Bring On the Dusk

by M. L. Buchman

  The comparisons would have been inevitable even if they’d never met. They were both tall and blond and were in the elite pool of female SOAR pilots. Claudia had ignored those side comments as well as she could, but there was no question that even Beale’s historical presence had driven Claudia ahead.

  Maybe Claudia could like Trisha a little bit. If she’d flown with Beale, Claudia could certainly respect her.

  Chapter 3

  Michael noticed when Trisha entered the chow line despite the busy room. He and Bill sat at their usual table in the far corner with their backs to the wall and exits to their right and straight ahead. At the nearer tables, the eight men of the two D-boy fire teams sat eating quietly. SOAR and Navy spread about the low-ceilinged, gray wardroom mess of second deck, though rarely mixing. A cluster of Rangers at the far end of the mess was making most of the noise.

  Then the new pilot appeared behind Trisha. She was several inches taller and built quite differently. Everything about Trisha was petite, except perhaps her temper and her boundless energy.

  The other woman had straight, blond hair that spread over her athletic shoulders despite being up in a sleek ponytail. She’d shed her SARVSO vest and, like Trisha, had stripped her flight suit down to her waist and tied the arms around her middle.

  What Michael saw made him damn glad he hadn’t tried to help her out of her flight suit last night. He’d have been toast.

  She was amazingly shapely, not big, just…right. Her T-shirt indicated that she probably had six-pack abs below her full curves. Even on the ground she exhibited the quiet steadiness that Trisha thoroughly lacked. Clearly this was his new pilot. The new pilot, he corrected himself. She walked the way she flew, which was amazing to watch.

  He was so screwed.

  “Hey, Michael! Hey, Billy!” Trisha plunked her tray down on the table. “This is CC. That’s Michael and this sweet piece of soldier is Billy the SEAL.”

  “I’m Delta now.”

  “Tough. Your nickname has already been stuck on you—by your loving wife. So don’t even consider trying to change it. Sit, CC.”

  “It’s not CC. It’s Claudia.”

  “Not CC?” Trisha shrugged. “Pretty fussy of you, but okay.” Trisha sounded as if she was granting royal dispensation in allowing Claudia to retain her own name.

  “Thanks.”

  Trisha didn’t even blink at Claudia’s dry tone, but Michael couldn’t stop the quick laugh that bubbled out from somewhere. Thankfully Trisha missed it, though Bill was looking at him as if he’d suddenly grown a second head.

  Claudia arched one perfect eyebrow at him and then set down her tray and sat.

  Trisha started simultaneously eating and talking as fast as the rattle of gunfire.

  Michael knew better than to attempt any form of interruption and started working on his apple pie.

  “Took her up. She done good. I pulled a Roland on her. Took her eight hundred feet to save us, and she almost cut my chest in two ramming the collective home.” She grabbed Claudia’s bicep and squeezed it as the woman sat down tentatively. “See, she’s strong. Hey, you really are.”

  He’d never really understood Trisha’s need to shock. Roland had taken a dud RPG to the head and died instantly. Maybe it was Trisha’s—what did she call it—her dealing mechanism.

  Then he looked back at Claudia, almost as close as last night but not hidden behind all the gear. He tried not to ever let looks influence him, but she was stunning.

  She even ate the way she flew, smooth and powerful. Nothing about her looked practiced; she was just herself. She was also one of those women who have perfect dancer’s posture. Trisha always leaned or slouched, as if she’d been made of rubber. Claudia sat with a straight back and her chin up. Even with the inevitable sports-bra lines showing through the tank top she was—

  “You’re staring, Michael.” Trisha spoke around a mouthful of hamburger.

  “I was? Sorry. A new face and an attractive one. I—”

  “Whoa! A compliment from the colonel. You better watch out, Claudia.”

  And Trisha constantly wondered why he talked so little.

  Bill grabbed the back of Trisha’s hand that held her burger and shoved it up and into her mouth, forcing her to take such a large bite that even she couldn’t speak around it. Recruiting Bill to Delta really had been a good choice.

  “Ignore her,” Michael suggested. “Where are you from?”

  He paid no attention to the wide eyes and raised eyebrows Trisha aimed in his direction.

  Maybe she was choking.

  Good.

  * * *

  Claudia ignored Trisha. Though she appreciated the compliment on her flying. Leave it to Trisha to make a wholly insufficient introduction.

  A colonel? Colonel Michael. Of Delta Force? A colonel back in Fort Campbell commanded all five battalions of the Night Stalkers.

  Michael’s hands could never be mistaken for a flier’s. They were too rough, and he had a big callus in the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. Right where her hand hurt after an afternoon on the practice range. Did this guy shoot so much that he had an actual callus from it? It matched the one on Billy…Bill. And Bill was Delta Force.

  A Delta Force colonel? And still in field operations rather than flying a desk. Or maybe in Delta it was killing a desk. Whichever, that meant he wasn’t merely scary, bug-shit crazy; he was probably at the outermost envelope of them all.

  The most extreme Delta operator?

