Andrea looked up at him, the devil light in her eyes. “You’re pretty sure of that promotion.”
“I’m positive about it.”
“Nothing like a pilot’s ego, I always say. Has something to do with the ‘right stuff,’ I guess. Maybe it adds lift to the plane.”
Chuckling, he stole a kiss. “Actually,” he said, when she was suitably breathless, “I got the word this morning. I pin on my stars April first.”
“Dare! That’s wonderful!” Her green eyes shone as she looked up at him.
“I guess that means I’ll outrank you for at least a couple more years.”
But Andrea was in no mood to joke about it. Her joy for him seemed to swell until she felt she could barely contain it.
“I’m so pleased for you,” she said softly.
That softness got him every time. Forgetting his determination to drag out every moment of this evening, he scooped Andrea up into his arms and carried her to his bedroom.
“Celebrate with me, Andrea,” he said as he lowered her to his bed.
“I’ve never made love with a general before,” she whispered, drawing him down with her.
“Big deal. You’d never made love with a colonel before, either.”
The soft smile lingered on her lips and in her eyes as he hovered over her.
“I’d never made love before,” she answered.
“Me either,” he murmured as he released the clasp of her bra.
Before she could wonder at his meaning, he closed his lips and teeth over her swollen nipple and sent shock waves of pleasure radiating outward to join with the ache that had been building all evening.
He had one intention and one intention only: to love Andrea so well, so perfectly, that if she never again allowed him to give her anything, he would already have given her the best he had in him. In seemingly no time at all, she reached a fever pitch, but he refused to give in to her pleas and tugs. Instead he trailed his mouth in lazy, tormenting spirals lower, across the sensitive skin of her stomach. Millimeter by millimeter, he drew down the zipper of her jeans, teasing her with hesitations. And finally he sent his hand foraging where she wanted his mouth, then his mouth where she wanted him.
All he wanted, all he needed, all he sought, was her pleasure. Only when he at last could please her no other way did he join himself to her and give her the gift of his own pleasure.
Sunday afternoon came all too swiftly. Andrea sat between Dare’s legs on the floor of the living room, her back resting against his chest. They’d been sitting in companionable silence for some time, and she found herself thinking how nice it was to be able to share a comfortable silence with someone else.
She also found herself thinking about the swift passage of time. She was racing against it neck-and-neck now. One more weekend. Nine more days. The more she dreaded her departure, the faster it bore down on her.
Looking back over the past two years, she had the uneasy realization that time had been racing past her all along but she had been too busy to notice it. Hadn’t she promised herself when she arrived here that she would make the terrible climate tolerable by taking the time to go cross-country skiing? Not once in two years had she taken her skis out of the closet. Instead she’d put her nose to the grindstone, determined to make her squadron the best in SAC.
And what had that gotten her? A slightly bigger squadron in the same execrable climate. Two years had passed in the blink of an eye, and the next two years would probably pass even faster, and maybe she would garner a somewhat bigger command with all its attendant extra headaches. By then she would surely have made major, and she would immediately set her sights on light colonel.
Some morning, inevitably, she would wake to discover that twenty years had flown by in the blink of an eye. Would she look back at those twenty years and think that the only time she’d ever really lived was during her last few weeks here, on these too-short weekends with Dare?
As for Dare, Andrea was no fool. She knew very well that men like him didn’t grow on trees. He was strong enough to be gentle and secure enough not to be threatened by her. In her experience, that was a very rare combination.
“Something wrong?” he asked when she stirred restlessly against him.
“Time,” she said obscurely, but he understood.
“Little enough of it in a lifetime, let alone a week.”
Slowly, she tilted her head and looked up at him, wondering not for the first time if he could read her mind. “Yes,” she said on a soft sigh.
No time like the present, Dare thought, to take that forward step and see if his foot landed on solid ground. “I’ll visit you on weekends, Andrea. If you want me to.”
“Will you?”
Her misty green eyes held a flare of hope, and he smiled as much from relief as pleasure. “Yes.”
Andrea turned over, still lying between his legs and against his chest, and kissed him. “Thank you,” she said.
He wrapped his arms around her, holding her snugly. “My pleasure. You won’t be that far away. I’ll just avail myself of one of the prerogatives of my position and fly out there. Things can almost always be managed if you want to badly enough.”
“You won’t mind?” she asked him.
“Are you kidding?” Tilting her chin up a little more, he looked into her eyes. It still shocked him to realize that his calmly confident Captain Burke was truly confident only in her job and her uniform. If he’d had a magic wand, he would have used it to give her all the personal self-confidence she lacked. But there was no magic wand, and all he could do was hope she would eventually get the message.
“Andrea, darlin’,” he said gently, “the only thing I’d mind is never seeing you again.”
Her eyelids fluttered closed, and he was horrified to see a silvery tear squeeze out from beneath one lid.
“Andrea? Andrea, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said shakily, and managed an unsteady smile. “Damn, every time I turn around, you’re making me cry. I hate to cry.”
“Then don’t.”
“I can’t help it. You say the damnedest things sometimes. Nobody’s ever said so many nice things to me.”
