Hotshot

by Jo Leigh

  On the other hand, he’d offered to quit the F-35.

  16

  LUKE WATCHED, WAITED, his heart pounding faster than it should. He’d been too late and too far away to hear what had gone down, but the moment Sara’s uncertain gaze met his, a rush of dangerous emotions swept through him, threatening to throw him off course. He’d done what he’d needed to do to save her career, protect her from humiliation and disgrace. He loved her. Even if she kicked him to the curb. Even if she never smiled at him again.

  “What the hell, Luke?”

  He had to be careful now, as careful as he’d been in the mountains in Afghanistan. The wrong move could spell disaster. He couldn’t kiss her, not yet, although, God, how he wanted to. “We’ll talk,” he said. “Not here.”

  She nodded, walked past him to the elevator, pressed the button. They stood maybe a foot apart, but Luke felt as if there was a vast chasm between them. It wasn’t only confusion in her eyes, but anger. Understandable. Sara had told him to leave it, that she’d handle the situation. She most likely assumed he’d interfered because he believed he could do a better job of it. Completely logical, utterly wrong.

  Sara was nothing short of amazing. She could handle anything in her path. But this was his fight.

  They remained silent during the walk to her room. He tried not to look at her at all. She was in uniform, he wore his flight suit, they were in public. The lesson of the week had sunk in to what Alf called his unbelievably thick skull, and Luke wouldn’t take Sara’s nearness for granted again. The pull, though, was as strong as a riptide.

  Once they arrived at her room, she checked that they were alone in the hallway at the same time he did, then opened the door. Like the fine officer she was, she held the door open for him, locked it carefully once he was inside.

  When she turned to him, there was more going on in the arch of her brow, the small frown and the sadness in her eyes than he’d prepared for. Misgiving, confusion, indecision: he could read the litany of his failings in her sigh. Luke struggled for the words, where to begin. When she had to turn her gaze away, he realized words wouldn’t cut it.

  It was instinct, or maybe just plain need that made him pull Sara into his arms. That made him kiss her as if his life depended on it. She had to know this, first. That he loved her. More than he loved his wings, more than he’d ever loved himself.

  Something must have gotten through because, after a terrifying moment, she melted against him, and there was nothing confusing now. Nothing but heat and yearning and honesty. Whatever happened, he had this. Sara in his arms, on his tongue, underneath his hands.

  He’d never told her he loved her. Not in all the years they were together. He’d avoided the word as if it were a curse, a life sentence. A bigger damn fool had never been born.

  Sara pulled back, shifted her hands to his chest. “Luke. Wait.”

  It hurt, but he stepped away.

  “I don’t even know…” she said, more to herself than him. She cleared her throat. “What happened? What did you do?”

  “I couldn’t let her hurt you,” he said. “It was my fault. All of it. No way I was going to make you pay.”

  Sara’s soft fingers went to his lips, at war with the steel in her gaze. “Tell me what happened. Not why.”

  Luke held her gaze. “I asked her to back off. Told her Graves wouldn’t take kindly to an official complaint.”

  Sara crossed over to the bed. She removed her cap, undid her tab tie and the top button of her blouse. “I need specifics. You stepped way over the line tonight, we both know that. From the way Van Linn behaved, you had to have threatened her somehow. I’m trying to make sense of it. Why did you tell her you’d give up the F-35?”

  “Because it was true. I didn’t think it would come to that, but she had to understand. So I told her.” He watched Sara rub the back of her neck. He wanted to take over, rub her neck, ease her pain, but the next move was hers.

  “So you said you’d leave the tour, but that obviously didn’t satisfy her,” Sara said, studying him as she worked things out. “What did? What did you say?”

  “I told her if she didn’t tear up the report, I’d call Graves and cop to everything. That the tour was important to him, and that he thought I was important to its success. That she was acting out of jealousy, and I’d make sure Graves knew it”

  “And?”

