Flash of Fire (15 page)

But when he leaned over to kiss her, she shook her head.

“Doesn't seem right.” Her voice was a whisper.

“That I want to kiss you?”

“No, that you can make me feel that way. I'm not big on vulnerability.”

“Not vulnerable?” He propped himself up on one elbow to survey the woman sprawled before him, completely naked and totally relaxed as if she didn't have a muscle left in her body.

“No.” She opened one eye and looked up at him.

“Yet you just were.”

“I know. And the results were out of this world, Mickey with the blue eyes. Thank you.”

“You're welcome.” Which sounded pretty damn stupid with what he'd just been doing to her, driving her helplessly with his own greed to see just how much he could make Robin Harrow feel. He'd wager he hadn't come close to the limit yet.

“What makes
you
feel vulnerable?”

“Me?” Mickey tried to think of something. “Watching other people fly. Emily, Jeannie, you.”

“Not Vern?”

“Nah, I'm as good as he is, or near enough.”

“Wait.” She sat up and looked at him, completely comfortable with her nudity and his still being clothed from the waist down. “Me?”

This time he used his strength to scoop her into his lap and kiss her. That naturally led him to think about what else was there for the taking and he began working his way down her neck toward—

“Ow! Ow! Ow!” He followed where she pinched and pulled on his ear until he was facing her once again.

“You said me. Watching me fly.” She let go of his ear and rubbed it in apology.

“I did.”

“Care to explain why?”

* * *

“Is it because we're all women and we aren't supposed to be able to fly that well?” Robin didn't like that thought at all but wasn't ready to force her way out of Mickey's lap. It was a very comfortable place to be.

“Clearly you know Emily far less well than you think you do.”

“And what does that mean?”

He looked out across the lake, but his hands remained on her.

Was he even aware of them as he rubbed one up and down her back and had the other wrapped around the inside of her thigh? She suspected not.

“I figure pilots come in three categories. Some learn to fly, just in the course of life. They make good, serviceable pilots. Gordon is one of those. Vanessa I think is another.”

Robin had known a number of pilots like that, a lot of them actually. They were far and away the most common breed out there.

“There are some who always dreamed of flying and still can't believe it's really happening. Vern and I. Bruce maybe. Henderson definitely—he's just a hell of a lot better than the rest of us. Had a lot more practice.”

“What's the third?”

“The naturals like you, Emily, Jeannie. Not that the learning was any easier than for the rest of us, but it just fits something in your nervous systems.”

“Mark had said Emily had forbidden him to train me.” Was this the final and real reason?

“Right, it would just screw up what you do. He can fix your knowledge with safety techniques and tactics, but how you fly? Probably not.”

“But he flew with Jeannie.”

“And she's been flying fire for close to a decade, both forest and Australian bushfire, though a bunch of the early stuff was fixed wing. She's not such raw material still.”

“Raw material?” Robin protested.

“Uh-huh.”

“Just waiting for the right man to come along and mold me into shape.”

“Maybe.” That self-impressed grin of his was back.

“I'll show you maybe.” She started to struggle out of his lap and discovered she was near helpless to do so.

Mickey was wrong about himself; he was an absolute natural, both as pilot and lover.

Mickey had one arm tight around her shoulder. In a single move, he tipped her back and latched his mouth on her breast. At the same moment, his hand, which had been resting nonchalantly on her thigh, slid down and clamped on to her.

There was nothing gentle at all this time. No floating on lovemaking as soft as a breeze. No back-and-forth play.

He was taking, forcing her to give.

Robin could only think of two ways to stop him as he consumed her, launching her straight toward madness.

One was to cause him bodily harm.

The other was to ask him to stop, because she knew he would in an instant, no matter what it cost him.

She considered and discarded the first.

And no way in hell was she going to do the second.

Mickey found Robin to be exactly as he expected, as apt a student in a kayak as she was a magnificent pilot. Whitewater boats were twitchy, particularly on flat water like a lake, and some people never got used to it. Robin easily transferred that dancer–martial arts balance and flexibility onto the water.

