by Emmy Curtis
She unwrapped a Twinkie and picked up her phone—it was dead. She plugged it in and ate the disgusting, delicious, sweet treat in two mouthfuls. Within seconds her phone started bleeping with notifications. Most were notifications from Facebook friends. One wasn’t.
>> I’m coming to get you at lights-out.
It was from Conrad, and literally the first message on her phone from him that didn’t just consist of the time for their flight briefing. It was the only time he’d actually used his words.
How had he gone from zero to a hundred in the space of a day? How had she? She was still pissed at him, though. He was still the self-absorbed guy who had put him and his own career ahead of hers. And that’s assuming he thought about her career at all.
A tiny part of her considered fleeing for the first time since she was seventeen. When the judge had given the choice between military boot camp and detention, she’d considered running. She’d had nothing and no one to stay for, and just about everything she owned could have fit in her backpack. Even now she was surprised, and thankful, that she’d made a different choice. She was going to make that same choice again. She was going to choose herself, her career, the air force, and everything she’d worked toward. She wasn’t going to cave and run from something she didn’t do. For a mistake.
It wasn’t a mistake. You did this to yourself by breaking the rules. None of this would be happening if you’d kept your head down and your hands off Conrad.
She lay on her new bed and pushed out a deep sigh. It was so much more comfortable than the cot from last night. She had a lot of questions for Conrad. A lot of stuff that she would have to get him to do. She had a plan.
Kind of. She picked up her Kindle and tried to read, but her brain refused to leave the possibility that she would be sent to jail for the rest of her life.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Conrad had been sweet-talking Sergeant April Heron the whole day, not that she needed much encouragement to support Missy over TGO. Pretty much everyone he talked to suspected they were sketchy. But no one had proof, and he had to be careful that word didn’t get back to them that he was going around base trash-talking them. It didn’t seem as if they took kindly to obstacles.
It was no secret that plenty of military contractors cut corners to bolster profits. But for all the accolades they had gotten for sponsoring Red Flag, nearly everyone was beginning to wish the exercise had been completely canceled. As was he.
This Red Flag had been an unmitigated disaster. Missy had decided to leave him, and he’d realized just how badly he’d been treating her—even though he was doing it for the best reasons. But now that they’d had sex, that reason had ceased to exist. All this time that he hadn’t asked about her life, hadn’t socialized with her, had kept her at bay with ridiculous lies about the women he was supposedly fucking every night, all those things were to keep her at arm’s length. Something inside him had always known that getting closer to her would be fatal to both their careers. Okay, to his career. Yup, he’d been an ass. And if it wasn’t for this shitting Red Flag, he could have continued in his ignorance. Except she’d obviously made the decision before they’d even come here. Shit. He clenched his fists.
He waited on the picnic table in the playground—the one that he’d remember forever—for the lights to go out at the barracks. As soon as they did, he hefted his backpack onto his back and waited for the half-assed sentry to go inside for coffee or whatever he did before his rounds.
He knocked at Missy’s window, and she opened it for him without a word. He shoved his backpack in and then jumped up onto the window ledge and fed his way through the small opening.
“Evening,” he said when he had both feet on the ground.
“Good evening, sir,” she said sassily.
He shook his head. “Okay. I have supplies.” He unzipped his backpack and brought out a four-pack of ice-cold Stella Artois and a lime.
“How did you know I drank that? You’ve never once seen me drink that,” she said, disbelief in her voice.
“That’s not all, baby.” He reached in and pulled out a thermal bag and handed it to her.
She sniffed it and moaned, which in turn sent a frisson of memory through him.
“Where in the world did you find a döner kebab here?” she whispered as she tore open the wrapping.
“Easy, tiger, one of those is for me.” He caught the white paper bag she threw at him.
She took a bite and her eyes closed in what he could only describe as ecstasy. It was only just hitting him how alike sex and eating were. At least, they certainly seemed to invoke the same feelings in Missy.
She took a few bites, grease and onion falling from her mouth. He shoved some napkins at her and she put the kebab down next to her on the bed and mopped up. “Seriously. How did you know you just hit my sweet spot?”
He reined himself in from saying the double entendre that was on his lips. “I knew I’d find someone here who had been stationed with you somewhere. The problem was, I didn’t know where you’d been stationed before.” He held his hands up. “I know, my bad. Anyway, I found a guy who used to fly from Incirlik to Ramstein when you were there. He said you were the döner queen of the squadron. He also remembered your drink of choice.”
“It’s true, I took my crown seriously. I can not only find the best döner in any city, but I can also make them. I just haven’t had one in ages.”
From a different section of his pack, he withdrew two notepads and a bunch of pens he’d stolen from the briefing room. “As requested.”
She’d already stuffed another mouthful of kebab in her mouth, so she just nodded at him and gave him a thumbs-up.
He popped the tops on the Stella and with his pocketknife cut the lime into pieces and stuck a piece in hers. No way was he going to wreck good beer with citrus. She was a freak.
He sat on the floor, next to the chest of drawers, facing her, and dug into his own kebab, enjoying the silence between them. He wasn’t even sure they’d ever eaten together before, aside from shoving sandwiches in their faces in the briefing rooms between missions.