  He sighed. He’d never been good with confessions. “She threatened to go over Graves’s head.” He’d meant to tell Sara the next bit under very different circumstances. “What she didn’t know, what no one knows, is that I’m being awarded the Air Force Cross. There’ll be a lot of publicity around it. The ceremony is in three weeks, after the tour. She realized she couldn’t fight that.”

  Sara stared at him, astonished. “The Air Force Cross? That’s… Why the hell didn’t you tell me? It’s about the crash, isn’t it? Oh, my God, what happened out there?”

  He had no idea why it unnerved him to talk about it. Maybe because that had been his fault, too. Or maybe because it still hurt so much. But it was time. Not just because of the Van Linn situation, but because he needed her to know. Not about the medal; that was nothing. But about how the crash had changed everything. He needed her to help him make sense of it.

  He sat next to her on the bed and took her hand in his.

  SARA WAS STARTLED by the coldness of Luke’s palm, the stark fear in his eyes. Van Linn and everything about her disappeared, leaving only Luke and what had happened to him in the Sandbox. She’d known it had changed him, but seeing his expression, the pallor of his skin, she got an inkling of just how bad it had been. “It’s okay. Never mind. You don’t have to tell me, Luke.” She touched his face. “You don’t.”

  He swallowed and leaned into her touch. He smiled a little, seemed more confident. He drew her hand away from his cheek, and squeezed it. “I want to,” he said. “I’d never been so scared in my life.” The quaver in his voice made her tear up, but she didn’t want to cry. He needed her to be strong now.

  “I didn’t see it in time. I thought it was an engine problem. When I had figured it out, there was nothing I could do. I signaled, rode her down as far as I could, then ejected.”

  He smiled at her, a quick, embarrassed grin, then went back to studying their clasped hands. “So it was just me and Alf, in the mountains, middle of the night, surrounded by Taliban insurgents. Where we landed wasn’t the best extraction site. We had to move into position. It was hairy, let me tell you. I could hear the enemy at night, hear them sneeze, hear them laugh. But the mountains bounced the sounds around, so it was hard to say where they were.”

  She brushed her thumb over a tiny patch of skin on the back of his palm.

  “I dreamt about you. Crazy timing, but—” He looked up at her again, his pupils huge in his wide eyes.

  She shifted closer to him, aching for how frightened he’d been. He’d changed, yes, but an admission like this still came hard to such a proud man.

  “Sometimes I talked to you,” he whispered. “Planned to talk to you, at least, tell you things I didn’t want to tell anyone else. One day, I’d think, one day we’d get together. It wasn’t until I was out there in a dark so deep it was like drowning that things got clear in my head. I’d screwed up. With you. I’d walked away from the best thing that had ever happened to me.”

  Sara’s chest constricted and the tears broke through. She didn’t dare move or look away. This wasn’t like his apology. What he was offering her now was his soul.

  “It took us a while to get out.” His voice broke. The silence felt heavy, as if the dark memories had physical weight.

  “You don’t have to do this, Luke. I know it’s painful.”

  His head dropped onto his chest and for a long moment he just breathed. Finally, he said, “The thing was, I ejected fine. Alf had gone before me, and I knew how far I’d have to backtrack to find him. He was right where I assumed. But his chute—” He pressed his lips together for a few se
conds. “His chute got caught weird on a rock. He didn’t have the right traction to get himself out.”

  He stared at her, the tragedy written on his face hard to take. He was reliving his helplessness, and Sara had nothing to offer him. Maybe listening was all she was meant to do. God, she didn’t know.

  She gave him a watery smile. “But you got to him.”

  He blinked. Took a deep shuddering breath as he slowly shook his head. “I was too late.”

  All the air left Sara’s lungs. Had she misunderstood? He’d talked about Alf as if… “Luke, I’m sorry, I’m confused.” Her pulse quickened with a nameless fear. “Alf came home with you, didn’t he?”

  A small smile chased the haunted look from his eyes, but only for a second. “He did.”

