by Janet Dailey
She caught Bubba’s arm and directed his attention to the jacket. “That would look great on you.”
“Do you think so?” He sounded interested, her comment appealing to his ego.
“Let’s go inside,” she urged, her eyes bright on him.
After a scant second’s hesitation, Bubba leaned the bike against the side of the building and walked with Eden into the store. A clerk brought out the same jacket in his size and let Bubba try it on.
The tailored wool tweed jacket gave breadth to his wide shoulders, erasing that lanky, country-boy look, and hinted at a muscularly trim physique. The camel-soft brown in the tweed highlighted the streaks of dark gold in his hair and deepened the brown. Bubba flexed his shoulders, testing the freedom of movement, while he studied his reflection in the mirror.
“What do you think?” he asked as Eden looked on with gleaming, satisfied eyes.
“We’ll take it,” she told the sales clerk.
“Wait a minute. How much does it cost?” Bubba flipped over the sales tag tied to the sleeve button.
“It doesn’t matter.” Price was not an object as far as Eden was concerned. “It’s my present … from me to you.” She opened her shoulder bag to pay for it.
“No.” It was a flat refusal. A second later, Bubba was shrugging out of the jacket and handing it to the clerk. “I changed my mind. I don’t like it.” He looked at Eden, an anger lurking beneath his expression. “Come on. Let’s go.”
This show of temper surprised Eden into silence. Bubba had always seemed so easygoing; nothing ever riled him. She didn’t protest as he steered her out of the store and back onto the sidewalk.
“What’s wrong?” She eyed him cautiously. “Surely you didn’t—”
“Forget it.” He cut harshly across her words, then paused, regret flashing across his expression as he lowered his head. “Just forget it,” he said in a quieter tone.
Eden started to speak, then let her lips come together. Maybe it was better to let it alone for now, she decided. Bubba stood his bicycle up and they started walking down the street again.
After they’d gone a block, she asked, “Where are we going?”
He seemed to hesitate, then looked at her directly. “There’s a hotel I know about, not far from here.” He paused, as if to await an objection from her, but she had none to make. “It sits kinda outa the way. Best of all, I guess, it doesn’t ask any questions.”
“Let’s go there, then.” She slipped her hand into the grasp of his roughly callused, work-worn hand. Her touch seemed to tame him and bring the warm glint back to his eyes.
Twenty minutes later, Bubba unlocked the door to their hotel room and carried her briefcase and his small duffle bag inside. The room was small and furnished with only the necessary bed and dresser. The fringed area rug was threadbare, its pattern and colors fading. He laid their things on the bed, and turned, a trifle self-consciously, to face Eden.
“It isn’t much.”
“It definitely isn’t the Waldorf,” Eden agreed, a smile in her voice as she stepped forward to link her hands behind his neck. “I missed you.”
His gaze became fixed on her lips while he seemed to hold himself on a tight rein. He rested his hands on the points of her hipbones, covered by slacks of Santiago blue. “I missed you one helluva lot.”
Pent-up hungers were released as he took her lips, driving into them with a fevered need. She answered the pressure of crushing arms, her own winding around him in an ever-tightening circle. The strain was raw and wildly sweet. It was some moments before they broke apart under the weight of it, to catch their breath.
Eden moved away, turning her back to him while she took the blue tarn from atop her red hair. She was disturbed by him, more deeply than she had been by any man. She was used to having control of things, but now she had none.
The tarn was left to sit on the dresser while she unbuttoned her Eisenhower jacket. Wire hangers hung in the small closet in the room. She took one down and slipped her jacket onto it. When she turned, Eden caught Bubba watching her.
“If you want to look halfway decent on these ferry trips, you have to look after your clothes.” No maids came along to do it for her. “You never know how long you’ll be away … or how long you might have to wear your uniform before you can have it cleaned. There’s only room in the cockpits of these pursuits for the briefcase. By the time you put your tech manuals, your orders, toothbrush and makeup in that, you’re lucky if there’s room for a clean blouse.”
