“I’ve wanted to fly since before I can even remember,” she was telling him. “And then Lenny moved in and—”
“Lenny?” Stan asked, instantly jealous, then instantly incredulous and amused at himself. God, get a grip, Wolchonok.
“The former SEAL I was telling you about? Except he never told my mother that he was a veteran. It was bad enough she was living with a Lenny. I don’t think she could have handled knowing he’d fought in Vietnam, too.”
Lenny, the SEAL from ’Nam, was her mother’s lover. Okay. That made sense. And it erased the troublesome and lingering pictures he’d had of Teri hooked up with a sixty-year-old man.
“He told me all about it, though,” she told him. “As much as he hated ’Nam, he loved being a SEAL. It was the best thing that ever happened to him. And when he found out I wanted to fly, he . . .” She laughed, shook her head. “Do you really want to hear all this?”
“What, do I look like I’m falling asleep?”
“No. But I know your darkest secret, so . . .”
He scowled at her, but she was still laughing. Either she knew he was hot for her and honestly didn’t mind, or she didn’t really know his darkest secret.
She leaned closer, and he got a whiff of her hair and an eyeful of her breasts, tight against the cotton of her shirt, nipples clearly outlined.
Oh, shit. Don’t get a hard-on. Don’t get a hard-on. As soon as he did, guaranteed, Jazz would need him and he’d have to stand up and . . .
“It’s that despite the hard-ass reputation, you’re really just a softy,” Teri told him, her voice low so no one else could hear.
There was a delightful teasing light in her eyes, but Stan found himself hypnotized by her mouth, by the perfect, graceful shape of her lips, by the thought of those lips . . .
Oh, freaking perfect. He yanked his gaze away and waited for Jazz’s inevitable summons. But it didn’t come.
She’d just called him a softy.
The irony was unbelievably intense, and Stan couldn’t keep himself from laughing. He heard himself make a sound that was remarkably close to a giggle, and that just pushed him even further over the edge.
Ah, dignity. It was overrated anyway.
Teri was laughing, too, clearly pleased with herself for making him crack up so completely, even though she didn’t really understand what was making him laugh.
“I want to sit with you guys and have some of whatever it is you’re drinking,” WildCard said as he passed by on his way to the head at the back of the plane.
Stan finally caught his breath. “Lieutenant, believe me, I enjoy your company very much. I’m glad we’re friends.”
“Me, too, Senior Chief.” She looked out the window again, as if she suddenly didn’t want to meet his gaze.
Shit. What had he just said that had embarrassed her?
“So what did Lenny do when he found out you wanted to fly?” Stan asked, hoping he was misreading her body language. He hated the distance she’d put between them with the set of her shoulders. “How old were you, anyway?”
“I was eight when he moved in,” she told him. “Twelve when he left.”
Ouch. “That must’ve sucked,” Stan said. She was looking at him again, thank God.
“He had his reasons,” Teri said. “Of course, I didn’t know them at the time. Still, without a doubt, he was the most important person in my life. Ever.”
And she’d had him for only four years. Stan had thought losing his mother at eighteen was bad. Damn.
“I’m sorry he left,” he said quietly.
“When he found out that I wanted to fly more than just about anything,” she continued, “he hooked me up with the local CAP—you know, Civil Air Patrol. A friend of his was a member—Archie. He used to take us up in this little Cessna.” She smiled, lost in the past, her eyes distant. “He used to let me take the controls. On my twelfth birthday, Lenny talked him into letting me make the landing, probably breaking every rule in the book.”
“So where’s Lenny now?” Stan asked.
“He died,” she told him. “When I was fifteen, I got this letter from a lawyer’s office, telling me that I’d inherited a quarter of a million dollars from someone named Leonard Jackson.”
“Holy shit—pardon my French, but did you say . . . ?”
“A quarter,” she said again. “Of a million. Yes. That was my reaction, too. He’d put it into a trust for me, so Audrey—my mother—couldn’t touch it. You know, I never even knew Lenny’s last name—I didn’t realize at first that this Leonard Jackson was my Lenny. And when I did . . . I didn’t want the money, Senior Chief. I wanted him. I’d always planned to go find him someday, because he was my real dad. He loved me even when I didn’t get an A plus in school, you know?”
Stan nodded. He knew.
“Then to make things even worse,” she continued, “I found out that he’d left back when I was twelve because he was diagnosed with cancer. My mother couldn’t handle the fact that he was dying, so he just . . . left. He didn’t tell me why he was going because he didn’t want to make her look bad. So he died in a hospice, all alone.” She looked bleak, as if she were reliving her loss all over again. “And I could have had his love for another three years.”
Touching her was a stupid idea. Touching her in public was even stupider. But Stan did it anyway. He touched the softness of her hair, touched her cheek before sanity intervened and he pulled his hand away.
“You did have it,” he told her gently. “You just didn’t know it until later.”
She gazed at him. “I never thought of it that way before.”
“Well, there you go,” he said, wishing . . . No, he wasn’t going there. Not right now. Not ever. He had to look away.
“He wrote me a note,” Teri told him. “He said, ‘College first. Then, be all that you can be.’ ” She smiled. “He included the name and phone number of a friend who was a Navy recruiter.”
Stan laughed at that. “So it’s Lenny we have to thank, huh? Without him, we might’ve lost you to the Air Force.”
“Without him, I wouldn’t have made it into the sky at all,” she confessed. “As soon as I was old enough, I used my inheritance to learn to fly—everything from Cessnas to small jets. I didn’t tell my mother. She would’ve had a cow.”
Wait a minute. “So you came into Navy flight school already knowing how to fly a jet?”
She nodded.
“And yet you chose to become a helo pilot?” Stan didn’t quite get it.
