Night Is Mine (35 page)

Before they parted, he leaned his helmet against hers. Even if anyone saw them, they were just two pilots in full flight gear discussing the flight.

“I’ve got battle plans for a joint operation, Beale.” A plan that was driving him insane.

“Really, Major? I can’t imagine.” So cool, so smooth. Just the way she flew. But he knew better. He’d seen the rocket-fire heat that could light her up until all she could do was moan and shudder.

“A plan to rip off your flight suit and every scrap under it.” Oh, man, the image was killing him. Killing him slow. “I can show you all about right on time.”

He heard her reply as much through the helmet as through his ears.

“Dream on, big boy.” But her voice was rough and her breathing fast. “Besides, who says I’m wearing anything else?” Now he understood how his copilot felt, Mark felt a desperate need to sit down abruptly on the tarmac. She wasn’t killing him slow, not Emily Beale. She was killing him fast.

At one point, Emily almost gave the controls to the copilot, but one look at his hands stopped her. They were fisted tightly in his lap as he stared rigidly ahead.

Focus, Beale. Focus.

She was, and that was the problem. She was focusing on Mark’s rough voice and thinking about his gentle hands. That was a dangerous place to be while flying just twenty feet above the rolling seas. She was tipped far enough forward that her rotor tips were five feet closer to the water, and that was all she dared risk. The Chesapeake Bay could offer surprise chop that rose to twice normal height.

A quick glance at the FLIR showed Mark on the opposite side of the shipping channel, roughly dead even.

The clock was running. Once again, she tried to run the numbers in her brain; time, distance, power, fuel. At this speed, the load lightened by 2.9 gallons every second, 19.6 pounds every second. Even rounding to twenty pounds, she couldn’t do the math for one minute. Sixty seconds. What could Mark make her feel in sixty seconds? Maybe that’s what she’d do; give him sixty seconds and then they’d be done.

Insane. She wouldn’t be satisfied in sixty hours. She wouldn’t have begun to explore the possibilities. That’s why this wouldn’t work.

One time somewhere safe to blow off the intense heat that fired between them wasn’t going to do it. And courtesy of the Army code they’d both sworn to uphold, they couldn’t risk being together more than that. That’s why she wasn’t even going to start.

Once more she tried to focus on the numbers—and barely managed to shear aside in time to avoid clipping the small sailboat out for a night sail.

***

A tie. There was no other way to call it. Mark might have been a few seconds behind, or not. Perhaps she eased her rate of descent for the last ten feet, maybe he’d accelerated his descent. They were so in sync, cutting in from different sides of the base and arriving together, settling in perfect unison. Everything else aside, they hit tar together. Four seconds after the mark.

By twenty seconds after the mark, the copilots were gone, staggering like drunks. The crew chiefs tucked the birds in for the night and were gone inside of ten minutes. Hangar doors closed, floodlights out.

Mark stood, his clipboard with his maps and notes in hand. A work light hung over the briefing table in the corner. Emily looked down at her own clipboard and couldn’t read a single word of her own handwriting. The questions, the doubts, the fears. She tried to hang on to them. To remember why she wasn’t going to have sex with this man. Why she wasn’t…

The clipboard slipped from her fingers and clattered to the concrete so loudly that they both jumped.

Mark stood there looking at her, his helmet at his feet. His flight suit was unzipped just enough to reveal the collar of an army-green T-shirt.

She knew only one thing.

Only one question filled her mind.

She had to clear her throat twice to give it voice.

“Your helicopter or mine?”

Neither of them jumped when his clipboard slipped free and clattered to ground.

***

Mark covered the five steps between them faster than she could raise her arms to welcome him. He plowed into her and kept right on going until her back slammed against the chopper’s pilot door. He’d have driven the air from her body if their mouths were not already clamped together, her arms wrapped around the back of his head.

Her chopper.

His mouth raged along her jawline, down her neck.

She shoved him away and tore at the release on his flight vest. Didn’t bother to push it off his shoulders, but dragged down the tab on his flight suit. Rammed her hands down the front into the silken gym shorts he wore and wrapped her fingers around all that hard heat. He was so ready; well, so was she.

Emily reached for her own vest only to find that Mark had already removed it without her noticing.

For a moment he froze. His hands at a stop. Why weren’t they on her? Ravaging her?

Mark stood there, the front tab of her flight suit still in his hands, pulled down past her waist. He wasn’t looking at her face; he wasn’t stripping her naked.

He was staring like a man struck dumb at the line of bare flesh that ran from her dog tags all the way down, revealed by the rolled back flaps of her flight suit.

“You weren’t kidding.” He turned his face up toward the heavens. “She wasn’t kidding. Thank you, God.”

Then he looked into her eyes, and she watched his turn suddenly black and feral. With a growl driven up from somewhere past speech, he dragged the suit off her shoulders and down to her ankles in a single pull. Almost before her next breath, she stood barefoot and buck naked on the smooth concrete.

He dug out some protection, tore the packet open with his teeth, and groaned like a man dying as she rolled it over him. He lifted her with those strong hands wrapped around her bare buttocks and drove into her, slamming her once more against the helicopter.

She wrapped her legs around him as he pinned her against the smooth curve of Plexiglas. One arm around his neck, and the other hand wrapped around the protruding muzzle of the .50 cal machine gun, their cries rose in unison to shatter against the hangar ceiling.

***

Mark lay against her. The only thing keeping them from sliding to the concrete was Beale’s hand wrapped around the barrel of the .50 cal. He closed his eyes against the first wave of vertigo he’d ever felt. The relief too great, too immense. It filled him like a breath of cool air at high altitude when a hot summer day shimmered far below.

