Wings of Gold Series

by Tappan, Tracy

  He opened his mouth but locked up again. No sound. Only cross-eyed panic.

  She turned back around, ducking lower than she needed to under the rotor arc. Civilian mistake. A smile tried to straggle onto Jason’s face.

  She climbed on board the aircraft, carrying her bag. When had she taken it from him?

  The aircrewman helped her belt in.

  A boot stomped down on Jason’s heart. All the way back in the forty-by-forty on the chair, he felt it. Total annihilation. He peeled his lips off his dry, useless teeth.

  Speak!

  The AW talked to Farrin. Through the passenger window, Jason saw her nod.

  Nothing, Farrin. You’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve my shutout.

  Just wondering how you’re going to blow it with Doc Barr.

  You only date women you can hate.

  The helo’s side door closed.

  Jason’s chest jerked. Jed was whining and pushing his yellow snout into his hand…

  Dispose of Barney.

  I’ll do better, sir… I can…I promise!

  The pitch of the helo’s engines changed, announcing liftoff.

  SAY SOMETHING!

  Dispose of Barney.

  Dispose of—

  Farrin looked at him through the passenger window. She pressed her fingers and part of her palm to the glass, a sad little gesture of farewell.

  His throat seized. Just run away… That’s what you always do.

  You wanted to bail on me. So I let you.

  What would happen if he didn’t run away?

  The helicopter’s wheels started to rise off the deck.

  I want you to know that you don’t have to blank out with me, Jason.

  “NO!” He took a huge step toward the airfield, another. “Stop, dammit! Wait” He broke into a run. “FARRIN!” he bellowed.

  But the giant downblast from the helo’s departure snatched up his shout and hurled it into the endless expanse of the sky.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Two weeks later, May

  Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, Norfolk, Virginia

  Farrin untied her surgical mask and tossed it into the laundry hamper along with her cloth cap. Stretching her tired fingers, she headed out of Operating Room Four, the automatic double doors buzzing open, and smiled at Patty, one the best surgical nurses on the floor.

  “Going to lunch?” Patty asked.

  “Yep.” Then home. Farrin was scheduled for only one surgery today.

  International Humanitarian Medical Relief maintained hospital privileges at Sentara Norfolk General for their doctors, and Farrin performed surgeries here at least twice a week to keep up her skills. On other days, she worked at IHMR headquarters in Norfolk, mostly in an administrative capacity. She used to stay on call for as many trauma surgeries as she could get—because that was the kind of work she did at aid stations—but she’d withdrawn from that rotation since returning. She didn’t have plans to captain any aid stations in foreign countries in the near future. After her adventures in Pakistan, she needed to homestead for a while.

  “Have a nice weekend, Patty,” she said, then stopped by the waiting room to tell her patient’s husband that everything had gone perfectly. This morning’s procedure had been a simple gall bladder removal.

  From there she took an elevator down to the first floor. She didn’t bother changing out of her scrubs, since she was just going to pick up something to eat at the Urban Bite sandwich shop next to the hospital, then jump in her car.

  Exiting the main front doors on the River Pavilion side, she emerged into golden sunshine. Springtime in Virginia was sunny without oppressive humidity. Beautiful. Maybe later she would—

  Her breath caught when a tall man stepped out from behind one of the pillars lining the front of the hospital.

  He was wearing a flight suit.

  It was olive drab in color, not like Jason’s beige one, but reminiscent enough that her heart nearly fell out of her chest. Pressing a hand to her breasts, she hurried her stride and tried not to notice him. Which was difficult. He was gorgeous, looking so suave in a pair of aviator glasses and with a foldable khaki flight cap sitting at a rakish angle on his head. This Navy pilot was more handsome than Jason—no small feat to pull off, considering he was up against the man she loved.

  When, during a week of running from terrorists, she managed to scrape out from under her past to fall in love with Jason, she couldn’t pinpoint. Maybe it had been a little bit more each day…

  I will get you out of here. Right now, Farrin. I promise. You’ll stay by my side and we’ll go together, slowly and quietly.