  He didn’t look old enough to have climbed the ranks yet, which meant he’d done it through an immense amount of skill—too much to keep back. There was a hardness to him, a strength that made him appear both powerful and…she searched for the right word…safe?

  Yes, that’s what she’d felt last night for a brief moment in his arms, and it was still right.

  Safe.

  Not something she’d ever found anywhere except deep inside herself. Never expected to either.

  “I’m from a little town called Bumble Bee originally,” she answered his question. The others had a blank look, but not Michael. He just waited. Of course he’d know that no one had ever heard of it and she’d automatically explain. “Ghost town about sixty miles north of Phoenix. Out in the deep desert. How about you?”

  “The redwoods.”

  Having swallowed at least half of what she was chewing, Trisha scoffed at him around the rest of it. “What? Like up a tree?”

  Claudia noticed that Bill was keeping his own counsel. So these were his friends, and they didn’t even know where Michael was from.

  “Is the wood actually red?” She’d never seen one.

  He appeared to like that she’d skipped over all the normal questions and moved right along.

  His simple nod, before returning his attention to the big slice of apple pie he’d been working on when they arrived, flustered Trisha no end.

  Claudia liked that Michael could do that to the irritating woman. Even if Trisha wasn’t intentionally irritating, which Claudia was beginning to think was true, that didn’t make her any less annoying. Maybe once you got to know her.

  But there was more than that. It was as if Claudia had just passed some test by not saying any of the obvious things. So Michael thought he was a deep and subtle one, did he?

  She was on the verge of teasing him with, “Is it nice up there, Colonel Michael?”

  No. Even that was too expected.

  He was Mr. Strong-and-Silent, dropping his little tidbits to see how others reacted. Wasn’t that just too cute for words. D-boy colonel with little mind games, ones that he apparently enjoyed playing on himself.

  So why would he say he lived in the redwoods? Beyond the test of her reaction, she could see some truth in his response. That wasn’t where he lived; that’s what lived inside him.

  She lived
in Bumble Bee, Arizona. But where she came to life was out in the hard-scrabble hills of the Sonoran Desert as they climbed toward the Bradshaw Mountains. That’s where…

  Ah.

  “Can you hear the world breathe up in your trees, Colonel Gibson?”

  Trisha looked at her like she’d gone nuts, and Bill simply looked lost. But she didn’t care about them; she kept her attention on Michael.

  He was slow in returning that dark-eyed gaze from his apple pie to study her face.

  She’d expected his eyes to be penetrating or even icy, something appropriate for a Delta Force colonel. But they weren’t. They were the eyes of a man who didn’t expect to be noticed and looked surprised that he had been.

  He hesitated long enough to show that it was a carefully considered answer. The trees were terribly important to him.

  She understood perfectly.

  For her, the rolling sagebrush and scrub oak of the steep hills around Bumble Bee were a constant call. She missed that perfect peace, only made all the deeper when a white-tailed deer passed by or one of Mr. Johns’s cattle got loose again and dislodged a rock that skittered down the hillside. She tried to imagine the different quiet of tall redwoods. She couldn’t quite picture it.

  “Yes.” His voice was actually rough with the unexpected truth.

  “Sounds nice,” she offered.

  “It is.”

  Trisha asked what the hell they were talking about.

  Bill stayed silent.

  Claudia started eating her own meal, feeling as surprised as he looked. For the first time, someone else had understood exactly what she meant about the desert.

  * * *

  “You’re technically not on duty until tomorrow.” Almost without Claudia noticing, Michael had slid up beside her after she’d dumped off her tray.

  “But?” There was clearly a “but” in his statement. If this was a pickup line, she was going to be very disappointed.

  “If you go to sleep now, you’ll sleep through the night and be completely out of sync.”

  She’d slept most of the day, but coming off a two-day deficit, a mission, and the flight with Tricia, she was ready to sleep another full eight.

  Actually, it was more like a five-day deficit. She’d started with the two-day final flight test—which had been brutal with long distances, rugged terrain to follow at impossibly low altitudes, and time constraints to make a grown woman weep, if there’d been a spare second to do so. There hadn’t. That had transitioned straight into graduation and being declared mission-qualified, then loaded within hours onto a transport bound for the Persian Gulf. The changes were almost overwhelming. The all-important test that she’d passed just three days ago was already ancient history—on the far side of a flown mission into the desert of the supposedly friendly country of Yemen.

  “Well, I’m in no shape to fly at the moment.”

  Not a line she’d ever have said intentionally; she must be more tired than she thought. In the military, a woman simply didn’t leave an open line like that, not even in as elite an outfit as SOAR. She braced for some joke about her “shape being made to fly” or some such crap.

  If the colonel was working a pickup line, she’d just walked straight into it.

  The question she had to ask herself was how much would she have to take because she was new to the outfit and he was a colonel? Not much, her years in the Marines decided—not in her current state of sleep deprivation, not even from a senior officer.

  “No mission tonight.” Michael had taken her statement at face value. “But I think you might wish to attend the briefing.”

  Not her first choice at all. She’d be asleep within thirty seconds of hitting the chair and end up slumped on the floor of the meeting room on her first day with the company. Hell of a first impression.

