Crusty's smile fled. The bag crumpled in his hand. Brown eyes hardened to a lethal flatness of a predatory male who would kill to protect his own. "Yes."
His protective urges were admirable. Once he and his wife had babies of their own, they would never be left vulnerable.
Of course his territorial manner was dangerous for her at the moment. There were many things she would consider doing to protect herself, but endangering a child did not number among those alternatives. Of course he did not know that and she would have to reassure him if she expected any further conversation. "I know Monica and her major told you about my midnight walks. I heard you on the phone."
His stance relaxed slightly, but not totally. "With the time change, it's easier on my wife if I call during the night here. I don't like to disturb her sleep."
"That is very thoughtful of you." Not all men were as sensitive to a woman's comfort. Was his wife ill? Or was he genuinely that considerate a husband? She continued to stroll in an effort to give her questions a less obvious air. "And your boys would be awake then, too. Children can be so grumpy when their schedules are disrupted."
As she had well learned during her annual childhood flights to America. Just when she lost the foggy feeling, she found herself on the return flight to Rubistan.
Crusty swept a palm branch out of the way for her to pass. "Do you have children?''
"No." A fact she mourned would never happen, but did not want a husband that would come with the baby.
Since Crusty did not seem likely to budge on his tight-lipped protective stance in talking about his family, she shifted her attention from the rumpled pilot to her spiky-haired escort from the OSI.
"What about you? Do you have someone at home to call?"
At her question, Max Keagan jerked, his sea-green eyes widening. Like a man being stalked, he stepped back from the perceived predator.
A giggle bubbled, but she suppressed it. "No need to worry." She angled closer. "I do not have designs on your neon-green shirt."
No, sir. Her attention gravitated toward desert camouflage these days. Surely only in her imagination could she distinguish his deep rumble from the collective swell of masculine voices drifting from a hundred yards away.
"I have a fiancee."
"Congratulations." She sagged back against a palm tree trunk. "When is the wedding?"
"No firm date, yet."
Not a chatty man, and she could not hide from the fact she wanted an excuse to stay out here where she could see the Colonel.
Crusty stepped into the conversational hole. "His fiancee is also in the military." He offered bare essentials. "Scheduling is hell. My guess is we'll all get about ten minutes notice that they're ready to get hitched."
Crusty's comment elicited the first grin from the spiky-haired man. "There are plenty of folks who would pay good money to see me in a tux. Wonder if they make pineapple-patterned cummerbunds?"
Yasmine laughed, couldn't help herself after so long of holding back from any kind of emotion. With restraints lowering, thoughts of opposites blending filled her mind, uniform and unconventional, different worlds coexisting.
Silk scarves and starched uniforms mingling.
A shiver tickled through her at the sensual image. And for a moment in the middle of a stark airfield, she let herself dream and laugh.
Drew planted his boots to prep himself as more of Yasmine's laughter drifted in the gritty wind. Sure as shit, that tinkling sound slammed into him with all the force of a grenade.
Watching her flirt with the two younger men while he tried to listen to a captain detailing a duty roster, Drew told himself he didn't give a damn. He reminded himself this should be exactly what he wanted, hell, had even asked for since telling her to take her scarves and all-out smile elsewhere.
She hadn't stopped turning up anywhere he found himself, but she no longer spoke to him. A whole twenty-four hours and he was already pouting like a kid.
He closed his eyes, pressed his forefinger and thumb to the bridge of his nose. If only he could stop seeing a rose silk scarf in his head.
Rose? The sun must be cooking his brain, a common enough occurrence around this woman.
Since when had he started noticing what women wore? And pink was pink, damn it. Not rose. Next thing he knew, he'd be watching the fashion network and whipping out a credit card for a fuchsia scarf.
He may not be the most creative Joe Sensitive on the planet, but he knew his job and his place. He nodded to whatever the hell it was the captain just said, eyes on the four Rangers flinging their bodies through the air, landing. Damn near perfect.
Except damn near wasn't good enough.
Next thing he knew, his boot jammed itself in the porch latticework while he hauled himself up. "Follow me, boys."
He might be getting old but he was not going soft.
