Sorry that Emily had murdered his wife.
“I’m the one who put you in this spot. Only it turned out to be much worse than I imagined.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t grunt, Squirt.”
They both chuckled at the phrase from their past. It was an instruction he’d oft repeated for her benefit, to no great effect on her tomboy manners. But the laugh fell hollow in the room and they both cut it off before it was complete.
“I repeat, ‘Huh?’ Sir.”
“Well, with the ‘sir’ I guess it’s okay.” Peter leaned back and crossed his ankles. He could have been lounging in a meadow watching clouds go by instead of wearing a three-piece business suit in a Hay-Adams boudoir and about to pass judgment on her future.
“I’m sorry. Because I’m the one who manipulated you.”
She shook her head. Couldn’t see it.
“The first letter. The one James delivered. I knew you couldn’t refuse. And I needed you here.”
“Why didn’t you just ask? You know I’d have come.”
He nodded. “I did know that, but you’re too black and white. You never could keep a secret worth a damn.”
She could certainly tell him a thing or two about that. Black-in-blacks for three different administrations now.
“Hmm. By your imposing glare, I take it I am overstating or perhaps misstating my case. You can’t play-act or hide your feelings well, as you are proving at this moment. Clearly you’re much better at secret keeping than you were as a kid.”
“It was only you.” Emily swallowed hard and laid her heart on the table. “I always told you everything. No one else ever knew.”
Peter nodded his thanks and his understanding. “But this time I needed to depend on your reactions being genuine.”
“Genuine,” she prompted. Somewhere in this conversation the ship she’d left harbor in had sunk outright.
Peter sat up, sat back, practically squirmed like the little boy she’d never known him to be. Mr. Comfortable had been an act. For her. She didn’t like that. Not one little bit.
“I knew there was a threat.”
“To Katherine.”
“To me.”
“Let me repeat my earlier statement. ‘Huh? Sir.’”
It elicited a brief smile, but that was all.
“I guessed, couldn’t prove, but guessed, that Katherine was gunning for me. I just didn’t realize quite how literally. I figured there’d be a trumped-up scandal. I expected her to try forcing women into my bedroom, or some such. But it wasn’t happening. I needed an eye on the inside of her operation. One that I knew was absolutely loyal to me.”
“You could have trusted Daniel. All he wanted was governmental support for his farming program. He did everything for that. Banked his whole life on that. He has so much integrity he doesn’t know how to be anything less.”
Peter raised his eyebrows. “Good to know. I’ll have a chat with him. But I needed you.”
“You have the entire bloody flock of blacksuits at your command. You sent me in where you wouldn’t send the Secret Service? What the hell, sorry, what were you thinking I was, goddamn Superwoman?”
“Yes.”
Nothing else. Just a yes.
She blew out a hard breath. “Try that again, in simple words so a mere captain can understand what the Commander-in-Chief is saying.”
“You are Superwoman incarnate. Come alive right out of the funny pages. You’re a SOAR pilot, Em. The first woman in their three-decade, blood-stained, glorious history. And commander after commander has reported that you are the best they’ve ever seen. I needed the best. Desperately. And what was I supposed to do? Go to the Secret Service and whine about my wife not liking me?”
He laughed at himself. “Oh, certainly, that was going to work just great.”
“So. You sent me…” She was feeling slow, like her brain might just be forcing the rotors around for that first aching rotation. “You sent me into Katherine Matthews’s employ, in the hopes that I would spy for you and uncover an unknown nefarious plan. The fact that I killed her, ruined Vice President Zack Thomas’s career, and put your Chief of Staff in jail were just side bonuses?”
“First, I’d argue that she is the one who actually killed herself. Second, I think Zack will make a comeback. He attempted to resign and I refused it. We’re in negotiation right now, but he did nothing wrong. And third, Ray got what he bloody well deserved, stealing the light weapon, shooting it at a helicopter, launching the airplane, finding cyanide… How far he would go to continue sleeping with Katherine I don’t even want to know. Thinking about how Katherine practically foisted him on me while I was still a senator and that I fell for it is a completely depressing concept.”
