He and Jordan had one of those relationships that seemed completely rock solid. I’d known him before he met her, had been there in Vegas the weekend they’d gotten together, and I’d never seen him as happy as he was with her. I didn’t doubt they’d both be great parents or that Burn was thrilled.
“So what’s the bad thing?”
“She’s fine and the baby’s fine, but it’s looking like the pregnancy might be bumpy. The medical situation here isn’t great and I’d really feel more comfortable if she was back home to have the baby. The Air Force won’t move her to Florida and she feels weird about staying at her parents’, so she’s planning on going back to my house in Oklahoma. I already talked to Easy and he’s moving out so she’ll just stay there, and I’ll take my mid-tour so I can be with her when the baby’s born.”
I felt bad for the guy. No man wanted to be separated from his wife, especially when she was pregnant and a newlywed, but I also didn’t blame him for his concerns about her staying overseas.
“Can I do anything to help?”
“Yeah, can you pick her up from the airport? I’d ask Easy, but he’s going TDY to Hill.”
“I’m in South Carolina right now, but I’ll be back in Oklahoma soon. When will she be flying in?”
“We haven’t booked it yet, but two weeks should work. We’re trying to finalize everything before she goes back.”
He sounded tired and beyond stressed.
“You know if there’s anything I can do to help while she’s in Oklahoma, I’m happy to.”
Burn and Easy had been roommates before he left for Korea, and Easy and Jordan had a friendship of sorts, but it had to be hard for Burn to know his wife would be so far away and it would be easier if she had a big support network in place.
“Thanks, man. I really appreciate it. Her family and her best friend are planning to come out and visit her, and I’ll be there for my mid-tour, but it’ll be nice to have the guys in the squadron to look after her. I really appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
This is what we all did for one another—we stepped up and filled the gaps when it was needed. That was one of the things that had drawn me to military life in the beginning; for a guy who hadn’t grown up with much of a family, having a group of people who always had my back meant the world.
“Did you hear about Dani?” Burn asked.
I felt a twinge at the sound of her name. Even though Dani, Joker’s widow, was around my age, she had been the unofficial “mom” to our rowdy group. I’d spent several holidays at their home; when she’d found out that people in the squadron didn’t have anywhere to go, she’d opened the doors to all of us, making us feel like we really were a part of their family.
She’d sent care packages on deployments, made cupcakes on birthdays, basically did everything she could to make our lives better and our jobs just a little bit easier. Joker had been one of the best guys I’d known and he’d been like an older brother to me; his wife was equally beloved.
When he died, we all stepped up as best we could to help out Dani. She went home to Georgia to spend time with her family, but we still occasionally traded e-mails. I didn’t know what to say to her, didn’t know how you helped someone through the magnitude of her loss, but I did the best I could to be there for her.
“Is she okay?”
“Yeah, she is. She and Jordan talked the other day and she mentioned that she’s coming back to Oklahoma.”
“Seriously?”
It had been several months since Joker died and she’d left right after the memorial service we’d had for him at Bryer.
“Yeah. She wants to get their house ready to go on the market and figure out her next step. She’s planning on arriving right before Thanksgiving.”
It would be good to see her again, and at the same time, there was always a tightness in my chest that appeared when I saw Dani, a guilt I couldn’t help but feel that I’d come home when her husband hadn’t. But whatever feelings I had about Dani’s return paled in comparison to the ones Easy would have.
“Does he know?”
There was no point in saying who “he” was. Easy had done a decent job of covering his feelings for Dani when Joker was alive, but considering everything we’d been through together, I could read Easy pretty fucking well.
“I haven’t told him.” Burn was silent for a beat. “How is he?”
“I don’t know. The same, I guess? We don’t talk about it or anything.”
“How are you?”
We were fighter pilots; we typically did not talk about emotional shit. So I had a pretty good feeling that someone had told him about my freak-out in the air.
“Let me guess, you talked to Loco?”
“He’s worried.”
“I have it under control.”
“Do you?”
No.
“Do you?” I countered.
He sighed. “I miss him. I still occasionally have dreams. But when I’m in the air, I keep that shit out. I have a wife, a baby on the way. I can’t risk getting fucked when I’m in the jet. It’s too dangerous for me and every single person in my formation.”
That was the worst part. It wasn’t just that my PTSD, or whatever the hell it was, was dangerous to me. It was the fact that I was putting the guys in my formation in danger, too.
“You going to talk to someone?” he asked.
“Come on. How well do you think that’s going to go over for my career?”
It was hard enough to get to the top; once you were there, you had to bust your ass to stay there, to keep a fighter spot, a Viper spot, when more guys were getting pulled out of the cockpit and sent to bullshit assignments. Something like this was an easy way to weed me out.
“I know, but think about how much worse it could be. You have to get your shit straight on your own or else you have to get help. You can’t just leave it and hope it’ll go away. It won’t.”
“I know.”
