Taking Cover

Kathleen stood silhouetted in the doorway.

His chair thudded to the barroom floor in a teeth-jarring landing. No flight suit for her tonight. She’d changed.

Man, how she’d changed.

Leather pants molded themselves to her every curve. They sealed over her trimly muscled calves, up her thighs, to cup that bottom he’d been trying not to watch all day. Her hair flowed in a fiery curtain around her face, brushing the collar of her satin shirt. Scorching his eyes from across the smoky room.

She leaned over the bar to place her drink order. Her blouse inched up, baring a thin stripe of skin along her back.

Twelve years.

Twelve years hadn’t dimmed the memory of how soft, how warm, that skin had felt beneath his hands….

Taking Cover

Catherine Mann

CATHERINE MANN

began her career writing romance at twelve and recently uncovered that first effort while cleaning out her grandmother’s garage. After working for a small-town newspaper, teaching on the university level and serving as a theater school director, she has returned to her original dream of writing romance. Now an award-winning author, Catherine is especially pleased to add a nomination for the prestigious Maggie to her contest credits. Following her air force aviator husband around the United States with four children and a beagle in tow gives Catherine a wealth of experience from which to draw her plots. Catherine invites you to learn more about her work by visiting her Web site: http://catherinemann.com.

Endless thanks to my editor, Melissa Jeglinski, and my agent, Barbara Collins Rosenberg.

Contents

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

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Epilogue

Chapter 1

Captain Tanner “Bronco” Bennett gripped the cargo plane’s stick and flew through hell, the underworld having risen to fire the night sky.

“Anything. Anywhere. Anytime,” he chanted the combat mantra through locked teeth.

His C-17 squadron motto had gone into overtime today.

Neon-green tracer rounds arced over the jet’s nose. Sweat sealed Tanner’s helmet to his head. Adrenaline burned over him with more heat than any missile. He plowed ahead, chanted. Prayed.

Antiaircraft fire exploded into puffs of black smoke that momentarily masked the moon. The haze dispersed, leaving lethal flak glinting in the inky air. Shrapnel sprinkled the plane, tink, tink, tinking like hail on a tin roof.

Still, he flew, making no move for evasion or defense.

“Steady. Steady.” He held his unwavering course, had to until the last paratrooper egressed out of the C-17 into the Eastern European forest below.

Off-loading those troopers into the drop zone was critical. Once they secured the nearby Sentavo airfield, supplies could be flown into the wartorn country by morning. Starving villagers burned out of their homes by renegade rebels needed relief. Now. The scattered uprisings of the prior summer had heated into an all-out civil war as the year’s end approached.

Anything. Anywhere. Anytime. Tanner embraced it as more than a squadron motto. Those villagers might be just a mass of faceless humanity to other pilots, but to him each scared, hungry refugee had the same face—the face of his sister.

A flaming ball whipped past his windscreen.

Reality intruded explosively a few feet away. Near miss. Closer than the last. Time to haul out.

“Tag—” Tanner called over the headset to the loadmaster “—step it up back there. We gotta maneuver out of this crap. In case you haven’t noticed, old man, they’re shooting at us.”

“Got it, Bronco,” the loadmaster growled. “Our guys are piling out of this flying coffin as fast as they can.”

“Start pushing. Just get ’em the hell off my airplane so we can maneuver.” Urgency pulsed through Tanner, buzzed through the cockpit.

His hand clenched around the stick. No steering yoke for this new sleek cargo plane. And it damned well needed to perform up to its state of the art standards today.

He darted a glance at the sweat-soaked aircraft commander beside him. “Hey, Lancelot, how’s it look left? Is there a way out on your side?”

Major Lance “Lancelot” Sinclair twisted in his seat toward the window, then pivoted back. A foreboding scowl creased the perspiration filming his too-perfect features. “Bronco, my man, we can’t go left. It’s a wall of flames. What’s it like on your side?”

Tanner leaned forward, peering at the stars beyond the side window for a hole in the sparking bursts. Bad. But not impossible. “Fairly clear over here. Scattered fire. Isolated pockets I can see to weave through.”

