The Woman Left Behind

by Linda Howard

  There were some snickers going around the cargo hold, tired laughter that was drowned out as the engine noise built to a roar and the plane began moving. Jina didn’t care. They knew what she meant, and so did she. They were all her guys. They were a team.

  Seventeen

  Levi opened his eyes a slit and looked across the cargo hold to where Babe lay curled on her side, fast asleep. She was using her equipment bag as a pillow. The roar of the engines drowned out even the snores he knew would normally rattle the rafters of a building, but cargo planes weren’t built to be quiet inside. About two feet away, on her far side, Voodoo was slouched against some boxes, his chin on his chest as he too grabbed some sleep.

  Sleep would have been nice, but Levi couldn’t quite get there. His shoulder hurt just enough to be annoying, especially when he leaned back. Not only that, he was still too rattled from those brief nightmarish moments when he’d thought Babe had been shot. He could see she was alive and moving—he’d have sworn she was glaring at him—but fuck, for a minute there he’d been ready to burn the fucking rain forest down and destroy everything in it. Reining himself in hadn’t been easy.

  But she was okay. The relief hollowed him out, knocked him sideways. And somehow she’d kept the FARC asshole from shooting Voodoo, though she’d said it was an accident. How she “accidentally” tackled someone was beyond him, but maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. With her thought processes, it was tough to tell. However it had happened, she’d finally won Voodoo over so at least now they wouldn’t have to listen to his bitching. What rattled Levi most of all was that “accident” or not, she’d thrown herself into the middle of a hot situation. Being heroic wasn’t in her job description, and he had a hard time handling the idea.

  Then he got on the damn plane and had to watch Ramirez coming on to her. He’d barely been able to change the “I” to “we” when he’d threatened to break the bastard’s legs.

  Shit. Keeping his distance kept the team working smoothly, but on another fundamental level it wasn’t working at all, because it didn’t do anything to lessen his attraction to her. He’d hoped that like most of the time when he was attracted to a woman, after a while the attraction would start fading, whether or not he did anything about it. The fact was no matter how much he’d enjoyed the various relationships he’d had, in the end the work had always been more interesting. But he’d been around Jina for months now, and he still got off on it. Damn, he liked looking at her, liked being with her.

  She was sexy, with those two-toned blue-and-gold eyes of hers, all that long, heavy hair, the way she laughed and cussed and tackled life. Her expression was usually that of someone who was about to get up to some mischief, or at least enjoyed the thought of mischief even if she didn’t do anything about it. She was funny, gutsy, and had a level head; she finessed keeping that fine balance between being friendly with the team members without letting anything sexual intrude. She treated them like brothers. She got along with Terisa and Ailani. She did her job and did it well. She laughed and joked, and sometimes he didn’t pay attention to what she was saying because he was too busy just watching her. To keep any of the guys from noticing, he tried not to look at her all that often, but sometimes he let himself tease her because all of them did, on one level or another.

  All in all, he couldn’t find a damn thing about her that he didn’t like, except that she was off-limits.

  And when he relaxed, like now . . . that was when he couldn’t stop his imagination from stripping her naked and pulling that fine, toned body of hers under him. In his mind he ran his hand over the curve of her ass, then reached lower to where she was hot and wet, pushed his fingers in and got her ready for his cock. The one time he’d had her under him, touching her, kissing her, she hadn’t tried to hide anything. She’d been honest, and real.

  She was the only woman he’d ever felt jealousy over. He hadn’t been kidding about breaking Ramirez’s legs.

  The truth was, since he’d met her, all he’d been doing was marking time: waiting for her to quit, then waiting for her to fail, and now just waiting.

  He could feel his patience stretching thinner and thinner. He was fighting to maintain the status quo, and the internal battle was turning all his inner barricades to rubble. Nothing had ever broken him; he’d always maintained that inner surety of his center. He knew what he wanted out of life, knew his own guidelines, his strengths and weaknesses. Doing what he did gave him the kind of challenge and satisfaction he needed. This was different; Jina was different. Sooner or later, he’d break under the strain.

