Target of the Heart

by M. L. Buchman

  Then she rested her fingertips ever so lightly against his back. The thin cotton of his t-shirt was warm enough for the evening, but not enough to fend off the heat of her touch. Hell, he’d feel the searing brand through full battle armor.

  Her simple touch silenced all his careening thoughts.

  “Tonight, we aren’t here. Not the Major and the Captain, not Napier and Delacroix, not even The Rapier and Spiderwoman. There is only tu et moi.”

  # # #

  The icy chill of Pete’s unmoving silence made Danielle instantly regret taking Sofia’s advice. But exactly as Sophia had predicted, he had returned to the same spot they had left him earlier, a mere shadow in the darkness of the night. The temptation had proved too much and she’d come to him—to be told to leave.

  How could she have been stupid enough, for even a moment, to reach out for something she wanted.

  There was only one thing she had ever wanted so deeply that it became a part of her: to fly. She’d been tempted to risk even that for this man, but still he didn’t turn toward her. How had she read everything so wrong?

  She let her hand drop. It was not for Danielle Delacroix to want things. She was the only child of an alcoholic mother and no father. Why had the gods made her want so much?

  And now she had gone too far.

  Would Pete even let her remain in the 5E? No. He would want her as far from him as possible, just as she had known he should.

  Her fingertips were still warm with his heat as she turned toward the lonely road to base housing. There was only the one vehicle that had been left for Pete’s use; she’d do her best to not give in to the tears on the long solo walk.

  Danielle curled her hand into a fist to hold in the warmth at the same moment Pete grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her about. She inadvertently clipped his chin with the back of her fist; hard enough to knock back any normal man.

  Pete Napier didn’t react.

  Didn’t hesitate.

  He pulled her in tight, trapping both of her arms between them, and crushed his mouth down on hers.

  His voracious need surged over her.

  She struggled for a breath, couldn’t find it, didn’t care, and leaned into the kiss.

  Pete tore at her clothes and, as soon as her hands were free, she did the same to his. In moments they were mostly naked in the faint light of the sliver-thin moon. His shirt caught around one wrist and her khakis snarled on one ankle where the bootlace had knotted.

  “I don’t…” he gasped out as he drove her mad with his desperate grasps and grazing teeth.

  She lifted the booted foot where her pants hung about one ankle, dug a foil packet out of the pocket, and shoved it into his palm. She had so hoped…

  He had her down on the grass and drove into her faster than a DAP Hawk diving to the attack.

  Their need let neither of them slow until the sensations rose too huge to contain and she released them into the night. Pete’s moan was the bass note to her treble cry, the only sounds echoing down the dark length of the deserted airfield.

  Chapter 8

  “I’ve,” Pete huffed out the word and tried again. “I’ve never needed anyone so badly.”

  Danielle wrapped her legs around his hips and crossed her ankles. Her arms were locked about his neck so hard he couldn’t have moved if there was an attack.

  “I didn’t,” he’d kill himself if he had, “hurt you, did I?”

  Her purr wasn’t one of contentment but rather of triumphant declaration. He’d take that as a no. By the sounds she was making, an emphatic one.

  He lay against her and only slowly became aware of other sensations around them. One of her feet crossed over his butt was still clad in pants and an Army boot, the sole of which was digging in hard. The long Nevada grass wasn’t as soft as the lush Alabama grass of Fort Rucker. He’d imagined in a hundred fantasies bedding this woman outdoors on a lush soft bed of nature. This wasn’t soft at all. Dry, scratchy, and embedded in hardpan soil with all the give of fifty-year old concrete. But he couldn’t imagine moving just yet, not even to accommodate her comfort.

  Pete noticed next how well they fit together and just how uninterested he was in moving. Her curves pressed against him and her Chinook-flying powerful legs wrapped around him. She shifted once or twice, but it wasn’t in discomfort, it was to settle their hips closer together.

  He’d never just taken a woman like this. Not in high school, not drunk in college. He might have paid less attention to a woman’s pleasure than he should have at times, but he’d never simply needed to drive himself into one and declare that was where he belonged.

  Pete spotted her discarded shirt off to the side. He gave them both a judicious roll that placed his back, at least most of it, on her shirt and shifted her off the itchy grass.

  Ever since that first brush of lips a month ago he’d wondered what it would be like to make love to this woman. You still don’t know, Pete.

  “What don’t you know?” her voice came out on a happy sigh.

  “I’d, uh,” have to be more careful about thinking aloud, “pictured our first time together differently.”

  “You pictured it?” No hint of disgust in her voice.

  “Yes.”

  “How often?” No hint of coy either. Or of letting him off the hook anytime soon.

  He tried to get enough distance to look at her face. But since her arms were still crossed behind his neck and he was lying on them and then the ground, he could neither move downward nor she upward. Despite the crick her arms were putting in his neck, he wasn’t ready to release her yet. So they lay there speaking mouth to each others’ ear.

  “Often.”

  She did a thing with her hips that had him hissing with the sensations scorching up his body, and grinding his butt into the sharp grass.

