Light Up the Night (6 page)

She didn't laugh, but just watched him and waited.

So he offered a shrug. “And why is that a problem?”

“A Kiowa is a spotter bird. Designed to peek over obstacles, attack, and run. The Cayuse is mission-profiled to deliver teams and fetch them back.”

He nodded. That's exactly how he'd used each of them.

“The Mission Enhanced Little Bird AH-6M—‘A' for ‘Attack'—has only one purpose: to deliver serious firepower where no one else can get in. It is a wholly different mission, and this bird has been crafted specifically for that. It's as related to the Cayuse as an armored Humvee with a turret gun and infrared night-vision gear is to a Jeep Cherokee with a Blaupunkt stereo and Bluetooth for your garage door opener.”

“Is that why you like it?” What made him ask that? No reason to get personal with this woman. Yet the chopper fit her somehow. She belonged here, right here beside her bird. He'd watched her for the rest of that first meal and through the parts of the briefing that he could. She was rarely at rest. Like her helicopter, she was about the attack. Fast, always in motion.

Another question about what she did with that energy in other situations came to mind, which he quickly suppressed, and suppressed hard. She was a fellow serviceman—serviceperson—standing on the deck of an amphibious assault ship, not some potential stateside recreation in a bar, no matter how good his body seemed to think she'd be.

Patricia O'Malley stood, hands on hips, and stared at him for a long moment. Then a slight smile pulled up the corner of her mouth and sparkled in those blue eyes of hers.

Slowly, she held her hands out toward him, side by side with the palms up.

Bill recognized the game. It was a speed test. Who was faster. Something you did when you were bored and wanted to prove you were still in top form. Well, screw her. He was the fastest in the unit. Let her just try.

He stepped up and immediately realized this was the closest he'd yet been to her. Even in warrior mode, you could see her smile threatening to dimple, her ever-so-fine hair fluttering in even the mere rising of the deck's heat. He shut it off and compartmentalized it as only a SEAL could do. Focus on the task, or rather the game at hand.

He placed his hands palm down over hers, not quite touching, but so close he could feel the heat off her palms radiating against his own. The trick was to pull your hands back before the person jerked their hands from below and slapped the tops of your hands.

Bill tried not to gloat. It was a game he rarely lost. He hadn't had his hands slapped in years. Why she wanted to lose at a power game was beyond him. He softened his vision so that it encompassed her whole upper body and face. There was always a tell, a sign, some shift in weight or narrowing of the eyes to telegraph the motion of the opponent's hands to twist aside, over, and slap down. Plenty of warning to withdraw his own hands.

Practiced reflex had him jerking his hands back before he was consciously aware of any motion. But he'd barely moved them before his conscious brain informed him there was a sharp pain. It wasn't coming from his barely moved hands, but rather a very sharp pain in his solar plexus as the air whooshed out of his body making him instantly light-headed.

It was only as he was trying to fight his body's natural reaction to keep exhaling, struggling against instinct with his training to pull in that first breath past the pain, that he reconstructed what she'd done.

She'd already preset for her attack when she'd taken the stance. Her weight forward, her feet braced a half step apart. That way, there had been no telegraphed warning signal. Then, rather than attempting to jerk her hands from beneath his fast enough to slap, which he had to admit might well have succeeded, she'd locked her fingers together and driven them straight into his chest with no warning of a change in posture.

And it had been so damn fast, he hadn't seen it. He couldn't even blame it on the failing light. She was just that quick.

“That's what my bird does that you don't understand. Your training hasn't prepared you for it. The Little Bird's job is to be the unexpected point of the spear. It's a different machine, different thinking, different flying.”

He managed to stand up straight again, though his body complained bitterly, and he resisted the urge to rub where she'd nailed him. It was an effective way to make an opponent fight one-handed—give them a pain that they would instinctively clutch. That had been trained out of him, but shit, it hurt.

