Full Throttle

And not above pulling rank over him. Well, that pretty much fit in with what he’d heard about Lieutenant Commander Kate Hargrave.

The sexy hurricane hunter couldn’t know it but her ex-husband had had a few things to say to Dave about the woman who’d just dumped him, none of them particularly flattering. She was, according to the still-bitter aviator, ambitious as hell, fearless in the air, a tiger in bed and a real ball-buster out of it.

Dave figured three out of four was good enough for him.

Yes, sir, he thought, as he caught a last glimpse of turquoise spandex in the mirror. This assignment was looking better and better by the minute.

Dear Reader,

Welcome to another compelling month of powerful, passionate and provocative love stories from Silhouette Desire. You asked for it…you got it…more Dynasties! Our newest continuity, DYNASTIES: THE DANFORTHS, launches this month with Barbara McCauley’s The Cinderella Scandal. Set in Savannah, Georgia, and filled with plenty of family drama and sensuality, this new twelve-book series will thrill you for the entire year.

There is one sexy air force pilot to be found between the pages of the incomparable Merline Lovelace’s Full Throttle, part of her TO PROTECT AND DEFEND series. And the fabulous Justine Davis is back in Silhouette Desire with Midnight Seduction, a fiery tale in her REDSTONE, INCORPORATED series.

If it’s a whirlwind Vegas wedding you’re looking for (and who isn’t?) then be sure to pick up the third title in Katherine Garbera’s KING OF HEARTS miniseries, Let It Ride. The fabulous TEXAS CATTLEMAN’S CLUB: THE STOLEN BABY series continues this month with Kathie DeNosky’s tale of unforgettable passion, Remembering One Wild Night. And finally, welcome new author Amy Jo Cousins to the Desire lineup with her superhot contribution, At Your Service.

I hope all of the Silhouette Desire titles this month will fulfill your every fantasy.

Melissa Jeglinski

Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

Full Throttle

Merline Lovelace

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MERLINE LOVELACE

spent twenty-three years in the air force, pulling tours in Vietnam, at the Pentagon and at bases all over the world. When she hung up her uniform, she decided to try her hand at writing. She’s since had more than fifty novels published, with over seven million copies of her work in print. She and her husband enjoy traveling and chasing little white balls around the fairways. Watch for the next book in the TO PROTECT AND DEFEND series, The Right Stuff, coming from Silhouette Intimate Moments in March 2004.

To my buds on the RomVets loop—

women who all served their country and are now

turning out great novels! Thanks for sharing your

expertise on aircraft malfunctions, explosive devices

and general all around fun stuff.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

One

Kate Hargrave was a good five miles into her morning jog when she spotted a plume of dust rising from the desert floor. Swiping at the sweat she’d worked up despite the nip September had brought to the high desert, she squinted through the shimmering New Mexico dawn at the vehicle churning up that long brown rooster tail.

A senior weather researcher with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency, Kate had logged hundreds of hours of flight time as one of NOAA’s famed Hurricane Hunters. The pilots she flew with all possessed a steady hand on the controls, nerves of steel and an unshakable belief in their ability to look death in the eye and stare it down. So when she gauged the speed of the pickup hurtling straight toward her, she had no doubt who was at its wheel.

USAF Captain Dave Scott—a seasoned test pilot with hundreds of hours in both rotary and fixed-wing aircraft. Scott had been yanked off an assignment with Special Operations to become the newest addition to the supersecret test cadre tucked away in this remote corner of southeastern New Mexico.

He was supposed to have arrived last night but had phoned Captain Westfall from somewhere along the road and indicated he’d check in first thing this morning. No explanations for the delay, or none the navy captain in charge of the supersecret Pegasus project had relayed to his crew, anyway.

That alone was enough to put a dent in Kate’s characteristically sunny good nature. She and the rest of the small, handpicked cadre had been here for weeks now. They’d been working almost around the clock to conduct final operational testing on the new all-weather, all-terrain attack-assault vehicle code-named Pegasus. The urgency of their mission had been burned into their brains from day one. That Captain Scott would delay his arrival—even by as little as eight hours of admittedly dead time—didn’t particularly sit well with Kate.

