“He shoots. He scores. And the crowd goes wild,” Garrett crowed.
Quinn was still standing where he’d been when he’d given up the ball. “The LT from the seventh ring of hell?” Quinn asked, his huge paws on his hips.
“Actually, she’s a
former
lieutenant. And you traveled,” Dallas accused the pilot.
“I’m a wounded war vet.” Shane grinned and exchanged an enthusiastic fist bump with Zach. “You’re lucky I’m not insisting on a handicap. Given that I’m playing on an artificial leg.”
“Handicap, my ass,” Dallas grumbled. “Maybe I lost some of my hearing that day up on the Kush, but I thought for sure I just heard you claim to be our nation’s very own bionic gazillion-dollar superhero.”
“Decatur left the military?” Zach cut off the argument. “What’s the matter? Did the Navy run out of flies for her to pull the wings off?”
“That’s harsh.” Shane passed the ball to Dallas, who began dribbling it back down the court. “Although I escaped the hearings because I was unconscious most of the time in the Kush, plus, I think no one wanted the press reporting the judicial pounding of a wounded vet; from what you guys said afterward, she might have been tough—”
“That female could make a junkyard pit bull cower,” Quinn said.
“But she was just carrying out her mission,” Shane argued.
“Which, in her view, was to send us all to federal prison,” Zach reminded him.
“Fortunately, that wasn’t the view of the prosecuting judge,” Shane responded mildly. “She was doing what she saw as her responsibility. Same way you guys did when you broke the rules of engagement by crossing international borders.”
“It wasn’t as if we went into Pakistan to have ourselves a Taliban tailgate party,” Quinn reminded him. “We were trying to save your life.”
“Which you did very admirably, and you know I’ll always be grateful.” Not that such alleged gratitude kept him from getting in the former CCT’s face on the b-ball court. “I owe you all a huge debt I’ll never—”
“You don’t owe us anything.” Dallas cursed as his shot hit the rim and bounced off. “We don’t leave men behind. It’s against the code. There wasn’t any other decision to be made.”
“My point exactly.” Shane snagged the rebound and passed it off to Zach, who went loping back down the court toward the basket at the other end. “Obviously the LT felt the same way, because the Navy’s Judge Advocate’s office never took it to court-martial.”
Damn. How the hell was he supposed to keep his mind on the game when they were mired in this conversation about the hot JAG officer? Which he had no one but himself to blame for bringing up.
“The way I heard it, she was overruled by higher-ups.” Zach’s shot slid in as if the basketball fairies had sneaked onto the court during the night and greased the net. “But, whatever happened, that lawyer was still one icy bitch.”
“But a luscious one,” Quinn allowed.
“What?” Quinn asked, when Zach shot him a dark, accusatory look. “I’m just saying that beneath that law-and-order exterior, the female’s a fox.”
With his former SEAL partner still glaring at him, Quinn took the pass, ran down the court, then tossed up a brick that missed the rim by a mile.
The pebbled ball rolled off the court and ended up against the wheel of Zach’s fire engine red Dodge Viper.
Dallas eyed it, then shrugged, deciding just to let the damn thing go.
Apparently the others agreed, as no one went after it. Which was just as well, since he and Quinn had been skunked, which had taken a lot of the fun out of the competition.
“You should’ve seen her in that sprayed-on black cocktail dress.” Dallas leaned against the backboard post, folded his arms, and sighed at the memory.
Quinn perked up at that. “Was it made out of that stretchy stuff that has to be peeled off?”
Quinn McKade might be engaged to a former FBI agent who’d recently joined Phoenix Team, but apparently you didn’t necessarily have to put your nuts in cold storage when you went out and bought a woman a diamond ring.
“That’s exactly the kind. She said her sister’s a dress designer. Anyway, what little there was of it fit like a second skin and made her look hotter than Buccaneer Day fireworks.”
“You didn’t.” Zach shot him a killer glare. “You wouldn’t . . . Fuck.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “Tell me that of all the willing females in the world, you didn’t sleep with the Navy’s very own Cruella de Vil?”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“Only because she turned you down,” Shane guessed.
