Heart Strike (8 page)

Melissa hadn't protested much when Richie steered her into the hotel's restaurant for breakfast; she'd been famished.

Any adrenaline that had carried her through the night had been spent by the time they'd reached the room. Eight hours of broken sleep in four days didn't begin to cover it. Richie had tucked her in, kissed her on the nose, and she'd been out.

Now she was awake, hungry again, and very frustrated. For one thing, she was alone in the room. For another, when she looked again, she was still alone in the room.

Showered and dressed, she started with the restaurant, then the weight room. She finally found him under the shade of a cloth umbrella at the side of the short pool. A low cyclone fence with those plastic slats separated the bare cement from the parking lot packed with cars baking in the sun. A Coast Guard Jayhawk helo ripped by close overhead, masking any possible sound of her arrival or approach.

Richie's hair was still wet, as if he'd just been swimming laps.

And he was gorgeous.

Brain boys were not supposed to be gorgeous; it was against the rules. She'd come up to him from the side. He was intently studying the flight manual they'd been given. Okay, she'd feel guilty about that later. He wore scant swimming trunks and nothing else. A towel was draped over the back of the chair; his T-shirt was balled up on the table next to his sunglasses.

One thin strip of cloth away from naked, it was easy to see that he was just as powerful as Chad in his own way. Muscle rippled across his shoulders as he turned a page. She could have traced out his leg muscles through the smooth skin. No knife slices, no bullet holes, his body was pristine and stunning. She was glad there weren't any women lying in the half-dozen plastic loungers scattered around the pool—they'd have been all over him in a second.

“Planning to stand out there in the sun until you burn to a crisp?” he asked as soon as the helicopter's roar had diminished enough to be heard. She could see it banking hard to the south and moving off in a hurry. Just because Cuba was opening up didn't mean that there weren't still desperate refugees braving the crossing to Florida in crappy watercraft.

He didn't turn to her, but of course she couldn't sneak up on a Delta even with the departing helo's noise. He'd probably known the moment she'd walked through the hotel's side door into the pool area.

She would have had the roles been reversed.

Wouldn't she? Had she missed something in training?

He reached out to tap his sunglasses resting on the table and she saw his-and-her tiny reflections in the curved surface. “Trick I learned from a SOAR pilot.”

Okay, in the future, she'd know if he came up behind her.

“Pretty slick, Slick.” Melissa circled around to the chair across the table from him but still in the wide umbrella's shade. Two minutes standing in the afternoon sun and she could feel her brain cooking.

He marked his place with a small piece of paper rather than dog-earing the page the way she would have, then slid on his sunglasses.

“So, what have you learned?”

“That you smile in your sleep.”

“I'm just a happy gal.” Though Melissa did wonder what dreams she'd been having that she didn't remember.

“I didn't know if you'd want lunch or breakfast.” He waved toward the door that had just opened behind him, despite his sunglasses no longer resting on the table to reflect his environment.

She hadn't heard the door open, but she'd seen it…which meant that Richie had seen her reaction to it.
Twice slick, Slick.

“So I ordered one of each. Asked them to serve it when you passed by.”

“Out of the whole place, how would they know it was me?”

“Easy. I told them to look for the most beautiful blond they'd ever seen.”

Melissa tried to think of a good answer, but she still hadn't by the time the waitress propped her big tray on the edge of the table.

“Breakfast or lunch?” Richie asked as if he wasn't messing with her brain at all. Which he totally was, intentionally or not.

“Uh, breakfast.”

The waitress set a big plate in front of her with an omelet, hash browns, and bacon. Coffee and orange juice.

Richie was served a burrito about the size of his head and a massive lemonade.

The waitress was gone and Melissa still felt like she sat in a fog. Q was no longer present at the table with her. Richie had somehow transformed into…himself, she supposed. But it was as if she didn't recognize the handsome soldier even though she'd been admiring him plenty.

“You actually told them that?”

His smile was luminous. “Couldn't think of a better way to describe you.”

No arrogance. No cockiness. It was as if he was speaking simple truth, like laying out the known factors of an upcoming mission.

“Richie?”

“Yeah?” He dug into his burrito.

“What the hell happened to you? Where's my too-sweet genius boy?” Like he'd been hers to begin with.

“I…” He blinked at her in surprise. “…don't know. I never say stuff like that, do I? But it just came out. It's true—and not like me at all.” He turned to look after the departed waitress and then back at her. “You're doing strange things to me.”