“Roger that, you’ve got the jet.”

“Roger, I have the jet.” He gave the stick a barely perceptible shake to indicate his control of the aircraft. Not that he’d ever lost control. Lance hadn’t been up to speed for weeks, a fact that left Tanner more often than not running the missions, regardless of his copilot status. “Tag, waiting for your all-clear call.”

“You got it, big guy.” Tag’s voice crackled over the headset. “Everybody’s off. The door’s closing…. Clear to turn.”

Anticipation cranked Tanner’s adrenaline up another notch. “Hold on to your flight pay, boys, we’re breaking right.”

He yanked the stick, simultaneously ramming the rudder pedal with his boot. The aircraft banked, hard and fast.

Gravity punched him. G-forces anchored him to his seat, pulled, strained, as he threaded the lumbering aircraft through exploding volleys in the starlit sky.

Pull back, adjust, weave right. Almost there.

A familiar numbing sensation melted down his back like an ice cube. Ignore it. Focus and fly.

Debris rattled, sliding sideways. His checklist thunked to the floor. Lance’s cookies, airmailed from his wife, skittered across the glowing control panel. Tanner dipped the nose, embers streaming past outside.

The chilling tingle in his back detonated into white-hot pain. His torso screamed for release from the five-point harness. The vise-like constraints had never been adequate to accommodate his height or bulk. Who would have thought a simple pinched nerve just below his shoulder could bring him down faster than a missile?

Doc O’Connell had even grounded him for it once before. He knew she would again in a heartbeat. If he let her.

Which he wouldn’t.

Tanner pulled a sharp turn left. The plane howled past a shower of light. He hurt like hell, but considered it a small price to pay. By tomorrow night, women and children would be fed because of his efforts, and he liked to think that was a worthwhile reason to risk his life.

Yeah, saving babies was a damn fine motivator for going to work every day. No way was he watching from the sidelines.

He accepted that none of it would bring his sister back. But each life saved, each wrong righted, soothed balm over a raw wound he knew would never completely heal.

Tanner’s hand twitched on the stick, and he jerked his thoughts back to the cockpit. He couldn’t think of his sister now. Distractions in combat were deadly.

He reined his thoughts in tight, instincts and training offering him forgetfulness until he flew out over the Adriatic Sea.

“Feet wet, crew.” Tanner announced their position over the water. “We’re in the clear all the way to land in Germany.”

He relaxed his grip on the stick, the rest of his body following suit. The blanket of adrenaline fell away, unveiling a pain ready to knife him with clean precision. Tanner swallowed back bile. “Take the jet, Lance.”

“Bronco, you okay?”

“Take the jet,” he barked. Fresh beads of sweat traced along his helmet.

Lance waggled the stick. “Roger, I have the aircraft.”

Tanner’s hand fell into his lap, his arm throbbing, nearly useless. He clicked through his options. He couldn’t avoid seeing a flight surgeon after they landed. But if he waited until morning and locked in an appointment with his pal Cutter, he would be fine. Doc Grayson “Cutter” Clark understood flyers.

No way was Tanner letting Dr. Kathleen O’Connell get her hands on him again—

He halted the thought in midair. Her hands on him? That was definitely an image he didn’t need.

Keep it PC, bud. Remember those soft hands are attached to a professional woman and a damned sharp officer.

All presented in a petite package with an iron will that matched her fiery red hair.

Forget reining in those thoughts. Tanner dumped them from his mind like an off-loaded trooper.

Lance pressed the radio call button on the throttle. “Control, this is COHO two zero. Negative known damage. Thirty point zero of gas. Requesting a flight surgeon to meet us when we land.”

“What the—” Tanner whipped sideways, wrenching up short as a spasm knocked him back in his seat. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Calling for a flight surgeon to meet us on the ground.”

In front of the crew? Tanner winced. “No need, Lance. I’ll be fine until I can get to the clinic.”

“Yeah, right.” Lance swiped his arm across his damp brow as he flew. “I’ve seen you like this before. You’ll be lucky to walk once we land. You need a flight surgeon waiting, man. I’m not backing off the call.”

