Blogger Bundle Volume VIII: SBTB's Harlequins That Hooked You

by Jennifer Crusie

  “I want the s.o.b. who did this,” Andrea told Nick that morning as she sat bleary-eyed at her desk. “I’ve got one measly week left, and I want him before I leave.”

  Nick stood at her window, hands on his narrow hips, and looked out at the bleak morning. The Security Squadron had gone on full alert the instant the fire was reported, and it had been a long night for everyone. He sighed now and rotated his shoulders to ease the tension.

  “The fire marshal promised to call me as soon as he knows what caused the fire,” he said.

  Andrea looked at his back. “But he said it was arson.”

  “Thinks it was,” Nick said. “I expect he’s right. Merle knows what he’s doing. But he won’t commit himself till all the evidence is in.”

  “Sensible,” Andrea admitted, rubbing the back of her neck. “Did he tell you how long that should be?”

  “He hopes to know by sometime tomorrow. He’s in one hell of a hot seat, ma’am. Did you hear the news on the radio this morning?”

  “You mean all the uproar in town because there were weapons on the plane? That’s the kind of noise politicians get paid to make. And, of course, the locals are nervous about it. Most people don’t understand how harmless an unarmed nuclear weapon is. As far as hot seats go, I think MacLendon’s must be the hottest.”

  Nodding, Nickerson faced her. “I hear he’s talking to the news people and the city council this morning.”

  “Probably. I really don’t know.” Sighing, Andrea stood and went to the file cabinet to pour another in an endless stream of cups of coffee. “I want the squadron to stay on full alert for the time being. And I’m going to activate the Pyramid tonight to make sure nobody’s ignoring our status.”

  The Pyramid Alert System was an ingeniously simple system whereby each person on the pyramid telephoned the two persons below him to pass along information or to bring the squadron to full alert. In less than twenty minutes, Andrea’s entire four hundred man squadron could be communicated with individually. In only slightly more time, the Bombardment Wing commander could bring the entire base to alert status through the same system.

  “I guess that’s it for now, Nick,” she said after a moment, dismissing him. “When you go by Lieutenant Dolan’s office, stick your head in and tell him I’d like a word with him.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He departed, shutting the door quietly after him.

  Poor Dare, Andrea thought as she settled behind her desk again. Closing her eyes, she leaned her head back against the chair and sighed. Between SAC HQ, the press, and the local politicians, he must really have his hands full. Through it all, he would have to be courteous, concerned, understanding, and firm. Quite a recipe, especially for a man who’d had no more sleep than he had, thanks to last night’s events.

  With her eyes closed, his image rose vividly in her mind, and now that there was no one to betray herself to, she admitted just how much she’d missed him this week. She went to bed at night longing for him and woke in the morning feeling empty because he wasn’t there. It was a ridiculous dependency, she told herself, especially since they’d only had three nights together. How could he have become a habit so fast? Why was it that after such a short time, such a brief acquaintance, a dozen times a day she wanted to turn to him to share some thought?

  And only last night she’d awakened in the dark and mistaken the shape of a pillow for his shoulder. She didn’t like to remember how her throat had ached and her eyes had burned when she’d realized it was just a pillow.

  Well, she told herself firmly, it didn’t matter. January thirtieth was fast approaching. Dare was clearly content to let the relationship end there, and after a time she would get over this ridiculous emotional reaction.

  A knock on the door announced Lieutenant Dolan’s arrival, and Andrea straightened. “Come in,” she called in a brisk, businesslike voice, relieved to have the distraction of work.

  “Still working, I see.”

  It was after ten that evening when Andrea looked up to see Dare standing in the doorway of her office. Her neck was stiff from hours of hunching over lists that refused to shed any light on the case, and her eyes were red and burning.

  Dare had never looked so good to her as he did now, leaning against the doorjamb. His unbuttoned parka revealed a teal blue sweater, and his fingers were tucked into the front pockets of snug, worn blue jeans.

