In the Weeds Read online

  Note to self: never underestimate Dilya.

  Ivy unleashed one of those million-watt smiles on him.

  Note to self: never underestimate Ivy either.

  He wanted to continue their conversation from the hotel lobby, but not with Dilya there.

  “Aren’t you going to at least talk to her?” Dilya was now eyeing him curiously.

  “Yeah,” Ivy said, sounding far more casual than her usual Marine Corps self. “Aren’t you gonna talk to me?”

  “About what? The startling way your eye color seems to shift with your mood? The way your hair catches the sunlight, even when there isn’t any? Or, there are other things I could point out.”

  Ivy actually blushed, so maybe it was a good track to pursue later…in private.

  “Duh! Tell her what you like best about her. That’s what girls want to hear.”

  “What I like best about her?”

  Dilya nodded.

  Ivy set her jaw and glared at him, but the color was still bright on her fair cheeks.

  “What I like best about you.” There were a surprising number of things to like about Ivy Hanson. But best? “Your absolute and complete determination that you can make the world a better place through sheer force of will. I know it changed my life for the better.”

  Dilya must have been keeping an eye on Ivy, because she punched him in the arm with a job-well-done gesture.

  “Your life?”

  “I told you. Would never have amounted to much if it wasn’t for you. You made being determined look like it was fun. I’ve never been a particularly driven guy, I know that about myself. But you’ve made me want to be a better one and I’ve tried. You kind of lent credence to the old nickname: Saint Ives, the patron saint of Colby Thompson, the sad sack.”

  That’s the moment that Ivy finally shed the last of her “Old Colby” bias. She could feel it sloughing off and falling out of the helicopter just as she’d considered disposing of Colby’s body yesterday over the Maryland countryside.

  Colby embodied the better man. He still wasn’t driven, displaying none of that edge that she knew cut other people away from her side. But he was steady as a rock. Was he also as loyal as his dog? It actually wouldn’t surprise her if he was.

  And he’d done it because of her? No. Erase the question mark. He had changed himself because of her.

  “I’m not anything special. I’m…”

  But Colby was shaking his head and offering her a smile that she remembered from the bedroom this morning. No, from that very first moment on the South Lawn when she’d turned around and almost fallen over Rex. She hadn’t recognized it at the time, but it had reflected a genuine pleasure at seeing her. Despite the teasing, the banter, the fumbling, and even the stupid comments each time he became uncomfortable—he looked at her as if she was a joy to be with.

  She definitely wasn’t a joy. There had been plenty of grunts under her command who had made that clear. Their opinions were solidly backed up by the abort-style exit strategies of her past lovers. She earned respect. She earned obedience. She rarely earned pleasure at her presence.

  Ivy the Marine didn’t go away around Colby, but it also wasn’t the part of her that he saw. And that scared the crap out of her.

  Yes, a Marine never showed fear, never ran from a fight. But this handsome, patient man from her past who had somehow metamorphosed into her present made her want to launch her heart right at him.

  Just because the President hadn’t ridden in the HMX-1 helicopters didn’t mean that they were put away on their return to Cape Canaveral. They would remain parked by the C-5 Galaxy, available on a moment’s notice until the President was safely back aboard Air Force One. That had meant that he and Ivy were free to go and watch the launch.

  Well, moderately free. Harvey Lieber didn’t believe in letting assets sit idle any more than Captain Baxter had.

  The public would also be at this launch, so Rex and Colby moved into the crowds ahead of the President along with Malcolm and Jim from the Motorcade.

  Ivy trailed along in the wide wake that Rex cut through the crowd. But she was enjoying herself hugely. It felt an awful lot like the way she used to tag after him and Reggie so long ago. She gawked like that little kid as they walked through the dramatically lit Rocket Garden.

