“I’m good and so are my men,” he murmured, checking his stride for hers. “Bitch of a firefight.”
“No kidding,” she said drily.
“You’re hell on wheels. You know that?” Ethan caught and held Sarah’s startled glance. “You brought that bird in so damned fast, I thought you were going to overshoot the landing site.” He grinned.
She shrugged. Sarah liked his smile. His eyes burned with intense interest—she hoped for her—and it felt good. It felt scary. She didn’t know what to do with Ethan’s attention. “Two Marines were critical,” she told him. “I don’t stand on much protocol when I know that. It has to be a fast infil and exfil.”
“Even though lead was flying?”
“Nothing fazes me when I’m saving lives. I’ve got my priorities straight.”
Shaking his head, Ethan smiled. “You’re amazing.”
Sarah took the compliment and allowed it to sink in. “Thanks. Funny, I was thinking the same about you. You were orchestrating and commanding the entire firefight.” She met his hooded stare. “You’re a hero in my eyes.”
Her words melted through him like sweet, warm honey. “Oh,” Ethan teased, “I think this is a situation of the pot calling the teakettle black. Don’t you?” He watched as her lips lifted into a wry smile.
“Maybe,” Sarah admitted.
“I’m going to get a shower and change of clothes. Want to meet me at the chow hall in an hour?”
Her heart lurched. She hesitated. The chow hall was in public. No one could accuse her of fraternizing there. “I’m not sure, Ethan.”
He briefly touched her uninjured shoulder. “Okay, see you in a few....”
Sarah watched him peel off and quicken his stride toward Ops. Ethan wasn’t taking no for an answer. He was
that
confident. He had led the QRF force and would have a ton of paperwork to plough through tonight.
Grimacing, Sarah took a look back at her helo. Donaldson was going to raise holy hell with her. But not right now. She was going to E.R., get a shower, clean off the sweat and smell of battle and climb into a clean flight suit. And then she’d meet Ethan at the chow hall. She was still on duty until tomorrow at 0800. Anxiety thrummed through Sarah, dissolving the weariness that always came after flying into a hot landing zone. As she pushed through the doors of Ops, Sarah knew Major Donaldson would have her on the carpet, wanting to chew her ass for disobeying his direct order. Tonight, she thought, she wanted to simply be in Ethan’s company because he was the safest male other than her now-deceased pilot friend Chief Warrant Officer Ted Bateman, in her life. Her curiosity was eating her alive because she wanted to know a lot more about the SEAL.
Chapter 7
E
than spotted Sarah as she walked into the chow hall an hour later. She was in a fresh uniform that hid her lush body. Her hair was clean, shining and in a ponytail. He rose and walked over to her as she stood in the chow line. All the blood on the lower right side of her face was gone, but he could see tiny red spots where fractured Plexiglas had cut into her soft, beautiful skin. He smiled when she spotted him. Her cheeks flushed, making her blue eyes even more intense in color. His entire body flooded with want. Forcing control over himself, he came and stood next to her in line.
“The doc give you a clean bill of health on your arm?”
Sarah nodded, slowing her steps, still unsure of eating with Ethan. “I’m good to go.” She wrinkled her nose and added, “I told them not to send the medical report over to my CO. I didn’t want him grounding me for a scratch, so they’re delaying sending it over until later tomorrow morning after I’m done with my shift.”
She looked up into those warm gray eyes of his. She could feel Ethan’s male interest and, for whatever reason, didn’t react negatively to it. There was a softening at the corners of his well-shaped mouth, and Sarah sensed kindness in him. It wasn’t that obvious. Hell, he was a SEAL, and no one could ignore that. She noticed a number of men watching them. “You know the system,” Ethan said, smiling a little.
“I’ve been at this for a long time,” Sarah agreed, picking up an orange and placing it on her tray. The Navy cook behind the line put a dollop of potatoes and gravy along with several thick slices of rare beef. She asked for some corn and then was ready to leave the line.
“This way,” Ethan urged, gesturing toward the rear of the chow hall.
Sarah felt her back prickle with so many damned eyes of men following her progress. She hated it. And, as if Ethan sensed her discomfort, he moved behind her, providing a barrier between her and them. She wished mightily she could get over being stared at in this military fishbowl. Right now, she felt safe and protected with Ethan shadowing her movement. And just that alone made her decide to eat with him. He was safer than the rest of the men. That’s what it boiled down to.
Ethan sat down at the table, his back to the wall. Sarah settled opposite him, her back to the doors. She noticed he was casually looking around. Cutting into her beef, she asked, “What is it about you SEALs? I haven’t had that much interface with them.”
Ethan folded his hands, elbows resting on the table. He had a cup of coffee to the right of him, having already eaten. “What have you heard?” He watched her eat. Sarah was delicate in all her movements. Who could have ever guessed she was the kamikaze medevac pilot roaring into that firefight earlier today? Even the bulky green flight suit couldn’t hide her curves from him. Heat shimmered through him, and Ethan felt himself going hard. Not exactly a good thing in a chow hall, and he was glad he was in bulky cammies where it wouldn’t be seen.
