One of the Boys

by Merline Lovelace

  “Yes, he did.”

  Maura blinked at the short, clipped response. And then again when he took his eyes off the road to offer her a taunting question.

  “So?”

  “So maybe you should take his advice. Maybe your career is too important to risk for a few nights in bed.”

  “I’ll tell you the same thing I told him. My private life is just that, private. No one’s going to tell me who I can and can’t love.”

  A thousand hot words trembled on Maura’s lips. Words of hurt and denial and love. But she didn’t utter any of them. This was too important for an impulsive, emotional response. She had to use the objective, analytical side of her brain to think this through. Jake’s career was at stake.

  He shot her another hard look, but refrained from further comment until he pulled into her drive. Coming around to help her out, he would have followed her into the cottage, but Maura stopped him with a hand on his chest.

  “Please, Jake, I’m too tired and too confused right now to talk, or even think. Let’s let it go tonight.”

  In the bright porch light, she saw his face settle into harsh, sharp angles. Impatience and restrained anger flared in his silver eyes. She waited while he fought down his emotions with his characteristic iron control.

  “All right,” he ground out. “No talk. No thinking. Not tonight, anyway. But I want you to keep two things in mind as you lie in bed tonight, Ms. Phillips. The first is that I know damn well you didn’t have anything to do with sabotaging our project, and so does the general.”

  “All right. What’s two?”

  “This.”

  His kiss was unrelenting, and Maura poured every ounce of her love into her response. When his lips slanted over hers, she wrapped both arms around his neck, reveling in his strength, his primitive possession. When his tongue slid in to dance with hers, she met the thrusts with urgent ones of her own. And when he pushed her out of his arms, she had no doubt about his commitment or his love.

  Only later, as she curled her legs up under the light sheet and stared into the darkness, did she question her own love.

  Bea gave a low, rumbling growl from her side of the bed as her mistress shifted restlessly under the covers. Maura patted the cat absently and struggled with the thoughts tumbling through her troubled mind.

  Could she let Jake sacrifice his career for her? He’d told her the air force was his life. It was in his blood, in his heritage. He was one of the finest officers she’d ever met. Would he come to resent her if she cost him the profession he loved?

  She drew a painful parallel to her own career situation. She remembered how miserable she was during those months she’d struggled in a management position. For more than a year, she’d juggled people and schedules when all she wanted was to bury herself in new designs and engineering projects. She’d done it for her fiancé, and Maura knew now that compared to what she felt for Jake, her passion for Brian was a pale, insubstantial thing.

  Still, she had almost married the man. Yet her unhappiness on the job ultimately overrode her feelings for Brian. Or maybe it was resentment because he couldn’t appreciate her career aspirations. In any case, Maura had firsthand experience with the impact of professional decisions on her personal life. In the deepest recesses of her heart, she knew Jake would be miserable out of the air force. It was his element, his natural milieu. Could she ask him to make a wrenching career change for her?

  The alternative, of course, was to give him up. Maura shied away from the thought. Surely there had to be another way, some middle ground. She tossed in frustration, trying to find an out. Try as she might, she couldn’t think of a way through the maze. The investigation could take months. By then Jake would have lost his chance at promotion.

  It wasn’t fair, Maura thought mutinously. Of all the colonels she knew, Jake was the best. He deserved to be promoted. Heck, even the young captain tonight recognized his leadership skills. In frustration, she gave the bed an angry thump with one clenched fist.

  “Umph!”

  Her breath left in a whoosh as a heavy, furry body landed on her stomach. Bea growled a warning that she was at the end of her patience, then kneaded soft stomach flesh with heavy paws. Circling twice, she settled her bulk squarely on Maura’s middle.

  With a half laugh, half sob, she soothed the disgruntled cat. Gradually her soft strokes and Bea’s low purr had a calming effect. Willing herself to sleep, Maura closed her eyes. She needed rest, and time, and a fresh perspective to think this thing through.

