Target Engaged (11 page)

He went down the line checking that each person was snapped in. The SPIES rope—Special Patrol Insertion-Extraction System—included a series of embedded D-rings separated by a few meters each.

He moved to the last ring in the line, hesitating just a moment at Carla's second-to-last position to brush a hand of thanks over her shoulder for not pushing. She looked at him like she was some kind of pissed or hurt, hard to read in night-vision green. Not the time to ask.

At the last position he snapped the D-ring onto the lift point of his vest's harness and held both arms out to his sides with his thumbs up. The others were doing the same, except for the two with bound hands.

A spotter high above them noted they were all ready and took them aloft.

Even before they cleared the trees, SOAR was reeling them up and moving out—fast. Kyle, in lowermost position, kept pulling up his feet as they approached treetops at over 150 miles per hour. The more they reeled the group in, the more his bare clearance over the trees remained unchanged. As the SOAR pilot bobbed and dodged above the terrain, they were also descending by exactly the amount he was being reeled in. It was freaky how good these guys were. With each slow spin, he had a clear view of the smaller Little Bird attack helicopter flying rear guard.

He was last aboard as they swooped down into the countryside of the coastal lowlands.

The outside of the helo had looked strange as he came aboard and he'd been unable to identify the chopper by sound, which was odd; he'd had a lot of training in that. Carla helped pull him in as the helicopter actually climbed to clear a pile of hay in a field and then descended once more.

From the inside, he could see it was a Black Hawk. Kyle could fly a Black Hawk, but only if he was desperate. SOAR made the machines dance and sing.

A final glance out the open cargo-bay door; he watched a house go by at eye level, a one-story house. He looked back inside quickly as the helo bobbed upward, then back down—probably avoiding a gopher hole mound at this altitude.

“These guys are cool,” he shouted to Carla as one of the crew chiefs snapped a safety line to the D-ring on his chest and then demonstrated with a yank that it was well attached to the helicopter's frame before she released him from the SPIES harness.

Then the crew chief leaned in and shouted loud enough for him to hear over the pounding of the rotors and the wind rushing by the open cargo bay door: “We're especially cool because we're…not-guys.”

Well, if that didn't beat all.

* * *

A Black Hawk flown by “not-guys.”

Carla decided that was beyond especially cool.

A SOAR Black Hawk flown by women. There was only one of those that she knew of. Clay had flown with these women and couldn't stop talking about them. And here they were.

Carla sat with her back against the cargo netting and contemplated just how small a community Special Operations Forces really was. Delta operators numbered in the low hundreds, and SOAR wasn't much bigger. There just weren't that many soldiers at this level. She'd always felt awkward about how Kyle seemed to know the background of almost every candidate in Delta Selection.

“Served with him in Bolivia.” “Spends a lot of lead, but real steady in a firefight.” “We did Airborne together. He squealed like a little girl on his first jump.”

But she was starting to see how it happened. Because her brother had died flying with SOAR, she actually knew
about
them even if she didn't know them.

Kyle was close beside her. Shoulders bumping lightly with the helicopter's rollicking flight just as if they were at the very end of the Forty-Miler around the fire. So, whatever had been bugging him on the ground must not have anything to do with her. She almost asked him, “What the hell?” but then thought better of it.

Focus on the mission, that's what mattered. Their relationship—damn, there was too heavy a word to tote around for everyday use—would take care of itself.

The General and the Major were tied back-to-back in the middle of the helicopter's cargo bay and attached to a couple of tie-down points. The other three Deltas were doing exactly the same thing she and Kyle were, restocking their ammo from their packs.

The female crew chief who'd latched them in had the name Davis on her gear. So this was Connie Davis. She offered them a box of cartridges.

“No thanks. We hand load our own rounds.”

“So does she.” Connie pointed at the other crew chief. “At least for match shooting.”

“She do a lot of that?” Kyle asked.

“Yes, she has been President's Hundred four years running. Twice number one.” No sound of pride in her crewmate, just simple fact stated as such. The woman drifted away. The President's Hundred was the premier shooting competition of the year.

Carla turned to Kyle. “You know who that is?”

“No. I had no idea a woman had ever placed number one, though I remember an unlikely story about a serious babe of a shooter.”