  “Very often,” he amended.

  “How?”

  “How what? How have I fantasized about you?”

  “Um-hm.”

  “No way am I answering that, woman.”

  She did the hip thing again.

  “No way,” he managed on a groan. “Spiderwoman going to bite off my head now?”

  “That’s praying mantises…mantisi?”

  “I’m the one on the verge of death and you’re conjugating verbs?”

  “Plurals as in nouns, not tenses as in verbs. Conjugal rights? No, I didn’t just say that.”

  He started to laugh. He was buried, uh, shaft deep in a woman and she was debating parts of speech. Well, not much debate from him really. She was analyzing parts of speech. And stumbling over words that meant marriage when they’d barely had sex. After what he’d just done to her, he’d let her off…this time.

  And now he was thinking about word choices. Fine job making her first time all screwed up.

  “No, you screwed down. Now that we’ve rolled over you could screw up though.”

  He tried thumping the back of his head against the ground to knock some sense into it but, with her arms still trapped there, it wasn’t very effective.

  Pete leaned upward enough for her to recover her arms. As soon as they were gone he missed them because he was a total fool.

  “Danielle?”

  “No. Don’t go rational yet. There’s plenty of time for that later. Tu et moi. We are all that exist in this moment.”

  “I don’t speak French.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I speak Viet, Mandarin, Japanese, and—”

  “What does that have to do with anything? A civilized man who is going to share my bed—”

  “This isn’t a bed.”

  “Never interrupt a French woman when she is lecturing you. If you had any manners you would parles français when you are inside her.”

  Damn but he really liked this woman.

  S
he propped her forearms on his chest, rubbed her hand over it for a moment, and offered another purr of contentment despite her rant.

  His hands, which he only now realized had remained firmly clamped on her butt as if it was somehow physically possible to force them closer together, traveled up from her waist and encountered her bra. He began searching for the release clasp.

  “Hello. Sports bra.” She reached down between them and tugged it off over her head flipping her hair across him in a soft caress of dark liquid that caught a thousand glints of the very last of the moonlight. Then she lay back down on him before he could test if her breasts’ feel and shape matched the fine lines they’d made beneath her t-shirt. They did feel moderately fantastic where they pressed against his chest though, so it was hard to feel grumpy about the missed opportunity.

  He stroked his thumbs along the soft skin to the sides. Even against his rough hands it was remarkably soft.

  “Back to those fantasies, Mr. Napier.”

  “That’s Major to you.”

  “You already did major to me. I’m just waiting for you to recover so that you can do more.”

  “Recover, huh?” He pushed her up until they were both standing on the grass. They stumbled about in the starlit darkness, doing their best to find their various pieces of clothing tossed among the grass. He would come back at first light to make sure they’d found everything.

  Grabbing her hand, he led her into the dimly-lit interior of the hangar. Danielle stumbled along behind him, her one still-booted foot clomping loudly on the hangar’s concrete floor. She turned for the Chinook, but he had something else in mind. For one thing, the pilots’ seats in the MH-47 were almost six feet off the ground.

  The DAP Hawk, a machine they both flew well, suited his purposes much better. A low seat and a wide-swinging door. Better yet, a Little Bird which had no door at all.

  Before she could protest, he scooped her up in his arms and dropped her into the seat.

  “Cold,” she tried to climb back out of the seat.

  “Stay.”

  When she again attempted to get out of the seat, he snapped the seat belt harness across her waist and pulled the strap tight to pin her there. He left off the dual shoulder harness as that would cover her breasts. They were very nice breasts, that perfect cross between perky and fullness, and he didn’t want them hidden.

  She crossed her arms there to achieve the same result.

  He gently unfolded her arms, admired the shadowed view for a moment, and then leaned in to kiss her.

  # # #

  It was lovely. Danielle could do nothing but hold onto the flight controls where her hands had naturally landed as Pete kissed her.

  Numb. Toast. Shorted out nervous system. She couldn’t even raise her hand to investigate how incredible he felt or to trace the muscles of that truly exceptional chest of his.

  Her grip tightened on the controls as his hands reached out to her. One dug into her hair offering her no escape from the lush kiss he offered, not that she wanted to miss a moment of it. Despite the almost violent heat of the possessive kiss, his other hand brushed downward more softly than a nighttime breeze.

  Again she braced for him to grab and squeeze. Instead—twice as thrilling because he was so strong and his hands rough with hard work—he traced, caressed, and cradled. He gave the shape of her ribs just as much attention as he had her breast, and then—skipping the wide waist belt he’d pinned her with—her hip and thigh.

  By the time he slid his hand up the inside of her thigh she was powerless to do anything but receive.

  It was his fantasy. And it was so clear and so persuasive that she could make no effort to resist or assist; she could only receive. Her hands slid loosely off the controls as he drove her up until she was bucking against the restraint of the harness and his hand. Her ultimate release came on a sigh rather than a cry—a soft sigh of a woman she didn’t recognize. She was always in careful control of her emotions, but around Pete she had no barriers, no internal gauge with neatly delineated areas of operation. He asked and she gave everything she had.

