The Top Gun's Return

It had occurred to him that Jess would probably like to go through it with him, sitting beside him and telling him the story behind each picture. He’d barely glanced at it, but that had been enough to tell him he wouldn’t be able to handle doing that—not now, not yet. He was going to have to do this by slow degrees and in a very private place. It was going to take time to absorb this new reality into who he was now. Time and some emotions he’d rather not have anyone see and wasn’t strong enough, yet, to control. He shifted the album slightly, nudging it furtively back under his forearm as he took another bite of mashed potatoes.

“For the next few days I expect there’s going to be some more tests. I know the head doctors aren’t done with me yet, and then they’d like to get these intestinal bugs under control before they turn me loose.” He glanced up and tried to smile. “Sorry—I know that’s not a nice topic of conversation for the dinner table.”

“What’d I tell you about apologizing?” She smiled back at him, a gentle smile that made him ache to hold her. Touch her.

If I touch her now, he thought, it would be like that napkin. Strange. Alien. If I hold her, it’ll be like holding on to that bag of toiletries they gave me. Like a crazy person, holding on because I’m too screwed up, too afraid to let go. I can’t do that to her. I can’t.

He grinned and said, “Sorry,” and saw her relax a little as she accepted his pitiful attempt at humor for the gift it was meant to be. He ate more chicken while she played with hers and the silence thickened. Helplessly he thought, We’re like strangers. And then: We are strangers.

Casting for something with which to break that silence, he cleared his throat and said, “I talked to my dad—” at precisely the same moment she got fed up with it, too, and decided to ask, “Did you call your…dad?”

He laughed and said, “Great minds…”

And she laughed and said, “Yeah.”

He began again, nodding as he chewed. “He was my second phone call. We had a good talk.” He looked up and flashed her his out-of-practice smile. “Well—actually, he did most of the talking. I guess I was pretty much in a state of shock.” His gaze fell, and he was staring at nothing, his mind a bleak landscape of shifting shadows. “Still am, if you want to know the truth. I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. Nothing seems real. I keep thinking I’m going to wake up at some point and I’ll be back in that prison—”

“I imagine that’s normal,” her voice interrupted, hurrying, trying to hold steady. It scattered the shadows, at least for the moment. They’d be back, he knew. They always came back. “It’ll get better, Tris. You just have to give it time. You need to get well, get your strength back. Once we get home and things settle down…” Her voice trailed off.

He looked up and saw her eyes on him, pleading silently in her pale face, and suddenly felt defeated, overwhelmed. She wanted too much from him. Wanted so much for him to be okay. To be the man she remembered. The Tristan he’d been before.

“You’re wondering why I asked to stay over here, aren’t you?” he said abruptly. “When they probably would have shipped me home as soon as they had me cleaned up and deloused and knew I was fit to travel.” He pushed back his plate. He wanted to reach for her hand, but found the album instead, and curled his fingers around it. “It’s not what you’re thinking—”

“You don’t know what I’m thinking,” she said with unexpected heat. It was a flash fire, only a glimpse of the Jess he remembered, but it caught him by surprise and made a nice spreading warmth inside him—like taking a slug of what looked like iced tea and finding out it was whiskey. He smiled, and for the first time since he could remember, felt like the smile came from someplace deeper than his tonsils.

“Anyway, I got to thinking, after I’d talked to Dad. He mentioned that where we are now isn’t that far from where he grew up, and I thought—”

“I know you always wanted to see Germany.” He heard a definite break in her voice. “We talked about it, remember? We always said we’d go, someday, when Sammi June was grown up and gone….” Her eyes had that suspicious glow again, and there were splashes of color in her cheeks. He felt the warm place in his chest grow larger.

“I do remember,” he said, staring hard at her, his voice gruff and raspy. “And I guess maybe I have a different take on ‘someday’ now than I used to. I asked to stay a few extra days in Germany so I could check out the places where my mom and dad grew up. And I wanted you to go with me. Because it was something we talked about. Doing together. If you want to.”

“I’d love to.” Her voice had a furry quality to it that made him feel as though the temperature in the room had risen ten degrees. “Are the doctors okay with it? How soon can we go?”

“Oh, the doctors seem to think it’s a great idea.” He grinned, but it was the new, painful one back again. “They’d like for me to get adjusted to ‘normal life’—whatever that means—as soon as possible, but I think they’re a little leery of turning me loose on society until they’re sure I’m not going to self-destruct at some point on down the road.”