“Flat,” Dallas admitted.
There was no point in lying, since his rep as a player was well-known. It wasn’t that he went out of his way to seduce women. The simple and happy fact was that he’d never had to. It was a lot easier to have them coming on to him.
Though, from what he’d witnessed thus far, there was nothing easy about former Lieutenant Julianne Decatur.
Except her looks.
Which were so fine he’d had a really, really hot dream about her last night. One involving melted Hershey’s bars, whipped cream, maraschino cherries, and Pop Rocks.
After waking up as horny as a sailor who’d been stuck at sea too long, he’d taken care of the morning hard-on himself in the shower. But, of course, the solution hadn’t been anywhere near as satisfying as the real thing.
It had also left him wanting a lot, lot more.
5
Navy fighter pilot Dana Murphy had been seven years old when she’d pestered her five older brothers to take her along with them and their pals to see
Top Gun
at the Pensacola base theater. The instant the movie opened with that memorable air dogfight scene, she’d fallen head over heels in love.
Not with Tom Cruise, since her seven-year-old heart had belonged to Andrew McCarthy after she’d gone with her mother to see
Pretty in Pink.
What had hooked her was the absolutely amazing, exhilarating idea of growing up to be, not the Kelly Preston girlfriend character, but a Top Gun pilot herself.
Afterward, when she’d shared that goal as they’d left the theater, her brothers’ friends—all Navy brats like her—had laughed their stupid heads off.
“Girls can’t be pilots,” Billy Johnson insisted.
Since his father, like hers, was a F-14 mechanic, their families spent a lot of time together. He was a loud-mouthed, stupid bully and Dana had hated him on sight. The feeling had been mutual.
She fisted her hands on her hips and thrust up her chin. “Can too.”
“Can not.” Billy leaned down into her face.
“Watch me!”
She’d been on the verge of punching him in his fat, supercilious face when her eldest brother, Brian, stepped between them. Since their dad was away at least six months at a time, Brian had taken on the role of her defender in a family where she was outnumbered five boys to one girl.
“Leave her alone,” Brian said mildly.
It wasn’t just his size that had him not having to raise his voice. He’d always possessed a quiet air of authority that others immediately recognized.
Which, she thought with a sigh as she circled into her break turn above the aircraft carrier steaming across the blue waves of the Pacific below her F-18, was why he’d ended up an Army Ranger, leading the way into battle in hostile territory.
Which had, no surprise, gotten him killed.
No
.
Circling in to do a night landing on an aircraft carrier was no time to think about Brian’s death.
She shook off the thought, blinked away the mutinous moisture—tears born more of fury than pain—she felt at the back of her eyes, and concentrated on the bank of lights in the distance.
Normally, Dana “Mav” Murphy loved landing on a carrier deck, which had been accurately described as being like taking a swan dive out of a second-floor window and hitting a postage stamp on the ground with your tongue.
Why any pilot would prefer flying for the Air Force, with their comfy twelve-thousand-foot-long runways—which was why it was said among carrier pilots that Navy wings were gold and Air Force lead—when they could land on a pitching and rolling flight deck was beyond her.
Like Tom Cruise’s character, Maverick, whom she’d taken her shortened nickname after, Dana had a “need for speed.”
At approximately ten miles out, she descended to eight hundred feet.
Unlike an airport runway, which stayed where it was put, and had ground references to help set up landing patterns, Dana had only a fleeting glance at the ship to judge whether she was on target.
After dropping her tail hook, she checked for any competing aircraft that might be coming off the catapult. Midair crashes were a surefire way to piss off the Navy.
Lacking a Y chromosome, even having grown up in a testosterone-dominated family, Dana had had to work extra hard to become one of the boys.
Which she thought she had. At least most of the time.
Except for one asshole Neanderthal, who, wouldn’t you know it, was on duty tonight as LSO. The Stone Age-minded landing signal officer, who’d made his feelings about women pilots more than clear, had already flashed the series of red lights, waving her off twice.