  Chapter 9

  The next morning, Maura felt like something Bea might have tried to bury under the oleander bushes. Despite her stern injunction to herself the night before, she hadn’t been able to sleep. In desperation she’d wandered out to the patio to watch the night sky slowly turn purple, then pink.

  The sun rose in a blaze of color, shimmering bright red against the horizon. Maura sipped coffee from a battered mug, her knees tucked up under her sleep shirt. She murmured the old nursery rhyme about red skies in the morning, sailors take warning.

  No kidding! As if she needed the sun to tell her this would be a horrible day. Her butt dragging, she abandoned the lounger and went to dress for work.

  When the team filed in for their morning meeting, she met Jake’s hard look over the conference table, but knew her wan smile didn’t come close to answering the question in his eyes. Deliberately she opened her briefcase and fiddled with some papers. Knowing Jake, she only had a brief reprieve. He’d want some answer to his unspoken question before he let her out of the room.

  Jake stood and faced the team. “We’re going to fly our next test shot tonight.”

  His quiet announcement startled the weary team. A chorus of excited voices filled the small room.

  “Tonight!”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “We can’t be ready by then!” Pete exclaimed with a fierce frown.

  “We can, and we will.”

  One of the test engineers leaned forward, his face furrowed with concern. “We just got the modified missile supports certified by maintenance yesterday. The crews will have to load the weapon using new technical data.”

  “They’re loading now.”

  “We’ll never get range time,” Pete insisted.

  “We’ve got it. Range Seventy is ours from seventeen hundred hours on.”

  Maura’s quiet voice cut through the excited chatter. “Will we be able to get the shot in before dark? Five in the afternoon is late to launch a mission like this. It doesn’t give us much margin for error or time for recovery.”

  “We should have plenty of time if the daylight holds. There’s a storm out in the Gulf we’re watching that could impact the launch. But as of a few minutes ago, the weather detachment is predicting it to remain outside of Range Seventy’s safety envelope.”

  Maura nodded and settled in as Jake ran the team through the final test parameters again. Then again. They all knew them by heart, but he was relentless.

  He had all team members present, their analyses of the best-and worst-case probabilities for the shot, and drilled them all to see if there was anything they might have missed to minimize the risks. When he finally released the team to their last-minute tasks, Maura’s palms were damp from a mixture of excitement and nervous tension. Pete was in even worse shape. His white face and worried frown reflected the strain they all felt.

  “Dr. Phillips, would you mind waiting just a moment?”

  Maura glanced at Jake, knowing he wasn’t about to let her plead the need to get back to the office and scurry out with the rest of the team. She leaned back in her chair and waited.

  Jake rounded the width of the conference table and approached her slowly. Sliding one hip onto the table edge, he studied her face.

  “You look like hell.”

  “Thank you very much, Colonel McAllister. Nothing like cheering up the troops before the big battle.”

  “I take it from the dark circles under your eyes you
didn’t work through your problem.”

  “My problem! I’m not the one whose career is going down the tubes.”

  “My career isn’t going down the tubes because of our relationship. And if it were, I’d say to hell with it.”

  Her hand reached out involuntarily to grasp his knee. “That’s just it, Jake. You can’t say to hell with it. You’ve put your life into the air force. You’re a natural leader, you belong in uniform. You can’t just toss all those years away!”

  “Listen to me, Maura. I lost a wife because I thought my blasted career was so all-fired important. Through some incredible quirk of fate, I’m getting a second chance. I’m not about to lose you to the air force, too.”

  Maura felt her heart begin to pound. With every ounce of her being, she wanted to slide out of her chair and into his arms. But she forced herself to sit rigid and unmoving.

  “This is too important to decide so quickly. We need to think it through, weigh the pros and cons.”

  One dark eyebrow hooked. “Is this the same woman who relocated from California to Florida on a whim?”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake, will you let go of that! This is different. You’re different. I won’t let you just shrug off your whole career.”

