Wingman

by Emmy Curtis

  She bit back a groan. She was so wet. With her foot, she traced his dick through his jeans. He froze as his fingers were about to pluck at one of her nipples. And then he rolled it between his fingertips and squeezed it. A line of electricity buzzed between her breast and her clitoris. She could feel blood pumping up and down it.

  “If you don’t touch me, I’m going to have to touch myself, Conrad. Don’t make yourself obsolete.” It would have sounded more convincing if her voice hadn’t been so low and whispery with need.

  His hands snatched away from her. “Really? You’ll touch yourself?” he said.

  “If you won’t…”

  He swiveled her around so that she was crossways on the table, instead of lengthways. She sat up, dizzy with need.

  He sat between her legs on one of the benches and growled, “Show me.”

  Jesus. What was happening here? Missy had a brief flashback to a week ago, when they only ever saw each other in uniform and they only talked shop. Suddenly their professional relationship seemed to have happened years ago.

  She sat up straight, planting her feet on either side of him. If he wanted a show, he’d get a show.

  Slowly, she tucked her hair behind her ears and trailed her fingers down from her hair to her breasts. Her nipples puckered again under her touch, and she felt more liquid pool between her legs.

  Conrad’s breath was heavy, and he was practically vibrating. His hands slipped around her ankles and then up to push her knees farther apart.

  Her hands moved down her stomach, and then slowly along her thighs to her knees, and then back up.

  His hands tightened on her legs as she stroked her inner thigh. Her insides clenched with the intensity of his stare as she extended a finger, dragged it through her wetness, and then slid it to her clit. The pressure was exquisite; the experience of Conrad watching her in this most intimate performance heightened every sense. She stroked her clit slowly and firmly, rocking her pelvis as she did.

  “Jesus,” he whispered.

  She stopped touching herself, desperately wanting him to make her orgasm, and placed her finger on his lips. He opened his mouth immediately and sucked in her finger. He groaned and closed his eyes as he tasted her. His mouth was hot.

  Her heart was thumping so hard in her chest, she was sure it was visible through her skin.

  He put a hand between her breasts and pushed her back down on the table. Instantly his tongue was on her, licking, probing, and then flicking at her clit.

  Her orgasm was ready to break hard. She watched Conrad’s head between her legs and couldn’t hold back. Her moans echoed around them. In a second he was kneeling on the table next to her, his hand firmly over her mouth to keep her quiet. His tongue returned to her clit, stoking her orgasm front and center. She tensed the second it hit and rocked against his mouth as he took her flying.

  For some reason, his hand over her mouth leant a frisson of naughtiness to the already-hot situation. What was wrong with her? What had happened to the demure Missy of last week? Last month?

  She didn’t care. She sat up and pressed her hand against his hard dick. “I guess I should go back to my room, huh?” she teased.

  “Of course,” he growled, trying obviously to even out his breathing.

  “Unless…” She unzipped his jeans and pushed them over his hips to the ground. “Unless you have a few seconds to spare?” she asked, eyes open wide with mock innocence.

  “Who are you, and what have you done with Missy?” he asked, spinning her around and bending her over the table.

  “Do you mind?” She looked over her shoulder.

  “I don’t know what I’m feel…” he began.

  Missy didn’t wait to hear the answer. Maybe she was scared to. She took his dick into her hand and placed it right at her entrance, flexing herself against him.

  “Wait. Give me a moment,” he ground out. He grabbed his discarded jeans and pulled a condom out of his pocket. Missy grabbed it from him and opened it gently with her teeth, her gaze not leaving his. She took it out of the packet and placed it on the tip of his dick. His eyes narrowed and his chest heaved as if he’d just ran a marathon.

  She bent her head and rolled it on with her mouth. Slowly, inch by inch. He jerked in her mouth.

  “Fuck,” he said, one hand on her head as she came back up.

  Still holding him in her hand, she placed him right where she wanted him the most.

  In one slow stroke, he filled her entirely.

  A heaviness settled along her limbs as he moved inside her. She bent over the table, allowing her erect nipples to be scraped by the rough surface. The duel sensation of being filled and abraded sent tremors through her.

  Conrad slipped his hand around her and stroked her clit in time with his thrusts. The trifecta of desire threw her over the edge, this time a sharper, faster, more intense orgasm. It hit her without warning, and as she muffled her cries with her hand, she felt him spasm inside her. His hands took her hips and rocked her against him.

  Neither of them said a word.

  As the afterglow left her, she suddenly felt exposed and a little awkward. She stood, and he wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight against him, nuzzling her neck.

  After a couple of minutes, he broke his silence with the words she dreaded. “We need to talk about this.”

  Really? Now?

  “No. I should go back. That can be a conversation for another day.” She disengaged from him and walked as nonchalantly as possible back to her clothes. She put them on and then picked up her beer bottle and took a drink, as casual as possible.

  By the time she’d turned around, Conrad had rearranged himself and pulled his jeans back on.

  “We need to strategize about getting you out of this and back to the squadron,” he said. “This is ridiculous. We’re the best team up there. Keeping you here is…is damaging our country’s security.” His voice was getting louder.

