First to Burn (6 page)

“Negative.” Morgan’s forehead rested on one fist with his elbow braced on his leg, but Wulf could see that he was blinking rapidly.

“We could be jack-in-the-box and pop out to surprise whoever takes delivery,” Deavers offered. His voice sounded slow, like he was planning, but his slightly tilted head and his single raised eyebrow flashed a different message to Wulf, a plea to fill the room with talk until Morgan had recovered. Let the man get himself together, Deavers seemed to signal.

“Negative on that idea, sir.” Wulf nodded once to acknowledge his understanding. “You ever spent time locked in a shipping container? Hotter than peppers on a Punjabi grill. Your Minnesota roots can’t take it.”

They traded meaningless barbs until Captain Morgan finally spoke through hard-pressed lips. “Thanks. I knew you’d come through for me. For Chief. Thanks.”

“Give us the call, and we’re ready to go.” Wulf put a hand on the pilot’s shoulder and offered him a bottle of water. “We’ve got your back. We’ll find out whatever Chief knew.”

Ten minutes with barely a thought of Theresa. This mission would be good for him.

Chapter Five

Theresa closed the postal trailer’s door with her hip, the sun-parched afternoon making her squint after the dim interior. The two packages in her arms were the first good omens since she’d realized Sergeant Wardsen must be avoiding her.

“Captain Chiesa!”

She couldn’t mistake that voice after listening to it through the curtain and on the ride where they’d struggled to help Nazdana. Before she turned, she knew Sergeant Wardsen would be there, his warm melody of words able to comfort in any language. He could probably soothe the damn dust if he spoke to it.

Three feet away, he stood like a granite monument, one hand on the pull door that covered the letter slot. Her exit had caught him in the middle of depositing a handful of letters.

If she hadn’t been holding the boxes, she could’ve touched his cheek. Clean-shaven, he was as delicious as a recruiting ad.

“How are Nazdana and the little guys?” Below his reflective sunglasses, he grinned like everyone in camp did when they asked about Caddie’s favorite guests.

“Great. Eating lots.” She wanted to keep him there, talking, even if only about this safe topic. “Someone made two cradles and the nurses are stitching quilts out of the camouflage patterns of all the NATO uniforms.” Refusing to obey her brain’s warning to keep her distance, her feet carried her down the steps. “They’ll be ready to go home after this weekend.”

“We’ll be on a mission. Can they stay until Tuesday?”

“Sure.”
Then we’ll have to see each other again.
“Extra days can’t hurt.” Her goal wasn’t to stand here and stare at him, especially when she couldn’t see his eyes through the lenses, so she asked, “Does your team know any other women who need maternity care?”

“Planning to open a women’s clinic?” His lips twitched at one corner of his mouth. “What’s the regulation authorizing that, ma’am?”

“No idea.” She squeezed her packages tighter, unsure how to present her half-formed plan to Colonel Loughrey. The sixteen hours it had taken her to track down a supply of vitamins with extra folate deliverable to Caddie hadn’t left much time to refine her idea of mobile prenatal visits.

“Kidding.” He caught the smaller box as it slipped across the larger one’s top. “It’s a great idea, and we’ll find you someone.” He gestured to the bigger package she held. “I’ll trade you.”

Her mother could fit an entire vacation wardrobe and dozens of cookies into a box the size of a file drawer, but it was heavy enough to make her arms ache. Asking him to carry it would be wimpy, but he’d offered. She wouldn’t lose her
atta-girl
credentials if she accepted his help as far as her hut.

He palmed the carton as if it were a basketball and handed her the smaller one to tuck at her hip. “So, what exciting contraband am I hauling? It’s not heavy enough to be beer.”

“Shoes.” She looked at her tan suede boots. “I need civvies for leave next week.”

“I’m carrying women’s shoes? Spiky things?” He shortened his stride to stay next to her.

“Probably.” She had no idea what her mother had sent, but smart money would be on black kitten heels. Refusing her stepfather’s dubious cash was one thing, but Theresa had long ago resigned herself to her mother’s extravagance. Buying clothes for her only child was an expression of love, as well as an attempt to make up for the losses of Theresa’s early years. Despite Carl’s jokes about his wife’s skill at money laundering whenever she went to the mall, Theresa knew everything in the box had been selected and mailed with her mother’s love.

“This is cause for despair?” He pulled his sunglasses halfway down his nose so she couldn’t miss his raised eyebrows.

“I asked for something comfortable for walking. I doubt that describes anything here.” A strong mother-daughter bond didn’t guarantee the same taste.

