by Rachel Lee
As commanding officer of the squadron, she had the largest office in the building. Entering it still gave her a thrill, even after two years. Here the majesty of the United States put on a moderately impressive display, ensuring that anyone who entered was reminded of the authority residing in a commanding officer. The floor, elsewhere tiled in nondescript beige, here was carpeted in Air Force blue. To the rear and either side of her massive, polished desk, on stands topped with brass eagles, hung the U.S. flag and the squadron’s flag. Large, framed photographs of historic Air Force planes adorned the walls on either side of the room. On the wall directly behind her desk hung the emblem of the Air Combat Command.
Actually Saturday and Sunday were the best days to take care of paperwork, she thought as she settled behind her desk in her deep leather chair and pulled out a report form. Distractions were few, if any, and heaps of paper disappeared as if by magic.
She was scribbling away industriously when she became aware that she was no longer alone.
“Just a sec,” she said and poked her tongue out between her teeth. “How do you spell circuit?”
“C-I-R-C-U-I-T.”
“I-T, huh? Sure doesn’t sound like it.” Suddenly her head snapped up. She knew that voice.
Colonel Alisdair MacLendon stood on the other side of her desk. He was resplendent in a Class A blue uniform, rows of ribbons on his chest. There was something about broad shoulders, a wide chest, and narrow flanks in Class A blues that made Andrea feel not at all like one of the guys.
Up, up her eyes traveled—good grief, he was tall—and finally reached a face that was craggy, weathered, and set in an expression of patience. His eyes, however, did not look patient. The color of blue ice, they were at this moment narrowly assessing.
“Ah…” The sound escaped her like a strangled sigh, and she leapt to her feet. Throwing back her shoulders, she snapped to attention with a ramrod stiffness she hadn’t needed since the Academy.
MacLendon opened his mouth to put her at ease, then stopped, a glimmer of amusement in his cool blue eyes. When she stood at attention in that sweat suit, there was absolutely no question that the captain had a pair of standard female issue breasts. In fact, he thought, a little better than standard issue. He rather liked the view.
He also found he rather liked the way her hair was tousled. Not quite red, not quite blond, it was almost exactly the color of a new penny. Was it strawberry blond?
“Captain Burke, I presume,” he said. The name was on a plaque on the front of her desk, but he couldn’t resist giving her a hard time.
“Yes, sir!”
“Do you always come to work in civvies, Captain?”
“At ease, Captain,” he said, finally relenting. Amusing as it was to watch her respond like a plebe on parade, the workaday world of the Air Force was a relaxed one, in most ways exactly like its civilian counterpart. He understood why Burke had resorted to military formality, but he wasn’t the kind of officer who required it.
Andrea at once slipped into parade rest, feet spread, hands clasped behind her back. The view thus provided was no less disturbing. MacLendon sighed.
“I’m Alisdair MacLendon,” he said. “Monday morning I’m taking over command.”
“Yes, sir.” Something flickered in her hazy green eyes. Humor? Doubt? He couldn’t tell.
“From the moment I take command, Captain, I will be grateful if you refrain from addressing unknown persons as cowboy. Sir or ma’am are the appropriate forms of address.” Was that laughter twitching the little minx’s lips? he wondered.
“Yes, sir,” was her only response, however, and a clipped one at that.
“Sit down, Captain. I want to talk to you.”
Andrea immediately plopped into her chair. MacLendon followed suit, taking one of the three chairs that faced her desk. He crossed his legs loosely, right ankle on his left knee.
“How long have you been in security?” he asked.
“Since graduation, sir. Over six years.” Andrea found herself wishing his eyes were any color but that particular icy blue that seemed to see right through her. She hadn’t felt this nervous since her plebe days at the Academy. Of course, she’d never gotten off to quite this kind of start with a new commander before, either. Worse, she had the feeling that her excessive use of military formality was amusing him rather than soothing any ruffled pinfeathers he might have.
“So you’re career law enforcement?”
“Yes, sir.”