  “Look! Look! Look!” She tried to point in every direction at once. “Both of the Mercury rockets—the Redstone and the Atlas—Gemini, Juno, Titan.” She named each like it was her favorite pet ever. “Look at them all standing on their tail fins as if they were still ready to leap into space right now.” She slapped her hands together sharply enough to startle Rex, then slashed one skyward as if she could take off like Superman. Or Superwoman.

  When they reached the Apollo/Saturn V Center, she practically swooned, sighing like a movie heroine in love. That rocket was so big they had laid it down in a cradle rather than erecting it vertically like the others. And still it dwarfed them. She was right, it was incredible.

  “This is when they knew how to dream,” Ivy told him. “The shuttle was a delivery van compared to these racing cars. Nixon made us give up space.”

  “No, he authorized the shuttle. That’s what got us to orbit.”

  “Trust me, Colby. The day we began work on the space shuttle was the day we gave up on reaching the planets. Nixon invested an extra hundred billion—a one-third increase—in 1968 alone into the defense budget to destroy Southeast Asia. At the same time, in just six years, he cut NASA’s budget from six billion (which was already the lowest in four years) to three. We were supposed to be on Mars in 1986. I could have gone there if—”

  She bit it off hard, looking sour and angry. Like everything else, she took this completely to heart as a personal affront.

  He took his attention off Rex long enough to wrap an arm around her shoulder. She leaned into him for a moment as if seeking comfort. He liked that. He liked learning that Saint Ives did have a vulnerability and was even willing to share it with him, however briefly.

  He couldn’t think of what to say as they made their way to the NASA control room, called a Firing Room.

  “Well, they’re dreaming again, Saint Ives.”

  She nodded as fiercely as Dilya sometimes did. Then she gazed longingly with puppy-dog eyes out toward where the rocket would launch later tonight. Why couldn’t she see that in herself? This was obviously where she belonged. All the echoing silence of the distant runway was vibrantly alive here at Kennedy Space Center, especially in this pre-launch moment.

  “How often do they launch here, Ivy?”

  “Every twelve days globally. They’re expecting growth to one every two days this year or next. A third of that is US, probably growing to half. Most of that from right here,” she sounded dreamy. Then blinked at him in surprise.

  “That sounds like a lot of launches.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” And for the first time since they’d rushed out of bed this morning, that smile was back. That smile of hope and what was possible.

  They’d arrived in the glass-walled room where the President was the guest of the NASA management team. The floodlights out at the launch pad three miles away shone like a star in the Florida night. He led Ivy over to a corner where they’d still have a view.

  “Secret Service trick to being invisible,” he whispered to her, “be exactly where everyone expects you to be.”

  “But not anywhere that they’d normally look,” Dilya said as she and Zackie slipped up by Ivy’s elbow.

  Ivy looped an arm through Dilya’s as they both leaned back against the wall, well out of the common sightlines.

  They were raptly watching the goings-on.

  To their left through an interior wall of glass window, long rows of computer stations were manned by serious, focused personnel. On their level, raised enough to look down over the entire floor, was the primary row of control stations. There were only six seats at the station and the launch director striding back and forth, hovering over thei
r shoulders.

  At either end of the upper platform were a pair of glassed-in rooms. On the far side, the Operations Support Team were the top-tier of decision makers. Ivy whispered that they were the senior flight and manufacturing personnel who would give the Launch Director the final go/no go. They themselves were in a similar glass box with all of the officials.

  “Nobody in this area has any say-so, but they’re too important to shut out.” And indeed, the NASA Administrator and his deputy sat to either side of the President while others hovered as nearby as they dared.

  Harvey Lieber, far from being inconspicuous, stood in the center of the only doorway into the room. Nobody was getting near the President without going through Harvey first.

  It was a real problem here. NASA security was like an itch he couldn’t scratch. They were an independent agency, but they needed a serious lesson. Colby figured that even without his badge, he could have entered this room given only minimal planning and a minor dose of razzle-dazzle. Security was still based in old-fashioned metal detector thinking. The White House had a multi-layered defense system far beyond most buildings, but—despite being the center of the American space program—this site was little more secure than a post office. Those guys at least had a healthy paranoia about how unpredictable civilians could be. NASA seemed to think that if you were dressed like an engineer, then you must belong.