  I want to apologize. What happened in the cave… I’m sorry for being rough with you.

  Now you know who I am.

  Dammit, Farrin. Paul was my copilot, my responsibility. Not yours.

  I’m going to get you home.

  Judging yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts isn’t useful or productive.

  I just want to be with you. I don’t care how it works out. I really don’t.

  If you’re not my flavor, I promise to stop.

  She shivered. Their last night together was so precious to her. Although it was one of life’s little unfair ironies that she hadn’t fully admitted to herself that she was in love with Jason until after they made love. Had she figured it out ahead of time, she might have discussed the possibility of a relationship with him, rather than make it sound like she was only interested in the physical—I would like to have a new memory for sexual intercourse. The next morning she tried to express her feelings for him somewhat, but purposely kept her remarks low pressure. She wasn’t exactly sure how these things worked, but she assumed it was Jason’s place to change the agreement, not hers. And he hadn’t.

  A practical and sensible choice—they lived thousands of miles apart, after all. But funny thing about her heart, it didn’t care about practical and sensible. It hurt. It missed Jason, and nothing she’d done over the last two weeks was easing the pain. The only thing she could think to do was keep wrapping herself in her precious memories…and try not to let herself get all misty-eyed every time she saw a man in a flight suit. Not so easy to avoid, considering there was a Naval base here in Norfolk.

  Swerving around the current tear-jerker, she—

  He stepped into her path, and she pulled up short.

  “Well, damn, this brings back memories, seeing you in scrubs.” He flashed her a dazzling, dizzying smile.

  Her heart stopped. Her breathing followed suit. She recognized his voice…

  He removed his sunglasses.

  Whisky eyes.

  Her bottom jaw dropped so low, her mandible bones squeaked. “What…what in heaven’s name…?” She had to clear her throat. She tried again. “What in heaven’s name are you doing here, Jason?”

  “Taking you to lunch.” He tucked his sunglasses into the zippered pocket above his nametag: LCDR Jason Vanderby.

  He is real, then. Her heart began beating—in truth, it took off for the races. He was here to…to…? “You flew three thousand miles to take me to lunch?”

  “Technically, I moved three thousand miles to take you to lunch.” He set a hand at the small of her back and urged her into a walk. “Hopefully dinner, too. A few movies. Maybe a picnic. Hey, I bet you like the botanical gardens here in Norfolk, right?”

  His hand on her back was making her spine slip around. She’d missed his touch so much.

  “You like seafood?” He steered them left around the helipad.

  She fought to collect her wits. He moved here? “Wait…”

  He kept going.

  “How did you find me?”

  He chuckled. “Easy enough. I Googled you. You’re openly listed on IHMR’s website as staff.” He guided her to the sidewalk next to the main medical building where there was shade. “Your assistant confirmed that you’re working out of the home office now.”

  Farrin frowned. “She’s not supposed to give out person
al information.”

  “I was charming.” Jason smiled again, lopsidedly.

  Her head spun. Would she ever get used to the sheer masculine beauty of this man?

  “You look good, by the way.”

  All right, that’s it. Stepping away from him, she stopped and planted her hands on her hips. “Sweaty and in scrubs, reeking of latex? I doubt it.”

  “Actually, you smell great.” He winked. “Always do.”

  Sweltering heat shot into her cheeks. You always smell so damned good, he’d said when he’d buried his face in her pubic hair during cunnilingus. “Stop distracting me. I want to know how it is that you’ve moved here.”

  His eyes danced. “It’s a bit of a story. Let’s keep walking while we talk.” His hand found her back again. “After you left Pakistan, I didn’t go back to my deployment, but traveled to the States. The Navy wanted to do a full medical evaluation on me post-crash, plus I had to go through an AMB.”

  “What’s an AMB?”

  “An Aviation Mishap Board.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.” Boards were never good in the medical world.