Then there was the fact that the air force had pegged Scott to replace Lieutenant Colonel Bill Thompson, the original air force representative to the project. Everyone on the team had liked and respected the easygoing and highly experienced test pilot. Unfortunately, Bill had suffered a heart attack after being infected by the vicious virus that attacked him and a number of other members of the test cadre some days ago.

Now Bill was off the Pegasus project and probably off flying status for the rest of his life. His abrupt departure had ripped a gaping hole in the tight, close team of officers and civilians plucked from all branches of the military to work on the project. Dave Scott would have to scramble to catch up with the rest of the test cadre and prove himself worthy to fill Bill Thompson’s boots.

“Sure hope you’re up to it, fella.”

With that fervent wish, Kate lengthened her stride. She’d just as soon not come face-to-face with her new associate out here in the desert. Her hair was a tangled mess and her turquoise spandex running suit sported damp patches of sweat. With luck and a little more oomph to her pace, she could veer off onto the dirt track that ringed the perimeter of the site before Scott hit the first checkpoint.

She should have known she couldn’t outrun a sky jock. The speeding pickup skidded to a stop at the checkpoint while Kate was still some distance from the perimeter trail.

The dazzling light shooting through the peaks of the Guadalupe Mountains off to the east illuminated the vehicle. The truck was battered. Dust streaked. An indeterminate color between blue and gray. She couldn’t see the driver, though. He was still too far away and the bright rays glinting off the windshield formed an impenetrable shield.

She’d get a glimpse of him soon enough, Kate guessed wryly. From the bits and pieces of background information she’d gathered about Captain Dave Scott, she knew he wasn’t the type to cruise by a female in a tight jogging suit. Or one in support hose and black oxfords, for that matter. Rumor had it Scott was the love-’em-and-leave-’em type, with a string of satisfied lovers stretching from coast to coast.

Kate knew the breed.

All too well.

So she wasn’t surprised when the pickup cleared the checkpoint, roared into gear and kicked up dust for another quarter mile or so. Scant yards from Kate, it fishtailed to a halt once more.

Dust swirled. The truck’s engine idled with a low, throaty growl. The driver’s-side window whirred down. A well-muscled forearm appeared, followed by a rugged profile. With his creased straw cowboy hat and sun-weathered features, Scott might have been one of the locals who’d adapted so well to life here in the high desert. The hat shaded the upper portion of his face. The lower portion consisted of the tip of a nose, a mouth bracketed by laugh lines and a blunt, square chin. The rolled sleeve of his white cotton shirt showed a sprinkling of hair bleached to gold by the sun. Mirrored aviator sunglasses shielded his eyes, but the grin he flashed Kate was pure sex.

“Well, well.” The drawl was deep and rich and carried clearly on the morning air. “This assignment is looking better by the moment.”

Kate had heard variations of the same line a hundred or more times in her career. Her ready smile, flaming auburn hair and generous curves had attracted the attention of every male she’d ever worked with. She’d long ago learned to separate the merely goggling from the seriously annoying and handle both with breezy competence. Edging to the side of the dirt road, she jogged toward the idling vehicle. Her voice held only dry amusement as she offered a word of advice.

“Pull in your tongue and hit the gas pedal, flyboy. Captain Westfall’s expecting you.”

His chin dipped. Eyes a clear, startling blue peered over the rim of the sunglasses and locked with hers.

“The captain can wait,” he replied. “You, on the other hand…”

He didn’t finish. Or if he did, Kate didn’t hear him.

She’d kept her gaze engaged with his a half second too long and run right off the edge of the road.

Her well-worn Nikes came down not on hard-packed dirt, but empty air. With a smothered oath, she plunged into the shallow ditch beside the road. Her right leg hit with a jar that rattled every bone in her body before going out from under her. A moment later she landed smack on her rear atop a fat, prickly tumbleweed.

