Wings of Gold Series

by Tappan, Tracy

  Not an option here, unfortunately, what with root survival on the line and problems piling up in opposition to it. He needed to lock it all away and—

  Little Shit tripped over a dirt clod and bowed slightly forward on his front legs, the position lurching Jason more solidly against Farrin’s luscious behind. A low groan slipped out. Dammit. This was more than any man should have to take.

  Shane glanced over at him but only managed a brief look before his chin clunked back down to his chest in a clear gesture of who-gives-a-shit-what-Jason-is-doing-when-I’m-on-the-verge-of-keeling.

  Shane did keel.

  About six miles from their destination of Kallar Syedan, he fell unconscious off his mare, hitting the ground with a loud thud.

  Careful of Farrin—who was awake, but groggy—Jason leapt off Little Shit and strode quickly to Shane. Hand on his hips, Jason exhaled an abrasive breath when he came to stand over the prone body.

  That’s the end of that, then.

  Today’s journey was over.

  Checking the map, Jason got his bearings. They were just outside a small town called Choha Khalsa. Looked like a river was at the west end of town, a cluster of trees on the far side of the waterway: their best bet for concealment.

  With a grunt—fucking moose—Jason hefted Shane belly-down over the swaybacked nag, then steered Shane over to his own horse, remounted, and led the way to the river. Hopefully there’s a bridge… Turned out the riverbed was dry. Crossing was a cinch. He found the densest cluster of trees available and pitched camp. Not that pitching camp amounted to anything more than unsaddling and hobbling the horses, then unpacking one blanket and their two remaining MREs.

  When Shane regained some of his brainpower, Jason gave him an entire MRE, instead of rationing. There wasn’t a hope in hell of riding out tomorrow if Shane couldn’t stay as strong as possible. The sick man would need a good, solid meal, but…fifteen minutes into dinnertime, the chili con carne Shane was eating made a reappearance in a spectacular show of projectile vomiting.

  Jason sighed. Well, there goes one of our precious MREs, totally wasted. Not the most generous of thoughts, but true nonetheless.

  He shared the last ready-meal with Farrin in silence. Their situation was growing more and more desperate; what was there to say about it? Afterward, he sat for a while—in more silence—back propped against a tree, watching falling night chase away the last streaks of gold in the sky.

  Stars peeked out and a young moon rose.

  He hefted himself back to his feet. There wasn’t much to do now except tuck everyone in—all there-there-now, like the frigging patriarch of the Waltons—and see how everyone was come morning.

  Taking first watch, he conducted a sweep of the perimeter, standing alone near a tree and slowly scanning the terrain, searching for shifting shadows. The landscape looked prairie-like at the night. Overhead, branches clacked together. He squinted up just as a handful of leaves burst in a swirl from some branches. Wind was picking up, and the air was growing nippy.

  Just what he needed: crappy weather on a night when he was stuck camping outside without shelter. Low supplies, the constant threat of terrorists, inefficient and unreliable transportation, and now maybe bad weather…It was like he’d been thrust into a master class on survival he hadn’t even enrolled in. What he had signed up for was some cool SPECOPS flying, culminating in saving four faceless American hostages, then a trip back to J-bad without incident—not even a chip light21 on his helicopter’s dashboard to mar the perfect execution of a successful mission. End of adventure.

  He wanted his damned money back.

  He went over to check on the horses, his stomach rumbling in protest of the half-rations. Little Shit nudged him, nuzzling his hand with a velvety muzzle and puffing out a warm breath.

  “He likes you now.”

  Jason turned around.

  Farrin’s eyes peered luminously at him through the moonlight. She was seated next to a tree, Jason’s blanket hiked up to her chin. “Your horse,” she clarified.

  “Ah…yeah.” He patted the gelding. “We’ve gained a mutual respect for each other.” He strode over to her. “You can’t sleep?”

  “Not really.” She shook her head, and a lock of hair tumbled onto her brow. This was the first time he’d seen her with her hair uncovered—her scarf was off—as well as unbraided. It flowed several inches past her shoulders, and looked thick and black and radiant. Touchable…

  He cleared his throat. Probably something to do with the moonlight.