He saw her throat tighten, but she nodded and her voice was matter-of-fact as she murmured, “Post-traumatic stress…”

“This way,” he continued dryly, “they can let me out on a leash, so to speak, then reel me back in so they can run tests to see how I’m coping.” He finished with a shrug and another half smile. “Something like that, anyway. Hey, I don’t mind, as long as they let me go. As long as you want to go.”

“Lord’s sake, you know I do,” she said, and hearing that Southern accent of hers made something tickle inside him, like bubbles in champagne. It came as a surprise to him to realize it was pleasure. “How far is it? When can we go? Tomorrow?”

“Not tomorrow.” All at once the heat in him cooled and the bubbles fizzled, swamped by a new wave of fatigue. He wondered if he was ever going to stop feeling tired all the time. He said with a smile of apology, “It’s probably gonna be a couple days before I’m up to it, darlin’. Tomorrow they’ve got me scheduled for some more tests…more debriefing. Which reminds me—” he clutched the edge of the table and clumsily pushed back his chair “—my shadow’s supposed to be picking me up at twenty—uh, make that nine o’clock, and if that clock radio over there is right, it’s near that now. I’d better be getting downstairs.”

“You have to go back?” She was on her feet, too, with her head held high. She kept her voice light, and because he knew she didn’t want him to, he tried not to see the disappointment in her eyes. “I just assumed you were staying here tonight.”

It was the moment he’d been dreading, and from the tense and defensive way she was holding herself, he wondered if she’d been dreading it, too.

“Jess,” he said gently, “I can’t. You wouldn’t want me to.”

She nodded once, quickly—and yes, half-relieved. “It’s okay. I understand.”

She didn’t, though, he knew that. Overwhelmed once more with tiredness and a sense of failure, he tried to explain. “I don’t…sleep well. I’m not used to sleeping in a bed—”

“Oh, hell, I knew it.” Her voice was suddenly bright and quivering with melodrama. “My stars, it’s this damn bed, isn’t it?” She threw her arms wide to encompass the bed, which he’d already noticed took up a good bit of the room, and he knew she was trying to ease the awkwardness between them by making light of it. “It’d scare anybody off. Not to mention, it’s just downright tacky.”

“It is a lot to live up to,” Tris agreed, coming up behind her. “I don’t think my prison cell was as big as that bed.” He lifted his hands, but didn’t allow himself to touch her. Her scent, one he was familiar with but couldn’t place, drifted to his nostrils, and he closed his eyes and drank it in, swaying a little with exhaustion and longing. So sweet…so clean.

God, the irony of it was terrible. He’d dreamed of her for so long…how she’d look…how she’d smell. How she’d feel. In his mind he’d explored her body, every inch of it. He knew…he remembered…every detail: the sprinkles of freckles on her shoulders and even across the tops of her breasts where her bikini didn’t reach; the way her nipples looked when she was aroused; the tiny red mole, no bigger than the head of a pin, just where the two halves of her rib cage came together; the scar low on her belly from the Caesarean she’d had when Sammi June was born. How he’d loved to kiss her there…then lower…oh yes, lower. Now here she was, inches away…a breath away. His wife. And he could hardly bear to touch her.

“I have nightmares,” he said, his voice ragged with his anguish. “I’m afraid I might—I don’t want to hurt you.” He knew how lame it must sound.

She turned back to him, moving in that abrupt, jerky way—and just like that, he was flashing back again to a Florida beach and the first time he’d ever set eyes on her, her body coltish, self-conscious and awkward, and at the same time so sexy. Sexy as hell.

“It’s okay,” she said, breathless and rushed, laying her hand along his jaw. As before, he curled his fingers around hers and drew them away from his face, carefully as he knew how. He wasn’t used to being gently touched. “You’re here. You’re alive. That’s all that matters.” She paused, and he nodded. A smile trembled on her lips. “So. You’ll be back tomorrow? After you’re finished with the tests and the debriefing?”

He nodded, then started violently when the phone rang. She went to pick it up, and he waited for his heartbeat to slow down before he said, “That’s probably Al now.”

The big red-gold letters on the digital clock beside the bed said nine o’clock on the money, and he thought what a luxury it was to always know the exact time. He was accustomed to determining the passage of days by the waning of darkness and light, and weeks by counting scratches he’d made on the walls of his cell. One of the first things he’d do when he got back to the world, he decided, was buy himself a watch.

That reminded him of something he’d forgotten to ask Jess.

