Guardian of the Heart Page 3

  When he came back out, there she was outside the office—and up in the air.

  Noreen had shed her Kevlar for an Army-tan t-shirt and it clung to her in all the best ways. She perched atop a twelve-foot concrete T-wall barrier as if sitting on the narrow top of the inverted T shape was the most natural place for her to be. Her position might be Humpty-Dumpty, but her grin was pure Cheshire Cat.

  “Looking pretty damned pleased with yourself, Cap’n Luc.” Guess he was grinning too.

  “Feeling pretty damned pleased, Miss Alice.”

  She laughed at his reference to Alice in Wonderland, then with alarming lack of care, she pushed off the wall. A foot planted on the slope of the wide base changed her vertical fall into horizontal motion. He expected a dive into the dirt with a roll—instead she hit with both feet, took the landing shock all into her knees, then punched her excess momentum into a no-hand, mid-air somersault, coming to a standing stop not two feet from him.

  “Having fun impressing the shit out of me?” She was so close that he could smell her, could feel her heat despite the warmth of the summer night.

  “Always.”

  “You’re giving me trouble, Guardian.”

  “And why is that, Cap’n?”

  “Your color.”

  Noreen hammered a fist into his solar plexus—it hurt like punching the T-wall behind her.

  Xavier did little more than grunt.

  She went to storm off but Xavier grabbed her wrist. He caught her other fist while it was still in mid-flight at his jaw, clamping his hand over hers like a massive cargo net over a lone chicken from her family’s farm—it suddenly wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Whoa! That came out wrong.” He still wasn’t letting her go.

  “You’re one of those bastards who only dates white women. As if my skin isn’t good enough!” She couldn’t believe that she’d fallen for that. For two weeks he’d been playing Mr. Good Guy and it turned out he was Mr. Major Asshole.

  “I meant silver.”

  She stopped struggling against his iron grip and he let her go. He was even stronger than Big John and not half as friendly—her wrists hurt.

  He held up his hands palm out as if to show he meant no harm. As if.

  “Silver? I’m sure as hell not silver.”

  “Your metal is.”

  And she finally got it. Her first-lieutenant officer’s insignia bar was silver, he was a four-striper, sewn-patch enlisted. Relationships were a no-go between enlisted and officers per Army regs. At least in most places. Her brother’s company, 5th Battalion D Company, was a little odd on that. Her big brother had married Connie, both sergeants, and they’d continued to serve together in the same unit—unheard of. And John’s first Night Stalker commander had married another, both majors.

  But Connie’s closest friend, Kee, was a sergeant who’d married a captain while still serving. It was okay now that they were out of the military—he was consulting on military matters at the very highest levels and Kee had finally joined the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team out of Quantico—but they hadn’t been when they got married. Really unheard of.

  “And, for the record,” he glanced around, apparently making sure they hadn’t attracted an audience from inside one of the supply offices, “you’ve got about the nicest skin this boy ever saw.”

  “I was talking to you, not offering to drag you off into some dark corner for sex.”

  “Oh,” and he looked disappointed, sad puppy disappointed, which was actually cute on six-four of Night Stalker badass. “Sorry, my bad.”

  She was not thinking about sex with Xavier. Really not.

  And there was no way she’d perched up there waiting for him. Nor was she impressed that he’d looked up. Most people were two dimensional beings, looking right, left, ahead, and—if well trained—back. He’d looked up, even though she’d been dead silent and perched above all except the faintest backwash of the security lights.

  She had liked that about him.

  Now she wanted to jump back atop her T-wall and run down the line. This stretch of them continued for half a kilometer, with only person-wide gaps through the base, for blast suppression of incoming mortars. There were wider gaps for vehicles, but those were kept to a minimum. During the US occupation, Balad had been nicknamed Mortaritaville for how often al-Qaeda had shelled them. Before ISIS had been driven out of the immediate area, they’d done the same, shelling the Iraqi Air Force elements that were now here.

