Since the First Day Read online

  Again his silent patience while she processed things. He understood her. Everyone else she’d been able to brush off with a joke or a flirt.

  Not Danny.

  He’d stuck by her. Encouraged her. Made sure she knew she was welcome from that first day. In the Night Stalkers you didn’t need someone to push you to excel, everyone did that. Everyone set their standards so high that you just wanted to strive to keep up with them. She was no different. Nor was Danny.

  One of the Delta couples came up with a change in the deployment for the exercise. They ran it by her and the two pilots. They’d decided to add a maneuver to the simulated attack.

  After she told them it was technically possible—though she kept to herself that it was bat-shit crazy, making it perfect for Delta—they cleared the last of the details with Danny before returning to the cargo bay.

  Danny had been her quiet place. Somehow he let her know that she was okay even when she was too tired to speak or too sick of the unending supply of terrorist nut jobs.

  He was…the man she didn’t know how to live without. When she’d hauled the trainee pilot’s body out of the copilot seat, she’d only been able to be thankful that he’d been sitting there rather than Danny. It was a guilty thought, but it ran deep. She would step in front of the bullet herself if it made sure he was still in the world afterward.

  “Fifteen minutes to target,” Danny announced on the PA.

  No response. She turned, and could see that the Delta operators were completing their final prep. Silent warriors indeed.

  Danny had stayed silent about his attraction to her. So carefully silent that she’d assumed he wasn’t attracted at all, making her keep her own mouth shut about how much she’d been attracted to him. Shut enough that she’d almost buried the feeling. Just kept on being Carmen—wild, funny, in your face.

  But now she knew, now she understood that smile on Danny’s face. He always laughed with her jokes, but he also saw the quiet person inside her too. It wasn’t Carmen the flashy gypsy dancer he was attracted to. It was Carmen Parker, lead crew chief of the Night Stalkers’ Chinook Calamity Jane II.

  “Danny?”

  “Carmen,” he said it exactly the way he had before.

  “You really feel that way?” Was if even possible she could be so lucky?

  He twisted all the way around to look at her for just a brief moment. “Really.”

  She wished she could see his eyes behind the visor, but she could see his smile, and that was enough. With Danny Corvo that was everything and it always would be.

  He turned back to flying and she hustled back to make sure the Delta team was ready for the drop. She lowered the rear ramp and peeked out into the night.

  The sea was calm, twenty minutes and sixty miles from the storm’s closest approach.

  The sky was clear.

  All the flying ahead wouldn’t be smooth. There’d be more gut wrenchers, but she knew, she just knew that they’d get through it all together.

  Justin started humming a song over the intercom. Vinnie picked it up with his low baritone and she found herself joining in on the melody before she caught herself.

  “What the hell?”

  “Y’all amaze me,” Justin Roberts spoke over the intercom, his Texas cranked up to full mud-thick. “Like y’all think that simply going up to little old Intercom 4 makes you private somehow. Rest of us tumbled to that trick about six months back. Let me just say, ’bout time, you two.” And then he swung back into the music.

  “Does this mean I’m going to have to buy a goddamn bikini?”

  There was a mass chorus of, “Yes!” without breaking the rhythm.

  “Then all you boys are buying goddamn thongs. Beach wedding.”

  There were laughs over the channel.

  “Love you, gypsy dancer. Since the first day,” Danny slipped in quietly between the words.

  And he was right. “Since the first day,” she echoed back.

  Then, as she helped the Delta operators launch their boat out into the night, she joined in the chorus.

  The hills (skies, Danny stuck in) are alive, with the sound of music.

  “They were right you know,” she whispered between the words. “You do sing like a choking hyena.”

  He only sang louder.

  It took an entire chorus before she could stop laughing with joy and join back in.

  If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy:

  Wild Justice (coming Fall 2017)

  Delta Force romance novel #3

  “Who the hell are you, sister? And how did you get here?”

  “Holy crap!”

  What kind of woman said crap when unexpectedly facing a sniper rifle at point blank range?

  “And not your sister,” she gained points for a quick recovery. “Now get that rifle out of my face, Jarhead.”

  Ouch! That was low. Duane Jenkins wasn’t some damned Marine. Not even ex-Marine. He was ex-75th Rangers of the US Army, now two years in Delta Force. And as an operator for The Unit, that put him way above any other soldier no matter what the dudes in SEAL Team 6 thought about it. That also didn’t explain who he’d just found here in the perfect sniper position overlooking General Raul Estevan Aguado’s encampment.

