Target Lock On Love

by M. L. Buchman

  “Partly wondering why I’m not interested in her.”

  “And the other part?” Mick Quinn didn’t open up like this very often. She could only recall him drinking one beer, but maybe it had mellowed him just enough.

  “Easy woman to look at.”

  “Eye candy. God, men are such trolls. What do you see when you look at me?” And as soon as she said it, she wished she could take it back. That feeling of euphoria that had followed her since the pizzeria plummeted away faster than a bomb-load’s worth of American candy.

  Mick glanced over at her as he turned in at the base’s security gate. A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth, but he didn’t let it out to play.

  “I see a royal pain in the ass.”

  “Great.” Exactly what a girl wanted a handsome man to think of her.

  “Damned pretty one.”

  Before she could ask what that crack meant, he had the window down. The MP on duty at the gate was looking in at them and asking for their IDs.

  Patty guessed she was pretty enough; at least men always said she was. Maybe they just liked her red hair. And that was the problem with men. They liked doing the looking and that was usually all they cared about. For them the next stage after that was getting a girl to go horizontal without any getting-to-know-you first. She’d thought Mick was better than that.

  He was. She’d flown with him for over two years and there was no question he was. Any thought of Mick Quinn had the word “decent” automatically attached to it as thoroughly as “sexy” attached to Sofia. “Sexy” slid right off Patty O’Donoghue.

  But if a guy like Mick didn’t want a woman like Sofia, then what the hell did he want?

  Well one thing was damn sure—Patty slouched in her seat as he pulled up in front of the JBER transient quarters—she was nowhere in the running at all. Not that she cared or anything, but she didn’t like the feeling.

  A woman wanted to feel that she was worthy of any man she took a liking to and finding out that she wasn’t up to the standard of one of the best guys she’d ever known…sucked! Big time!

  # # #

  Mick didn’t notice that Patty was still in the car until he was a half dozen steps toward the three-story white block structure of Matanuska Hall. He circled back and opened her door for her. She was slumped in her seat, her arms crossed tightly in front of her. It always amused him that angry women didn’t understand that gesture only emphasized the shape of their breasts—of which Patty’s were a particularly fine example—and distracted men even further from whatever was the matter.

  In this case Patty was glaring at the dashboard as if it was trying to kill her.

  She been so bright when they left the Moose’s Tooth, practically shining from within. He’d seen her drunk a few times and she wasn’t in any stage of her manically-inebriated modes, but even dead sober her moods could move fast enough to make his head spin.

  By any prior O’Donoghue standards, she’d really shone at dinner. Her magnetic laugh had become the keynote sound of the meal. She’d turned a convivial meal into a party, everyone joining in on the merriment until they were helpless to resist; sometimes helpless to breathe from laughing so hard. She’d gotten Major Napier to unwind enough to tell jokes about some rather unlikely corporals and what had happened when they’d tangled with the wrong woman—a brigadier general’s exceptionally comely wife.

  Now Patty had apparently decided that the world was a horrid place. Maybe she was too hung over to breath. Her slightly hyper system couldn’t have metabolized such a transition in the seven miles they’d driven. Even her notoriously mercurial mood swings didn’t account for this. Besides, they were typically variations of cheerful and ecstatic. It was one of the things he’d always appreciated about her; even when she was whining, it was from a place of wry humor.

  “Hey.”

  When she didn’t react, he leaned in and reached over to unlatch her seatbelt.

  She growled something unintelligible about “such trolls” and then she grabbed him.

  One moment he was leaning across her; the next she had him by both of his ears. With a sharp twist—that would have hurt like hell if he’d any balance with which to resist the action—she turned his face to hers.

  Then she kissed him.

  He’d been kissed plenty enough ways to recognize when it was in anger. Patty’s kiss wasn’t that—it was vengeance. She kissed him hard, in a cobra strike attack. She drove at him until his lips hurt even when they shifted to a French kiss—accompanied by a deep growl that vibrated between them.

