Hot Point (3 page)

And boy did he ever, getting a three-drink raise before driving the hammer down.

Damning himself for a fool, Vern swung wide as he and the guys threaded their way toward the chow line. The others bucked their way in the straightest line, weaving and dodging among the tables, occasionally goosing somebody as he was about to take a drink. You could easily follow the wake of turbulence they left behind as they went.

Vern followed the line of least resistance, walking outside the perimeter of the clustered tables. A flight path that just happened to pass close by where three of the four women had settled.

Carly and Denise sat with their backs to him. Denise was half a head shorter than Carly, even sitting down. But the way her hair caught the last light of day and shimmered with each tiny shift of body position was a siren call.

He might have crashed right up on those rocks if Jeannie hadn't been facing him from across their table. She watched him, puzzled for only a moment, then offered him a knowing smile.

Shit!

The woman was too smart for his own good. Well, hopefully she'd have the common decency to keep her mouth shut or he really would be crashing on the rocks.

He cut farther to the outside to get clear. That had him passing close to Mark, Emily, and their daughter. Tonight their island nation was slightly isolated to one side from the rest of the group.

He passed behind them just as Emily spoke softly to her husband.

“Honduras?”

Vern suppressed a shiver across his shoulders and paused at their table. “Honduras? If you're thinking of a vacation now that the fire season is almost over, you can do way better than Honduras.”

Emily closed a folder that was sitting on the table before they both turned to look at him.

“You know Honduras?”

“I do.”

Tessa sat at the end of the table beside Emily, beating on a small bite of chicken with the back of her spoon and the enthusiasm of a two-year-old.

He circled around and sat next to her, starting the airplane game with a small french fry to get her to eat it while he spoke to her parents. She was a bright, shining girl who looked much like her mother.

“In 2009, I was serving on the Coast Guard cutter
Bertholf.
We were coming out of San Diego as the Honduras coup d'état of that year was kicking into full gear. Five months of political train wreck.”

He managed to land the french fry, which Tessa began cheerfully chewing away on. He selected a bit of beaten chicken for the next flight.

“The Navy felt that they didn't have enough assets in the area, so they called us. Full steam south. Mine was one of the two MH-65C Dolphin helicopters they had on board. I had search-and-rescue gear, but they had an airborne use-of-force package ready for me if I needed to arm up. We were on constant patrols, stuck offshore from June through September. Back a year later for flood relief following Hurricane Paula. Honduras sucks. Highest murder rate in the world there just as a bonus. Try Belize or Costa Rica. Much friendlier.”

The flight of the chicken was a crash and burn. As soon as the bit of food in question finally made a soft landing on the plate, it was beaten once more with a spoon to ensure its complete suppression.

After they chatted for a few minutes and another successful french fry landing, he headed to the line for his own meal. Glancing back at the table, he saw that Emily had managed to fly some chicken in safe, but her attention wasn't on the task.

She and Mark had reopened the folder and both were studying its contents.

* * *

It was full dark outside as Denise sat in the pilot's seat of Firehawk Oh-Three and cycled down the hydraulic pumps. Everything checked out. As long as she was here, she turned on the Health and Usage Monitoring System and checked the readouts.

The HUMS tracked most of the problems and worked as a fair predictive tool for maintenance. It didn't like surprises though, and it took her a few minutes to convince the computer that the line failure had been fixed. The HUMS was quite certain that the pressure drop and subsequent return to normal was a problem rather than external service done by a human it knew nothing about.

Then it convinced itself that due to the pressure loss, the rotor was on the verge of imminent failure even though they were sitting on the ground and the engines were off. She didn't start the twin turbine engines or even let them have any fuel, but she started the Auxiliary Power Unit and let the APU cycle the engines once. That cleared its miniscule computer brain. She shut down the power. The HUMS, well, hummed at her, happily green across the entire screen. She shut that system down as well.

The large LCD screens across the control panel went dark, and now the only light was the soft glow beside the few mechanical instruments that were there in case the electronics were blown. Beyond the windshield, night had fallen. There were still a few lights over at tables across the runway and small groups gathered around them.

Denise threw the last switch. The lights died, and now she sat alone in the dar—

“How's it going?”

She yelped. She didn't mean to, but she did. A totally girly sound of surprise.

“Sorry, sorry.” Though she couldn't see him, Vern's voice was right outside the open pilot's door, not more than a foot from her elbow. For an instant he rested a steadying hand on her arm.

“Vern, you jerk. First you break my new helicopter, then you sneak up to scare the daylights out of me? What's up with that?”

“Sorry.” His deep voice did sound really contrite. He was long, lean, and had a voice to soothe wild animals. The man should not be allowed to run around loose.

“You owe me!” He did. A new heart. Because her present one was cranking at liftoff speed and still might fly away without her at any moment.

His silhouette crossed in front of the camp lights outside the windscreen as he did that lazy mosey thing that pilots did so well and circled around the chopper's nose to the copilot's seat.

She didn't leave, didn't gather her tablet computer with its checklists, didn't… She simply waited until he'd climbed aboard beside her and then leaned back against the seat. The seats were comfortable enough—they had to be for the pilots to fly the hours they did every day—but they weren't loungers. They kept the pilot upright and facing forward.

Vern somehow managed to lounge in the seat anyway.

She became intensely aware that she was in his normal seat. Her toes could barely reach the rudder pedals because they were set for his long legs. She'd need to raise the seat several inches for a clear view over the top of the T-shaped console. The base of the T started on the deck between their two seats. After curving up until it was above their knees, it then branched to either side at the height of a car's dashboard. His hands would rest right on the controls that—

Denise jerked her hands into her lap milliseconds before she rested her hands over where his would normally be.