  The low hill, shadowed by banana and mango trees in the twilight of the late afternoon sun above the Venezuelan jungle, overlooked the heavily guarded camp a half-mile away. It had taken him over fifteen hours to scout out this one perfect gap between the too-damn-tall trees that made up this sweaty place and, with just twenty meters to go, he’d spotted her heavily camouflaged form lying among the leaves. It had taken him another half hour to cover that distance without drawing her attention.

  This place was worse than Atlanta in the summer. The red earth had been driven so deep into his pores from crawling over the ground that he wondered if his skin color was permanently changed to rust red.

  Why the hell did evil bastards like Aguado have to come from such places?

  More immediate problem, dude. Stay focused.

  The woman’s accent was American with a thin overlay that matched her Spanish features—full-lipped with dark eyebrows and darker eyes, which was about all he could tell through her camo paint—and she wasn’t supposed to be here. No one was.

  “Keeping you in my sights until I get some answers,” Duane kept his H&K MSG90 A2 rifle aimed right at the bridge of her nose—a straight-through spine cutter if he had to take her down. It would be serious overkill, as the weapon was rated to lethal past eight hundred meters and they were whispering at each other from less than two meters apart. With the silencer, his weapon would be even quieter than their whispers, but he hadn’t spent the last sixteen hours crawling into position to have her death cry give him away. If she so much as squawked as she went down, every goddamn bird in the jungle would light off, giving away his presence.

  She sighed and nodded toward her own rifle that rested on the ground in front of her.

  He shifted his focus—though not his aim—then let out a very low whistle of appreciation. A G28. Even his team hadn’t gotten their hands on the latest entry into the US Army’s sniper arsenal yet. Not quite the same accuracy as his own weapon but six inches shorter, several pounds lighter, and far more flexible to configure. A whole generational leap forward. Richie, his team’s tech, would be geeking out right about now. The fact that he wasn’t here to see it almost made Duane smile.

  “A Heckler & Koch G28. What’s your point, sister?” He drawled it out for Richie’s sake, who’d be listening in on Duane’s radio. Then the implications sunk in. If his Delta Force team couldn’t get these yet, then who could? Whatever else this sniper was, she would be tied to one of the three US Special Mission Units: Delta, SEAL Team 6, or the combat controllers of the Air Force’s 24th STS.

  Or The Activity.

  That fit.

  The Intelligence Support Activity served the other three Special Mission Units. If she was with the Activity…that was seriously ho
t. It meant she was both one of the top intel specialists anywhere and a lethal fighter. And that meant that she’d been the one to put out the call that had sent him here. That at least answered why she was in his spot. It also said a lot that she hadn’t taken any of several easier to reach locations that were almost as good.

  “About time you caught a clue. Welcome to the game.” She picked up her rifle as if his wasn’t still aimed at her. Very chill. “A little slow there.”

  “Hey, they don’t call me ‘The Rock’ for nothing,” Duane lowered his barrel until it was pointed into the dirt. “They actually call me that becau—”

  The moment his weapon was down, he suddenly was staring down the dark hole of the G28’s silencer.

  “Uh…”

  “The Rock certainly isn’t because you are a towering black movie star. It must be for your thick head.”

  Duane swallowed carefully, unable to shift his focus from into the barrel of her weapon to see if the safety was on or not.

  “He spells his name differently. He’s Dwayne ‘The Rock’ with a w and a y. I’m more normal, D-u-a-n-e T-h-e R-o-c-k.”

  “M-o-u-s-e,” she finished for him. Because of course they’d both been kids when the The All-New Mickey Mouse Club had been airing.

  He couldn’t help laughing, quietly, despite their positions—him still staring down the barrel of her weapon.

  “Normal is not what I need here,” the woman sighed and there was the distinct click of her reengaging the safety on her rifle.

  “Only thing normal about me is my name.”

  “Prove it,” she turned her weapon once more toward the camp half a kilometer away through the trees.

  Duane breathed out slowly and spent the next minute easing the last two meters toward her. Having the camp in view meant that one of their spotters could see them as well, if the bad guys were damned lucky. He and the woman both wore ghillie suits—that’s why he’d gotten so close before he spotted her. The suits were made of open-weave cloth liberally decorated with leaves and twigs so that the two of them looked like little more than the jungle floor. He’d dragged his on backcountry jungle roads for twenty miles to make sure he smelled like the jungle as well. Having a jaguar notice his ass wouldn’t exactly brighten up his day.

