No! She’d better stop right there! She’d laid out the conditions for their fake marriage up front. No point in renegotiating them at this point. Not when he was taking off for parts unknown in a few hours. Which reminded her...
“You mentioned that you moved out of your apartment and put your things in storage. Where were you going to stay tonight?”
“I’ve got a room at the Transient Lodging Facility at Kirtland. But...” He glanced at his watch and shrugged. “I have to be at the Base Ops with my crew at 0400. I’ll probably just hit the TLF to change into my uniform, then hang in the crew lounge until takeoff.”
“You’re not going to fly across country with no sleep!”
“Not hardly.” He laughed. “Remind me to explain air force regs governing mandatory crew rest to you sometime.”
The mutual realization that he wouldn’t be around to explain crew rest...or anything else...hung in the air until he broke the awkward silence.
“My crew is one of ten being ferried across the Atlantic in the back end of a C-17. The transport crew will do the flying. The rest of us will spend the whole flight sawing z’s.”
“Can you tell me where you’re going?”
“No. Sorry.”
The silence stretched a little longer this time. Alex took another cautious sip of coffee and was hit by the unsettling realization that the kitchen she’d so lovingly decorated was just the right size for her and Maria. She’d painted the walls a sunny yellow herself and spent hours haunting Old Town’s bazaar for the terra-cotta sun faces arranged above the cooktop. Ben, however, seemed to shrink the kitchen’s proportions by at least a third.
It wasn’t his height, she had to concede, or those broad shoulders. It had to be that Special Ops confidence. The quiet air of authority he exuded even with his back in a lazy curve and his hips propped against her kitchen counter. Somehow, some way, he owned the room.
“Why don’t you hang here for a while?” she suggested.
He looked interested. Very interested.
Reluctantly, Alex popped his bubble. “We could go into the living room, put up our feet and talk.”
“Right. Talk.”
“I might need to know more about my...uh...husband than his name, rank and serial number.”
Dammit! She’d better learn not to stumble over the H word. And, she realized as she led the way into the living room, she actually had no clue what his serial number was.
“It’s the same as my Social Security number,” he replied in answer to her embarrassed question. “I’ll take a photo of the SS card for you. Also my military ID, which has a different number. You might need both.”
He laid them on the coffee table, clicked a quick photo and texted it to Alex’s cell phone. The JPEG nestled next to their wedding certificate and the picture with Chelsea and Pink in her phone’s photo album.
She bit her lip as she studied Ben’s face on his military ID card. She had absolutely no intention of making any spousal claim on him. All she wanted—all she needed—was his signature on a marriage license. She wasn’t about to risk being accused of fraud by the air force. Or by the state of New Mexico, although she skated closer to the line with the state than she did with the military.
The thought caused a little flutter in her stomach. Resolutely, she banished it. Maria was worth the risk. A thousand times over.
Which brought her back to name, rank and serial number. If she was going to sway the Neanderthal judge who’d sustained Eddie’s objection to the adoption because of Alex’s single status, she needed to know more about her groom. Kicking off her shoes, she sank back against the overstuffed sofa cushions and tucked her feet under her.
“I know this sounds really manipulative... Okay, it is manipulative. But it would help if you tell me a little about yourself. Just in case I need to provide some details about my absent spouse.”
Ben stretched out in the saggy armchair opposite her. “What do you want to know?”
She shrugged. “Your favorite ice cream. Your shirt size. Your mom’s and dad’s first names. Where you graduated from high school.”
“Plain vanilla. Fifteen-and-a-half neck, thirty-three sleeve. Alice and Ben Senior. Although,” he added sardonically, “the ‘senior’ part’s a little iffy. My mother was fairly sure the trucker she lived with for a few months fathered me, but they parted ways long before I was born. Never saw him, never wanted to. Mom took off when I was about eight or nine. It was pretty much a series of foster homes after that.”
Uh-oh! The casual way he’d tossed that out didn’t pass the smell test. With a quick kick to her gut, Alex guessed he’d just shared the real reason he’d agreed to her outrageous proposal. Apparently, his childhood had been as rootless and haphazard as Maria’s. His next comments confirmed her guess.
“As for high school, I dropped out after my junior year. The oil fields were hiring,” he related with a careless shrug. “I’d had enough of foster homes and didn’t see the need for a diploma, so I lit out on my own. The air force recruiter who had me in his sights didn’t see it the same way.”
“He talked you into going back to school?”
“Not hardly. Staff Sergeant Rakowski wasn’t taking any chances. The man rode me like a half-broke mule until I got my GED. And he was there, looking as smug as all hell, when I headed off to basic training.”
Fascinated, Alex encouraged him to continue. “And?”
“From basic I went to aircraft maintenance school. I was actually a pretty good wrench bender, but the air force provided one hundred percent tuition and fees for college. So I filled my off-time working on a bachelor’s degree. After that I applied for Officer Training School. Then flight school. Then Special Ops.”
He shook his head, looking almost as amazed as Alex was impressed. She didn’t know very many men or women who’d made the leap from high school dropout to command of an aircrew and a multimillion-dollar aircraft.
