Raising her eyes to Dare’s face, Andrea took an instinctive step backward. There was murder in Dare’s face, Andrea took an instinctive step backward. There was murder in those icy blue eyes.
As she stepped back, Dare stepped in, easing through the opening and closing the door soundly behind him.
“Tell me, Burke,” he growled down at her, “do your troops sleep on the job? Or are they doing dope?”
Andrea blinked rapidly and drew herself up to her full five foot six. “Sir! I can’t let you say—”
“I’ll say anything I damn well please!”
Andrea stood her ground, chin thrust forward, arms folded across her breasts.
“I almost died this morning,” Dare said, advancing on her. “I almost augered in at Mach 1 because somebody fiddled with my hydraulics. That upsets me, Burke. That upsets the living hell out of me.”
Andrea froze, horrified by the image evoked by his words: Dare’s plane nosing into the ground at the speed of sound.
As he spoke, he cast his parka aside and took another step toward her.
“And all the time I was fighting the damn stick and pedals and trying to keep from being splattered all over the state of North Dakota, I could only think about one thing. This!”
Grabbing her with hands like steel, he hauled her up against him, forced her head back, and seized her mouth in a punishing, ruthless kiss.
Andrea fought him, twisting and turning like a wildcat, but he held her effortlessly. Moving with her struggles, he made her feel as if she were wrapped in an invisible net, never once hurting her, but giving her no escape from his ravaging mouth.
Suddenly Dare lifted his head and looked down at her with burning eyes. “What if I’d died?” he asked.
Andrea went utterly still, her swollen lips parted, her green eyes huge. What if he’d died? she asked herself.
Dare saw her lower lip quiver, and then she melted against him where she belonged, closing her arms around his waist in a fierce hug. She cared, he thought, shutting his eyes with relief. Whether she would admit it or not, she cared. At twenty thousand feet, when only brute strength had given him any control at all over his plane, in those interminable minutes when he’d been sure he was about to die, he’d wondered about that. He’d wondered if he would ever find out, and it had seemed incredibly important to know.
Wrapping his arms around her now, he held her as close as he could, as tightly as he could, without hurting her, and wished he could pull her right inside him. “Kiss me, Andrea,” he said hoarsely. “Kiss me. Please.”
She lifted her face and sought his mouth blindly, seeking the warmth, the passion, the essence, of this man. One of her hands crept upward to cradle his rough cheek, to slide into his hair and then hold on for dear life. Without reservation she gave him the kiss he wanted.
“I need you, Andrea,” Dare said raggedly when he let her catch her breath. “We’ve got to talk. About this. About what happened. About everything.” His blue eyes were intense as he tilted her head up. “We can’t do any of that here.”
With difficulty, Andrea concentrated on what he was saying. At the moment the only thing that seemed important was that a half-dozen steps would carry them to her bedroom. “No,” she agreed, dimly aware that before long everybody in the BOQ would know Dare was here.
“Call Dolan,” Dare said. “Tell him he’s in charge for the rest of the weekend. Meet me at the Gasthaus in Devil’s Lake.”
Andrea blinked, coming to her senses. “I can’t just—”
“You can,” he interrupted her. “You can damn well do anything you please. When are you going to believe that?”
“But your hydraulics! We need to—”
“We’ll talk about that later. Right now there’s not a damn thing you can do about that.”
Releasing her, Dare stepped back. “I’m going to Devil’s Lake,” he said. “I’ll give you until one o’clock to meet me. It’s up to you, Andrea. It always is. But I won’t ask again.”
Without another word, he left.
Nothing was up to her, thought Andrea miserably. Nothing had been up to her since Dare had crashed into her life. Closing her eyes, she clenched her hands into fists and tried to tell herself that she wouldn’t do as he’d asked.
She didn’t believe it herself. For an entire week now she’d been lying awake, full of yearnings no amount of argument could quash. In little less than a month she would be leaving for Minot, and in all likelihood she wouldn’t see Dare again for years, if ever. Why not have a fling during these few weeks? Why not give in just this once in her life? Chances were she would never again have such an opportunity.
