

  But she’d almost gone fetal on him, her face nestled into his side.

  He opened his mouth to whisper her name as a question.

  Then she nibbled him in the ribs.

  Right on his ticklish spot.

  * * *

  The moment she felt Justin flinch up and back, she rolled away from him; she landed catlike on all fours on the deck.

  One disadvantage to a Navy berth, there wasn’t a lot a lot of room.

  One advantage to a Navy berth, that meant that they were very close.

  She kicked his boot with hers.

  As she planned, he looked down in surprise.

  It was going to cost him. She grabbed the back hem of his T-shirt and pulled it up, over his head, and forward down his arms until it was snarled around his two wrists.

  Then she stopped. She simply didn’t have a choice.

  “Justin,” she managed against a dry throat.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “You do me a favor?”

  “If I can.”

  “Do not ever! stop working out.” He was a damned handsome man, but his chest was a work of art. She wanted to relish it, admire it, so…

  She attacked it.

  Kara shoved him onto his back, straddled over him, pinning his T-shirt-bound hands beneath her, and admired those beautiful pecs. It was clear from his rippling arms that he could throw her off if he wanted to, which he’d think of in a moment. So she had to distract him.

  She peeled off her own T-shirt and sports bra, then tossed them in his face so that he stopped staring wide-eyed at her chest much the way she’d been staring at his. Then she leaned forward and rubbed skin to skin, chest to chest. The power of it slapped against her and she dove further in.

  He started to explore with his hands. They might be marginally trapped in cotton, but she was sitting right on them.

  “Naughty, naughty,” she warned him, hoping he wouldn’t stop. When he persisted, she used it as an excuse to tease his chest some more. He didn’t hiss or buck, he growled—a low feral sound she could feel rippling over his pecs and through her lips.

  He finally remembered his strength and pulled his hands free from beneath her, though they were still inside the shirt.

  Kara was pushing back with one hand on the center of his chest to give one last good old Army try at controlling the situation, when he wrapped his fingers around her bare waist—both palms to her belly since his wrists were still snarled up.

  With that simple gesture, all her desire for a good tussle just slipped aw
ay.

  She straddled his hips, one hand on the center of his chest, the other slowly slipping along his beautiful arms. He’d shaken her T-shirt and bra aside from his face, though the latter still lay across his throat. She plucked the garment free and tossed it aside, his T-shirt as well, never losing the connection of her hand on his chest. She tossed both onto the growing pile of their clothes.

  He slid his hands up her rib cage and back to her waist. As his hands traveled up her body, their rough texture and soft touch made her eyes want to slip closed. But she couldn’t look away from his blue eyes.

  This time she wanted to protest that those eyes should be focused on her chest, not looking right back at her.

  It was too much, too close.

  She did close her eyes, and leaned back to guide his hands up and over her breasts. Every callus elicited a nerve sensation that blasted into her brain; every brush of a thumb earned a gasp of breath that pounded out of her.

  If this is what it felt like to be touched by Justin, how would it feel to have him inside her?

  She wasn’t sure if she was ready for that much power.

  He hesitated as if sensing her mood.

  She opened one eye and peered down at him. He was watching her face intently, both of her breasts cradled in his palms.

  “I’m not one of your goddamn horses.”

  He teased her breasts just right to send a shiver through her. “Must say, I noticed that.”

  “Stop being so…so…” She didn’t have the word that was supposed to land on the other side of that sentence. Aware? Considerate? He was supposed to be a glorious, spectacular, Texas-sized fuck. And then done. Just a test drive, remember?

  When he’d attacked her, he’d read her mood perfectly. Now that she felt inexplicably quiet, she rather wished he didn’t.

  But on their own, her eyes slipped closed once more. Of their own volition, her hands slid up over the backs of his. Not to guide—damn, but this man didn’t need any guidance—but simply to enjoy feeling his motions as he explored her body.

  She floated as he stripped off both of their pants and underwear, never once losing contact with her.