Flash of Fire (29 page)

“That was great, but this is where I'm living from now on.” She needed to shake off the amazing memories so that she could even breathe. The best moments of her life had been along that wandering river with Mickey, and the worst, but they seemed to be over that now. “I'm never leaving this place,” Robin insisted to bury the last of that bad feeling.

“Good, that's settled.” Mark turned to the redheaded waitress who came up. “Hi, Amy, looks like you're hopping. We'll start with potato skins and buffalo chicken wings. Em is after ice tea, decaf, or the baby will kick the crap out of her, and I'll have a Black Butte.”

“He gives restaurant orders the same way he gives fire orders,” Robin couldn't help observing.

Emily laughed and nodded. Then she kissed Mark on the cheek when he looked chagrined. “That's my man.”

“What do you like?” Mickey had to ask her twice before Robin realized the question was for her.

“Dark” was all she managed. It was one of those questions she should know the answer to about Mickey but didn't. There wasn't a whole lot of drinking when you spent every waking minute on the fire line.

“Walking Man Cherry and a Walking Stick Stout,” he ordered. “I'll take whichever you don't want,” he told Robin, then turned back to the waitress with that amazing smile he'd used on Robin any number of times. “Thanks, Amy. You're the best.”

“She's cute,” Robin said as soon as she was gone. Jealous that Mickey would share that smile with another pretty woman? Maybe jealous that he'd been with her in the past? Maybe losing her mind because she had no hold on Mickey, no ownership invested in him.
No promises
, she'd insisted.

“She is,” Mickey agreed amiably. “She also owns the place and is married to the cook.”

“Shutting up now,” Robin informed him, and this time his radiant smile was aimed at her. Which was equally disorienting.

“She didn't get it,” Emily said to Mark but was looking at her.

“I didn't get what?” There was a whole lot that Robin wasn't getting at the moment.

Mark was wearing that half smile that always made her want to take a poke at him.

“How do you live with him?” she asked Emily.

“He knows better than to use that look on me. Besides, I'm the mother of his children and the man is secretly a total mush.”

“Not so secret.” Robin gave it her best sneer.

Mickey and Emily laughed while Mark did his best to make an unhappy face. He totally failed.

“So,
Emily
”—Robin emphasized who she was talking to hard enough to keep Mark quiet—“what did I miss?”

“You agreeing to sign on long-term with Mount Hood Aviation.”

Robin checked Emily's face, then Mark's, then Mickey's. Mickey was as surprised as she was, so she squinted her eyes and turned back to the other two.

Then she happened to glance at Denise on her other side.

Denise's nod was in such an emphatic agreement that she momentarily disappeared behind a shield of hair.

“When did I…” When she'd said she was moving in right here and was never going to leave.

And…what had Mark said?
Good, that's settled.

“Okay, I guess I did.”

“You did?” Mickey asked her. “She is?” he asked Mark. “Really?” he asked the table in general. His voice rising.

“Yeah, I did. Why?”

Mark's eyes crossed at her apparent non-reaction.

Emily just smiled and left Robin to play her game.

Denise nudged her shoulder against Robin's. Of course she hadn't missed a word of anything that happened around her.

Robin casually leaned back and wrapped an arm around Denise's shoulders in a comfortable embrace. That her new friend would now be an ongoing part of her life was a huge bonus.

“
Why?
” Mickey's voice practically broke with excitement. “Because for weeks I've been trying to figure out how to tell Mark that I was going to quit this job so that I could follow wherever you needed to go at the end of the season.”

All of the teasing evaporated in that moment, washed away by Mickey's offer.

“You wouldn't,” she managed on a croak.

“To be with you? Of course I would.”

This time it was Emily who looked flabbergasted and Mark who was looking pleased.

“What?” Robin snapped at Mark.

He just pointed at Mickey. “His set of problems, not mine.”

“What?” Robin tried again but didn't know where to aim the question.

Mark pointed again, forcing her to turn back to Mickey.

“You wouldn't dare quit MHA.” Robin saw that he would. “You were born to do this. You love doing this.” She wound down to a whisper against that look of perfect surety. He'd leave everything he loved in a heartbeat because he loved her more. “Holy sh… I don't know what to say.”

“You say—” Denise started to whisper in her ear.

“Shush, Denise,” Emily told her. “Let her find it on her own.”

You say…
Denise was right and so was Emily.

Robin had kept a small part of herself shut away, locked off in a corner because she knew that she couldn't stay. Because she knew that Harrow women had men, not husbands.

