Hard Way (24 page)

Liam lost control as well. His thrusts stuttered and jerked. His hand sank deep in her hair, twisted tight. Even in this moment, they were still themselves—still rough beneath the sweetness. Her name was a low rumble as he released all that tense passion.

As Liam eased to the bed and her breathing started to calm, Sunny felt tears prick the corners of her eyes. She blinked them away because she didn’t know how to explain them. All she knew was her sharpest pains and greatest joys were bound up in the same man.

Maybe she’d been too hasty.

Maybe she wanted to hold on to these lingering moments with all her might, and to love him every chance she could get.

And maybe she was brave enough to try again.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Dash had always been able to handle G-force. Something about the shape of his brain or his inner ear. Whatever it was, he could endure more gravitational abuse than anyone he’d ever known. He’d gotten his call sign because of it, when his instructors had needed to shut down the centrifuge. Dangerous levels, they’d said. Never seen anything like it, they’d said.

Dumb as shit, they’d said.

“Dash” stuck.

How long had he thought that a hallmark of his success as an individual? By genetic mishap, he was stupid enough as to be utterly incapable of knowing when to stop.

Stop spinning.

So when his F-16 reached takeoff speed, he hardly felt the pull. Other pilots described the grab of the ground, how Mother Earth held on and didn’t want to let go. He could never relate. He got more of a charge out of driving his Evo down never-ending, twisting roads. The distance between accelerator and brain was so much shorter, with more of him involved in the journey.

The jet was practically run by computers. Cynically, that was how he regarded the machine as his and five other fighters joined F-15s from the 65
^th
. They screamed out over the desert in a holding formation before the day’s maneuvers would begin—the last before departing for the Maple Flag exercise. According to the official roster, he was still scheduled to leave on Friday. How could he do that when he and Sunny had spent the weekend in bed? They’d made love—sometimes with the roughness they both craved, although they hadn’t gone so far as a full session. Hours had blended into one another as smoothly and easily as breathing.

“Dash, you dumb ass,” came Eric’s voice over the radio. “Wing up, man.”

Dash blinked his way out of the past, out of the bedroom, and corrected his place in formation. “You know where to put those lips of yours, Kisser.”

Mike was up next, flinging shit with the rest of the monkeys. “Do you two dickwads know the definition of professionalism?”

“This from the man whose call sign is Strap Happy.” Dash adjusted his telemetry and watched for the rendezvous landmarks. “Really professional, dude.”

“Cut the chatter, bandits. Time to work.”

Fang’s voice had magical properties. Dash would’ve sworn by it. Just one of the man’s trademark rough yet calm growls in Dash’s ear transformed him from human being into pilot. The machine owned him. To give the assignment any less than his entire attention was to risk failure or far, far worse.

He would’ve liked to give his entire attention to a task he actually enjoyed.

Fuck. Just…shut the hell up.

Dash and the combined fighters of both squadrons squared off for three hours. Indians versus Canadians. He was flying as if the enemy were one of Sunny’s people. He didn’t need more of his mind ripped out, but that left plenty of room to skull-fuck the empty vessel that remained.

Only after the Aggressors completed the combat sorties was he relieved to return to base. Then…
Then
he felt the gravity. Not when taking off, but when he touched down and his whole body hovered outside of reality.

He hated it.

For years, he’d tried to adjust and to love the thrill as much as everyone else expected him to. They called him gifted. He called himself good enough. Shouldn’t a gifted pilot give a goddamn about whether he ever climbed into another cockpit? Instead, he liked being in control of his own body—excellent control. Mind and limbs and reflexes working together in a ballet of power. Martial arts was an even more personal thrill than driving his Evo, where the connection between thought and action was primal.

That explained why he liked taking down an opponent, and why he liked fucking Sunny so viciously that they’d both quit pretending it was anything other than the consensual equivalent of rape.

Pure instinct.

He taxied around to the hangar and brought his F-16 into perfect alignment with the other fighters. As he climbed down the ladder, he wondered how much aspirin he had left in his flight bag. A lot. He needed a lot.

“My office after you’re cleaned up,” Fang said at his side.

The major cradled his helmet under his arm, with his rigging flung over one shoulder. Sweat spiked his hair, and he was flushed. He strode. He was barely hiding a smile, even when throwing around his hardcore Major voice. The man looked… Hell, he looked
satisfied
. After three hours in the air, he appeared for all the world as if he’d spent those three hours fucking.

Dash shook his head. Nothing worked anymore. He wondered if it ever had. Not once, not ever, could he remember striding away from his fighter with that level of proud accomplishment. Good job. Nice work. It never got any better than that.

“You hear me, Dash?”

“Yes, sir. Your office.”

Fang was probably right in giving him a deep, appraising look. He seemed to shrug out from his thoughts—a technique Dash dearly would’ve liked to learn. “And you too, Kisser. My office in ten.”

While Fang walked on ahead, Eric walked alongside Dash. “You look like crap, as usual.”

“And you’re in a good mood if you’re self-censoring.”

“I used my quota today. Can’t think of more to call you. What the fuck, Dash?”

A tight, pinching anger crawled up Dash’s backbone. He wanted to hurl his flight helmet and smack the shit out of one of his best friends, preferably using his goddamn parachute rigging. “What do you want from me? Spit it out so we can get it over with in Fang’s office, whatever the hell he wants us for.”

Eric tipped his chin to the sky. “Nobody home up there. You’re gonna get someone hurt.”

“Great. Isn’t that what Tin Tin always tells you?”

“Screw that punk. I’m serious.”

“You up for a heart-to-heart? Really? I didn’t think you were the kind.”

Eric spit onto the tarmac. “Fine.”