He gave her a bruising hug. “I’m just being truthful, sweetheart.” And only partially truthful, at that.
For a long time they sat like that, her head on his shoulder, arms wrapped around one another, but finally Dare’s stomach started rumbling. Reluctant as he was to disturb the cocoon of closeness they shared, he was going to have to do something about dinner.
“Give me a few minutes to get dinner started, Andrea.”
“Can I help?”
“Nope.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “When I come to visit you, you can do the honors.”
“Every time?”
He caught the wicked sparkle in her eye. “Well, maybe just sometimes.”
She let him go reluctantly and stretched out on the floor, unwilling to disturb the warm glow she was feeling. He was going to fly out to see her. She hugged the thought to her, more relieved than she could say. Even though he wanted nothing but an affair, at least he wasn’t casual in his feelings about her. He cared, or he certainly wouldn’t be willing to visit her in Minot.
Now, if she could just catch their homegrown saboteur. Why couldn’t there be some way to smoke him out, right into a trap?
Toying with the idea, she wandered out to the kitchen and helped herself to one of the carrot sticks Dare had set out on the counter.
“I can almost smell smoke,” Dare remarked as he lifted a steak off the electric grill. “What’s got your brain on overdrive?”
Andrea shrugged. “Just wondering if there isn’t some way to lay a trap for our saboteur.”
“To lay a trap you need some kind of enticement to draw your quarry out. We don’t know enough about him to come up with the right bait.”
“That’s what has me stymied. But maybe we do know enough and just can’t see it.”
“You keep sayi
ng that. Pull the milk out of the fridge, will you?”
Andrea complied. “I keep saying that because I can’t shake the feeling that the answer’s staring me in the face. It just keeps nagging at me.”
“Maybe you ought to let it rest awhile.”
“I’ve let it rest all weekend.” Walking up behind him, she wrapped her arms around his waist from behind and leaned against him. “You smell so good.”
“Better than steak?”
“Always.” Sighing, she nuzzled his spine. “I keep wondering, if the culprit really is Halliday, why he’d be doing this. I always thought he seemed pretty happy with his niche. You haven’t served with him before, have you?”
“Not to my knowledge. We might have been posted to the same base at some time or another, but we’ve never been in the same unit.” He flipped the second steak off the grill. “Come on, let’s eat. You still think I’m the target?”
“Well, you’re the only person being consistently harmed by all this. It makes more sense than the entire Bomb Wing being the target, or SAC.”
“I guess.” Dare held out her chair for her and snagged a quick kiss as she sat. He rounded the table and took his own seat, then unfolded his napkin. After a moment he shook his head.
“Nope, I can’t remember ever knowing a Halliday. Now back in Nam there was this kid named Holi—” He broke off abruptly, his eyes growing distant with recollection.
“What is it, Dare?” Andrea asked impatiently. “What kid?”
“Holiday. I thought his name was Holiday, but maybe it wasn’t.”
“What kid?” Andrea demanded.
For a long moment he didn’t answer. “Just a kid, an airman. He was in my ground crew. He got hit in a firefight one night at Tan Son Nhut, and I tried to get to him, but I couldn’t. I wrote to his family afterward, but there wasn’t much to say. He’d been out there exactly one week, he was eighteen years old, and he was dead because he was on mission for me when the firefight broke out.”
Andrea set her fork down, aching for him, for the shadow of old sorrow she read on his face. “It was war, Dare,” she said after a moment. “You can’t hold yourself responsible.”
His blue eyes focused on her. “I don’t. Oh, maybe that was my first reaction when it happened. You’re bound to think if only when something like that happens, but nobody is responsible for the accidents of war. No, I was just wondering if his name was Halliday, not Holiday. It’s possible, I guess. It’s been a long time. My memory could be playing tricks.” He shrugged. “And where does it get us if his name was Halliday?”
Andrea pushed a piece of steak round and round on her plate. “Well,” she said presently, “maybe a younger brother grew up thinking you were responsible for his older brother’s death because you sent him on an errand.”
“That’s sick.”
“So’s poking holes in your hydraulic lines and blowing a hole in the nose of a flying B-52. We’re clearly not dealing with a normal mind here. And it would fit with this feeling I can’t shake that you’re the real target.”
“Then why didn’t he kill me?”
“Damn it, Dare, he almost did! If you weren’t as physically strong as you are, you would probably never have come out of that nosedive. I know you don’t want to believe it. I sure as hell don’t want to believe that somebody is trying to kill you. But I think we’re both going to have to accept it. This creep wanted to kill you, and he wanted to be sure you were aware every agonizing moment of your approaching death.”
Dare shoved his plate to one side. “I just lost my appetite. Andrea, we’re really reaching with this.”
“You mean I am.” She’d lost her appetite, too. And then slowly she raised her head, looking at him. “I’ve got it.”
“Got what?”
“An idea for a trap.” Suddenly she was excited. “Say this guy wants to ruin you.”
“I thought he wanted to kill me?”
“Say he does, but say he wants to get you into hot water before he does you in. Look, he put a hole in one bomber cockpit and set fire to another. Neither one of those incidents was physically dangerous to you, but both of them have made your life miserable.”