  One of his hands found purchase on the steel post of the headrest and he, in turn, drove her back against it. He’d never thought about kissing Patty O’Donoghue, not really, except on really stupid, really lonely nights.

  With the choice taken out of his hands, he could absolutely appreciate everything she brought to her attack. The taste of ginger-chocolate cheesecake...the power…the force...the need.

  It woke a need in him too. A deep need that rooted so hard in his gut that he finally pulled free despite her tight grip on his ears.

  They stared at each other from a breath apart for a long moment.

  Then she—thankfully—let go of his ears and slapped her hands over her face to hide her eyes.

  “I did not just kiss you. Please tell me that I didn’t just kiss you. God I wish I was drunk.”

  “Why?” he answered to buy himself a moment to think. The system-wide shock of kissing Patty O’Donoghue was still roaring through him. Like a helicopter just struck by lightning, it was impossible to tell which of his systems were working at the moment and which weren’t.

  “Why? You’re a blockhead, Quinn. If I was drunk, I could blame that kiss on being drunk.”

  “But you are, so you can.”

  “No. Wish I was, but I’m not.” Then she did a very unusual thing for her; Patty blushed. Her creamy skin went brilliant red, several shades brighter than her auburn hair.

  “Maybe I could buy you a t-shirt that says, The Devil Made Me Do It. Would that make you feel better?”

  She uncovered one eye and glared at him.

  “I could sing you a country song, about the man who done you wrong. Maybe that would help?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be angry or something? I’m the one who kissed you.”

  Mick squatted on the pavement and leaned back against the inside of the open car door but he wasn’t ready to move any farther away from Patty just yet. He could use a distraction, but the parking lot of on-base lodging was very quiet at two in the afternoon.

  He’d never considered kissing Patty for real. And by how flustered she looked, it was clearly something she’d never thought about either.

  “C’mon Mick. Talk to me,” she uncovered the other eye and then dropped her hands into her lap. “What are you thinking?”

  “Thoughts I shouldn’t be,” which was true. She was a fellow officer, but he was a commissioned lieutenant and she was an enlisted chief warrant—which were supposed to stay worlds apart.

  “Slow down there, Mick. I’m not looking to get bulldozed by The Mighty Quinn.” He liked that she was already recovering and had her feet back under her, at least metaphorically as she was still buckled into the car seat.

  “Wasn’t quite where my thoughts were going.”

  And her face closed down hard.

  # # #

  Right back into her same angry cave.

  She wasn’t good enough.

  Patty could still taste Mick on her tongue. Could still feel the pressure on her lips that had far exceeded how hard she was holding him. Now she felt trapped between the seatbelt, the central console that ran between the bucket seats, and Mick studying her through slightly narrowed eyes from just an arm’s length away. Far more trapped than when he’d been reaching across for her seatbelt and something had ma
de her kiss him.

  Oh God! How were they going to fly together? It was the best part of her life and she’d fucked it up. They’d be even closer together than they were right now every time they were airborne. How could—

  “My thoughts were going somewhere else entirely.”

  Yeah, like how fast could he get her transferred. She was going to lose the 5E—

  “I’m thinking that if that’s how you kiss when you’re pissed at the world, what would it be like to kiss you when you were happy?”

  —and she’d lose the friends she’d already made among the women of the…

  Mick was just squatting there with that damned half smile tugging at his lips. He was…

  “Say what?” Patty blinked, but couldn’t rewind the statement.

  “C’mon,” this time he didn’t lean in, just reached across her to snap her seatbelt free. Then he rose to his feet and stepped back.

  She stared at the offered hand. His face was out of sight, above the line of the car’s roof. All she could see was Mick Quinn from mid-chest down, and one of those big fisherman hands held palm up to assist her from the car.

  What the hell. Patty took it, figuring she wasn’t about to trust her legs at the moment for reasons that had nothing to do with alcohol.