  “If it comes to a choice between you and the air force,” he said simply, “there is no choice.”

  “Jake…”

  “We’d better get to work.” He bent down and kissed the tip of her nose. “And don’t worry.”

  As if there were any way not to worry, Maura fumed hours later. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so tense and racked by doubts. Jake’s stubborn insistence that his career didn’t matter warmed her romantic heart, but chilled her professional mind. In a crazy role reversal, she’d have to be the one to approach this problem with cool, detached logic.

  Adding to her personal worries were her concerns over the test. In the deepest recesses of her mind she was convinced the accident had to have been the result of carelessness, not deliberate sabotage. The thought haunted her that something she did, or didn’t do, might have caused it. Some calculation she failed to interpret correctly, some clue she missed about the properties of the materials used to construct the missile racks. Some error she made could have caused Jake’s death.

  Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she ran every analysis twice, then ran it again. She hunched over the computer all morning long, all through lunch, and then throughout the afternoon. Jake would fly this mission, as well. It had to be perfect.

  By four o’clock, she’d reviewed her input into the test parameters a half dozen times. With a small sigh, she switched off her computer. Stretching her aching shoulder muscles, she strolled over to Pete’s desk. To her surprise, he was in the process of stuffing his briefcase.

  “Are you leaving?”

  “Yeah. I have to pick up Carol’s folks at the airport.”

  “Aren’t you going to watch the shot?” Incredulity laced Maura’s voice. “After the stress and strain we’ve been through these last weeks, how can you stand to miss it?”

  “I guess the investigation took some of the thrill off it all for me.” Bitterness tinged Pete’s reply. “Believe it or not, I’d rather spend the evening with my in-laws than sit through another session in the control facility.”

  Maura watched him gather his things and leave a short time later. Too keyed up to go out for supper, she dug through her oversize straw carryall for a little plastic bag full of pottery pieces. She hadn’t been able to go sharding with Lisa in more than a week, much to the girl’s disappointment. Still, their find for the summer included some incredibly beautiful bits. If you could call dull gray-and-red-tinted chunks of clay with barely discernible squiggles on one side beautiful.

  Fingering the indented patterns in a determined effort not to dwell on the evening to come, Maura let her mind rove back over these summer months. A smile tugged at her strained features as she thought about how rich and full the weeks were before the investigation had put everyone on edge. She’d never dreamed when she left California that she’d find so much enjoyment splashing around in the shallow blue waters of the bay with a precocious teenager—and thrashing around in bed with the girl’s father. She loved Lisa’s company and looked forward to a string of golden summers with the girl.

  And Jake. God, how she loved him.

  She wanted him in the summer, in the winter and every day in between. She wanted him in bed and out, naked and clothed, laughing and panting with his own particular, all-consuming desire.

  Maura’s hand closed around the pottery piece, jabbing the sharp edge into her palm. Did she want Jake so much she was willing to risk his future happiness?

  She still hadn’t found the answer to that question when she left the engineering facility and crossed the grassy lot to the control facility. Eyeing the dark thunderclouds piled up over the Gulf, she felt her adrenaline begin to pump. Not only would they have all the inherent dangers in the test to contend with, as well as the ominous threat of sabotage, but now they’d have Mother Nature to worry about.

  As long as the storm remained out in the Gulf, they should be okay.

  “Oh, come on, Lisa. Don’t be such a prude.”

  “I don’t want to do this.”

  Lisa’s soft voice barely carried over the boisterous shouts and laughter of the crowd of teenagers. She glanced toward the group congregating at the water’s edge. As the more daring of the group began to strip off their shorts and T-shirts, she looked away again quickly. A tinge of red crept up her cheeks and she faced Tony squarely.

  “I want to go home.”

  “For Pete’s sake, haven’t you ever gone skinny-dipping before?” Tony made no effort to hide his exasperation.

  “No, and I don’t plan to tonight. You should have told me that was the game plan before we left the pizza parlor. I wouldn’t have come.”