“But he was Katherine’s fall guy.”
“Sorry, I still can’t feel an ounce of pity for him. And she was my wife. I might not have had much joy in the connubial bed for the last decade, but she was my wife.”
Her ship still wasn’t returning from the depths, but neither was it resting easily in the dark, far below.
“You…” She could only piece her thoughts together one word at a time, as if climbing an infinite ladder. “Put. Me…”
It all clicked. She jerked to her feet and wavered there a moment. Then she burst clear of the cloud cover and could see the entire field of battle arrayed before her.
“You bastard. You used me. Just as Katherine tried to. Just as my mother always tried to. You knowingly used me to uncover your wife’s madness without so much as a ‘please.’ You put my life in danger with no warning. I know a goddamn mission profile when I fly it. And you—” Her voice caught, and she didn’t like that one bit either. Hated that she cared so much.
She stormed away and stormed back. The luxurious boudoir pressed too close. Too intimate.
“‘Squirt’ indeed. You used our past to keep me close. Your ever-so-nice story about the lowest point in your life being that day I lay drunk and drooling in my father’s office. Pure crap! You probably don’t even like pie! You deceitful, lying, son-of-a-bitch! You’re worse than all the others put together! You goddamn politician!”
She headed for the door just below a run.
“Em!”
His call stopped her a step from escape. Stopped her cold. It was filled with pain and pleading and hope.
She didn’t turn. Didn’t move.
Peter came up close behind her, rested his hands on her shoulders.
“Em.” Now it was a whisper. “I screwed up, Em.”
She couldn’t answer.
“In your father’s study nine years ago, I made the biggest mistake of my life.”
Her shoulders sagged as she turned to face him. He let his hands slide free.
“Why do you keep bringing that up?” Emily searched his face.
He looked worn. Exhausted.
“That was the worst night of my life. Drunk and passed out.” She felt almost as sick to her stomach now as she had that night.
“Gorgeous. Like a fairy princess waiting to be awakened by a kiss from her prince. But he’d turned into a frog. He’d married the evil queen. Not a very seemly thing of him to do.” Peter took her hand and led her over to a small carved Edwardian settee. They sank onto it side by side, she more tired than she’d ever been in her life.
They both hung their heads. Only slowly did she become aware of his gentle massage of her freezing cold fingers. Joint by joint. Playing with them. Wiggling them back and forth as if the muscles inside had no volition except that imparted from the outside.
This was the Peter she knew so well. Had so loved as a girl.
“The timing’s lousy, Em. I know that. But I need to say something before you fly off again headed to who knows where.”
He wiggled her thumb like a cyclic control. Left. Right. Forward. Back. Steering her down a path. What path? One of her choosing or his?
She waited. Waited in the silence that drew out until she looked up at his face to ma
ke sure he was still there. His hazel eyes were watching her intently. Studying her like he’d never seen a woman before.
“Stay.”
“Stay? That’s it? Just stay?”
“Stay. With me.”
She’d have risen if her feet worked. She’d have dropped her jaw if it wasn’t numb.
“Katherine’s been—”
“Dead two days. I know. But she left me years ago. I’ve been so alone. The minute I heard your voice on the radio as I sat in the Situation Room, I knew I couldn’t live without you. And when I saw you on the stairs, it was one of the nicest surprises I’ve ever had. That was the real reason I agreed to let Katherine call you to the states. I missed you like a piece of my heart was gone. I need you here with me. Stay?”
Emily stood, dragging her hand from his. She paced across the carpet to a gilt-framed painting of something she couldn’t focus on. The movement helped. Getting the blood back in her body. In her brain.
“As your mistress?”
“As my girlfriend, then my wife. Over a respectable period. We could work it out. If I have you with me, we can work out anything.”