  Danielle had never enjoyed dominance games, those power games that were so important to men.

  For some reason that she couldn’t identify, she knew that Pete Napier was not playing a dominance game on her. Instead, he was focused on giving all that he could to her in a place she so belonged, the cockpit of a helicopter. The pilot seat of a SOAR helicopter was a place that only a handful of women had ever sat, and she was one of them.

  Pete was making love to her there out of all the possible places he could have chosen.

  He acknowledged who she was and whatever trouble it would cause her—it was sure to be much trouble—and she loved him for it.

  # # #

  It was the sound of the tractor arriving outside the hangar that afternoon that had once again sent them scrambling for their respectability. Pete recognized the tractor’s noise; it was a mower, a big one.

  Definitely time to get moving if they didn’t want to be caught. Somewhere in mid-morning Pete had finally bedded Danielle properly in the back of the Chinook upon a pile of folded-out rescue blankets, or rather she had bedded him. He had screwed up, and she had knelt over him and controlled his every sensation as she went down on him.

  He liked the power of being on top, but the opportunity to caress and watch such an amazing woman as she slowly unraveled in the throes of passion and release had been incredible. The privacy of the shadowed interior of the helicopter had only added to the image.

  They had then laid there together for the longest time afterward talking idly of nothing much at all. He couldn’t recall a single one of the topics, far too aware of how Danielle felt lying against him. Of how protective he felt for the simple arm he kept wrapped about her waist. For the perfect contentment of her head on his shoulder and his cheek against her hair.

  But the mower dragged them back to real life and they began tracking down their clothes. Some were in the Chinook with them, most were over by the Little Bird. A few other pieces were scattered about the hangar floor in places he didn’t remember stopping during the night, Danielle’s panties had ultimately ended up dangling from the long, phallic tip of the DAP Hawk’s refueling probe for reasons neither of them could recall.

  It was Danielle, not himself who identified his missing piece of apparel. No matter where they looked, he had no pants.

  He sent the fully clothed Danielle out to check the grassy verge between the hangar and the flight control container for the Avenger RPA.

  She made it two steps out the door and then turned back, closed the door, and fell laughing into his arms.

  “What?”

  “Tes pantalons, monsieur. They are now in teeny tiny pieces.”

  “He mowed them?” Pete pictured a thousand tiny bits of khaki scattered about the runway’s grassy verge.

  She nodded and burst out laughing again.

  Thankfully, he had some gear in the small locker room at the back of the hangar, but it didn’t help that Danielle’s bright laughter followed him as he crossed the broad concrete floor in his underwear.

  Chapter 9

  Danielle had thought they were being discrete, until she saw Sofia’s smile when everyone gathered at the base Mess Hall for breakfast that evening. The 5E’s team suddenly felt overwhelming large. Two pilots times four aircraft, five crew chiefs, and now Sophia and her copilot, a quiet, blond woman.

  She and Pete had slept little, but she felt simultaneously wide awake and languid. And she also felt as if everyone could see writ large on her face that she’d just spent hours participating in life-changing sex.

  Pete was such a powerful personality that he was constantly overwhelming her. Her nerve endings were exhausted by the unprecedented scale and quality of messages they’d had to transmit. And her emotions were wrung from the degree of pleasure
and joy they’d been forced to contemplate.

  “Was it goodness, little sister?” Sofia asked in a moment when they were shuffling their trays down the chow line together.

  “Very much goodness,” Danielle agreed.

  “I knew this would be. The way he looks at you, I wish someone would look at me like that way.”

  “I think all men must look at you that way.” Sophia’s beauty was undeniable.

  “Your Major Napier did not look at me so. This is how I know he is in love with you. Besides, when men look at me, they look at this,” she brushed a negligent hand down her body in a move so graceful that Danielle could never hope to match it. “Not this,” she tapped a finger against her heart.

  Danielle had a soothing reply on her lips, but couldn’t seem to complete the delivery.

  Sophia’s words “he is in love with you” had sunk in somewhere after dishing up bacon but before the scrambled eggs. The rest was a blur and she arrived at the table with bacon, green beans instead of hash browns, and a hot dog rather than the eggs she’d been looking forward to just moments earlier.

  Orange juice instead of cranberry.

  Hot chocolate instead of coffee.

  She needed coffee. She caught herself only moments before she began dumping sugar into the hot chocolate, but couldn’t seem to halt the addition of cream. Her brain knew it was wrong, but signals to her hand were not making it through.

  “I’m…he’s not.”

  “Who’s not what?” Patty asked, the redheaded Chief Warrant, folding a long slice of steak into her mouth as she spoke. Her meal of steak and fries with a cup of soup made sense when Danielle looked at it. She looked at her own tray again and knew it was wrong but still couldn’t quite get a handle on how. She was fairly sure that she despised hotdogs, about the only thing her mother had known how to cook, but even that thought didn’t gain much traction in her whirling thoughts.

  Sophia started to explain, but Danielle put up a hand.