“Listen, Lance—” Tanner wanted to argue, fully intended to bluster through, but the spasm kinked like an overwound child’s toy ready to snap.

He couldn’t afford to be grounded from flying again, not now. He only had six weeks left until he returned to the states to begin his rescheduled upgrade from copilot to aircraft commander. Not only could he lose his slot, but he would also lose six weeks of flying time, of making a difference.

Why the hell couldn’t he and O’Connell have pulled different rotations, leaving her back at Charleston Air Force Base with her perfectly annotated regulation book and haughty cat eyes?

The strain of ignoring the stabbing ache drizzled perspiration down Tanner’s spine, plastering his flight suit to his skin. Options dwindled with each pang.

“Fine.” Tanner bit out the word through his clenched teeth. What a time for Lance to resume control. “Just have them find Cutter to meet us. He’ll give me a break.”

Not like Doc O’Connell. She probably hadn’t colored outside the lines since kindergarten.

“And, Lance, tell Cutter to keep it low-key. Would ya? No big show.” Rules be damned, he wasn’t going to end a combat mission publicly whining about a backache. Cutter would understand. Tanner was counting on it.

If by-the-book O’Connell ran the show, he would be flying a desk by sunrise.

Waiting on the tarmac, Captain Kathleen O’Connell braced her boot on the ambulance bumper and tugged down the leg of her flight suit. Lights blinked in the distant night sky, announcing the approaching aircraft carrying her patient. Time to report for duty.

Snow glistened as it drifted past the stadium-style lights casting a bubble of illumination over the airfield. She shivered inside her leather jacket and longed for her sunny Charleston town house rather than the American airfield in Germany. White Christmases were highly overrated.

Of course, the holiday season hadn’t held much allure for her since her divorce.

Thank God she had her job. She loved working flight medicine, but dreaded calls like this one. Familiar with Captain Bennett’s medical and personal history, she knew what to expect.

The tussle of a lifetime was only a short taxi away.

Why couldn’t he understand her job required keeping flyers healthy for future missions? Her mission demanded more than simply slapping a Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound so some jet jock could finish out the day with his ego intact.

Flyer egos.

Those required more technique in handling than a vasectomy in a cold room.

Maybe if she’d mastered the art of navigating aviator psyches earlier, her marriage might have lasted. Logic told her otherwise. Dual military careers were hell on even the most compatible of couples. She and Andrew hadn’t stood a chance.

At least her parents had restrained themselves from spouting a litany of I-told-you-so. No big family secret, she sucked at relationships. Had from the cradle. Give her a textbook anyday. The dependability of science, rules, regimen offered her a lifelong security blanket against being hurt, and she was smart enough never to bare herself to anyone again.

Snowflakes caught and lingered on her eyelashes while she watched the jet circle then land. As the cargo plane taxied closer, battle damage revealed itself. Runway lights glared on half-dollar-size chinks and dings under the wings and along the tail. Like the edges of a twisted soda can, the ragged metal gaped.

Kathleen shuddered inside her jacket. She knew it was rare for larger combat planes to land without holes. That didn’t lessen horrific images of the wreckage that one better-aimed scrap of flak could cause.

The C-17 taxied to a stop, parking beside a line of other planes, engines whining, silencing. Wind howled from the rolling hills, stirring a mist of snow from the evergreen forest surrounding the flight line.

With trained precision, crew chiefs swarmed the plane. A refueling truck squealed to halt. BDR—Battle Damage Repair—began their assessment and patching. All joined to prep the plane for its next mission while she patched the flyers.

The side hatch swung open, and Major Lance Sinclair bounded down the stairs to wait by the rail. Kathleen squinted, searching for her patient. What kind of shape would he be in? Did he need a stretcher?

The jet’s doorway filled, sealing closed with a body as Tanner Bennett eased into view. Halogen lights glinted off his golden-blond hair, shadowed the bold lines of his bronzed jaw, his square chin and a twice-broken nose that somehow added a boyish appeal. He ducked and angled sideways to clear the hatch, had to for his leather clad shoulders to fit. Slowly he tackled the steps, his gloved hand gripping the rail for support.

