Target of One's Own

by M. L. Buchman

  Luke wanted to tease. To draw it out for her, but he couldn’t. His slightest touch lit her up like a thermite reaction. Unable to help himself, he gave her what her body was clearly craving. Placing one hand to hold her sweet behind, he massaged her through the towel from the front.

  When she came apart, he was almost envious. It was so fast and so powerful. She clung to the doorframe in desperation while the release slammed through her so hard he was half afraid that he’d hurt her.

  “Now!” Zoe’s whisper was fierce through clenched teeth with closed eyes.

  Now, what?

  “Hurry, Luke. I need you inside me now.”

  He pulled her from the doorframe. Her grip shifted from the panels to clench around his neck. Three steps later, he had her on the bed in the back of the camper.

  “Hurry,” she begged again as he struggled to sheath himself when she wouldn’t let go.

  He slid into her like he’d never been anywhere else. No one had ever fit around him the way Zoe did. It wasn’t that he was entering a woman, it was that he was sliding into the best place he’d ever been.

  She buried her face in the crook of his neck and together they went up again. As he drove her aloft, as he climbed right along with her, he knew this wasn’t about the sex. Nor was it about fears or tears.

  This was about him and Zoe. No one else who could ever feel this way. This was connection at a level he’d never known existed. Being married to Marva—perhaps standing at the altar had been the very best part of the whole disaster—he’d admired her body and what she did with it.

  Zoe didn’t treat sex like an art form as the exceptionally skilled Marva had, but she also had no artifice. She simply gave so completely there was no questioning that she wanted to be with him in this moment more than anything and that made it all the more amazing.

  He did what he could to delay crossing over the tipping point. It felt as if he perched on the precipice of some decision. He needed to pause, to hold off, even for a just a moment, in order to understand what was happening to him.

  But such thoughts were useless.

  With Zoe in his arms, they were racing toward a finish line that allowed no turns or delays.

  The release gutted him. It left her humming happily against his neck as he wondered what the hell had just happened. His body had no calibration for such a powerful release. It wasn’t sex. It was filled with meaning. But his brain had been scrambled even more than his hormones and he had no idea what that meaning might be.

  Zoe’s body hummed.

  She didn’t mind Christian’s sly comments as the three of them worked through the Road Book. Didn’t care that the nine p.m. route briefing said they were in for even a rougher day than the Road Book implied. The Road Section would be short and the Selective Section horrendously long—the opposite of today. That was fine too.

  This had to be just a hormone-fueled temporary euphoria. A mental aberration that she’d eventually recover from, but she hoped not.

  It wasn’t just her. Nikita, never one to be expressive, had offered no words. Instead, she’d merely hugged Zoe and held her for longer than even when the nerves had hit the bride as she’d been maid of honor at Nikita and Drake’s wedding.

  When she’d crawled into bed, exhaustion had threatened to take her. It certainly knocked Luke out of circulation.

  Instead, she lay with her head on his shoulder and her leg thrown over his hips. The past she’d survived could never have been worth it, but the present certainly put it in perspective. With Luke she was simply Zoe and—she pressed herself against his hip, enjoying the deep heat that stirred to life—that was all he asked of her.

  She worked hard to suppress the laugh that would surely wake Luke, because once it started coming out, she might not be able to stop it.

  Luke only asked her to be Zoe.

  But who in the name of all that was twisted and warped was that?

  Chief Warrant 2 Zoe DeMille of the US Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (airborne) ready for duty. Yes sir, you betcha.

  The Soldier of Style: Living in the Cutey-Edgy Budget Battlespace. At least to a kajillion fans and most of her previous lovers, that’s all she’d ever been.

  The Rookie currently holding third place in the Dakar Rally. The officials had ruled that since Christian hadn’t made it even fifty meters from the starting podium, she and Luke were eligible in the Rookie category—which they were leading by a huge margin.