Shrugging, Sarah said between bites, “Well, you guys are the blackest of the black ops groups around here from what everyone says.”
“We’re shadows. We don’t want to be seen unless we want you to see us.” He smiled, drowning in her blue eyes; her pupils were large and black, framed by long dark lashes. Did Sarah realize how incredibly beautiful she was? Ethan didn’t think so. He’d never seen her with makeup on. Of course, the Black Jaguar Squadron—which was composed of only women flying the Apache combat helicopter—didn’t exactly dress up, either. Still, Sarah seemed disconnected to her natural beauty. It wasn’t anything that pointed to it, but Ethan could sense it. And his finely honed intuition was never wrong.
“Are you top secret and can’t say anything about yourself?” she asked, partly teasing.
“Ask me anything. I’ll try to answer it.”
She saw the challenge in his eyes and grinned. She was fine talking about him. “Okay, how old are you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Same age as me.”
“See? We have something in common.”
Sarah felt elated with that info. Good to know, but she cautioned herself. “How many tours have you had over here?”
“Fourth one. My team is on a two-year rotation schedule. We remain stateside refreshing all our skills for eighteen months, picking up new training techniques along the way, and then we redeploy to the Middle East for six to twelve months of combat duty.”
“God, I know more in five minutes about the SEALs than I have in all the years I’ve been over here. You’re an open book, Ethan.”
He liked the way his name fell from Sarah’s lips. “With you, I’ll always try to be,” he responded. “My turn?”
Sarah suddenly felt wary, but her heart pushed her to open up to him. She finished off her food, then pushed the tray to one side. “I’m
not
an open book.”
Ethan hesitated because he was going to get very personal. It was his nature to dig into a person’s background. It wasn’t a SEAL attribute necessarily; it was just him. He liked to understand what made a person tick. He’d come to understand over the years, a person’s childhood held the key to who they were today. And he was fascinated with Sarah’s courage under fire. What made her that way? Most women wouldn’t do what she did, but maybe that was a prejudice on his part. “Your call on this, but I remember you saying the first twelve years of your life weren’t happy?”
Sarah’s heart snapped shut over his softly asked question. She hesitated and stared into his half-closed eyes. Her woman’s instincts were wide-open and she could feel Ethan probing her, wanting to know more than what any man had ever asked of her before.
“Why do you want to know?” Sarah muttered, swallowing hard.
Ethan sensed Sarah’s immediate withdrawal; fear lodged in her narrowing eyes. That caught him off guard. “I want to know more about you. The person, not the medevac pilot.” He added a slight, coaxing look, holding her guarded gaze. Ethan could sense her sizing him up as a potential enemy, just because he was curious about her.
Sarah picked up the orange and began to slowly peel it. Ethan was throwing her off balance. His face was as sincere as his question. God, did she really want to open up this can of worms to him? To a man? His gray eyes held hers, and she felt a deep emotional connection building between them. It wasn’t visible, but, damn, it touched every part of her being. She kept peeling the orange, thinking, and dropped the rind into the tray. The scent of the orange enveloped her nostrils, something clean and sweet juxtaposed with her world of combat. Sarah glanced up at him and scowled. Ethan was relaxed, as if he were the most patient person in the world, waiting for her to make a decision. Her stomach tightened.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” The words came out roughened, charged with a lot of barely held-in emotion. Ethan opened his hands.
“Why do I threaten you, Sarah?”
She stared bluntly at him. “Because
most
men want to take a piece of my soul from me. It happened when I was young. I’ll be damned if I’m giving any other part of myself away to one.” She saw him sit back, digesting her growling words. And she had growled, almost a wolf warning to back off or it would bite.
“All I want,” Ethan began after the silence strung for a long minute between them, “is to get to know you better. You’re an incredible pilot and woman, and, maybe it’s my SEAL curiosity at work here, but I do care about you, Sarah.”
Wincing inwardly, Sarah stared down at the orange in her hands, weighing and evaluating. She was so tired of hiding. So tired of trying not to be noticed because she was a woman in a male world of combat. Lifting her chin, she met his eyes again.
“When my mother, who I still don’t know to this day, gave me up, a couple of winos found me tossed into a garbage Dumpster. They called nine-one-one, and I was taken to a hospital.” Ethan’s brows immediately drew down into a scowl. And there was actual sympathy in his eyes for her. “And please don’t feel sorry for me, okay?”
Ethan nodded. “No pity,” he promised, his voice strained. His heart ached over her statement. He tried to imagine how he would feel in her shoes. “Did you get placed into the children’s protective services, then?”
“Yes, but I don’t remember much until I was about six,” she muttered. Another peel dropped from the orange; her eyes were on it, not him. Sarah did not want Ethan to feel sorry for her. “I guess I was a sick baby and went through a series of foster homes until I landed in the one at six.” Sarah shrugged. “I was a pain in the ass for families that took me in. Who wanted a kid that was always sick? Always crying?”
Drawing in a deep breath, Ethan could see the injury in her right now from that time in her life. “Well,” he murmured, “you couldn’t help being sick or needing attention. Even as a baby, you knew you’d been abandoned by your mother. Tears of grief...”
