by Rachel Lee
“Time,” she said obscurely, but he understood.
“Little enough of it in a lifetime, let alone a week.”
Slowly, she tilted her head and looked up at him, wondering not for the first time if he could read her mind. “Yes,” she said on a soft sigh.
No time like the present, Dare thought, to take that forward step and see if his foot landed on solid ground. “I’ll visit you on weekends, Andrea. If you want me to.”
“Will you?”
Her misty green eyes held a flare of hope, and he smiled as much from relief as pleasure. “Yes.”
Andrea turned over, still lying between his legs and against his chest, and kissed him. “Thank you,” she said.
He wrapped his arms around her, holding her snugly. “My pleasure. You won’t be that far away. I’ll just avail myself of one of the prerogatives of my position and fly out there. Things can almost always be managed if you want to badly enough.”
“You won’t mind?” she asked him.
“Are you kidding?” Tilting her chin up a little more, he looked into her eyes. It still shocked him to realize that his calmly confident Captain Burke was truly confident only in her job and her uniform. If he’d had a magic wand, he would have used it to give her all the personal self-confidence she lacked. But there was no magic wand, and all he could do was hope she would eventually get the message.
“Andrea, darlin’,” he said gently, “the only thing I’d mind is never seeing you again.”
Her eyelids fluttered closed, and he was horrified to see a silvery tear squeeze out from beneath one lid.
“Andrea? Andrea, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said shakily, and managed an unsteady smile. “Damn, every time I turn around, you’re making me cry. I hate to cry.”
“Then don’t.”
“I can’t help it. You say the damnedest things sometimes. Nobody’s ever said so many nice things to me.”
He gave her a bruising hug. “I’m just being truthful, sweetheart.” And only partially truthful, at that.
For a long time they sat like that, her head on his shoulder, arms wrapped around one another, but finally Dare’s stomach started rumbling. Reluctant as he was to disturb the cocoon of closeness they shared, he was going to have to do something about dinner.
“Give me a few minutes to get dinner started, Andrea.”
“Can I help?”
“Nope.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “When I come to visit you, you can do the honors.”
“Every time?”
He caught the wicked sparkle in her eye. “Well, maybe just sometimes.”
She let him go reluctantly and stretched out on the floor, unwilling to disturb the warm glow she was feeling. He was going to fly out to see her. She hugged the thought to her, more relieved than she could say. Even though he wanted nothing but an affair, at least he wasn’t casual in his feelings about her. He cared, or he certainly wouldn’t be willing to visit her in Minot.
Now, if she could just catch their homegrown saboteur. Why couldn’t there be some way to smoke him out, right into a trap?
Toying with the idea, she wandered out to the kitchen and helped herself to one of the carrot sticks Dare had set out on the counter.
“I can almost smell smoke,” Dare remarked as he lifted a steak off the electric grill. “What’s got your brain on overdrive?”
Andrea shrugged. “Just wondering if there isn’t some way to lay a trap for our saboteur.”
“To lay a trap you need some kind of enticement to draw your quarry out. We don’t know enough about him to come up with the right bait.”
“That’s what has me stymied. But maybe we do know enough and just can’t see it.”
“You keep saying that. Pull the milk out of the fridge, will you?”
Andrea complied. “I keep saying that because I can’t shake the feeling that the answer’s staring me in the face. It just keeps nagging at me.”
“Maybe you ought to let it rest awhile.”
“I’ve let it rest all weekend.” Walking up behind him, she wrapped her arms around his waist from behind and leaned against him. “You smell so good.”
“Better than steak?”
“Always.” Sighing, she nuzzled his spine. “I keep wondering, if the culprit really is Halliday, why he’d be doing this. I always thought he seemed pretty happy with his niche. You haven’t served with him before, have you?”
“Not to my knowledge. We might have been posted to the same base at some time or another, but we’ve never been in the same unit.” He flipped the second steak off the grill. “Come on, let’s eat. You still think I’m the target?”
“Well, you’re the only person being consistently harmed by all this. It makes more sense than the entire base being the target, or AAC.”
“I guess.” Dare held out her chair for her and snagged a quick kiss as she sat. He rounded the table and took his own seat, then unfolded his napkin. After a moment he shook his head.
“Nope, I can’t remember ever knowing a Halliday. Now back on my first tour there was this kid named Holi—” He broke off abruptly, his eyes growing distant with recollection.
“What is it, Dare?” Andrea asked impatiently. “What kid?”
“Holiday. I thought his name was Holiday, but maybe it wasn’t.”
“What kid?” Andrea demanded.
For a long moment he didn’t answer. “Just a kid, an airman. He was in my ground crew. He got hit in a firefight one night, and I tried to get to him, but I couldn’t. I wrote to his family afterward, but there wasn’t much to say. He’d been out there exactly one week, he was eighteen years old, and he was dead because he was on mission for me when the firefight broke out.”
Andrea set her fork down, aching for him, for the shadow of old sorrow she read on his face. “It was war, Dare,” she said after a moment. “You can’t hold yourself responsible.”