  “Give it up, Andrea,” he said roughly. “You’re out of here in a little over a week. It won’t be your problem anymore.”

  “It’s my problem right now, sir.”

  “It’s the OSI’s problem.”

  “They don’t seem to be getting very far with it.”

  He looked tired, too, she noticed. And angry and frustrated. The lines of his face seemed to have grown deeper just since yesterday. She resisted a totally feminine and totally ridiculous impulse to smooth them away. Or soothe them away.

  “Got any coffee?”

  “I just brewed a fresh pot.” She watched him lever himself away from the door frame and stride to the coffeepot on top of her filing cabinet. She’d forgotten how big he was, just since yesterday. How tall and lean and hard he was. She always felt a clenching thrill when she saw him for the first time after an absence, however brief. Why was that?

  Her eyes never left him as he filled a cup and settled into one of the chairs facing her desk. He crossed his legs loosely, one ankle on the opposite knee, and leaned back, rubbing his eyes wearily.

  “The guy doesn’t leave a trail,” he said. “Not a hint or a sign of what he’s up to. What’s the point of all this if he doesn’t get the satisfaction of telling somebody why?”

  “Maybe he gets all the satisfaction he needs just from doing it. Or maybe he’s saving up his explanations for some grand finale.”

  “That thought’s cost me some sleep, I can tell you.” He sipped the coffee and grimaced. “I’ve swallowed enough coffee today to float a battleship. At this rate I’ll have an ulcer in a week.”

  Andrea opened her desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of antacids. She tossed them to him. “Help yourself.”

  “You, too, huh? Thanks.”

  “I keep thinking I’m missing something that’s as plain as the nose on my face,” Andrea remarked. “Like I’ve got all the puzzle pieces but I just can’t see how to fit them together.”

  “Well, if you’re right that I’m the target, he’s doing a damn fine job. My career’s getting more tenuous with every passing minute.”

  “But why, Dare? You’ve done everything you can to stop him.”

  He shrugged. “The buck stops here, as they say. They’re starting to ask some tough questions at the top, like why the devil everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket since I took command here.”

  Andrea ached for him. “Everything has not gone to hell since you took command. Everything is just fine, except for some loony, and you can’t be responsible for loonies.”

  “That’s not how it looks if you’re sitting up at SAC headquarters and one of your bases is all but out of commission, and the guy in charge out there isn’t doing diddly about it.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Who said life was fair?”

  “Who said it shouldn’t be?”

  A faint smile came to Dare’s mouth, lifting the corners slightly, as he took in the pugnacious set of Andrea’s chin.

  “I need a cigarette,” was all he said, but he was thinking how badly he needed her in his arms right now, needed to feel her warmth and the gentleness she kept so well hidden.

  Andrea pulled open yet another drawer and retrieved an ashtray, setting it down on the desk between them. “So smoke,” she said.

  “Prepared for all eventualities, I see,” he remarked as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his parka pocket.

  “Yes, sir. We try.” She rose and refilled her own cup with coffee, then started to pace around her office, unaware that Dare spared a few moments to admire her bottom in the ugly blue Air Force
slacks.

  “What have we got?” she asked rhetorically a few minutes later. “I was shot by somebody who was evidently trying to get through the perimeter fence. That doesn’t fit with the rest of it.”

  “Why not?” Suddenly he looked over his shoulder at the door to her office. “Andrea, maybe I’m paranoid, but if you want to discuss this mess in any detail, maybe you should close your office door.”

  “There’s plenty of reason to be paranoid lately.” She even glanced into the hallway before closing her door and, after a moment’s hesitation, locking it.

  “So what doesn’t fit about you being shot?”

  Andrea perched on the edge of the desk and set her mug down so she could rub the back of her neck. “It’s not just me being shot that doesn’t fit. It’s that at this point I’m not sure our loony is an intentional murderer.”

  “Why not? Want me to rub your neck for you?”

