An Honorable Woman

by Lindsay McKenna

  Lost in the explosions arcing through him as her mouth caressed his over and over again, Gus felt his control disintegrating. Alarmed, because he didn’t take Cam’s words to mean that she wanted to go “all the way” physically, he prayed that he was reading her right. Otherwise, he could botch this and send her running.

  Cradling her in his arms, Gus moved his mouth more slowly, sipping from her wet, warm lips. Laving her lower lip with his tongue, he covered her mouth with his, smiling against her. Cam was trembling. So was he. Savoring the weight of her arms around his neck, the pressure of her fingers opening and closing against his back, he absorbed her thirst for him. Feeling euphoric, he finally reached up and smoothed her hair away from her cheek.

  “You are so beautiful,” he whispered to Cam, their noses almost touching. Watching her eyes open, those long chestnut lashes flutter up to reveal her drowsy, desire-filled gaze, Gus gave a very male smile of appreciation.

  “You make me feel that way,” Cam whispered unsteadily. Just being in Gus’s arms was wonderful. “I’ve never felt how I do now, Gus. You make everything seem so right. So good.”

  His mouth curved ruefully as he traced her arched brow with his index finger. “That’s because we trust one another, querida. We’ve laid a good foundation, don’t you think? We’ve had time to get to know one another. We’ve talked a lot out here.” Gus lifted his head and glanced appreciatively around the quiet, darkened grove. Looking back down at Cam, he saw her mouth part and a soft smile touch the corners.

  “Yes…we have.”

  “I’m going to turn you around so you’re more comfortable,” he told her.

  Nodding, Cam eased away. Gus positioned her so that she was straddling the bench like him, her back against his chest, her head resting on his shoulder. When his arms went around her waist and captured her hands across her abdomen, Cam sighed.

  “Better?”

  “Much better.”

  “We’re not pretzels anymore.”

  Laughing softly, Cam looked up and drowned in his dark, narrowed eyes. “No…”

  “That’s for teenagers,” Gus chuckled. “At our age, comfort is better.”

  “Mmm, this is nice,” Cam agreed, and she sighed, feeling languorous and sated on so many levels. Moving her fingers across his clasped hands, she added, “I don’t know how you did it, Gus.”

  Holding her close, he pressed a kiss to her hair. “What, querida?”

  “Got me to trust you.” Cam frowned and traced his thick, hard knuckles with her finger. The back of his hand was darkly haired and silky.

  “It was easy,” Gus confided. “The first time I saw you, the doors of my heart just sprang open.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Kinda took me off guard.”

  “Because of the woman you loved and lost?”

  Nodding, Gus rested his cheek against hers, content just to have Cam in his arms like this. It was an unbelievable gift. His heart was still pounding in his chest, and his lower body was in knots of need, but he refused to allow his raging desire to affect this moment. Everything was perfect. Perfect. Cam was in his arms, trusting him, and maybe…loving him? Gus wasn’t sure about that. He did know that whatever they shared, it was mutual.

  “Yes, losing her ripped my heart out of my chest,” Gus said quietly. Feeling Cam’s hands tighten comfortingly around his own, he closed his eyes. “I’m still not right with it all, Cam. I’m scared, too, in a different way than you. But scared just the same.”

  Cam nodded. “I’m always amazed at how our fears stop us.” How wonderful it was just to be held by Gus, to be talking like this. She had been starved for such intimacy, she realized, for a long time. In part, Cam knew, the closeness of her women friends at BJS had filled that need in her. When she left for this assignment, however, she’d been cut off from that lifeline.

  Gus compressed his lips and he tasted Cam on them. Aching to love her, but knowing that wasn’t possible now, he said, “You fear trusting another man. I fear having a relationship with a woman in a dangerous profession again.”

  “You’re helping me get over my fear,” Cam told him softly as she grazed his hand with her fingers. Gus tightened his arms briefly around her in response.

  “And I’m getting to be friends with mine, too.”

  “Where does this leave us, Gus?”

