Wait Until Dark (The Night Stalkers) (16 page)

John eyed Connie as he drove them back. There she sat as calm as could be. For a moment, he’d thought that he’d lost her. He’d seen the blast-shield defense clamp down as she spoke of her abilities. There was a lot of hurt, but once again, he didn’t know why. He took her hand, glad his dad drove an automatic these days. He’d wanted to wrap her into his arms and hold her safe, but the connection of holding her hand appeared to work as well.

Several times during the meal, one or the other had reached out and they held hands as they told tales.

They’d both steered toward safer topics. And had a great time. She flown nearly every rotorcraft airframe and, once he got her started, was comfortable talking about the differences and changes. In addition to working at Sikorsky, she’d consulted with Bell and worked for a year on the Boeing Chinooks.

He’d flown with Major Beale for almost a year and Major Henderson before that. They’d flown into and back out of some really serious shit. The kind only another chief mechanic could appreciate. They’d talked long and late over fresh deep-dish apple pie, homemade vanilla ice cream, and decaf.

But it was still there. He could feel it now, lurking just below the surface. The battle of iron will that always strove within Connie Davis. He suspected that he’d be nothing more than a pile of Jello if he had to live with something inside like that.

That immense strength that lay hidden along her very bones. Beneath that, an anchoring that hooked right down to the very core.

He swung left off the highway and into the Sub Park.

It wasn’t often that no one at all was here, but it was past ten on a chill winter’s night. Not a single car in the whole lot. In summer, the place would be packed with kids and picnics and tourists. He pulled up and stopped, shutting off the engine and just letting their eyes adapt to the bright moonlight. Enjoyed the feel of her hand in his for a moment more before letting go.

“C’mon.” He slid out of the seat. Headed for her door, but she was down before he could get there.

They headed into the park.

He took her hand to steer her to the east of the park building. When he offered to release it, she didn’t let go. He’d walked here holding the hands of many a girl over the years. There’d always be something to say, he’d be telling a story, trying to be entertaining. She’d be talking about some local news. They’d been comfortable walks and talks. The shared excitement of meeting up with a bunch of friends.

With Connie, it felt as if they’d done this a thousand times. Always walked hand in hand. He could picture them decades from now, still coming here. Still holding hands. It felt so right.

“That’s a torpedo.”

It wasn’t like Connie to state the obvious. That meant the surprise of this park was working.

“Ton and a half. Delivered five hundred and seventy-five pounds of Torpex at thirty-three miles per hour up to three miles out. That means you could have to wait up to six minutes to see if you’d aimed right, hoping no one blew you up in the meantime.” Most of the DAP Hawk’s traveled at supersonic speeds and would cover the same distance in under fifteen seconds.

She looked up at him, her face etched in the moonlight.

“Tour guide. Summer job.” His own words sounded drifty. Her beauty in the moonlight simply—

He leaned in and tasted her mouth. This time she literally tasted of apple pie and vanilla. She also tasted of the promise of summer.

She leaned into the kiss until his mind was gone. He’d never been kissed like this. She dug her fingers into his neck muscles, holding their lips tight together.

When at last she pulled back, he stumbled forward.

He dragged in a breath and fought for rudder control to maintain his upright position. His head was spinning with the power of a simple kiss. What would it be like—

“Easy there, flyboy.” Connie’s voice was gentle with humor. “Unless you’re planning on dragging me back to the truck, you’d better show me what you brought me here to see first.”

The truck wouldn’t exactly be his first choice. That’s what kids did. For two grown-ups to manage sex in a truck wasn’t going to be so likely. Not that the idea didn’t have its attraction.

He leaned in for a light, easy kiss, ready to make a small joke about the potential joys of CQC, a little close-quarters combat in the backseat, but even that momentary brush of lips heated his skin until it flushed hot.

Giving up on attempts at speech, he held her hand tightly in his and headed forward. He watched her closely, knowing the big surprise would be when they rounded the cherry trees.

Past the WWII three-inch gun and out onto the brow of the hill.

He couldn’t have asked for a better setting. The full moon had risen an hour earlier, their breath the only clouds in the night. Moonlight washed the USS
Batfish
in soft golden light. Three hundred and eleven feet of World War II submarine stretched out before them.

“Holy shit!” Connie whispered on a breathless gasp. “What’s that thing doing here?”

“That ‘thing’ is the number one Japanese sub killer of the Second World War. She knocked out three of them in just seventy-two hours. Can you imagine that? Three! That’s a major portion of the number of confirmed sub-to-sub kills in the entire war.”

“But John,” she waved her free hand helplessly before her, “that’s a submarine. We’re in Oklahoma. And it’s not down in the river, it’s up here in the middle of a park. How?” The river was a trail of moon glitter in the distance.