But the question that a Harrow woman never seemed to ask was what if she met the right man. The man that she could never imagine being apart from. The man who would be such an incredible father to their children.

She took Mickey's hands and held them in hers as the happy mayhem of the Doghouse made a somehow perfect backdrop. She looked into those beautiful, blue eyes and spoke the words that were finally so clear in her heart.

“I say…for as long as we both shall live. Yes.”

Denise squeaked with joy, Emily wiped at her eyes, and Mark reached across the table to pound a fist against Mickey's shoulder.

News swept the Doghouse faster than wildfire.

But all of the cheers, hugs, and congratulations remained in the background.

Front and center was the best man she'd ever known.

Her
man.

“I love you, Robin of the Hood.”

“I love you, Mickey. For as long as we both shall live, I do.”

Then she leaned in close because there were some words that were too precious to share with more than this one man.

“That's the version
with
promises.”

Order M.L. Buchman's next book
in the Delta Force series

Heart Strike

On sale August 2016

Richie Goldman eased back into the darkness.

Most of the Bolivian farmworkers were sitting around the nightly campfire, eating their
salteñas
—meat-, veggie-, and quinoa-stuffed pastries. He'd learned to pretend that their food didn't agree with him. It gave him an excuse to duck into the trees frequently, though he'd actually learned to enjoy the local food almost as much as a good New York pastrami on rye.

Some of the farmhands were idly chewing on a strip of
charque de llama
;
the llama jerky lasted forever despite the jungle heat. Others chewed on coca leaves—little more than a low-grade stimulant in that form, and it grew in lush abundance all across the hillside above their camp. Refined cocaine was too valuable for mere farmers, but chewing the leaves was practically a national pastime. Street vendors had piles of them in all the cities.

Richie had tried it, thinking it would help him fit in, but found the taste so astringent that he had no problem just tucking it in his cheek and only pretending to chew. Others on his team had found similar tricks. Only Duane had flat-out declined, but his formidable silence made it so that he wasn't an easy man to question. The locals let him be.

Once out of the firelight, Richie met up with Duane. That left the other three members of his Delta Force team—Chad, Carla, and the team leader, Kyle—still at the fire making sure that no one followed them into the darkness.

He and Duane spoke softly in Spanish about nothing in particular as they strolled along the edges of the coca fields they'd been working for the two weeks since their arrival. A thousand hectares, almost five square miles of coca plantation in this farm alone. They'd been building up to this one for six months; it represented almost five percent of Bolivia's coca production. They'd be gone in a few more days.

And that would be the last day of this farm's existence.

Only two more measurements to take. They strolled the edge of the field like a pair of
hombres
walking off the day. Their feet were nearly silent on the rich dirt. To one side was thick jungle, with no two trees alike. A massive kapok, a spindly palm, a fig tree that was bigger than the Goodyear blimp sitting on its butt were crowded together. Beneath them were banana, rubber, and a hundred other small trees he couldn't identify in the dark, but the rich, loamy scent was lush with life. The leaves rustled, whether on the light breeze or due to some passing band of monkeys, he couldn't tell. To the other side, there lay row upon neat row of man-tall coca bushes with their thick leaves ready for harvest.

When they reached the southwest corner of the main field, Richie ducked down low while Duane kept watch. He pulled a GPS tracker out of his boot, checked that he had a valid and stable reading, then recorded the numbers. He slipped it back into his boot and once more they were just two shadows strolling the line.

The two of them had originally bonded during the six-month training course for The Unit—as Delta Force operators commonly referred to themselves. They had discovered a shared inner nerd over various triggers for different types of explosives, which was Duane's specialty.
Being
the team's chief nerd was Richie's specialty.

Duane's deeply laconic nature made for a very lazy conversation, a rhythm which Richie had come to rather enjoy. It felt as if they blended better into the night that way—the occasional bat winging by with a quick
brrrr
of wings, the dry grass rustling against their calves, and two guys down on their luck sharing quiet commiseration.

Kyle and Carla were a couple now and it was rare to have a conversation with one and not the other. And
any
conversation involving Carla was more like a debate match than a conversation. The lady was intense. Amazing, beautiful, and incredible…but intense. And Kyle and Carla's relationship was like that too. Richie had never seen anything like it, had never imagined it was possible. When the two of them were together, the day became brighter. His parents had always been his ideal of a good relationship, which was solid and stable, but Kyle and Carla made it look like a heck of a lot of fun too. For the first time, Richie was forced to recalibrate the standards of what he hoped for from his own future.