He raised his head to look at her; she kissed him, long, slow, and deep. A real tonsil-grabber of a kiss. She kissed with her eyes open. Those impossible eyes that could see straight to his soul inspected him. What did they see? He didn’t even know himself.

She slid one foot down until it touched the concrete though he remained buried deep within her.

“Tonight,” her voice little more than whisper. Rather than looking at her own watch, she took his wrist and turned it to look at his. “We have one night. Three hours. Mark, show me what we can do in three hours.”

It ripped his soul open. He knew she was right. One night was all they’d find.

“What if…”

She stopped his mouth with her fingertips, then she replaced them with her lips.

The heat didn’t build again with a roar and a slap. No rocket flare. No explosion echoing to his toes. Her lips rode over his, tasting like sunrise. Sunrise and sea salt.

He wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her hair. He breathed her in until he’d filled his lungs with her. Until he’d never smell anything so sweet again.

She laid her head on his shoulder and they stood there. Still her back against the pilot’s door. Unmoving except for a gentle rocking like the tops of trees on a windless day. Moving to some rhythm all their own. He had never held a woman who felt so right, so true.

He scooped her off her feet, carrying her the few short steps to the Black Hawk’s cargo door. The engine cooling with quiet pings of a job well done.

A stack of blankets had been stowed at the rear for Search and Rescue survivors. Now he spread them upon the hard deck. Layer upon layer until they made a bed worthy of his lady.

He scooped her back into his arms as if she weighed nothing and set her upon the jury-rigged bed as if it were a mahogany four-poster.

Emily laid back and let her eyes drift shut.

“No.” He leaned down to kiss her on each eye. “I need you to look at me. Look at me with those beautiful eyes of yours, Ms. Emily Beale.”

She opened them, and he couldn’t say what he saw, but it cast a mist over his mind, wrapping them in the safety of the night.

He studied her face with his lips, her neck with the back of his hand, her collarbone and that beautiful neckline with the tip of his nose.

She wore nothing but her dog tags, which was sexier than any cotton, silk, or lace he might have encountered. Lying partly on her and partly beside, he placed his ear upon her heart. He’d know that splendid double-skip beat from a thousand others now that he’d heard it.

He traced his fingertips over her breast, down her body, around her splendid curves, each such a perfect fit in his hand. Her long fingers slid into his hair and then held him close to her. So close, so tightly, that he could never live, never exist anywhere other than against her heart.

The fire of the hospital bed, the electric voltage of her apartment floor, the rocket flare of moments ago, all washed away behind their slow exploration.

He discovered her shivers when he ran his teeth over her insole, her quiet groans when he dug strong fingers into strong shoulders. She discovered how to kiss his one ticklish spot in a way that warmed rather than irritated. How to make him laugh when her smile bloomed mid-kiss.

When he discovered the tattoo across her lower back while massaging her shoulders, he couldn’t help but take the time to trace every line with a gentle finger. Just the size of his palm, it was about the cutest thing he’d ever seen. The Night Stalker winged horse, with laser-vision eyes, but rather than being mounted by sword-wielding Death, a black serpent rode its back with eyes to match his steed. Beneath, in midnight blue, just four letters curved along the line of her hips: “N.S.D.Q.” It was beautiful work.

They spent as much time holding each other as they did in any sexual act. She laid against him, on him, under him, and their bodies were in perfect harmony as long as they were wrapped tightly together.

When at long last he entered her, she cried out. Cried out and he swallowed the cry. He took her pleasure inside him and did his best to give it back. Again the tears rolled down her cheeks, and not all of them were hers.

He hadn’t cried since before he could remember. He’d always been his dad’s “little trooper.” Now there was too much inside him. Too much pleasure, too much fire, too much heat, too much Emily Beale.

She swallowed his moans as he had her cries, and when they rose and rose like a rotor gaining speed for takeoff, when she wrapped her legs tight around him and he drove home, his breath wracked out of him in gasps. So sharp and full and complete that he half feared he’d never be able to move again.

And he half feared he would.

There were no words between them. Not that they were awkward as they dressed, pulling on flight suits, tucking pant legs into boots, holstering weapons.

Emily thought it was just the opposite. They dressed exactly as they flew, exactly as they’d made love, in absolute and perfect harmony. Never had such peace washed over her as when Mark brushed at her hair with his fingers and as she strapped his watch about his wrist.

If she’d felt mellow after waking in the hospital, after he had taken such exquisite care of her body, she’d need a new word to define her feelings now. Languid. Sanguine. Glorious!

She started laughing. A giggle at first, but it built and built until it rolled about the hangar and pulled Mark into its arms and hers.

They began to dance. Some jaunty mash-up of waltz and two-step. They were stumbling, half falling, laughing in each other’s arms when one of them kicked a clipboard. It skittered loudly across the floor and snapped them back to reality.

In minutes, they’d folded the blankets, stowed their gear in their bags, and left the base.

Emily dropped Mark at the curb of the first of his backward stops. It was a SOAR apartment that he’d signed out, where he kept his uniform and flight gear. He’d change to civilian and then head to a hotel room under the name Marky Herman, from which the uncouth high-roller would emerge.

The cab took her back toward the White House, but she had the driver stop and leave her at the Lincoln Memorial. It was still half an hour to sunrise, and she wanted to spend it with her old friend.

Other than a strolling security guard, there was just the two of them, Emily and her marble pal.

She wanted to… She didn’t know what and almost laughed aloud, but in the silence of the pre-dawn light it felt presumptuous to laugh here.