  Andrea looked at him, her green eyes growing smoky. “Maybe later,” she said. “I don’t think too clearly when you touch me, and right now I want to think.”

  There was no way he could repress the grin that seemed to rise from the tips of his toes and banish his fatigue. From Andrea that was one hell of an admission. The lady admitted very little, he’d learned.

  “I’m having trouble with the idea that this guy is a mad killer,” she said, “because nobody has died. Anybody who’s been around B-52s for a while knows how hard it is to knock one out of the sky. That charge didn’t knock out anything essential to the aircraft’s survival. That may have been deliberate.”

  “It could also have been an accident,” Dare pointed out.

  “But don’t forget last night. Setting fire to a plane on the runway was hardly designed to kill. It seems to me that it was designed to give you a hard time. Tell me you haven’t had a hellish day today, with more to come.”

  He smiled faintly. “I can’t. It was awful, start to finish. What about my hydraulics? For a while I believed that hadn’t been intended to kill me, but I’ve had a lot of time to think about it since Saturday, Andrea. Nobody messes around with an aircraft’s hydraulic system if he doesn’t want to kill.”

  “He could have intended for you to punch out, which any pilot in his right mind would have done, Dare. I still can’t believe you didn’t eject as soon as you knew you were in trouble. My God!”

  “A pilot has to believe he’s got no other option before he’ll punch out, honey. I didn’t believe it.”

  For a long moment she appeared to be incapable of speech. Dare watched the way her eyes sparked with outrage and darkened with remembered fright. God, he needed to hold this woman.

  “Anyhow,” Andrea continued when she had a grip on the surge of unwelcome emotion, “I was shot because I scared the guy. I can understand that. No, my problem is that it just doesn’t fit with the rest of what’s been going on. We’ve agreed that our man must be somebody who can get past security, who probably has a legitimate reason to be on the flight line. Halliday keeps telling me—”

  “Halliday?”

  “My electronic security expert. He keeps telling me the perimeter is a no-man’s-land of sensors, that nobody who doesn’t know the location of those sensors could get through without detection—unless the sensors are turned off. If we agree to that, and I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t, then I can’t understand why anyone was trying to get through the perimeter. And even if somebody could get through the perimeter, he’d have to get past all the security guards, which brings us right back to someone who has a legitimate reason to be out there—”

  “And therefore has no need to cut the fence and dodge the sensors.”

  “Exactly.”

  Dare rubbed his chin and then took another swig of coffee, steeling himself for the fire when it hit his stomach. Life dealt rotten hands sometimes, and right now he was feeling that the most rotten hand was that he couldn’t take Andrea home with him and fall asleep wrapped around her. Instead he forced himself to consider what she was saying.

  “Maybe,” he said presently, “we ought to look at it another way. Say our man has a legitimate reason to be out there, but not one legitimate enough to cover multiple visits to the flight line. Say he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s been there if he can avoid it, but if he gets stopped his cover story is good, just once.”

  “Just once?”

  Dare shrugged. “Well, not enough times to explain repeated visits, but good enough that he’d be overlooked once or maybe twice.”

  Andrea nodded. “He still has to get past all the sensors.”

  “There must be people who can do that.”

  “Not according to Halliday. According to him, only he and his technicians know anything about the layout of the sensors. He said each of them knows part of it, and only he knows all of it.”

  “So maybe Halliday’s wrong. Maybe he just likes to think he’s the only one—”

  Andrea shook her head. “I looked into it. The plans are highly classified. There’s one copy in Halliday’s safe and one copy with central document control. Nobody on the base has checked out the copy from document control, and none of the document custodians has enough technical background to understand the stuff, so that rules them out. That leaves only—” Andrea’s head snapped up. “Dare!”

  He leaned forward. “What?”

  “Maybe he is the only one.”

  “Who? What? Run that by me again, Andrea.”

  “Maybe Halliday is the only one who can get by all the sensors. And he’d have a legitimate excuse to be on the flight line, but not too often.”

