by Emmy Curtis
It was way above his pay grade. He was happy to leave all that palace intrigue alone.
Not that he was 100 percent sure what his pay grade was anymore. In the time it had taken him to fly to Tampa, fight for the life of the woman he loved, and sit by her bedside while she slept, he had realized that his life would be nothing without her in it. It was nothing to do with their professional life. Of course she made him better, but spending that long working almost exclusively with anyone would.
It was her. It had always been her, and now he had to make his move and make sure she knew it. What she said—or wrote—would determine his future. Because he sure as shit wasn’t going to let her out of his line of sight again, unless she forced him to.
By the time he rented a car, got back to the hospital with all their gear, waited for the doctor to discharge her, and pick up meds from the pharmacy, it was getting late.
She sat next to him in the car, with her head back against the headrest and her green spray in her hand. When they finally drove onto the most beautiful military base he’d ever set eyes on, she heaved a sigh of relief. The lodging overlooked the sea, and frankly, the salty air seemed to act like an antiseptic to everything they’d gone through.
“This is nice. No wonder you wanted to live here. Do you have a house on base?”
She nodded, looking out at the waves crashing on the rocks beneath them. “I think so,” she whispered. “All instructors do.”
He checked her in and helped her out of the car and up to an open walkway that led to the rooms on the first floor.
The room was considerably less fancy than the one she’d had downtown. “Less fancy is good,” she said.
He paused, and she put her bag on the bed and turned around to face him. “I’ll go then, and—”
A look of alarm flashed across her face as she grabbed his arm. “No. Stay.”
“I can’t. I mean, I need to have a conversation with you about everything, but I can’t do that if you can barely talk.” He took a step toward the door.
She held up a finger and dug in her bag for the damn My Little Pony pad and pencil.
Talk about stalling the momentum. “Look, we can’t have a conversation if only one of us can talk. What if I want to shout at you, and then I have to wait five minutes for you to write a message in all caps so I know you’re shouting too?”
She held up her finger again as she scribbled on the paper. After a couple of moments, she lifted the paper so he could see it. Kind of.
He squinted at it and stepped away from it, still squinting. “I think you need to use all caps anyway. I can’t…what the hell does that even say? There—does that say puppy?”
She shook her fist at him, which was completely adorable. Then she took back her pad and sat at the desk. She was there for a long time. “You see, this is why having a conversation now is ridiculous. Let’s just put a pin in this and revisit it tomorrow,” he said.
“I’ll stick a pin in you, if you don’t shut up,” she whispered.
“Not to labor the point, but I saved your life yesterday. Don’t you go threatening me.” In truth, he wanted to get out of there like there was no tomorrow. He didn’t want to spend another night with her without knowing that she would be his forever.
He didn’t want her to decide today what his fate would be. He wanted more time to have hope, which was the one thing she’d never given him. She’d never inferred or hinted, or even just looked at him as if she wanted him in her life as anything other than a colleague.
Give him just one more night of hope, please.
He opened the room door, and she kicked the trash can hard enough for him to look around again. She was still holding her finger up for him to wait.
He watched as she made deliberate letters on the pad, using God knows how many pieces of paper.
She cleared her throat, and then teared up in pain. He lunged for the spray and handed it to her. She sprayed and took a breath.
She handed him each page one at a time.
If you love me, stay.
Because I love you, even though you are an ASS at times.
And I think we would be good together.
Maybe.
Unless you don’t.
In which case, J/K.
?????
With each page, his heart lurched in his chest until the last few, when he laughed. “Okay. I’ll stay. I’ll give you a little while to sell me on MacDill, and you, of course. But you need to sell hard.”
She threw the multicolored pencil at him. He watched it as it sailed by him about a foot from the target.
“And I won’t tell people what a terrible shot you are when you’re not in an F-15.”
“I love you,” she whispered.
“I love you too. I think I always did.”
Tears appeared in her eyes, and she allowed them to fall unchecked. She held her hand out to him, tears now falling onto her T-shirt. His heart grew by 200 percent as her eyes told him everything he needed to know.
EPILOGUE
One year later
“Is it true that you and Colonel Conrad are the ones that the textbook talks about, ma’am?” The young man found the page in their textbook and pointed at it.
The other students groaned. “What’s the matter with you?” he shot back at them. “This is all we talk about when we’re at the chow hall. I just thought I’d cut to the chase.” He turned his attention back to Missy. “People say it was you. That you were the ones who used a supersonic boom to fool the enemy that you were about to drop more bombs when you’d actually run out of missiles?”
Missy smiled at Conrad, who was at the back of the class, leaning against the wall, waiting for her to finish for the day. “Does the textbook have our names in it?” she asked with a smile.
“No, ma’am.”