“I wanted to work with the SEALs.”
“Ah.” God bless Lenny and the stories he’d told her.
“Excuse me, Senior Chief.” Sam Starrett was in the aisle, looking curiously from Stan to Teri. “XO could use you in a minute or two. He asked me to wake you, but apparently you don’t need waking.” He smiled at Teri. “Hey, Lieutenant.”
Instant tension. It was amazing the way Teri just tightened up. She nodded at Starrett, but her shoulders were practically up around her ears.
What was that about?
“How’re you doing?” Starrett asked her.
“Fine, thanks.” She met his eyes only briefly, looking away as if she were embarrassed.
It was a weird dynamic. If they’d been lovers and Starrett had ditched her, ending their relationship with his usual lack of grace and finesse, he would’ve been the one who was uncomfortable around her.
Unless she’d ditched Starrett . . . ? No, that didn’t sit right, either.
Stan excused himself and stood up, grateful that enough time had passed so that he could do it without embarrassing himself.
Teri picked up her book, holding it like a shield against Sam Starrett. It was almost as if . . .
“Starrett, you got a sec?” Stan asked.
“Sure, Senior.” The lanky lieutenant followed him toward the front of the plane.
And sure enough, Teri visibly relaxed.
“What’s up?” Starrett drawled.
Stan didn’t mince words. “Keep your fucking hands off Teri Howe.”
“My hands? Whoa, wait a second, it was Admiral Tucker who was—” Starrett broke off at the look Stan knew must’ve been on his face. “I just told you something you didn’t know, didn’t I, Senior? Shit.”
“When was this?” Stan kept his voice quietly calm. Deadly calm. Starrett wasn’t fooled.
“Hell, I don’t know.” He scratched his head. “A year ago maybe? Maybe more? Teri was doing two weeks of Reserve training, and three of the regular helo pilots got food poisoning and— I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“Oh, yes, you should,” Stan said.
Starrett cast an uneasy glance back toward Teri. Lowered his voice. “She was filling in, chauffeuring top brass in one of the puddle jumpers. She took Tucker back to the base after some dinner thing, but he’d had a few drinks too many, and she was intending to drive him home, too. She was helping him to her car in the parking lot—you know, seriously helping the man walk? Arm around him? He was pretty severely alcohol challenged and I guess he got the wrong idea.”
“Christ,” Stan said. Was this kind of thing so commonplace in Teri Howe’s life that she simply hadn’t bothered to tell Stan about an admiral’s inappropriate behavior?
“That’s when I made the scene,” Starrett continued, his voice still low. “Tucker had his hands all over her, and—it was the funniest thing, Senior—I was sure he was going to have a permanent handprint of her palm on his face, but she froze. I had to pull him off her, and as soon as I did, she ran.
“I loaded Tucker into my truck, drove him home, and then went over to Teri’s house. I got her address from the phone book—I knew she lived in San Diego and I had to make sure she was okay. I couldn’t get her face out of my head, you know? That look in her eyes—like the world was coming to an end. The weirdest part of it was that while she was upset, she wasn’t half as upset as I would’ve expected,” Starrett told Stan. “I mean, she was way more resigned about it than I would’ve been. She didn’t want to tell anyone, didn’t want to do anything—she just wanted to forget about it. She seemed convinced Tucker wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning anyway, so . . .”
Stan was mad as hell at Admiral Tucker, at Teri, at Starrett, too. “And it didn’t occur to you to come to me, Lieutenant?”
“No shit, Senior, I swear to God, I wanted to, but she asked me not to report the incident.”
Stan looked back across the plane, at Teri. Who wasn’t reading. She was watching him. She quickly looked down at her book as if he’d caught her being bad.
What the hell had made her freeze that way? Both with Hogan and with Tucker. She should have kicked both of them in the balls so hard their eyes would’ve been permanently crossed.
How had she made it so far in a world where women had to be twice as strong as their male counterparts to succeed?
Except she hadn’t made it that far, had she? She was only a lieutenant junior grade after joining the Navy at age nineteen. And she’d gotten out of the regular Navy and into the Reserves. Running from something he didn’t yet know about, perhaps? Christ.
And yet Teri Howe, the pilot, didn’t run from anything when she was in her helo. She flew without hesitation. She was decisive, courageous, and a consistently excellent junior officer. She gave her opinion when asked and followed orders without question when she wasn’t.
Stan turned back to Starrett. “I apologize for jumping to conclusions, sir.”
“Don’t sweat it, Stan. If I were hanging out with her, I’d be pretty possessive, too.”
“No, we’re just friends.”
Starrett didn’t wink, but it was there in his voice. “Sure thing, Senior.”
Christ, what was wrong with everyone? Both Tom and Starrett thought he had something going on with Teri Howe. They must think he really was some kind of miracle worker.
He made a mental note to himself not to sit with her again. Not without Muldoon or one of the other guys, anyway. She didn’t need rumors about her and him being spread around.
He headed toward Jacquette, psyching himself up so that he’d be prepared for anything thrown at him, and when he glanced back at Teri, he caught her watching him again.
She smiled, and he was instantly there.
Ready for anything.
King of the world.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Six
The chartered flight to Kazbekistan wouldn’t land for several hours.
Helga Rosen Shuler sat, wondering what he looked like.
Stanley Wolchonok. Marte’s son.
In all likelihood, she wouldn’t be able to meet him right away. He was going to be in K-stan as part of the team of men who would launch an assault on the hijacked plane, gain entry, and kill the terrorists before they had time to kill any of the innocents on board.
Yes, he was going to be very busy. But after it was over, she would request some time with him.
Did he look like Marte, with light brown hair and blue-green eyes? Or did he take after the elder Gunvald sister, Annebet?