The Top Gun's Return

His fingers walked across her shoulder blades, drawing her hesitantly closer as though he feared at any second she might vanish in a puff of smoke. He folded her into his arms, as if he’d never be able to get enough of her.

He held her carefully, almost reverently at first, then closer…harder, and buried his face in her hair. The breath she’d been holding burst from her in a sob. She no longer had to worry about her trembling; it wasn’t possible to tell where hers left off and his began.

She had no way of knowing how long they stood there like that. It occurred to her that it was like a refuge, that silence…the closeness, a safe place neither of them wanted to leave.

But they must leave it, of course. And confront what had happened to them and what lay ahead….

Dear Reader,

The year may be coming to a close, but the excitement never flags here at Silhouette Intimate Moments. We’ve got four—yes, four—fabulous miniseries for you this month, starting with Carla Cassidy’s CHEROKEE CORNERS and Trace Evidence, featuring a hero who’s a crime scene investigator and now has to investigate the secrets of his own heart. Kathleen Creighton continues STARRS OF THE WEST with The Top Gun’s Return. Tristan Bauer had been declared dead, but now he was back—and very much alive, as he walked back into true love Jessie Bauer’s life. Maggie Price begins LINE OF DUTY with Sure Bet and a sham marriage between two undercover officers that suddenly starts feeling extremely real. And don’t miss Nowhere To Hide, the first in RaeAnne Thayne’s trilogy THE SEARCHERS. An on-the-run single mom finds love with the FBI agent next door, but there are still secrets to uncover at book’s end.

We’ve also got two terrific stand-alone titles, starting with Laurey Bright’s Dangerous Waters. Treasure hunting and a shared legacy provide the catalyst for the attraction of two opposites in an irresistible South Pacific setting. Finally, Jill Limber reveals Secrets of an Old Flame in a sexy, suspenseful reunion romance.

Enjoy—and look for more excitement next year, right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

Yours.

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Editor

The Top Gun’s Return

Kathleen Creighton

KATHLEEN CREIGHTON

has roots deep in the California soil but has relocated to South Carolina. As a child, she enjoyed listening to old timers’ tales, and her fascination with the past only deepened as she grew older. Today, she says she is interested in everything—art, music, gardening, zoology, anthropology and history—but people are at the top of her list. She also has a lifelong passion for writing, and now combines her two loves in romance novels.

To Gail Chasan, my editor and champion

for I’m-not-even-going-to-tell-you-how-many years.

How did I get so lucky?

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Epilogue

Prologue

Sammi June stared at the shadows on her ceiling cast by the soccer-ball-shaped night-light beside her bed. Under the covers her knee stung and throbbed where she’d picked the scab off it too soon, and she thought about that while tears tickled their way down the sides of her face and ran into her ears. The tears came from the achy, lonely place inside her, but if she concentrated hard enough she could make herself believe that her skinned knee was to blame for that, too.

Stupid knee. She’d had skinned knees before. It was no big deal. Except, why did it have to happen now?

Tomorrow was supposed to be her big day. She was so excited she couldn’t fall sleep. It was the most important part, and the teacher had picked her, the new kid. The new kid—wasn’t she always? New place, new school, new friends. She’d wanted so much for them to like her, to be amazed at how smart she was, and how pretty. She even had a dress to wear—a pink one, brand-new, Momma had bought it for her last week at J.C. Penny—and new shoes to go with it, and socks with lace around the tops. And now it was all going to be ruined, because of a stupid skinned knee. It was going to show, and look ugly and tacky, and everyone would think she was just a tomboy hick from Georgia.

I wish my daddy was here. If Daddy was here, I wouldn’t care if I have a skinned knee. Daddy would find a way to make it be all right.

Sammi June sniffed and wiped her cheeks with her hands, then listened to the darkness as hard as she could. She thought sometimes if she listened hard enough she could make herself hear the sounds she wanted so badly to hear: the front door opening, footsteps on the stairs, Momma’s voice, trying to whisper but bubbling brightly with happiness. Daddy’s voice whispering back, low and gruff and growly.

