One of the Boys

by Merline Lovelace

  Jake could see his arguments weren’t getting past her hurt and anger. His own feelings were still raw enough that he acted without thinking. Whipping out an arm, he yanked her forward and bent her backward with the force of his kiss. She clutched at his shoulders to keep from toppling over. For a long, heart-stopping moment she clung to him, then reached back a sandaled foot to whack him in the shins.

  Jake took the hit with a grunt. Tilting her farther off balance over his arm, he slid his other arm under her knees and gathered her high against his chest. Over her squirming, indignant objections, he carried her in through the patio doors and down the short hallway to her bedroom.

  Bedsprings bounced in noisy protest when he unceremoniously dropped her, then followed her down. Maura’s breath left with a whoosh as Jake sprawled on top of her, making no effort to cushion his weight. She wedged her hands between their bodies to push at his unyielding mass, but he wrapped one arm tightly around her waist, leaving her no room to maneuver.

  Jake stared down at her wide, luminous eyes and for the first time in their acquaintance, he couldn’t read her expression. He sensed it was a combination of anger, hurt and something else, something he couldn’t define. He held her, waiting. She said nothing for long, tense moments.

  “Do you really love me?” she ground out at last.

  “I love everything about you.”

  “All I can say, McAllister, is that you’ve got a hell of a way of showing it.”

  Her tone still carried a distinct note of belligerence, but some of the stiffness went out of the body under his. Relieved and determined, Jake gathered her even closer.

  “Listen to me, Maura. You fill my heart with laughter and my life with color. I didn’t know how to tell you before. Hell, I didn’t even know myself how much you’ve become part of me.”

  He punctuated his words with tiny, sucking kisses that covered her eyelids, her nose, her lower lip. With a long, shuddering sigh, Maura let go of the fury that had gripped her since he’d arrived.

  “Oh, Jake, are you sure? We’re so different. How can you love me?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. And we’re not that different. We both like mullet,” he reminded her, his mouth kicking up. “And we have a lifetime to discover what else we both enjoy.”

  A slow, tremulous smile spread across Maura’s face and erased the lingering doubt in her eyes.

  “Well, I know of at least one other small pleasure we both enjoy.”

  Jake met her grin with a relieved one of his own. The stress of the last traumatic days receded, replaced by a different tension. Blood surged into his lower body, hardening him against Maura’s pelvis. Groaning, he buried his face in the dark warmth of her neck.

  She had a taste uniquely her own, a combination of tangy femininity and sweetness. His nostrils caught the faint, lingering scent of her perfume, something fresh and flowery. Jake covered her breast with his hand and kneaded the soft flesh hungrily. When the nipple peaked under his palm, he slid down her body until he could take her breast in his mouth. Through her T-shirt, he teased and suckled and nipped.

  Maura writhed in his arms, glorying in his seductive hands and mouth. Tendrils of her hair caught on the sharp metal wings pinned to his chest. When she tried to lift her head for his kiss, her hair tugged painfully.

  Surveying the way she was tethered, Jake grinned. “I’m sure Freud would have something very profound to say about this.”

  “I’m not sure about Freud, but I can tell you what it means to me.” Maura gave him a slow, languorous look that made his heart thud painfully. “It means you’d better get undressed. Fast.”

  Much later, they lay wrapped in each other’s arms and watched the moonlight spill through the low windows to dance along the cardboard boxes stacked along the far wall. Replete, relaxed, content to simply stroke the damp stretch of back and derriere curled at his side, Jake listened sympathetically to her whispered recount of the day’s events. Their loving had taken the hostility, but not all of the hurt, from her voice.

  “It was awful, Jake. By the time they finished with their questions, even I thought my answers were suspicious.”

  She propped herself up on one hand and stared down at him. Her hair formed a soft, silky curtain around them. “They implied I left my last job under a cloud and was out to get even or something.”