  Her Pismo Beach-based parents’ daughter. A source of so much anger that in a sick way it was almost funny—in how it had twisted and twined its way through her life.

  But most of all, she was a top pilot for Special Operations Command and her lover was a high-ranking SEAL Team 6 officer. And life simply didn’t get any better than that.

  19

  Any tiny hint of order that had occurred in the Stage One went right out the window in Stage Two.

  He and Zoe had regrettably been woken by the alarm clock rather than their bodies, so there was no time for a rematch. But he certainly enjoyed waking up with Zoe curled up against him.

  It was also not his standard mode of operations. He was typically gone from a woman’s bed by two a.m. If she was in his bed, he’d become an expert at sliding out without waking her and going for a run—typically until she was long gone. Marva had slept well apart from him, sometimes in the other bedroom, claiming that her constant need for him made her too restless.

  Zoe was snuggled so tightly against him that they might have made love in their sleep and not known it.

  But they hadn’t even grabbed a quickie because the alarm clock had electrified Zoe.

  “C’mon, Luke. Stop dragging. Race day today.”

  Being a SEAL had whupped being a morning person or a night owl out of his system—whenever he needed to be sharp, he was sharp. But when he wasn’t out in the field on a dangerous mission, he liked to take a few moments to wake up. Zoe simply threw her internal On Switch, going from Sleeping Beauty to ballistic missile in two seconds flat. There wasn’t even time to really admire her form as she dressed.

  A standard Argentine breakfast had filled another thirty seconds of their morning: cream-filled medialunas—crescent rolls—with black coffee and a glass of orange juice. Their rank in the standings had placed them early in the starting lineup and had them hurrying to the timing start position just outside the bivouac gates.

  The Road Section had proved uneventful.

  One minute into the Second Stage, disaster had already struck. Two of the drivers of a Jeep were standing in the low swale between the third and fourth dune along the Selective Section. Brothers Andy and Jim Kyle, United States, seven Dakars each—two of the nine Americans in the race, including themselves. They were looking morosely at their vehicle from a distance. It was intensely on fire, the entire vehicle engulfed.

  Zoe had slowed beside them, close enough for Luke to ask, “You guys okay?”

  “Blown hydraulics line, we think. Maybe. Shit, I don’t know,” Jim managed while Andy simply stood there looking numb. And then there were seven Americans in the race.

  “Need me to call—”

  The guy held up a satellite phone to indicate he’d already placed a call.

  “Sorry, man.”

  The poor guy didn’t even manage a wave before turning back to stare at the burning remains of several hundred thousand dollars of race car. Once a carbon fiber body ignited, there wasn’t much other than time that could put it out—certainly not the small handheld extinguisher they had aboard with their other supplies.

  Zoe let go of the handbrake and opened up the engine with a roar to get up the next dune. Over that dune, a car was badly sand-bogged. Luke had only the briefest glimpse of two guys out in the heat with small shovels trying to dig in a couple of flat traction ramps just like the ones they had stowed in their own cargo area.

  “Getting real,” Zoe commented drily as she slid down a dune slip face, crabbing sideways around
a particularly steep section.

  “Seriously,” Luke agreed. The GPS flashed on. “Way Point,” he called out. Which meant they were within eight hundred meters of the point. They’d have to get within ninety meters before the GPS would mark them as validly reaching the electronic check-in represented by the Way Point.

  “Which way?”

  “Dead ahead or I would have told you.”

  “Some help you are,” Zoe in race mode sounded pissed at him. No, ultra-intense driver and pissed.

  Then he looked up and saw why. An insurmountable dune practically blanked out the world ahead of them. There was a low pass far to the left—far enough to add over a kilometer out and another back once through. He could see tracks that showed most racers had gone that way. Close to the right was a far higher pass. It looked as if only a single motorcycle had gone that way.

  “Left?” he asked.