Neither of them said anything. Occasionally their eyes met as they ate, and a warmth between them bloomed as her eyes smiled at him.
It was a picture he’d keep locked away for a long time. Missy, the object of all his attention and deliberate nonattention, with grease on her face and bits of onion and lettuce hanging out of her mouth, but with her eyes shining in the light from the streetlamps outside.
He wiped his mouth when he finished. She was still attacking the last half of her meal, so he decided to take the initiative. “Okay, so I realized that I’ve been a bad friend these past few years. I don’t know much about you, not where you’re from, nothing about your family—if you even have one—nothing about your past before we started to work together. And I want to know you. Properly. I want to be able to anticipate your every move, the way you do mine. I want to see you. Try to understand you. Okay?”
She suddenly looked self-conscious. She held her hand over her mouth and grabbed for the napkins. Was she choking? Or was she going to cry?
She finally swallowed her mouthful and wrapped the tissues and the last remnants of her döner that had fallen on her lap and put them back in the white paper bag. She balled it up and lobbed it into the trash can in the corner of the room.
“Swish,” she said as it went straight in, no rebound or anything.
“See? I didn’t know you could do that.”
She twisted her mouth into a smile and scooched back on the bed, so she was leaning against the wall. She took a mouthful of beer and shook her head. “I’m honestly not sure if you deserve to know anything about me.”
“You’re right. I definitely don’t.” He nodded and waited for her to reply.
She said nothing, just took another swig of her stupid citrus beer.
“Okay, how about I tell you a secret about me first.” He was really going to tell her. It was now or never.<
br />
Her eyebrows rose, but still she said nothing. She was a hard audience. And he deserved no less.
“Do you remember the nurse in Colorado? The swimming instructor in Norfolk? The waitress, also in Norfolk? The lawyer in Virginia Beach? The—”
“The archaeologist from Penn State, the stripper from…okay, I can’t remember where she was from, the gymnast from two days ago? Of course I do.”
He took a breath. “Yeah. None of them were real.”
She blinked a bunch of times and her mouth dropped open. “What?”
“None of them.”
She frowned and stared, for the first time seemingly at a loss for words. Or scheming his imminent death. It was hard to tell with Missy. “But why?”
And that was the sticky part. Because he was only just figuring it out for himself. “Because I didn’t want to fall in love with you. I didn’t want you to fall in love with me—” he began.
“What, so if you weren’t sleeping around, I would one hundred percent just roll over and fall in love with you? Let me tell you this, Conrad: You’re not that charming. You’re barely charming at all, actually.” She looked annoyed. And when she put it like that, she was right to be.
“Look, I know ‘sorry’ barely covers it, but my motives were pure. At least, they probably weren’t exactly pure, but…well maybe good is a better word. I didn’t want to socialize with the squadron, when I knew I’d be in close proximity to you. I know it’s stupid—trust me, I’ve been over this in my head a thousand times—and it makes not a whole lot of sense to me either, but in my defense, I don’t think I exactly knew why I was doing it either at the time.”
“Well that just makes you stupid.” She was staring at her beer bottle and pulling strips of damp label from it and chucking them onto the floor.
“Do you forgive me?” he asked, at a loss for anything else to say.
“I don’t know. It’s too early to say and too soon to process,” she said, finally meeting his eyes.
He thought—no, really he had just hoped—that she would jump into his arms in delight. But deep down he kind of knew she was too smart for that. He needed to pay for misleading her.
“So why do you want to know about me now? What’s changed?” she asked.
“Everything’s changed. Everything. You’re leaving me. No, you chose to leave me, and that just about kills me. That we knew each other so poorly. That I lied to you. That I did everything to push you away, even though you literally never showed any interest in me.” He paused, suddenly realizing what a complete and total ass he’d been. Like, on fucking multiple levels.
A silence fell between them again. “So what do you want to know?” she asked, lobbing a pillow at him.
He deflected it before it hit him in the face. She did throw with extraordinary accuracy. “Tell me how you came into the military.” It was a test, and he hated himself for it. But he needed to know if she was open to being truthful with him, now that he’d bared his soul.
She laughed and looked up at the ceiling. She nodded a few times to herself, and his heart clenched, hoping she wasn’t thinking up a lie.
“Honestly? A very nice judge told me to enlist in the military or go to jail. So, being the rebellious pisser I was, I chose the greater of the two evils.”
Conrad laughed, a release, and a sliver of happiness shot through the emotional mess that was stuffing up his brain.
“Jail? What happened?” he asked.
“My parents kept bugging out on me through my high school years, so I kind of bugged out on school too. I managed to graduate, eventually. It was that spring break before I was supposed to graduate that I got caught trespassing with some friends…and, well, the owner of the factory had donated heavily to the county sheriff, so we got charged. Three months in a correctional facility, or graduate school and enlist. So off to boot camp I went. Two years later I’d completed a degree in applied math and was commissioned as an officer. And then four years later I met you.”