  “Well, not everyone would voluntarily chuck a six-figure income to become a civil servant,” he commented.

  “I wasn’t happy there.”

  “You don’t have to explain anything to me. Whatever you did, for whatever reasons, they were right—for you.”

  “Thank you…I think. I want to explain. It’s not that mysterious, just private.”

  Tracing the line of his jaw with one finger, she searched for the right place to begin.

  “I went to work for Lockheed right out of graduate school. Those years working in advance concepts were more exciting than I could have imagined. I was right in the middle of all the action and loved every minute of it.”

  She paused, staring down at his mouth as if mesmerized.

  “A couple of years ago I started dating a brilliant financial wizard. Brian did the cost estimates on one of our proposals. I thought we were in love, and Brian thought we made the ultimate, up-and-coming professional couple. He had ambitious plans for our future. When he got promoted to corporate level, he convinced me to accept a management job, and we celebrated by getting engaged. I knew I wasn’t right for that position, but to please Brian, I gave it my best. I even got another promotion. Can you imagine me as a corporate VP?”

  Jake gave her hair a tug. “Well…”

  “I hated it. I hated the political infighting and one-upmanship. I itched to get back to hands-on engineering the whole time. That’s what I was trained for, that’s what I love.”

  She folded her hands on his chest and propped her chin on them. Her hazel eyes held a remembered pain and self-disgust that made Jake itch to take a fist to the bastard who’d put it there.

  “I don’t know how I ever fooled myself into thinking Brian and I could make a go of it. He was fun and full of energy, but so focused, so ambitious. He found us a condo in just the right neighborhood and filled it with lots of neon sculpture and stainless steel. He began suggesting what clothes I should wear to work. He even wanted to get rid of Bea, for heaven’s sake.”

  Jake silently revised his opinion of her discarded fiancé. The guy had at least one redeeming quality. Maura’s next words, however, wiped all thoughts of the man out of his mind.

  “That’s why I resisted you for so long. You’re a lot like Brian. The air force is your life. You’re on your way up, and I don’t see someone like me fitting into the pattern all laid out for you.”

  Abruptly Jake shifted, reversing their positions, pressing her down into the rumpled bedcovers. He leaned over her and measured each word clearly, carefully.

  “I love you, Maura. I don’t want you to ‘fit in’ anywhere. You’re too unique, too precious, to just fit in. We’ll create our own patterns.”

  Smiling, Jake made the ultimate sacrifice.

  “I’ll even learn to tolerate that misbegotten hunk of fur you call a cat.”

  Maura’s mouth opened with an indignant defense of her faithful companion. Before she could speak a word, Jake covered her lips with a kiss that demanded as much as it promised.

  Three days later, Jake sat in the office of the center’s commander. Big, tough, with shuttered eyes that gave away nothing of his thoughts, Major General Palladino listened impassively while Special Agent Thompson finished briefing the assembled group.

  “So there’s no doubt the faulty code came from this end?”

  “No, sir. Headquarters had a team of five of the air force’s top engineers review the complete series of designs, from the project’s inception.”

  General Palladino’s bushy black brows drew together. Jake sat in stony silence, as coldly furious as the general that one of their own could be re
sponsible. Palladino swiveled in his massive leather chair to pin Jake with a hard look.

  “And you believe the intent was not to damage the Stealth, but to cause the missile to drop outside the target zone?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why?”

  Jake leaned forward, meeting the general’s gaze with a steady one of his own. He’d done a lot of thinking, a lot of agonizing, over the motivation behind the suspected sabotage.

  “After one failure early in the project, we had several spectacular successes. We know this modification will double the internal payload of the Stealth, with minimum cost. Add to that the improved maneuverability of the missile, and you have a lethal combination.”

  Palladino nodded. A fighter pilot himself, he knew the importance of improving the payload and capability of existing systems.