Rather than admit that he was doing strange things to her too, she changed the subject.

“So”—she nodded toward the book that he was at least halfway through—“tell me what you learned.”

And just that simply, he switched modes and did. The comfortable geek returned as she began working on her omelet—better than average for hotel fare. He told her about drag factors in single- versus dual-engine flight on a multi-engine aircraft. Induced versus parasitic drag trade-offs and varying P-factor forces.

While he grew excited by what he'd learned and dove deeper and deeper into the tech material, the hard-bodied soldier didn't disappear as he had back in Maracaibo.

That his T-shirt was still bundled up on wire-mesh table next to his lemonade was allowing her an eyeful. And the suspicion that he would not have been quite so excited to explain this to anyone else gave her a charged feeling that she was unable to ignore.

The more he continued in his rich, confident tone—comfortable in his role as analyst of information and teacher of knowledge—the more some long-forgotten girlie part of Melissa Moore—the museum carpenter living in her family's houseboat—listened right alongside Melissa the Delta Force operator known as The Cat.

Listened and was rapt.

* * *

“I talk too much, don't I?” he asked as they rode the elevator back up to their room. It was a pretty standard hotel affair, dark-brown veneer paneling, a darkly mirrored ceiling so that the elevator didn't look so small but average people didn't freak out when they saw themselves standing there upside down in a small box apparently twice as tall, and a handrail for those less steady on their feet. Not a whole lot to look at other than the woman standing beside him. Richie couldn't believe that he'd spouted off about multi-engine flight for close to two straight hours. He'd finally stopped when the sun had shifted toward setting into the Gulf, indicating they were due at the airfield soon.

“For a Unit operator, probably,” Melissa answered.

“Damn it!” Richie leaned back and pounded the back of his head against the wall of the elevator. “I'm sorry. I just get excited by something and… Chad's always telling me to shut up. Though Kyle and Carla never seem to mind, I do sometimes catch them sharing one of those laughing looks. But I—”

And Melissa turned to face him, clamped a hand onto the handrail on either side of him. She stood between his feet and used her grip to pull her body up against his. He still only wore his swimming shorts; despite the hotel's chill air-conditioning, he'd continued to carry the T-shirt low by his waist, hiding the reaction his body had been having to her all afternoon.

Now she leaned against him and there was no hiding anything. Not with the way her legs—that he'd very much admired because she'd been wearing shorts as well—rubbed against his. Not the way her breasts pressed against his chest through the thin cotton of her tan T-shirt. Though being military issue and therefore far thicker than the Aruba one, it still showed her off splendidly. One of the reasons he'd babbled for two straight hours about airplanes was so that he didn't spend them staring at her breasts. Or her face. Or her eyes, once she'd shed her sunglasses.

“Now might be a good moment to stop talking,” she murmured, their faces mere inches apart.

The elevator dinged and he glanced up at the indicator above the door. “Eleven, that's our floor.”

She sighed and moved away, ready for the door to swish open.

Talking too much again, Richie.

So he grabbed her wrist, tugged her back against him, and, ignoring the door, kissed her hard. Kissed her the way he'd wanted to since the first moment he'd seen her.

She didn't even hesitate. She leaned into him and wrapped her arms around his neck.

His own arms simply fit around her. No overreaching, no awkward gaps. Melissa fit in his arms as if custom-made to the lengths of his radius, ulna, and humerus bones.

His hands too, from scaphoid to distal fingertips, cupped perfectly about her waist and cradled her upper vertebrae and cranial… He lost track of what he'd been thinking, simply lost in the taste and texture of her kiss, of the astonishing nerve signals sent by every instance of bodily contact between them.

He'd always figured himself fated for some hometown girl in an unknown but distant future. Instead he was in Florida, kissing a Canadian turned Delta Force operator, whom he'd met in Venezuela. Richie didn't know when his life had gotten so exotic, but he was enjoying every second of it.

Melissa felt incredible, smelled better, and, he realized in the first few moments, was the best kisser he'd ever had the opportunity to assess.

Again, there wasn't “fire,” like all those novels his mom read. He'd tried a couple—maybe more than a couple during his raging puberty years—some of those women were very steamy writers.

Melissa's kiss was too solid, too rich, too deep to be described as fire.