Chances were she would never again meet a man like Dare. Squeezing her eyelids tighter, she drew a breath that sounded like a sob. What was happening to her? Just a few short months ago, everything had been so simple and clear-cut. Now she didn’t know where she was going, or why she was doing what she did. She didn’t even feel like herself. Why was it when she closed her eyes all she could see was Dare? Where had this wrenching need for him come from, and why was she so helpless against it? Why, when she thought of how close he’d come to dying, did her heart stop?
And how the devil was she going to get on with her life and her career when all she wanted to do was punch out and go along for the ride with Dare?
Drawing another deep breath, Andrea stiffened her spine and opened her eyes. She couldn’t let him do this to her. She couldn’t let any man do this to her. She had a life and a career of her own, and she was going to keep it that way.
No, she wouldn’t go to Devil’s Lake. He would get the message then and leave her alone. And the longer she stayed away from him, the dimmer her unwanted feelings would grow.
She squared her shoulders. She would go over to Squadron HQ and see what she could find out about Dare’s near miss. It looked like she’d been right about the motive behind what was happening, but it gave her no satisfaction.
The Gasthaus Restaurant in Devil’s Lake was a large, Swiss-style chalet with a gleaming wood interior and numerous nooks and crannies for guests to disappear into. Dare had chosen it because it afforded privacy to dining couples but had no guest rooms to imply anything more intimate. He hoped Andrea would agree to stay overnight with him, but he didn’t want her to think he expected it. He was discovering that dealing with an emancipated female could be every bit as touchy as dealing with the unliberated types of his youth.
As one o’clock crept closer, his state of tension grew almost intolerable. He hadn’t handled his encounter with Andrea very well, he knew. Maybe he’d blown it completely. After his near miss, he’d been so full of adrenaline that he’d acted without thinking. No woman would like being grabbed and kissed the way he’d kissed Andrea, and certainly not on the tail end of such a ridiculous accusation. Worse, he’d practically ordered her to meet him here, which was guaranteed to rouse a woman’s perversity. Andrea, he’d discovered, could be perverse with the best of them.
So he watched the minute hand on his watch crawl toward one with a steadily sinking heart. She wasn’t coming. She could have been here over an hour ago if she’d really wanted to come. Yep, he’d blown it. The same experience that had made him realize just how much she meant to him had also driven him to ruin his chances. So it went. Only right now he was in no mood to feel philosophical about it. Staring into his beer stein, he decided to give her fifteen more minutes and then go home and get royally drunk.
“There’s no future in this, sir.”
Dare’s breath locked in his suddenly tight throat. Slowly, hardly daring to believe his ears, he looked up and found Andrea standing by the booth. Her cheeks were pink from the cold, and her hair was ruffled from the wind. Her eyes—her eyes were hazy with both sorrow and yearning. Dare thought he’d never seen a more beautiful sight.
“I know. Sit down, Andrea.”
But she didn’t obey immediately. “I almost didn’t come.”
“I know.” His heart beat in a
slow, painful rhythm.
She blinked. “It’ll hurt worse if we don’t stop this right now.”
“I’ll risk it. What about you?”
Slowly, very slowly, she slid into the seat facing him. “I don’t want either of us to be hurt, Colonel.”
“I’ve got a feeling it’s already too late to avoid it.”
“It feels that way.” Abruptly she reached out and covered both his large hands with her small ones. Dare immediately turned his hands over and clasped hers.
“I keep thinking,” she said in a tense, un-Andrea-like voice, “of what almost happened to you this morning. I’ve seen it happen before, so it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination—” She looked to the side, blinking rapidly. “It’ll be like that when I leave for Minot.”
“Do you think if we pretend it doesn’t exist that it won’t hurt?”