“Like we're at a drive-in movie.” A hint of reflected light showed the joystick was moving. Vern must be nudging the cyclic around with gentle taps of his fingertips. The one rising between her legs brushed the inside of her knee.

She didn't move, but she did shiver. Curiously, her nerves insisted it was a good shiver, one that warmed rather chilled her skin.

The two controls were linked together so that either pilot could fly the craft at any moment. It was as if he were somehow sitting on her side of the cockpit as well. If she reached out and touched the cyclic, she'd feel his small motions…which was way too personal.

“I'm not your girl.” She'd never been to a drive-in movie. She hadn't been…wasn't the sort of girl that boys took to “the movies.”

“Seem to have noticed you weren't.” His tone had a definite
duh
quality to it. “How's Jasper?”

“Okay,” she guessed. The relationship had fizzled and finally died a quiet death a month ago, but she hadn't told anyone. She didn't like failure in any form, not even when it was mutual. Subject change. “I'm really sorry. I should never have certified this chopper for flight without—”

“What did you find?” With a wave of his hand that she could barely see in the dim light coming through the windshield, he brushed her apology aside as if it hadn't been her fault.

She reached into her work-vest pocket and offered him the six-inch piece of offending hose line. It was about as big around as her thumb. She braced her eyes for the shock of a cabin light, but instead he held it out before him. He was holding it so that the camp lights across the runway would glance along the surface.

“That doesn't look right.”

“Duh!” She felt pretty good about the casual sound. It came out correctly instead of her normal too-awkward-to-live sound when she tried such things. “There's a split blown right through the sidewall.”

“Not that, this.” He didn't hand it back to her. Instead he leaned over until their shoulders were almost brushing and she could smell the soap he'd used to shower. He held the hose out in front of her and twisted it back and forth slowly. She had to shift her position to get the distant camp lights to shine along the surface. A millimeter more and they'd be rubbing shoulders. It was so tempting to let herself take some comfort in—

“What's that nick?” And how had she missed it and a pilot caught it?

“This bird used to be Army before we picked it up used and converted it, right?”

“Sure, though it was the Sikorsky factory that converted it for us.” She winced and clamped her mouth shut to stop herself. She was always correcting people to get things exactly correct, which she'd been told very clearly was one of her less charming habits.

Denise was torn between studying the hose and considering whether or not to lean against Vern and feel human contact for even a moment. She didn't miss Jasper.

Not at all.

Which was information she'd only just processed at this moment—a feeling supported by the fact that she'd thought in the general terms of their relationship ending a month ago rather than counting the twenty-seven days that had actually passed. Or was it twenty-eight? While she might not miss him, she did long for the casual intimacy of being with someone. She'd liked the human contact while it lasted and missed it.

But this was Vern Taylor, the handsomest flyboy in MHA and one of her coworkers—an absolute recipe for disaster. Men like him didn't notice women like her when they could have any cute girl passing through Hood River, Oregon, to windsurf the Columbia Gorge. What was she thinking? He always hooked up with the tall, loud, flashy ones who laughed brightly and easily. And probably gave the same way.

Personally, she'd never found sex to be the least bit easy. Occasionally good, but it complicated all matters and everything connected with them.

Like easing right on the cyclic to tip the rotor swash plate, she pulled away from Vern enough to create a small distance between them. But she didn't shift so far that she couldn't still see the hose…or sense the warmth of his closeness on her cheek.

“This Black Hawk…” Denise actually had to swallow to clear the lonely taste her thoughts had left in her throat, as if the emotion was a bad flavor. “It served with the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles. Three tours, I think.”

Jasper had always been on her about how precise she was about everything. Four miles, not three miles to the nearest restaurant—rounded up from 3.85. “Sixty-five degrees outside,” not “in the sixties.” “It's seven thirty-eight,” when asked the time. She wasn't being fussy; it was simply how she thought about things. She'd slowly been forced to append most of her conversations with “I think” or “about” or “somewhere around” until she stuttered like a mistuned radial engine.

Well, she was done with that.

“Three tours.” She repeated definitively, then added the beginning and ending dates of service because she knew the history of every one of her birds from the moment they flew off the assembly line—and to hell with any man who didn't like it.

Except for Firehawk Oh-Two. Something very strange had happened to that helicopter last winter, but she'd never been able to uncover what. And when she'd pushed, she'd not only been stonewalled. She'd been told flat out that questions were unwelcome and were a job-level “didn't need to know.” Finally, when she still didn't back down, her questions were deemed a security-level risk.

With no explanation and a maintenance record that displayed odd discrepancies, she didn't trust the craft. Without telling anyone else why, she'd had her team help strip the bird down and put it back together, but it was as flawless as any aircraft she'd ever seen. Yet it still wasn't the bird she'd sent to Australia last year to fight bushfires.

She wondered if Vern knew what had happened, but she'd guess not. He hadn't traveled with the two Firehawks when they'd split off from the rest of the MHA team to fight a different bushfire.

Vern didn't comment about her elaborate precision and total command of Firehawk Oh-Three's service record. Instead he was once more inspecting the hose in the distant camp lights.

She no longer had any excuse to remain leaning so close, so she sat back in the pilot's seat. But now she could feel his shape in the shapeless pilot's seat. How pathetic was she?

“That's a bullet crease.”

“It's what?” She rapped his ribs hard with her elbow as she leaned back over to see.

“Easy there, Wrench. You could hurt a fella. See?” He held it out again.

“You're right. It looks like the bullet cut through the first layer or two of the hose. How did you know?”

“Flying Coast Guard isn't only about pulling idiot tourists out of riptides.”

Coast Guard? How had she not known that about him? If he'd been one of her choppers, she would have.