Dare sighed and looked truly dubious. “All right, I’ll agree with that for the sake of argument.” He pulled out his cigarettes and lit one.
“Well, if he wants to ruin you, I bet he couldn’t resist a chance to do it spectacularly.”
Dare exhaled smoke. “How spectacularly? Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like this?”
“You’ll like it. Listen, let’s use the grapevine. I swear it works better than the base paper. Schedule a generation for Wednesday or Thursday.”
“I can’t do that. We’re grounded until—”
“You can always cancel it right beforehand,” Andrea interrupted. “Say you schedule a generation, and then we put it on the grapevine that some important congressman or other is going to be on base—unofficially, of course—and that the generation’s being held for his benefit. We can even increase security under the guise of protecting this congressmen.”
“And then?”
“And then we put somebody on each and every one of the bombers from now until then. If our man can’t resist the opportunity to give you a black eye in front of the world, he won’t be able to resist this. And we’ll catch him.”
“We haven’t caught him so far,” Dare pointed out. “Despite stepped-up security.”
“Dogs,” Andrea said. “Let’s use the K-9’s. Put one on every plane with a handler.”
Dare gave a grudging nod. “I can almost believe dogs might work. But Halliday, if it is Halliday, is bound to hear about it.”
Andrea shook her head. “Nick can handle it. He can order the dogs out on some kind of maneuver, keep the entire unit out of contact with the rest of the squadron. Once it’s dark they can move around the airstrip without anybody being the wiser. There’s not even a moon this week.”
“Somebody will hear about it.”
“So I’ll slap a classification on the whole damn thing. Nick can pick guards who he trusts to keep their mouths shut. The group of people who’ll know what’s really going on will be small enough that they’ll know I can court-martial every one of them if word gets out.”
Rubbing his chin, Dare thought about it. The plan was a rough sketch, of course, and a lot of details needed to be worked out, but it was a hell of a lot better than no plan at all.
“Okay,” he said. “First thing tomorrow, I’ll schedule a generation for Wednesday.”
Andrea grinned. “Thanks.”
“Thank me when it works.” And it just might. At least they would be doing something, which agreed with him a hell of a lot more than sitting on his hands waiting for events to unfold. In fact, it gave him back his appetite.
“Eat up,” he said after a moment. “And tell me how you’re going to manage the security on this trap.”
Dare ate and listened, thinking that Andrea had a tactician’s mind. Steadily, piece by piece, she outlined a covert operation in which handpicked troops would move in and occupy all the bombers without tipping off the other guards. She’d learned well at the Academy, he thought, and displayed a natural talent for applying the things she’d learned. If she were a man…
The thought brought Dare up short. If she were a man. How many times must Andrea have thought the same thing and been forced to face the fact that she had to work harder and perform better and yet would never have the same opportunities? If she were a man, she wouldn’t have set her sights on making colonel. No, she would be aiming for brigadier, at the very least, and he would have put his money on her to make it.
It was no wonder she was so fiercely independent, so determined to let nothing affect her career, so reluctant to let her femininity come forward. She worked under a major disadvantage and had to struggle continuously to overcome it.
He hadn’t really thought about it like that before, but then, he’d never really been burd
ened by notions of what women should and shouldn’t do. If an officer was capable, Dare didn’t particularly care if the officer was male, female, black, or white or green with purple polka dots. Finding women in positions of command responsibility was a relatively new experience, a facet of the changing Air Force, and one that still caught him unawares at times, but he never held gender to be a mark against someone. Unfortunately he doubted that all his fellow officers felt the same.
When all was said and done, he decided, it was pretty remarkable that Andrea had let go as much as she had with him. And the fact that she had must mean that she felt something for him, something strong, because Andrea obviously wasn’t the type to be led astray by mere hormones, not levelheaded, sensible, virgin Andrea Burke.
When Andrea at last fell silent, it was nearly nine. Dare was already thinking of taking her to bed for some long, lazy lovemaking that would still leave time for a good night’s sleep before he took her back to the BOQ. She, however, was clearly revved up, thinking over her plans for the trap. He watched her for a while, but his patience began to wear thin as the minutes ticked by.
“Captain Burke.”
She looked up from the pad she was making notes on. “Sir?”
“It’s getting late. Are you planning to make notes all night?”
Andrea blinked, obviously coming out of her preoccupation with difficulty, but then a smile appeared, warming her hazy green eyes. “Do you have a better idea of what I should be making tonight, sir?”
“A much better idea. Can I interest you?”
Andrea crossed the living room and slid onto his lap. With a smile, she wrapped her arms around his neck. “I might have a few ideas of my own.”
The ache that never entirely left him when he was within sight of her began to deepen. “Have I told you just how special you are?” he asked, capturing her face so she couldn’t look away.
A faint blush stole into her cheeks, and her eyelids fluttered. “I’m not special,” she protested in a smothered voice.
“Oh, yes, you are,” he said gently, never taking his eyes from hers.
Unable to bear the intensity of emotion she was feeling, Andrea ducked her head, wiggling until she was able to tuck it into his shoulder. “No more, please,” she begged in a small voice.
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