  “Afraid but moving forward, I think,” he said, giving a short laugh.

  Nodding, Cam closed her eyes. “Yes, I feel the same.”

  Sighing, Gus murmured, “We just need to keep pacing ourselves with one another. And we need to keep talking. I’m not a mind reader and neither are you. The last thing I want to do, Cam, is misread you or assume. That can get us into hot water real fast. The last thing I want to do is shatter your growing trust in me.”

  “Just keep doing what you do so well, Gus.” She looked up and smiled at his very serious face. “You seem to have this sixth sense about me, what I need and when I need it. I’m in awe of it, to tell you the truth. I don’t trust myself in thinking I know you, or where you’re at, because I never could with the other men I was involved with, so I’m relying more on you than me. Does that make sense?”

  He gave her a one-cornered smile. “Yeah, it does, querida. It just puts more pressure on me to read you right the first time, though. I’m afraid I’m going to screw up with you…and that if I do, it will wreck what we have.”

  Cam shook her head. “No, Gus, it won’t. I’ve known you for a long time now, in a lot of very different and difficult situations, and you’ve been steady as a rock for me. Your morals and values, the way you treat me daily, have never changed, no matter what was happening around us.” Searching his eyes earnestly, Cam reached up with her hand and slid it along the curve of his jaw. “I trust you—with my life. Just know that, okay? I trust you, Gus.”

  Those were words he’d prayed to hear. At the same time, as he caught her hand and pressed it against his cheek, they scared him even more. Unwilling to call what they shared love, because it was just too much for him to grasp at this time, Gus whispered, “I’ve always trusted you, Cam. You hold my life, my heart in your hands, whether you know it or not.”

  “I didn’t know that, Gus.” She sighed deeply. “I’m so inept at reading men.”

  “You’re innocent,” Gus said in a hushed tone, pulling her hand from his cheek and placing a slow, warm kiss on her palm. “Don’t be hard on yourself. Innocence is forgivable in my book.”

  Her palm tingled deliciously as he rested his lips against it. Every fiber within her screamed to make love with Gus, but Cam knew it wasn’t time. At least, not yet.

  “I’ve never thought of myself as an innocent,” she said, humor tingeing her tone.

  “Well, you are in my eyes,” Gus said, pressing a second kiss to her palm.

  “You’re wonderful, Gus,” and Cam smiled up at him, into his deeply shadowed face, carved with the harsh lines of life. “Thank you for everything tonight….”

  “Even the cream puffs?” He chuckled. Gus knew their time was drawing to a close. He knew Cam had to get back to her office and stay alert in case the Apache crew needed her help.

  “Especially the cream puffs,” she said, laughing softly. As Gus lifted her hand and kissed the back of it, she felt giddy. Effervescent and free.

  “Hmm, I wonder if they’re really aphrodisiacs in disguise. I should bring them to our next secret meeting in the grove.”

  Cam sat up and turned toward him, laughing fully. “Gus Morales, you are an incredible man.” She placed her hand against his heart. Growing serious, she met his hooded gaze. “I don’t know what life will throw at us, but I want you to know this—I’m in it for the long haul with you. I don’t want a one-night stand. I’m not built that way and I think you know it. I want the time to get to know you. I want to laugh with you. Cry with you. I want to talk, and share life with you.”

  Pressing his hand to hers, Gus said in a rasping, emotional voice, “Cam, we wa
nt the same thing. Only our lives aren’t our own here. Not really. We’re going to have to make precious hours like this one happen when we can.”

  Nodding, Cam whispered, “Let’s make them happen, Gus. For both of us.”

  Chapter 13

  “Nasty night out,” Gus grumbled as he leaned down, frowning at the green HUD screens in front of him. Cam was flying the Apache over the harsh, high desert in northern Mexico, roughly a hundred miles south of the Texas border.

  Cam gripped the controls, trying to keep the Apache on course despite the rain and wind whipping them around. “Yeah, our first time together on a night flight in over a month and we get this.”