  Many of the barriers had been painted with unit insignia during the tenure of the Coalition Forces, now sun-faded.

  “I…” he fumbled with his rifle for a moment. “Shit! Sorry, Noreen. You’re about the most impressive lady I’ve met in or out of the service. Seriously sucks tamping down those fantasies. But you didn’t ask for them.”

  She wanted to rub it in, but he looked seriously contrite. Besides, her own motivations were suspect and she definitely didn’t want to go there.

  However, hadn’t he just confessed to having fantasies about her? They were probably guy-in-the-shower fantasies, but what if they were more than that? Her own felt like more than that. Only now did she realize that he’d been avoiding her on the ground. Fun, smart, tough-as-hell on a mission—invisible on the ground. Which was why she’d finally hunted him down. Of all things, his avoidance had piqued her interest.

  “Well,” she sighed. “If you insist on being completely honest…”

  “Not in the habit of it,” but he didn’t quite hold a straight face. “Seems like you’re a bad influence. Of course, if you insist on being completely honest…” His handsome features went all the way to grin.

  Was it so obvious on her own face that she’d been thinking about him? Her brother was gonna kick her ass if she fell for an Army grunt. She could just hear him, You’re better than that. It didn’t matter that he himself was an Army grunt and the best man she’d ever met.

  Best man. Not a chance that Xavier fell into that category. He had bad-boy past written all over him. Actually, by the light of the security lamp she could see that some of that was literal—blue ink that barely showed against his dark skin. If a person with his skin color wanted a tat to show, they’d use white ink. But if it was just for him…

  She reached out and traced a finger along the line of it, just above his wrists. Funny that she hadn’t noticed it before. His skin seemed to shiver at her touch.

  “What…” Noreen couldn’t make them out.

  “Broken shackles.”

  “You don’t seem like one of those guys wrapped up in ‘the black man’s burden’ thing.”

  Xavier huffed out a sigh. “Broken from my past.”

  “Before you were beamed into the Army.”

  “Yeah, something like that. How about you? Got any?”

  “Tats? I hate needles. Why do you think I became a medic?”

  That earned her the laugh she’d been after. Then she waited. Apparently he was willing to fantasize about her, but not talk to her about anything real like his precious past.

  “Whatever.” She took two steps, then ran straight at the wall. With a hard kick and a quick grab, she was back up on top of the barricade. She turned to walk away along the foot-wide tops when she heard a slap and grunt behind her.

  Xavier didn’t have the technique, but he’d gotten his fingers over the top edge. With his massive strength, he swung a foot up sideways and was seated astride the wall a moment later.

  “Quite the view.”

  She couldn’t read his voice without seeing his face. They were now above the main wash of the pathway lights. She glanced around. The barren, trampled dirt and battered one-story buildings of Balad Air Base stretched away in all directions except the airfield itself. Most of that view was blocked by the angular lines of tall sheet-metal hangers. The pathway lights were kept low so as not to aid mortarmen in their targeting if they started up again.

  Here, atop the wall, they were in darkness. At night it felt both freeing and safe. Th
ey were as good as invisible but it let her see a wider vista that reminded her of home.

  But she didn’t need to read his expression to tell that he was looking directly at her. If she ran, even money said that he’d follow. This wasn’t some ROTC freshman or first tour dude; Xavier was a Special Operations Aviation Regiment Night Stalker. A foot-wide path along the top of the T-walls wasn’t going to stop him any more than the twelve-foot vertical height had.

  She sighed and sat down cross-legged atop the next barrier in the line.

  “You’re beautiful,” which was not the first thing she’d meant to say, even if he was. “But you don’t talk to me, not really, so this is going nowhere.”

  Xavier rubbed his hand over his scalp and decided that he needed to shave tomorrow.

  Beautiful. That was a new one on him. But if that’s how Noreen wanted to tag him, he wasn’t going to complain. He was also damn glad she telegraphed her punches or his gut would hurt even more than it still did.

  “I was born in the Army—”

  Noreen started to rise before he could finish his goddamn sentence. And there was no way he was going to be able to chase her through the air with the way she moved.