It was more like the end of Delta training, having shot a rifle so many times that it was no longer familiar, but rather integral.

Familiar yet new.

As if they'd kissed a thousand times before, yet it was their first real kiss and felt that way.

The kiss lasted forever. It lasted—until the door dinged and began to close.

Melissa slipped out of his arms, caught the door, then smiled wickedly.

Part of their training had included knowing which brand of elevator closed how quickly, useful information in a firefight. He glanced up at the manufacturer's loading plate. On this model, the doors held open unattended for three point four seconds and took one point five to close as installed by the factory. That could be varied, but few bothered to change the standard settings.

He leaned there against the elevator's back wall and tried to make sense of the fact that so much was possible in less than four point nine seconds. No matter how he calculated it, it wasn't.

Yet Melissa stood there in the hallway, grinning in at him.

“Come on, flyboy. Gonna be late for class.”

“Uh-huh.”

She turned and sauntered out of sight, hips swaying. If she'd had a tail, Melissa The Cat's would be arced high in the air in that happy question-mark thing that cats did.

Three point four seconds later, the door closed on him and he was down to the eighth floor before he managed to hit a button. The elevator was headed for the lobby, so he got out on eight.

He entered the stairway, the concrete steps chilly against his bare feet, and began the walk back up to eleven.

They started at a line of aircraft that Melissa hadn't noticed last night. It was behind the main hanger. Along the fence line were numerous planes parked too tightly together for everyday use. There was her Cessna 172, looking much the worse for wear. Pipers, Beechcraft, more Cessnas, a sleek little Learjet. Singles, twins, seaplanes, even a big DC-3 tail dragger that she half expected a team of smokejumpers to be diving out of with their parachutes and axes.

“What's all of this?” She shrugged a men's button-down shirt she'd stolen from Richie over her T-shirt. With the sunset, the temperature had gone from blistering to merely obnoxious. She missed seeing Richie only in his bulging shorts, but he looked pretty damned amazing in the black T-shirt and jeans that matched her own.

“Seized aircraft,” Vito The Priest answered. He too wore nondescript khakis and a dark T-shirt. They could be three off-duty military personnel or three casual tourists. “Sinaloa, the Mexican cartel, tends to run the smaller craft mostly off the Yucatan. Venezuela has to cross the Gulf of Mexico to reach us, so they favor the bigger and more powerful equipment. Smaller planes out of South America don't have the range to reach us directly—they're mostly used for hopping over to Aruba or up to Honduras or Mexico, so we don't see Venezuela's small planes here, but they have a lot of them.”

“Are we going to fly all of those?” Melissa eyed the long line of aircraft.

“Doing anything else for the next three nights?”

“Three nights? I thought we were here for…”
Huh!
No one had said for how long; at least now she knew.

“Why always at night?” Richie asked.

“Flying during the day is easy.” He led them to a big Beech King Air, a ten-passenger twin turboprop—the Beech Baron's big sister. “Running drugs during the day is stupid, too easy to spot. Drug flying is done low and at night, typically with insufficient or malfunctioning equipment.”

Which, Melissa now understood, explained the Post-it notes all over her flight instruments and flying low enough to ram an oil derrick.

Courtesy of Richie's careful analysis and lecture, she kept up easily as The Priest rattled question after question at them. His final grumpy assessment of “Not bad. Do better tomorrow” must be his idea of high praise, because he said nothing nice about her piloting at any time during the rest of the night.

It's not that she was bad; The Priest also didn't find anything to criticize. Richie was simply a better pilot than she was. He had more than twice as many hours as she did, but that wasn't all. His analytic brain could react faster than her instinctual one. She always had to
do
in order to learn; Richie only had to think to learn.

He'd clearly thought through how to kiss a woman. He put more attention into kissing her than most men had into bedding her. And the results showed. Damn but that man was a pleasure. And his paralysis in the elevator hadn't done her own ego any harm.

She was going to have to teach him a thing or two about continued engagement of a willing target though. They'd been in the room at least ten minutes together, changing from pool garb into more appropriate clothes for the night's flights, and he hadn't grabbed her once. Sure, they hadn't had time, but he could have at least tried. What was up with that?

It was easy to see that he was still thinking about her. Even jeans didn't hide his continuing interest, yet he'd been the perfect gentleman. She'd finally caught up on her sleep, so they'd definitely be taking care of that…after tonight's lessons.