Her green eyes came back to meet his. “No,” she said steadily. “It hurts already. I’ve been lying to myself all along, I guess. I thought I could handle a fling. I kept telling myself that’s all this is. That was a really stupid assumption from someone who’s never had a fling before.”
He squeezed her hands gently. “I told you this wasn’t casual. This is no fling.”
She drew a deep, unsteady breath. “No, it’s not. And it’ll hurt just as much when I leave whether we make love again or not. I’d rather have the memories than nothing at all.”
“Would you like the menu now, sir?” The waitress’s voice startled both of them.
“Yes,” Dare answered without taking his eyes from Andrea. “And a couple of beers.”
Releasing one of her hands, he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket, shook one out, and lit it. “This morning wasn’t my first close call, but it reminded me of something I’ve lost sight of over the past few years. Life doesn’t give any guarantees, Andrea. Today is the only day we’ve got for sure. Tomorrow might never come.”
“I know. I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking…” She shook her head as if she couldn’t find the words. Dare waited patiently.
“I was thinking,” she said presently, “that I’ve been so busy following this schedule I have in my head that I haven’t had time for anything else. I guess I’ve been missing a lot.”
“And so?”
“And so maybe I should accept these next few weeks as a gift and quit trying to fight it. I—I really don’t want to miss it.”
Dare squeezed her hand.
“But…” Her voice quavered and then steadied. “But I have to know exactly what it is you want from me.”
“Exactly what you’ve offered me.”
Andrea drew a deep breath. “I can only give you the next few weeks,” she said straightly. “There’s no future.”
He nodded. “I understand that. Didn’t I just tell you that there’s no guarantee tomorrow will ever come? I want now, Andrea. The moment in our grasp.”
She looked into his blue eyes, eyes so close to the color of the North Dakota sky, and it was like racing down a ski slope at eighty miles an hour, like the time she’d gone skydiving and she’d been falling, falling, only this time there was no rip cord.
Letting go of her, he leaned back, allowing the waitress to set two frosty steins of beer on the table along with two menus. “Give us ten or fifteen minutes before we order,” he told the girl.
Food? Andrea thought. He wanted her to think about food? Wrapping her hands around her stein as if it were the last anchor in the universe, she stared down into the frothy beer and tried to find a rip cord. Any rip cord. Oh, God, she was so scared. She could only fail. She couldn’t be what he wanted, even for a few weeks, any more than she’d ever been able to be what her father wanted. She wasn’t that kind of woman. She was unnatural.
“Relax, Andrea.”
Dare’s deep voice beat back her panic a little, and she managed to look up.
“I told you,” he said gently, “I don’t want anything you can’t give, so quit worrying about it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do, and for the third time—Charlie Burke is a horse’s ass. Just pick up your menu and think about lunch. Let me worry about everything else.”
It was tempting to do exactly that, Andrea thought as she obediently picked up the menu. His shoulders looked broad enough to handle all his own worries and hers, as well.
“I’d like to get my hands on the son of a bitch who messed up my hydraulics,” Dare remarked.
The words had a salutary effect. Andrea was immediately diverted, anger rising at the thought of anyone pulling a stunt like that. With her anger came her appetite. She hadn’t eaten breakfast, because she’d been too upset by Dare’s visit to her quarters. Suddenly everything on the menu looked good.
“I’m surprised you didn’t punch out,” she said. “Most pilots would have. You couldn’t have had much control.”
“Barely enough,” he agreed. “But if I’d ejected, all the evidence would have been gone.”
“And that was worth your life?” Andrea looked outraged.
“I didn’t say that. I felt I could make it or I wouldn’t have tried.”
“Exactly what happened?”
“Slow leak. Slow enough so that I’d been in the air more than an hour before I lost enough fluid to make control extremely difficult. I wasn’t doing any fancy flying, just straight, level stuff, so I didn’t need much stick, but every time I used the pedals, I squeezed out a little more fluid. I thought I was getting a little mushy, but I couldn’t be sure. And then I decided to try a stall and spin out of it.”
