Heart Strike

by M. L. Buchman

  A lie until the moment she’d been snatched back from an icy sleep by Michael Gibson and an Army helicopter that had flown into the heart of the storm. That was the last time she’d allowed herself to give up on anything.

  All the changes of the last forty-eight hours had simply stirred it all back up again. Melissa shoved it all into her past. Maybe, just maybe, this time she could finally leave it there.

  At the car, she called to Richie, “Toss me the keys. I’ll drive.”

  Without any “guy” stuff, he handed them over and headed for the passenger door.

  “Hey,” she called.

  He turned back to look at her from just a few steps away.

  A part of her wanted to put him in the “little brother” slot, even though hers had been older than her by a year. But Richie refused to go there in her head.

  Either he was too damn good-looking or too nice. Or too Delta. And with the way their few brief contacts had felt, he definitely wasn’t going into that “little brother” pigeonhole.

  He’d been right there for her from the first moment she’d stepped into the hotel suite in Maracaibo. All through tonight’s flights—both the real one in the Beech Baron and the phony one sitting in the parked monster of a seaplane. He’d ridden the controls with her every step of the way. She’d been able to feel every nuance of his touch through the connected flight controls just as thoroughly as she’d felt them when she’d leaned back against his chest.

  Even now, he stood close and simply…

  “How much longer are you going to wait?” she asked him.

  “For what?”

  “You aren’t that naive.”

  She could see Richie calculating, that Q brain analyzing rapidly. Maybe he was that naive. Maybe he—

  His process complete, some light went on.

  She half expected his jaw to drop in surprise. She’d never had a guy gawk at her the way he had when she’d arrived in that stupid Aruba T-shirt.

  But he didn’t this time. His eyes did widen for a moment, and then he smiled at her. “The nickname is Q, not James Bond.” A tease from Richie, his first.

  “Which means what? Doesn’t Q ever get the girl?” Now she was the one being surprised. She’d known Richie for less than twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours, two continents, and three plane flights if she counted the jet up from Maracaibo. Being forward wasn’t her style at all. Being the one who asked…well, this was the twenty-first century.

  “Never.” But his smile wasn’t going away.

  “Poor Q.” Asking Richie…that should have been the biggest surprise of them all—but it wasn’t. Not from the first moment when she’d leaned back against him and felt more right then than she had with any other man in her past.

  “How about,” Richie started, “I wait long enough to not be standing in the middle of an Army base?”

  “This isn’t the Army; nothing here but a bunch of Coasties.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want to shock them, would we?”

  She could feel the wall coming down and the moment slipping away. Melissa could feel the protective shield of ice that she’d built up around her recrystallizing. Whatever the moment had held, it—

  Richie took a slow step toward her and brushed a finger down her cheek. Such a simple gesture, it should have been meaningless, but it lay there on her cheek like a line of fire. Not wildfire, but rather a warm fireplace on a cold night.

  “What are—”

  “Shh,” he whispered and leaned in to brush his lips over hers. It was the gentlest of kisses—it bore no more weight than the fingertip that had brushed her cheek. But neither was it merely a test. Richie didn’t offer a question with his kiss, nor a desperate hunger. Either of those she would have known what to do with.

  Instead, the kiss was sweet, as she’d expect from him. But it was also complete unto itself, as if of course he’d be kissing her. He made it the most natural thing in the world.

  Not knowing quite what else to do with the kiss, Melissa The Cat purred. Heck, her entire body felt ready to do the same though their only contact was the lightest of touches along her jaw and their lips.

  “Sure you want to drive?” he whispered.

  “Bet your bum,” she replied.

  “Definitely Canadian,” Richie remarked and turned back to the passenger side car door.

  She circled the car and decided that maybe she’d show him a thing or two about polite when they arrived back at the hotel.

  * * *

  Richie rode shotgun for the short drive back to the motel.

  He watched Melissa drive, without watching her. She drove the way she flew, clean and precise. He’d felt how her hands had moved through their joined dual controls and tried to imagine he could do better…and couldn’t.

  It wouldn’t have surprised him if Carla had done that, though her style would be totally different. But that there were two such competent women…well, anywhere, was no end of a surprise. He’d met smart women or strong ones or pretty ones…all he’d had to do to find that last type was to go to any soldier bar in any level of uniform.

  The pretty ones flocked!

  A couple years ago, before joining The Unit, he’d gone to his five-year high school reunion with his full dress uniform, his brand-new Airborne patch, and three stripes on his arm. His buddies had no clue what to do with that. Spackenkill High was almost exclusively IBM brats, the company’s original and still-primary plant was less than a mile from the school. Almost everyone he knew had gone on to college and a whole section of his friends were in grad school or working at the plant.

  But the geeky guy who was the head of backstage tech in the high school theater had become the ultimate magnet for women who flocked to the uniform.

  Melissa didn’t flock to the uniform; she was the uniform. To make The Unit took strength, skill, and brains; and a level of determination that no civilian could ever comprehend. That she was knock-out beautiful was just impossible, but still true.

  The hotel was only a mile away, at the other end of the airfield. It didn’t give him much time to think, but he spent it thinking hard.