After a moment she pushed back the covers and got out of bed and walked over to the window. In the daytime in this new place, there wasn’t much to see from the bedroom window except for other people’s houses. But at night, if she knelt down and pressed her face close to the glass and looked up…way up…just above the rooftop of the house next door, she could see it. One star, all by itself, so big and bright it didn’t seem real. But it was real; Momma said so. She said it was the Evening Star, the one everyone sings to you about when you’re real little: “Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are….” Momma said if you make a wish on the Evening Star it will come true, and there was a poem for that, too.

Kneeling on the hard floor—on one knee, because the skinned one was sore—Sammi June closed her eyes and whispered the poem:

“Starlight, star bright,

First star I’ve seen tonight,

I wish I may I wish I might

Have the wish I wish tonight.”

Then, staring at the Evening Star until her eyes burned and made new tears, she silently added the wish she’d wished so many times before: I wish my daddy would come home.

Chapter 1

May, 1995—Near Athens, Georgia

The day Jessie Bauer’s life changed forever began like any other. She worked the day shift as a nurse’s aid at the hospital in Athens and came home looking forward to the same three things she always did after a long day on her feet: a glass of Momma’s sweet tea, a letter from Tristan and a quiet hour to sit with her feet up while she read it.

“Hey, Momma,” Jessie said as she stepped through the open back porch door and put her pocketbook on the kitchen table, “whatcha makin’?” So close to the first day of summer, the year’s longest day, the sun was still high in the sky. The house was warm and smelled of burned sugar and overripe fruit.

Her mother lifted damp hair off of her forehead with the back of a hand that held a long-handled wooden spoon. “Oh, I picked up some of those last-of-the-season strawberries Frank had on sale down at the produce stand. They were goin’ fast, so I thought I’d better get ’em put up while they still had some good in ’em.” Red-faced and sweaty, she flashed Jessie a smile.

“Let me get changed,” Jessie said. “I’ll help you.”

“Oh, heavens, I’m about done here—just these last few jars. Then I’m gonna put the kettles to soak and go in and catch Dan Rather. You go on and sit—there’s tea in the ’fridge.”

Jessie picked up her pocketbook and slung the strap over her shoulder. “Thanks, I will in a minute. Where’s Sammi June? Doing her homework?”

“Finished—at least, that’s what she told me. She and J.J. are off ramblin’ down by the creek somewhere.”

Jessie nodded. “I get a letter today?” She asked it in that way people do when they think they’re going to be disappointed.

Not this time, though. Her mother smiled and pointed with the spoon. “You did. It’s on the desk in the—”

And Jessie was already gone, her heart going thump-thump in time to the whapping of the swinging door behind her. In the hall, she let the pocketbook fall to the desktop as she picked up the familiar envelope and pressed it against the place where her heart was beating so fast, fighting the little shivers of joy inside her only because she knew if she wasn’t careful they’d turn into tears. When she had herself calmed down some she went back into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of tea. She carried the glass and the letter out to the front porch and sank into one of the white-painted rocking chairs that sat there in all kinds of weather.

For a while she rocked and held the letter close in her hands while she thought about how beautiful it was just now, with the day lilies blooming along the lane, and the front lawn dotted with yellow dandelions, and the air warm and smelling sweet from Momma’s roses rambling over the porch roof. Finally, having savored the moment about as long as she could stand to, she tore open the envelope and unfolded the single sheet of lined notepaper.

It took only a minute or two—never long enough—to read the words written there. Everyday words about the everyday things that made up Tristan’s life on board an aircraft carrier somewhere in the Persian Gulf: what they’d had to eat, the last movie they’d seen, something some buddy or other had done that made him laugh. Then a line or two about how much he missed Jess and Sammi June, but how glad he was to be where he was, doing something so important. The same words that nearly always ended his letters home.

I know I’m doing what I was meant to do. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be able to stand being away from you guys. But I do believe it, with my whole heart and soul, and I want you to, too. I need you to believe in me, honey. I love you and miss you always.