“The direction you go as you paddle is largely controlled by your hips. Shift your hips right and you'll go right, even though it will feel as if you're leaning the other way.”

“And I have such nice hips.”

“I should never have told you that.”

“You weren't the first,” she teased.

“Who was?”

Robin tried to paddle away from him, but however natural she might be in the air, she still had a lot to learn in a kayak.

Mickey slipped up close behind her. He dipped the fingers of one hand into the cold water and flicked it at her bare back—neither of them were wearing shirts.

She didn't yelp as he'd expected. Instead, with a backward flick of her paddle, she sent a sheet of freezing water into his face and chest. Okay, maybe she was learning the truly essential skills of kayaking faster than he'd thought.

Then she carved a turn and almost went for an icy swim, one reason they were staying within twenty feet of the shore, where the water was less than two feet deep, while she practiced.

Robin did manage to slide up to him without capsizing, their kayaks pointing in opposite directions so that they wound up face-to-face. He grabbed the cockpit cowling of her boat and pulled her in close. And as she melted into a kiss, he dipped his other hand overboard and raised it to cradle her breast with his cold hand.

It almost got out of control, and they both would have gone swimming, but they managed to stop in time. Barely. He'd never been with a woman who was so damned much fun.

“Who was your first, Mr. Smart-Ass?”

“Debra Monroe. Or maybe Debbie.”

“You don't remember?” She sounded melodrama-heroine aghast.

“I was a very willing sixteen, as was she—though she was far more experienced than I was. It was on one of Dad's multiday, campout-in-the-wilderness raft trips. Trust me, if she hadn't lived in Kansas, or maybe it was Oklahoma, I would have gone back for a lot more lessons and ended up more sure of her name. How about you?”

“Davis–Monthan.”

“Davis…wait a minute. Isn't that the name of an Air Force base? The one where they store all of the old planes?”

“Smart boy.”

“You lost your virginity to an Air Force base?”

“Might as well have.” She sounded chagrined and started into paddling along the lakeshore again. But she wasn't racing away from him, rather just continuing her practice.

He rowed after her. “Care to explain that one?”

“Not particularly.”

“Hey, no fair. I told you about Debbie.”

“Or was it Debra? And are you sure about the Monroe part of it?”

Well, he had been a moment ago. Of course now he was distracted, as he had been a hundred times over the last half hour, by watching Robin paddle. Those strong soldier and waitress muscles flexed and rolled beneath the creamy skin of her bare back. Her short hair left her shoulders wholly exposed, as well as that wonderful transition to her neckline.

When she stopped, he was paying attention to the wrong things and rammed right into her, again almost tipping them both into the water.

She waited for him to recover and pull up alongside her. Soon they were floating with a hand each lightly resting on the curled edge of the other's cockpit.

“You're getting pink,” he commented.

“I'm not embarrassed. I just don't think I should be feeding your prurient fantasies.”

“No.” He pointed a finger at her breasts and then at the setting sun. “You may soon be Robin Redbreast though. And I'm a guy, of course I have prurient fantasies whether or not you feed them, which trust me, you do. Floating here next to you, they've gone right off the charts and I can't wait to get you back to shore to try out some more of them.”

“Let's go.”

He didn't let go his hold on her kayak.

She sighed and relaxed. “Okay. Okay. You know that Davis–Monthan is where they store the old planes until they need them again because they don't rot in the high desert. B-52s, Chinook helicopters, A-10 Warthog gunships, all of them. They call it the Boneyard.”

“Right, though I've never been there.”

“Then you wouldn't know that it's about five hundred yards from Phoebe's Tucson Truck Stop. Phoebe is my grandmother and she founded the place. That's where I grew up. Our house was halfway between the air base and truck stop, same side of the I-10 Interstate.”

Mickey used his free hand to slowly turn them, so that her chest moved out of the sun—her back wasn't pinking yet. But her skin was so fair, he needed to get her in a shirt soon, as much as he hated the idea.

