Night Stalkers: By Break Of Day Part 15

He could sure imagine this golden-skinned beauty lit by a campfire and a Texas-sized sky of stars.

The curves, and nerves, of her body were something Justin had become finely attuned to. But like an unbroken wild horse, there was something going on inside, close below the surface but out of sight.

It puzzled him, though he'd figure it out when it was time. She looked almost as good in her Army gear as she did out of it. He liked the juxtaposition of competent soldier and sensual woman.

"Don't sleep through dinner." She leaned down to give him a kiss that rapidly had him thinking about things other than food, despite what they'd just done. "Jeez," she remarked and grinned down at him while she straightened the bra and T-s.h.i.+rt he'd messed up some. "And I thought I was the one-track hound of this team."

Then she was gone.

With the way she'd left his body buzzing, sleep was no longer an option, so he stood up and dressed. Taking his time, though he was sure they were fooling no one, he wandered into the chow line about ten minutes behind Kara.

She was nowhere to be seen. He double-checked the room, even if he couldn't imagine how he could miss her despite the crowd.

The stewards had put on a spaghetti feed and it was causing mayhem. Rangers were taking a bowl of spaghetti that would feed, well, an entire Brooklyn Italian family, and then covering it in sections with different sauces like a battle map marking areas of control. They were cycling back into the line for more, pus.h.i.+ng ahead of him when he blocked the path to more sausage marinara or pesto meatb.a.l.l.s.

The smells were deliriously good, but that didn't explain where Kara had gone. None of the SOAR women were present. Maybe they had decided to have a sunrise picnic somewhere.

He actually had the ladle for the sausage marinara dipped into the serving bucket when he caught a whiff of something. It was so clear that he realized it was the first aroma he'd been aware of other than Kara in a fair while. It didn't take long to locate the source.

A bacon-and-ground-sirloin tomato sauce. He breathed it in again and ignored the Ranger jostling him to get more garlic bread.

There. In a quiet corner of the steam table was a small tureen of Texas-style spaghetti sauce. Right down to the Worcesters.h.i.+re and chili powder. He ladled it onto his pasta, added a fistful of the sharp cheddar from the handy bowl that no one else had touched, and topped it with a sprinkling of scallions.

Then he went over and dropped his tray across from Bill and Michael.

He dug in a fork, unable to wait till he actually sat down, and the flavor exploded into his mouth. He sat and leaned in to inhale the aroma as he chewed.

"You planning to wear that or are you gonna eat it?" Sly Stowell, one of the Navy's chief petty officers, dropped his own tray next to Justin. He drove monstrous hovercraft parked down on the Peleliu's amphibious deck.

"Don't you be joking about this food none, Sly. That's Texas spaghetti sauce on a Navy s.h.i.+p in the Mediterranean. I'm either dreaming or I'm gonna marry the cook."

"Gonna have ta fight me for her, boy."

Justin inspected Sly. He was broad of shoulder and looked as tough as any Special Ops soldier despite being Navy.

"I wouldn't suggest it," Bill advised, actually breaking his silence.

"Why not? Other than I'd get some incredible food if I win."

Bill contemplated a piece of his garlic bread at length before responding. "First, Sly beat the s.h.i.+t out of every Ranger aboard in a wrestling match a few months back."

Justin had wrestled more than his fair share of bull calves, angry steers, and rowdy cowhands. He and Sly traded friendly grins that said a wrestling match might be in their near future.

"The main reason..." Bill finished the piece of bread with a crunch and left for another iced tea. When he returned, he continued the conversation right where he'd left it. "His wife is chief steward and almost as scary as the rest of the women she hangs with." He tipped his gla.s.s to acknowledge the empty table in the center of the officers' mess.

"Trust me." Sly started twirling up his pasta covered with shrimp and scallops and other things that had no business being on pasta. "I'm married to her, and I can promise you that she is just as scary. I tried messing with one of her recipes once." He shuddered. "I'm lucky to be alive here today. A missile can only kill you. A chef with her knives... Look out, son, and keep your legs tight together."

"So, a soon-to-be inductee in the Married Special Operations Forces Club..." Gail Stowell drawled in a soft Southern accent as she joined them at the stainless steel prep table in the main galley.