“Then you should probably assume it’s classified, and you shouldn’t—”
“It was totally us,” Conrad butted in. “And the whole thing was Major Conrad’s idea.” He pointed at Missy. “We were out of weapons, we were running low on fuel and didn’t have much maneuverability, and she figured we had one more attempt at forcing them to retreat so our ground troops could regroup.” Missy rolled her eyes as Conrad used his hand as if it were his plane. The students’ eyes were fixed on him. “So, we banked around the mountain and tripped it up to Mach II, and dropped a boom on them that made them think heaven was dropping in on them. They turned around and ran.”
“Awesome,” the young airman said, nodding. The other students grinned.
“Now, don’t you go telling anyone. That’s our secret, right?”
“Yessir!” they chorused. Any time Conrad stopped by on his way to pick up their daughter from the base day care, he always managed to derail her class. “Okay, guys, it’s nearly four, and it’s Friday, so why don’t we pick this up next week?”
The officers looked so damn young to her. “Have a good weekend, and if you’re drinking…”
Everyone joined in with the instructions she always gave them: “Have a plan to get home.”
She nodded. “I’m not giving up my weekend to visit you in the hospital.”
They filed out, leaving her and her husband alone in the classroom.
“It wasn’t my idea; it was yours,” she said, shaking her head.
“No, it wasn’t. It was you. I remember being skeptical that it would work.”
“You and I have very different memories about a lot of things.” She smiled.
“Not everything, though,” he replied.
She stepped up to him as close as she could without actually touching him, which would be horribly unprofessional. “No, not everything.”
He gazed into her eyes with a warmth and an interest that never failed to weaken her knees. From the moment they’d confessed their feelings to each other, it was as if he’d been given permission to get inside her head. He was always asking her opinion on things and figuring out how she felt. It made her feel loved,
more than the words, more than the nights they spent trying not to wake Libby up.
She stretched her arms over her head and sighed. “It’s the weekend at last.”
“And I get you all to myself. Well, me and Libby get you all to ourselves. Beach? Barbeque? Movie and some making out?” he said, slowly making his way to the front of the classroom.
“All of the above, please,” she replied, a pure joy rising in her. If she could shoot rainbows out of the top of her head, she would every day. He had given up flying six months before and become the commandant of the intelligence school at MacDill. They shared a beautiful base house overlooking the bay and had slipped into an easy domestic life filled with laughter and wisecracks. And then their daughter had arrived unplanned and desperately adored.
“Come on. Let’s break for the border. Grab Libby and make a run for it,” she said, closing her briefcase.
“How I wish you were being serious,” he replied. “I’d go on the run with you any day of the week. After we retire.”
“It’s a date.”
He opened the classroom door for her, and they both walked slowly into the late afternoon sunshine, toward the childcare building.
Missy’s heart fluttered as it did every day when Conrad picked up her baby. The delight on both their faces made her day complete. Made her life complete.
This was her family. The first she’d ever had. And they were freaking awesome.
As they left the building and headed back to their house, he motioned down to his pocket. “I forgot. I have something for you. Can you…I can’t…” He was holding Libby with both hands.
She dug in his pocket and pulled out its sole content. Two AA batteries. “Wha…ohhhh,” she said with a giggle. She started speed-walking. She shouted over her shoulder. “Hurry up! Don’t make me start without you.”
The image of him holding their daughter, with the grin he gave, slayed her.
“Right behind you, sweetheart.”
Keep reading for a preview of
FREE FALL
Coming in Spring 2018.
CHAPTER 1
Colonel Duke Cameron didn’t recognize the man who stared back at him in the mirror. What had happened to him? Clean-shaven, pressed uniform, an uncertain look in his eyes—defeated even. Was this him? Or just some sap who’d had the warrior in him snuffed out through a series of promotions?
With every rank attained, it seemed like another little piece of him had been suppressed until he’d become a completely different officer. But now something inside him was fighting to get out.
He was in his final year of running Red Flag. A hefty retirement check was in his sights, along with a brand-new career. Fishing charters maybe. Or being a golf pro. That’s what he told himself anyway, but it was becoming more and more obvious to him that he couldn’t go quietly into the night; he was a fighter.
It was supposed to be a smooth transition. But this year’s Red Flag had become a total fuck-up. It was eating away at him—the lack of control, the loss of the two pilots in a horrible crash on the second day of the exercise. He could feel it roiling inside. He should be out looking for the missing pilots. He should be doing something, goddamn it.
He grimaced in the mirror. The special operator in camo face paint bringing the fight to the enemy, the Osprey pilot who executed the most deadly attacks and fearless rescues had become…this. An insipid commander who played by the rules and respected the line of command. And the latter was sticking in his gut like a five-pound wad of chewing gum.
The three-star general who had shown up from the Pentagon had basically given all operational control of the base, and Red Flag, to a third-party military contractor. And here he was, hunched over a sink in the men’s room, not wanting to return to his office lest something else happened that would make him feel even more impotent.
Two planes had crashed the day before, and TGO, the contract company that had paid for Red Flag this year, insisted on being in charge of the search and rescue. The general had agreed, which left Duke sitting with his fucking thumb up his own ass while they dicked around, seemingly unable to find two planes and two pilots on a desert range.