  “Sit your fine ass down, girl. You wanta hear this shit or not? Your call. One time offer.”

  He could see her hesitate, then resettle like a sexy Buddha atop the wall. Her camo pants and dark skin were nearly invisible except for the occasional glint from her eyes. The buff-colored t-shirt showed up like a disembodied perfect torso. She wanted “beautiful”? Damned woman should look in a mirror.

  “I was born in the Army because it’s colorblind, or closest I’ve ever found. From Day One any boot dumb enough to make an issue of it went down hard. It was only a matter of whether it was me or the drill sergeant who got to him first. Rednecks don’t stay that way long, at least on the outside, during Basic. Be nice to think the inside changes too, once they see they’d be dead if you weren’t shooting right beside them. I liked that shit.”

  “And before?” Noreen’s voice was soft as a nighttime desert breeze, and no longer quite so chilly.

  “My parents were white—”

  “Yeah. And mine were Chinese.”

  “You gonna let me finish a goddamn sentence here?”

  Her t-shirt sketched a shrug in the darkness that said maybe yes and maybe no. His eyes were adapting enough that he could make out some of her face. He’d guess on the maybe no side of things.

  “They were white wannabes. White jobs in white offices and a big house in the very best of the ’burbs. Private school with the white kids and a few other white wannabes. By the time I was twelve they were talking about Ivy League schools and all that shit. Maybe I was young and stupid, but none of that sounded like me. So I sought out ‘my own kind’ on the streets.”

  “Why was that stupid?”

  “Because I trooped my sorry ass out to Prichard, of all ultimate pits. If you don’t know it, it’s a piece of Mobile that keeps winning ‘Worst City in Alabama’ awards. There I fell in with crackheads, petty thieves, carjackers, and a ton of other shitheads who wouldn’t know an opportunity if it punched out their damned faces. But they were my color, my kin inside and out—or so I thought. How I didn’t die or get caught by the system in those years beats the shit out of me.”

  “Maybe some angel was watching out for you, Captain Luc.”

  “Some angel like you?” Not a snowball’s chance that was gonna happen in a hole like Prichard.

  She shrugged. It was enough to make him smile.

  “Wish you had, not that I’d have understood what you were at that point. I was a cocky bastard. My ‘angel’ turned out to be a big, ugly, black dude. I went into the Army Recruiter on an eighteenth-birthday dare to prove just how tough I was—way tougher than any mere soldier creep; that was a fact, Jack. Turned out I’d walked into an Army Medical Brigade Recruiter, shows you how much I knew. Black dude there was a seriously squared-away local. Begged to be assigned to Mobile when the post came open because he wanted to help. Made sure I wasn’t out of his sight until a white buddy of his from Regular Army showed up—they’d served two tours together. You could see how goddamn close they were.”

  “But that isn’t the day you were born?”

  “No. It was stepping off the bus at Fort Benning. The Drill didn’t give a good goddamn about my skin—he chewed me up and down just like everyone else there. Me, the six-foot-two of white pencil-neck geek, the Asian kid who coulda been rolled along he was so short and heavy—he went Green Beret in his third year if that don’t beat all. Didn’t matter to the drill sergeant. To him we were all squat until we’d proven ourselves. That’s when I knew I’d done it right. Never forgot the Med recruiter though. I bucked for a slot as a CSAR crew chief the minute I heard there was such a thing.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “Disowned my sorry ass at fourteen. Said they were done with me. Didn’t want me tarnishing their reputation. Sent back my GED certificate when I got it. Doesn’t matter if I put my rank and unit on the return address on the Christmas card I send every year. Comes back, ‘Refused by Sender’ as if that ain’t some shit. Tried contacting them separately. No luck either side of the house.”

  “Assholes come in every color.”

  “That’s the damn truth. Not saying I was some kinda joy as a kid, but they both got some serious issues. I get cards from those two recruiters sometimes, though. Real, handwritten ones. Couldn’t believe it at first, but I do the same back to them whenever I find a good one.” Too bad Balad sucked for cool cards. All of which was way too much shit about him. “You got a past, Guardian Angel?”