  But Zoe was already slicing the other way, scooting diagonally up the dune’s slip face. He considered asking why, but even the intercom might not overcome the roar she was coaxing out of the engine. Besides, it might be better not to distract her as the car kept threatening to lose traction and roll over onto his side first. Each time, she did something that kept her crabbing upward rather than rolling down.

  “Hang on,” was the only warning he had as she reached the top. The steep approach had forced her down to second gear, the engine pumping at seven thousand RPM to keep them moving. Great rooster tails shot off the rear tires.

  He grabbed the handle on the inside of the door and the other on the center console.

  Just as the car reached the crest—and threatened to high-center atop the pass—she cut the wheel hard, slamming them through a nearly end-for-end turn. At one moment they were slicing right over the dune crest, at the next they were racing left along it. Now their left front tire was hooked on the edge of the ridge with the other three wheels having crossed over. She made it back up to third gear and powered up the ridgeline.

  Now he was looking down a far steeper dune face than they’d just climbed. Had they crested directly over the ridge, they’d almost assuredly have done an end-over-end down the other side.

  “How did you know?”

  “Wind carves dunes in strange ways. I remembered one in Pismo when I was still fifteen that did that. I was out in a dune buggy and high-centered on a pass just like that one. Getting stuck was probably the only thing that kept me from really bunging up Dad’s newest buggy. Even with the roll cage, I bet it would have really hurt.”

  By the end of her explanation, she’d reached the very pinnacle of the dune that had blocked their way. Here, at the center of the dune, the back slope was much less steep—merely vicious rather than terrifying.

  With a hard snap of the steering wheel, she managed to point them directly down the slope. Fourth gear, fifth, and they flashed through the Way Point several minutes ahead of the route through the lower pass.

  “Next heading is 120 by the compass,” he slashed a hand sharply to the right, “for five kilometers.” He looked at the dunes across their path and knew it would probably take traveling ten kilometers in a zigzag pattern to cover those five.

  Though with Zoe driving, maybe not.

  Getting real? Talk about the goddamn understatement of her life.

  She hadn’t remembered the dune that had almost battered her as a teenager until they were mere meters from the crest. This one wouldn’t have battered them, it could have killed them. Ridge-running with one tire hooked over the top was a new one on her—it had been an act of desperation that had worked by pure chance. She’d meant to get two wheels on either side of that crest and high-center them to a safe stop. It was the only option left to her when she understood the steepness of the face they could never descend except in a tumble. But in only catching the one wheel, she’d learned a new technique. More importantly, it had been enough to save them from a very ugly descent.

  It didn’t help that one of The Dakar’s official helicopters had been hovering only a few hundred meters away for her entire maneuver. She hadn’t seen it behind them as she climbed the dune, but as she’d slewed around on the ridge crest, she’d spotted it flying lower than she was now driving. A cameraman leaning out the door had tracked her all the way up the crest. Luke wouldn’t know, he had no way to see down where they’d come from because he’d been sitting in the passenger’s seat tilted down the other side of the ridge.

  She was used to looking down on helicopters—from sixty thousand feet. In the dead of night. Via remote feed from her RPA. But from two hundred feet away in broad daylight? Not so much. In the rearview mirror, she could see that it climbed aloft high enough to film her race down the dune face before peeling off to other tasks.

  Near death experience. Wild-ass ridge running. ESPN at eleven.

  Definitely getting real.

  Zoe eyed the first dune of the next set and decided to go straight over it. With a long flat run, she was able to gather enough speed to take it while still in fourth gear. She eased off the gas as her front wheels left the crest, reaching out to pop the handbrake for just a moment. It made the rear wheels drag just enough at the crest that the car tipped from nose high to a level-flight jump. They fell almost three stories before they hit.

  The car’s suspension and the deep sand ate up the shock, and she was up in fifth gear as they hit to keep pulling them ahead rather than slower-spinning tires acting like an unintended brake that might flip them. The Citroën had taken it with less complaint than her Mini Cooper did when eating a pothole on the highway to Mobile.