  The darkness was complete except for lightning bolts that sizzled cloud-to-cloud around them, or danced toward the earth. A U.S. Army radar balloon tethered at the border and floating three hundred feet off the earth, had detected two aircraft, one fixed wing and the other a helicopter, coming in over a well-known drug route. BJS2 had been called to intercept them.

  At five thousand feet, the Apache strained and bobbled as Cam hit one jolting air pocket after another. Sweat stood out on her brow. She had her nightscope, which was hinged on the right side of her helmet, positioned beneath her right eye, allowing her to see objects out there in the darkness. It was a necessary piece of high-tech equipment. With her other eye she continued to monitor the instrument panel in front of her. The soothing green color served to calm her heightened sense of anxiety somewhat. Cam didn’t have a good feeling about this mission, but she said nothing to Gus. After all, it was only an intuition she had, and so far, nothing had confirmed it.

  “I hate thunderstorms. They destroy our night vision capability,” she groused. Sitting in the upper cockpit, with Gus below her, separated from her by an armor-plated wall, Cam pushed the nightscope away with her gloved hand. It was useless with lightning dancing around them. They had to fly through the edge of the huge storm in order to reach the validation point where they’d intersect their targets.

  “I can see why,” Gus agreed. Peering at the HUDs, he saw the two aircraft approaching from the right. “I’ve got ’em painted on the screen.” He placed his gloved index finger on the television-screen image in front of him. “One’s a Cessna 150 and the other is a Bell helicopter, according to the identification.”

  “Helluva night for either of those Tinkertoys to be out here,” Cam said. “They must have a lot of coke on board to risk flying in a storm like this.”

  “Yeah,” Gus said grimly, “a 150 is too light to withstand violent up-and-down drafts. If that pilot is in the wrong place at the wrong time, he’ll get smashed into the desert below, like a fly hit by a flyswatter.”

  Chuckling, Cam said, “The flyswatter being a nasty downdraft that pushes him to the ground before he knows what hit him.”

  “Well, as we know, druggies will do anything, fly in any kind of weather or circumstances, to get drugs across the border.”

  Grimly, Cam turned the Apache to the south on an intercept course as Gus called out the coordinates. “It’s bad out here tonight. Those pilots have got to be sweating it out, too,” she muttered.

  “They’re at fifteen hundred feet and going lower. They sure don’t want to remain on radar very long.”

  Cam knew that drug-running pilots were well aware of the radar balloons placed at certain points along the U.S.-Mexico border. The balloons were a first-warning line of defense to pick up their approach. Drug pilots tried to fly beneath the reach of radar, sometimes as low as fifty feet above the ground, or what was referred to as “nap of the earth flying.” It was dangerous at any time. Especially dangerous tonight, given the turbulence caused by the storm.

  “Uh-oh, they’re turning west. I think they’re trying to avoid this storm altogether.”

  “Right,” Cam agreed grimly, easing the Apache downward to intercept them. “They’d have to. This storm would kill ’em and they know it.”

  “Okay, they’re both hugging the earth. One thousand feet. Twenty miles ahead. We’re going out of our box.”

  “That’s okay.” The “box” was an area they normally flew in on a known drug route. They would often fly Bravo or Alpha box, specific latitude and longitudes, in a rectangular flight pattern at five thousand feet, hoping to intercept a drug flight coming north. Gus would have to notify the base back at Tijuana that they were moving out of the box now. That way, military personnel would know where they were located in case they had engine trouble and had to go down. Rescue teams would know what their last location coordinates had been.

  Looking around, Cam saw the roiling, cauliflower-shaped clouds light up for a second above them. Right now, even with the jostling they were experiencing in the storm’s turbulence, they were still safer in the Apache than those two pilots were in their lightweight aircraft. Her heart was pounding a little, and anxiety enveloped her. Cam didn’t like storms, didn’t like flying anywhere near them. Akiva and Joe’s Apache had been struck by lightning and suffered severe software damage on their last mission, and she had no wish to be placed in the same position.

  “They’re outta the storm’s reach,” Gus said, following the radar images on the HUD, “and going down to five hundred feet.”