He could tell Connie all the details of shifting the
Batfish
here in 1969. Towing mishaps, the Army Corps of Engineers lowering the river by three feet to get her under a bridge. Digging a huge channel into the middle of the park, then closing it off and pumping it full of water to raise fifteen hundred tons of submarine thirty-six feet, and finally dumping all the dirt back in to drive the water out.

But with Connie, the mechanical wizard that she was, that was a path to a thousand questions, and it would take away from the wonder of the soft moonlight and the aged weapon of war.

He leaned close and whispered in her ear, “Magic.”

The smell of her overwhelmed him, and he nuzzled her for a moment in that warm cascade of hair over that exquisite neckline.

“Want to go aboard?”

“Well, yeah! But it looks closed up.”

He pulled out Pap’s truck keys and rattled them. “One of the advantages of a parent who heads up the restoration team.”

Connie stepped aboard the
Batfish
as if it might break beneath her. But the decking was solid. And new.

“They just finished redecking her, over two hundred feet worth. I helped lay this section here when I was home on leave back in the summer. Isn’t she a beaut? Tomorrow night is sort of her coming-out party.”

Connie could only acknowledge with a nod. She hadn’t been able to put together a coherent thought since he’d not lambasted her at the dinner table over her unusual memory.

When he took her hand on the drive back, she’d begun estimating his ability to control the truck if she suddenly jumped him.

Their kiss at the head of the park had actually made her toes curl in her shoes. Her brain was wrapped in a wild and heady mix of John’s strength and his warmth. And his desire.

Men had wanted her before. But there’d never been one who couldn’t stop himself around her. John needed to be in constant contact, holding her hand, nuzzling her neck. And what shocked her even more, she was equally eager to be in contact with him.

Beside her, John was babbling on about seven war patrols and Navy Crosses and Presidential Unit Citations.

And all she could really hear was her own labored breathing and her heart pounding so hard in her chest it actually hurt.

At the side of the conning tower, he inserted a key and stepped in through the door. Rather than being cold and dark, the interior was well-lit in the soft red of heat lamps and the air was warm.

“She’s well enough insulated against the cold sea that we can keep her warm and dry with just a single heat lamp in each compartment. It took a while to figure out that we had to do something to beat the condensation. She gets over a thousand visitors a week in the summer. That’s a lot of people breathing.”

He led her down a ladder into the control room.

He kept up his tour guide thing through the bow by describing the Forward Battery and Forward Torpedo Room.

As they retraced their steps aft, John stopped and turned to her.

Connie readied herself for another mind-numbing kiss. For a total loss of willpower except the desire to immerse herself in his arms.

“I just remembered my question.”

“What?” What was he talking about?

“The way I figure it, Connie, it simply isn’t right that you know something about my own sister that I don’t. Noreen is the stubbornest person ever born, and you win her over in a day. If not aliens, then it had to be blackmail. What do you have on her?”

Connie shook her head trying to make sense of how Noreen had suddenly entered the conversation. Nonlinear progression. She knew it was one of her weaknesses, but she’d always had trouble following sudden jumps of topic.

“Why won’t you tell me? I know it isn’t some wicked use of that amazing memory you’ve got. That doesn’t make sense. It has to be you. You knocked over Paps. Grumps is letting you fix his tractor, which I still can’t believe. Mama Bee is taking your side over mine, and I didn’t even know there were sides. And now Noreen. My whole family is falling in love with you.”

They were? She’d thought that she blended in well enough. Pretended that she fit in, looked as if she belonged even if she didn’t.

“How do you make friends so easily?”

Connie coughed. It was all she could manage. A laugh, a scream, and a horridly tight choking sensation collided in her throat and spilled out in a strangled noise.

“What? What is it?”

She turned until she faced back toward the bow of the boat.

“Connie? You okay?”

She shook her head. In disbelief. At the sheer unreality of it. The ultimate loner being accused of making his whole family fall for her. It didn’t make sense.

His hands came to rest gently on her shoulders. In moments his thumbs were digging into her tight muscles.

“What did I say? I’d apologize, but I don’t know what for.”

She shook her head again, trying to clear it. “I’m fine. Fine.”

Blinking hard brought the world back into focus.

“I’m fine.” She turned to face him, pulling out from beneath his grasp of her shoulders. The concern showed clear on his face. Another emotion she wasn’t used to having aimed in her direction.

“No, seriously.” She was probably just caught in the blowback of the family’s joy of having John home for Christmas.

He studied her in doubt, his brow furrowed, his right eye narrowed suspiciously a little more than the left.

“Really, John. Your family is just being nice because they’re so glad you’re home. Being nice to the stranger you dragged in from the dark. They’re a great family. Really.”

He still remained undecided.

“Show me the rest of the boat.” She patted his cheek, then kissed him lightly on the lips. “You’re sweet to think I have some special power.”