She put the phone down and turned to him, eyes too bright. “That was your ride. He’s waitin’ for you downstairs.”

He nodded and reached for the cane he’d left propped against the bed. “Jess, there’s something—”

“He said to take your time.” She was hugging herself, and her smile looked strained. He wished he felt strong enough to put his arms around her and make her feel safe and protected, the way he used to. But he knew he wasn’t.

“Come down with me,” he said. “You can meet my shadow. Al’s a good guy.”

She nodded, and waited while he shifted the cane to his left hand and opened the door and held it for her.

“There’s one thing you can do for me,” he said, and she looked at him again in the eager way he remembered from when they were first dating. “Tomorrow, if you want…while I’m busy at the hospital, you…uh, maybe you could go shopping for me? Pick me up some clothes?” His smile slipped sideways. “Just occurred to me, I don’t have any civvies.”

“Sure, I’ll do that. I’d love to.” So eager to please him it made his throat ache. “Where— I mean…”

“I don’t know what there is around here. Al can probably tell you. Or—did they assign you somebody?”

“They did—Lieutenant Commander Rees, my casualty assistance officer. He’d probably even take me. Oh—” her eyes darkened as they swept across his body “I don’t know what size—”

“Just get me my old size,” he said softly as he closed the door behind them. “I’ll grow into ’em.”

“Promise?”

He took a deep breath. “That’s a promise,” he said fervently. Then he put his arm around her shoulders and brought her to his side. Suspense hummed in his muscles until he felt her body relax against him, and there was an aching familiarity about her softness as she slipped her arm around his waist.

Back in her room half an hour later, Jessie closed the door and leaned against it. She felt drained and lonely. It had taken all the emotional stamina she’d had left to make brave small talk for Major Sharpe, and then to smile and let her husband slip away from her side and walk away. Funny—as apprehensive as she’d been about this reunion, and as awkward and difficult as it had turned out to be, watching him leave again had been the worst. She’d wanted to cling to him and cry like a child. Instead she’d kept her smile plastered in place and returned his little farewell wave—it had seemed so uncharacteristically tentative, for Tris—and then turned and walked back inside and up the stairs on legs that were suddenly trembly. Now, with no one to see her, she clamped her hand over her mouth and let the tears come.

Gulping sobs, she felt her way to the huge bed and sank onto it. Shaking, bereft, she reached blindly for something to hold on to—a pillow—and found herself hugging a large plump Teddy bear instead.

She stared at it in surprise, and then a gust of laughter replaced her sobs. Intermittently laughing and sobbing, she gazed at the fat brown bear while she mopped at her tears with the sleeve of her sweater. Whose idea had it been to leave her such a thing? she wondered, poking and tugging distractedly at its cheery yellow bow.

Heavens, she’d never been the Teddy bear type, even when she was little. Joy, now—she was the one for bears. Joy Lynn, Ms. Sophisticated New York Career Person, had bears all over her apartment. She had them on her bed and her sofa and her dressertop. She had one sitting on the back of her toilet, for heaven’s sake.

Jessie had been…well, somewhere between the baseball mitt and the Nancy Drew type, which was a hard place for a Southern girl raised in the seventies to be. In fact, come to think of it, she’d had a hard time fitting into any recognizable niche, growing up in Oglethorpe County, Georgia.

Until Tristan Bauer had come along. Right then, for the first time in her life, she’d known exactly who she was and where she belonged.

She lay back on the bed, hugging the bear to her chest. With her eyes closed she could see him walking away from her, not the way he’d looked tonight, thin and worn, steps uneven, but on a night half her lifetime ago, striding down the second-floor walkway of a Florida beachfront motel, tall and strong and straight, head set with that proud and arrogant tilt, radiating self-assurance in almost visible waves.

And she, leaning against the wall outside her door because she feared her legs weren’t going to hold her up if she left it, and her lips still throbbing from his kiss and her insides turning upside down, had called out to him. “You don’t have to go, you know.”

At the top of the stairs he’d paused to look back at her, one hand on the railing, smile tender, eyes dark with regret.

“You can stay if you want to,” Jessie had said to him in a husky, grown-up voice that hardly trembled at all. Lauren Bacall, sexy and sleepy-eyed. But inside her head she was crying in panic, If you leave me now, I’ll just have to die.

He sauntered back toward her while her heart tried to beat its way out of her chest, and when he was close enough to touch her he stopped. Smiling wryly, teeth white against his dusky skin, he murmured, “Darlin’, much as I wish I could, I don’t have any protection, and I’m pretty sure you don’t, either.” He lifted a hand and lightly brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers. Then he turned away once more.