The Priest worked them up and down the Florida coast. Once convinced they could both avoid oil derricks and fishing boats with ease, they followed a clear route a half mile out from the last line of towering condos, working strictly on the planes themselves. He rotated them through plane after plane, simulating failures and dumping an unending stream of performance characteristics. Some planes were easy and they were gone and back again in fifteen minutes and right on to the next one. Others were more touchy and they might spend a whole half hour in.

Any attempts at small talk with The Priest to interrupt the battering stream of aircraft data utterly failed.

“What do you do when you aren't teaching beginners how to fly?”

“Teaching non-beginners how to fly better.”

Maybe they should have called him The Monk.

And chatting with Richie while the three of them were on a single intercom wasn't going to happen. So she just flew.

And she got better.

Engine failures became second nature. The Florida winds were steadier than Victoria's. The Pacific Ocean often sent battering winds that were ripped up and twisted by the hills and bays of Vancouver Island. The winds here were steady and light—and The Priest lectured them endlessly on the storm variations and how to fly through them. Her comment that she was surprised that he hadn't arranged a hurricane for them to learn in had earned her a bright laugh from Richie and ten seconds of solemn silence from Vito Corello before he returned to his lectures.

“Light twins lose altitude when you lose an engine; their second engine is not powerful enough to climb. You get to drive to your crash,” The Priest intoned. “Avoid them if you can. You are better off in an engineless box kite like a Cessna than the lead brick of a light twin. The problem in a light twin is that one remaining engine does give you safety choices, only not nearly as many as you think. I'd rather have you panicked and figuring out how to get your plane down.”

Normal twins could still fly and even gain altitude under most conditions after losing an engine. Some flew exceptionally well. The big DC-3 was so well designed that when they lost an engine, she could almost hear the old aircraft thinking, “Huh. What was that? Am I missing something? Oh well,” and continuing on with a shrug of its vast wings. The plane rapidly became a favorite of hers.

“Why did they ever stop building these?” she asked as they skimmed low over a mangrove swamp. She felt like a huge, swooping gull.

“Because they're idiots.” It was the first, and only, personal response she'd elicited from Vito Corello.

Low-altitude flying was the next challenge, and exactly the opposite of what FAA instructors wanted a small plane pilot to be doing. All of her carefully trained, private-pilot instincts told her to fly at least a thousand feet over cities and five hundred over countryside or water.

Vito kept forcing them down to two hundred feet, then a hundred. The DC-3 had a wingspan of a hundred feet—fifty to either side. Which meant a steep-banked turn would put the wingtip far too close to trees and highway road signs. Tall buildings became an issue, as did radio masts, even tall, whip antennas on yachts. Suddenly oil rigs and cruise ships were the least of their worries.

“Why so low?” Melissa's hands hurt with how hard she'd been holding onto the control yoke as they cruised over water and land.

“At seventeen miles from a Coast Guard cutter, you break onto their radar screen at about two hundred feet. Florida has a lot of coast, and they can't put a cutter every forty miles, so they keep moving and don't advertise their positions. At a hundred feet, you cut their range to twelve miles. At fifty, down to eight. Staying low is your best defense.”

She reluctantly brought the DC-3 back to the airport and they moved on to another plane—a seaplane this time. The first night—after she'd almost eaten the oil rig—they'd had a couple of hours in a small seaplane called a Lake, which was even littler and more fun than the DHC-2 Beaver she'd flown in Victoria as a teen. It had a boat hull, sat low in the water, and had an engine sitting on top like a miniature lighthouse turret. They'd practiced takeoffs and landings, first in the harbor, then on the ocean.

This time The Priest led them to a much bigger plane and, thank god, sent Richie into the pilot's seat. She didn't know if she'd be up for another low-level flight at the moment.

It was a de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter—the big brother of the Beaver. The Beaver had six seats and the Twin Otter could carry twenty. The Twin also, like its name, had two large engines on its high wings. She knew from flying beside them in Victoria Harbour that the Twin Otter was an amazing STOL craft. Short takeoff and landing was something of a trademark of the de Havilland planes.

This had made it a favorite of every environment from Vietnam War jungle airstrips to the Australian bush. She and her brother had sometimes fantasized about the latter as they rode the tiny water ferry from their family's houseboat in West Bay to downtown.