  He wanted to touch Melissa. To see if that incredible feeling, that even the least contact with her caused to ripple through him, promised more.

  But he also wanted her to remain on the team with him. He wanted to be near her like no one before. If they started too fast, it was likely to end just as fast. He had observed that numerous times.

  He remembered the electricity that had crackled between Kyle and Carla from the first second. It had been impossible to miss. Yet he knew that they hadn’t so much as touched throughout the entire month of Delta Selection. The change in both of them when they finally did had been dramatic. And though the two of them had lived together through much of OTC, and they’d all fought together in Venezuela then Bolivia, it was only last month they’d traded vows.

  Chad had stood best man. He and Duane had shared the “men of honor” role for Carla, figuring the two of them together had some chance of handling her. It had been a small, quiet ceremony in the same beautiful church in the heart of Maracaibo where he’d been drugged and Kyle had been kidnapped. He’d loved how it brought everything full circle. And Carla had looked astonishing in her wedding dress.

  He’d never seen a woman who so outclassed other women—until Melissa Moore had stumbled into the hotel suite, blinking tiredly and wearing an over-tight “I (heart) Aruba” T-shirt.

  Two questions, Richie.

  One, do you want her?

  More than Bond had ever wanted any of his many girls, except maybe Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. Because that had been serious. Tracy didn’t count. Because even if Diana Rigg had been hot, the fact that she’d said yes to Lazenby’s Bond wholly disqualified them.

  Two, what are you going to do about it?

  Bond o
ffered no answers.

  So instead he’d go Delta—make it up as he went along.

  Chapter 5

  Melissa hadn’t protested much when Richie steered her into the hotel’s restaurant for breakfast; she’d been famished.

  Any adrenaline that had carried her through the night had been spent by the time they’d reached the room. Eight hours of broken sleep in four days didn’t begin to cover it. Richie had tucked her in, kissed her on the nose, and she’d been out.

  Now she was awake, hungry again, and very frustrated. For one thing, she was alone in the room. For another, when she looked again, she was still alone in the room.

  Showered and dressed, she started with the restaurant, then the weight room. She finally found him under the shade of a cloth umbrella at the side of the short pool. A low cyclone fence with those plastic slats separated the bare cement from the parking lot packed with cars baking in the sun. A Coast Guard Jayhawk helo ripped by close overhead, masking any possible sound of her arrival or approach.

  Richie’s hair was still wet, as if he’d just been swimming laps.

  And he was gorgeous.

  Brain boys were not supposed to be gorgeous; it was against the rules. She’d come up to him from the side. He was intently studying the flight manual they’d been given. Okay, she’d feel guilty about that later. He wore scant swimming trunks and nothing else. A towel was draped over the back of the chair; his T-shirt was balled up on the table next to his sunglasses.

  One thin strip of cloth away from naked, it was easy to see that he was just as powerful as Chad in his own way. Muscle rippled across his shoulders as he turned a page. She could have traced out his leg muscles through the smooth skin. No knife slices, no bullet holes, his body was pristine and stunning. She was glad there weren’t any women lying in the half-dozen plastic loungers scattered around the pool—they’d have been all over him in a second.

  “Planning to stand out there in the sun until you burn to a crisp?” he asked as soon as the helicopter’s roar had diminished enough to be heard. She could see it banking hard to the south and moving off in a hurry. Just because Cuba was opening up didn’t mean that there weren’t still desperate refugees braving the crossing to Florida in crappy watercraft.

  He didn’t turn to her, but of course she couldn’t sneak up on a Delta even with the departing helo’s noise. He’d probably known the moment she’d walked through the hotel’s side door into the pool area.

  She would have had the roles been reversed.

  Wouldn’t she? Had she missed something in training?

  He reached out to tap his sunglasses resting on the table and she saw his-and-her tiny reflections in the curved surface. “Trick I learned from a SOAR pilot.”

  Okay, in the future, she’d know if he came up behind her.

  “Pretty slick, Slick.” Melissa circled around to the chair across the table from him but still in the wide umbrella’s shade. Two minutes standing in the afternoon sun and she could feel her brain cooking.

  He marked his place with a small piece of paper rather than dog-earing the page the way she would have, then slid on his sunglasses.

  “So, what have you learned?”

  “That you smile in your sleep.”

  “I’m just a happy gal.” Though Melissa did wonder what dreams she’d been having that she didn’t remember.

  “I didn’t know if you’d want lunch or breakfast.” He waved toward the door that had just opened behind him, despite his sunglasses no longer resting on the table to reflect his environment.

  She hadn’t heard the door open, but she’d seen it…which meant that Richie had seen her reaction to it. Twice slick, Slick.

  “So I ordered one of each. Asked them to serve it when you passed by.”

  “Out of the whole place, how would they know it was me?”

  “Easy. I told them to look for the most beautiful blond they’d ever seen.”

  Melissa tried to think of a good answer, but she still hadn’t by the time the waitress propped her big tray on the edge of the table.

  “Breakfast or lunch?” Richie asked as if he wasn’t messing with her brain at all. Which he totally was, intentionally or not.