  Even their rifles were well camouflaged except for either end of the spotting scopes and the very tips of the barrels. If he hadn’t recently been lusting over the new specs, he wouldn’t have recognized her Heckler & Koch G28 at all in its disguise.

  Getting into position as a sniper took a patience that only the most highly trained could achieve. A female sniper? That was a rare find indeed. The two women on his Delta team were damned fine shooters, but he and Chad were the snipers of the crew. A female sniper from The Activity? This just kept getting better and better. He’d pay a fair wage to know what she really looked like beneath the ghillie and all the face paint.

  At long last he lay beside her, close enough that he would have felt her body heat if not for the smothering sauna of his ghillie suit.

  “Let’s see what y’all are up to down there.”

  The general’s camp was a simple affair in several ways. The enclosure was a few hundred meters across. An old-school fence of wooden stakes driven into the ground, each a small tree trunk three meters high with sharpened points upward. Not that the points mattered because of the razor wire looped along the top. Guard shacks every hundred meters—four total. The towers straddled the fence. Not a good idea. The structure should have been entirely behind the wall to protect it from attack. Unless…

  “You got a name, darling?” Lying beside her, Duane could tell that they were of similar height. Her hands were fine, though her body was hidden by the ghillie.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s nice. Always good to have a name,” Duane could play that game just as well as the next person. He turned to his attention to the camp. “Our friendly general isn’t worried about attack from the outside or he’d have built his towers differently. He’s worried about keeping people inside.”

  Available for pre-order July 2017

  About the Author

  M.L. Buchman started the first of, what is now over 50 novels and as many short stories, while flying from South Korea to ride his bicycle across the Australian Outback. Part of a solo around the world trip that ultimately launched his writing career.

  All three of his military romantic suspense series—The Night Stalkers, Firehawks, and Delta Force—have had a title named “Top 10 Romance of the Year” by the American Library Association’s Booklist. NPR and Barnes & Noble have named other titles “Top 5 Romance of the Year.” In 2016 he was a finalist for Romance Writers of America prestigious RITA award. He also writes: contemporary romance, thrillers, and fantasy.

  Past lives include: years as a project manager, rebuilding and single-handing a fifty-foot sailboat, both flying and jumping out of airplanes, and he has designed and built two houses. He is now making his living as a full-time writer on the Oregon Coast with his beloved wife and is constantly amazed at what you can do with a degree in Geophysics. You may keep up with his writing and receive a free starter e-library by subscribing to his newsletter at: www.mlbuchman.com

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  Also by M. L. Buchman

  The Night Stalkers

  Main Flight

  The Night Is Mine

  I Own the Dawn

  Wait Until Dark

  Take Over at Midnight

  Light Up the Night

  Bring On the Dusk

  By Break of Day

  White House Holiday

  Daniel’s Christmas

  Frank’s Independence Day

  Peter’s Christmas

  Zachary’s Christmas

  Roy’s Independence Day

  Damien’s Christmas

  and the Navy

  Christmas at Steel Beach

  Christmas at Peleliu Cove

  5E

  Target of the Heart

  Target Lock on Love

  Target of Mine

  Firehawks

  Main Flight

  Pure Heat

  Full Blaze

  Hot Point

  Flash of Fire

  Wild Fire

  Smokejumpers

  Wildfire at Dawn

  Wildfire at Larch Creek

  Wildfire on the Skagit

  Delta Force

  Main Flight

  Target Engaged

  Heart Strike

  Wild Justice

  Henderson’s Ranch

  Nathan’s Big Sky

  Love Abroad B&B

  Heart of the Cotswolds: England

  Where Dreams

  Where Dreams are Born

  Where Dreams Reside

  Where Dreams Are of Christmas

  Where Dreams Unfold

  Where Dreams Are Written

  Eagle Cove

  Return to Eagle Cove

  Recipe for Eagle Cove

  Longing for Eagle Cove

  Keepsake for Eagle Cove

  Deities Anonymous

  Cookbook from Hell: Reheated

  Saviors 101

  Dead Chef

  Swap Out!

  One Chef!

  Two Chef!

  SF/F Titles

  The Nara Reaction

  Monk’s Maze

  The Me and Elsie Chronicles

  Strategies for Success

  Managing Your Inner Artist / Writer

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  www.mlbuchman.com

  Copyright 2017 Matthew Lieber Buchman

  Published by Buchman Bookworks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the author.

  Receive a free Starter Library and discover more by this author at: www.mlbuchman.com

  Cover images:

&n
bsp; Couple in love © yanlev

  CH-47 Chinook Helicopter © Michael Fitzsimmons

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