  “I think I napped too long today.” The statement was followed by a slight darkening of her complexion.

  A blush? Over having slept in his arms? He smiled.

  A whipping tail of wind streaked the wayward lock of hair into her eyes. She tugged it away. “Plus, it’s getting unexpectedly cold.”

  Should he join her under the blanket and help warm her? He should. Last he checked, he wasn’t a base animal—notwithstanding his dick seeming to have a will of its own.

  He crouched down and took the edge of her blanket, lifting it up and scooting in next to her. “Come here,” he said and wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

  She snuggled close to him without hesitation, like there wasn’t a worry in her head about his two previous boners possibly meaning he’d pop a third one under the blanket with her. Or…

  No, Jace. Don’t start with a bunch of ors. Like, or maybe she wouldn’t mind if he got a boner. Or maybe her interest in him had increased to the point that she even wanted him to get one.

  Bad idea, thoughts like those.

  He rubbed his palm up and down her arm and concentrated on his Adam’s apple. A safer body part to focus on than his dick, which was taking note of Farrin’s heat and the Mother Earth scent that made her smell so…genuine. Heat and pressure grew in his groin, and he forced himself to check his breathing. Maybe he was a base animal. There was a first time for everything, after all.

  “Why did you and Shane have a falling out ten years ago?”

  He froze in the act of rubbing her arm. The question hit him blindside. He hadn’t expected a woman who deftly sidestepped her own revelations to try and mine his depths.

  She set a hand on his chest. “I know it’s a personal question, Jason, so you don’t have to answer it. I just…” She peered up at him, the apex of her chin soft and curvy, blunted by the moonlight. “I just seem to need to know you.”

  He turned to study the dry riverbed, rocks, big and small, smooth and sharp, covering the bottom. Rocks that would be a nuisance to flowing water come the wet season…and wasn’t this a nuisance, having to give Farrin an emotional pat on the head about who he was.

  His brain registered the very clear cue about what was expected of him; he knew how communication worked between men and women. Over the course of his thirty-five years of life, he’d had a total of four girlfriends, and he’d figured out early on that a woman got huffy with her man if he didn’t “share” his “feelings.” It doesn’t seem like you’re really opening up to me, Jason. I don’t feel like you’re truly intimate with me, Jason. The logical response of And why, exactly, are you dating a military man if you need that kind of gush? was a thought he’d also learned to keep to himself.

  By way of maintaining the peace and getting his girlfriend to quit harping on him, he would tell her stuff about his day. I flew a simulated SAR hop at work. Met my brother for lunch at Chili’s; he’s doing fine. The same kind of talk he’d engage in with his guy friends, who were way easier to deal with. No feelings mandated. Just sports and politics and work. No depth required. No follow-on destruction.

  He never talked with his girlfriends about his father or the grill sessions, never anything about Jed and Barney—which was what they really wanted. He just gave them all the nothingness that eventually killed a relationship. Weeks, months, years…however long it took was beside the point. From the start, his relationships were pretty much DOA: Dead on Arrival.

  So in ans
wer to why did you and Shane have a falling out ten years ago? his mouth kicked out the old standard. “Shane and I were supposed to be SEALs together, but it didn’t work out.” A short and relatively meaningless answer.

  Farrin’s chin came up. “Shane stopped being friends with you because you didn’t make it through SEAL training?” Her tone was filled with all kinds of disbelief and indignation, the firm uptilt of her chin showing that she was gearing up to defend him, to be the protective tigress he’d never been able to earn from any woman in his life—astonishing things.

  “That wasn’t it,” he said. “I made it through BUD/S.”

  “Oh.” She paused. “And wow.”

  He smiled slightly. “I hope I’m not detecting a note of surprise in your voice.”

  “No.” She leaned her cheek against his shoulder. “So what happened?”