MacLendon rubbed his chin. Clearly she was an exemplary officer or she wouldn’t be sitting where she was. Why, then, was he so convinced she was going to be a handful?
“Did you ever finish your unannounced inspection last night?” he asked.
“No, sir. We had that intruder alert out in the Zulu Bravo section. It took us until almost 5:00 a.m. to locate the cause of the alarm.”
“Not a faulty circuit, by any chance?” he said drily.
Just the faintest tinge of color came to her cheeks. It was so slight he almost missed it.
“Yes, sir, it was. I plan to perform my inspection tonight.”
“How often do you do this?”
She gave that one-shoulder shrug. “Whenever the mood takes me. Often enough so that my troops know I can show up anywhere at any time. Sometimes I hit everybody, sometimes just a few. I try to keep it random, so they can’t predict.”
“What time are you going tonight?”
“About nine.”
He stood up, and Andrea immediately rose with him.
“Pick me up when you leave,” he said to her. “I’ll go with you. I’m in room 221 at the BOQ.” He narrowed his eyes slightly. “Unless you object.”
She did object, strenuously. This was something she always did by herself, or with one of her noncoms. But this damn cowboy was going to be her CO in less than forty-eight hours, and even though she had every right to refuse him, at least until he took command, it wouldn’t be politic.
“I recommend you wear field dress, Colonel MacLendon,” she said coolly.
He turned quickly so she wouldn’t catch the sudden glimmer of amusement in his eyes. “I’ll be ready.” He headed for the door.
“Ah, Colonel?” Her cool voice halted him and he looked back. “How’s your head?” she asked pleasantly.
His lips twitched appreciatively at her veiled implication that the blow to his head had affected his judgment. “Just fine,” he answered in an equally pleasant tone. “You were right, though. I did get one hell of a goose egg.”
Minx, he thought as he walked away. He had the strongest feeling that with Captain Burke most people never knew what hit them. Or even that they’d been hit. A handful indeed.
Slowly, Andrea released her white-knuckled grip on the arms of her chair. Inside, she had that same slightly fluttery, slightly edgy feeling she always got before she did something dangerous. It had to be because he’d gone out of his way just to reprimand her about her conduct last night. What a great start!
After drawing a deep breath, she expelled it through pursed lips and closed her eyes, only to stiffen anew as she recalled with unexpected vividness exactly the way his eyes had settled on her breasts. Back in the Academy she’d had a drill instructor who’d had a problem with his female cadets. Sergeant Harrison had been so obvious in his refusal to let his gaze stray that some women had taken to teasing him mercilessly by thrusting their breasts out as prominently as they could manage. One girl in particular had possessed the ability to render Harrison nearly speechless.
“Oh cripes,” Andrea groaned, gifted with a sudden insight as to just how she had looked standing at attention like that. Not once but twice she’d thrust her chest to MacLendon’s notice. Was she doomed to do everything wrong around the man?
Just as MacLendon reached the front office of the squadron, the glass doors opened to admit three men. The two in front looked as if they’d been through one heck of a barroom brawl. Their cheeks were bruised, one had a rapidly blacke
ning eye, and the other had dried blood in a streak from the corner of his mouth down his chin. Bringing up the rear was a Master Sergeant, the man MacLendon remembered from last night in the emergency room. Nickerson? Yes, Nickerson. Just a little above average height and whipcord lean, Nickerson exuded tough competence.
“Move it, Butcher,” Nickerson said, his voice a whispery rasp, when one of the men ahead of him appeared to hesitate. “The CO’s gonna hear about this even if you pretend to be molasses.”
“What’s up, Sarge?” asked one of the men at the desk.
Nickerson opened his mouth as if to answer when his eyes fell on MacLendon. “None of your business, Schuler,” he said, and in one sweeping glance he took MacLendon in from head to foot. MacLendon knew that look. An experienced noncom could take a man’s measure in a single glance.
“Ten-hut!” Nickerson barked, bringing everyone in the room to attention.