“Next you’re going to tell me there are clothes in this.”

Part of her knew she shouldn’t follow the conversation away from safe medical subjects and into the risks of personal details so easily, but that part had lost its voice.

He stopped moving and his eyes skimmed her body all the way to the ground. “Silk.”

His single word conjured a lush image that brought her to a standstill, an image of a man’s hand sliding a swath of fabric over her throat and chest to caress her skin. Her eyes locked on his fingers, tanned and strong, spread wide on her carton. They weren’t too thick, and his nails were clean. At his wrist, blond hairs touched his watchband.
The hand would be just like Wulf’s.

“Or lace?” His voice had slipped to a depth that she rarely heard, because men didn’t describe medical symptoms in that slowly melting tone or present slides at battle update briefings with that husky vibration deep in their chest.

“I hope not.” Her voice barely squeezed out of her paralyzed throat, but she had to answer. Why was he flirting with her? She wanted to ask about helping Afghan women—she couldn’t allow anything more—but why did he want to talk to her? They both knew army rules; a relationship between them was off-limits. Special ops soldiers calibrated risk and quantified outcomes as finely as neurosurgeons, or they didn’t stay alive, yet he wrapped his voice around her like a net. She swallowed the knowledge that he wanted to take his chances.

“Dare I imagine a dress?”

A
dress
. She focused on her gray-and-brown pants fabric. This close, the blocks in the design were right angles, orderly and regular, like her life. To keep it that way, she had to stay far away from this man. A semisecret maternal clinic was enough professional risk. To pile on more by—
no
—they could be nothing to each other but people who nodded and exchanged half smiles across the dining facility.

“Imagine a dress if you want.” She started to shrug, but the move would lift her chest, so she turned and spoke over her shoulder as she moved away. “I’ll imagine practical pants.” Whatever her mother had sent, she doubted it would be practical, unless it was a nail file. “I hope being that close to something the army didn’t issue won’t cause you problems.”

“If I have a heart attack, I’m confident I’m in good hands.” He came even with her in three strides.

The image of leaning across his body to press his chest flashed in her mind, so real that her arm spasmed on the smaller box until its corner dug into her waist. She’d almost reached the end of temp city, rows of tents for soldiers taking breaks from more remote outposts. By comparison, the plywood hut she and Jennifer shared with four other females seemed posh.

“Where you headed?” he asked as they approached the rows of prefabricated housing that marked the main area of Camp Caddie.

“Bravo 8.” Revealing her hut location felt like giving out a phone number at a bar, but this afternoon she couldn’t blame alcohol.

His glasses re-covered his eyes. “For leave.”

“Oh.” She’d misinterpreted his question. Maybe she had read too much into all his conversation. “Rome.”

“Ahhh.” His sigh reminded Theresa of someone sinking into a hot tub. “Lucky you.”

“I know.” She lifted the smaller box. “Guidebooks.”

“Meeting someone?” A casual, polite question. He wasn’t fishing for her dating status.

“No. Planned it myself. The books should be enough, although I might join a Vatican tour. I’ve read that—” His sideways smile made her want to slap a hand over her inner babbler.

“So.” He stopped walking. The banter, and his smile, faded. “Someone sent the clothes and shoes?” His attention fixed her to the gravel.

“My mother.” Her throat clogged and breathing took effort.
Too much dust.

He leaned closer. “Did she include anything else...”

Two tiny Theresa reflections stared at her, brown butterflies pinned to his lenses.

“...tempting?” he finished.

“Umm.”
Flirting.
Not her strength. His mouth came closer. She couldn’t think and watch his lips at the same time. “I mean—not unless you lose, oh, fifty pounds. Even then I doubt the clothes would match your, ah, active lifestyle.”

Lame, lame. She wanted to slap her forehead, but he laughed obligingly. “A mother who doesn’t send cookies?”

“Cookies? Oh.” Her shoulders fell away from their tight bunch by her neck. “Yeah, of course. She knows I have sergeants to bribe.” Grabbing the subject change would remind him of their different ranks.

“This particular sergeant is very bribable. And carrying your incredibly heavy box.” He sagged as if the contents had turned into concrete.

“Fine.” They were close to her quarters. Time to retrieve her box before someone saw. “Lend me a knife?” She’d pay him off and send him on his way.

He shifted the box to his other hand and pulled a serrated blade from his thigh sheath. The blade stretched from her fingertip to the base of her palm.

“Nothing small about you, is there?”
Crap.
Her cheeks flamed when his shoulders shook with laughter. She closed her eyes but couldn’t erase his white-toothed grin from inside her eyelids. “I didn’t mean—” She swallowed. “I give up. Go ahead.”