John huffed out a breath and then smiled, a bright, mischievous grin.

“Didn’t think of that. Maybe you used magic on her. Just like the guys who got a submarine to Muskogee, Oklahoma.”

“My secret is out.” She winked and he winked back. The tension that had shot into her shoulders and neck eased back out. His family was just being nice to her. She could be comfortable with that.

The engine room really slowed them down. Connie’s questions were more detailed than any tour John had ever led through the belly of the sub. And more insightful. She picked out operational necessities built into the design that clearly indicated failure of prior designs. She saw the evolution of the fuel injectors and air flow, the control systems and the maintenance accesses. She didn’t just have an amazing memory. Even as they studied the ship she reminded him that she was also a damn fine mechanic.

He led her into the Maneuvering Room, the one guaranteed to strike any mechanic to the core.

“Oh, my, God.” She stood with one foot still in the engine room and the other straddled through the watertight hatchway.

One of the smallest rooms in a vessel built of small spaces. Inches weren’t wasted on a sub and this room represented the pinnacle of that design mandate. The overhead pipes barely cleared the top of his head.

“This room is fully suspended. It’s sprung separately from the rest of the submarine to block vibrations from depth charges. It’s the most heavily protected room on the whole sub.”

“Of course it is.” Her voice just a church whisper.

Here was the heartbeat of the sub. The four main engines and the “dinky” fed power into this room, as did the racks of electric batteries while running submerged. Here every decision was made about allocation of power to engines, to battery recharge, to living spaces. Let those in the Control Room think they ran the ship; every mechanic would know that here lay the boat’s true heart.

“You can still feel it,” her voice barely audible.

And he could. Forty years perched on an Oklahoma hillside hadn’t changed the truth. The old ship had power.

Connie moved about the room, inspecting gauges, noticing everything. She jumped up and landed hard on her heels against the steel grates. The lightest shiver through the floor plates showed the tightness and size of the springs. Depth charges must have wreaked unholy hell on the occupants for such stiff springs to make any difference.

She halted in front of the main control desk. In a room of iron and gray-painted steel, the stainless steel levers shone like a beacon. Connie slid the levers, smiling as he had his first time at the smooth flow of their movement, unchanged in over seventy years.

“You know, Connie. You’ve been making me feel a bit incompetent.”

Again that owlishly slow blink. “I have? How? You’re the best chopper mechanic I’ve ever worked with. I learn something new every time I watch you working.”

That took him aback. He hadn’t imagined the Mechanical Wizard—Mech Wiz for short, as she was starting to be called behind her back at camp, or more often Mechanoid—learned anything from anybody, least of all him.

“I’m always impressed at the integrity of what you do. Not a single bolt is left uninspected, not a single shortcut is taken.”

His laugh was automatic. “Would you skip a step with someone like Major Beale at the controls?”

“Not a chance.” Her smile was a testament to the abuse the Major could unload on a machine. “If it can be overstressed, she’s the woman to do it.”

John nodded. “You also share her strength. A quiet power. It’s mesmerizing.”

Her smile bloomed slowly. Growing until it stunned him, until he lost the power of speech.

“I like being called powerful. I like the way it makes me feel.” She reached out and grasped his jacket’s lapel. She pulled him in, like a sucker at a poker table who just wanted to give all his money to this woman.

Their lips didn’t meet with bruising urgency as they had before. It was power, but in perfect control. Slow and delicate testing. Her lips, as often as not drawn in a tight line of concentration, were the softest texture he’d ever experienced. As delicate as water, as strong as steel.

He slipped his hands inside the coat she’d already opened against the warmth of the sub. He held that perfect waist. This time he didn’t fight the urge to slide one hand down the delightful curve of the back of the skirt. The thin fabric barely more than a suggestion between his hand and those tight, tight muscles.

She moaned against his teeth as he used that hand to pull her in. Close against him. He lifted her, supported her with two hands, raised her until she sat on the control desk.

Perched there, she faced him eye-to-eye. Ever so slowly, he traced the line of her neck, tasted the hollow at the base of her throat.

Her hands laced into his hair and held his attention there.

He wasn’t about to complain.

And she didn’t complain either as his hands explored her torso. The curve of her rib cage fit his broad palm as neatly as her breast cupped against the inside of his palm.

With the slightest downward pressure, she guided him to her breast. Through the fine blouse and sheer bra, he could almost taste her arousal, could certainly feel it.

He wanted this woman. Wanted her so badly he couldn’t breathe.

He wanted to be inside her. He wanted to feel her come apart. Feel all of that perfect control slip away. Then he had a thought and cursed.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?” She pulled him back up and kissed him full and deep and slow.

“I didn’t think to bring any protection.”

Connie giggled in his ear before nipping it sharply. He’d thought her shy and found her uninhibited. Not shy, just quiet. Another one of her fascinating dichotomies.