  “Go, DeMille!” Luke shouted loud enough to hurt her ears.

  She slalomed for a low spot around the next dune. Her lover was cheering her on. Since when did that happen? Lovers were always looking for a way to make themselves feel superior. Every relationship she’d ever been in had a built-in power dynamic of making the male feel even more male: the strong one, the teacher.

  She was the one driving the race car.

  —And Luke was cheering her on!

  It wasn’t her ears that were hurting, it was her heart. Her brain kept waiting for the subtle (or not so subtle) manipulation. For the wake-up call that said no matter what she did, she didn’t really belong. Her heart had no idea what to do with what was happening between them.

  Around the next dune wasn’t another dune, instead there was a river—that she almost plowed straight into, not always the worst tactic. Except she spotted a head popping up out of the water, and another. Not trusting to brakes alone, she did a four-wheel drift to make sure she stopped before she drove into the river.

  Then she realized that the heads were helmeted and on either side of a car that was flooded and floating downriver—driver and co-driver crawling out the windows of their sunken vehicle. She followed them for over a hundred meters, but neither one seemed hurt. She was about to turn around and figure out where to find the ford—and hopefully cross it with better luck than they had—when their car crunched up on a hidden shallow and its roof resurfaced before it stopped.

  One of the big six-wheeled racing trucks pulled up to the river’s edge and drove across easily—wetting about halfway up their monstrous wheels. As soon as it was completely across, it stopped and one of the crew climbed down.

  Zoe had memorized most of the truck numbers as well, though she’d only learned the drivers’ names rather than the full crew.

  This was Pierre Rousseau, France, seven Dakars, driving ten tons of Kamaz racing truck with a thousand horsepower.

  He tossed a six-inch-wide strap out to the guys standing chest-deep in the river. One ducked underwater for a moment to hook it to his bumper, then gave a thumbs-up to the trucker. Rousseau’s crewman hooked the other end of the strip to his rear hitch and in moments they had the car towed out of the water. As soon as they dropped the strap, the truck raced away, leaving the car’s team to see if they could repair and restart their soggy vehicle.

  Zoe looked at Luke. Halfway u
p the Kamaz’s big tires would be near the top of theirs. Deep enough that the current might drag them away if it floated them before they crossed.

  “You got this, Zoe. Do it!”

  She could only look at him in amazement.

  Zoe had lain awake for a long time this morning before the alarm went off, listening to Luke’s heart and slow breathing. She’d slept in his arms with no thoughts to her own safety. No knife clandestinely slipped under the pillow—which had freaked out more than one lover who’d accidentally discovered it there. Not even on the nightstand. For all she knew, it was still in the bathroom where she’d stripped down while watching Luke shower yesterday. It might still be there now because she’d never thought to strap it back on. She’d worn a knife every day for over half her life, and suddenly she wasn’t.

  At his side, she’d gone to the driver’s meeting without a thought of carrying her own weapon. When was the last time she’d felt for her missing sidearm—locked in her gun safe back at Fort Rucker? Hours? Maybe even days?

  She lined up with the Kamaz’s tracks, kicked the engine hard, then popped the clutch and plowed into the river. Her passage blew an arc of spray over Cid and Jabir, working frantically on their car—their second Dakar Rally, Ford car, United Arab Emirates, last year finished forty-seventh.

  She stopped to apologize.

  “Shit. Don’t stress, Zoe. Like we weren’t wet already. Just go,” Cid turned back to his car. As far as she knew, she’d never actually met them, but they certainly knew who she was. They moved down several notches on her suspect list.

  Dropping into first, she eased away to make sure she didn’t blast a load of sand on them after the bath. Once away, she punched back up to racing speed.

  Zoe looked at Luke, at perhaps the first lover she’d ever had who made her feel completely safe.

  Without thought or comment. Without realizing quite how incredible he was, Luke was studying the Road Book to find their next destination.