  He closed his hand over hers and rubbed his thumb across the backs of her knuckles. It was a question, but one look up at his eyes when she reached her feet made her decide that the question wasn’t for her. It was for him.

  Without another word, he escorted her to her hotel door…and left her standing there flat-footed.

  Mick moved down the hall to his own door, worked the card key, cursed softly, and worked it again. On his third try the door opened and he went in without a single glance back her way; she might as well not exist.

  She slotted her own card key, four attempts before she stopped flipping it around and looked at the little arrow mostly hidden by a garish delivery pizza ad. Turning it properly, the door clicked open with much the same smugness that the car door locks had shown.

  Okay, maybe Mick was still thinking about her if he couldn’t open his own door either.

  Because no matter how that kiss had started, the way it had finished meant she was sure as hell thinking about him.

  Chapter 3

  “I was chatting with Stan McCabe over at the Two-Twelve,” Major Napier started talking even as he and Mick set their breakfast trays down on the table the 5E had taken over.

  They were the last two to arrive. The rest of the Night Stalkers were already crowded around a long table in the Gold Rush Inn Dining Facility. The evening crowd—which was the Night Stalkers’ morning—was mostly Air National Guard grunts, though there were some Army fliers and servicefolk mixed in. The Air Force was based down at the far end of JBER and they used other facilities down at that end of the field.

  The floor-to-ceiling curved windows showed a view of streetlights in the last of the fading fall light and a heavy drizzle, chill water that had indeed found its way down the back of his collar as he was crossing from the hotel. Interior lights made it daylight bright inside, enough so that he almost pulled down his sunglasses.

  Conversations buzzed through the air and sounded off the high wood ceiling. It made the room feel even more crowded and friendly than it already was. The diners all fit a common motif: military wear and military hair.

  The Night Stalkers’ table had been easy to spot because many of them grew their hair long. If their main customers—SEALs and Deltas—wore their hair long, Night Stalkers took it as permission to fit right in. In this environment, men with hair over an inch long or women with it past their jaw were clearly marked as Special Operations. As such, they were given an especially wide berth by mere mortals of the ANG, Army, and Air Force.

  The first thing he’d spotted was the red banner of Patty O’Donoghue’s cascade of hair down to her shoulders. Patty was sitting between Rafe the DAP Hawk pilot and Danielle, and being her usual chipper self. She looked as if she’d spent a full twelve out cold and then run a 10K before breakfast or something. Health and vitality poured off her, but down at the far end of the table he couldn’t seem to soak any of it in. Nobody looked that good after just four hours sleep. Maybe she was doing it on purpose to rub in the fact that he hadn’t slept a wink.

  He ignored her smug look when he dropped into one of the last two seats next to Sofia.

  Mick looked at his watch. Seven at night, all he’d had since kissing Patty was four hours of staring at the ceiling. And it hadn’t made anything make more sense.

  Napier was going on about the Two-Twelve.

  “Don’t you sleep?” Mick tried to slow him down so that his own brain could catch up.

  The Major ignored him, so he turned to Danielle. She was the rational one of the couple and had become their natural leader throughout training because of her incredible strategic vision.

  “Doesn’t he sleep?”

  Napier stopped steamrolling them and glared at Mick. Mick really didn’t care, he just needed the major to give him a few moments to catch up. And whatever else Napier did, he never interrupted his wife.

  “He sleeps only un petit peu,” Danielle conceded in her soft Québécois French, but her own happy smile said that she wasn’t talking about him being off somewhere talking to the Alaska Air National Guard’s famous 212th Rescue Squadron.

  Which meant that Rapier had gotten even less sleep because he’d also…

  Mick wasn’t going to think about what her smile implied. He really wasn’t. He’d already spent hours trying to figure out what Patty O’Donoghue’s kiss had meant. Actually, he’d spent most of the time trying to ignore the high voltage charge the kiss had pumped into him that a cold shower had done nothing to cure.

  The Two-Twelve.

  He’d think about them.