“How is it being back home?”
I grimaced. “Is there anything you and Loco didn’t talk about?”
“He didn’t know about the girl you left behind there.”
I’d totally forgotten about the night I’d told Burn about Becca. I’d been drunk and missing her, and it had all just tumbled out.
“Have you seen her yet?”
I groaned. “Are you trying to play matchmaker now that you’re married?”
He laughed. “Maybe. I’m just saying—it’s a hell of a lot easier to fight when you have something you’re fighting for.”
“Let’s just say I’m working on it, although I’m not sure how this one is going to play out. She hates my job and there’s a fuckload of baggage there.”
“Trust me, Jordan wasn’t wild about it, either, but you find a way to make it work.”
If only it were that easy.
“I gotta go, early brief, but if you ever need to talk, I’m here.”
“Thanks, man.”
He was one of those guys who’d definitely been tapped early on by the Air Force brass to go far. He was a patch—a graduate of the prestigious USAF Weapons School—and I didn’t doubt that he’d be a squadron commander someday in the not too distant future. He was also one of the best guys I knew.
“Thanks for the help with Jord. I’ll let you know when I have her flight info.”
“Sounds good.”
Burn was quiet for a beat.
“You’re there. I’m not. How badly is he going to take this Dani business?”
He and Easy had always been more brothers than friends.
“I honestly don’t know. He doesn’t talk about what happened—about her—at all really. He’s up to his usual routine; I’ve been out with him three times and he went home with two different girls. He could be totally fine and over it, or he could freak the fuck out.�
��
Burn sighed. “If he goes off the rails, let me know.”
“Copy.”
“Sometimes I feel like everyone’s fucking dad,” he grumbled.
I grinned. “It’s good practice. Stay safe.”
The call disconnected, but the smile lingered on my face, and I realized that as much as I’d enjoyed being home, as amazing as it had been to be with Becca, there had been a part of me that missed this, missed talking to my bros, to the guys I would give my life to protect. Ours was a small brotherhood, the bonds forged through a life spent on the edge, but more than anything, it was a family.
SIXTEEN
BECCA
We drove to the restaurant with the top down, Eric’s hand on my thigh, “Jack & Diane” blaring from the stereo speakers. When we were younger, little more than kids, we’d done this drive so many times in Eric’s beaten-up car, eager to escape the quiet of Bradbury. By most people’s standards, Columbia probably wasn’t considered a big city or anything, but to us it had been a whole other world, full of limitless possibilities.
Neither one of us had the greatest home lives, both of us ending up feeling more than a little alone, and Columbia had represented a fresh start for us, that first step toward building lives of our own.
I didn’t know if it was how much all of this felt like déjà vu or the fact that I’d grown up a bit, but it hit me, really hit me, how young we’d been back then. It hadn’t seemed like it—I’d been on my own for all intents and purposes for a long time at that point, but I’d still been figuring out who I was, what I wanted out of life. I’d thought otherwise, been so sure of my path, but now? Looking back, I realized how little I’d known about myself and life. And as much as it had hurt me at the time, a part of me couldn’t help wondering if I’d found a part of myself somewhere along the way when I lost Eric, a part I never would have found without that loss.
Eric’s hand drifted a little higher on my leg. “You okay tonight? You’re quiet.”
I turned and smiled at him, studying his face in profile. “Just enjoying the ride.” I hesitated, not wanting to spoil the mood with bringing up our past but, at the same time, failing at pretending with him. “I was remembering all the times we did this drive when we were younger.”
His lips curved, his attention turning from the traffic to look at me.
“We made this drive on our first date.”
I couldn’t believe he remembered that.
“You’re right, we did.”
I’d been so nervous that night. We’d officially met when I started tutoring him in English, although I’d known who he was before then. Everyone had. Our high school was small and we’d all grown up together, but Eric had been a year ahead of me. He was held back at the beginning of high school when his parents divorced and he started skipping school, so we ended up in the same grade.
After a couple weeks of sitting at a cramped table in the library, hunched together, he asked me out, which had been a pretty good thing considering I’d had a massive crush on him by that point and Middlemarch had been the last thing on my mind.
“You wore a blue dress with flowers and your hair was down.”
Shock filled me. I totally had. I still remembered going shopping for the dress with Lizzie after school, remembered when I’d nearly called the date off because I’d hated my hair and had so badly wanted everything to be perfect. I just couldn’t believe he remembered. It had been fifteen years.
“How do you remember that?”
“I remember everything about you.”
God, I didn’t know if I was ready for this. It hurt and yet his words tempted me until I wanted to cloak myself in them. In him.
“What else do you remember?”
“I remember that you take your coffee with skim milk, no sugar. That your favorite breakfast food is pancakes. You hate scary movies. Your favorite color is blue. If you could go anywhere in the world, you would go to Venice. You like bananas, but not banana-flavored things. Bizarrely enough, you like strawberry-flavored things, but not strawberries, because it’s a texture thing.”