“As you were,” MacLendon said immediately. “Carry on with your business, Sergeant Nickerson. You’re obviously occupied.” And you just as obviously don’t want me to know what’s going on here, he thought. Stepping aside, he watched the man urge the two others down the corridor toward Captain Burke’s office. Well, it was a good sign that Nickerson was loyal to his CO, and that spoke well of Andrea Burke.
Alisdair MacLendon was a man who liked to get the measure of his officers, who liked to know what was happening in his bailiwick. It might not be his bailiwick yet, but he had a very good notion he could get the measure of Andrea Burke if he poked his nose into this affair.
So he followed Nickerson back down the corridor at a discreet distance. By the time he reached the open door of Andrea’s office, she had risen from her desk and come around it.
“So,” he heard Captain Burke say, very, very softly. She stood before the two battered airmen, several inches shorter than either of them. Her feet were splayed, her hands clenched into fists behind her back, her narrow chin thrust out like a bulldog’s. But her voice was calm, deceptively cool. As he moved into the room, MacLendon could see the white lines of fury stamped around her mouth, and her hazy green eyes were sparking with fire.
“So,” she said again, quietly. “You couldn’t have waited until you got off duty to act like a couple of animals in rut?”
“Ma’am,” one of them started to say.
“Zip it, Butcher,” she said coldly. “I don’t give a hooker’s damn if that woman sleeps with one of you, both of you, or half the men on this base. I don’t even care if the two of you want to go off base on your own time and beat each other to a bloody pulp like a couple of overgrown roosters. What I do give a damn about is the security of this site. You two were assigned to protect the weapons depot. You were entrusted with the security of the United States of America.”
A short silence followed her words. The two men’s heads sank lower.
“Did you hear me, Butcher? Frankel?”
“Yes, ma’am,” two voices mumbled.
“I said entrusted, and I meant entrusted. You were trusted by the people of this country to stay awake and do your job for a few lousy hours. You have betrayed that trust. You have disgraced yourselves, and you have disgraced your uniforms. I don’t particularly give a hoot about your personal disgrace, but when you disgrace your uniform, you disgrace my uniform, too.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I want you back here at 0800 tomorrow morning. In the meantime, maybe the stockade will cool you off. Maybe I will cool off. Nick, take ’em out of here.”
Never taking his eyes off Andrea Burke, MacLendon once again stepped aside to let Nickerson and the two airmen pass. “What will you do?” he asked her.
Only then did Andrea become aware of MacLendon’s presence in her office. Damn! she thought, feeling her face tighten even more. Wouldn’t you know every blasted thing in the world would go wrong with MacLendon there to hear about it?
MacLendon watched her face tighten, watched her back stiffen, saw Andrea Burke vanish behind a cool, expressionless facade.
“I’ll hang their hides out to dry,” she said flatly. “It’s dereliction of duty.”
“Demotion?” She had the right to summarily dispense nonjudicial punishment for infractions of regulations. The stiffest penalty allowed was demotion by one grade in rank.
“Probably.” Unfolding the fists that were still clenched behind her back, she consciously relaxed her posture. “Was there something you needed, Colonel?”
“No.” He regarded her steadily for another moment, thinking that he’d learned what he’d come to learn, and that he liked what he saw in this spunky young woman. “No, Captain. I got what I came for. I’ll see you this evening.” With that reminder, he nodded his head and left.
Chapter 2
Andrea was still objecting strenuously when she walked up to MacLendon’s door that night and rapped smartly on it. She couldn’t escape the conviction that if she’d been a man he wouldn’t be proposing to observe her in the field. What annoyed her even more was the feeling that he had every right to question her professionalism. Whatever had possessed her to call him cowboy?
If Colonel Alisdair MacLendon was imposing in Class A blues, he was intimidating in field dress. The loose cut of the green field jacket added about four inches to his shoulders. His pistol was strapped to his waist, accentuating its narrowness. The rakishly tilted field cap had surely been designed just to give his face a dangerous look. In all, Andrea thought irritably, he made every other man she’d ever seen look like a wimp. At five foot six, she’d never felt small, but just now she felt positively diminutive. The feeling annoyed her to no end.