Chad, on the other hand, talked about women and nothing but. He thought women were great sport, and if he hadn't been so successful with them, Richie would have discounted half of what he said. Chad somehow always ended up with the hot women and seemed to leave every one of them smiling; his successes were short-lived and he claimed that's the way he wanted it. He just didn't have the greatest conversational range on other topics.

Duane was the one most like Richie on the team. They came from professional backgrounds; they both had grown up in nice neighborhoods with good schools, corporate executive fathers, and involved mothers—Richie's was a housewife who did a lot of entertaining in support of Dad's job; Duane's was a family-law attorney. It was almost like he and Duane were related, separated only by New York versus Georgia respectively and an entirely different hereditary line.

“I don't know, brother,” Duane was saying. “How did Chad sweep up Mayra?” They spoke Spanish for both the practice and to protect their cover story.

It wasn't typical of them to discuss women, but Mayra was the hottest, most-built Bolivian beauty they'd seen in the eleven coca farms they'd worked over the last six months. Their Delta team had been quietly roving the countryside, posing as itinerant workers—ex-pat Americans down on their luck. Their assignment had been to blend in, precisely map each field's location, and then move on with no one the wiser.

“Chad makes it look so easy.” Richie didn't exactly envy Chad's insane success with women. It was too slick, too casual, and too easily forgotten. But he wouldn't mind having at least a few of those skills himself for when the right woman came along—so she wouldn't pass on by before he could untie his tongue.

“Maybe he is hung like horse,” a voice said out of the darkness. Rolando faded into view, a battered AK-47 over his shoulder catching the moonlight and an even more worn radio at his hip.

“You got patrol tonight. Sorry,
amigo
,” Duane said more easily than Richie could have. Rolando was one of the most dangerous of the coca farm's guards. The others joked that he loved his gun more than his mother.

“No big deal. But I was
mucho
close to spreading Mayra.” He held up two fingers so close together the moonlight couldn't slip between them. “Like so before he come along.” Then he shrugged. “Maybe when he gone.”

With Rolando it was hard to read if that meant he was expecting them to just leave or if Rolando was planning to accidently shoot Chad some night soon. Richie reminded himself to tell Chad to watch his back around Rolando—not that Chad was easy to surprise. He might be a complete womanizer, but he'd also grown up on the wrong side of the Detroit streets.

The first option was unlikely, because once a person came to work on a coca farm, it was very hard to leave. There were hundreds of booby traps set around the perimeter of the fields. They were intended to keep raiders and government men out, but the lethal wall was not far into the jungle and it did just as effective a job of keeping the workers in. The main road in and out was always heavily guarded, except for a few minutes around sunrise a couple days from now, which is when the Delta team would be leaving.

They traded some more sympathy with Rolando, all agreeing that it would help if Chad wasn't such a good guy as well.

Richie knew better.

Chad was one of those guys who was everyone's friend and most people assumed that's all he was. But he had also come by his nickname, The Reaper, because he was a stone-cold killer when he needed to be.

Richie and Duane continued their walk, leaving Rolando to watch the night. They stopped and chatted with two more guards before reaching the one corner of the field they hadn't had a chance to exactly locate yet.

“Anyone?”

He and Duane stood for at least ten minutes, talking about the backbreaking work of tending the vast plantings—which in truth wasn't as tough as a typical day of Delta training—and watching over each other's shoulders.

Duane finally shook his head in answer to Richie's earlier question. They were alone.

Richie knelt quickly and pulled out a small, high-powered radio, unfolded a tiny parabolic dish antenna, and aimed it upward. He checked his watch, shifted the antenna to point toward the constellation Virgo, and pinged their full set of GPS data coordinates up to a satellite that should be in that vicinity. By using a directional antenna and sending all of the data compacted into a single short burst of information, their signal should be undetectable.

Many coca fields were heavily protected from above as well; acre after acre of camouflage nets hid the cash crop. Others, like this one, were hidden so deep in the mountains that it was easier to find them from the ground, following leads and tips rather than aerial photos.

Ten seconds later a “squirt” pinged back from The Activity—America's most clandestine military intelligence agency in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Another coca field had been accurately located and recorded.

Richie glanced at the return message quickly, checking that it unscrambled cleanly. Then swore when his eye caught on the last line.

“What?” Duane whispered.

Richie sent the “message received” squirt back, collapsed his little setup of equipment, and scanned the message fully before putting away his gear.

“Six hours,” was all he said. “All the way out.”

“Aw,
mierda
!” was Duane's response.