  God, this was crazy. “I still don’t…”

  “His older brother had gone down in Iraq two years before. They never found his body. Alf was the last child. I gave him my word I’d get him home no matter what. He was a hell of a WSO. The best guy I knew. He shouldn’t have died that way. I shouldn’t have waited so long to eject.”

  So many thoughts collided in her head, so many unanswered questions. It was hard to think, hard to process everything he’d told her.

  But now she understood about the medal. The Cross was the highest honor in the air force, awarded for extraordinary heroism in combat. When Luke said it was hairy, what he meant was that he’d had to engage the enemy. He’d fought his way out, carrying the body of his friend each step of the way.

  She swiped the tears from her eyes so she could see him. She’d known Luke as a boy. Now she knew him as a man, forged by fire, strengthened by pain. God. “Luke…”

  He put his free hand on her cheek, brushed his thumb across the track of her tears, comforting her.

  “I talked to him the whole week. It kept me sane. I told him I was still in love with you,” he said, and she forgot how to breathe. Then he gave a slight shrug. “I don’t know if it was even true, not at the time. So much had happened. But I know now,” he said, his eyes brimming with emotion. “I love you, Sara. More than I thought I was capable of. I was stupid and reckless with you once. Never again. You’re the one for me. You’ve always been the one for me.”

  Sara kissed him. Her tears kept coming, wetting her cheeks and now his, but she didn’t care. She ached for his loss, for his terror, but he loved her and that filled her heart with a stab of pure joy, because, God, it was as if all the dreams she’d never dared to dream had come true.

  He pulled her close, his kisses sweet and hot and desperate. She moaned as he cupped her neck, as his fingers found the pins in her hair.

  “Luke,” she whispered as she shifted her lips, tasting his lips, his love.

  “I love you,” he said, again.

  “Wait.” She pulled back, and he followed, but she made him stop. Made him look at her. “I love you,” she said. “You hear me? I love you.”

  He nodded, but his gaze skittered away. She’d known he wouldn’t believe her. Because she knew him as he’d been. “Sweetie. Look at me.”

  He breathed in, shaking. He let go of her hair. The left half of her twist fell onto her shoulder. He still kept his palm on her neck. No pressure, just trembling as if the next minute would change the rest of their lives.

  “Who you’ve become astonishes me,” she said. “What you did for Alf makes me proud. Why you did it makes me love you more than I ever did before. You’ve always been the one, even when we weren’t ready for each other. I’m ready for us now. I believe you are, too.”

  He swallowed hard. Closed his eyes and breathed deeply twice. When he looked at her again, his gaze was steady and a little damp. “I want you in every way possible,” he said, his voice wrecked and gorgeous. “It’s not going to be easy. You’re going to Randolph and I’m going to end up at Hill, but I don’t care. If it’s too much, I’ll get a transfer. I can fly anything. As long as you’re with me, I don’t care what.”

  She felt dizzy, and the only thing that could steady her was touching him. She pressed her hand to his chest, felt his heartbeat through his flight suit. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “I have no doubt we can make it work.”

  He nodded. “Okay,” he said, letting her nape go to capture her hand. “I want you tonight. I want you to hold me. To make love with me. I need to be inside you. I want to hold you as we fall asleep, wake up to you first thing in the morning. I want to make you happy for the rest of your life. Starting now.”

  Sara smiled as she reached for the zipper of his flight suit. “Duly noted. Now, kiss me, flyboy.”

  Epilogue

  Eighteen months later…

  THE F-35 WAS STILL IN TESTING, only at Edwards Air Force Base in California instead of Hill AFB in Utah. It was a chilly afternoon as mile upon mile of desert spread around the landing field.

  Sara’s gaze focused on a speck in the sky, a tiny blip that could have been anything, but she knew better. That was her man, in his jet, and he was coming in for a landing.

  They hadn’t seen each other in three weeks. She was still stationed at Randolph, about to start another road show, this time in the Midwest. Ten weeks of nonstop talks, job fairs, junior colleges, universities and radio spots. But this time, they were using her playbook.