So much for breezy competence!

Scott was out of the pickup almost before Kate and the tumbleweed connected. His low-heeled boots scattered rock and dirt as he scrambled into the shallow depression. When he hunkered down beside her, she expected at least a minimal expression of concern. What she got was a swift, assessing glance followed by a waggle of his sun-streaked eyebrows.

“And here I woke up this morning thinking the next few weeks were going to be all work and no play.”

Kate cocked an eyebrow. Best to set him straight right here, right now. “You thought right, Captain.”

“I don’t know about that.” Dipping his chin, he gave her another once-over. “Things are lookin’ good from where I’m squatting. Very good.”

Kate sucked in a swift breath. Behind their screen of sun-bleached lashes, his eyes were electric blue. The little white lines at their corners disappeared when he smiled, which he did with devastating effect.

Thank heavens she’d been inoculated against Scott’s brand of lazy charm and cocky self-assurance. The inoculation had been painful, sure, but once administered was supposed to last a lifetime.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t been inoculated against the effects of sharp, stinging barbs to the backside. The prickly weed had penetrated right through her spandex running tights. Now that Kate had recovered from the initial shock of her fall, she felt its sharp, stinging bite.

“How about unsquatting,” she suggested dryly, “and helping me up?”

“My pleasure.”

Rising with the careless grace of an athlete, he reached for her hand. His palm felt tough and callused against her skin, his skin warm to the touch.

Of course Kate’s blasted ankle had to give out the moment she gained her feet. With a grunt, she fell right into his conveniently waiting arms. This time he had the decency to show some concern. At least that was the excuse he gave for swooping her up.

“You must have come down hard on that ankle.”

Hefting her not-inconsiderable weight, he cradled her against his chest. His very solid, very muscled chest, Kate couldn’t help noticing.

“I’d better get you to the base.”

He was already out of the ditch and striding around the back of the pickup before she could tell him she had a more pressing problem to worry about than her ankle. She tried to think of a subtle way to inform him of her dilemma. None came immediately to mind. Sighing, she stopped him just as he opened the passenger door and prepared to deposit her inside.

“Before you plop me down on that seat, I think you should know I’m sporting a collection of needle-sharp stickers. I landed on a tumbleweed,” she added when he flashed her a startled look. “I need to remove a few unwanted thistles from my posterior.”

“Damn!” His mouth took a wicked curve. “And I was just thinking my day couldn’t get any better.”

His leer was so exaggerated, she didn’t even try to hold back her sputter of laughter. “Let’s not make this any more embarrassing than it already is. Just put me down and I’ll, er, perform an emergency extraction.”

He set her on her feet and gave her a hopeful look. “I’ll be glad to assist in the operation.”

“I can manage.”

Making no effort to hide his disappointment, he watched with unabashed interest while Kate grabbed the door handle to steady herself and twisted around. It took some contorting to reach all the thorny stickers. One by one, she flicked them off into the ditch.

“You missed one,” Scott advised as she dusted the back of her thigh. “A little lower.”

Removing the last twig, she leaned her weight on her ankle to test it. The pain was already subsiding, thank goodness. Pasting a smile on her face, she turned to her would-be rescuer.

“I’m Lieutenant Commander Kate Hargrave, by the way. I’m with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency.”

As a lieutenant commander in NOAA’s commissioned-officer corps, Kate outranked an air force captain. The fact that Scott had just watched a senior officer pluck thorns out of her bottom appeared to afford him no end of amusement. His eyes glinting between those ridiculously thick gold-tipped lashes, he introduced himself.

“Dave Scott. Airplane driver.”

To her profound disgust, Kate discovered her inoculation against handsome devils like this one wasn’t quite as effective as she’d thought. Or as permanent. Shivers danced along her skin as she gazed up at him. He was so close she could see the beginnings of a bristly gold beard. The way his cheeks creased when he smiled. The reflection of her sweat-sheened face in his mirrored glasses.