  “How so?”

  “He could say he was checking out the security systems. My guys know who he is. They’d let him pass without a second thought. But if he was out there too often, they’d get suspicious.”

  “Well, I guess he’s a possibility, then, but that doesn’t prove anything, Andrea.”

  She sighed. “I guess not. I can’t imagine why he’d do this, anyway.”

  “That’s been a problem all along—no apparent motive. Look, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on him.”

  “Damn straight,” Andrea said briskly, standing. “I’ll talk to Nickerson in the morning. Honestly, Dare, he sat right here and told me he was the only person who could bypass the electronic surveillance. I thought he was bragging, but it never occurred to me that he might be laughing at me.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t.” Dare stood, too. “Maybe we’re too tired to think straight.”

  “Yeah.” She gave a short laugh and rubbed her neck again.

  Dare moved around behind her and put both his hands on her shoulders, rubbing deeply but gently. Andrea released a soft groan of satisfaction.

  “Feel good?” Dare asked.

  “Mmm.”

  “You know what I want more than anything, Andrea?”

  “Hmm?”

  Bending his head, he closed his teeth gently on her earlobe. “To take you home with me and go to sleep with your head tucked under my chin and your legs all tangled with mine.”

  He heard her softly indrawn breath and waited for the anticipated refusal.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Stunned, Dare froze, his hands locked on her shoulders, his mouth near her ear. He had to clear his throat before he could find his voice.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said ‘okay.”’ Turning, she faced him.

  Dare drank in her face, noting that her eyes were incredibly weary, but also incredibly soft. This Andrea was the one who’d reached in and plucked something from his heart that he’d thought himself incapable of giving. He was fond of all the Andreas, but this one, so rarely in evidence, held a special place in his soul.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, daring to touch her hair, her cheek, with the gentleness she so easily evoked in him.

  “I’m sure.” She met his look squarely.

  “You won’t regret it?”

  “I’ll regret even more spending tonight
alone,” she said steadily. So little time. So very little time. It was suddenly important not to waste even a minute of it.

  “I’ll get you back before the world is up.”

  She nodded. “I know you will, Dare.” The words conveyed her trust, surprising them both, for neither of them had realized just how much she trusted him.

  “Give me ten minutes to warm up the Bronco, then come out,” he told her. Not for anything would he have the cops at the front desk see them depart together. It wouldn’t bother him, but it would bother Andrea.

  A short while later, Andrea snuggled into Dare’s embrace, her head tucked under his chin, her thigh caught between his, just the way he’d wanted her so badly.

  “Now,” she murmured, “I don’t want to sleep.”

  “You should. You’re pooped.”

  “So are you. Are you sleepy?”

  “Only a little.”

  “I needed this,” she sighed. “God, how I needed this.”

  “You only had to tell me.”

  “I know. That scares me.”

  He slipped his fingers into her short hair and stroked her scalp gently. “Why does that scare you, Andrea?”

  She was silent for so long that he began to think sleep had claimed her, but then he heard her draw a deep breath.

  “I’ve never had anyone want to please me before,” she said finally.

  “But why should that scare you?”

  “Because it’s so different. Because it changes the rules.”

  “How does it change the rules?” Patiently he caressed her, waiting for her to work her own way through her feelings.

  “It’s a responsibility,” she said. “A big responsibility.”

  “How so?”

  “I could hurt you.”

  He sighed heavily and hugged her tighter. “That’s not your responsibility, Andrea.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t think I’m explaining myself very well.”

  “Take your time.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does,” he said. “It’s as important as hell because it bothers you. Are you afraid you’ll disappoint me?”

  “Yes!”

  The way the word burst out of her told Dare more about Andrea’s real fears than any number of words could have. So she wasn’t terrified of being turned into another woman like her mother; she wasn’t terrified of being devoured by him. She was terrified of disappointing him the way she’d disappointed her father.