"Break your ankle practicing and you won't be any good to anybody. Break your ankle out there in the field and you're gonna be a liability to your fellow soldier who'll risk his life to carry you out." He jerked a thumb toward young Santuci. "Keep an eye on the private here."
Santuci beamed like a star pupil. Kid wasn't much older.
Drew lined up beside Santuci. "You ready, Private?"
"Uh—" his Adam's apple bobbed "—you're gonna jump, too, sir?"
"I have done this once or twice before."
"No disrespect meant, sir."
"None taken." Sometimes a commander had to remind his troops he'd been in the same trenches. Walked the same walk. He wasn't doing this to impress some woman.
"Anytime, sir."
"Hoo-uh." Two sets of boots pounded the roof, nearing the edge, flat desert sprawling ahead through hazy heat waves.
Airborne!
Launching himself, he focused on the horizon, on her scarf. And God, but it sure was rose and pretty and called to him like a beacon as he flew through the muggy air, a sensation of freedom as damned incredible as it had been the first time he launched himself over twenty years ago.
He landed, instincts carrying him through the PLF to absorb the shock of impact—balls of the feet, roll to the thigh, the ass, up the arm to the shoulder.
He sprung to his feet. Hoo-uh!
His knees shouted back in response.
Shit, that hurt. He schooled his features and suppressed a wince as the pain shot from his time-battered knees all the way to his teeth.
And then his men gathered around him blocking Yasmine from sight. Smiles and backslaps,
hoo-uhs and grunts jam-packed the air.
Hell, yeah. This is what it was all about, how he liked his life, and he needed to remember that. The camaraderie. Unity. Not about posturing like some young stud on the make for a woman he wasn't even interested in having.
Didn't want?
Damn. All right. He wanted her. But that didn't mean he'd left behind rational thought.
Drew dug in his pocket, found the LifeSavers and thumbed one into his mouth, sucked back a curse and the throbbing in his knees echoed by a far more painful one a few inches north of his knees. He definitely wasn't twenty-five anymore.
And if he were twenty-five now? Newly divorced, with a solid set of knees and a recklessness time hadn't had a chance to beat out of him. What would he think of Yasmine if they'd met then? A damned ridiculous thought since she would have been six, for God's sake.
But what if?
The answer rushed in without hesitation. If they were closer in age, he would already have her scarf off and his hands in her hair, working his way toward persuading her to let his body be inside hers.
The applause faded along with hoo-uhs as his men resumed their training exercise. But Yasmine hadn't moved. Wasn't laughing.
Wasn't talking to her two young escorts anymore.
She stared straight at him, breathing faster in rapid bursts that lifted the gentle curves of br**sts against her dress in a passionate rhythm of arousal. Damned if the ache in his knees didn't fade right that minute and it was all he could do not to climb back on the roof.
And double damned if he didn't feel a little like he was already flying, anyway.
Damn but he wished he were flying.
Parked in a seat at the mobile command center, Jack twitched his boot against the metal underpinnings of the console on a pallet down the belly of the plane. Close-up intelligence gathering from the SEALs for the next couple of days was crucial, though, so he would just have to cool his jets.
His shitty mood from the night before simmered on the back burner. Only completing this mission would clear his mind enough to deal with it. Three screens hummed in front of him, just like at the other eleven stations manned by military representatives from each service in the joint mission, maintaining databases, ensuring comm links remained up and working.
Colonel Cullen sat across from him, slowly drinking from a coffee mug with the words "It's All About the Hoo-Uh'' stenciled across.
Jack's dual flat-screen color monitors contained intel on one side, maps on the other. A smaller six-by-six, black-and-white monitor perched above with continuous feed from the Predator unmanned spy drone.
Monitoring went on pretty much 24/7 now to make sure the hostages weren't moved, but the daily walk time was of particular interest. They logged with interest the one time of day they were assured the hostages still lived.
That Monica's sister still lived.
Dusk approached. Predator images scrolled by, over the locale where coordinates indicated two SEALs lay completely camouflaged in their desert ghillie suits—strips of tan cammo and mesh that resembled a desert swamp thing monster. Effective as hell. Someone could pee right on them and never know.