  “Uh, breakfast.”

  The waitress set a big plate in front of her with an omelet, hash browns, and bacon. Coffee and orange juice.

  Richie was served a burrito about the size of his head and a massive lemonade.

  The waitress was gone and Melissa still felt like she sat in a fog. Q was no longer present at the table with her. Richie had somehow transformed into…himself, she supposed. But it was as if she didn’t recognize the handsome soldier even though she’d been admiring him plenty.

  “You actually told them that?”

  His smile was luminous. “Couldn’t think of a better way to describe you.”

  No arrogance. No cockiness. It was as if he was speaking simple truth, like laying out the known factors of an upcoming mission.

  “Richie?”

  “Yeah?” He dug into his burrito.

  “What the hell happened to you? Where’s my too-sweet genius boy?” Like he’d been hers to begin with.

  “I…” He blinked at her in surprise. “…don’t know. I never say stuff like that, do I? But it just came out. It’s true—and not like me at all.” He turned to look after the departed waitress and then back at her. “You’re doing strange things to me.”

  Rather than admit that he was doing strange things to her too, she changed the subject.

  “So”—she nodded toward the book that he was at least halfway through—“tell me what you learned.”

  And just that simply, he switched modes and did. The comfortable geek returned as she began working on her omelet—better than average for hotel fare. He told her about drag factors in single- versus dual-engine flight on a multi-engine aircraft. Induced versus parasitic drag trade-offs and varying P-factor forces.

  While he grew excited by what he’d learned and dove deeper and deeper into the tech material, the hard-bodied soldier didn’t disappear as he had back in Maracaibo.

  That his T-shirt was still bundled up on wire-mesh table next to his lemonade was allowing her an eyeful. And the suspicion that he would not have been quite so excited to explain this to anyone else gave her a charged feeling that she was unable to ignore.

  The more he continued in his rich, confident tone—comfortable in his role as analyst of information and teacher of knowledge—the more some long-forgotten girlie part of Melissa Moore—the museum carpenter living in her family’s houseboat—listened right alongside Melissa the Delta Force operator known as The Cat.

  Listened and was rapt.

  * * *

  “I talk too much, don’t I?” he asked as they rode the elevator back up to their room. It was a pretty standard hotel affair, dark-brown veneer paneling, a darkly mirrored ceiling so that the elevator didn’t look so small but average people didn’t freak out when they saw themselves standing there upside down in a small box apparently twice as tall, and a handrail for those less steady on their feet. Not a whole lot to look at other than the woman standing beside him. Richie couldn’t believe that he’d spouted off about multi-engine flight for close to two straight hours. He’d finally stopped when the sun had shifted toward setting into the Gulf, indicating they were due at the airfield soon.

  “For a Unit operator, probably,” Melissa answered.

  “Damn it!” Richie leaned back and pounded the back of his head against the wall of the elevator. “I’m sorry. I just get excited by something and… Chad’s always telling me to shut up. Though Kyle and Carla never seem to mind, I do sometimes catch them sharing one of those laughing looks. But I—”

  And Melissa turned to face him, clamped a hand onto the handrail on either side of him. She stood between his feet and used her grip to pull h
er body up against his. He still only wore his swimming shorts; despite the hotel’s chill air-conditioning, he’d continued to carry the T-shirt low by his waist, hiding the reaction his body had been having to her all afternoon.

  Now she leaned against him and there was no hiding anything. Not with the way her legs—that he’d very much admired because she’d been wearing shorts as well—rubbed against his. Not the way her breasts pressed against his chest through the thin cotton of her tan T-shirt. Though being military issue and therefore far thicker than the Aruba one, it still showed her off splendidly. One of the reasons he’d babbled for two straight hours about airplanes was so that he didn’t spend them staring at her breasts. Or her face. Or her eyes, once she’d shed her sunglasses.

  “Now might be a good moment to stop talking,” she murmured, their faces mere inches apart.

  The elevator dinged and he glanced up at the indicator above the door. “Eleven, that’s our floor.”

  She sighed and moved away, ready for the door to swish open.

  Talking too much again, Richie.

  So he grabbed her wrist, tugged her back against him, and, ignoring the door, kissed her hard. Kissed her the way he’d wanted to since the first moment he’d seen her.

  She didn’t even hesitate. She leaned into him and wrapped her arms around his neck.

  His own arms simply fit around her. No overreaching, no awkward gaps. Melissa fit in his arms as if custom-made to the lengths of his radius, ulna, and humerus bones.

  His hands too, from scaphoid to distal fingertips, cupped perfectly about her waist and cradled her upper vertebrae and cranial… He lost track of what he’d been thinking, simply lost in the taste and texture of her kiss, of the astonishing nerve signals sent by every instance of bodily contact between them.

  He’d always figured himself fated for some hometown girl in an unknown but distant future. Instead he was in Florida, kissing a Canadian turned Delta Force operator, whom he’d met in Venezuela. Richie didn’t know when his life had gotten so exotic, but he was enjoying every second of it.

  Melissa felt incredible, smelled better, and, he realized in the first few moments, was the best kisser he’d ever had the opportunity to assess.