  Sadly, Luke wasn’t one of her speakers. He’d been working with the new plane, taking it through its paces as the slow wheels of the Joint Strike Task Force rolled. But he was thrilled to be a member of the very elite team. They were lucky to have him.

  Of course she wished she could see him more often. But there were benefits to him being a super pilot. He managed to come to her a lot more frequently than she got to him, and every time they saw each other it was an explosion.

  She had loved him back in college, but that had been kid stuff, love with training wheels. Now they were… Well, there was a lot to be said for growing up, despite the difficulties. They had a trust between them that couldn’t have come from anything but hard-fought battles and lessons painfully learned.

  The speck was growing in the pale blue sky. The clouds were few and wispy, as if they didn’t want to compete with the slick aerodynamics of the next-generation fighter jet. As Luke flew toward her, her heart rate climbed, the anticipation filled her with enough kinetic energy to light a building. She missed him.

  They spoke every day, no matter what. They’d never gone three weeks without each other, even when he’d been in the classroom at Eglin, learning his jet from the inside out. Those visits had been odd, but good. Both of them working pretty much straight through, except for bedtime. But what bedtimes they were.

  Now it looked like a plane. A small one, but getting larger as it traveled at supersonic speed, and it felt as if he was racing toward her. They had an entire weekend ahead of them in a sweet little motel just outside of Lancaster.

  One minute, it was like something in a movie, something made of magic and metal, and the next the noise could drown out thunder. The very air shimmered in awe.

  A perfect landing. Grinning like a lunatic, she watched his canopy until she could make out the man. She stepped away from the borrowed jeep, even though she knew she had to wait once more for Luke to come to her.

  The moment the canopy went up, her heart surged and so did her body, leaning, always leaning toward him. That never stopped.

  He climbed out of his jet, whipped off his helmet, then paused until he spotted her. His smile made her fall in love all over again.

  He wasn’t walking slowly, it just felt that way. She maintained her dignity because she was in uniform. But watching him in that damn flight suit, with his helmet under this arm and his hungry grin made her want to leap into his arms and never let go. Unfortunately, they weren’t alone. Not by a long shot. Each and every test flight of this new plane was monitored by dozen of people outside and in, on computers and cameras and satellites. It was a very big deal, and she was a guest, an outsider.

  She didn’t expect Luke to walk righ
t past the first wave of support personnel, and certainly not the second. But he did. He ignored every call and every look except hers. Then his arm was around her and she was swept off her feet into a kiss that scorched the tarmac.

  Finally, when the need for air became an issue, he let her down gently, but kept her attention with a look that made her tremble. “Marry me,” he said.

  Whatever had been on the tip of her tongue vanished along with her breath. “What?”

  “Marry me. I don’t know where we’ll be, or what’s gonna happen. What’s more, I don’t care. I love you, and I don’t want to wait. Marry me, Sara. You’re the goddamn love of my life, and I don’t want to go another week without you being mine.”

  She gripped his arm so tight it had to hurt, but she was dizzy from his words and how he meant them. “Okay,” she said, her voice as wobbly as her knees. “I don’t think we can do it before next week—”

  “There’s a plane leaving tomorrow morning at 0600 taking us straight to Nellis. A car will meet us there and get us registered, and we’ll get hitched on Sunday.”

  “Excuse me? When did you do all this? You’ve barely had time to sleep for the last three weeks.”

  His grin changed. “O’Malley might have had something to do with it.”

  Her mouth opened, but Luke brushed her cheek and she forgot about everything but him, and what they were about to do.

  “He also gave me the name of a jeweler in Vegas,” he said.

  She touched his chest, anxious to find some privacy so they could really celebrate. “Don’t you have to report in?”

  He looked at the coterie of uniformed personnel and civilians waiting to get to work, then back to her. “Yeah.” His kiss this time started out fierce, then gentled. “You wait right here, Sara Weston. I’m coming back for you. I will always come back for you.”

  GOING FOR IT