“You got arrested after one offense?” he asked. “Where was this?”
She grinned. “Oh, no. That was maybe my sixteenth offense. And it was in Sacramento.”
“I can’t believe it. When we first met, you had this reputation of being a squared away, by-the-book officer. I would never have imagined you had such a delinquent past.” He tipped his head to one side, as if considering. “Actually, yes, I can.” He winked at her and she gave him the finger, making him laugh out loud.
“What do you do when you’re not at work?” he asked.
“I ride my horses. I go out with friends. I see movies…” She spread her hands. “Like everyone else.”
“You have horses?” he said, slapping his hand against his forehead. “How did I not know…Jesus, I’m sorry. What a jackass I am. I really didn’t ask you anything about you, did I?” Could the depths of his misery get any worse?
“Well don’t get me started on my conspiracy theory website, my thirteen cats, or my visceral need to live-tweet every episode of Real Housewives…,” she said earnestly. “I wrote a post about the truth behind the Bermuda Triangle and that one guy from Jersey Shore totally reposted it on his site.”
What? He hesitated just a second before realizing that she was putting him on in a big way. “Dude. You nearly had me there.”
“I really did, didn’t I?” she said with a smile.
Silence fell between them. There was so much more that he wanted to know, but he didn’t know how to ask. “Shall we return to the elephant in the room?”
“You mean the fact that I’m actually in this room?” she asked with a sigh. “Yeah. There’s stuff I need to talk to you about. There’s a guy—Colonel Janke—who came to me claiming to be my JAG. He was a douche-canoe and when I asked for a different lawyer, he kind of freaked out. He insisted on knowing what Eleanor had told me about the conversation with her father. I didn’t tell him anything, but—”
“Wait. In our meeting with the general, when you mentioned the guy in the hangar and the conversation Eleanor had with her father about it, that was when our whole conversation went to shit. The way Danvers put his hand on the general’s shoulder almost seemed threatening instead of supportive.”
“Right?” Missy said. “That’s what I thought too. So, you think this whole shit show is about the conversation Eleanor had with her father? It must have been about the guy in the hangar—the one who approached me outside lodging.” She averted her eyes as if she was trying to piece everything together.
He’d never admit it, but he definitely owed that guy. He was the one who literally put Missy into his arms. “Maybe he’s the key to all of this.”
Missy opened her mouth to say something, but his phone rang. He answered quick as he could to suppress the noise.
“Animal?”
Missy looked anxiously at the door, expecting someone to come in, but no one did. She opened one of the notepads and wrote some notes to herself as Conrad talked to the Animal. God only knew what the crazy pilot wanted at this time of night.
Conrad ended the call and took a deep breath. “The Animal took out a team and found Eleanor.”
“Oh thank God. Is she okay?” She blew out air in relief.
“She’s alive, but not okay. They medivaced her to the city hospital. The RAF pilot is dehydrated and injured, but he’s being brought back to the base hospital. It took them an hour to find them.” His eyes squinted.
“What? A bunch of pilots found them in an hour, but TGO’s search and rescue couldn’t do it in over twenty-four?”
“Or didn’t want to,” he said.
“I can’t believe that. If we’re saying seriously that they caused the crash and then tried to leave them out there in the desert, then they won’t think twice about getting rid of me too.” Her voice was grim, and stressed-sounding even to her ears.
“I’m not going to let anything happen to you. You’re my wingman. Anyone will have to go through me to get to you.” He said the words
simply, as if they were just plain old fact.
She got up and looked at him. “Thank you,” she said. “But in case this is our last moment together…” She let her words drift off for dramatic effect.
His arms wrapped around her, and she dropped her head back to kiss him. Nothing would feel safer than being in his arms. But he gently disengaged. “Nice try, but slightly overdramatic. I’ve got to go, but Sergeant Heron will be looking out for you while I’m gone, and when she has to leave the facility, she has recruited someone else to watch TGO around here.
“I’ve also got a special investigator to come speak to you first thing. He seems to be a good guy. One of ours. Call if you need anything, but, you know, hide your phone. Yours and Eleanor’s room had been ransacked when I got there this afternoon. They may go through all your stuff here too.”
Her blood rose at the thought of a TGO guy riffling through her clothes and belongings. Not to mention Eleanor’s. “I really want to see Eleanor,” she said, stepping back from them.
“I’ll put out some feelers and see when and if she can have visitors. But prepare yourself for the worst. She wasn’t in good shape when they found her.”
She nodded. “You really can’t stay?” She hated how small her voice sounded.
“I want to stay. But this evening was about döners and beer and trying to get to know you a bit better. I know things are complicated right now, but I can do better work out there.”
She nodded again.
“I’ve got to go. Oh, I brought these, in case you really can’t live without me.” He pulled two AA batteries out of his pocket.
She looked at them, perplexed, until she realized that they were for the vibrator. “Get out!” she hissed. “And take your batteries with you!”
He grinned and hugged her one more time, kissing her on the forehead. She punched his arm in response. She had no idea what was going on with them now. He seemed to be ignoring the conversation they’d had. But it was true she needed all the friends she could get.