“The transformation didn’t stop there,” she guessed.
“No,” he admitted with a laugh that was 1 percent embarrassed and a 99 percent self-deprecating. “Eight years of flying into every godforsaken corner of the world earned me a good number of ‘applied science’ graduate credits. I added another twenty hours of course work and walked away with a master’s in International Affairs. Sergeant Rakowski had retired by then, but he was right there again when I was awarded that piece of parchment.”
“Sounds like he was a pretty good stand-in for your absent dad.”
“He was,” Ben said easily. “Just like the military’s been a stand-in for my otherwise nonexistent family.”
Alex shifted, fighting off a twinge of guilt. He didn’t make any reference to the fact that he’d just acquired another family. It was too temporary, too ephemeral to factor into his personal history. The realization hit even as she was thinking how her perspective of this man had changed so drastically. Ben Kincaid’s past had been the furthest thing from her mind when they’d met two years ago. All she’d seen then were those bedroom blue eyes, that sexy smile and the impressive shoulders he sported under his flight suit.
Now the memory of her purely visceral reaction made her squirm. The truth was that the man she’d hooked up with in Vegas bore little resemblance to the man she’d married a few hours ago. Oh, the eyes and the smile were the same. And she was having to fight increasingly erotic fantasies that involved peeling off his shirt and sliding her palms over those sleek, muscled shoulders.
The fact that Maria was asleep just a few yards away pretty well axed those fantasies. Not to mention the preconditions to this...arrangement...they’d entered into. Still, as he made a quick trip to the kitchen to refresh his coffee, Alex couldn’t help thinking there were so many more dimensions to Ben Kincaid than she’d guessed.
“What about you?” he asked when he returned. “Favorite ice cream, dress size,
Mom’s and Dad’s first names?”
“Rum raisin, I’m not saying, Helen and Tom.”
“Your folks weren’t around to help when your sister got sick?”
“They tried, but they live in a retirement community in Florida and aren’t in very good health themselves. To make matters worse, Janet’s scuz bucket husband pretty well sucked them dry of their savings with heartrending tales of her medical expenses. None of which he paid, of course. The money went to drugs, right up to the day he got busted.”
“So you moved to Albuquerque and have assumed sole responsibility for the scuz bucket’s daughter.”
“Maria had lost both her stepmom and her dad. I couldn’t take her away from her friends and school, too. And it turned out my talents were pretty portable. I’m doing way better as an entrepreneur than I did as an apprentice.”
“That right?”
“If it wasn’t so late, I’d show you my production facility. It’s only rented warehouse space,” she admitted with a laugh. “Nothing high-tech. But my eight employees and I are filling upward of a thousand orders a month. Mostly T-shirts and tank tops but once in a while I get ambitious and match tops to bottoms.”
His gaze roamed over her outfit and lingered on the scoop neckline. “Are all your designs as sparkly as the one you’re wearing?”
“Yep.” Alex couldn’t help basking a little in his obvious approval. “I’m the queen of bling. Literally. My trademark is my initials stitched inside a silver crown.”
“Swish wants to know where to place an order.”
“I’ll give you a card with the URL for my website before you leave.”
“Better give me a handful. I’ll pass ’em out to the guys. They’re always trying to figure out what to order their wives or girlfriends for birthdays or Christmas.”
“Won’t that be a little hard to explain?”
“What? The cards or the silver crown?”
“All of it. The cards...” she tipped her chin toward the hand holding his coffee mug “...the ring, the wife.”
“I can guarantee that Swish and Dingo and Pink have already spread the word,” he said drily. “The fact that I’ve traded in my carefree bachelor existence for a hottie with red hair, chocolate-brown eyes and a little girl will be old news by now.”
Alex suspected he wouldn’t get off that easy but didn’t press the matter. Snuggling deeper in the sofa cushions, she asked him to tell her what he could about his unit and the kinds of missions they flew.
He could only touch briefly on their military operations but went into some detail on the humanitarian missions he’d participated in. They varied widely, from flying in rescue teams after the earthquake in Nepal to air-dropping food and medical supplies to hikers stranded high in the Rockies. Fascinated, Alex didn’t realize how much time had slipped by until he checked his watch.
“I’d better go. I need to swing by the Transient Lodging Facility and change into my uniform before I check in at Base Ops.”
“Oh. Okay.”
She uncurled and pushed off the sofa. Not for the first time, the enormity of what she’d asked him to do hit her square in the chest. “I don’t know any other way to say this, Ben, except...thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Let me know how it goes with the adoption.”
“I will. And you stay safe.”
“Do my best.”
They kept the kiss easy. A friendly goodbye that left Alex awake and aching long after he’d driven off and she’d crawled into bed.
* * *
The call came in the early hours of the morning, just after 6 a.m. Dragged from a deep sleep, she fumbled for the cell phone on the nightstand and squinted groggily at the number flashing on caller ID. She didn’t recognize it and smothered a curse that some idiot telemarketer or political hack would send out robo calls this early.
She started to slam the phone back down but saw that the caller had left a voice mail. She punched the icon to listen to the recording. The brief message brought her jerking straight up.