  “Yep.” Then she did one of those liquid moves and climbed to her feet like a gymnast on a balance beam—leaning over backwards, planting her hands behind her atop the wall, then kicked over through a handstand until she was once again on her feet a story in the air on a wall one foot wide.

  It was the kind of move that grabbed him by the balls. Beauty, grace, and power all in one steaming hot lady.

  “Come on.” Rather than jumping down, she walked away from him along the top of the wall.

  He eased up to his feet carefully, as any normal human would, and followed along the wall trying not to think about the long fall if he screwed up.

  Noreen needed some space to think, but didn’t want to leave Sergeant Xavier Jones behind either. She moved slowly along the top of the wall, not sure where she was going, but listening until she was sure he was following. He moved quietly for such a big man.

  He was an orphan, or might as well be, which hurt her heart. However, that wasn’t enough reason to do something stupid.

  His answer to his awful parents had been to fight his way into the Night Stalkers, a height very few could climb. She knew. The pilots had a ninety percent wash-out and the rest of the crew weren’t far behind. Like her big brother and Connie, she’d made it and she knew exactly what that meant.

  And he wasn’t some raring-to-go hothead with a Minigun—he’d asked for CSAR, a truly thankless job for a gunner. Those who flew to the front were always teasing CSAR fliers about not being up to the fight, until they needed a rescue. They were more respectful after that.

  She hopped over a couple of four-foot gaps and kept moving. Glancing halfway back, she could see Xavier doing it with one long stride.

  “Where you leading, Noreen?”

  If he’d tagged her with any of the nicknames he kept trying on her, she’d have scoffed and kept moving. But her name stopped her. She didn’t run away from things, not even at such a slow pace. She always faced her challenges.

  Turning ninety degrees, she dropped down onto a picnic table, hopped to the ground, then shifted out of the way. Xavier followed by lowering himself by his hands and then dropping the last few feet to the ground.

  “Where the hell are we?”

  “It’s the back patio of the old USO club.” The wooden decking was heavily covered with sand. The couple of
picnic tables and benches were equally dusted. The tight T-wall barrier made for a panoramic concrete view.

  “Shit. I used to hang here back in the day. Looked just about as nice back then.”

  The back of the building was open and dark. One security light leaked through a narrow gap at a turn in the barrier wall, lighting the space in warm shadows. He looked magnificent in his camos and black t-shirt with his rifle still slung across his back.

  “Why here?”

  Noreen didn’t know until she was already in motion.

  She slid into his arms in a single smooth stride. He’d thought her delicate when he’d lifted her aboard the helo so easily on that first night. Then tough as nails when she’d punched him, and finally fragile for how small her wrists felt in his big clumsy hands after he’d blocked her punches.

  All of that was right.

  The woman who slid into his arms was slender, strong, and soft. And she had a kiss that started like the desert during a perfect sunset—warm but with a cool serenity—and a finish that made him feel battered by a whirlwind.

  Xavier hadn’t been saving himself for anybody, but if he had been, it would be for a woman who felt like Lieutenant Noreen Wallace.

  Lieutenant.

  He pulled his hands off her ass and put them on her waist to walk her back one step. She almost took one of his lips with her by a playful nip of her teeth.

  “I know what you’re going to say, Cap’n Luc. So don’t waste time saying it.”

  “You a mind reader now, too?”

  “Can’t we just for one moment pretend that we’re alone and all that doesn’t matter,” she waved a hand at the far side of the towering T-wall.

  Against his own better judgment, his hands were pulling her back in. He hadn’t moved away from the wall, and now she had him pinned to it.

  It wasn’t her fine form that was so overwhelming, nor the powerful muscles she’d built. She came at him with an enthusiasm he’d never experienced before in his life. It was as if all of that daily joy she spilled out of her during the long night missions came slamming into him in one mighty blow.