  He put a shrug into his tone. “Shane and I graduated together, but right afterward I was offered a position as a pilot in Special Operations warfare aviation. I accepted it.”

  “That doesn’t sound unforgiveable.”

  “Shane saw it as a betrayal of our friendship.” He glanced over at Shane, confirming the man was still asleep. “I guess you have to understand it from Shane’s perspective. Since the time we were eight years old, we were practically inseparable. Shane even lived with my family for his freshman and sophomore years of high school. Then when we were juniors, Shane and I moved out together and rented a room at Old Lady Crawford’s house. We both worked at Sizzler Restaurant, bussing tables to pay for rent and food while we finished up our last two years of high school. When I went off to college—”

  “Wait,” she cut in. “You left home at sixteen?” She angled her head to peer up at him. Her brow was furrowed. “I know American culture is very independent, but moving out while still a minor is young even by American standards, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Most kids don’t do it that way.”

  “Why did you?”

  He aimed his attention at the dry riverbed again. One by one, muscles all over his body were coiling into knots. She was trespassing into dangerous territory now.

  You will sign the paper, you bastard, or I’ll carve out your eye with this fucking pen!

  The cords on his neck tautened. Very dangerous. “I stole a car when I was sixteen.” He clipped the answer. “It has to do with that.”

  She didn’t comment, and he breathed a little easier. She’d taken the hint to stop talking.

  But, no. She hadn’t.

  “Is stealing a car one of those male rite-of-passage rituals I know nothing about?” she asked.

  He hesitated a moment to circle the question, observe it, tense and skittish, like a horse itching to bolt. Okay, he could answer. “No, it was bad. I was convicted of a felony, and would’ve done jail time if my father hadn’t stepped in. Not out of love for me, of course, but to save his own reputation. I guess I should’ve been grateful to him for expunging my criminal record—I never would’ve been able to join the Navy otherwise—but at the time I was trying to smear the old man’s good name.”

  “Why did you want to do that?”

  Full stop. His muscles slammed into all-over rigidity as the memory sliced through him, the edges sharp and serrated.

  Dispose of Barney…

  I hate my father, Shane. I really, really do… Someday I’m going to kill him…

  Knee-jerk and violent, Jason forced the memories aside, locking away the images. Locking down his jaw.

  Locking himself inside his padded brain-room.

  When he didn’t answer, Farrin peered up at him again. Whatever she saw in his face made her sit up straight. “You have that look in your eyes again.”

  “I…” His brain offered no further help with syllable formation. What was she talking about?

  “Your eyes deaden at times…when something is very painful for you, I think.”

  His muscles, if possible, tensed further. No one was ever supposed to say shit like that out loud. He bit his teeth together.

  Her hand clasped his forearm, gentle but firm. Like a poorly dubbed foreign movie, the realization came a beat after she grabbed him. He’d started to shift away from her, their shared blanket sliding off his shoulders.

  “I want you to know,” she said, her voice as gentle and firm as her grip, “that you don’t have to blank out with me, Jason.”

  He said nothing. Ire churned in his throat. I just seem to need to know you. Clearly she already knew way too damned much.

  “Anything you ever want to get off your chest, I’m here.” Sincerity shone from deep within her eyes. Even through the shadows, he could see she meant what she was saying. “And I’m a good listener.”

  He sat rooted to his ass. The gaunt pines squeezed in on him. The Stygian darkness pressed him flat. Seconds kept adding up, time stretching out, skin-tautening and painful.

  She squeezed his arm. “It’s difficult when you don’t see eye-to-eye with a parent. My mother and I were that way. She’s old-fashioned and I’m modern—too modern for my own good, she would say.” A brief, wan smile touched her mouth. “I was the selfish one in the family, you see.”

  He didn’t respond. The part of him containing his civility appreciated her attempt to reach out, to smooth the way for him to do more sharing. But this subject wasn’t one that could easily be summed up with a, Dang, it’s just so awful. Moreover, when it came to glimpses of his soul, he couldn’t give her one. As much as he liked Farrin, and as much as she smelled genuine, as much as he was coming to sense—in a roundabout, organic way, like finger-painting newly discovered feelings on bark—that she had a trustworthy core, there was one truth dooming Farrin. Something incontrovertible. Forever inescapable.