She got an up close whiff of him, too. Unlike Kate, he still carried a morning-shower scent, clean and shampooy, coated with only a faint tang of dust. No woodsy aftershave for Captain Dave Scott, she noted, then wondered why the heck she’d bothered to take such a detailed inventory.

This wasn’t smart, Kate thought as her heart thumped painfully against her ribs. Not smart at all. She’d learned the hard way not to trust too-handsome charmers like this one. If nothing else, her brief, disastrous marriage had taught her to go with her head and not her hormones where men were concerned.

Added to that was the fact that she and Scott would be working together for the next few weeks. In extremely close proximity. Despite her flamboyant looks and sensual figure, Kate was a professional to her toes. A woman didn’t acquire a long string of initials after her name and the title of senior weather research scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency without playing the game by the rules.

“Do Not Fool Around With the Hired Help” ranked right up there as rule number two. Or maybe it was three. Within the top five, anyway.

Not that Kate was thinking about fooling around with Captain Dave Scott. Just the opposite! Still, goose bumps danced along her spine as he took her elbow to assist her into the pickup’s passenger seat. Once she was comfortably ensconced, he rounded the front end of the truck and climbed behind the wheel.

“So how long have you been on-site?” he asked, putting the vehicle into gear.

“From day one.”

When his boot hit the gas pedal, Kate braced herself for the thrust. Instead of jerking forward, however, the pickup seemed to coil its legs like some powerful, predatory beast and launched into a silent run. Obviously, Scott had installed one heck of an engine inside the truck’s less-than-impressive frame.

Interesting, she thought. The captain was a whole lot like his vehicle. All coiled muscle and heart-stopping blue eyes under a battered straw cowboy hat and rumpled white shirt.

“So what’s the skinny?” he asked. “Is Pegasus ready to fly?”

Instantly, Kate’s thoughts shifted from the man beside her to the machine housed in a special hangar constructed of materials designed to resist penetration by even the most sophisticated spy satellites.

“Almost,” she replied. “Bill Thompson had his heart attack just as we were finishing ground tests.”

“I never met Thompson, but I’ve heard of him. The AF lost a damned good pilot.”

“Yes, it did. So did Pegasus. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” she warned him, “and not much time to do it.”

“No problem.”

The careless reply set Kate’s jaw. She and the rest of the cadre had been hard at it for weeks now. If Scott thought he was going to waltz in and get up to speed on the top secret project in a few hours, he had one heck of a surprise waiting for him.

Unaware that he’d just scratched her exactly the wrong way, the captain seemed more interested in Kate than the project that would soon consume him.

“I saw your career brief in the package headquarters sent as part of my orientation package. Over a thousand hours in the P-3. That’s pretty impressive.”

It was, by Kate’s standards as well as Scott’s. Only the best of the best got to fly aboard NOAA’s specially configured fleet of aircraft, including the P–3 Orion. Flying into the eye of a howling hurricane took guts, determination and a cast-iron stomach. Honesty forced Kate to add a qualifier, though.

“Not all those hours were hurricane time. Occasionally we saw blue sky.”

“I went up once with the air force’s Hurricane Hunters based at Keesler.”

Kate stiffened. Her ex-husband was assigned to the Air Force Reserve unit at Keesler Air Force Base, on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. That’s where she’d met John, during a conference that included all agencies involved in tracking and predicting the fury unleashed all too often on the Gulf by Ma Nature.

That’s also where she’d found the jerk with his tongue down the mouth of a nineteen-year-old bimbette. Kate had few fond memories of Keesler.

“So how was your flight?” she asked, shoving aside the reminder of her most serious lapse in judgment.

“Let’s just say once was enough.”

“Flying into a maelstrom of wind and rain isn’t for the faint of heart,” she agreed solemnly.

He cracked a grin at that. When he pulled his gaze from the road ahead, laughter shimmered in his blue eyes.

“No, ma’am. It surely isn’t.”