  “It was okay, mostly procedural. Since my helo was downed due to DEA, or Direct Enemy Action, I was assumed free of fault going into it.” They passed the Emergency Department entrance. “A few days after I was cleared to return to flight status, I got called into AIRPAC, which is the organization in charge of all naval aviation in the Pacific. The chief of staff offered me my choice of assignments as a reward for the part I played in helping to save the American hostages.” He glanced at her. “For the information I passed on to the SEALs at the outpost after spotting the four engineers at the Pakistani Air Force Base. Remember?”

  “Vaguely.” She mainly remembered frantically searching for a stupid strobe button.

  “I told the chief of staff I wanted to transfer to a sister squadron in Norfolk.” Jason stopped at the border of the visitor parking lot, took her lightly by the upper arms, and gave her a meaningful look. “Because this is where you live.”

  She inhaled a deep, shaky breath, only just stopping her heart from leaping into a giddy skip. “I’m a little lost here, Jason. Here you are saying that you moved here for me, but I didn’t get the impression…I mean, the day I left, you didn’t say anything to me.”

  His expression clouded. “I know, and I’m sorry. I tried calling out to you, but I was too late to catch your helicopter.” He caressed his thumbs back and forth on her arms. “I should have said a lot to you that morning, Farrin, but I didn’t. I’m hoping you’ll give me the chance to tell you some of it today.”

  She let go of her heart, releasing it to soar upward. He really has come here for ME. “Goodness yes, of course.”

  He took her to Captain Groovy’s Grill and Raw Bar on Shore Drive for lunch.

  She chuckled as they entered together. The entire interior was done like the inside of a ship, all dark wood, including high-beamed ceilings, and with nautical-themed wall hangings. “Quite a spot for a date,” she said, her insides warming. Jason was keeping their time together playful and relaxed again, trying to make her feel comfortable with nothing too fancy.

  “I thought so, too,” he said wryly.

  They were seated at a table—wood, of course—and Jason removed his aviator cap and tucked it in the leg pocket of his flight suit.

  “Your hair’s so short now,” she exclaimed. “No wonder I didn’t recognize you at first.”

  His eyebrows rose a good two inches. “You didn’t recognize me?”

  She opened her menu and perused the lunch items from half-closed lids. “You looked too handsome.”

  “Ah. Okay, you’re forgiven.” He picked up the other menu. “I was way overdue for a haircut the last time you saw me, anyway.”

  The last time she saw him… Do you know why I drew a happy face? “I’ll have the Cajun étouffée.” She slapped her menu down, and it zinged off the tabletop.

  He laughed. “The crab cakes sound good to me.” He reached down to pick up her menu.

  She gazed at the short, prickly hairs on the back of his nape. How could he actually be here? It was surreal. After two long weeks of pining away, here she was having lunch with him. How does something like this happen? “What changed you toward me?”

  He straightened. “What?”

  “After you told me your falling-out-with-Shane story, you shut me out. We had a fight about it in the fire-damaged hut, as I’m sure you remember. Then all of a sudden you were…I don’t know, more open.”

  He set her menu on top of his. “Because you were honest with me about going into Islamabad, even when you knew I was going to get royally pissed off.” He lined up their menus. “No woman has ever been that kind of truthful with me before.”

  “Really?” She scrunched her face at him. “What kind of women have you been dating?”

  His mouth leaned sideways. “Well, that’s another story.”

  After lunch, Farrin chuckled some more when Jason took her to the botanical gardens located in the part of Norfolk known aptly as The Gardens.

  Holding hands, they strolled along the pathways leading through lush greenery and an eye-pleasing explosion of every imaginable flower color. They passed through the Rose Garden, Wild Flower Meadow, and the Bristow Butterfly Garden, but as they walked, she sensed tension gradually growing in him, like he was bracing himself. His palm even got a little damp.

  I’m hoping you’ll give me the chance to tell you some of it today. Whatever it was, it was coming soon, and he was nervous about it.

  In the secluded Enchanted Forest at the far end of the park, he led her to a bench and asked her to sit with him.