The first time he’d claimed that the plane before her had taken too long to clear the landing area, so the crew hadn’t had time to get the arresting wire retracted and back into the battery.
Which could possibly be the truth, though she’d never seen this crew not clear the landing area within fifteen seconds after a trap.
The second time, he’d insisted that not only had she been coming in too high, she’d been drifting right.
This time, red lights or green, damn the potential inquiry, there was no way she wasn’t going to fucking set it down.
Too-familiar bile rose in her throat. Steeling herself against hurling right here in the cockpit, she forced it back down again.
There were four braided steel cables, strung across the deck at fifty-foot intervals and hooked to a pair of hydraulic cylinders located a deck below. Dana always liked to aim for the second, which, if she overshot, gave her two more chances for her tail hook to snag one.
The moment she touched down, she shoved the throttles forward, applying full power, just in case she’d have to take off again. When the wheels hit the deck, friction slowed the plane, jolting her to a bone-jarring halt, the negative Gs nearly pushing her eyes out of their sockets.
They didn’t call them controlled crashes for nothing.
And damn, Dana flat-out fucking loved them!
After the blue-shirt handler had directed her to taxi out of the landing area, she was out of the plane like a rocket and stormed toward the port aft platform, where the LSO was finishing filling out her score sheet, which would be posted in the squadron ready room for all to see.
Dana knew that, thanks to this guy, her chances of getting the Top Hook award at the end of the cruise, was, oh, how about nil to none?
“What the fuck did you think you were doing?” she yelled, yanking off her helmet. “Another circle and I wouldn’t have made it back to the ship.”
“The first time was unfortunate,” he allowed. “The timing sequence went off on the deck. The second time was pilot error.”
“The hell it was. We both know that I’ve got one of the best trap records on this boat. Male or female. Day or night.”
He shrugged and turned away. “If you’ve got a complaint, why don’t you just take it up with someone above my pay grade?” he suggested, the dare dripping with sarcasm.
Which they both knew wasn’t going to happen. The LSO was master of his domain, and to challenge his authority wasn’t going to help her long-term career chances.
She was still fuming as she marched across the deck. An aircraft carrier, which was essentially a floating air base, was huge. Impossibly huge—a skyscraper turned on its side. The flight deck alone was four and a half acres.
It was also an impossible maze—with ladders and bridges and hatches, and so many corridors and dark corners beneath the waterline.
Which was why she didn’t notice the man waiting in one of those corners until a hand reached out and snagged the arm of her green flight suit.
“We need to talk,” he said.
Dana might still have been furious. She might have wanted to punch her fist through the ship’s steel bulkhead, which would only break every bone in her hand.
But she was Navy to her toes, which was why there was no way she’d mouth off to a superior officer.
“May I inquire what about, sir?” she asked.
He glanced around, as if wanting to ensure they were alone. Which wasn’t surprising.
“It’s a matter best discussed in private, LT.”
Surprise, surprise.
“Sir, request permission to shower and meet in your quarters at thirteen hundred.”
His jaw tightened. Even in the shadows as they were, Dana could actually see the vein pulsing at his temple. Like any other officer on the boat, this man was not accustomed to anything less than immediate obedience.
“Permission denied.” His voice snapped like Old Glory atop a flagpole.
She sighed and resisted, just barely, dragging the hand that wasn’t holding her flight helmet through her hair.
“Yes, sir.”
Suspecting she knew exactly what topic he had in mind to discuss, as she followed him through the winding hallway and back up another flight of metal stairs, fighting back a sudden, unbidden, and decidedly unwanted nausea, Dana found herself almost wishing that, instead of cajoling Brian into dragging her along to the movies that long-ago afternoon, she’d stayed home and watched some sappy after-school special with her mother instead.
6
Dallas was going to get lucky. All the signs were there over the Lowcountry boil at the Black Swan Pub overlooking Somersett Harbor.
His date for the evening—an ER physician at St. Camillus Hospital—had been sending out so many signals, she might as well have been waving semaphore flags in his face.