  She put a hand on his arm. “No, it isn’t. There are plenty of people as good as we are, and you’ll find someone great to fly with.” She smiled at him. “I’m putting you in charge of finding someone new and protecting the country with your awesome piloting stuff.”

  “What are you talking about? This fuckery will be sorted out soon, and we’ll be back to normal.” He looked at the barracks. “I’m getting you a JAG first thing, get this done and dusted.”

  She had a feeling that getting a judge advocate general—a military lawyer—might spring her, but definitely wouldn’t put her back on flight duty.

  “Conrad, I told you. I’m leaving. After Red Flag, I go home, pack my things, and move to MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. It’s already done. I should have orders tomorrow, assuming I’m not arrested on high treason.”

  “What?” he said between clenched teeth.

  “I told you last night that I’d put in for a transfer. This morning they told me that my old commander is there and jumped at the chance to have me as an instructor.”

  “But I thought…”

  Heat rose in her—but a totally different kind of heat now. “You thought you’d fucked that idea right out of me? Is that it?” she said, barely managing to keep her voice down.

  His face registered shock, but also an admission.

  “Seriously? You thought that if you took me to bed, you’d get me to stay?” Her hand flew to her belly, where a storm of betrayal and distress was brewing. “It’s like I don’t even know you. No, you know what? I do know you. I’ve heard about all the women you fuck and your laser focus on your career. It was me who was stupid enough to believe for a second that you’d be concerned about my career, about my future, about what I want. But now I know for absolute sure who you are.”

  She turned and ran. Over the grass and the track, to the foot of her window. She didn’t look back and disappeared as fast as she could.

  In the dark of her room, she stood for a moment, trying to catch her breath. Everything was different now. Everything was
wrong. She had no one. How could she have thought for a second that he’d be looking out for her and not just himself? He hadn’t changed at all. She could see that now. And she was seven kinds of stupid for expecting him to be different with her.

  Fighting back a wave of emotion that threatened tears, she lay back on her bed and counted missiles. Two in each bay, four in each aircraft, twenty in each hangar, two hundred in the lockup. Her breathing steadied, and her heart rate slowed. She took a couple of deep breaths and closed her eyes.

  She had to get out of this mess by herself.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Conrad hadn’t slept worth a shit. His eyes were gritty and his temper was far from even keel. He just wanted someone to look at him wrong so he could take out his frustration physically. He was consumed with too many emotions to name. Not that he truly understood any emotion that wasn’t hair-raising fear, anger, or anxiety.

  What he wouldn’t give to dial the clock back forty-eight hours. Everything was fucked to hell now. Missy had totally bought the endless women he made up. Of course, he only started lying about the women to make excuses for why he never went to social events with her. Then they’d joked about the number of women he pretended he’d slept with, and then it became his schtick. Stupid, stupid move. And how did you ever tell anyone that you’d been lying to them for two years?

  He left his room and went to the lobby. There were loads of people in civvies, milling around, talking in low voices.

  He saw a pilot he’d been on patrolling sorties with on the Korean peninsula. “Hey. What’s going on?”

  The Animal—as he was always known—shook his hand. Unusually for him, he looked somber. “I’m arranging a…” He paused to search for the right word.

  “Posse,” another pilot suggested.

  “Yeah, I’m organizing a posse to go out and look for Eleanor and Dex. You heard, right? Of course you did. We decided last night—”

  “In the bar,” the other pilot added.

  “Look, who’s telling this story, man?” The Animal was an American-raised Korean national who was a legend at Red Flag, He was the guy who put everything on the line every time he took off and left nothing on the field when he landed.

  The pilot grinned and held up both hands. His cell phone rang as soon as he did, and he took the call.

  The Animal nodded. “Okay, we were in the bar, but where else do I get my great ideas?”

  “It’s a mystery to us all,” Conrad replied with a patience he definitely wasn’t feeling.

  “We don’t trust TGO. Too many people have too many stories about various fuck-ups they’ve had downrange. You know? Ones that don’t make the official reports.”

  Really? So maybe Missy and he were right to think that this all revolved around TGO.

  “I hadn’t heard that,” he said, leaning against one of the armchairs.

  “It seems as if you have to be directly involved to know what happened, because as I said, none of the incidents make it to the reports.” The Animal was tapping his fingers against his leg and was clearly amped up. “I hear that TGO has deep connections to your government. Like entrenched for many years.”

  “I hope you’re not saying my government is corrupt?” Conrad frowned.

  “No more than mine. But power and money corrupt individuals. And that’s where the shit hits the fan. Anyway, none of us feels real comfortable leaving Eleanor and Dex’s rescue to TGO. You want in?”

  “Sure I do. But the base is on lockdown.”

  “I think I have someone who can help me with that,” he said. “Someone on the inside.”

  “Okay, I’ll help if I can, but I can’t come with you. My weapons officer—Major Malden—is under house arrest, and I feel like they’re trying to pin the accident on her.”