“The one just talking to us is considered the number one mechanic in all of SOAR, and the other one just has to be Kee Stevenson. Top five sniper in the U.S. military four years running. And I've heard that they're both serious babes.”

“Top five only 'cause Delta never shoots in that competition.”

“Right, tough guy. And you're welcome to outshoot Kee Stevenson anytime you want.”

“How do you know this, Anderson? It's like with that colonel. You seem to know everybody.”

She kept her mouth shut.

“Damn! Sorry.” Kyle kept his voice down. “I'm even dumber than Richie.”

Which wasn't saying much, considering that Richie was the genius of the crowd. Though he could be pretty inept at times, especially around her when they were off duty. He really didn't have a clue about women. He got tangled up trying to memorize everything when she was trying to give him social skills, as if women could be approached using a rote list of techniques. Telling Richie to be himself totally snarled him up, so she saved that for when she just wanted to watch the show.

“Your brother, right?” Kyle said softly.

She'd rather bite off her tongue than try to speak. It wouldn't come out well, not at all. This was the kind of thing Clay had done, flying into foreign countries at night with no one a bit the wiser. Until it went to shit and he ended up in a sealed box in a hole in the ground.

Kyle was waiting on her, so she managed a nod. It had been her big brother.

He left a respectful pause before continuing.

“So, these women are hot shit?” Somehow, Kyle knew she needed the subject change and he made it funny, bless him.

It helped her get control back. She nodded again and then whispered, “It was his stories of these women that made me go for Delta. That and Colonel Gibson. The perfect soldier. It's so what a man should be.”

Kyle grunted as if she'd just kicked him.

“You really are a dumbass, Reeves.”

“Why's that? Because I don't like the woman I'm sleeping with lusting after a colonel? He's way older than you, you know.”

She smiled at him. “Because you don't see that you're the younger version of him. You're that damn good.”

Their flight abruptly leveled out and steadied. They must finally have been over the water and headed for whatever craft was awaiting them offshore.

“Am I good?” Kyle asked, clearly going for the joke rather than letting the compliment in. Typical. “Or am I, you know, goood?” There was no doubting his second meaning, not with that low, seductive voice of his.

Well, she wasn't going to stroke his ego that much.

“You'll do.” She almost added “for now,” but a part of her bit it off. A part of her that she was becoming very suspicious of.

He acted like he'd been shot in the chest. Clamping his hands over his heart, he gasped out, “The wound. 'Tis mortal.” Then he collapsed to the deck and spasmed once or twice.

The other three guys just looked over at him and shook their heads.

She hated when he got all cute like that.

Guys weren't supposed to charm the shit out of her.

If someone made Kyle choose between the Delta Selection psychological evaluation and a CIA debriefing, he'd be hard pressed to decide which was more irritating.

There were always two analysts in the small steel room they'd stuck him in within minutes of boarding the Littoral Combat Ship USS
Freedom.
Though not always the same two. As if they were kaleidoscopically interchangeable.

He'd tell them his actions on the mission, such as he sprinted from the cliff to the hacienda.

One would ask for clarification.

He'd been focused on live and mobile targets, of which he hadn't seen anyone closer than fifty meters.

The other one would start to argue that Kyle hadn't said that to begin with and then proceed to totally misconstrue his words.

Don't you mean fifteen meters? Because fifty meters is a long way, way bigger than fifteen.

This would escalate as if he wasn't even in the room, until half the time he didn't know where reality had actually been, and then they'd ask him to repeat what he'd done.

Kyle could see the method to their madness—ferreting out only the consistently repeatable facts—but he didn't like it one bit more for understanding the tactic. And then somewhere in hour three, while describing the money in Major Gonzalez's safe for the fourth time, he finally remembered the two USB drives he'd slipped into a shirt pocket.

They went ballistic. It was another hour, dragging him back through the whole operation step by individual step, to make sure he hadn't forgotten anything else.

When he finally remembered all of the cash tucked in a different pocket, he kept his mouth shut just to avoid going through it for another hour. He'd turn it in when he didn't have to punch out a CIA agent to do so.

By the time they were done with him and let him escape into the hall, he couldn't remember his own name. The debrief had lasted as long as the operation, from HALO jump to SPIES extraction, and been far more exhausting.