Patricia O'Malley simply stood there waiting, palms up, perfectly balanced. Ready for another go at it. He considered surprising her just as she had him, but decided that it was a set of bruises neither of them needed.

What the hell! Common sense had never been his strong suit.

So, instead of placing his hands just over hers, he grabbed down and captured her wrists. Soft skin registered, and impossibly slender wrists for how hard she'd caught him.

He barely turned his hip in time to take the brunt of her kick. Though holding her wrists tightly kept his own hands occupied so he couldn't use them. He went to trap both her slender wrists in one of his big hands, but didn't have a chance.

He felt her pull against his grasp, not for freedom, but rather for leverage.

He barely tightened his gut in time to block the head butt to his solar plexus. It hurt, especially on top of her first strike, but at least he kept his air this time.

While trying to butt him, she must have gotten a foot up on the deck edge of the helicopter behind her. She drove at him, using her body as a battering ram. If she'd weighed even five pounds more, he'd have crashed to the hard deck with her atop him, but he managed to stand fast.

She was so close, so wound up, that she made his head spin. She smelled of fire and summer. Of grass fields at the height of their growth, filled with so much life that it practically burst forth.

In the near-darkness, he could see the flash of her bright smile, almost feral.

Because he still held her wrists, it only took a small step to push her back against the side of her now-just-warm chopper and lean down to kiss her.

Her mouth opened without hesitation, consuming him, filling him with her scent and her taste. He could feel her smile against his lips.

He wasn't smiling. He was filled with a need so strong that he barely recognized it as his own.

She slid one cool hand, that he didn't remember letting go, along his cheek and held him tight to the kiss, offering no escape. As if he'd want to. Her taste was even more captivating than her smell, like comfort food if it was made into a hot, sensual woman.

Then he felt cold steel against the scar that ran down the other side of his face and froze. He didn't have to see it to know that a large, sharp knife now lay against his cheek.

Patricia eased back just the slightest inch, making it clear she could cut his throat if she wanted to, or leave him with a fresh scar.

“Uh.” He managed to clear his throat, though it sounded rougher than he liked. “I shouldn't have done that.” He could feel the knife biting his skin so he made an effort to move his jaw as little as possible as he spoke.

She nipped her teeth lightly on his chin, without removing the blade.

“Maybe some other time, sailor. For now, I think the lesson is done.” She shifted out from between his body and the side of her helicopter.

The cold steel edge moved away with just the slightest rasp, as if she were shaving him with it.

A shimmering twist of steel spun between them, highlighted by the few work lights on the deck. She caught the knife by the blade and held it out to him.

He wrapped his fingers around the hilt and she was gone.

Just before she disappeared around the next chopper, she called back, “Time to gear up, sailor, if you want to go flying tonight.”

The deck lights, red for night flight operations, began flashing on.

By their light he could see what he'd known the instant he'd wrapped his hand around the hilt.

It was his own knife and he never felt her take it.

He slipped it back in the leg sheath and did his best not to smile.

***

Trisha entered the gear locker room to get her flight suit and survival vest but collapsed back against one of the locker doors. Turning her face to the side she was able to lay her cheek against the cool metal. It burned with the heat of Billy's kiss and the heat of his body pressing hard against hers.

She'd had her share of good times, but no one had ever fired her up like that. Not so fast, not so far.

The kiss should have been a joke, a distraction. It was supposed to be, or she wouldn't have let him push her back to begin with. After all, everything's unfair in love and in war. She'd learned that long ago. But if she'd learned it so well, why had she used a kiss rather than one of several dozen other tactics that now came belatedly to mind? And why had she suggested, practically promised a rematch? And why was her heart still beating so damn hard?

“Hey, O'Malley.” Kee Stevenson came in and popped her locker open with a sharp rap from the side of her fist. Her daughter, Dilya, almost shoulder tall, drifted in carrying an e-reader in a bright pink cover. They were a funny-looking pair. It had been obvious the kid was adopted and of a whole different race, but still they looked somehow alike.

