The Complete Mackenzie Collection

by Linda Howard

  Joe noted her challenging stance and the fierceness of her glare. Evidently she had decided that her best course of action was to simply carry on as usual. He was glad; being around her might not be comfortable, but it was sure as hell exciting, and he didn’t want that to change.

  “Supper,” he said.

  She crossed her arms. “I’m not feeding you.”

  “No, I’m feeding you,” he said mildly. “Remember? I told Daffy you’d be with me tonight, and everyone will know about it tomorrow if you aren’t.” It was an effort to keep his voice mild and his eyes on her face, because she was obviously braless. The thin T-shirt she was wearing plainly revealed the shape of her high breasts and the darker circles of her nipples. Every muscle in his big body tensed with growing arousal.

  “Just a cheeseburger,” he cajoled in the soft voice he’d often used to calm nervous mares. “You don’t even have to change. Just slip on your shoes and we’ll go off base and find a hamburger joint.”

  Caroline hesitated. The thought of a cheeseburger was enticing, since she had been about to choose between two brands of cold cereal.

  “All right,” she decided abruptly. “Give me a minute.” She dashed into the bedroom and put on a pair of sandals, then raked a comb through her hair. Her freshly washed face stared back at her from the mirror, and she contemplated putting on makeup, then shrugged. A cheeseburger was waiting.

  Just before she left the room she remembered that she wasn’t wearing a bra and hurriedly put one on. She didn’t think he would have noticed, but it was better to play it safe.

  He hadn’t entered her quarters but was still standing just outside the open door. Caroline turned the lock on the door and stepped out, closed the door firmly, then tried the knob to make certain the lock had caught. Satisfied, she dropped her keys into her pocket.

  He was driving a muscular black pickup truck. Caroline looked at him in surprise as he opened the door and she climbed up into the seat. “I never would have figured you for a truck person,” she said as he slid his long legs under the steering wheel.

  “I grew up on a horse ranch in Wyoming,” he said. “I’ve driven pickups all my life. What did you think I’d drive?”

  “Something low and red and flashy.”

  “I save my speeding for the air.” His ice-blue eyes flicked at her. “What do you drive? I know what you’re driving now is a rental car, since you flew in, so that doesn’t count.”

  Caroline settled back in the seat. She decided that she rather liked sitting up high so she could see, and she was feeling more comfortable by the minute. Maybe it was the truck that did it; it was such a no-nonsense kind of vehicle. “What do you think I drive?”

  “Something safe and dependable.”

  “Oh.”

  The one syllable was a little disgruntled. Joe controlled a smile. “Am I wrong?”

  “A tad.”

  “So what do you drive?”

  She turned her head to the side and stared out the window. “Something low and red and flashy.” She had absolutely rebelled against buying anything sedate and conservative. She had wanted power and speed and handling, and had paid a small fortune to get it.

  “How flashy?” he asked.

  “A Corvette,” she said, and suddenly chuckled at the contrast between them.

  Joe looked at her again. He couldn’t keep from it. She had lived the life of a total egghead, reclusive and socially awkward, but the fire in her couldn’t be hidden. It was revealed in the unconscious sex appeal with which she moved and dressed, the fierceness of her temper, the adventurous car she drove. She sat so decorously on the passenger side, but her face was lifted to the hot wind blowing in through the lowered windows. There was a streak of wildness in her that intrigued him, and he shifted restlessly to ease the constriction of his jeans.

  They were checked through the gate, and he turned the truck toward the sunset, blazing red and gold in front of them. She didn’t seem to feel any need to carry on a conversation; Joe was comfortable with silence, too, so he let it continue.