  She was a woman.

  And someday she would sit on a couch and throw him under the bus.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The Naval Special Warfare Group 1 Medical building loomed in front of Shane like a hot dog at Fenway. Nothing better than a dog and a Sox game… He hobbled and wheezed toward it, not even trying to saunter like an invincible SEAL trainee anymore. He was done hiding how fucked up he was. He’d been driving on fumes for the last two days, and as soon as the BUD/S commanding officer, Captain Wickmeir, announced that Hell Week was secured, the last energy Shane had been shelling out to keep up the badass con job evaporated.

  All the men who’d made it through Hell Week were in sorry shape, but only Shane and two others were diagnosed as bad off enough to need medical help right away: flesh-eating bacteria was making a meal out of Roger Landburg’s left hip, and Sam Tyson’s right calf was big as a football—Sam would eventually end up on SEAL Team Three with Shane.

  Walking pneumonia was Shane’s current snivel. His lungs would only feel this bad one other time in his life—during the drowning torture he went through at SERE22 school when he was water-boarded.

  Shane limped his way inside Warfare Group 1 Medical, and Chief Levitsky led him straight into an exam room. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Maybe he was worse off than he realized. Levitsky helped him up onto the table. The paper sheet stuck to Shane’s ass. He’d come out of the Pacific Ocean five minutes ago, and was still drenched in ocean water. He was also still wearing an orange life vest, and not much more—only skivvies and combat boots.

  Levitsky said some congratulations stuff to him, then left, passing an incoming corpsman on the way out.

  Hunched over and shivering, Shane saw the BDU pant leg of the corpsman, and nothing more. Shane didn’t say hi. He didn’t have enough lung power to waste on two-letter words.

  Silently, the corpsman unbuckled Shane’s life vest. The fingers were slim and the color of milk.

  Shane blinked slowly at them. There was salt water in his eyes, but… Those milky hands belonged to a woman.

  The corpsman circled behind Shane to remove the life vest. In the next moment, a warmed blanket was gently set on his shoulders, and he groaned. He’d never felt anything s
o great in his life, ever.

  The female corpsman came back around front and picked up his wrist to take his pulse.

  Shane unstuck his eyelids and managed to glance up at her. Man, not a good time for him to be stinking of week-old sweat and rotten kelp—she was a total cutie.

  She had a face like a girl in an Abercrombie ad, fresh and pure…like no face he’d ever dated in Southie, that was for damned sure. Her hair was a shiny brown, though he couldn’t tell how long it was, because it was twisted into a cinnamon roll at the base of her neck. Her big blue eyes were the kind that told the whole story. Stare straight into eyes like those while banging a girl like this, and a guy could see exactly what he was doing to her. A complete fucking turn-on. She was on the small side, but had a wicked hot body, and that got his heart rattling back to the land of the living with a boom.

  He smiled at her, or tried to… Half his face was numb, so he couldn’t tell what one side of his mouth was doing. “Hello, gorgeous.”

  She flashed him an amused look. “Best you be savin’ your energy now.”

  A honeyed drawl straight from the Mason-Dixon line? Maybe he hadn’t made it through Hell Week. Maybe he’d died and gone to heaven instead.

  She stuck a stethoscope in her ears. “I’m going to take a listen at those lungs of yours now.” She placed the disc on his chest without asking him to draw deep breaths. Probably knew he couldn’t.

  She clucked her tongue. “Stuffy as a jammed cotton gin. I think you better lie down.” She took off the blanket and helped him stretch out on the exam table, her palms smooth and soft on his bare shoulders. And even though damned if he knew how his body was managing to muster enough energy even to keep his heart working, his cock stirred over her touch. And me only in a pair of wet, clingy skivvies. At least he lacked the strength to get embarrassed…but, also, you know what, who gave a fuck? His cock was nothing to be ashamed of.