Inside the house she heard the TV turn on. Heard the introductory fanfare to the evening network news. Then Dan Rather’s familiar voice.

The screen door creaked open. From inside, her mother’s voice called, “Jessie, you need to come in here.” Jessie stopped rocking and turned halfway around in the chair, not quite understanding. She saw Momma standing there, holding the door.

“There’s been a plane shot down over the no-fly zone,” Momma said. “They’re saying the pilot’s missing. They won’t tell who it was until they notify—”

Somehow Jessie was on her feet, and she felt the screen door’s wooden frame under her hand. It’s not Tris. He’s not dead. I’d know if he were dead. I’d know. “It can’t be Tris,” she said. “I’d have heard something. They’d have told me…”

Over the sound of her own voice and the music of a commercial on television came the crunch of tires on gravel.

As Jessie turned, her world shifted into slow motion. Sounds faded. Floating in the silence, she watched a strange car come along the lane and pull to a gentle stop in front of the house. It was one she’d never seen before, a dark sedan with writing on the doors, but she knew it just the same.

She watched, suspended in time and silence, as the doors opened and two men got out. Men she didn’t know. Tall, dignified men wearing dark-blue Navy dress uniforms, their white hats gleaming bright as moons in the evening sun.

Looking back on that day, Jess recalled that she’d stood alone on the wide front porch, watching those two men come toward her across the lawn with its happy polka-dot riot of yellow dandelions. She didn’t remember Momma coming to stand with her, putting her hands on her shoulders.

She remembered that she held out her hands when the men took off their hats and began to mount the wooden steps to the porch where she was. She held her hands with the palms out, as if she were going to try to hold them back. As if she were going to push them away. As if by keeping them away, she could keep them from saying to her what they’d come to say. As if keeping them from saying it would make it not be true.

She remembered thinking, How in the world am I gonna tell Sammi June?

But after that, she didn’t remember much of anything for a very long time.

Eight Years Later—Near Baghdad, Iraq

The bombs had stopped falling. He wondered if it was for keeps this time, but doubted it would be. The bombs had been falling on and off for six days. On the seventh day they rested?

Lying in the silent darkness he thought about the bombs. He was sure they were American bombs, and wondered if the next round would finally bring the ancient prison tumbling in on top of him. No telling what this place was disguised as, and no one had any idea he was here, anyway. He thought what irony it would be if it turned out it was the Americans who finally killed him.

“Missed again,” came a hoarse whisper from beyond the damp stone walls of his cell.

He grunted a reply. Rising stiffly from his pallet, he made his way to the heavy wooden door and leaned his back against it.

“You think they’re done for tonight?” the whisper came again. The whispering was from long habit; talking among prisoners wasn’t allowed.

He turned his head and addressed the small barred opening high in the door. Though it was invisible now in the darkness, he knew its position exactly; through it, for the past several weeks, at least, had come everything he depended on to stay alive. As well as everything he most feared. “Maybe. Seems early, though.” An unnamed tension gripped his muscles and his nerves quivered as he and the whisperer fell silent, listening to distant noises of chaos: shouts, small explosions and the rattle of gunfire.

“Listen—” It was a faint hiss, like spit in hot coals.

He’d heard the new sound, too. Footsteps.

Footsteps spoke a language all their own, one he’d learned well over the years. These were not the usual footsteps, firm with authority and menace, that set his nerves and muscles and sinews to vibrating with conditioned fear responses. These were furtive footsteps. A lot of them. Hurrying footsteps. Running, but not with thumps. Like…scuffles, rhythmic and purposeful.

A shiver crawled down his spine. He pressed it hard against the door, and with the drumming of his pulse in his ears he almost missed the voices. They were only intermittent mutters at first, and whether it was due to that or a self-protective refusal to believe, it was a while before it dawned on him they were speaking in English.

“…Clear!”

“Panther one, clear!”

“Move on three…”

“Roger that—go, go go!”

The footsteps were growing louder, now broken by pauses, thumps, brief explosions of gunfire that crashed like thunder against the stone walls. And in the dying echoes of the thunder, the voices came again.