Kara jolted as if someone had just stung her with a cattle prod.

"I knew it," Trisha crowed and slapped the chief steward on the back.

The woman was as slender as one of her knives...and a raving lunatic.

"It is all over you," Gail informed her.

Kara didn't know whether to pound her head against the steel table or be sick on it.

She'd arrived in the officers' mess close enough to the end of the meal that the women were already leaving. They had scooped her up and led her down a deck to the large galley kitchen that was being cleaned up from the last of the service. A few of the crew were finis.h.i.+ng the scrubbing, but most were eating and laughing at another prep table on the far end of the kitchen.

While Kara struggled to recover, Gail ducked into the crew's neighboring mess hall and returned with a big bowl of spaghetti with meatb.a.l.l.s and a sprinkle of parm on top that smelled almost good as Kara's mom's recipe. Gail set it down in front of Kara and sat on a stool with a pleased sigh as she surveyed her quieting kitchen.

Kara looked down at herself to see if she was wearing Justin's underwear on the outside of her pants or what.

"She doesn't know." Connie made one of her rare p.r.o.nouncements. She took a piece of garlic bread from the basket that Gail had also supplied.

"Know what?" Know what? "I'm so not talking about this." Justin. "You." She pointed at Trisha. "I am not falling for your tricks."

"Have I said a word? For once I'm minding my own business, and look what I get for being right." Trisha did her best to sound deeply and morally offended. Maybe if she'd left out the "minding my own business" part, she'd have stood a chance.

"Wait." Kara tried for a breath, but it wasn't working. "Right about what?" she asked Trisha. She turned to Connie. "I don't know what? I-"

Claudia had sat on the stool next to her and slid an arm around Kara's shoulders, offering a sideways hug. "Shh, honey. It will be okay. Honestly it will. And if it feels like you're choking or want to kill him, you're absolutely on the right track. I almost murdered Michael before I married him."

"She's the one I want to murder." Kara aimed a finger across the table.

"Oh, I'm so scared." Trisha did a lousy job of cowering.

"I'm-" Kara stopped because something terrifyingly unlike a hiccup had caught in her throat. Deep breath. Drop into the zone. Fly through.

Her self pep talk wasn't working.

Ride it out.

The fact that Justin's metaphor helped more than her own completely negated any bit of calm it earned her.

She grabbed the edges of the table and braced herself. There were way too many a.s.sumptions flying around.

Fine! She'd fix that.

"I like him." Though she couldn't seem to let go of her death grip on the table. "He's an amazing man."

The women nodded, though she'd guess by some of their rather mushy expressions that they were thinking of their own husbands.

"Really good with his hands." She'd play that angle.

Several of the women sighed.

"But there's no way I deserve him."

They all startled in unison and turned to face her.

Where in the h.e.l.l had that come from?

But she didn't deserve him.

She sat in a steel coffin aboard one of the most powerful s.h.i.+ps in the Navy. He flew into the heart of Israel and rescued people from the middle of allied Air Force bases. He'd been blown up, lost his crew, and climbed back aboard to fly into SOAR.

Several of them started to speak, doing one of those group stumbles and stops. After their second attempt, Gail raised a hand to cut them off.

"Stop it. Just go away. We need to let the woman get some calories." Spoken like a true chief steward. Then she grinned. "By the size of the smile on your face when you first came in here, I think you have a need for those calories."

Kara wanted to cut and run, but didn't dare under Gail's commanding gaze.

Trisha tried to say something, but Lola grabbed her by the ear and dragged her out, going, "Ow! Ow! Ow!" for which Kara would be eternally grateful. Later.

Claudia gave her shoulders a final squeeze, and Gail sent off the last members of her lingering crew and followed them out.

Soon it was only Connie at the table, along with Kara and her confusion.

"Quite something when it catches up with you."

Justin looked at Michael across the dining table and nodded. No question what the man meant because Justin was feeling it right down to his bones.

"Was there a moment for you?"

"Top of a tree," Michael replied without elaborating.

"I was chewing her out for rescuing my sorry a.s.s from near certain death," Bill put in, pointing upward toward the flight deck. "Didn't even know her name yet. Cutest d.a.m.n thing I'd ever laid eyes on."