She smiled at him, because it was really quite humorous. Her reputation as a clotheshorse was notorious. She laid her briefcase flat and unfastened the catches to open it and unpack.
“You’d be surprised at the tricks we’ve learned to stay looking neat,” Eden told him. “We wash our underwear out at night and drape it over the radiator or the bedstead to dry. If you can’t count on getting an iron, then you just rub the collar of your shirt clean and set it under the Bible so it will dry already pressed. The slacks we put between the mattress and the box springs. The next morning, they are creased to Army perfection.”
His chuckle widened her smile as Eden gathered up her cosmetics kit and carried it into the small bathroom. At least they had a private one and didn’t have to share some community facility off the hallway.
“What’s this?” Bubba’s voice followed her. She came back into the room to find him standing by the bed, holding the .45-caliber pistol she carried in her briefcase. “How come you’re carrying a gun?”
“The planes we fly sometimes have sophisticated equipment aboard.” Eden took the loaded weapon from him and put it back in the briefcase with her manuals, charts, and orders. “Gun sights, transmitters, and those IFF—If Friend or Foe—sensors. Some of them even have morphine in the medical packs.”
“But why the gun?” Bubba frowned. “The Army doesn’t expect you to shoot people, does it?”
“No,” she assured him with a faint laugh. “But if we’re forced down under ‘suspicious circumstances,’ the phrase they use, we’re supposed to fire at a spot on the fuselage. Supposedly it will blow up the entire plane.”
He looked at her hard. “That sounds dangerous.”
“And Camp Davis was a piece of cake, with artillery lobbing fifty-millimeter shells at a muslin sleeve towed behind a plane,” Eden reminded him ironically. She crossed to stand in front of him, then reached up and began unbuttoning his khaki shirt.
Halfway done with the task, she slipped her fingers inside to touch his warm, hard flesh. She felt the small tremor that shook him, and satisfaction ran hotly through her veins, smooth and fiery as aged Scotch whiskey—and just as intoxicating.
His long hands cupped her face, framing it. “Do you love me, Eden?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“No.” He shook his head, the strain of something else visible in the yearning of his look. “Do you love me the way I am?”
“What nonsense is this?” Eden murmured. “Are you talking about that jacket? Back there at the store—”
“I don’t want you buying me things,” he said. “I know you’ve got plenty of money, but I’ll pay my own way. It isn’t really that, though … it’s just, I’m wondering if you’re trying to change me. Eden, I’m a mechanic. I don’t have any fancy houses or fancy cars or clothes.”
“Not now,” she said. “How could you? The Army isn’t exactly the place to get ahead.”
“What if I don’t want to get ahead, Eden?” Bubba said. “What if I like what I am? Can you be happy with that?”
She didn’t like this talk. She didn’t like the questions he was raising. She didn’t want anything spoiling their precious time together.
“What does it matter?” she asked impatiently and pressed her body to his length. “Does it change this?”
“No,” he admitted hoarsely and let his frustration be carried away by the roughening fire of a kiss.
A minute later, he was scooping her into his arms and
depositing her on the bed. Wrinkled uniforms became the least of their concerns.
It was a balmy California afternoon, a fresh breeze was stirring, and the sky was high and blue. Mary Lynn didn’t think a more perfect day could have been created. Even after the long flight she’d just completed, she felt revived and inwardly exuberant. Briefcase in hand, she moved away from the aircraft she’d just delivered to head for the operations building.
“Hey, Marty!” she called to the long-legged blonde in her striking blue flying fatigues. This trip had been one of the rare occasions when their orders had taken them to the same destination, so they’d flown their planes tandem. “Are you coming?”
Marty’s hands were cupped to her mouth as she stood beside her plane with a mechanic. “Gotta get my gear out of the plane.” Her megaphoned voice sounded even deeper and huskier. “Go ahead without me. I’ll be along.”
Mary Lynn waved an acknowledgment and crossed the wide flight line to the operations building. It seemed more crowded than usual, a lot more civilians milling around inside than she was accustomed to seeing. Most of them scowled at her with unconcealed dislike.