Her breath hitched, a glacial gasp of air freezing a path to her lungs. At the oddest times his incredible size caught her unaware. She knew his vitals. Six feet five inches. Honed 238 pounds. Good cholesterol and blood pressure as of his last physical recorded in his chart stowed inside the ambulance.

Chart stats didn’t come close to capturing the magnetism of the man.

He hadn’t lost one bit of his brawny charm that had so enchanted fans during his four years on the Air Force Academy football team. Then when he’d chosen service to country over a seven-figure NFL income with the Broncos—Even she had to admire him for that.

Not that it would garner him special treatment from her.

Kathleen inhaled a deeper breath of chilly air to banish a warm hum in her stomach that she wanted to attribute to sleep deprivation and too much coffee.

Tanner shuffled over to her, pain etched in the corners of his eyes, skin pulling tight around his bumpy nose. “Hey, Doc, what are you doing out so late?”

Sympathy pinched her right on her Hippocratic Oath. Poor guy had to be in agony. Of course, experience told her he wouldn’t admit it.

She pushed away from the ambulance and pulled herself upright, still no more than eye level with his chest. Strands of hair blew across her face, making Kathleen wish she’d had the time for her more professional braid. She tipped her face up and met Tanner’s sapphire eyes dead-on. “I’m taking care of flyers who won’t take care of themselves.”

He turned to look back at the plane, the twist stopping midway when he grimaced. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, instead. “Is somebody hurt in there and I missed it?”

Yeah, she had a tough one on her hands tonight. “Your wit has me in stitches.”

“I can tell.”

“Trust me, hotshot, I’m laughing. Just not with you.”

Getting him into the ambulance wouldn’t be an easy sell. The man was as stubborn as he’d been at the Academy his freshman year, making her junior year as his training officer a challenge from start to finish. Twelve years hadn’t changed them, only their jobs.

He began to turn. “Well, then, time for me to go—”

“Legal point of reference, my good Captain. Your body belongs to the United States Air Force. If you mistreat it, say you get sunburned—” a frigid gust of wind mocked her example, whipping her hair across her face “—if you can’t perform your duties because of that recklessness, that’s abuse of government property and grounds for a court martial.”

“Geez, Doc. Do you keep the Uniform Code of Military Justice in your bathroom?”

“I happen to have a UCMJ travel edition right here.” She patted her zippered thigh pocket over her wallet and comb. “They issued them to all the good officers. Didn’t you get yours?”

“I was probably stuck waiting in sick call that day.” He raised his hand with a barely disguised wince and flicked aside her strand of hair.

At his touch against her cheek, his eyes widened, then narrowed, colliding with hers. Her face warmed with the curse of a redhead’s blush, her skin firing even hotter on the exact spot his gloved fingers lingered. They’d never touched in any way except professionally since that one moment at the Academy….

His arm dropped to his side, and she exhaled a proverbial storm cloud into the cold air.

Kathleen backed up but not off. “Okay, hotshot, let’s cut the chitchat. I’m cold and I’m tired. I’ve got rounds at six and sick call at seven. If I’m lucky, I’ll manage three hours of sleep tonight. Let’s get you into the ambulance and evaluated.”

Tanner shifted right then left as if trying to look around the snow-dusted tarmac without turning. “Uh, where’s Cutter?”

Kathleen bristled even though she wasn’t in the least surprised. Tanner Bennett had been dodging appointments with her since she’d been stationed in Charleston a year ago. She wanted to attribute it to narrow-mindedness on his part about being treated by a female doctor, but she couldn’t. He never objected to seeing the other female flight surgeon when Cutter wasn’t available.

Only her. “Cutter’s not on call. You’ll have to make do with me. Now step up, and let’s take a look at that back.”

Ready to end the whole awkward incident, she reached to brace a hand between his shoulder blades. His muscles contracted beneath her fingers into a sheet of pure metal beneath leather.

He lurched away, flinched, then stared at her hand as if it were a torture device rather than an instrument for healing. Stepping aside, she gestured forward for him to precede her into the ambulance.