  Caroline couldn’t stop herself from glancing at him every few minutes, though she would then jerk her gaze back to the sunset. The T-shirt bared his powerful arms, darkly tanned by the desert sun. He had so many muscles, it was unnerving. She knew that fighter pilots regularly worked out, because a dense muscle mass seemed to help them resist the effects of pulling Gs, but his muscularity was somehow different. He was powerful—the way a panther or a wolf is powerful—from a lifetime of work and using his body. The sun outlined his profile in gold, mercilessly revealing the bladelike bone structure, as clean and fierce as an ancient warrior’s face cast on a coin.

  She stared at the thin, high-bridged nose, the wide forehead and high, chiseled cheekbones. His mouth was almost brutally clear-cut. The hot wind was sifting through his thick black hair, disarranging the short military cut and her vision blurred as a disturbing vision filled it of this man with his hair long and flying around his broad, bare shoulders. Her heart thumped in a sort of painful panic, and she jerked her gaze away yet again, but it didn’t do any good. She could still see him in her mind. It took her only a minute to decide that if out of sight wasn’t going to be out of mind, she might as well give in and let her eyes feast.

  She turned her head toward him, and her hungry gaze slipped down over his wide, powerful chest to his flat belly. She just couldn’t stop it, though neither was she brave enough to let her eyes rest on the fly of his jeans, instead hurriedly skimming on to those long, muscled legs.

  She blurted out, “Aren’t you almost too big to get into a cockpit?”

  He briefly took his eyes off the road to look at her, though the dark lenses kept her from reading his expression. She wished he would take them off. “It’s a tight fit,” he replied, his voice low and slow and growling. “But I always manage to squeeze in.”

  The underlying sexuality of his words hit her like a sledgehammer. She was woefully inexperienced but not naive, and there was no mistaking his meaning. Now she was glad he had those dark glasses on, because she didn’t want to read his expression. She wanted to hide her face in her hands. She wanted to jump out of the truck and run all the way back to the base and the safety of her quarters. Had she been mad? She had actually climbed in the truck with this man, and now here they were, alone in the Nevada desert with the sunset rapidly darkening to purple.

  Then she remembered that it was her own reaction to him that frightened her, not anything he had done, and she wondered miserably if she should tell him to bail out now while he still could. The way she had been ogling him, he was probably wondering if he would make it back to the base with his pants on, though considering the notorious libido of pilots in general and military pilots in particular, he might not fight very hard. Maybe it was the contrast he presented that got to her the way no man had before, the sense of an intense, smoldering sexuality beneath that cool remoteness. And maybe, if she was lucky, he had no idea of the tumult going on inside her.

  Joe was glad of the dark lenses that protected his eyes from the sun, because they allowed him to study her without her being aware of it. She had put on a bra, damn it, but the thin restricting material couldn’t quite disguise the pebbled hardness of her nipples. The little darling was aroused—and upset by it; he could feel her tension, see it in the faint trembling of her body that her still posture couldn’t control. His eyes went back to her distended nipples, and his hands tightened on the steering wheel as he inevitably began thinking about taking those hard buds into his mouth. She was so beautifully responsive, and she didn’t even know it. If she could be so aroused by a naughty comment, what would she be like when he was actually making love to her?

  She wasn’t the only one who was aroused. If he looked at her nipples one more time, he might have to stop the truck on the side of the road, and she was far from ready for that. To keep himself from making a big mistake, he didn’t look at her again until they had reached his favorite drive-in ha
mburger joint, which was just seedy enough to be interesting.

  He parked beside one of the speakers and turned off the ignition, then removed his sunglasses and put them on the dash. “What do you want?”

  She wished he had phrased it differently. She leaned down so she could read the menu posted above the speaker and scowled as she forced herself to concentrate on food. The heavenly aroma of frying hamburgers, onions and French fries filled the air; why did the most unhealthy food always smell the best? “A cheeseburger basket and large soft drink.”

  He punched the button on the speaker, and when a tinny voice answered, he ordered two cheeseburger baskets. Then he half turned toward Caroline, his wide shoulders wedged into the corner of the truck, and casually said, “I’m going to kiss you when we get back to the base.”