“Ready, sir?” she asked, managing to keep her voice expressionless, although her chest seethed with hot emotions.
Looking down at her, MacLendon wondered if he was losing his marbles. There was no way on earth he would ever have believed a woman could look appealing in fatigues, but somehow Andrea Burke managed to look cute. Impossible. That concussion must have unbalanced him. There was nothing cute or feminine about the way she looked at him, however. Her gaze was straight and steady, man to man.
“Ready.” He closed the door behind him and followed her down the stairs to the dark blue Air Force pickup truck.
Andrea left rubber on the asphalt of the parking lot. MacLendon looked quickly out the window so she wouldn’t catch the suppressed laugh on his face. She was furious with him, he knew, but before the night was out he figured he’d have her measure. He always got the measure of his officers.
After her quick, hot-blooded start, which embarrassed her a little, Andrea settled down to the speed limit. What the heck, she told herself. He’s stuck with me, too. And she had it on the best authority that she wasn’t great to be stuck with.
“What’s on the agenda tonight?” he asked.
“I figure on poking around the perimeter of the weapons depot. Sir.” She added the last word punctiliously.
“Do you ever have a problem with the men passing the word that you’re on the prowl?”
“Communications are monitored. The first idiot who tries to pull that stunt is going to answer to me.”
“I see.” Tough little cookie, he thought. “By the way, Captain, I’m here tonight strictly as an observer. Anything I see or hear won’t go any further.”
There was a moment’s silence. Finally Andrea answered, hating having to say it, “Thank you, sir.”
MacLendon half smiled into the dark. Spitfire, he thought. He took out a cigar. “Mind?”
“No, sir.”
“You smoke?”
“No, sir.”
“Not ever?”
Again there was a pregnant silence. Turning, he saw the struggle on Andrea’s face. It was over quickly, but he caught it.
“My father didn’t allow it. Girls,” she added finally, “don’t smoke.”
“Oh.” He lit his cigar and cracked the window to let the smoke trail out. “But they go to the Air Force Academy and become regular officer
s?”
“If you want something badly enough, nothing holds you back, not even long-entrenched sexism.”
“I guess not.” He felt another inkling of real respect for her. It didn’t mean he was necessarily going to like having her around, or that she wouldn’t be a headache, but it gave him some of her measure. “Married?”
“No, sir. Are you?”
She turned the personal question back neatly, and he decided it was time to change tacks. “No,” he replied. “How long have you been at the base?”
“Two years come December.” She paused, then decided to make an effort to be friendly. Only God and Uncle Sam knew how long she was going to have to put up with this cowboy. “December is a wonderful time to arrive in North Dakota. No chance to acclimate. Winter hits you like a ton of bricks.”
“This is my third tour here,” he offered. “There’s something about surviving a North Dakota winter that leaves you feeling a little smug.”
“Smug?”
“Like you went eyeball to eyeball with Mother Nature and came away whole.”
She surprised him with a throaty chuckle.
“Where are you from originally, Captain?” His question was a traditional military icebreaker, a perfectly legitimate query from one transplant to another.
“All over. I’m an Air Force brat.”
“Who’s your father? Maybe I know him.”
“Charles Burke. He retired four years ago as Chief Master Sergeant.”
MacLendon suddenly swiveled to look at her better. “Charlie Burke. Was he air crew chief at Mather?”
Such coincidences no longer surprised Andrea. Everywhere you went in the Air Force you met old friends or friends of friends. It was, at heart, really just a large family. “Yes, sir.”
MacLendon’s brain clicked. He hadn’t spoken to Andrea Burke at Mather, but he’d seen her. A teenage girl in a ridiculously frilly dress at chapel on Sundays. Thin, leggy, coltish. He’d seen her a couple of times rough-and-tumbling at football and basketball with a gang of boys who all had her hair and freckles. He’d noticed her because she’d struck him as out of place in both those situations. And he knew Charlie Burke. No girl would have found it easy growing up under his thumb. Another piece of the puzzle fell into place.