His blue eyes focused on her. “I don’t. Oh, maybe that was my first reaction when it happened. You’re bound to think if only when something like that happens, but nobody is responsible for the accidents of war. No, I was just wondering if his name was Halliday, not Holiday. It’s possible, I guess. It’s been a long time. My memory could be playing tricks.” He shrugged. “And where does it get us if his name was Halliday?”
Andrea pushed a piece of steak round and round on her plate. “Well,” she said presently, “maybe a younger brother grew up thinking you were responsible for his older brother’s death because you sent him on an errand.”
“That’s sick.”
“So’s poking holes in your hydraulic lines and blowing a hole in the nose of a flying B-52. We’re clearly not dealing with a normal mind here. And it would fit with this feeling I can’t shake that you’re the real target.”
“Then why didn’t he kill me?”
“Damn it, Dare, he almost did! If you weren’t as physically strong as you are, you would probably never have come out of that nosedive. I know you don’t want to believe it. I sure as hell don’t want to believe that somebody is trying to kill you. But I think we’re both going to have to accept it. This creep wanted to kill you, and he wanted to be sure you were aware every agonizing moment of your approaching death.”
Dare shoved his plate to one side. “I just lost my appetite. Andrea, we’re really reaching with this.”
“You mean I am.” She’d lost her appetite, too. And then slowly she raised her head, looking at him. “I’ve got it.”
“Got what?”
“An idea for a trap.” Suddenly she was excited. “Say this guy wants to ruin you.”
“I thought he wanted to kill me?”
“Say he does, but say he wants to get you into hot water before he does you in. Look, he put a hole in one bomber cockpit and set fire to another. Neither one of those incidents was physically dangerous to you, but both of them have made your life miserable.”
Dare sighed and looked truly dubious. “All right,
I’ll agree with that for the sake of argument.”
“Well, if he wants to ruin you, I bet he couldn’t resist a chance to do it spectacularly.”
Dare exhaled slowly. “How spectacularly? Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like this?”
“You’ll like it. Listen, let’s use the grapevine. I swear it works better than the base paper. Schedule a generation for Wednesday or Thursday.”
“I can’t do that. We’re grounded until—”
“You can always cancel it right beforehand,” Andrea interrupted. “Say you schedule a generation, and then we put it on the grapevine that some important congressman or other is going to be on base—unofficially, of course—and that the generation’s being held for his benefit. We can even increase security under the guise of protecting this congressman.”
“And then?”
“And then we put somebody on each and every one of the bombers from now until then. If our man can’t resist the opportunity to give you a black eye in front of the world, he won’t be able to resist this. And we’ll catch him.”
“We haven’t caught him so far,” Dare pointed out. “Despite stepped-up security.”
“Dogs,” Andrea said. “Let’s use the K-9’s. Put one on every plane with a handler.”
Dare gave a grudging nod. “I can almost believe dogs might work. But Halliday, if it is Halliday, is bound to hear about it.”
Andrea shook her head. “Nick can handle it. He can order the dogs out on some kind of maneuver, keep the entire unit out of contact with the rest of the squadron. Once it’s dark they can move around the airstrip without anybody being the wiser. There’s not even a moon this week.”
“Somebody will hear about it.”
“So I’ll slap a classification on the whole damn thing. Nick can pick guards who he trusts to keep their mouths shut. The group of people who’ll know what’s really going on will be small enough that they’ll know I can court-martial every one of them if word gets out.”
Rubbing his chin, Dare thought about it. The plan was a rough sketch, of course, and a lot of details needed to be worked out, but it was a hell of a lot better than no plan at all.
“Okay,” he said. “First thing tomorrow, I’ll schedule a generation for Wednesday.”
Andrea grinned. “Thanks.”
“Thank me when it works.” And it just might. At least they would be doing something, which agreed with him a hell of a lot more than sitting on his hands waiting for events to unfold. In fact, it gave him back his appetite.
“Eat up,” he said after a moment. “And tell me how you’re going to manage the security on this trap.”
Dare ate and listened, thinking that Andrea had a tactician’s mind. Steadily, piece by piece, she outlined a covert operation in which handpicked troops would move in and occupy all the bombers without tipping off the other guards. She’d learned well at the Academy, he thought, and displayed a natural talent for applying the things she’d learned. If she were a man…
The thought brought Dare up short. If she were a man. How many times must Andrea have thought the same thing and been forced to face the fact that she had to work harder and perform better and yet would never have the same opportunities? If she were a man, she wouldn’t have set her sights on making colonel. No, she would be aiming for brigadier, at the very least, and he would have put his money on her to make it.
It was no wonder she was so fiercely independent, so determined to let nothing affect her career, so reluctant to let her femininity come forward. She worked under a major disadvantage and had to struggle continuously to overcome it.
He hadn’t really thought about it like that before, but then, he’d never really been burdened by notions of what women should and shouldn’t do. If an officer was capable, Dare didn’t particularly care if the officer was male, female, black, or white or green with purple polka dots. He had never held gender to be a mark against someone. Unfortunately he doubted that all his fellow officers felt the same.
When all was said and done, he decided, it was pretty remarkable that Andrea had let go as much as she had with him. And the fact that she had must mean that she felt something for him, something strong, because Andrea obviously wasn’t the type to be led astray by mere hormones, not levelheaded, sensible, virgin Andrea Burke.