“What are you doing here?” one of them demanded, surprising Mary Lynn with the vehemence in his tone.
“I just flew a P-47 in—”
But he wasn’t interested in her explanation. None of them were. “Why don’t you go home where you belong?” he challenged.
“No one needs you or the rest of your fancy-assed women. You aren’t wanted here so why don’t you clear out!”
“You got no business in the cockpit of an airplane!”
Unable to fight back against this barrage of verbal abuse, Mary Lynn tried to walk away from it, but the men crowded around her, not letting her by. Hostility swept from them in threatening waves, swamping her with the implied menace of their pressing bodies.
“Your organization is worthless. You’re nothin’ but a bunch of glamour gals.”
“Go home!”
Not knowing what to do, Mary Lynn looked at them in helpless confusion. She couldn’t understand why they were attacking her.
An officer shouldered his way into their midst. “Leave her alone,” a familiar voice snapped. In relief, Mary Lynn recognized Walker. “Beat it. All of you,” he ordered, his low, hard voice commanding their attention and respect.
Reluctant and grumbling, they dispersed, moving slowly away and leaving Mary Lynn standing there, shaken and confused by the experience.
“I don’t understand. What did I do?” she asked.
“You didn’t have to do anything.” With his usual disregard for the Army’s uniform code, Walker’s summer khaki shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, revealing a glimpse of the chain that held his dogtags. A cigarette dangled from a corner of his mouth while he squinted his eyes against the upward curl of smoke and stared at Mary Lynn. “Don’t let them get to you. They’re just a bunch of former flight instructors, taking scheduled flight tests for Air Transport Command. I guess these guys didn’t pass. Then you walked in and I suppose it was too much for their injured pride that a mere slip of a woman had made the grade and they didn’t. You’ve got a job they want and can’t qualify for.”
“I see.” She lowered her head, troubled by the venom that had been thrown at her so unjustifiably. “That’s why they said I didn’t belong in those planes.”
“Hey.” His voice cajoled her while he touched a finger to the side of her mouth, trying to coax a smile from her. “Not everyone feels like that. You can ride in the cockpit of my plane any time.”
His suggestive comment heated her skin. She turned away from the touch of his finger and made a move to leave, but his hand hooked her waist in a lightning reflex while he discarded the cigarette. She was stopped by the action, and turned of her own volition to face him. Indolent satisfaction darkened the gleam in his eyes as he traced her cheekbone and jaw with a caressing finger.
“Have dinner with me tonight,” he urged.
She lowered her glance, trying to elude his touch. “No, thanks. You drink your dinner and I prefer to eat mine.”
With her head down, she walked quickly away from him, passing Marty just as she entered the building. Marty’s glance flashed past her to strike at Walker. Ignoring her presence, he bent his head to light another cigarette, shaking out the match flame while he watched Mary Lynn walk away. Marty was rarely given to violent likes or dislikes, but she despised him.
“Why don’t you keep your hands off her?” she snapped.
Without turning his head, Walker looked at her with amused scorn. “What makes you think she wants to be protected from me?”
“What a ridiculous question.” Marty was angry. “She’s in love with her husband.”
The line of his mouth deepened its mocking slant. “You … of all people … should know love has nothing to do with this.”
At a loss for a reply, Marty spun on her heel and marched out of the building after Mary Lynn. She caught up with her outside.
“Are you okay?” Marty peered at her.
“Of course.” Mary Lynn continued walking, head up and eyes to the front.
Marty matched the shorter stride of her friend. “That guy is about as crude as you can get. Someone needs to teach him some manners and proper respect.”
“That’s not quite true.” She defended him. “Some pilots—men—were giving me a hard time because I was doing a job they felt should have been theirs. Captain Walker came along and sent them on their way.”
“Then he started bothering you.” Something about the man kept ringing more than alarm bells in her mind, but Marty couldn’t place him. “If I were you, I’d steer clear of him.”