“I was fifteen. There was this drop-dead gorgeous guy. He was eighteen, fresh out of high school, and working a civilian job at Davis. It was like he knew everything about everything.”

“He should be shot for touching a girl who was—” Mickey could feel the heat rising.

“I'm the one who tripped him.”

“Still.” He tried not to fume. At least he and Debbie had been the same age. Or Debra.

“It was over a decade ago, Hamilton. Thanks for your ire, but he's a nice guy, married now with two kids that he supports pretty well. Get over it.”

He knew if he kept fuming, he wasn't going to get the rest of her story. Still, as a tour guide and later a ski instructor, he'd had plenty of opportunities with very cute young girls. And, goddamn it, he hadn't touched a one of them despite the blatant offers.

“You're still jealous, aren't you?”

“Maybe.”

She leaned over to kiss his shoulder. “You really are sweet, especially when you think you're being all gruff.”

Being called sweet while you're wishing to rearrange someone's face didn't sit very well.

“Were you one of those
hot
fifteen-year-olds?” he teased her, trying to find a lighter mood.

“I sizzled. Just like now.”

“No argument from this boy.”

“Anyhow, there's this thing called Celebrity Row at the Boneyard. One of every type of aircraft in storage is lined up there. I decided I wanted to have sex in every single make and model. Most of those are all sealed and locked, but in the vastness of the Boneyard, you can always find a model that's accessible. There are over four thousand aircraft parked there all in various states of storage or being scraped for parts.”

It was a good quest. If you were going to go after something outrageous, you should really go for it. “How many different aircraft are parked on Celebrity Row?”

“Sixty-one at the time.”

“What?” His shout echoed across the lake and sent several ducks aloft from where they'd been nosing in the grasses along the water's edge. “You had sex with this guy sixty-one times?”

“Jealous?” She practically crowed it out.

“No.”
Desperately.
The thought of someone, anyone, ever having Robin at all other than himself was an uncomfortable thought no matter how ridiculous. “Envious.”

Her laugh totally pegged him as deep green with jealousy.

“We only made it through four aircraft. The B-52 was first, because of course it had to be. But the plane was the only good part of it. It hurt like hell and I bled like a stuck pig. Scared the hell out of both of us.”

“Grim” was all Mickey could think to say.

“We tried a helicopter next, a Huey as a matter of fact, the old UH-1 Iroquois Huey, the great-granddaddy of yours.”

“I'll take that as a good sign.”

“You'd think, but it wasn't. It didn't hurt that time, but it wasn't all that much fun. By the time we tried the big B-1B bomber, I was beginning to wonder if something was wrong with me. After the monstrous C-5A Galaxy, I decided that it wasn't me, it was him. I was seventeen by the time I tried again; turns out I was right. He still ranks as the single most boring time I've ever had.”

“Most boring four times.” Mickey was—

“Yep. That making you feel better?”

“Way.”

“Let's get ashore and I'll make you feel much better in another way.”

“No argument from me.”

They were soon sprawled out in between the two sleeping bags. She was on top and doing something magic with her hips that she hadn't demonstrated before and was absolutely making his eyes cross.

“And, Mickey?” she gasped out.

“Yes?” he managed. He knew her well enough now to feel when she was rising, climbing ever so close to that breaking crest. He wasn't that far away himself, and speech was becoming a major challenge.

“Every…one of…my best times?”

“Uh-huh.” He was concentrating on just how far into her he could reach. He shifted his hips side to side to make sure there wasn't a wasted millimeter.

“Every one of them…has been with you.”

Her rocketing over the top cascaded through her and sent him off as well.

But Mickey was a mental step back from his thrashing body, a single step that was a whole world away.

No one had ever told him that he was their best time. It made him feel…

Strong.

Powerful.

Incredibly male.

And it awoke a tenderness that couldn't wait to fold her into its arms as soon as the aftershocks released their control of her body. In moments, she would lay once more upon his chest, where it felt most perfect.