  Restlessly, he changed positions, finally managed to get halfway comfortable. He was able to grab some sleep, waking when the thunderous sound of the engines changed. He’d been on so many planes that his subconscious recognized the altered pitch as a signal that they were slowing in preparation for approach and landing.

  He stretched and got more water; around him, the others were stirring, too, alerted by the change in the noise level. Jina slept on, her soft lips barely parted, but she didn’t look particularly blissful; faint, fleeting expressions gave her a troubled look. He watched her for a minute, then nudged her sneaker with the toe of his. She gave a quick little frown, pursed her lips, and that was it. He nudged harder. Another frown, and this one looked as if it meant business. On the third try, he gave the sole of her shoe a light kick and said sharply, “Babe! Wake up!”

  She sat up with a jerk and blindly threw a punch that would have de-balled him if he hadn’t jumped back, but he’d been halfway prepared for that sort of reaction. The other guys started laughing. Scowling, she looked around at them all, then scrubbed her face. “I was dreaming,” she muttered. “About the dead guy on my foot.”

  “Thought you might be,” he replied, keeping his tone neutral. “We’ll be landing in a few. There’s a forward lav, if you need to go.”

  Without a word she jumped to her feet and headed forward, weaving her way through the secured pallets and boxes. She needed to piss more often than the men did, so over the months they’d all adjusted to stopping for more piss breaks and letting her go first. Levi sat down again, thinking philosophical thoughts about the realities of traveling with a woman.

  Actually landing took them another half hour; according to his watch, there were a couple of more hours until sunrise. At least they’d had some sleep and none of them were as jet-lagged as they had been the previous mission. He and Ramirez would go straight to debriefing, but the rest of them could catch a little downtime.

  The plane rolled to a stop and the big ramp lowered. They got their gear and wearily trudged down the ramp and toward where they’d left their vehicles. As soon as they were off and clear, the ramp was raised again and the plane taxied around to take off for its final destination.

  “C’mon, you can ride with me,” he said to Ramirez, striding past him toward his truck.

  Ramirez gave him a wary look. “Will my legs be okay?”

  “As long as you stay away from Babe,” he replied equably. He unlocked the doors, leaned in to insert the key and start the engine, then began scraping frost off the windshield.

  “Like seven big brothers, huh?” Ramirez said as he slid into the passenger seat.

  “She has brothers. We’re the mean-ass guys she works with.” He didn’t want to be her damn brother. He wasn’t content with being the mean-ass guy she worked with, either, but for now he’d have to settle.

  As he drove the mostly deserted pre-daylight streets to headquarters, Ramirez—evidently he had more balls than brains—said, “She’s a grown woman.”

  Levi grunted. “Noticed that, did you? Did you also notice that she’s more than capable of telling us to shut up and mind our own business if she was interested? What does that tell you?”

  Ramirez frowned. “Okay. Shit. I get it. She wasn’t interested.”

  “She’d have thrown something at us if she had been.”

  They reached headquarters and entered the nondescript building, signed
in. Ramirez went one way, Levi went another. They would be debriefed on different aspects, Ramirez on what he’d learned while undercover, Levi on the exfil mission itself.

  Two cups of coffee helped him get through the debriefing in a relatively benign mood, but he was damn hungry by the time they finished. As he was heading out of the building, he heard his name called and turned to see Kodak striding toward him.

  “What’s up?”

  For once, Kodak’s easygoing expression was absent. Instead he looked tired and grim.

  “Thought you’d want to know. We lost Bingo day before yesterday.”

  “Lost” meant “dead.” Bingo was the nickname Kodak’s team had given Brian Donnelly almost as soon as he joined the team.

  “Shit,” Levi said under his breath. Losing any member of any team was always a kick in the gut, but Donnelly was not only one of the drone operators, he was Jina’s friend. That one time Levi had been around him, he’d had to like him even though he’d been jealous as hell over Donnelly’s status as Jina’s date. “What happened?”