  “I’ll try not to be boring.”

  She laughed. It just burst out of her.

  No one had ever been able read her like that.

  Claudia had been accused of being an Ice Queen any number of times in her career, just because she liked keeping herself to herself. Of course, the guys said it because she wouldn’t sleep with them, which also had made the nickname useful. She’d learned early on the advantages of nurturing the image. She would occasionally let carefully selected men through her barriers, discreet ones who had no association with the Corps, though none of them had stuck for more than a few months.

  But some of the women called her that too, which made her wonder. It was exactly the sort of thing Trisha would have said, if she’d thought to.

  Claudia was far too tired to try to make sense of Trisha at the moment.

  She was about to decline when Michael tipped his head in a gentle “C’mon.”

  It was charming, and she was tired enough to be charmed a little. She hadn’t missed his compliment or how much it had surprised his tablemates. And she’d never met someone who might understand the attraction of her desert. But maybe, just maybe, he did.

  Share her desert with Colonel Michael.

  She noted that in her head, it wasn’t an interrogative but rather a flat statement. Too young to be going senile, perhaps going psychotic? She’d known him for…an embrace, a meal, and a firefight.

  Well, that only verified that they were both soldiers to the core. The average couple couldn’t point to the obliteration of an al-Qaeda cell as their meet-cute.

  Couple? She really was losing it. It was a good thing she wasn’t one of those people whose brains connected directly to their mouths with no filter.

  With a shrug of acceptance—which she deemed safe enough—she followed him up the steel ladders, through the ringing hangar deck where dozens of SOAR and Navy people were now scattered along a makeshift track, and on up to the flight deck.

  The sun was close to setting off the starboard side. The entire line of the horizon was glowing a soft orange, especially to the south. The particulates thrown into the air by the dust storm were making for a spectacular sky.

  She noticed that all the helicopters were still on the deck, tied down with no one working on them. The stealth birds even had loose cloth covers that would mask their shape from aerial observation. Right, only moments ago Michael had said no mission tonight. In her current state she’d be lucky to remember her own name from one minute to the next.

  If there was no flight, then what was the briefing about?

  He turned for the door into the communications platform, as the above-decks tower was called. She could tell he didn’t know the ship as well as he might. He could have saved more than twenty steps from the wardroom mess to here by traveling aft and then climbing the inside ladder.

  But Delta operators didn’t make mistakes and they always knew their terrain.

  Perhaps he’d wanted to spend a longer walk with her. She must really be exhausted to be having thoughts like that one. She told her brain to shut up and turned to study the sunset to buy herself a moment.

  Hadn’t it been setting astern just an hour before? Yes, she’d been flying out in the Gulf of Aden and the coast had been south. Now they’d rounded the Horn of Africa and were headed south into the open ocean.

  Something else had changed. This ship had been her home for years and she knew it intimately. They were moving at close to full speed, based on the brisk wind sweeping the length of the deck.

  She breathed it in deep: ocean air, hot metal, and spent jet fuel. If she moved to the farthest stern extent of the fantail, she’d catch just the slightest whiff of diesel exhaust shot up into the air through the funnels atop the communications platform.

  Michael had led her halfway along the platform, past a half-dozen rooms she knew all too well from when this ship had been servicing the Marines.

  For most of her history, the Peleliu had transported seventeen hundred Marine grunts and could launch enough SuperCobra helic
opters and Harrier Jump Jets from the flight deck, and amphibious water craft from her sea-level well deck to get all of those troops on the move fast.

  Claudia had spent countless hours attempting to read a book in the squad ready room while on “alert hold” status.

  They’d passed the “pee room” where every pilot had to pee in a cup before every flight to prove they were “Marine clean.”

  Now, beneath the setting sun, the old ship felt new and fresh. No longer a jarhead pilot among thousands, Claudia was a SOAR pilot. A Night Stalker. One of the best helicopter pilots on the planet. And in the 5D besides.

  And the man beside her was probably the most senior D-boy in the field, making him pretty much the best warrior on the planet. She could sense his quiet center as surely as she could smell the oncoming darkness.

  There was a tiny release inside her, as quiet as a skittering stone slipping down a sandy hillside. It was a part of her “safe” memory from last night’s sleep-blinded embrace.

  What more was there in Michael’s arms other than “safe”?

  She was just dumb enough and brain hazed enough to ask the question.

  Claudia had never been a big fan of unanswered questions.

  She turned to face him, his quiet, assessing eyes not blinking for a moment.

  A half step closer…

  * * *

  Michael thought he’d be shocked. Was sure he would be. They had only met just…

  His mind blanked when Claudia brushed her lips over his.

  His mind never blanked.

  There wasn’t heat. There wasn’t fire.

  No…

  There wasn’t only heat and fire.

  Beyond those, there was a moment of impossible perfection as if this sensation, this soft intimate touch of only their lips was indeed the goal he’d been seeking since he’d climbed his first hundred-foot tree seeking the pinnacle that you could never quite reach.

  He tasted her. Could almost imagine that he could taste her beloved wild desert, for he’d seen that connection in her as clearly as she’d seen it in him.