  Lisa tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice as she stared up at the sandy-haired youth next to her. After she’d worked on her dad until he relented and allowed her this date, Tony was turning out to be a real jerk.

  Lisa had looked forward to this evening with tremulous anticipation. She’d hoped Maura would help her with her makeup, but she was working late tonight. Still, Lisa thought her own efforts weren’t too shabby. When she’d dressed in a new pair of cream shorts and a hot pink silk top very similar to one Maura wore, she’d felt deliciously adult and sophisticated.

  The first part of the evening had been fun. Tony had taken her to meet some of his friends from school at a local pizza joint, and Lisa listened shyly while the gregarious group shared horror stories of vacation trips with parents and summer jobs. She’d even overcome her initial reserve enough to contribute some of her own experiences. But her enjoyment slowly turned to dismay as the group discussed and discarded possible alternatives for the rest of the evening.

  The movies were out—too tame. A suggestion from one of the girls to head out to the island for miniature golf met with hoots of derision. The beach was a possibility, but with thunderclouds threatening over the Gulf, they knew the lifeguards would be overly cautious and clear the public areas at the first sign of rain or lightning within ten miles. Finally the boys hit on the idea of driving out to one of the natural ponds on the base for a private picnic.

  Lisa had started to get nervous when a bold, redheaded teen with a forged ID volunteered to get the picnic “supplies” and meet them at the site. Her uneasiness increased tenfold when their little convoy turned off a main highway onto an unpaved road, which in turn led through a wide clearing and onto a barely discernible dirt track through the woods. She sat beside Tony in the back seat of one of the cars and watched with worried eyes as they drove past prominently posted signs reading Government Property, Restricted Area, No Trespassing.

  The track twisted and turned through the tall pines and heavy scrub until Lisa had lost both her sense of direction and the last of her confidence. With each jouncing mile, the pines cut o
ff more of the summer twilight and enveloped them in whispering darkness. The breeze had sharpened with the storm far out on the Gulf, causing branches to rustle and twist high above them. When they pulled up at the wide pond that was their destination, its waters were black and uninviting.

  The other kids didn’t seem to mind. They spread blankets at the edge of the water and began passing six-packs. Lisa sat beside Tony with her knees drawn up and arms locked around them. Unobtrusively she refused the beer, feeling more uncomfortable by the minute. But when one of the giggling girls coyly suggested they cool off in the water, she flatly refused to participate.

  “I want to go home, Tony,” she repeated firmly.

  “Look, we just got here. If you don’t want to swim, fine. But I’m going in with the others.”

  He shrugged himself out of his jeans and bent over the blanket to pull off his ragged, sleeveless sweatshirt. Lisa turned away when he reached for the waistband of his shorts.

  Not knowing what else to do, she stayed still on the blanket and hugged her knees once more, wishing fervently she’d heeded her dad’s warning regarding Tony. The dark night had surrounded her when the laughing teenagers finally splashed out of the pond.

  “Hey, let’s light a fire,” one of the girls suggested. “That water was freezing.”

  “Good idea,” someone else echoed.

  “No!” Tony’s voice cut through the darkness. “My dad mentioned there was a test tonight. The range patrol will be scouting the area and would sure as heck notice a fire.”

  “Yeah,” one of the other boys concurred. “All we need is to get hauled in for trespassing. Come here, Joyce, I’ll get you warm.”

  Shocked, Lisa tried not to watch as a beefy, still-naked boy wrestled the girl to the ground and rolled across the blankets with her. She scrambled to her feet as another couple followed the first’s example.

  “Lisa, wait a minute.”

  Ignoring Tony’s impatient call, she headed for the car with the intention of sitting in the back seat until the incipient orgy was over. Thick darkness and her own welling tears blinded her. Her foot caught on a tree root and she went down on one knee. When Tony’s hands closed around her arm to pull her up, she whirled on him.