  Should have stuck with them in the first place.

  The 212th Rescue Squadron were the busiest pararescue jumpers in the military. Not only did they jump into active-war hot zones to extract wounded, but the Two-Twelve worked the search-and-rescue detail in the Alaska Range. Rescue of the fools who thought climbing the twenty-thousand feet of Denali was something anyone with a rucksack and a pair of crampons could do.

  “The Pipeline” to become pararescue took as long as the Night Stalkers’ two-years of training. He’d transported these guys on occasion during his time in Afghanistan. Typically the Air Force flew them in, except when they had to go somewhere truly ugly and then they called in the Night Stalkers. Pararescue jumpers were the ultimate badasses. Because sometimes even the SEALs need to call 911, and Air Force PJs were who they called.

  Napier was setting them up for an exercise with these guys? Oh man.

  “I asked the unit’s commander to come join us,” Major Napier waved a hand toward an Air National Guard major who dropped into the last open seat next to Mick, holding a mug of black coffee.

  “Who’s the local here?”

  Mick ticked up a finger, “Here, sir.”

  “Hear you got this lot out for some real Alaska fodder at Moose’s Tooth. Good man,” he landed a solid slap of approval on Mick’s shoulder and then grabbed on and shook him back and forth a bit. “Pete said you folks were now looking for an Alaska-style training hike. Excellent!”

  Mick swallowed down his own reaction and scanned the table. Other than Napier, they were all in shock. They’d been Army for enough years that it was subtle, but it was there on every face. Napier had promised them twenty-four hours dark—welcome to the Army. It wouldn’t be a problem for the members of the 5E. After all, a hike meant they wouldn’t be flying and the twenty-four hour bottle-to-throttle rule wouldn’t apply.

  Last of all he looked at Patty. But she wasn’t watching him; she was watching McCabe. And he couldn’t read anything into her expression.

  # # #

 
Patty was well aware of Mick’s attention and refused to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d cost her even a minute’s sleep. He did look awfully good sitting next to Sofia. Too good. Was that why she’d maneuvered the empty spot to be by Sofia? Because Mick was too good for Patty O’Donoghue?

  Damn it! She’d just done it again, except this time she’d done it to herself. Mick was supposed to be her pilot, no more, no less. Well, maybe friend as well, but she wasn’t supposed to have kissed him. And she really wasn’t supposed to be bothered by how amazing a couple he and Sofia made.

  At least he looked like hammered shit this morning, as if he’d drunk a pitcher or three rather than a single beer. That made Patty feel a little better. Because she could only think of one reason he’d look that way…he’d slept as little as she had.

  ANG Major Stan McCabe gave her the perfect excuse to ignore Mick.

  First, he was the poster child, no, the poster man of the super-fit warrior. He wasn’t the handsomest guy around, not a chance sitting next to Mick, but he was built on an impressive scale. Six-four and all of it muscle; he also had a smile that came out far more easily than Mick’s.

  Second, Mick had suddenly gone humble when the PJ sat next to him. Mick was always kind and decent, but it wasn’t like a member of the 5E to go humble around anyone. But McCabe was a pararescue jumper. Yeah, that made her feel pretty humbled as well.

  “We have a team headed up into high country,” McCabe’s voice was deeper than even Mick’s, “for some ice and snow training. We’re glad to have you folks along. Don’t worry. If you have any problems, we’re going up there to practice high-altitude rescue anyway. We’re always glad to take on some real-life training opportunities.”

  For all his easy manners, he’d just thrown down the gauntlet. Patty wondered if Napier was behind that or was it just the normal: one branch of the military baiting another. For herself, the gauntlet hadn’t even hit the ground and she’d already grabbed onto it. She knew it was a bad habit, but a challenge was never allowed to slip by Raymond O’Donoghue’s little girl. She was going to tackle and take down whatever mess the Two-Twelve sent her way. “Real-life training opportunity” like hell. She’d show them what a Night Stalker was made of, especially a 5E.