  She sat, a bit nervous herself. How bad was this thing he was going to confess?

  He took a place next to her on the bench, but not too close. He also wouldn’t look at her, his focus pinned on the sentinels of giant oaks in front of him. “What I need to tell you is going to be very difficult for me to talk about,” he said, his voice sounding rusty and underused. “I’ve never told anyone any of this before. Shane knows, but from witnessing a lot of it, not from me telling him.”

  Her heart tugged in her chest. “Okay.”

  He hesitated. The silence clinging to him seemed to displace the air. “I should probably start with some background. A lot of how screwed up I am has to do with my father, Dr. Spencer Vanderby, prominent neurosurgeon, who is a callous, malicious, exacting son of a bitch. He might not be the worst father on earth, but I’d say he ranks in the top five percent of the world’s biggest dicks.”

  She clasped her hands in her lap, her stomach clenching. Oh, holy Allah… She hadn’t expected to hear that. She thought Jason was going to talk about them as a couple.

  “Spencer wanted to shape everything about my brother and me. At first I assumed it was because he was a manipulative and controlling bastard. Later I understood that he hated himself. His self-esteem was down so deep in the sewer, he needed to destroy the people around him to make himself feel better about who he was. So he broke people. He broke my mother. He broke my brother. He wanted so much to break me. It was a huge, fucking battle, but the stick-to-itiveness that got me through BUD/S must’ve come into play with my old man because I never stopped fighting off his efforts to destroy me. It made Spencer crazy. Brutally determined.” Jason’s upper lip quivered. “Sadistic.”

  She stayed still. She didn’t reach out and touch Jason, even though the muscles along his shoulders looked rock-tight.

  “I had two dogs, Jed and Barney, a yellow and a black Labrador. They were my best friends—friends I desperately needed in that household. Spencer knew it. So when I was ten years old, my father…” His lashes lowered, hovered on his cheeks, then wrenched back up. He stared at the large oaks. Stared hard. The tendons on his neck rippled. “When I was ten years old, my father forced me to shoot and kill one of my dogs. Barney.”

  She grabbed her throat. A gasp pushed at her larynx, but she remained painfully
quiet.

  “That day, I…I was in a forest much like this one…” His voice faded away, and shutters slipped down over his pupils.

  Farrin’s eyes gushed tears. Those horrible shutters… They made sense to her now. The pain Jason suffered was so unimaginably difficult, he needed to deaden himself to survive it. But deadened pain wasn’t any kind of pain that ever got completely resolved. “Jason, I need you to stay with me during your story, okay? No blanking out.”

  His lips went white, but his pupils cleared. Moisture slid onto his lashes. He ducked his head, pressing his thumb and forefinger to his lids.

  A long, silent moment passed.

  A butterfly escapee from Bristow Garden conducted a loop-de-loop between them.

  “Did your father finally break you with that?” she asked gently.

  “I hadn’t thought so.” Jason raised his head, shaking it. “From that day forward, whenever Spencer called me into one of his grill sessions, I never spoke a single word, just sat there and glared at him in hostility. How could he make me participate, right? Fucker already did his worst. But all my hostility…” He exhaled coarsely. “It changed me. I stewed in constant rage, boiling with it, until I finally imploded when I was sixteen years old and stole a car. I told you I did that to smear my father’s good name, remember? Well, the incident with my black Lab is why.”

  “I remember.” A couple of birds, high up in two adjacent trees, quarreled with each other. When they stopped, she added, “And you said your father saved his reputation by expunging your criminal record.”

  “Yeah.” He snorted, a bitter sound. “Fucker. Afterward, I couldn’t spend another second in the old man’s presence. It felt like I could never win against him, and I also think a part of me knew that if I wasted my life plotting revenge, I would be destroyed, and then Spencer would win again. So when I got home after being released from juvenile hall, I slapped down paperwork declaring me an emancipated minor in front of Spencer, and told him to sign it. ’Course since Spencer loved to deprive his sons of anything they wanted, he refused at first.”