Kate didn’t reply, but she knew darn well Scott was anything but faint of heart. When the air force had identified him as Bill Thompson’s replacement, she’d activated her extensive network of friends and information sources to find out everything she could about the man. Her sources confirmed he’d packed a whole bunch of flying time into his ten years in the military.

Flying that included several hundred combat hours in both the Blackhawk helicopter and the AC–130H gunship. A highly modified version of the air force’s four-engine turboprop workhorse, the gunship provided surgically accurate firepower in support of both conventional and unconventional forces, day or night.

Kate didn’t doubt Scott had provided just that surgically accurate support during recent tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq. After Iraq, he’d been sent to the 919th Special Operations Wing at Hurlburt Field, Florida, to fly the latest addition to the air force inventory—the tilt-wing CV–22 Osprey.

Since the Osprey combined the lift characteristics of a helicopter and the long-distance flight capability of a fixed-wing aircraft, Scott’s background made him a natural choice as short-notice replacement for Bill Thompson. If—when!—Pegasus completed its operational tests, it might well replace both the C–130 and the CV–122 as the workhorse of the battlefield.

Thinking of the tense weeks ahead, Kate chewed on her lower lip and said little until they’d passed through the second checkpoint and entered the compound housing the Pegasus test complex.

The entire complex had been sited and constructed in less than two months. Unfortunately, the builders had sacrificed aesthetics to exigency. The site had all the appeal of a prison camp. Rolls of concertina wire surrounded the clump of prefabricated modular buildings and trailers, all painted a uniformly dull tan to blend in with the desert landscape. White-painted rocks marked the roads and walkways between the buildings. Aside from a few picnic tables scattered among the trailers, everything was starkly functional.

Separate modular units housed test operations, the computer-communications center and a dispensary. The security center, nicknamed Rattlesnake Ops after the leather-tough, take-no-prisoners military police guarding the site, occupied another unit. A larger unit contained a fitness center and the dining hall, which also served as movie theater and briefing room when the site’s commanding officer wanted to address the entire cadre. The hangar that housed Pegasus loomed over the rest of the structures like a big, brooding mammoth.

Personnel were assigned to the trailers, two or three to a unit. Kate and the other two women officers on-site shared one unit. Scott would bunk down with Major Russ McIver, the senior Marine Corps rep. Kate directed him to the line of modular units unofficially dubbed Officers Row.

“You probably want to change into your uniform before checking in with Captain Westfall. Your trailer is the second one on the left. Westfall’s is the unit standing by itself at the end of the row.”

“First things first,” Scott countered, pulling up at the small dispensary. “Let’s get your ankle looked at.”

“I’ll take care of that. You’d best get changed and report in.”

“Special Ops would drum me out of the brotherhood if I left a lady to hobble around on a sore ankle.”

He meant it as a joke, but his careless attitude toward his new assignment was starting to seriously annoy Kate. Her mouth thinned as he came around the front of the pickup. Sliding out of the passenger seat, she stood firmly on both feet to address him.

“I don’t think you’ve grasped the urgency of our mission. I’ll manage here, Captain. You report in to the C.O.”

Her tone left no doubt. It was an order from a superior officer to a subordinate.

Scott cocked an eyebrow. For a moment, his eyes held something altogether different from the teasing laughter he’d treated her to up to this point.

The dangerous glint was gone almost as quickly as it had come. Tipping her a two-fingered salute, he replied in an easy, if somewhat exaggerated, drawl.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Dave took care not to spin out and leave Lieutenant Commander Hargrave in a swirl of dust. His eyes on the rearview mirror, he followed her careful progress up the clinic steps.

The woman was stubborn as well as gorgeous. And not above pulling rank on him. Well, that pretty well fit with what he’d heard about her.

The sexy Hurricane Hunter couldn’t know it but her ex-husband had piloted the mission Dave had flown with the reserve unit out of Keesler. The man had had a few things to say about the wife who’d just dumped him, none of them particularly flattering. She was, according to the still-bitter aviator, ambitious as hell, fearless in the air, a tiger in bed and a real ball-breaker out of it.