He'd graduated from OTC thirty-six hours ago in a different country on a different continent. He'd participated in a highly successful operation. Major Gonzalez was way high on the CIA's kill list, and they'd brought him out as well. And he was so wiped, whipped, and—

His Spider-Man senses went off and slapped him most of the way back to consciousness.

Not ten feet down the hall, Carla staggered out of a doorway that looked suspiciously like the one he'd just escaped. Why they were released at the same moment, he didn't have a clue, but he wouldn't be turning back to ask those jokers. It would probably cost him another hour, and he'd never get the answer anyway.

She walked across the narrow width of the corridor, rested her forehead on the opposite wall, and let out a sound somewhere between a snarl, a scream of frustration, and a whimper.

He scooped an arm around her waist just before she sagged to the floor. A frantic look around and he spotted a midshipman. “Do you know where our berths are?”

“Sorry, sirs.” He looked at them uncertainly. “No one told us that you weren't both male. All I have allocated for your use is a two-berth bunk room.”

That Carla didn't even reply told him how tired she was.

“That'll be fine. Lead the way.”

* * *

The room was classic Navy ship: two-tier bunk, hanging closet just four uniforms wide, and enough room to dump your gear and change your clothes, provided you did it one at a time. At least it wasn't open berthing space. Oddly, it had that rarest of luxuries: a private bathroom. A meter and a half square, it boasted a sink and toilet, and if you closed the door, the whole thing turned into a steel-lined shower.

He stripped Carla down, which wasn't as much fun as usual because of her near-somnambulant state, and shoved her in. When he didn't hear the water start, he stripped and followed her in.

She sat on the closed toilet and leaned against the wall, on the verge of sleep.

He turned on the overhead shower, which flashed cold, then hot as the pipes cleared.

She squawked and sputtered, sitting up but not rising. So, once they were wet, he slapped off the water and shampooed and soaped them both.

He dragged her to her feet and hit the water again.

She hung against him as he sluiced them off.

Rubbing Sergeant Carla Anderson down with a towel, even an undersized, low-pile Navy one, was a worthwhile experience. Her skin glowed, her muscles shifted beneath the surface in enticing glides that he did his best to ignore. He was exhausted as well, but his body clearly had other ideas. The confined space was not conducive to keeping his distance.

He ached with need as he lay her down on the lower bunk, and not only his body. He was…happier for simply being near her. But it wouldn't be fair to go sharing his happiness, or his body's raging lust, not in her current state.

She stopped his escape to the upper bunk with a light hold on his hand. Carla shifted on the narrow mattress and tugged lightly until he lay down against her. There was no way in hell he was going to get any sleep with his body pressed up against hers.

She brushed her lips over his, a tickling sensation that ran right up his spine.

“Thanks.” Barely a mumble.

“You're welcome.”

“You smell good.” Her voice was thick and sleepy as she nuzzled against his neck. “You feel good too.” She snuggled up against him.

Okay. He might be a decent kind of guy, but there were goddamn limits to that code of gentlemanly conduct, weren't there?

He nuzzled her back.

And the damn woman purred. Carla was not the sort of woman who purred. She snarled and wrestled and laughed at the strangest moments, but she didn't go languid and feline and make low sounds in her throat that forced a man to try to cause more of them.

Kyle continued his efforts with surprising success. Rather than pushing him away or ramping it up, she brushed her hands lightly over his shoulders and slid them into his hair, guiding him to breast, belly, and beyond.

Sex with Carla was invariably an aerobic sport, but she didn't rise into one of her wild climbs.

Not this time.

Instead of sex, Kyle felt as if he was making love to her. Perhaps for the first time in the six months they'd been together. He evoked small murmurs and gentle pressures as she leaned in for more, rather than driving against him.

He took his time, investigating the terrain she offered for his study, a terrain he both did and didn't know. They had certainly used each other very thoroughly at every opportunity, but the heat always exploded forth, never allowing the time to appreciate more.

The skin at the side of her breast was as soft as her inner thigh. When she opened to him, she was warm, deep, and soft. When at long last he found protection and slid into her, she welcomed him with a kiss as gentle as a breeze and as deep as forever.