I was either going to laugh or cry.
“You hate waking up in the morning. You love to read, especially romance novels because you’re always looking for a happy ending. You love your job because justice is its own form of happy ending. You’re not a big fan of cats, but you’re a sucker for dogs, the fluffier the better.” He shot me a smile I couldn’t quite read. “Do you want me to go on?”
I couldn’t have answered him if I wanted to; my words were frozen in my throat.
“You’re the most loyal person I’ve ever met, and when you do something, you don’t believe it’s worth doing unless you give it your all. You love fiercely, would die for the people you love, but the flip side is that you don’t forgive easily, and once someone breaks that bond, it’s tough to get back in.
“But if someone is lucky enough to be one of those people that you love, if they’re lucky enough to get just a moment of what you give, then they’d have to be a fucking idiot to do anything to jeopardize that. And if they were stupid enough, then they’ll do everything they can to get back what they lost because once someone’s had it, life without it is unimaginable.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“Pull over.”
“What?”
“Pull over,” I repeated, my voice and heart tight.
“Becca—”
“Just pull over.”
He slowed the car, and then he pulled over to the shoulder of the highway. The road between Bradbury and Columbia was mostly rural and there wasn’t a ton of traffic at this time of day—it was past rush hour and most people were home with their families.
I didn’t care.
I took off my seat belt.
“I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry—”
His words were cut off by my mouth, my lips, my tongue. I didn’t so much kiss him as I attacked him, every single word that had fallen from his lips building an ache inside me that had been a low-level hum since I’d left him this morning.
Getting dumped, especially getting dumped when you were engaged, made you question everything you thought you knew about your relationship. You wondered how you could be so stupid as to think you were in love, to imagine your relationship was one thing when it turned out it was actually very different. I’d run the gamut of self-doubt, analyzing so many moments of our past, wondering where I’d gone wrong and what mistakes I’d made.
So to hear things from Eric’s perspective—not just that he was sorry, but the fact that I hadn’t been just a phase in his life, that what we’d had together had meant something to him—well, it affected me. A lot.
And while I wasn’t sure I was ready for a big emotional discussion, while there was still a part of me that felt the need to keep my heart under lock and key, my lips didn’t get the memo.
So I kissed the hell out of him.
His lips parted beneath mine instantly, his hands gripping my hips, pulling my body closer to his. We couldn’t have sex—it wasn’t that remote—but I figured tongue was totally fine.
My fingers threaded through his hair, tugging his head toward me. I sucked on his lower lip, capturing it between my teeth, before moving down, kissing the line of his jaw, inhaling that masculine, woodsy scent that was as familiar to me as breathing.
Eric groaned. “You know we can’t have sex here, right?”
I grinned, pulling back to look into those gorgeous blue eyes. Gah. He really had an embarrassment of riches in the looks department.
“I know. Sorry, I couldn’t resist,” I said, not sorry at all.
I climbed off his lap, settling myself back in the passenger seat, rebuckling my seat belt with shaky hands.
His hands clutched the steering wheel, a pained expression on his face that I was pretty sure could be
attributed to the impressive bulge in his pants.
Yep, not even a little bit sorry.
“I’m guessing a blowjob is out of the question?” he asked.
I laughed. “While you’re driving?”
He gave me a hopeful look.
“Sorry.” I patted his leg inches away from where he wanted me to be. “But if you’re good, I’ll go down on you when we get home.”
He groaned. “You can’t give me that mental image and expect me to get through the night.”
“I don’t. I want you to be horny and miserable.” I grinned. “Kidding.” I reached out and ruffled his hair, unable to resist screwing with him a bit. He could be so cocky that it was difficult to turn down the opportunity to steal the upper hand on the rare times it presented itself.
“Well, now tonight definitely has something in common with our first date.”
I snorted. “Seriously?”
He grinned at me, that boyish charm taking another swipe at my resolve.
“Hey, like I said, I remember that blue dress very well. I spent half the night wondering if you were going to let me get under that short skirt.”
I made a face. “I definitely wasn’t going to put out on our first date.”
“I knew you weren’t. But I was a seventeen-year-old boy. I hate to break it to you, but ninety-nine point nine percent of the time my thoughts involved sex.”
“And now?”
He laughed. “I’ve grown up since then. Much better control.”
“Ninety-three percent?”
“More like ninety-five.” He gave me a wolfish grin. “In that dress? One hundred percent.”
“Just wait until you see what I’m wearing underneath,” I teased.
His head jerked toward me so quickly, I worried he’d have whiplash.
My lips curved. “Let’s just say I bought a few things at the sex shop.”
He groaned, his hands gripping the steering wheel more tightly. “Jesus, Becca.”
I leaned back in my seat, looking up at the sky, loving the rush of power, the knowledge that he would be thinking about us all night long.
Into the Blue (A Wild Aces Romance) Page 14
