Guardian of the Heart Read online

  He held her, lifted her, and groaned as she clenched him tight.

  She rubbed her hands over his bald head. “If you’re growing it out for me, don’t.”

  He definitely had to shave in the morning. He usually went three days between; for her he’d do it twice daily as long as she didn’t stop doing what she was doing.

  Her fine fingers were gentle yet possessive. Some women were put off by his bald-by-choice, some called it sexy. But no one had traced the shapes of his scalp the way Noreen did while she was kissing him.

  He rolled over and pinned her back against the warm concrete wall. He leaned back enough above the hips so that he could investigate just how good she felt. Rather than going for her chest, he ended up tracing her jaw and her lips instead so that he could feel her smile as their lower bodies pressed hard together and shuddered with need.

  Then she took his big hand in both of hers and kissed his palm. The sensation shot straight into his chest.

  “Just in case.”

  “In case what?” he managed on a gasp.

  “In case you ever need an extra smile,” he could feel her lips curve against his palm.

  Because of course Noreen would know exactly what he’d been doing.

  Chapter 4

  She didn’t take him that night, it was too much too soon. Or the next, because the flight was long and the fight brutal. Besides, she was enjoying the zing every time they looked at each other or passed close enough to brush shoulders—at least her shoulder. He was so damn tall that she brushed him barely halfway up his arm.

  But when two nights became two weeks, she wondered if she was losing her mind—or her touch. No man she was interested in avoided her for that long. Especially not ones who generated a crackle of energy between them brighter than the static sparking a bright circle off the tips of a helo’s rotor blades in a dust storm. She no longer wanted Sergeant Xavier Jones; she needed him.

  Noreen Wallace never needed a man. She liked men—the right ones could be a serious amount of fun—but they always grew boring. She never stuck with a man past his expiration date. And she’d always found that date eventually—usually sooner rather than later. When she did, at least it was an excuse to buy another tight blouse or short mini-skirt just to make them whimper once they’d lost her. They also made her dad worry, while Mama just shook her head and laughed—both nice bonuses.

  In the Army it was tougher. She’d collected fewer men, and the ending of relations was best kept on the QT for everybody’s sake. Besides, all of her girl clothes were back home in Oklahoma. She’d also made a habit of only dating men of the same rank, but Xavier was long past tempting her.

  “Tonight,” she’d practically snarled at him as they trotted side by side from the night’s mission briefing to the helo. “At the USO. Don’t care when the flight is done.”

  “You know how much I’m gonna hate that,” he grinned down at her.

  “Not a bit?”

  “Not even a tiny little one.”

  They’d stolen a kiss here, a cuddle there, and an exquisitely long yet painfully slow grope aboard the Black Hawk when they’d met there alone by chance to restock ammo and medical supplies.

  They’d also spent a lot of time talking. Usually in public, over meals or during mission flights. Not about anything serious—too public for that—but still it felt real. It fast became clear that he was a seriously thoughtful guy. He talked about why he’d done eight years in CSAR, even drew Mason into the conversation. He didn’t have her brother’s gift of storytelling, but there was a brutal honesty to everything he said. As if he wasn’t taking crap from anyone—least of all himself.

  Thinking about what it was going to be like to make love with Xavier had her messing up the preflight supply check enough times for Barry to eye her strangely.

  Xavier, on the other hand, appeared as calm as ever.

  She was half tempted to torture him a bit when the time came, just to make him feel as she did. She knew she wouldn’t though. At this point, she’d take him any way she could get him and he knew it, the smug bastard. Even his grin as they all closed doors, harnessed in, and headed aloft was just the normal-friendly look he gave her every time they went aloft. He even gave Barry a friendly “Hey!” that had her rolling her eyes.

  What was wrong with her?

  She never got this way about guys. Not back in ROTC, not while working her way up through the med corps, and not ever.

  She leaned into the hard maneuvers hoping they’d jar her out of her mood.

  That’s what it was—just a mood.

  Yeah, a mood that said she hadn’t been laid in too long. She hadn’t minded the last long dry spell, nobody had come along to bother breaking it for. It was the two weeks since they’d vaulted back over the walls of the USO together that had gone so far past reason.

  Noreen looked at Xavier in profile in the red-lit darkness of the Black Hawk. His attention was where it was supposed to be, out the window and looking ahead.

  So why was her attention entirely on how fast he could get into her camos?

  There was no way she really cared about him.

  Not a chance.

  Xavier’s blood pressure had left the planet within seconds of Noreen’s invitation. She wasn’t the sort of woman that you slammed up against a wall and pounded into, no matter how close he’d come to doing exactly that.

  And there was a fear factor as well. If they were caught, he could be screwing up her career…and his. He’d been born in the Army, that had been his mantra for eight years now. His goal was to serve until he died—preferably of old age. But the risk of Noreen’s career was enough to have him holding back as hard as he could, even though he knew what he’d do given the least opportunity.