  If not for Rex and Malcolm, who was also on patrol, he could have walked in with an entire knapsack of Semtex and taken out whole sections of the complex. They’d blocked all of the obvious routes and methods, but the Secret Service had plugged those decades ago. The kind of attacks the Service planned against could breeze in here on a tourist pass.

  So Colby kept a careful eye in the one direction that Harvey couldn’t see without fully turning around. Harvey spotted that and gave him an infinitesimal nod of acknowledgement. Which, in the grand scheme, wasn’t bad. It was more than Captain Baxter had typically offered.

  The closer the launch came, the lower the numbers rolled on the countdown, the harder it was to not watch Ivy and Dilya rather than Harvey’s back.

  The brilliantly blonde Marine Corps major was the same height as the dark teen, but they could almost be mother and daughter with how greedily they both watched the monitors and the small star of light that was the distant launchpad.

  Mother and daughter.

  Imagining Ivy with her own mother only evoked images of how alike the two women were. Ivy’s coloring had come from her father the chef, but her small build and attitude had come straight from her Marine Corps mother.

  Watching Ivy with Dilya made it easy to imagine Ivy with a precocious daughter of her own. Of their own? Was that the image in his head? Despite her mother’s decades of service and his own mother’s constant tales of high-profile divorce, both of their parents’ marriages had been very stable through the years.

  Relationships that grew too deep were his excuse to find fresh pastures. But Ivy, who felt like the freshest ground of all, also dated back to his first memory. What was up with that?

  The clock was finally released from the final planned hold at nine minutes. The other glass cubicle, filled with its specialists, must have given approval for the launch. The excitement grew palpably as single-digit minutes became double-digit seconds and ultimately they turned single-digit as well.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  At zero, the star of nighttime floodlights was suddenly overwhelmed by the brilliant glare of the rocket. The clock reversed.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  On four, the tiny rocket balanced atop the huge ball of light climbed impossibly slowly out of its own steam cloud. But climb clear it did, clawing aloft until it seemed to find its gait, then it roared aloft.

  But it wasn’t the rocket’s glare that captured his imagination. It was the fire’s glow on Ivy’s shining face as she tracked it upward with her whole being.

  Somewhere in the background, the announcer declared they were five-by-five and continuing on profile. All good to go. Cheers broke out around the room. The NASA administrator and the President were trading solid handshakes of congratulations.

  And Ivy stared aloft with tears streaming unwiped down her cheeks and a smile bigger than all of space lighting her features.

  He liked his life just fine, but he’d never felt the way she looked. No woman, anywhere, had ever looked that happy.

  He’d thought Ivy was done with changing his world, but he’d been wrong. He wanted to be a part of that joy so badly it almost hurt.

  12

  Ivy wasn’t used to waking in a man’s arms, but she could get used to it quickly if it kept feeling like this. And despite its newness, she felt instant awareness about the identity of the man holding her. Perhaps it was because of the massive dog lying by her feet like the world’s best foot warmer, but she didn’t think so. She leaned into Colby’s smell, so unchanged from when they were younger yet completely different.

  In their youth, he’d sometimes carry her piggyback, at least until she’d started tickling him whenever he did—she hadn’t been able to resist. He’d reluctantly agreed to be her sparring partner when she needed to practice a judo move, at least until she’d misjudged a grapple and throw, bloodying his nose so badly that it had taken hours to fully stop.

  Breathing him in now, he smelled like home. As familiar and safe as her childhood room.

  Safety.

  Colby Thompson?

  That part of him wasn’t completely new, but most of it was. It was like the transition from a Bell TH-57 trainer (the 206 to civilians) to the majesty and power of the MV-22B Osprey. It was bigger than the transition from a solo Mercury rocket barely reaching low Earth orbit to an Atlas V moon rocket. Younger Colby and the man presently sleeping with his arms still wrapped around her couldn’t be more different. He was the Falcon Heavy rocket, the biggest rocket since the Saturn back in the 1960s.