“What do you say, Charli?” She still missed her brother calling her by her middle name. “Let's get type-certified and go find us some roos to chase across the bush.” He had the worst fake Australian accent ever, and she'd trade in anything at this moment to hear it again.

Instead, she inspected the aircraft more closely and did her best to be objective. The Twin Otter was smaller than her newest buddy, the DC-3, but it was a floatplane with small wheels sticking out of the huge floats for landing on runways. That made the bottom of the door roughly level with her head because it was parked on land. The door at the rear of the main cabin was a side-by-side affair, each half opening to the side to make a four-foot square entry—clearly meant more for carrying cargo than people.

Richie paced along the pontoon floats that were twenty-five feet long and almost two feet in diameter. The tops were flat and broad enough to stand on comfortably. He rapped his knuckles against the side, and it gave off a hollow ringing sound like an out-of-tune bell. By the way he did it in three separate places, she could only assume that he was assessing the structural design, thickness of materials, who knew what else.

Melissa was used to being the smartest in the room. At the museum, she could always see how a space would feel before it had been fully designed. Could explain problems about the experience they were trying to create before her far more seasoned coworkers. With Richie, everything was measured, calculated, and comprehended. The only thing he appeared the least bit dense about was her.

It was kind of fun, riding in his blind spot. Was it all women or just her? Or maybe it was people in general. He didn't seem to be reacting in any discernible fashion to Vito The Priest's chilliness or Chad's “friendly” abuse.

The Twin Otter was surprisingly like the much smaller Beaver in that it felt more like a pickup truck than a refined aircraft. In her little Cessna that she'd flown off Victoria International's paved runways, you pulled the doors closed with the ease of a passenger sedan and twisted the small locking lever.

In the Beaver and Twin Otter, you slammed the door like a pickup truck and cranked the lever into place. It even sounded like a truck with a slam and a rattle of metal.

Which was especially appropriate for this particular plane. There was no separation between the two pilot seats, the six passenger seats in two rows close behind, and the big open area for cargo.

She pictured it full of bales of illegal drugs and disreputable smugglers. Then she sighed. If Richie was right, that would soon be them. Melissa wished that the future would hurry up and get here. She was getting tired of all the waiting and, after six months of OTC, was beyond sick of training.

After the standard familiarization tour and pre-flight, they took off into the night sky from the paved runway, retracted the gear, and then Vito instructed them to land almost immediately on Old Tampa Bay. They went back and forth, bay to airport to bay, alternating who was at the controls until there was no question about landing in water with wheels down or back on land with the wheels up. Then Vito put them through their paces up and down the coast until it was as familiar as the DC-3 or even her old Cessna.

It was an intense, visceral relief that echoed through every aching cell of her body when they parked the big, twenty-passenger plane close by the line of other confiscated craft just as the sky was breaking dawn.

Vito leaned forward between the pilot seats in the echoing silence interrupted only by the pings of cooling engine metal. “No flight tonight. Take today off and finish the manual, get some sleep. Tomorrow during daylight hours, we'll work on long, over-water flights. Think about the two primary problems. First, on a long water flight, there's nothing to look at but water and sky; it's very easy to lose focus and low altitude doesn't allow for mistakes. Second, how do you gauge distance above the water? Your altimeter is pressure based, which means if you move into a new weather system, it becomes inaccurate, so you can't trust it.”

Then he turned on his heel and walked away.

* * *

Richie fooled with the control yoke for a minute. It felt good in his hands, familiar. Like the Delta Force shoot-rooms, each plane's training layered onto the ones before until it was only the quirks that separated each type—the underlying patterns and skills were all the same.

He also knew that the moment he climbed down, he was going to be all over Melissa. And he didn't want to do that. He didn't want a quick tumble with her.

Liar.

He absolutely wanted a quick tumble. But he also wanted more and that wasn't going to happen if they simply went back to the hotel and fell into bed together.

“A whole day and night off,” Melissa said softly, apparently aghast at such a luxury. He carefully didn't look over at her sitting beside him but could see that she was shifting uncomfortably. He'd guess that things were moving both too fast and not fast enough for her as well. He felt all out of balance perched high up in the air in a parked airplane.

“We could…” Richie's throat was dry at the thought of Melissa naked beneath him. Some crappy, barely-off-base hotel was all wrong for such an incredible event.

Think. Distract yourself.

And he recalled that first flight and the fireworks off the wingtip.