“He knows Beau.” Mary Lynn mentioned it as if that gave him credibility.
“How?” Marty stopped, taken aback by the announcement.
Mary Lynn’s dark eyes took on a lively, yet wistful quality. “Captain Walker was a B-17 pilot in England with Beau. He knows all about him.”
“What’s he doing here?” Marty didn’t like the sound of any of this, and the graveled edge of her voice became rougher.
“Like Cappy, he’s flying the C-47S to their embarkation points when they come off the assembly lines at Douglas.”
“Why should the Army have a B-17 pilot doing that?” she asked, skeptical of his story.
“Look at what they have you doing.” The lilt in her voice said it all as Mary Lynn resumed walking, prompting Marty into motion.
But a bell had rung loudly in Marty’s head. “I’ve got it!” The declaration was made under her breath as all her attention was turned inward. “That’s where I saw him before. I’d swear to it.”
“What are you talking about?” Mary Lynn paused before they reached the jeep parked outside operations, waiting to transport them to their quarters.
“I’d bet a month’s pay he’s the bomber pilot I bumped into in Miami Beach. The scars on his face. The voice. I’d almost swear to it.” In an aside to Mary Lynn, she added, “He was a coward—trying to drink himself brave when I saw him. More important, he doesn’t know Beau. He is lying to you, Mary Lynn. I asked.”
Tired and worn by a series of long flights, Cappy sat in the post canteen on her old home base outside of Washington, D.C., and pushed the food around on her plate. Her appetite had fallen off—along with a lot of other things, like contentment—since she’d been transferred. When she’d been assigned to the same ferry command where Eden was stationed, she had thought everything would be fine. Close to three months had passed and everything wasn’t fine.
A new set of orders was in the sealed envelope lying on the table beside her plate. She hadn’t looked at them yet, not particularly caring what she would be flying or where. Since leaving Long Beach nearly four days before, she had logged a prodigious number of hours. Cappy felt she had earned this break—and these few rare moments with her family, specifically her mother, who sat across the table from her.
Her mother was doing nearly all the
talking, recounting to Cappy her visit to Capitol Hill. The House Civil Service Committee had been meeting in regard to the WASP program, which they had concluded was a waste of money and effort.
“General Arnold argued with them for more than an hour,” her mother reported. “He was most insistent that women pilots were necessary to the war effort. Jacqueline Cochran was there, sitting beside him, but she didn’t say anything. The committee was all for disbanding the entire organization. They could do it just by refusing to fund it, since it is a civilian program. It’s all that business about those flight instructors who lost their high-paying civilian contracts to train pilots for the Army. The committee made General Arnold give them his assurance that the services of these men would be utilized immediately.” A small smile touched her mouth. “They’re afraid of getting drafted in the ‘walking’ Army.”
Cappy wanted nothing to do with the Army in any form. She just wanted to fly planes—and the Army could go to hell as far as she was concerned. Her throat got tight and some wrenching pain pushed at her chest. A raw unnamed emotion seemed to strangle her.
“Did I mention I saw Mitch at the committee meeting?” her mother inquired.
Cappy’s eyes were the deep color of her blue flying suit and they burned. “No, you didn’t.” Her voice seemed to come from some hollow well inside her. “How is he?” So casually.
“Oh, he’s still the same handsome devil,” her mother declared with a laugh. “It’s a shame you won’t be able to see him while you’re here.”
“I hardly have the time—” Cappy began stiffly.
“Mitch isn’t here,” her mother hastened to explain, then lowered her voice. “He’s in England with General Arnold … for the Allied invasion of France.”
“It’s happening?”
“Soon,” her mother replied, then looked around to be certain no one had overheard.
Mitch. She had trouble keeping the tears out of her eyes. He was staff so it was unlikely he’d be exposed to any danger. It wasn’t that causing the ache, the clawing frustration, the near anger. She had done the right thing, Cappy insisted to herself. It wouldn’t have worked between them. She pressed her fingertips to the bridge of her nose, trying to fight back the tears.