  Jake took a deep breath and continued. “What we’ve done is make the best weapons system in the world even better. You know as well as I do our allies will be badgering the State Department to make the new design available through Foreign Military Sales immediately. Similarly, every tin-pot dictator with a few oil wells and his own private fleet of fighters will want it. Any arms merchant in the business would give major bucks to get their hands on an early prototype. The black market’s potential desire for this modification could be unlimited.”

  Special Agent Thompson added his assessment. “We agree with Colonel McAllister, sir. The faulty release code on the wing strut precluded a clean separation and caused the missile to deviate from its projected flight pattern. With five hundred square miles of test range, we were lucky to have found it. As you’re well aware, we don’t always recover every test projectile.”

  “Tell me about it!” The general harrumphed. “My first week here, I went to a cocktail party at the home of one of the local dignitaries. Damned if he didn’t have a sleek little bomblet sitting on his coffee table as a conversation piece. This distinguished citizen, who sure as hell should have known better, found the thing while out hunting, poked it to see if it would detonate, then decided it was safe enough to take home as a souvenir.”

  “Well,” Jake said, smiling, “our missile is a little large to sit on a coffee table, but it would fit easily in an average-size van or camper. If it had fallen outside the projected test area, we might have spent days looking for it. Someone else could have found it. Some innocent hunting party who just happened to wander into the area, with metal detectors and heat-seeking scanning devices.”

  Agent Thompson nodded vigorously. “The demand for U.S. systems has skyrocketed since their performance in Iraq. We’ve opened several cases of suspected illegal arms-dealing in the past six months. Any black market arms dealer would love to get his hands on this baby. He could sell the prototype to one of a number of the less-reputable arms manufacturers. Copies of the systems would be in the inventories of the nations we refuse to sell to within a year.”

  The general eyed the young agent. “If, as you suspect, the saboteur is one of our own, why wouldn’t he or she just steal the plans? Why take the risk of going after a whole blasted missile?”

  Thompson knew he was being tested. He sat up straighter and spoke with crisp precision. “Sir, the plans would be a poor substitute for the actual system. With today’s reverse-engineering techniques, a manufacturer could duplicate materials more precisely and more quickly from a sample than starting from scratch with the plans.”

  At the general’s hard look, Thompson took a deep breath and began to lay out the plan he and Jake had developed.

  “You’re suggesting we rig a dummy test with a fake missile?” Palladino interrupted, his thick, bushy brows drawing together once more. “At night?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll make sure it ‘accidentally’ falls outside the drop area. Using airborne infrared scanners, we can track any unauthorized vehicles on the range. If anyone or anything heads for the downed missile, we’ll get them.”

  “Do you know how much one of these tests costs in terms of manpower and resources? Even with a dummy missile, you’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in people and aircraft costs. You better be damn sure you know what you’re doing before you ask me to spend that kind of money.”

  Jake knew well the general’s fierce growl belied his interest. The gruff, forceful man would have thrown them out of his office unceremoniously if he didn’t think the proposal had merit.

  After a half hour of the toughest grilling Jake suspected Agent Thompson had ever endured, the general agreed.

  “I’ll let HQ know what we’re doing. Get back to me with the final details when you have the date and flight pattern worked out.”

  The small group rose at his brusque dismissal.

  “Colonel McAllister, I want to talk to you for a moment.”

  Jake stood at ease before the general until the others had filed out. At Palladino’s nod, he resumed his seat in the leather armchair to one side of the massive oak desk.

  “I understand Maura Phillips is one of the suspects in this case.”

  “She was interviewed by the investigators, like everyone else on the team,” Jake replied evenly. He knew that the general was aware of the fact that he’d been seeing Maura. Hell, they’d shared more than one drink with Palladino and his wife at the Officers Club.

  “I like that woman, Jake. She’s bright and energetic, and Ed Harrington says she’s the best damn engineer on his staff.”

  Palladino got up and moved out from behind his desk. He began to pace back and forth across the wide expanse of sunlit office.