"Best d.a.m.n barbecue anywhere." Sly got a round of laughter as he pointed down toward the belly of the s.h.i.+p. "What about you?"

"I can't really say." First time he saw her? Not the moment when she'd given herself to him with such perfect trust. Perhaps when she'd reached across the c.o.c.kpit of the Chinook and traced a finger along his scar that so few were allowed to see.

The others were waiting for him.

"Doesn't make it any less true though. Does it?" Justin already knew the answer to that.

All three of his dinner companions shook their head in agreement.

Michael pa.s.sed him the salt and Sly went for more garlic bread.

"It doesn't matter, you know."

Kara really didn't need some Connie statistic about the inevitability of Trisha's prodding. She wanted to be like Kirk to Connie's Spock: Never tell me the odds.

"Whatever we say doesn't matter. You'll know when it's time." Connie stood up to leave.

Kara grabbed her sleeve to halt her departure. "What if I don't? Because no matter what you all say"-she barely managed to resist one of Justin's lazy y'alls-"what we have is great s.e.x. Nothing more."

Connie's smile was slow. It was a rare thing-she was mostly deadpan to the world, even around her husband-which made the expression all the more stunning when she did let it out. Pure brain; she really was part Vulcan.

"Believe that as long as you can. The it's just s.e.x concept was a comfort to me while it lasted." She moved several steps farther away before turning back. Now her grin was suddenly as wicked as one of Trisha's.

"What?"

"Well, I should, being me, point out that you are in a statistically bad grouping. So far, the women who fly for the 5D-going all the way back to Emily Beale, the first woman to make it into the 160th-have each and every one married Special Operations soldiers within or closely tied to the 5th Battalion D Company. I just thought you should know that."

Kara considered heaving a meatball at her, but threw her balled-up napkin instead.

Connie's grin flashed briefly once more before she departed, leaving Kara to fetch the napkin from where it had fluttered harmlessly to the immaculate floor of the empty kitchen.

Chapter 14.

"A sailor's life is a very itinerant one." Lieutenant Boyd Ramis had called them all into his cabin up on the hangar deck shortly after dinner.

Justin felt an incredible sense of dej vu. The first time he'd sat here, he'd been so hopelessly naive. Fresh out of SOAR training, he'd thought that he knew what he was doing. They'd been in the Arabian Sea at the time.

Then Kara Moretti had walked into the briefing room, and his world had tilted worse than a pinball machine in a typhoon. Twenty-four hours later he'd been flying a raid deep into Somali territory and rescuing hostages during the peak of a tropical storm. Since then he'd flown in a dozen different countries, both friendly and a bit less than.

He'd also taken a lover who now sat in exactly the same seat she had before, close beside Captain Claudia Casperson. Once again the blond and the brunette sat side by side on the couch in Ramis's topside office. How Justin's emotions had traveled such a distance in such a short period of time was beyond him.

"Once again"-Ramis managed to sound both n.o.ble and put-upon-"it is up to the hardworking Navy to travel to a remote destination with no reason given. I have been informed that there will be no operations while en route."

Justin glanced around but saw no more clarity on anyone else's faces than he felt on his own. A herd of longhorns on a cattle drive had more sense of where they were going than anyone here did. He saw Michael's unending patience and did his best to emulate it. Experience had shown that Ramis would get around to the point only when he was good and ready.

"We are to transit the Med once again, this time via Sicily, Athens, and Cyprus..."

In his peripheral vision Justin saw Kara start to look toward him and then stop herself. Only four people in this room knew about the trip into the heart of Israel; even Ramis hadn't known that's where they went, though it wouldn't be a hard guess. That the Peleliu was headed back in that direction only meant more trouble.

"...which we are told to take at a moderate rate to 'avoid unnecessary equipment wear and tear.'" Ramis was plenty smart enough to not buy that for a single second. "The transit that we made in four days going west is projected to take eight going east. We already have notified teams to s.h.i.+ft all of your aircraft down onto the hangar deck."

At least there they'd be out of sight. But that meant a week trapped aboard without a single flight. There was only so much ground training and vehicle maintenance that could be done.