“Give up—” She couldn’t say it. Give up flying? Give up SOAR? Give up the Black Adders? That didn’t sound like any Emily Beale that she knew. She’d started flying to set her own course and fly along it. And now it was who she was. Her body wouldn’t be her own if it wasn’t crammed into a pilot’s seat and pounded upon by the thudding rotor blades.
“I need to fly,” she told the painting.
“You could fly,” Peter rose; she could hear him. Feel him come close behind her. “Transfer to Anacostia. Fly Marine One or learn to fly Air Force One. Become my personal pilot and my personal wife.”
“And give up…” who I am.
“Nothing.”
“I need…” Something. The gilt-framed picture was still a meaningless blur before her tired eyes. She needed time to think. “Time.”
“All you could ever want.” Then he took her in his arms, there in the elegant boudoir of the Hay-Adams suite, and gave her the kiss she’d been craving with body, mind, and soul since before she could remember.
When they parted, when her heart stopped racing enough for her to breathe, she gave voice to the only thing she could think.
“Time.”
He’d nodded. Nodded, but didn’t release her.
He clearly had more words. More to throw at her, more ways to cajole and convince.
She pushed against his chest until they were a full step apart. Stopped his flow of words with an outfacing palm.
It was the hardest thing she’d ever done. The hardest answer she’d ever given. Why did the answers always have to be so impossibly hard? How to answer the best friend she’d ever had?
But in that instant, she knew the answer. Had Katherine not been a psycho, she’d have been perfect for Peter. Had been, despite being psycho. Perfect image. Perfect charm. Peter hadn’t made a mistake when he married her. He’d never have reached so high without her.
Emily didn’t need time. She knew the answer. And as soon as she could feel it in her heart, she could see it in his eyes before he hung his head.
They were old friends who knew each other too well.
She kissed his cheek before turning without another word and leaving him to stand alone in the most luxurious suite of that luxurious prison.
Chapter 65
Emily didn’t remember leaving the suite or passing by the blacksuits. She found a transport, a series of them, to get back to her family of crew, her home in the desert.
She slashed the poor crew of newbies and that idiot Bronson up one side and down the other about the condition of their bird during the flight from the carrier back to the base. She reamed everyone who came within hearing radius before crash-landing face down in her cot.
She remembered none of it.
Not until she woke up and Archie informed her she’d sacked out for two straight days.
Neither her copilot nor her crew said anything to her about her two weeks stateside, nor her rough reentry. After a few days, the laughter stopped dying the moment she entered a room. Though she couldn’t bring herself to join in.
And she flew. Thank God, Mark let her fly. She flew the missions no one considered survivable. She reached enemy cells that no one had ever sighted before and she dropped her hammer on their heads, hard. For two full weeks now, she’d brought the hammer of the U.S. Army to the true infidels, those who used religion as an excuse to murder, rape, and pillage. The traitors to their own faiths as Katherine had been to her sworn vows. As a warrior, Emily understood better than most the meaning of true faith and swearing to uphold it, even at the cost of your life.
Now, late each afternoon, she sat here, high on the soccer-stadium bleachers. Away from Archie’s worried looks, away from Big Bad John and Crazy Tim checking her sidewise, trying to gauge her madness.
Emily sat here and stared out at the distant mountains each afternoon before the night’s operations kicked in. Her MRE, Meal, Ready-to-Eat chicken fettuccine, cooking on the scorching concrete, no need for the flameless heater. She pulled out the biscuit and Tabasco bottle. Tugged the small cellophane Candy II packet from its corner and clenched it in her fist.
She didn’t belong in D.C. She didn’t. But neither did she belong here anymore. What had Peter done to her?
Emily sat in the bleachers.
Alone except for the ring of sentries patrolling the highest level. Rangers, who claimed to fear no man, had learned quickly not to meet her eyes.
Alone.
“Hey there, Captain.”
Almost alone.
“Hey yourself, Major.”