Andrea’s eyes were wide. “That’s when you knew you were in trouble?”
Dare nodded. “I fell from forty thousand to twenty thousand feet before I could come out of the spin. By then I had more air than fluid in the system, and every time I hit those pedals I was leaking. Air’s a lot harder to compress than hydraulic fluid, and it leaked out the holes a whole lot faster. Still, I had just enough control to make it.”
“Thank God.” She bit her lip, looking hesitant. “Has it—has it occurred to you that somebody might have it in for you personally?”
He looked surprised. “What makes you think that?”
Andrea flushed. “It occurred to me last week that all this business started right at the time you arrived here.”
Before he could reply, the waitress came to take their orders.
“Well,” said Dare when they were again alone, “I imagine I have a few enemies, but I can’t think of any who’d have that kind of grudge against me. But then, who can?”
“It’s a horrifying thought,” Andrea agreed. “Maybe it’s just coincidence.”
Dare lit another cigarette, saying a mental farewell to his attempts to quit. Maybe next year. “You know, Andrea, I fly that trainer every Saturday morning. You could say it has my name on it.”
Andrea sucked a sharp breath. “Nobody else flies it?”
“Not on Saturday morning.”
Andrea’s hands knotted into fists. “Maybe we should go back to the base and—”
“And what?” he interrupted. “Damn it, Andrea, I called in the OSI to handle this, and if you think I like the OSI any better than any other Blue Suiter, you’re wrong. I’ve got those guys tramping all over my bailiwick, poking their noses into every little nook and cranny—God knows what dirt they’re digging up to look into another time—and I want you to let them handle this. This is our time.”
He looked so irritated that she almost smiled. “Poking their noses everywhere, huh?”
“Everywhere,” he said emphatically. “Hell, you’ve been in the service long enough to know. I’ll bet they’ve got a complete list of every glove that’s disappeared from Supply in the last six months.”
“Probably.” At last her smile broke through. “Okay, Colonel, have it your way. I’ll let OSI handle it until Monday. Then, whether you like it or not, I’m getting involved.”
“Just what do you thin
k you can do that they can’t?”
Andrea shrugged. “My brothers always said I had a mind like Sherlock Holmes. We’ll see. Just don’t order me to back off, because I won’t. My job is to investigate, and that’s just what I’m going to do.”
Her chin was set like a bulldog’s, and Dare decided to let it ride. What would it hurt, anyway? By Monday everybody on the base would know what happened with his plane, and they weren’t going to be able to cover this one with tales of sick geese.
“Fair enough,” he said. “And if you ask me nicely enough, I might tell you everything I told OSI this morning.”
Her eyes widened. “You mean there’s more?”
“Actually,” he said, letting a smile come through, “the only thing more is that they debriefed me for two solid hours this morning. I’d rather wrestle with a shot hydraulic system any day. It was like a bad scene out of a third-rate movie, the same questions over and over and over.”
“Why? They couldn’t possibly think you had anything to do with the damage to your plane!”
Dare shook his head. “No. They just wanted to be sure I wasn’t overlooking anything. I got away from them by promising that if I thought of anything over the weekend I’d write it down and let them know Monday morning.”
“You’ll let me know if you think of anything, won’t you?”
He smiled. “Of course I will. You can count on it.”
Chapter 11
The temperature had reached its daytime high of seventeen below zero when Andrea and Dare were ready to leave the restaurant. Standing in the vestibule, they began to zip and button up.
“Where do we go from here, Andrea?”
She paused in the process of zipping her snorkel hood. “I thought you had it all planned.”
“I had hopes, not plans.”
“Oh.” Smiling slightly, she finished zipping the snorkel and peered at him from a small, round opening that was edged in gray fur. “I packed an overnight bag.”
She’d packed an overnight bag. Dare felt his face split into a wide grin, the first time he’d felt like grinning since Christmas. “Follow me, Captain.”
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