And she’d known—she’d absolutely known—that if he went ahead and walked away from her then, it was going to be forever, that she was about to lose her one and only chance for true love and lifelong happiness. The man was gorgeous, and this was Florida, spring break. There had to be hundreds—no, thousands!—of girls out there on those beaches more beautiful, more sophisticated, more prepared than she was. If she let him slip away tonight she was gonna lose him—simple as that.

Trembling, she’d heard herself say, “I’m on the pill.” In the comparative innocence of that long-ago time, pregnancy had been the only concern on both their minds.

He turned back to her once more, looked down into her eyes and smiled. Then he tucked his finger under her chin, lifted it and kissed her, pressing her back against the wall until she felt the whole hard length of him against her. He kissed her in ways she’d never known before, then took her room key from her nerveless fingers and unlocked her door. Somehow or other they found their way inside.

The door had barely closed behind them before he was taking off her clothes—not that it was a hard thing to do, a tug on the tie of her new beach coverup, another on the string of her new matching bikini—and kissing her all the while, until her mouth felt hot and swollen and her breathing was only desperate sips, caught between whimpers. He kissed her throat until the pressure made her pulse pound like a bass drum, then moved his mouth downward, kissing his way across the tops of her naked breasts. Hot as she was, her nipples went puckered and hard as if she had a chill, until he began to warm them, pulling one deep into his mouth and sucking and stroking it with his tongue while his hand covered and chafed the other, and she thought she couldn’t possibly stand so much…so much feeling. Then his mouth moved to the other breast while his hand came to warm the one his mouth had abandoned, and she moaned and drove her fingers into his hair and clutched him harder against her, pleading for…she didn’t know what.

His hands stroked down her sides, hooked under the strings of her bikini bottoms and yanked them down, and the heat bubbled up in her like a geyser. Her legs buckled, and he caught her hips and held her while his mouth pressed kisses across her belly, and then lower. And…oh, no—lower. His tongue slipped into her, and she uttered a sharp, shocked cry. She gripped his shoulders and sagged against the wall, legs spasming as his arms held her captive and his tongue moved rhythmically inside her.

Her mind left her. Later she would marvel and wonder at what had happened to her, stunned to think that she, Jessica Ann Starr, had allowed a man to do to her what he’d done. Stunned to discover her body was capable of such sensations. But then, utterly mindless, she’d gasped as her body jerked out of her control and he’d surged upward to wrap her in his arms and hold her while she sobbed and quaked through her first-ever climax.

Before reason could return and find her perched on the brink of utter humiliation, she was lying in a tumble of sheets, and Tristan’s hard, hot body was covering hers and he was kissing her again—her belly, her breasts, her mouth—and the bubbling, searing heat was spreading once more beneath her skin. His hand stroked her thighs, coaxed them apart and cupped the moist, pulsing place between. A finger gently probed while he kissed her mouth deeply…and then he held her intimately in the warmth of his hand, raised his head and looked into her eyes.

“You’re a virgin, aren’t you?” he said.

Breathless and belligerent, she’d replied, “What if I am?”

He’d laughed softly and kissed her again. Sometime later, breathless and trembling now himself, he’d lifted his head again to ask in a broken whisper, “Are you really on the pill?”

She’d told him the truth, but by then it was too late, and neither of them cared.

Seven months later, while Tristan was on an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean, Jessie had been rushed to the base hospital for an emergency Caesarean. The baby, a girl, had weighed a little over three pounds, and since Tristan hadn’t been there to say otherwise, Jessie named her Samantha June.

That’s who the bear’s for, Jessie realized as the pounding heat ebbed from her body. Whoever was responsible for warming her quarters with flowers and a fruit basket would have known Tristan had a teenage daughter. The Teddy bear had obviously been meant for Sammi June. And they’d forgotten to call her.

She sat up, hands smoothing the bear’s fur and straightening the yellow ribbon around its neck. She felt terrible, ashamed; she was a miserable excuse for a mother. She’d meant to phone Sammi June while Tris was here. Of course, she hadn’t known he was going to be with her for such a short time, but the truth was, she’d forgotten. She’d been so focused on herself and on Tris. She’d been selfish, thinking like a lovesick girl instead of somebody’s mother.

Placing the Teddy bear back in its nest amongst the pillows, Jessie wiped her face with the sleeves of her sweater and reached for the phone.

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