“We got a live one here. Barely.”

“Ah, Jeez. Look at this. Poor bastards…”

“What do you want to do with ’em?”

“We got no choice. They’ll have to find their own way out. We’re here to get one guy.”

“We have to find him first. Jeez, there must be a hundred cells in this stinking hell-hole.”

There was a pause, and then a controlled shout: “Pearson! Cory Pearson—you in here? If you can hear me—”

“Here! I’m here!” It was the unseen companion’s voice, excited, not whispering, now. Cracking with excitement and hope.

“Okay, we hear you,” came the reply, calm by contrast. “Keep talking. We’re coming to get you.”

Huddled in the darkness with filthy stones against his back, he listened to the shouts and the footsteps coming nearer, until they seemed to be right outside his cell. An explosion thumped his eardrums, and he clapped his hands to the sides of his head and opened his mouth in a silent scream of pain. In the seconds that followed he realized he was shaking. His knees and head felt the way they did when he knew he was going to pass out.

Not now, he prayed, gritting his teeth together. Not…now.

The darkness around him filled with images, the same well-loved faces that had kept him sane and clinging to life for so long. Well-remembered voices spoke to him, as they had so many times before. He concentrated on the faces and felt his head clear and his breathing quiet. Drawing on reserves of strength he’d forgotten he had, he drew himself slowly erect, and his chest filled and his shoulders lifted.

“Wait! There’s another one!” The unseen companion’s voice came again, trembling with emotion. “You can’t leave him—”

“Another one—in here? What, you mean, another American?”

“Yeah, he’s—”

“That’s impossible. We weren’t briefed—”

“Look, I’m not leaving him behind.”

Someone swore impatiently. “You sure? Where is he? In here?” The same voice rose to a shout. “Hey, buddy, can you hear me? If you can hear me—”

“Yeah, I hear you.” It felt odd to him to be talking so loudly, but he thought his voice sounded okay. Calm. Normal. Not even shaking. Much.

More swearing—startled this time. “I’ll be damned—uh…okay, buddy, listen, we’re gonna get you outa there. I want you to take cover, you understand? I’m gonna blow the door.”

“Ready when you are.”

He pressed himself into the corner of his cell to one side of the door and covered his head with his arms. The explosion that came then seemed almost an anticlimax, and in its aftermath he turned and drew himself once more erect.

For some reason he’d expected light, but in the rectangle where the door had been there was only the thin gray of starlight and the flickering glow from burning bombsites leaking through the high, narrow windows of the ancient fortress. His rescuers were darker shapes, anonymous and alien in their gear, like something out of science fiction.

“Are you guys SEALS?” he asked. For some reason he knew they would be.

“That’s right. Who the hell are you?”

Realizing they’d be able to see him with their night-vision goggles, he gave them the best salute he could. “Lt. Tristan Bauer, United States Navy.”

There was a stunned silence. Then one of the shapes said, “You’re Navy?” just as another said, “That’s not possible.”

That one, the nonbeliever, pushed past his comrade and into the cell, cradling his weapon across his chest as if he needed the comfort of it. “Lt. Bauer’s dead. My brother served with him on the Teddy Roosevelt. He was shot down in ’95. That’s…” His voice wavered. “Jeez, that’d be eight years.”

Tris grinned, stretching muscles he hadn’t used in a very long time. “Yeah, so, what the hell took you guys so long?”

Early April, New York City, USA

Jessie and her sister, Joy Lynn, were arguing about where to have lunch, as usual.

“Not Thai again, please,” Jessie said with a shudder as she lengthened her stride in a vain attempt to keep up with her older and considerably shorter sister. Joy Lynn had been a New Yorker for going on ten years, since before her second divorce became final, and had evidently forgotten that GRITS, as in, Girls Raised in the South, never walk if they can help it.

