Out of Control (9 page)
His heart grew in his chest, just like the Grinch’s, only his had already started out a little too big for his own comfort. Man oh man, he was in trouble when she gave him that big blue-eyed look.
“How about after my morning training session, I put in for a few days leave, and we talk all day tomorrow?” he asked. “How about right now I kiss you for about a half an hour, and then we do what we just did all over again, only this time in slow motion?”
He kissed her, and she welcomed him with an answering kiss that was slow, deep, and hot. It sent a bolt of desire clear through him. Forget a half hour. Try ten minutes.
He kissed her again, and forgot all about time.
Molly Anderson had never flown in a Cessna quite like this one before.
It occurred to her that she should probably be afraid for her life, considering she was all these thousands of feet up in the sky in a plane that spent more time in pieces on the ground than in the air.
But then Joaquin’s mother became frantic, crying out over the roar of the engines. Her son had stopped breathing.
To Molly’s complete surprise, Jones answered the woman in the local dialect. “Check his air passage, clear any foreign obstruction, and start mouth to mouth—”
He turned to Molly, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. “I’m not sure she knows how to do that.”
“I do.” Molly climbed into the back.
Oh, dear God, the little boy truly was in trouble. His lips were blue and his face was mottled and swollen. In fact, his fingers were swollen, too.
“Check to make sure he’s really not breathing,” Jones ordered crisply. “Check for cyanosis.”
“What?”
“Is he turning blue?”
“You’re a doctor,” she realized.
“Come on, Molly. Answer the goddamn question. Is he turning blue?”
“Yes.”
“Check for an obstruction,” he ordered.
She opened Joaquin’s mouth and . . .
“Nothing I can see,” she reported. “But his throat looks swollen.”
“It’s probably anaphylactic,” Jones said. “Shit.”
“What?”
“Allergic reaction. Christ, I thought you were a nurse.”
“I’m not. But if you tell me what to do . . .”
“He needs you to give him a tracheotomy.”
Oh, dear God. Molly had watched enough episodes of M*A*S*H as a kid to know that that involved cutting a hole in Joaquin’s throat and inserting a tube through which he’d be able to breathe. “I can’t do that.”
“Know how to fly a plane?”
Yeah, right. “No.”
“Get your ass up here, because you’re going to learn.”
She scrambled to the front, telling Joaquin’s mother that Jones was going to help, Jones was a doctor.
“I’m not a doctor,” he said, pulling her onto his lap. He was as hard as he looked, all muscle and bone and grit, not an ounce of softness anywhere.
“Hold this steady,” he added, putting her hands onto the oddly shaped steering wheel as he slid out from beneath her. He tapped a dial. “This is your altitude.” He tapped another. “This represents the horizon. This thing here is our wings. Keep everything steady. Try not to crash.”
Some lesson.
Of course, there was no time for Jones to be more precise. Joaquin was running out of time.
Molly held the controls of the plane with white knuckles, listening to the murmur of Jones’s voice as he spoke to Joaquin’s mother. The woman’s voice rose in panic as Jones took out his knife, but Jones kept on talking to her, his voice low and reassuring. Joaquin was going to be okay. Jones was going to make it possible for him to breathe, and then they were going to get him to the hospital. Trust him. She had to trust him. He knew she trusted Molly. And Molly, she trusted Jones.
It seemed like forever, but Molly saw from the clock in the dashboard—did planes have dashboards?—that it was only a few minutes before Jones was back.
“Thank God for Bic pens.” He was trying so hard to be blasé, she knew he was feeling anything but. “He’s breathing again, but I need to push this crate faster. Outa my seat.”
This time she slid out from beneath him. “Can you radio ahead to have an ambulance waiting?”
“I could if I had a radio that worked.”
Joaquin’s mother was cradling the boy in her arms, murmuring a steady stream of prayers.
“Go sit with her,” Jones ordered. “She needs another dose of God. Takes a lot of faith to let a stranger stick a knife in your kid’s throat. She probably needs some of hers restored.”
“Her faith is fine,” Molly said. “She trusts in God.”
Jones laughed, glancing up at her, his eyes filled with disgust. “Yeah, God really took care of that little boy.”
Molly smiled. “He certainly did.”
He snorted. “And on the eighth day, God created Jones, his pocket knife and a Bic pen, right?”
“Mr. Jones, I do not doubt for one second that you are one of God’s more magnificent masterpieces.”
“Jesus H. Christ, give me a break.”
“Or should I call you Dr. Jones?”
“Only if you want me to wind up dead in some Parwati back alley,” he said flatly. “Please take your seat and prepare our other passengers for landing.”
Savannah stirred as Ken searched his dark bedroom for his clean T-shirts.
His T-shirt drawer was empty, and as he discovered the pile on top of his dresser, he also managed to knock about fifteen dollars in coins onto the floor.
Amazingly, it wasn’t that that seemed to wake her, but rather his whispered epithet.
“Kenny?” She was barely awake, barely able to lift her head.
“Shh,” he said. “I’m sorry, Van. Go back to sleep.”
“Are you leaving?”
“Yeah, I gotta go. It’s nearly 0400.” He made the mistake of moving close enough to the bed to see her in the dimness. She was only half covered by the sheet, and when she stretched, he actually found himself considering facing Unauthorized Absence charges. How bad could it really be to go before a Captain’s Mast?
Bad enough that he’d kiss good-bye his chances of getting leave for the next week—and that he absolutely didn’t want to do.
Still, he couldn’t resist sitting on the edge of the bed and kissing her. And that was his second mistake. She pulled him down on top of her, kissing him back that way that she always kissed him—as if she couldn’t get enough of him. As if he were some kind of freaking sex god who made her world spin.