Kee was Trisha's height, but with all of the curves Trisha had never grown. As a matter of fact, she was so generously built that Trisha wondered if that's where the rest of her own figure had gone. With sun-kissed skin and almond-shaped dark eyes, she was clearly an exotic mash-up of the American melting-pot gene pool.

The kid was starting to come into some shape, though it was too early to tell how she'd finish. Her skin was significantly darker. Uzbekistani, someone had told her. Refugee.

They both wore dark T-shirts. Kee's showed a large handgun. The words “Protected by Smith & Wesson” stretched over her breasts. Dilya's sported a large feather, a sparkling magic wand, and Hermione's words, “Wingardium Leviosa.” Protected by magic. Both wore dark jeans and sparkly red sneakers. Their hair was even the same length, though Kee's was straight and pure black, and her adopted daughter's ruffled its dark brunette waves down to narrow shoulders.

The two of them gazed at her, dark eyes and soft green ones.

“You okay?”

Fine.
But her throat wasn't working and the word didn't come out aloud.

She nodded. She was fine. It was just her blood that wasn't. It still roared about her veins in ways that it really wasn't supposed to. She turned to change as Kee did the same.

But Dilya drifted over to stand beside her.

“Why is your hair that color?” Her voice was a strange mix of modern English and the hint of a roll on the
r
that must come from her native language. It also had a lilt to the end of the sentences that went up, but not like a question, even when it was a question.

Dilya reached out a tentative hand and Trisha tipped her head down. The girl stroked a hand over it.

“It feels thinner than mine.”

“Red hair is thinner.” Trisha tucked it back behind her ear. Maybe she'd let it grow again. Regular Army kept it short; jawline was the lower limit. But this company of Night Stalkers wore their hair more like their customers. SEALs and Delta often went undercover, so many of them had longer hair or beards. Billy's dark hair was almost long enough to catch in a short ponytail, though his cheeks were clean-shaven. Even standing here, she was aware of how soft his hair had been against her palm.

“Is it color or were you born with it?” Dilya was still inspecting her carefully. “Like Ron in Harry Potter? Does your whole family have red hair?”

“Only my mother and me.” The problem was that she was the spitting image of her mother. Everyone had always commented on it since her first memory, until she became only a shadow of her mother and was expected to grow up that way. Wow, that sure hadn't worked out the way her mother had planned.

Dilya looked at Kee and then back to Trisha. With an idle hand she tugged on her own hair, as if testing its length.

Kee was watching them closely. Assessing Trisha. Was she an overprotective parent? Or was there something else going on here?

Trisha peeled down to her underwear and stepped into the fire-retardant flight suit. It weighed about thirty pounds with all of the armor plates. One of the drawbacks to flying a Little Bird with no doors was not having a lot of protective armor around you unless you were wearing it. But since she'd worn it almost every day of the last half-dozen years, it felt more unnatural to be in civilian clothes, so light it was as if she was prancing around naked.

Before she zipped up the flight suit, Dilya was holding her arm near Trisha's stomach, comparing the color.

“You are so white.”

Indeed, while the girl wasn't African dark, there was a startling contrast.

“It comes with the red hair.”

“If I make my hair red, will my skin turn white?”

Trisha had to blink at that one.

Kee had stopped dressing and was waiting for her answer. Clearly used to Dilya's strange inquiries, she didn't step in, but Trisha could feel pending judgment. Kee was the woman with the longest term of service in SOAR, so Trisha valued her good opinion. She usually didn't care what other people thought, but this time she did.

“No,” she informed the child. “Our skin color stays the same no matter what we do to our hair.”

“Good.” Dilya nodded seriously, clearly filing away that tidbit. “I like red, but I wouldn't be me if I was your color.” And then she turned to leave.

Trisha glanced over at Kee.

“If my kid dyes her hair electric red, I'm going to blame you.” It was said dead seriously, but there was a light in the woman's eyes.

“Guilty and proud to be.”