The rest of the SEALs were holed up two miles back in a bunker dug out of a knob dune. Once the sun set, the pair—Blake and his swim buddy Carlos—would start recon along the compound's perimeter for intel. But now they waited silently with their handheld parabolic satellite dish sending back any sound from the compound.
Unusually little sound.
"Control," Gardner's voice echoed through, "the place is too damned quiet."
"Hold steady," Jack answered. "I show a human target at your two o'clock. Looks like a sentry. He's lighting up a smoke."
"Roger that."
Lighting a cigarette screwed with night vision for valuable seconds, crucial info to be exploited for a point of entry on a recon run after dark.
"Predator three-seven," Jack called to the pilot and his sensor operator flying the unmanned spy drone by remote from Indian Springs Auxiliary Airfield in Nevada, "how many do they have stationed around the northeast guard tower?"
"Only the one," the sensor operator answered, his job being to interpret data and adjust the pilot's remote-control flight path accordingly.
Catching some fresh movement on the screen, Jack keyed up the mike to transmit to the SEAL pair. "Check your six o'clock. Truck moving toward the front gate. Looks like...just a dump truck. Gravel and some rocks in the back."
An airman at the end of the console chuckled. "Maybe they're going to build themselves an outhouse."
"Hey, not bad," an Army lieutenant answered, "or some kind of Zen rock garden to spruce up the place."
As much as Jack couldn't find the laugh within himself, he knew these guys needed the release from stress. Everyone was tense, ready to roll, in need of an outlet for all the pent-up energy. Hell, the Rangers were even jumping from rooftops.
"Truck's clear of the gate," Jack informed the SEALs, then straightened sharply. "Okay, heads up, people. We have some serious activity."
The SEAL pair stayed silent except for louder breathing, heavy, but steady.
On the screen, figures poured from brick and cement buildings, men, women, at least a hundred, most armed with machine guns and rifles carried as casually as a businessman's briefcase. "We've got some kind of gathering in the works. Not the regular afternoon walk."
The dump truck rumbled down a central dirt road until it reached the compound's main square. A groundbreaking ceremony?
Another door opened from a small cement outbuilding. Three stepped out. Two men. One woman covered in a burkah from head to toe. Jack shifted in the unrelenting seat, not liking one damned bit the bad feeling creeping over him faster than a debilitating rapid decompression.
And liking even less the gaping pit dug in the center of the town square.
"Oh, shit," the young airman at the end of the console whispered.
"What? What the hell's going on? Over." Gardner's voice demanded an answer and carried an edge that made Jack leery as all get-out of giving him the obvious one.
Someone was about to get stoned. A woman, because only men in this region were sometimes granted the faster execution of beheading.
And there wasn't a thing they could do to stop it. With chilling horror, it would unroll before his eyes, his mind already three steps ahead because of all the briefings he'd received on the region in the past.
There wouldn't be a mob-frenzy-style stoning like movie dramas perpetuated. Reality was far worse. Far more calculated. Coldly barbaric. A token stone was thrown, usually by an old man, and then a dump truck unloaded rocks and cement onto the condemned up to her neck until she was crushed to death.
Who would be placed in that pit?
Sweat iced on his brow. He'd tried to prepare himself for the possibility Sydney might die. But, God, he couldn't stomach it being this way. Not Sydney. And damn it all, not this hell for Monica to have to think about for the rest of her life.
He and the Colonel exchanged glances over the console, then back down again to their screens. The image continued of two men hauling the woman toward the pit, bound her hands and feet, then dropped her in.
The crowd roared. No way would Gardner and his partner miss that, too far to see or help, but damn well close enough to hear even without the parabolic dish.
The dump truck rolled to a stop, jerked, shifted into reverse and repositioned until it idled, butt facing the pit. Gardner's insistent questions gained speed while an airman stalled with excuses of interrupted satellite feed.
Jack couldn't escape the cold sense of kinship with Gardner, since he knew too well the nightmare of being helpless while the woman he loved died. Even if this wasn't Sydney, there would still be an endless wait until the Predator could pick up fresh footage of her or the SEALs risked slipping in to check.
As much as he tried to tell himself that Tina had been fragile and Monica was the strongest woman he'd ever met, the current situation unfolding in front of his eyes reminded him everyone was vulnerable sometime.
And women were most especially vulnerable here.