  “Things went sideways,” Kodak said wearily. “We were doing a hostile exfil, the LZ was hot, and Bingo took one in the head.”

  That was a very brief description but Levi knew exactly what the exfil had been like, having done more than one himself. Chaotic, violent, bad shit going down. It happened.

  And now he had to tell Jina.

  Even though she was tired and would have liked to sleep for half the day, Jina had already learned that the best way to get back on schedule was to stay awake for the rest of the day and do normal stuff. Besides, she didn’t want to sleep just yet. The dead guy’s face—even though he was a bad dead guy—wasn’t far enough away from her subconscious. She didn’t want him to bother her, but he still did.

  On the way home she stopped at an IHOP and had breakfast, taking care to sit well away from other customers because she figured she stank. If she did, at least the waitress didn’t make a face. Coffee, bacon, and eggs went a long way toward making her feel human again. Gray daylight was peeling back the shadows of darkness as she drove the rest of the way home.

  When she unzipped her go-bag to dig out the dirty laundry, however, the smell nearly knocked her down. Her head turned aside, she dumped all the contents out in front of the clothes washer. Whether she’d worn everything or not, all of it was contaminated beyond what she could bear. If the source of the extremely bad smell hadn’t been her dirty socks, she’d have thought the guys had pranked her by maybe spraying the inside of her bag with sulfur mixed with skunk—and maybe dead possum thrown in for variety. Her Merrell sneakers smelled really bad, too, though the footbed was supposed to have odor control; maybe rain forest funk outstunk the control factor.

  She stripped off where she stood, determinedly ignored the blood on her jeans, and started her laundry, even tossing the sneakers in, too. If being washed ruined them, then they were ruined. She could buy more sneakers, but she couldn’t stand that smell.

  After that she took a nice long shower, shampooing twice, conditioning, and sighing with relief because her skin could breathe again, without all the dirt and sweat. Doing girl stuff felt so good. She moisturized, put on scented body lotion, then pulled on a pair of cuddly flannel pants and a long-sleeved thermal shirt. She removed her chipped toenail polish and put on a pair of moisturizing socks to pamper her feet.

  There! Human again.

  She was on the couch catching up on some programs she’d recorded when the doorbell rang. She scowled at the door. No way should her doorbell be ringing, unless maybe the downstairs neighbors had a dead battery and needed their car jumped off. That was the only possibility that got her to her feet.

  But it wasn’t either of her neighbors she saw through the peephole, it was Levi.

  I don’t need this, she thought. This wasn’t how to keep his distance. She could get angry at him, she could sometimes hate him, but what she could never do was be indifferent to him. She needed his help, she needed him to stay away.

  “Go away,” she said aloud, leaning her head against the door.

  “It’s important.”

  Of course it was. Damn. She unlocked the door and opened it, standing in the threshold so he couldn’t come in. “What?”

  He came in anyway, simply stepping forward and putting his hand on the side of her waist, muscling her back, then closing the door behind him. Jina’s heart tripped at his expression, both grim and remote. She knew he’d gone first to debriefing, but evidently he hadn’t had an opportunity to shower and change clothes. He still wore the grimy clothes he’d had on when he drove away a few hours ago, he still had a two-day stubble darkening his jaw. Whatever had happened was bad enough that he’d come straight here.

  Her thoughts flashed to her family. If anything had happened to one of them, was it somehow set up that Levi would be notified first if the team was on a mission? They weren’t on a mission now but they’d just returned, so that was possible. She hadn’t checked her personal cell phone for messages or looked at Facebook. She had no idea what could have happened.

  She kept on moving back, putting distance between them. “What?” she asked again, but this time there was alarm in her voice, because she’d never seen him look like that.

  “There’s no easy way to tell you,” he said, striding forward and gripping both her elbows before she could back even farther away. “Babe—Donnelly got hit.”

  “Hit” could mean slapped. “Hit” could mean struck by a car. But in their world, “hit” meant something else entirely. She felt as if she’d been hit herself and would have reeled back if he hadn’t been holding her, his big hands like clamps on her arms. His dark gaze was steady on her face, reading and assessing every thought and emotion that flickered past.