This time her peaks weren't shuddering mountains that slammed through her frame causing an avalanche in his, but ocean waves that rose, then rose again until they both finished on a sigh rather than a gasp. For all the skin contact she so readily offered, her hugs were typically hard and brief.

This time she held him to her and wouldn't let go. She kept her face buried in the crook of his neck, her arms and legs wrapped around him. It wasn't as if she was clinging to him, but rather as if she'd simply never let go because they fit so well together.

He'd had his fair share of sex, maybe more, starting with a blond and very flexible red belt on his father's dojo's padded floor on their shared sixteenth birthdays. Sally Ann McKay threw one hell of a fine party. And he'd made love to several of the fine women who had consented to share his bed.

Never before had he been
in
love when he did it. But there was no question, he was that far gone on Carla Anderson.

This wasn't some post-action fuck. That would have been wild and perhaps dangerous, considering how he was still feeling about the poor girl he'd had to kill. But Carla had let it not be about that. This had been only about them, as if they hadn't just had the busiest forty-eight hours of their military careers.

They shifted into a position so familiar now that it was hard to sleep any other way. He flat on his back, she curled against his shoulder with an arm and a leg flung across him. He brushed her hair back behind her ear, but knew it would shortly slide across her face as if she always slept safe behind its liquid brown shield.

He kissed her on the top of her head and lay back.

He'd never had to explain to his dad about Sally Ann; his father had simply known. He'd waited until the next weekend when they were standing thigh deep in a nut-freezing cold stream trying to tease breakfast onto their lures. Mom was sleeping in.

Then Dad had simply asked if the sex had been safe.

It had.

“You'll know when it's the right one, Ky. Until then, you treat them as nice as you know how and you'll be well rewarded.” Like most of his dad's lessons, it had been a good one.

That had ended “The Talk,” though not the lessons that Sally Ann had offered in exchange for extra sparring practice. They'd lasted two years, until the night before she went to college and he went Green Beret, one heck of a fine send-off.

And now Dad was right again.

Kyle simply knew.

It was crazy, ridiculous, and stupid. Carla was a teammate. If they were anywhere other than Delta, they'd probably have had both their asses booted by now. They'd certainly have been assigned to different units. She was wild, chaotic, and shared almost nothing about herself or what was going on inside that beautiful head of hers.

Didn't matter.

Kyle knew.

Carla Anderson was the only one for him, which would only piss her off if he was dumb enough to tell her. So he'd keep his own counsel for now.

He kissed her once more atop her hair and let the stresses of the last couple days wash out of him.

* * *

Carla lay on Kyle's shoulder wishing she could cut out her brain and drop it into the closest garbage chute. It was so screwed up that she couldn't even imagine it would make worthwhile compost.

Her body was asleep, passed out, gone beyond the pale, and humming very contentedly to itself about what Kyle had just done to it. She couldn't move a muscle even if there was a hull breach and they were sinking. Between exhaustion and the positively magnetic attraction of her body to Kyle's, she might as well be riveted into place.

What he'd just done to her was impossible. She'd never let someone else take control before. She always had tabs on exactly what she was doing and what she wanted.

She wanted to blame what had just happened on the mission, on exhaustion, on finally being mission-qualified for the Combat Applications Group.

The raw heat that always drove them together was somehow still the Carla perched on the top of the cliff with her shirt open.

She might have been working it to distract the other soldiers, but she'd only been thinking of one man as she flaunted her distractions. She could still feel the spike of heat that had soared through her as Kyle grabbed her hard and rough with his worn-soft leather climbing gloves and slammed her back against that tree with such desperate need.

But that ravenous woman still lingered back in the Venezuelan jungle. On this bunk in the heart of this ship of war lay another woman.

There had been a release she'd never known. Kyle hadn't just satisfied them both; he'd worshipped her body. And he'd done it with a tenderness that she didn't know what to do with.

Tenderness was not in the experience of one Carla Anderson.

And she'd let him do it to her. Even worse, she'd encouraged him. She didn't want to lose control and let a man make her feel like…

No, that wasn't quite it.

Kyle Reeves didn't make her feel
like
anything.

He made her
feel.

And that was the worst of all.