Holding the box between his forearm and shirt, he slit the tape and sheathed the blade with an economy of movement a surgeon would envy. At this distance she could see the pulse beat in his throat, but the thump-thump in her ears had to be her heart. If she placed her hand where his fingers hovered, above his thigh, she’d feel his quadriceps. Last night in her bunk, she’d squeezed her leg to recall the living steel that she’d accidentally gripped on the Black Hawk flight, but her own muscle had nothing in common with his. Today he stood next to her, a simple box separating them.

No.
She grabbed for the cardboard flaps to end this folly.

“Oww.” A line of blood welled from a slice across the pad of her second finger.

He touched her wrist, then tugged her palm closer to examine the cut. A sensation not unlike hypoxia, complete with vertigo and shortness of breath, spun from her stomach to her head and knees. She wouldn’t, couldn’t, faint over a simple paper cut.

“I apologize.” He bent over her hand.

He wouldn’t kiss her finger; she couldn’t allow that. “It’s not your fault.” She tried to retrieve her hand, but his thumb pressed into her palm and he cradled her knuckles. Tugging harder didn’t help.

“My knife cut the box edge, not the tape.”

“I’ll be fine.” Her high-pitched tone must have reached him, because he released her. She immediately wished he hadn’t, then stifled the thought. “What were...oh, cookies.” This time she used care to open the flaps.

“Delicious.” His slow, deep voice returned, cueing her to look down.

Her mother hadn’t put cookies on top. Black lace peeked out of pink packing tissue. Jet beads caught the sun and winked at her from ribbon trim that connected two scalloped bra cups. She shoved the offending object deeper. Her jaw hurt from the pressure of gritting her teeth, but nothing she could say, nothing, would make this go away. She should shut up.
Right now
.

“If you decide to take her advice...” His smile lifted one side of his mouth.

What was he talking about? She followed his gaze to a sticky note that’d transferred from the tissue paper to her forearm.
Not for your roommates!
Share these with a nice boy.
Written in her mother’s distinctive slanted loops.

She needed to escape before she surpassed her record for embarrassment, set the day she broke her holster in pre-deployment training at Fort Benning, and her Beretta slipped down inside her pant leg. Two more minutes and she’d blurt out that story. That would impress a Special Forces stud.

“Here.” She reached deep, felt plastic and tugged out a bag of chocolate espresso swirls. After he caught them, her free hand snatched the carton he held, and she jammed the small box into the top. She was out of here like crap in a case of salmonella.

“Would you like to see a movie?”

Her mouth opened a second before her thoughts gelled into speech. “What did you say?” She suspected her mother’s cooking had led high school boyfriends to date her longer than they might have, but never had the effect occurred from merely seeing the food.

“Friday night movie at our ready room. Maybe cookies would cheer Captain Deavers.” The eyebrows arched over his shades ruined his sincerity. “Team’s worried.”

“Laying it on thick, aren’t you? I know his wife’s been to three parenting meetings already.”

“We’re showing
Cinderella.
”

“Tell me that’s not spelled with an
S
.”

“Disney, I swear.” He raised a palm like a Boy Scout. “Kahananui’s pick. His girls are into the princess lifestyle. He wants to share it with them.” Lines at the corners of his mouth betrayed his struggle to hold a straight face. “You could bring Meena.”

“She still insists on being Mir.” She shouldn’t say yes, but how could she deny Nazdana’s helper the chance to see a cartoon?

“The rest of the team might know a new patient for you.”

This felt like high school, when guys had three idiotic ways to explain why getting a burger wasn’t a date, but finding women who needed medical care would involve Wulf and his team. “Okay, what time?”

“We start at twenty hundred. You know where our ready room is?”

“Yes.” If he knocked on her hut, gossip would explode like a rocket-propelled grenade.

“Until tonight.” He leaned in until her face filled his reflective lenses.

Did her eyes really look half-closed? Her lips half-open? Her sports bra compressed her chest as she struggled for air, waiting for him to close the last inch between their bodies even though
he must not
.

He swung a second bag of cookies in the air as he pulled away and gave her the free-form salute perfected by Special Forces.

She squeezed the big box until its seams creaked. The shameless bastard had grabbed her butteroons.

* * *

Wulf’s internal clock passed nineteen hours fifty-five minutes. He didn’t lurk next to the ready room door, but his team sensed not to get between him and the knob.
He
would answer when she knocked. At three minutes before eight, he heard two taps. He snapped the waistband of his army running shorts and counted to five before opening the door.