And that was that. They didn’t talk again until they met, independently, in Fang’s office.

“Captain Christiansen,” the major said. “You’re off the Maple Flag team.”

The rush of relief Dash felt would’ve taken out a lesser man, or one less tightly strung. “Thank you, sir.”

“Nothing to thank me for. Absolutely nothing. You’re going to babysit each other on Thursday, first day of the air show. Report there at 0600.” Fang’s All-American face, which could be genial and welcoming when the occasion permitted, looked ready to use nails as ammo. “Then, you’re on mandatory leave for two weeks.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me, Christiansen. I don’t want to see you in my hangar for two weeks.” With a slightly less rip-your-balls-off expression, he turned to Eric. “Kisser, we suddenly have a vacancy on the Maple Flag roster. You’re in.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Speaking one-on-one with Major Haverty was about the only time Eric behaved like a damn officer. At that moment, Dash was the least professional man in the room.

“Yokel will take your place in Arkansas. She’s next on the rotation for C-130 training. Other than making nice-nice with the air-show tourists on Thursday, you have this week to rest up. Report here 0430 on Friday. Dismissed, Captain.”

Eric shot Dash an unreadable expression that probably meant,
I’m gonna fuckin’ grill you next time I see you.
He closed the office door behind him.

“Sit.”

Doing as he was ordered, Dash grabbed a metal desk chair. He dragged it so he could look at his commanding officer dead-on. It felt important to face the judge at his sentencing.

“First,” Fang said, “keep Kisser off the women on Thursday.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Second, get it together. This is no joke. I can’t have you on my team right now. I keep waiting for the pilot I know to return, but you haven’t shown me that for weeks. Even longer. Take the leave. Figure it out. Then get back here.” He tapped the eraser end of a pencil against a notepad on his desk. His eyes narrowed, but his mouth softened into something that looked a lot like sympathy. “Unless you don’t want to come back. We can have that conversation too.”

“Sir, I…” Dash could only shake his head.

“Nope. Your turn to get out. Enjoy smiling and waving at the good people of Las Vegas. Then like I said. Two weeks.”

The whole drive home, he rehearsed what he’d say to Sunny. She hated when he left for various assignments, but at least she didn’t hate them as much as deployments. Maybe she’d be relieved that now, at this strange and tentative juncture in their relationship, he wouldn’t need to leave. Yet he’d held back on telling her. That alone might piss her off, and why he was relieved would spark off another flurry of questions.

Because it wasn’t only about fixing his marriage. He simply didn’t want to go. A fundamental part of his psyche had shifted. He had no idea what it was, what it meant or what it was doing to his goddamn life.

No wins. He was being swung around by a tornado of no-win situations.

She wasn’t there when he got home, which wasn’t a surprise. He’d left for Nellis before sunup. The squadron could fit an entire day’s work into the hours before lunch.

He grabbed the Monday edition off the front stoop but entered through the garage. He ditched his filthy gear in the near corner, showered, found something to eat—whatever that was. Didn’t matter. He was a genuine sleepwalker.

What a fucking superstar.

Until… Idly turning newspaper pages rang a wake-up call through his used-up, foggy funk.

Karate instructor wanted.

Three words. The rest was details—the where and when and how much experience.

Fifteen minutes later he was back in his Evo, with his gym bag in the backseat. It was another fifteen before he pulled into the parking lot adjoining the Kawashima School of Karate. Out of long habit, he bowed a
tachi-rei
greeting inside the door. Six years hadn’t been enough to dissolve any of the etiquette. That meant bowing when entering and leaving the
dojo
. That he wasn’t in his
gi
and still wore athletic shoes suddenly bothered the shit out of him. It was the equivalent of climbing into his F-16 while wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.

The air inside the building was barely cooler than the August afternoon, although the noisy hum of single-room air conditioners vibrated through the walls. He breathed the smell of the mats, of sweat, of leather, of dust that collected on the ancient-looking wainscoting in the hallway. But there wasn’t a single smudge of dust on the lines and lines of trophies.

The office was tiny and right up front, facing the street. A man of short, stocky stature sat at an industrial 60s-green metal desk, talking on the phone in Japanese. Dash had learned bits of the language to keep up with his instructors, but not to eavesdrop.

Maybe mid-forties, the man caught sight of him. Dash automatically bowed, eyes lowered. The protocol of various martial arts disciplines wasn’t far off from what was required of him in the Air Force. Each was a form of combat, after all. That meant paying respect to the
sensei
, as much as it meant saluting Major Haverty. It didn’t take much to guess the man behind the desk was in charge. Small of stature, yes, but dressed in a black
gi
and wearing a black belt with four yellow stripes meant he could kick nine out of ten asses at Nellis.

Dash stood in the hallway, waiting. He was unaccountably nervous, while wondering why this spur-of-the-moment decision felt so important. Sunny’s suggestion that he return to his martial arts training had rung only half true. Something hadn’t clicked. Perhaps it was that both of them assumed he’d return to tournament matches.

His last tournament had soured him on the whole endeavor, although he’d never told anyone why. Hell, he could barely make sense of it. All he knew for sure was that he’d stood over his final opponent with a sense of utter futility. Coming back from that first tour over Afghanistan had done a number on his head, apparently, because he couldn’t even enjoy the hobby that had given him so much focus and enjoyment over the years.

He hadn’t fought anyone but Sunny since.

“Welcome,” the man said.

Dash bowed again. “
Oss
.”

“Very nice. I don’t have to ask if you have any experience. Now it’s a matter of how much experience.”

“I’m here about the instructor position, sir.”

“You military?”

Effectively strangling a smile at having been identified as such so quickly, he nodded. “Yes, sir.”