Mark Henderson, hidden behind his mirrored shades, dropped down beside her. She’d seen those eyes. Knew those eyes and how they watched her. For the two weeks since her return, he’d been pure military with her. No gropes, no jokes, no hints of what they’d had. Not even any fake Texas tease, which she missed far more than she’d ever admit. Clearly he was trying to make her welcome and safe once more with the Black Adders.
“You don’t want to be eating that, you know. Bad luck there.” A brief hint of Texas and cozy familiarity. Did he resent not being free to use it as much as she missed hearing it?
She looked down at the Candy II packet crushed in her fist. No Special Forces grunt would dare eat the candy from an MRE before a mission. Seriously bad luck. She pried open her fist and let it flutter down to rest by her dusty boot.
The sun had set. Her MRE, forgotten too long on the scorching concrete, had fried and died, not that she cared. The knife-edge suddenness of nightfall in an arid desert was hacking its way across the sky. The temperature had already dropped twenty degrees to merely unbearable. It felt like heaven.
“You know…” He leaned back on his elbows on the bench behind, crossed his ankles on the bench below, and stared up at the darkening sky. “You are either the luckiest person alive or the unluckiest. And I’ll be damned if I know which.”
She knew where her vote would land so she kept her mouth shut.
“That mission you flew last night, even the D-boys were shaking when they got off your flight. I didn’t know you could get that many bullet holes in a Black Hawk and still have her fly. Tough. Really tough.”
“Me or the bird?”
He didn’t reply. Clearly he’d meant both. She was back in the guy-speak world. Didn’t know why she’d even asked.
The setting sun would soon be revealing Venus on its path to set in the west. If she looked a little north, she could pick out the planet with the more sensitive corner of her eye. Old pilot trick, center of your eye sees color, sides see no color but gather more light. There. As she did every night, she tried to track it until she was facing the planet square on. Too dim still, it faded away in the center of her vision. She turned her head slightly until it danced, enticingly elusive, in her peripheral vision. Her vision. Each night it gave her at least one thing to be thankful
for. She could see.
Maghrib, the prayer at sunset, slipped through the air from the town that had once used this soccer stadium, before the jihad had murdered the star players and inducted the rest. Before the U.S. military had moved in. The sunset prayer wafted from the town. In a village too poor to have electricity, no massive speakers screeched the muezzin’s chant into incomprehensibility. Instead, one man acted as town crier and the faithful echoed his call.
“How many of you share Katherine Matthews’s wish? How many of you would rather see me dead than fighting your enemies? Rather see us all die, though you speak ‘peace be onto us’ in each round of prayer?” Emily half-whispered it into the night.
“Pretty morose there, babe.” Mark slurred the last as luridly as he could, thick Texas and all.
She refused to answer his jibe. What was he playing at anyway? Why was he breaking his commitment to be her CO but no more? Couldn’t he see how it tore her in two every time she saw him?
He let the silence linger until she could finally spot Venus head on.
“You’re going stateside for a bit.”
“No!” She jerked upright and faced him. “Don’t send me down! I’m the best damn pilot you’ve got.”
“Wrong, you’re the best damn pilot I’ve ever seen. And I’m not sending you down. Ten days leave, all the Army can spare you. Get your head screwed back on. Even though the D-boys love where you can get them, they’re afraid for you. Not ‘of you,’ Michael insisted. For you. They want you in fighting trim, not showing up dead one day because you pushed a line you shouldn’t have crossed.”
“But—”
“It’s an order, Captain. I’m hereby ordering you to take a vacation. It can be on an Italian beach for all I care, but away from here.”
He pulled the order from his pocket and handed it to her. The paper was slick and hard to unfold. Ten days, and no training courses allowed. Ten days completely off. What was she supposed to do with that?
“I want you alive. I wouldn’t mind if it were for a long time. It was fun being your boyfriend, even if only for a little time.” His voice drifted off to a bare whisper. “I wouldn’t mind having you back.”
Night Is Mine Page 30