  The Animal’s eyebrows rose. “Dude, if you think TGO has her in their sights, I’d keep a real close eye on her.” He put his hand on Conrad’s arm. “Seriously. I’d give anything to be able to pin this shit storm on them. They deal with my government, too, and it’s only a matter of time before they fuck up over there too. And I don’t want to see that. The stakes are too damn high in my neck of the woods.”

  “I’ll let you know if I find anything. Thanks, brother.”

  They shook hands. As Conrad left, he heard the other pilot say that he’d rented a van from Hertz. God only knew what exactly they were planning. He had a flash image of a Mad Max–style convoy of multinational forces, storming the desert to find their missing troops. It brought a smile to his face, and he would have given nearly anything to be a part of it.

  But he wasn’t going to leave Missy alone, even if she begged him to. Even if she was pissed off to hell with him. He had this unnerving feeling that if he walked away, everyone else would turn a blind eye. And he wasn’t about to let that happen.

  He marched over to Colonel Cameron’s office, ready to confess his sins and explain what he thought TGO was up to. To see if Cameron would step up and help Missy.

  Only then could he try to figure out a way to keep her in his life. If she’d have him. And for the life of him he couldn’t think of a good reason why she should. He knew knee-trembling, earth-shattering sex wouldn’t be enough to make her love him. He didn’t even really want to think about what a prick he’d been to her.

  A good officer would have at least asked what her career goals were and ensured that she was put in a position where she would get the relevant experience to achieve them. He hadn’t. Hell, he knew more about the Animal than he did his own weapons officer. He’d never asked her anything about herself. He wondered why. No, he didn’t wonder why. He knew why. He was just scared to acknowledge it.

  God only knew how he could fix all this, but he did know that the key to everything was getting her away from TGO and out of house arrest.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Casey Jacobs sat on an uncomfortable plastic chair outside the command center, constantly swiping the TGO screen saver on her phone to check it was still on. She dialed her office number. Yup. Her phone was working. So why wasn’t anyone calling her back?

  She was TechGen-One’s vice president of military marketing, which meant something bad was going on if no one was returning her calls.

  Briefly she slumped, holding her head in her hands, trying not to give in to the paralyzing feeling that her company was responsible for the missing pilots in the Nevada desert.

  When she’d left the military, she’d been an MC-130J pilot at the top of her game. But with the niggling suspicion that her career had already reached its apex, she’d been receptive when a recruiter contacted her about working for TechGen-One. They offered to double her wage as a lieutenant colonel in the air force—which was already a lot. She’d been assured that she’d still be serving her country, but just not in uniform and without the regulations and constraints that the military put on its service people.

  So, she’d resigned her commission and accepted a job with the well-regarded military contractor. All her friends were jealous, and Casey was on cloud nine on her first day in their state-of-the-art offices in Washington, DC.

  Except after the lunch she’d had with Mr. Danvers and the other VPs, she’d been taken to legal, shut in a room, and been given a nondisclosure agreement to sign. It wasn’t just any confidentiality contract. It took her seven and a half hours to read, initial, and sign every pertinent page. It covered company patents, products, clients, advancements and services, memos, reports, and anything discussed by TGO employees.

  It had felt overwhelming when she’d seen the stack of papers. And then she felt pride that they trusted her with their business—which they clearly took so seriously—and that she’d finally landed a position where she could take her career as far as she wanted.

  Now, however, as she waited for her call back, doubt prickled her thoughts. Had she signed all those pieces of paper so she couldn’t talk to anyone about product failures?

  She straightened her spine and tried to find the confidenc
e in TGO she’d had before Red Flag. She could do this.

  She swiped her phone again. Why wasn’t Malcom calling her back? He was the closest thing to a friend she’d had at the company. He’d been assigned as her buddy her first week there to show her around the campus, and they’d been tight ever since.

  The thought of the rambling voice mail she’d left him made her wince. But she was sure he’d forgive her moment of panic.

  Casey was able to apply her knowledge as a pilot to help the research and development department fine-tune their concept for new products. The software they were testing here at Red Flag had gone through a number of iterations before she joined the company, and like the good employee she was, she’d taken all the files home and read up on the notes from inception to prototype in her spare time. She liked to be on top of her game, and extracurricular work never fazed her.

  PreCall had been designed to give allied pilots a split-second advantage over their enemies. It was designed to learn a pilot’s unique way of flying. To detect shifts in physical movement and to predict what the pilot would do in any given situation. All it took was a few hours on an exercise, and the device could align to a pilot’s way of flying, his or her intentions, and trigger the aircraft systems a fraction of a second before the pilot reacted to a situation.

  Gaining just that extra second in reflex time would make a world of difference in combat. As long as only your side had the technology.

  But the static over the radio that she’d heard in the control room and the sudden uncontrollability of the aircraft that the pilots had called in just before the accident were exactly the same as the problems they’d had with the prototype a year previously. She thought they’d fixed that. All she could think was that they’d either installed an earlier model of PreCall on the aircraft accidentally, or the newer version was reverting to old issues.

  Either way, she needed answers. She was not going to sell these to the U.S. military if they had problems. Whatever the pressure.