  She’d been emotionally exhausted after the long day and the launch. Riding back to the C-5 Galaxy within the President’s Motorcade, the President and Dilya were quickly airborne and headed back to DC on Air Force One. It was midnight when they began breaking down and loading the helos. Three a.m. before they unloaded at Andrews Air Force Base back in DC. At four a.m., they’d crawled into Colby’s bed. She had no real memory of her arrival here. Up the stairs, through a darkened room, shed clothes, and pass out curled up in his arms.

  Now, she was awake, realizing how spontaneously she had gotten where she lay and feeling a bit wanton. She hadn’t even asked, but then again, neither had he. She’d simply climbed into the taxi with him and ridden back to his place.

  This wasn’t confusing enough, let’s go back to bed together because the sex was better than having a warp drive in her own personal starship.

  Real deep, Ivy.

  Who needed deep when it felt and smelled this good?

  She snuggled back in and let the exhaustion take her back under.

  He’d felt her wake up, but hadn’t said anything at first. And then when she didn’t, it finally became so awkward that he wasn’t sure what to say so had kept his mouth shut.

  Colby had spent the entire night in uncharted territory. Rex hadn’t tested it for safety with his nose, wasn’t even trained to help him detect potential hazards and traps. Colby was out here on his own, stumbling into pitfalls and triggering explosions all on his own.

  In the middle of the night, Rex had snuck up onto the bed, and Colby couldn’t figure out how to stop him without waking Ivy. Now, his feet were numb and tingling below where Rex lay across them. They had so little blood flow that they could probably be amputated without him even noticing, until Rex moved and the nerves all came roaring back to life.

  That’s what Ivy had done to him. She made it feel as if he was roaring back to life—a life he’d never known he was missing in the first place. And it hurt!

  He’d named the uncharte
d territory somewhere around dawn. It was the land of the What If in the future possible lives of one Colby Thompson. Definitely not a place he’d ever been before. Thinking ahead wasn’t a major pastime for him or Rex. He liked that about his dog: they were both very present-tense sort of guys.

  Ivy was anything but that.

  What if Ivy wanted more than a fast fling for old times’ sake? But there was no “old times’ sake” between them for that to happen. She wasn’t some sexy, ex-girlfriend looking for a one-night revisit to old triumphs. She was… He didn’t know. So he’d continued the game as its sole and unwilling player.

  What if she didn’t want more than a fast fling? That didn’t sound like as much fun as it usually did.

  What if it became more? What if they both let that happen, then she left the Marine Corps to pursue a job in space? She’d end up in Cape Kennedy or Houston, or, God help him, maybe she would walk on the surface of Mars someday. Meanwhile, what would Colby be doing?

  Walking the South Lawn.

  Rex still had a couple good years in him if everything went well. But eventually Rex would be retired. And then one day his pal would go to sleep and never wake up…not a prospect Colby could even face.

  When had he become emotionally dependent on a dog? Attached? Sure. He loved the furry beast. But to have Rex as the deepest emotional relationship of his life sounded pretty lame.

  And he was flung back into the land of what if. What if this fling-that-didn’t-feel-like-a-fling turned into more than a fling? What then? He and Ivy?

  Reggie would kill him, that was a given.

  Their moms would probably be thrilled. Their dads…well, they’d be dads. They’d raise a beer and call it a job well done.

  What would Ivy do? What would he do?

  It was better not to tell anyone…especially himself. The less he knew about this, the happier he’d be. But he couldn’t seem to get there. Not with Ivy curled in his arms as if she’d never belonged anywhere else. Her hair, so light he could barely feel where it lay upon his chest and cheek, smelled of springtime and that joy that she wore like an inner skin—letting it shine through her fair outer skin whenever the mood struck her.