“Someone else took care of that.”

He pulled back enough to look at her. “You thought we might…” But she was shaking her head.

She reached into the coat pocket and pulled out a string of four silvered packets.

“Your little sister thought we would.”

His little… Noreen. He was going to have to kill her, or at least lock her up in her bedroom until she was thirty, at a minimum, or get down and kiss her feet.

Connie twisted the strand back and forth. “She appears to have a pretty high opinion of your stamina.” Her grin was wicked.

“Wa’ll,” John drawled in his best Texas. “This here little boat does have eight compartments, not jus’ four of ’em.”

She reached into the coat’s other pocket and pulled out four more.

All John could do was groan.

“I was right, by the way.” Again that radiant smile that lit her up like a rocket flare.

“About what?”

“You look absolutely amazing in a suit.” She leaned in and nipped his chin. “Now let’s see how you look out of it.”

***

John didn’t let Connie off her perch on the control desk and it didn’t bother her in the least. She liked being at a height with him, eye to eye. Liked the way he looked at her as if he’d ravish her in an instant. Chest to chest. The way he held her nearly stopped her heart as his kiss had accelerated it.

He held her tight in a long hug that was almost enough to satisfy all on its own. Not hurried. Not on the road to somewhere else. He simply held her as if that’s where she belonged. And by that very action, she did.

And the way he undressed her so slowly, like a fragile and wondrous new system. A single released button of her blouse led to his hands, his lips, his tongue setting off on a whole new mission that made her body sigh with pleasure and hum louder than a chopper’s turbine. A very well-tuned one.

He watched her fingers as she unbuttoned his shirt, such a long row. She waited until they were all undone before pulling the shirt open. Open to a world of wonder she’d only imagined. His chest was a landscape a woman could spend hours exploring, even on an initial recon mission. Shape, definition, power. She leaned forward and nipped his pecs with her teeth and he hissed.

When she took his nipple in her mouth and laved it with her tongue, she elicited a moan from him that she could feel rippling up his chest.

Each time she expected John to be like any man, running for home plate, he turned aside. Her bra remained long after her blouse. First he had to play with her hair and lean in for another one of those mind-searing kisses. Had to test skin to skin, his hands and arms so smooth across her back.

When at last he’d undressed her, he stepped back rather than forward. In the compartment that was only a half step, but it was away.

For half a moment old fears rose in her belly and quivered there, until she saw his eyes. Darker than should be possible, they inspected her slowly from her toes until his attention at long last reached her eyes. A look of the most desperate need she’d ever witnessed.

“Damn!” The softest whisper caressed her nerves. “I didn’t know it was possible for a woman to look so amazing.”

“That’s just lust talking.” Not that she was complaining.

But John merely shook his head at her words.

Some words formed there, some momentary concern crossed his brow. A concern she didn’t like seeing.

She reached out and cupped her hand behind his neck, the contact shock as huge as their first kiss by the fence, and then pulled him back across the gulf of that half step between them.

It started as a kiss, her hand on his neck sliding over to his shoulder. And their lips. Their contact built in slow waves. His hand cupping her face before trailing down over her breast to her waist. The slow drawing in as they met breast to chest, belly to belly, and finally, his hands lifting her buttocks, pulling her to him. She slid her legs about his waist.

His entry, impossibly, almost painfully slow, staggered her with its shock of power. She felt his footing shift and she grabbed an overhead pipe to help steady them. Closed her eyes as she focused on the sensation of him filling her. Nothing like it. Ever.

When they were finally pressed hip to hip, she didn’t want to stop.

She leaned back to drive them closer together, knowing his strong arms would never let her fall. She wrapped her other hand around the overhead pipes and leaned back, driving them together with the change of angle.

John kept one hand in the small of her back and explored her front with the other.

When she began to shift her hips up and down he actually cried out.

It was the last sound she heard other than the roar of her own blood carrying her away, far beyond free fall.

***

John could feel Connie’s body vibrate as she rose and then drove back against him at a higher and higher frequency. The exquisite agony rose in him as he waited for her, watched her. She become no more than a blur in his vision until she exploded.

He could feel the pulses fire through her. Launching from where their bodies connected, fire rocketing up her back and through her chest until it found voice in a low desperate moan.

It was the moan that got him. That tipped him off the deep end. A moan of such pure and perfect pleasure. It didn’t get loud, it barely filled the small chamber, but it echoed from so deep inside that her whole soul lay open before him.

Even as he shuddered from his own release pounding through every nerve ending, he gathered her tight back against him.

She held on to him. More tightly than any opposing tackle who had ever sacked the quarterback. She held on to him and he to her as the waves flared through them both.

Connie tucked her head against his shoulder and nuzzled in against the base of his neck.

And, amazingly, he felt the slow trickle of hot tears slip down his chest.