  Caroline stared wide-eyed at him, her heart going into its crazy thumping rhythm again. “I want onions on my cheeseburger. Lots of onions.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid I’m going to grab you,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “It’ll just be a kiss, outside your door where anyone walking by can see us, and someone probably will. I won’t even put my arms around you if you don’t want me to.”

  “I don’t want you to kiss me,” she said, withdrawing to her own corner of the truck and glaring at him across the expanse of the front seat.

  “I’m going to anyway. It’s expected.”

  “I don’t care what’s expected. I agreed to come out with you tonight because it does seem to be a good way to keep all the others inline, but I never agreed to any kissing.”

  “Don’t you like kissing?”

  She glared sullenly at him. The perfect answer would be that yes, she liked kissing, but she didn’t want to kiss him. The perfect answer, however, was a bald-faced lie, and from the way her heart was fluttering like a Victorian maiden’s at the prospect of kissing him, she wouldn’t be able to carry it off. Lying, she found, seemed to work better when performed with a certain amount of detachment.

  On the other hand, the truth was the worst answer she could give him. No, she hadn’t liked any of the sloppy kisses that had been forced on her in a hit-or-miss fashion because she’d been fighting like a wildcat to avoid them, but the thought of kissing him made her light-headed, and she was afraid she would like it too much.

  When she didn’t reply he said calmly, “When we get back to your quarters, unlock your door, then turn and hold out your hand to me. I’ll take it, lean over and kiss you. It won’t be a long kiss, but it can’t be a quick peck, either. Does three seconds sound long enough to you? Then I’ll let go of your hand and say good-night. On a busy base, any number of people will see us, and the word will spread that we don’t seem to be having a flaming affair, but we’re definitely involved.”

  She cleared her throat. “Three seconds?” That didn’t sound like very long. Surely she could manage not to disgrace herself for three seconds.

  “Just three seconds,” he reassured her.

  Chapter 4

  The cheeseburger—without onions—and fries were delicious, reminding her of those few precious times during her childhood when she had been allowed to stay over with her mother’s brother and his wife, both of them about ten years younger than her parents, and Uncle Lee had invariably treated her to the biggest, juiciest hamburger she could eat, followed by ice cream, another forbidden food. Her parents had allowed her to eat sorbet or frozen yogurt, but never ice cream. If it hadn’t been for Uncle Lee, Caroline thought she might have reached the age of majority without knowing the joys of junk food. She still always felt as if she were having a special treat when she indulged.

  After the cheeseburgers, he gave her a slow smile and asked, “Ever played the slots?”

  “No. I’ve never been to a casino.”

  “That’s about to change.” He started the truck, and soon they were tooling down Las Vegas Boulevard, an endless array of flashing neon lights in every color of the rainbow. They blinked, they arrowed, they cascaded, they exploded in endless neon showers, inviting one and all to sample whatever it was they were advertising. The big casinos drew the largest crowds, of course, but a goodly number of people were just strolling, tourists determined to see everything in this town geared toward attracting them. People were dressed in clothing that ran the gamut from shorts to formal gowns.

  “Do you like to gamble?” she asked.

  “I never gamble.”

  She snorted. “Except with your life. I was in the control room today, remember? Hitting eighty degrees alpha and pulling 10 Gs isn’t what I’d call safe living.”

  “That isn’t gambling. Baby was built to give us an unlimited angle of attack, but her capability doesn’t do us any good if we don’t know how to fly her. My job is to make certain she does what she’s supposed to do, get her fully tested out and operational and find out her limitations. I can’t do that if I don’t exceed what we’re already doing in the F-22.”

  “None of the other pilots are pushing the envelope like that.”

  His eyes were utterly calm when he looked at her. “They will now. Now that they know Baby will operate under those conditions.”

  “You did it just to show them it could be done?”

  “No. I did it because it’s my job.”