  “The Office of Special Investigations seems to have questions about her, though. The interim report suggests there are some unexplained holes in her background. They’re digging into it.”

  “They can dig all they want,” Jake said firmly. “There’s nothing there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not sure how involved you are with her, McAllister, but maybe you better throttle back a bit. Until this is all cleared up.”

  Jake stood and faced the general squarely. “Sorry, sir, I can’t do that.”

  “Look, man, use some common sense. I gave you this project not only because of your background but because I knew you’d do it right. Headquarters has you lined up for a wing commander’s job as soon as it’s over. That means promotion to brigadier general. Are you willing to risk that by getting involved with a suspect in an espionage case?”

  “General Palladino, you’re one hell of a pilot and a fine commander. I’d fly as your wingman anytime. But when it comes to my personal life, you’re way off base. I’m telling you up front I intend to keep seeing Maura Phillips. If that makes my professional or personal judgment questionable in your eyes, then pull me off this project.”

  After a tense moment, a wry grin spread across Palladino’s face. “I guess I’d be disappointed if you responded any differently. Get the hell out of my office, McAllister.”

  Chapter 8

  Jake cursed under his breath as he struggled to slip tiny silver studs into the minuscule openings of a white dress shirt. There were five of the blasted things, each one about the size of a small thumbtack. When the last stud stubbornly refused to fit into the hole right under his chin, Jake’s oath was more vocal and more audible. A giggle from the bedroom door brought his head whipping around.

  “You didn’t hear that, Lisa.”

  “No, sir!”

  She gave a very creditable rendition of a military salute and wandered into the bedroom.

  “Here, let me do it.”

  Relieved, Jake leaned back against a long, brass-trimmed Korean chest and let his daughter’s nimble fingers slip the recalcitrant stud into place. When she smoothed down the crisp, pleated front of his shift and grinned up at him in triumph, Jake felt his heart turn over. God, she was beautiful. So fresh and open and loving.

  “Thanks, honey.”

  Lisa plunked herself down in the middle of Jake’s bed. “I’d be
tter stay, in case you need me again. I remember how Mom used to have to help you into your monkey suit.”

  Jake grinned at his daughter’s reflection in the wide mirror above the chest. “As many times as I’ve worn this dress uniform over the years, you’d think I’d have learned how to manage it by now.”

  His fingers fumbled with a length of dark blue satin, trying to achieve a roughly symmetrical bow tie. Lisa giggled again when he tugged his first and second attempts loose and tried a third time.

  “Maura says she always wears comfortable clothes that express her personality. I bet she won’t be buttoned up to the neck and choking in a tight tie tonight.”

  “No, I bet she won’t.”

  Jake felt the first flicker of anticipation for this evening’s formal function lick at his veins. Up to this point, he sure as hell hadn’t been looking forward to getting all gussied up and spending the evening socializing. In fact, he’d considered canceling out completely. The investigation had all but demoralized his team, and he’d had to exert every leadership skill he possessed to recharge them. His interview with General Palladino a few days ago hadn’t exactly contributed to his own festive spirit, either. But his sense of duty wouldn’t let him cancel. A dining-out was one of the air force’s few formal traditions. It was a time when officers and senior civilians suited up in fancy dress and gathered to celebrate their common fellowship.

  Most of his subordinates and their spouses would be there tonight. So would Maura, although she’d been less than enthusiastic about going to a party in the midst of their frantic preparations for the next test shot. Until Lisa’s casua1 reference to her dress, though, Jake had considered the function more a duty to perform than an adventure. Now delicious visions of what his free-spirited Maura might consider appropriate formal attire danced through his mind.

  His mood considerably lighter, Jake began to look forward to the evening. He pulled up decidedly unregulation red suspenders and handed Lisa a dark blue satin cummerbund to hook for him.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go over to the Camerons’ tonight? I don’t like you staying here by yourself. We’ll probably be pretty late.”