“Ms. Kincaid, this is Sergeant Johnson. I’m a med tech at the 377th Medical Group at Kirtland. There’s been an accident. We’re notifying you as Major Kincaid’s next of kin.”
Chapter Four
There’s been an accident.
The words thundered in Alex’s head as she scrambled upright and hit dial. The phone rang five, then seven, then eight times with no response. Swearing, she killed the call and tried again. More unanswered rings brought her out of bed and racing to the living room to turn on the TV. Horrific visions of a crashed plane engulfed in flames filled her frantic mind as she stabbed the remote, searching for breaking news. All she found on the local channels were early morning traffic and weather reports.
She got on the phone again and Googled the 377th Medical Group. When she dialed the group’s main number, a recording informed her that the clinic was currently closed but was a “joint venture” with the VA hospital and after-hours queries would be forwarded to the VA’s main switchboard.
“I received a call from the air force.” She got it out in a rush when the switchboard operator answered. “My husband’s been hurt.”
She didn’t stumble over her married status this time and was too frightened to notice.
“I’ll put you through to the ER.”
Yes, the tech who answered confirmed, Major Benjamin Kincaid had been brought into the ER two hours ago. No, he couldn’t release details of the major’s condition over the phone except to say he was currently in surgery.
“Oh, God!”
Trying not to panic, she hit the speed dial number for Pat Madison. An early riser, Pat was already up and quickly agreed that Alex could drop Maria off as soon as she could drag her out of bed. Alex threw on some jeans and a tank and shoved her feet into flip-flops before hitting the light switch in Maria’s room.
“Hey, Kitten. Wake up.”
“Nooo.” Maria flopped onto her belly and buried her face in the pillow.
“You need to get up. Now!”
Ruthlessly, Alex hustled the whining seven-year-old out of bed. She had the cranky child in her school uniform and out the door in less than twenty minutes. Pat Madison promised to feed both girls breakfast and asked Alex to call with an update as soon as she knew anything.
The morning rush hour hadn’t yet swelled to its peak, thank God. Even with the ever-present orange traffic cones, Alex was able to cut across on Lomas, then zip down San Pedro with minimal stops. The sand-colored, multistory complex housing the VA Medical Center backed up to Kirtland but wasn’t actually part of the military installation, so Alex didn’t have to worry about getting through base security. She vaguely recalled reading something about how the military and veterans population mutually benefited from this shared, state-of-the-art facility but economic efficiency was the last thing on her mind as she parked and rushed through the main entrance.
The pink-coated volunteer at the central desk checked the computer and confirmed that Major Kincaid was out of surgery and in recovery. Following her directions, Alex hurried down three different corridors. She was breathless and fearing the worst when she buzzed for entry into the surgical recovery unit and checked in at the nurses’ station.
“You can go on back, Ms. Kincaid. Your husband’s in unit four.”
She nodded to the semicircle of glass-and-curtained cubicles behind her. The curtain was drawn on number four. Once again fearing the worst, Alex steeled herself to rap lightly on the glass.
“Yo.”
Encouraged by the hearty tone, she edged the curtain aside. Relief swept through her when she saw Ben sitting on the side of a bed with a hospital gown hiked up around his hips and his left foot and leg encased in an orange cast.
“Alex?” Surprise chased across his face. “What’re you doing here?”
“Sergeant
Somebody called me. He said you were in an accident and he had to notify your next of kin.”
“Oh, for...!” Ben shook his head. “That must’ve been Sergeant Johnson. He conducted our final medical out-brief and heard the guys giving me guff about our abbreviated honeymoon. Since he accompanied me to the hospital, I’m guessing he went through my wallet while I was in surgery and found the card with your name and number on it.”
“Why were you in surgery? What happened?”
“Stupid accident. A couple of us were helping the loadmaster on-load our pallets of gear when a tie-down snapped. Damned pallet rolled back, right over my foot.”
“Oh, no!”
“My boot protected me from the worst of it, but I crunched some bones bad enough that they had to put in a couple screws. I’m waiting for the doc now to tell me how long I’ll be in a cast.”
The surgeon appeared almost as if on cue. Accompanying him was another physician, this one wearing an air force flight suit. Both men looked a question at Alex, then nodded when Ben introduced his wife.
“The pallet did a number on your husband’s fourth and fifth metatarsals,” the surgeon explained. “They fractured right where the long bones join the base of the foot. The good news is the pins I inserted should help them fuse cleanly. The bad news is they’re at the outer edge of a lower extremity and thus get a reduced blood supply, so they take longer to heal than other fractures.”
“How long?” Ben wanted to know.
“You won’t be able to put any weight on that foot for five to six weeks. If things look good at that point, you should graduate to a walking boot, with a return to full activity in three to four months.”
“Three or four months! You’re kidding!”
“Wish I was.”
“C’mon, Doc. I’ve hurt worse than this from a flu shot.”
“You might think differently when the anesthesia wears off completely,” the surgeon drawled. “I’ll prescribe some pain pills to get you through the next few days. Also a pair of crutches. You’re going to need them. Then I’ll see you back here in a week to check the incision and change your cast.”
Marry Me, Major Page 5