When Andrea at last fell silent, it was nearly nine. Dare was already thinking of taking her to bed for some long, lazy lovemaking that would still leave time for a good night’s sleep before he took her back to the BOQ. She, however, was clearly revved up, thinking over her plans for the trap. He watched her for a while, but his patience began to wear thin as the minutes ticked by.
“Captain Burke.”
She looked up from the pad she was making notes on. “Sir?”
“It’s getting late. Are you planning to make notes all night?”
Andrea blinked, obviously coming out of her preoccupation with difficulty, but then a smile appeared, warming her hazy green eyes. “Do you have a better idea of what I should be making tonight, sir?”
“A much better idea. Can I interest you?”
Andrea crossed the living room and slid onto his lap. With a smile, she wrapped her arms around his neck. “I might have a few ideas of my own.”
The ache that never entirely left him when he was within sight of her began to deepen. “Have I told you just how special you are?” he asked, capturing her face so she couldn’t look away.
A faint blush stole into her cheeks, and her eyelids fluttered. “I’m not special,” she protested in a smothered voice.
“Oh, yes, you are,” he said gently, never taking his eyes from hers.
Unable to bear the intensity of emotion she was feeling, Andrea ducked her head, wiggling until she was able to tuck it into his shoulder. “No more, please,” she begged in a small voice.
“All right, darlin’. No more. Just know that I think you’re pretty damn special.”
He felt her arms tighten convulsively around his neck, and he smiled against her ear. She was so small, so soft, so sweet, his lovely Captain Burke. And she would probably kill him for even thinking such a thing.
“Let’s go to bed, sweetheart,” he said. “I need to get as close to you as I can.”
Much, much later Andrea said, “You never told me about your childhood.”
They lay snuggled together under a down comforter, basking in the afterglow while the wind keened noisily around the corner of the house and rattled the windowpanes.
“There’s not much to tell. I grew up with three brothers, working hard and playing harder. It was a good life for a kid. Plenty of fresh air and open space, horses to ride and a creek to fish in. My brothers are still on the ranch, and their kids are playing in the creek now.”
“How come you didn’t stay on the ranch?”
“I just always wanted to fly. To hear my father tell it, I was plane crazy from the age of two. I can’t remember ever wanting to do anything else.”
“Did it ever wear off?”
“A lot of things wore off, especially after I saw combat, but I still love being all alone at forty thousand feet in a clear sky.” Turning onto his side, he wrapped his other arm around her.
“What about you, Andrea? When did you make up your mind to go to the Academy?”
“As soon as I realized I had a good chance of being accepted. Before that I’d planned to go ROTC in college.”
“But why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I wanted my father to have to salute me.”
There was a laugh in her voice, and Dare smiled. “But you could have done so many things. Why this?”
“I just never seriously thought about doing anything else. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because I grew up with the Air Force. I just wanted to do it, and do it well.”
“You certainly do it well. Why didn’t you want me to notify your family when you were shot?” As he spoke, he stroked the puckered scar on her shoulder with a gentle finger.
Andrea sighed. “Because my dad would have gotten on my case again about resigning, settling down and having a family. Because he would have said I wouldn’t have been shot if I’d been doing my job right.”
“You don’t believe that, do you?”
“No. I know better. That’s just my father.”
Dare kissed her. “Do you want a family someday?” He nearly held his breath.
“I never thought about it.”
“Never?”
“Never. Why? Do you?”
“I think about it.” Though she didn’t move a muscle, Dare could feel her withdrawal. “You could have a family, you know,” he said quickly. “Lots of career Air Force women do these days.”
“Child care would be a pain,” Andrea said distantly. “Base day-care isn’t open in the middle of the night.”
“Are you planning to do this without a husband?”
“I’m not planning anything at all!”
She was rigid in his arms now, and he could tell she felt cornered, but he couldn’t understand why.
“Easy, honey. This is just a theoretical discussion.” With one hand he kneaded her shoulders, willing her to relax.
“It may be theoretical,” she said stiffly, “but I’m a realist. You can’t expect me to believe any man would tolerate being a baby-sitter while his wife went running out in the middle of the night.”
Dare held his peace, stroking her soothingly.
“Well,” she said after a moment, “it doesn’t matter. It’s all academic.”
He wanted to shake her then, shake her until her teeth rattled. It doesn’t matter? It’s all academic? Never had mere words cut him so deeply or hit him so hard. Take it easy, MacLendon, he warned himself. Take it easy or you’ll drive her away.
Andrea bit her lip, sensing that she’d angered him, stunned to realize that she wanted him to argue with her, to tell her it wasn’t academic. To say he wanted her to have his children.
But he hadn’t said it. He’d been the one to say the discussion was theoretical, and he hadn’t argued with her. All of a sudden she was terrified in a way she’d never been terrified before. Everything was out of whack, as if she’d become a person she hardly recognized. All those things she’d never thought she would want had suddenly become paramount. She wanted to talk about them, argue about them, hammer them out until she’d built a modified version of her future that included Alisdair MacLendon.