Tanner looked from her to the ambulance and back again. His eyes glittered like blue ice chips. “Not a chance.”

“Pardon me?”

He skated a glance toward the crew bus where Lancelot and Tag waited, then ducked his head toward her. “No way.” Tanner’s voice filled the space between them with a low rumble. “I’m not climbing up there in front of everyone.”

Each word puffed white to swirl between them, caressing their faces, linking them in an intimate haze.

Making her mad as hell.

“Am I supposed to pitch a tent in the middle of the tarmac and examine you out here? Or maybe you can haul yourself back inside the plane.” She jabbed the space between them for emphasis—and to disperse those damned distracting breathy clouds. “Zip your ego in your helmet bag, hotshot, and use your brain. You need to be in the hospital, not standing out here freezing your boots off arguing with me.”

He blanched. “The hospital?”

“If this is anything like last time—”

“Sorry, Doc. Not gonna happen.” He pivoted slowly on his boot heels and lumbered toward his aircraft commander. “Hold on, Lance. I’m outa here.”

Kathleen hooked her hands on her hips, a quiet rage simmering. “Bennett.”

He ignored her.

Forget simmer, she was seething. “Bennett!”

Tanner held his right hand up and kept walking, if his shuffle-swagger could be called that. Frustration fired within her until she could almost feel the snowflakes steaming off her. Of all the thick-headed, arrogant stunts he’d—

Reluctant remorse encroached on her anger as she watched him struggle to board the bus.

But what could she do? She couldn’t force him to seek treatment if he wouldn’t admit to a problem. If she were a gambler, she would bet he hadn’t even been the one to place the call for a flight surgeon in the first place.

Not that she was one to waste her money, time or energy on chance. Logic served better.

And more faithfully.

Kathleen clambered back inside the ambulance, her exasperation over his senseless testosterone dance igniting again. Logic told her Tanner Bennett wouldn’t be able to roll out of bed by morning, and she was the flight surgeon on call until noon.

She slammed the ambulance door shut. Hard. With any luck the big lug would oversleep and someone else could treat his wounded back and tender ego.

Too late, Kathleen recalled she’d never believed in luck any more than chance.

Chapter 2

Two hundred twenty-three. Two hundred twenty-four.

Tanner counted the tan cinderblocks in the wall for the eleventh time that morning. Not much else to do since he couldn’t move. His reach for the telephone fifteen minutes ago had left him cursing—and shaking.

He cut his gaze toward the clock, not risking more than half a head turn.

The time—8:30 a.m.—glowed from the clock in the dim room, the only other light slanting through a slight part in the curtains.

He sure hoped Cutter had gone on call at eight.

After waking and realizing he couldn’t haul his sorry butt out of bed, Tanner had shouted for Lance in the next VOQ—Visiting Officer’s Quarter. Their rooms, connected by a bath, were close enough that Lance would have heard had he been around. No luck. The telephone call to the clinic had been a last-ditch resort.

Where was Cutter? Didn’t the guy ever check his messages?

Tanner hiked the polyester bedspread over his bare chest. Even the small movement hurt like a son of a gun. How long before it let up? Lying around left him with too much time to think. He preferred action, needed to be back out on the flight line.

The flight line.

Images of Kathleen O’Connell looking mad enough to chew rivets blindsided Tanner when he didn’t have any chance or the physical capability of ducking.

Had he actually touched her?

Awash in postbattle adrenaline, he’d found her fire stirred his, as well. With a will of its own, his hand had swiped that silky strand of hair away from her face.

Surely the impulse was only combat aftermath, emotions running high. He didn’t think of her that way.

But he had before.

Tanner’s head dug back in his pillow as if he might somehow dodge memories he couldn’t suppress. His first day at the Air Force Academy, he’d seen Kathleen walking across the parade ground, vibrant, toned and radiating a confidence that had found an answer within him. Every hormone in his eighteen-year-old body had roared to life.

Until he’d noticed she wore a beret with her uniform, the distinguishing symbol of an upperclassman.