  She looked around, as if her condo could give her some safe, reassuring answer. Donnelly was her friend. Donnelly had the same job she did; they stayed out of the action—though hadn’t she almost gotten “hit” herself, about fifteen hours ago?

  “Is he . . .” Her voice was faint and faded away. Her lips felt numb, barely able to move. She swallowed, tried again. She couldn’t ask if he was dead, couldn’t make herself say the word. Instead she said, “Will he be all right?”

  Levi slowly shook his head. His voice was quiet. “No.”

  She stood very still, staring at his chest, about three inches from her nose. She didn’t want to look up into his eyes, she wanted to pull into herself and not move at all for a very long time, until she could process this and handle it, get her emotions under control.

  Donnelly was dead. Donnelly. He was a nice guy, everyone said, and he had been. Good-looking, good-humored, intelligent, friendly, sharp—what wasn’t to like?

  She wished she could have loved him.

  Very gently Levi eased her forward until she was resting against him and closed his arms around her.

  Gentleness from him was devastating. It shattered her self-control, allowed the grief to come roaring up. A sob caught in her throat, broke free, and she began crying. Levi pulled her even closer, his big hand coming up to cradle the back of her head, his strength wrapping around her as if giving her permission to turn to mush within that sturdy framework of protection. She still tried to resist, for maybe a second, then she rested her forehead against the hard muscle of his chest, circled his waist with her arms, and gave in.

  Even when the sobs dwindled down to sniffles and trickles of tears she stood there in the circle of his arms, tiredly astonished that he was holding her and just letting her cry, because Levi didn’t strike her as a man who was very patient with shows of emotion. The hand on the back of her head was slowly rubbing, his fingers sifting through her damp hair, his fingertips brushing the nape of her neck.

  “Where were they?” she finally asked, her voice nasally and thick with tears.

  “I don’t know. I can find out, but does it matter?”

  She felt something brush the top of her head. Had he kissed her, or had
he rubbed his chin against her hair? But as he’d said—did it matter?

  “No,” she said, to both questions, and fell silent again.

  After a while she withdrew her arms from around his waist and gently pulled back. His arms tightened briefly, then he released her and stepped back. She scrubbed her hands over her damp cheeks, wiped her eyes on the hem of her shirt. “Have you had anything to eat?”

  “Haven’t had time.”

  Meaning he’d come straight here to give her the news before she could find out from someone else. She nodded and managed to look at him. “Are you hungry?”

  “As a bear.” A small quirk curled one corner of his mouth.

  “Have you had that shoulder looked at?”

  “Haven’t had time.”

  Okay, that settled that. He’d offered her comfort, likely against his better judgment, so she felt obligated to offer him something in return. He was tired, he was hungry, he was hurt. She couldn’t just push him out the door.

  “If you want to grab a quick shower, I can have eggs and bacon on the plate by the time you’re finished. You likely need stitches and I can’t help with that, but I can put a clean bandage on your shoulder.” She paused. “And you’ll have to put your dirty clothes back on, because I don’t have anything that’ll come close to fitting you, other than a sheet.”

  He didn’t say anything right away, making her brace herself for a rejection; he surprised her by finally saying, “Both the shower and food sound great. You don’t mind me using your shower?”

  “I wouldn’t have offered if I did. I doubt you’re dirtier than I was. The fresh towels and washcloths are in the linen closet in the bathroom.” She showed him the way through her bedroom to the connecting bath; once she’d have been embarrassed by her unmade bed, but he knew she’d jumped out of bed in the middle of the night and his bed likely wasn’t made, either. “How do you like your eggs?”

  “In pancakes.”

  She snorted, but said, “Got it,” and left him to it, hurried back to the kitchen. As it happened she was short on eggs—she had one—but she did have a Shake ’n Pour pancake mix, and a couple of packs of precooked bacon. She got out her griddle pan and began getting it hot while she nuked some of the bacon. Because she was smart that way, she also started some coffee brewing.