It was wild, because she was barely even awake.
Savannah breathed his name, and he was doomed. He was going to walk around with a serious woodie for the rest of the morning.
And that was going to look swell in a wet suit. If there was a God, the water would be nice and cold. And it would stay good and dark outside until he was submerged.
“I don’t suppose I can talk you into staying right here, just like this, until about 1100,” he murmured. He had about ten minutes before he had to walk out the door but he couldn’t stop kissing her.
“Don’t go,” she said. “Please, Kenny. I need to . . . I have to ask you to go to Indonesia with me tomorrow.”
Ooo-kay. What was she dreaming about? Ken had to laugh. And in the manner of the not-completely-awake, her question was of vital importance to her.
“I didn’t get a chance to ask you—”
“Shh,” he told her, between kisses. “Don’t worry about a thing. Go back to sleep—I’ll be home before you know it.” And if she woke up, he’d already written a note and left it on the kitchen table, on top of her purse.
“But—”
He kissed her. “I’m going to get leave,” he told her. “I’ll take a couple of weeks—I’m long overdue.” In fact, Senior Chief Wolchonok had all but ordered him to take some vacation time, and to take it soon. “Then we can go to the moon if you want, okay?”
“I don’t want to go anywhere,” she mumbled, “but I have to.”
“Don’t worry,” he said again, kissing her face, her throat, lower. “We’ll figure it all out later, all right?”
“Please,” she said, arching against him. “Don’t go without . . . I want . . .”
At first consideration, pulling back the sheet that covered her didn’t seem to be a move worthy of a man with his enormous IQ, a man who knew there’d be hell to pay if he were late. But then again, his enormous IQ was not what she wanted right this second.
She pushed down his shorts, and—proof that not all of the oxygen-carrying blood in his system was being diverted to his lower extremities, that at least a small amount was still going to his brain—he grabbed for a condom. Number three for the night.
He had three minutes before he had to be in his truck and heading for the base.
But he wasn’t the only one in a hurry here. He’d barely managed to cover himself before she pressed her hips up and pushed him deep inside her, surrounding him with her slick heat.
And she did it again. Just like the first two times they’d made love. Just as he’d hoped she would.
She exploded.
She was so freaking hot for him, she just went off as soon as he was inside of her. He knew that if he had even just a little more time, he could make her come once, maybe even twice more—outrageously long, lingering orgasms that left her gasping and giddy and weak with laughter and pleasure—before he lost his own somewhat tenuous control.
And that was just after only one night. After just a few short hours of exploring one another. They hadn’t even gotten past the missionary position. Imagine what he could do to her with his mouth.
It was the thought of going down on her that made him explode in a heated rush.
He got himself cleaned up and dressed and kissed her good-bye, leaving her sleepy and satisfied—at least temporarily. It seemed so ridiculously rushed, but he was out of time. He kissed her again, then ran for his truck, just a few minutes behind schedule.
There was no real traffic at this time of the morning, so he leaned on the accelerator, quickly making up the lost time.
He was going to spend the morning diving—which he loved to do. And then he was going to arrange for leave and meet Savannah, either at his house or her hotel. He would kiss her hello, then peel off her clothes and . . .
Ken drove through the empty streets, grinning like a fool.
He was, without a doubt, the luckiest son of a bitch on the face of the planet.
Berlin. Early summer, 1939.
The loss of some amount of innocence is always a necessary step in the journey each girl takes to become a woman.
My path was one in which I lost more at age eighteen than most women lose in a lifetime.
I went to Berlin that May, at the end of my first year of college, a proud—and remarkably innocent—recipient of what I thought was the Brooklyn German American Club’s All-Around Merit Scholar Award. It turned out to be something else entirely.
But as I, the daughter of a carpenter from Bremerhaven and a cook from a small town in the German Black Forest, boarded the ship that would carry me across the Atlantic Ocean, the pride on my parents’ faces went with me.
As did my memories of having seen Benny Goodman and his band, live and in person, just a few weeks before I left New York.
I may have been the recipient of an award that lauded both my ability to read and write in German and my studies of German literature and history, but I was an American girl, through and through. I loved music and I loved to dance and I loved Hollywood movies—especially the ones with Jimmy Stewart. I loved Coney Island in the summer and Fifth Avenue at Christmastime. And oh, I passionately loved my Brooklyn Dodgers.
I was not just an American, I was a New Yorker—loyal to my borough of the city, down to my very toenails.
My trip was fun—at first.
Days one through three had been filled with visits to my mother’s brothers and sisters in their tiny Black Forest village. Vati—my father—had been an einziges Kind—an only child. He’d come to New York with his father, also a carpenter, after his mother had died when he was quite young. Mutti, my mother, had come as a teenager, to work in the kitchen of the great house in which her aunt was a cook.
She met my father at the Brooklyn German American Club, and the two fell deeply in love. They had me almost immediately. But then my father contracted the mumps, which ensured that I, too, would remain an einziges Kind.
I still often thank those mumps for the opportunities I was able to enjoy as a result of my lack of siblings. Not having a son, my father took me to baseball games with him. He taught me how to frame a wall, how to fix the broken plumbing, how to pour concrete, how to install a lock, how to plant a vegetable garden on our apartment building rooftop. And he and Mutti saved their pennies and nickels to send me to college.
So here I was in Berlin, after winning this wonderful opportunity to see the land of my parents’ birth, the home of Goethe and Bach. I’d met my mother’s younger brothers and sisters—my Tante Marlise was just a few years older than I—in the fairy-tale village in which Mutti had grown up. I met my cousins—more cousins than I’d ever dreamed of—little sweet-faced blond-haired children who stared with wide eyes at my American clothing and shoes.
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