  And because he loved it. The thought echoed in her mind. She had seen it that day when he had entered the control room after his flight, tired and sweaty, his eyes bloodshot, his expression as remote as ever. But his eyes had given him away. They had been fierce and…exalted, the fires of life burning white hot in him.

  He parked the truck, and they strolled down the sidewalk. “Do you feel lucky?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “How does lucky feel?”

  “Want to try it?”

  She paused before the entrance to one of the casinos, feeling the cool air gush out through the opened doors. Rows and rows of slot machines stretched before her and even spread out on the sidewalk. Most of them were manned by people automatically feeding in their tokens of worship and pulling the levers. Occasionally there were cries of delight as coins in varying numbers came tumbling out to reward their persistence, but mostly the machines took rather than gave.

  “It isn’t cost-effective,” she said after studying the procedure for a few minutes.

  He laughed softly. “That isn’t the point. Never gamble if you can’t afford to lose, that’s rule number one. Rule number two is to have fun.”

  “They don’t look like they’re having fun,” she said doubtfully.

  “That’s because they’ve forgotten rule number two, and maybe even number one. C’mon, I’ll stake you.”

  But she waited another few minutes, until she saw someone abandon a machine that hadn’t paid anything in quite a while. The law of averages said it was more likely to pay out than one that had just disgorged a few coins would be to do so again. She sat down in front of it and fed in the quarters, feeling like an idiot as she did so. Joe stood behind her, softly laughing when the mechanical bandit gave her nothing in return. After she had fed in about five dollars without winning anything, Caroline began to take it personally. She muttered warnings and threats as she went through the procedure again—and lost again.

  “Remember rule number two,” Joe cautioned, amusement in his voice.

  She told him what he could do with rule number two, and he chuckled.

  She hitched her stool closer to the machine and shoved a quarter into the slot. She pulled the lever and the pictures began whirring, then one by one clicked into place. Bells began ringing and quarters began flooding out of the bottom slot, spilling out onto the floor. Caroline jumped up and stared at the silver coins as other slot players crowded around, offering congratulations, and a smiling casino employee came over. Then she gave Joe a look of consternation. “All those quarters won’t fit in my pocket.”

  He threw back his head and began laughing. She stared at his strong brown throat and felt suddenly dizzy as that damn light-head
ed feeling swept over her again.

  The casino employee, still smiling, said, “We’ll be glad to change the coins into bills.”

  They did, and to her relief Caroline found that the flood of quarters wasn’t a great fortune after all, only a little over seventy dollars. She returned Joe’s stake to him and stuffed the remaining bills into her pocket.

  “Did you have fun?” he asked as they left the casino.

  She thought about it. “I suppose so, but I was beginning to feel a little vindictive toward that machine. I don’t think I have the temperament to be a gambler.”

  “Probably not,” he agreed, and took her hand in his to gently pull her out of the path of a man who wasn’t looking where he was going. But then he didn’t release her as she had expected.

  She looked down at their clasped hands. His hand was big and hard, the fingers lean, his palm tough with calluses, but his grip was careful, as if he were very aware of his strength. She had never held hands before, and the touch of palm against palm was surprisingly intimate. She was beginning to realize that fear had kept her from doing a lot of pleasurable things before, but then, she had never before been even tempted to explore them. Her reactions to other men who had tried to venture into a physical relationship with her had varied from bored and disinterested to absolute revulsion.

  She could tug her hand free. That was the safest course of action, but somehow she couldn’t do it. So she ignored the situation, acted as if her hand wasn’t nestled in his much more powerful one like a bird taking shelter, and inwardly she savored every moment of it.

  Finally they walked back to the truck, and she realized she was reluctant for the night to come to an end. It was her first date, if she cared to categorize it as such, and it was almost over.

  They were both silent on the drive back to the base, and inevitably her mind turned to the coming kiss. She felt both panicked and excited. Another first for her, the first kiss she had actually agreed to and welcomed. It was a toss-up whether she would bolt in fear or hurl herself into his arms.