  “What’s the terrain under us like?” Cam asked. This was territory they’d never flown over before. But fortunately, the Apache’s state-of-the-art equipment gave them a good look at the terrain.

  Gus chuckled darkly. “Brutal. My people’s land. My mother was born about fifty miles east of here. It’s high desert, very dry with lots of canyons and caves. It’s not hospitable. No water.”

  “Nice place to visit but not live in,” Cam said, smiling tightly. Her eyes narrowed as she continued to sweep her gaze over the instrument panel. In the dark, a pilot could get vertigo. Especially with lightning causing havoc with her eyes and brain. It was more important than ever for her to watch her instruments and trust them. Guiding the Apache swiftly downward, she saw that they would intercept the other aircraft in a matter of minutes.

  “Right on,” Gus said. Reaching for his night-vision binoculars, he waited as Cam placed the Apache in position to get a positive identification of the two aircraft. The first thing they had to do was get close enough, without giving away their position, to retrieve the numbers on each aircraft’s fuselage. Then Gus would type them into his computer and send a request to the Federal Aviation Agency’s computers in Washington, D.C., to find out if either of the other pilots had filed a flight plan. Every plane was required to have one, especially if crossing from one country’s airspace to another’s. Aircraft without flight plans were very likely drug runs.

  The registry of the plane, and the owner’s name, would pop up on Gus’s HUD as well. Those names would be cross-referenced with the FBI database in D.C., which held a list of pilots known to fly drugs. A match there—a frequent occurrence—confirmed it was a drug run. If there was no match, but the plane had been involved in other suspected drug flights—even searched and found clean—that info, too, would pop up on his screen.

  All they needed, however, was a thumbs up from D.C. to confirm there was no flight plan. That meant they could go to work and force the pilot to land at the nearest airport, where Mexican soldiers could apprehend and search the plane.

  “This is strange,” Cam muttered. “Two aircraft flying together? You’d think they’d realize that two make a bigger dot to be picked up on the radar screen.”

  “Yeah,” Gus said. With the turbulence so bad, he held the binoculars in his lap, gripped in both hands to prevent them from flying around the cockpit and injuring him. “Makes me wonder if they’re really drug flights….”

  Shrugging, Cam said, “I don’t know. If they are, this is a new tactic, and we need to be super alert.”

  “It’s odd that one’s fixed wing and the other’s a helo. Usually it’s one or the other.”

  “A lot of things aren’t adding up on this miserable night,” Cam muttered. They were less than a mile f
rom the fleeing plane and helicopter now. She would bring the Apache closer, without lights on so that they wouldn’t be detected, and Gus would get the numbers on the fuselage by looking through the night-vision binoculars. At least that was the plan.

  “Druggies are always tryin’ new things,” Gus stated. They were within a half mile of the fixed-wing craft. Turning in his seat, the harness biting into his shoulders, he lifted the binoculars to his eyes. Even in the rain, he’d be able to read the numbers. “Stay the course, I’ve got ’em sighted, Cam….”

  Using all her flight skills, she held the Apache as steady as possible. For the most part, they were out from under the storm cloud, and the wind was lessening. That made it easier to fly the gunship and she was grateful. Rain was still falling, but conditions weren’t as bad as before.

  “Steady…” Gus murmured. “Steady…I got ’em!”

  Cam grinned, hearing the crow of triumph in his voice. Within seconds, Gus had typed in the numbers and sent them on for verification.

  “Bingo!” he said shortly. “It’s a Javier Rios flight, a drug lord from southern Mexico.”

  “Excellent,” Cam said with a short, tense laugh. “Akiva and Joe must be doing a good job down there. He’s been sending more and more flights north to avoid interdiction by them over the Gulf of Mexico, where Akiva and Joe’s black ops base is located.”

  Before Gus could answer, he saw something on his HUD that made his eyes go wide.

  “Rocket! Rocket being fired at us!” he yelled. Disbelievingly, he saw the helicopter, which was half a mile behind them now, firing—at them!