He splashed water on his face slowly, wanting to prolong the moment until he had to go back to his desk and answer every call with a weak “I don’t know” response. Because he didn’t know a goddamned thing. It was like the whole of Red Flag—Duke’s whole reason for being at Nellis—had been taken away from him. His entire scope of responsibility had been reduced to sitting at his desk, wondering what had happened, and being completely out of the loop.
Someone rushed into the bathroom and ran for one of the stalls. He knew how that felt. But anyway, it was a good enough reason to give the poor guy some privacy. Cameron left, and only realized that he’d slammed the door open with such force that it had bounced against the wall when a couple of officers stopped talking and stared at him. He resisted the urge to apologize.
He was losing control of Red Flag, and himself.
He wasn’t the squared-away colonel they saw. He wasn’t the obedient by-the-books officer he’d accidentally become. He’d never been that. And it was only now—in the face of losing pilots on his watch—that he was able to really see himself for what he’d become.
The bottom line was that the higher up you rose through the ranks, the more you had to lose. He only had two years to go before his twenty years was up. He just had to keep his head down to get full retirement. At forty-three, he’d be able to get another job, and with his military retirement check, be able to live a quiet, easy life.
Back at his office, Captain Olivia Moss jumped up as he entered.
“Sit down, Captain.” He’d been trying to persuade her that she didn’t have to stand every time he returned to his office, but she was struggling with the lack of protocol he was apt to enforce in his own domain. Maybe because he was a walking contradiction.
“I just wanted to remind you that it’s eighteen hundred hours, and you have a date. I wanted to be sure to give you enough warning so you can go home and take a…” Her voice trailed off as if she’d only just realized how inappropriate it would be to talk to a commander about his showering habits.
Then he focused on what she was reminding him of. A date? “What in the hell are you talking about? What date?”
Her face fell, and her gaze dropped to her planner. “Um. You have a seven o’clock date with a Casey Jacobs?”
He took an uneasy breath. “It’s not a date,” he bit out. “It’s an…appointment.” At least, he hoped. Maybe he hoped. Shit.
Captain Moss frowned. “Oh God. I’m so sorry.”
She looked so stricken that he eased up. “It’s not a date. She’s a retired major. She used to fly MC-130Js out of Germany. I met her a couple of times when we were deployed. And now she works for TGO. My only goal for the meeting is to try figure out where my pilots are.” And what else she knew about TGO.
He visualized how she had looked in his office that afternoon. Beautiful as usual, sharp as usual, but with an imperceptible barrier between them. He was sure she knew something about the crash and why her company was taking forever to find the aircraft and the pilots.
He told himself again that it had nothing to do with the looks they had exchanged when they’d crossed paths in Afghanistan. Nothing to do with the time they’d taken shelter in the same bunker when their base had been attacked by insurgents. Nothing to do with how she’d been his “what-if” person. Nope. Nada.
Captain Moss had been right, however. He did need to get back and shower before he met her at the officers’ club. The base was on lockdown; otherwise he’d have been happy to meet somewhere downtown. There was always something to do in Vegas. But this was probably better. More professional.
“Okay, I’m off,” he said, locking his office door. “I’m your first call if you hear anything, okay? Gossip, whispers—anything. Got it?”
She looked affronted. “Of course, Colonel. I have some lures
out. As soon as my hook tugs, you’ll be the first to know.”
He smiled. You could take the woman out of Montana, but…“I’m relying on you to reel in a fifty-pounder.”
“You got it, boss,” she said as he left.
Casey Jacobs had her phone in her hand and was pacing inside her hotel room. She should switch the phone off, right? But maybe her company would get suspicious if she did. Her nerves were wrangling about her as if her aircraft were taking small-arms fire on descent. Her brain was jumping from thought to thought. She had to calm down.
She took some deep breaths and sat on the bed. Then after a couple of seconds, she put the phone in the drawer of the bedside table. It would be better if it rang and she didn’t hear it. Less suspicious maybe.
All she’d done was make an innocent inquiry about the equipment on the planes that had crashed, and her world had collapsed around her. If she kept her mouth shut, everything would be okay. Maybe.
Her friend at TGO headquarters had warned her off. Suggested that TGO tapped its employees’ phones. Suggested that they sued whistle-blowers. Suggested that when the whistle-blowers committed suicide, that maybe it wasn’t exactly suicide. What the hell had she gotten into?
But if they had tapped her phone, they would have already heard her panicked message.
What’s going on? We have planes and pilots missing, and their last transmissions suggested the same bugs we experienced in our PreCall software. Aircraft overcorrecting, lack of pilot control, radio static. Did we put PreCall on their aircraft? Did they even know? Is that legal? Call me back! We could have killed these two pilots! Call me back!
Even if she didn’t know any specifics, she already had the sense that her new company, and her new boss, Mr. Danvers, were somehow above the law. Their letterhead boasted names from the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. From high up in the Pentagon. From the White House.