“And don’t even think about suggesting Indian,” she warned as the suggestive tinkle of temple bells floated from a nearby doorway. “Last time you took me to an Indian restaurant I had to go find a hotdog vendor afterward just to put my stomach right. Whatever happened to good old American?” It was a rhetorical question, asked plaintively of the weeping sky, and had less to do with her food preferences than it did the serious second thoughts she was having about visiting her New-York-dwelling sister in the springtime when the air back home in Georgia was warm and sweet and the countryside aflame with azaleas. “What’s wrong with KFC?” she whined, hugging her borrowed raincoat close across her chest. “Bojangles with cole slaw an’ biscuits?”

Unperturbed, Joy Lynn said, “Don’t be such a hick,” as she whipped her trilling cell phone out of a raincoat pocket. She glanced at the caller ID, said, “Huh,” in a wondering way and put the phone to her ear. “Hey, Momma, what’s up?”

“Momma!” Jessie exclaimed. “Why would she be callin’?”

Joy Lynn’s pace had slowed. She flicked a glance sideways at Jessie and said, “Uh-huh.”

Jessie’s belly quivered. “She wantin’ me?” An alarm had gone off in her head. Sammi June.

“Uh-huh,” said Joy Lynn again, but not to her, holding up a silencing finger. Then she said, “Okay. Hold on a sec—” She grabbed Jessie by the sleeve of the raincoat and hauled her through a warm doorway that smelled strongly of garlic.

“It’s Italian, for God’s sake,” she hissed at Jessie, who was muttering, “But—but—” and dragging back against the tow. Jessie had nothing against Italian, but butterflies were flopping earnestly in her belly now, and she no longer had any interest whatsoever in eating.

It’s Sammi June—oh God, it must be. Why else would Momma be calling me unless something awful’s happened to Sammi June?

Numb with foreboding, she let Joy Lynn haul her to a table next to a heavily textured wall that was painted dark green with spiderwebs of white plaster showing through. Her sister tugged a chair out with a thump, pushed Jessie down on it, then wedged herself into the one opposite. “Okay, she’s sittin’ down,” she said into the phone, breathless and pink in the cheeks. She went silent, listening. Then breathed, “Oh, my Lord.”

Something’s happened to Sammi June, was the only thought in Jessie’s head. She had begun to tremble uncontrollably. Panic washed over her; she couldn’t breathe. No. I can’t bear it. I can’t. I can’t.

She’d felt like this only one other time in her life. That day came back to her so vividly now…Dan Rather’s voice on the television, the screech of the screen door…her mother saying, “Jessie, you need to come in here.” The crunch of tires on gravel, the dark-blue sedan, and two tall men coming toward her across a polka-dot lawn. The way the world had gone silent. The way she’d held out her hands to keep those men from coming on up the steps, the same way she was holding out her hands right now, as if she could push away that phone Joy Lynn was trying to give to her. As if by keeping it away she could keep herself from ever having to hear the words Momma was about to say to her. As if by not hearing them she could make them not be true.

“Sammi June—” The words burst from her, exploding like a sneeze past the icy fear, the trembling.

“No, hon’, it’s not Sammi June.” Joy Lynn’s voice was gentle, and so was her hand as she took Jessie’s and held on to it. Her fingers felt warm, wrapped around Jessie’s icy ones. “Sammi June’s fine. Everybody’s just fine.”

Then what…? Dazed, Jess could only give her head an uncomprehending shake.

“Jessie, honey, you need to take this.” Joy Lynn pressed the cell phone into Jessie’s hand and folded her stiff fingers around it. “Momma’s got somethin’ to tell you. It’s okay,” she added when Jessie just went on looking at her, dumb and frozen with anguish. Trying her best to smile though there were tears in her eyes, she said, “It’s okay, I promise.”

Drained and shell-shocked, still trembling, Jessie lifted the phone to her ear. “Momma? What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, honey.” But Momma’s voice sounded way too calm, the way it only did when she was about to deliver some painful news. It had sounded like that, Jessie remembered, when she’d told Sammi June and J.J. the old hounddog, General, had been bitten by a copperhead and had to be put to sleep. “But…this is gonna be hard to hear.”