Sarah peeled off more skin of the orange. The scent helped steady her slowly unwrapping emotions. The memories from her past made her feel vulnerable. Somehow, the tenor of Ethan’s voice, that sincere concern in his eyes, allowed her to go on. “At six I landed in a snake pit. The foster parents, Marge and Bill Caldwell, were both alcoholics.” Her voice turned derisive. “The social workers did not thoroughly vet them. The state child protective services didn’t do their job.” Anger rose in her. Her voice became colder. “I learned not to cry, not to want anything from them. I didn’t speak a word until I was five years old, so the state said I was mentally challenged. When I lived in their home, I became very scared. I tried to run away all the time, which got me into a whole lot more hot water. Marge and Bill wanted me because I was money in the bank for them every month so they could buy their bottles of whiskey.”
Ethan saw how she averted her gaze. Sarah was staring at the orange in her hands as if it could somehow take away the pain he heard in her low voice. He wanted to reach out to comfort her, but he didn’t dare. The gesture would be misinterpreted by those around him. And even worse, she would misinterpret it. He watched Sarah fighting back tears, her lashes lowered so he couldn’t look into her blue eyes. His heart wrenched in his chest. Mouth quirking, he said softly, “I can’t imagine how you felt as a little girl.”
His words had a calming effect on her roiling feelings. Sarah lost her appetite and placed the orange on the tray. Clasping her hands in front of her, she lifted her gaze and met his. Ethan’s face was utterly open to her. The man and the SEAL were two entirely different creatures. His gray eyes burned with compassion, not pity, for her. Every line in his sun-darkened face was readable. Sarah saw no judgment in his eyes.
“I was too young to understand anything,” she went on, her voice hoarse. “I hated them. And they hated me. I knew if I ran away, the social worker would come. And every time I wanted her to take me out of there, but she was blind, deaf and dumb to what was going on.”
Ethan wanted to protect Sarah as he saw moisture in her eyes. “Did you have to stay with them until you got to Hank and Mary Benson?”
Sarah straightened, rolling her shoulders, wanting to throw off the weight and haunting memories from the past she still carried. “I don’t want to say much more, Ethan. I— It’s just too personal and...” Her voice trailed off. She was ashamed to say it. No one came to the rescue of a terrified six-year-old girl. Maybe that’s why she was so passionate about rescuing wounded men and women who were in a wartime situation. And she was damn well not going to abandon them as she had been abandoned. No one had come to rescue her.
“That’s okay,” Ethan rasped, giving her a tender look. “I didn’t mean to open up a can of worms.”
“Some people just have sad lives and that’s the end of it, Ethan.” Sarah frowned and gave him a hard look. “But that doesn’t mean we let our past define us, either.”
“You’re a damn good medevac pilot,” Ethan said, meaning it.
“I know I am. I’ll fight to save a life no matter how hot the LZ gets.”
Ethan believed her. “So, you mentioned your CO? Major Donaldson? He sounds more conservative about how he’s running your squadron than you’d like.”
Sarah pulled a wedge of orange free and said, “He’s a bean counter. Afraid to have his conservative budget he made up a year ago get destroyed by our helos being shot up or lost in combat,” she said, chuckling.
Ethan watched her pop the wedge of orange into her mouth. He couldn’t help but be turned on by it, by those lips glistening with the juice, wondering what it would be like to kiss this courageous woman. His body hardened, and he groaned inwardly. Ethan was discovering he had absolutely no defense against Sarah. “Do you think he’s going to be upset with today’s mission?”
“Count on it. I’m sure I’ll get called in on his infamous red carpet tomorrow morning and he’s going to try and take me apart, piece by piece.” In some ways, Donaldson, rightly or wrongly, reminded her of Bill Caldwell. He had the same close-set small eyes, and it sent off a vibration of terror through her every time her CO looked at her. She hated being around the major. It just dragged up so many feelings of being trapped, unable to escape Bill’s hands, his mouth on hers, touching her private parts, that she wanted to vomit. Though she knew Donaldson wasn’t Bill, her body and her memory didn’t make that same delineation. Only her mind did, and she had no control of how her body violently reacted when the major was pissed off at her. Which was often.
Sarah was always standing up to the nitpicky major when the other pilots wouldn’t. And in that snake pit foster home of hers, Sarah had fought Bill and Marge just as much as she fought Donaldson. Here, she didn’t run away as she had as a frightened, terrorized child. She was twenty-nine, mature far beyond her years, and Sarah ran toward any fight she considered worthy of her passion. And her heart, her wounded but fiercely ardent heart, would easily enter the fray on the behalf of a wounded man or woman on the battlefield in a heartbeat.
Donaldson was frustrated with her, didn’t understand her commitment as a medevac pilot to go through literal hell to save a wounded person’s life. All he saw was his budget being ripped to shreds because a helicopter required maintenance, a new Plexiglas cockpit window installed, a new engine or whatever. He lived in a cold world of numbers, not human values and lives. She lived in the world of the heart, making damn sure rescue would come for those men and women when she was given the mission. No one was going to be left behind. No one, like herself, was going to be left sitting in a closet after Bill sexually molested her, crying and wishing for a rescue that would never come.