The Daredevil

“You having a good time?” Mark leaned across their table and spoke above the noise of raised voices and slot machines filtering into the bar.

“Yeah. Sure.” As good a time as possible, he supposed.

“What about that little blonde down at the end of the bar?”

“Not you, too.”

Raising his hands, Mark chuckled. “Hey man, no hurt in looking.”

“What would Nicole think if she heard you say that?”

The sheepish grin on his face had Chase chuckling too, and looking down the bar.

“Holy shit.”

Twelve heads whipped around to stare at Chase, conversations silencing throughout the tables. He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud, certainly not loud enough to stop his buddies in their tracks. Clamping his jaw shut, the reverberating shock spiked through his muscles down into his neck.

The one woman he’d never thought to see again, the one woman who’d dwelled in the back of his mind for the past six years, was sitting smack-dab at the end of the bar.

Three days before he was scheduled to fly halfway across the world to Iraq.

“WHAT IS UP with this place tonight?”

Another rousing boom of male voices erupted at Rina McAllister’s back.

“There’s a bunch of airmen in tonight.”

Rina watched as her longtime friend poured a whiskey for a guy four seats down the bar. It was nice to finally be in the same town again. It had been…oh, ten years, way too long, since they’d lived in the same state let alone the same city. Despite the years apart, with phone calls, e-mails and sporadic visits, they’d managed to maintain a strong bond. She’d only been here for a few weeks, and they’d already fallen straight back into their normal, easygoing routine. Sadie was the sister Rina never had. Hell, she was family. Her only family, besides the General.

Yelling over the noise, Rina said, “But they usually aren’t this loud.” Or rowdy. As the newly appointed public affairs officer for the Thunderbirds Squadron she was intimately familiar with airmen. Oh, they could get rowdy with the best of them, maybe down the street at one of the seedy, hole-in-the-wall joints you could find off the strip, but not here. Not at an upscale casino bar like the one Sadie managed.

“Yeah well, several of them are leaving for Iraq in a few days. I’m cutting them some slack.”

Sadie stepped away to fill a drink order. While she waited, Rina craned her neck against the Saturday night crowd, trying to see the cluster of men on the other side of the room. The curve of the bar and crush of people blocked her view for the most part, although she could see a few of them on the fringes.

Flyboys. She could smell them a mile away and they tended to group together. Living with one her entire life—her protocol-thumping air force general father—and fending off the cocky come-ons of more men than she cared to count…she knew one when she saw one. And preferred to avoid them.

Fighter pilots were the worst. A special breed of macho daredevils who weren’t satisfied with pulling Gs—they wanted to do it with their hair on fire just for show. They all exuded that same mix of swagger and charm, filled with the idiotic idea that they were bulletproof and unbreakable. Rina secretly thought they held special courses during their training—ego-inflating 101.

She supposed they needed that instinctive confidence along with nerves of steel in order to do their job. On the ground though, those qualities tended to rub her the wrong way. She’d spent years worrying about her father and whether or not he’d come back from the latest in a long line of missions. Once he’d reluctantly agreed to ride a desk—his body no longer able to take the torture that came with thumbing his nose at gravity—she’d finally learned to breathe easy again. She wasn’t willing to take back that mantle of dread…not for some flyboy.

Sadie slid back to her end of the bar for a few minutes. “Actually, you might remember one of th—”

Just then the solid wall of male moved out of her way and Rina got a great view into the center of the action. And about swallowed her tongue.

“Oh my God. Is that Chase Carden?”

“Yep.”

“And why didn’t you mention this thirty minutes ago?” Rina fought the urge to reach across the polished wood bar and shake Sadie. “Didn’t you think that was something I’d want to know?”

Her disgruntled tone of voice must have registered with her friend. She stopped halfway into pouring a drink and said, “Really, Rina, it’s been six years. You guys didn’t even sleep together—”

Oh, but she’d been sorely tempted. There was just something about the man that made her brain go haywire, made her body respond, made her lose her hard-won cool, calm and collected outer shell.

They’d met the summer after her graduation from the academy. She’d gone to visit the General while she was on leave. That’s where she met Chase. A fighter pilot. The worst possible man for her. At the worst possible time.

She’d known it and yet she hadn’t been able to ignore him…or the all-consuming sexual attraction that snapped between them. It was draining to fight against the urges pounding in her brain. Wanting him was a losing battle that thankfully had been interrupted when she’d received her orders to leave immediately.

Fate had stepped in to save her from a colossal mistake.

But even now she remembered the breathless, expectant way he’d made her crave something she couldn’t—shouldn’t—have. And she’d often wondered what might have happened if she’d stayed.

“I would have thought you’d gotten over him by now.”

Rina fought down the warm memory that flushed across her skin. “There was nothing to get over.” But there was sure a hell of a lot to remember.

He was laughing. She couldn’t hear the sound from this far away but she remembered the way it had rolled around inside, making her chest tighten.

He looked the same. Several years older but still the same. Dark, dark hair cut a little closer on the sides than she recalled but still long enough on the top to run her fingers through. Even from this far away she could see the stubble covering his cheeks, the dimple in the center of his chin.

A vivid memory exploded in her mind, of running her tongue up from that cleft to the seam of his full lips above. Closing her eyes against an unexpected spike of arousal, Rina turned away. It had been a completely out-of-character—and unwise—action for her at the time. Remembering it now wasn’t any smarter.

Forcing the words past the desire clogging her throat, she asked Sadie, “Has he been in before?”

“A few times, I suppose.”

“When? How long has he been in town?”

“I don’t know. About two years, I guess. He’s at Nellis. I guess I thought you would have known.”

Sure, like the place wasn’t huge. She might also now be stationed at Nellis, but she’d only been there for about a month. She wrote website copy, newspaper articles and press releases—her favorite part of the job. She handled external communications for the Thunderbirds Air Demonstration Squadron, coordinating public relations efforts at each of their show locations throughout the year. She was the point of contact for all media inquiries about the program and keeper of the squadron’s public image. She did not study the attendance roster for the entire base.

“Sadie. How are you doing, beautiful?”

She’d been so lost in her own thoughts, Rina hadn’t noticed him walking up to the bar.

“I was wondering when you were going to come and say hello.”

“You looked a little busy when I first came in.”

Two feet away from her. It was the closest Chase Carden had been to her in six years. The immediate physical reaction that blew through her body was familiar and yet somehow different. She was no longer a fresh academy graduate just starting her career and life. She was a woman, successful, intelligent—and apparently sexually deprived for way longer than was safe.

Sadie reached up on tiptoe and wrapped her arms around his neck…his strong, thick, tan neck. He was taller than she remembered. Broader. More muscular.

“You weren’t gonna leave without saying goodbye, were you?”

“Not on your life. That’s why we’re here tonight. I couldn’t go away without seeing your beautiful face one more time.”