  So he’d waited—waited for her to not want him the way he did want her since that first moment he’d seen her crossing the hangar. What he wasn’t ready for was how it felt that she’d turned toward him rather than away.

  He tried to remember the arrogant little asshole who had stormed out of his parents’ home so long ago. And the teen who was so convinced that he was such hot shit back in Prichard, taking his first whore at fourteen. But he couldn’t reconcile those two twerps with the guy who had a chance at a woman like Noreen Wallace.

  So he kept his face just enough out the gunner’s window for the cool desert air to brush away the flaming heat in his cheeks. His whole body felt turbocharged.

  “Huh!” he grunted at the night as the realization sank in. He’d never aspired to a woman like her. Maybe a piece of it was because he’d never met anyone quite like her. Or maybe he knew he’d never attract the notice of someone so spectacular.

  Now that he had, it made him think a bit about the broader scope. What else had he taken for granted? Or, worse yet, rejected out of hand because it had been his parents’ values? Maybe there was some good shit there among all of the guilt and manipulation crap.

  What if—

  The sudden slowing of the helo rocked him hard into the back of the pilot’s seat, even rapped his helmet hard on the window’s frame.

  If they’d reached their holding station, that meant that the extraction was already in progress.

  Tuned in now, he could hear that Delta operators were already on the ground. A woman minister—bringing word to the heathens—and, god help him, a Japanese tourist had been swept up by the insurgents. Their executions were planned for the next day unless the Iraqi forces all quit and abandoned their jobs—like there was a chance in hell of that happening.

  The transmissions were eerily silent as Delta infiltrated from their drop-off point—racing two kilometers over the night desert.

  Over the radio there was a brief “Oh fuck,” then a boom that was cut short—probably when the radio was destroyed along with its owner. Even from their hold distance, Xavier could see the brilliantly-lit plume of the IED’s explosion flaring up into the night sky. For a moment, it lit the whole center of the small village. Then another bl
oomed upward and another, like hideous mushrooms of death. They were daisy-chained together to try and kill a whole team at once, with the trigger plate at the farthest point.

  He and Noreen shouted, “Go!” in unison, but Vince was already racing them into the fray.

  It was the ultimate nightmare scenario. The Air Mission Commander was telling them to hold shy of the compound even though she could see friendlies writhing in the dirt.

  “Not safe to land. Not safe to walk. CSAR hold.”

  So they held and all she could do was impotently fume. If she went down and stepped on another trigger plate, she’d kill herself and maybe put a whole other section of the ground team at risk.

  That didn’t stop her from eyeing the Fast Rope—kick it out, slide down, it would be too late to stop her.

  “Don’t you be thinking ’bout what you’re thinking about,” Xavier’s voice was a low grumble. It didn’t come over the intercom into her helmet; instead, he’d switched himself out of the circuit so that only she would hear it. He hadn’t even turned to her.

  “How do you know what I’m thinking?” Her snarl went out over the intercom. Damn it!

  Xavier gave a noncommittal shrug.

  It sucked that he was right.

  He continued scanning the ground, his gun aimed high and his attention aimed low.

  She watched as the ground team dragged their casualties behind a low row of stones in a corner of the yard, some leaving long trails of blood in the dirt.

  “Cleared to triage area only,” the AMC announced. “Do not land.”

  She wouldn’t think about how she was supposed to evacuate them if the helo couldn’t land—slow winches didn’t work well under enemy fire. That was a problem for some later moment.

  Vince brought the CSAR bird in low.

  She and Barry jumped to the ground and dropped to all fours. They stayed low as weapon’s fire continued to spit against the compound’s walls above their heads. Even kneeling could put them in harm’s way—it wasn’t all that much of a wall.

  Only meters above them, Xavier answered with hard bursts from his Minigun. A shower of hot 7.62 mm brass tumbled out of the sky and rained down on them.

  “Goddamn it, Vince,” she shouted over the radio. “Don’t need a hot metal shower down here.” The Miniguns dumped overboard eighty rounds a second of hot, two-inch-long brass casings when they were firing.

  The helo slewed sideways so that the brass was raining down a dozen feet to the side.

  She could never remember if the second thing she did was see it or hear it…

  No question about the first thing though, she felt it.

  The blast lifted her up and sideways, slamming her into the compound wall on the far side of the prone casualties.

  Her thought as she briefly flew above the people she was supposed to be treating was that this was going to be a bitch unless she could grow real angel wings—fast.

  The outer wall of the compound was a heavy structure that stopped her cold. She hit flat on her back—spread-eagled sideways in the air. Her brief urge to create a snow angel on the wall was defeated as she dropped to the ground.

  Everything hurt.

  Her ears rang despite the buffering of the helmet. She was going to be black and blue from her helmet to her boots from that slam into the wall.

  Her eyes…she hadn’t been facing the blast so she could see everything just fine. The line of casualties had been below the blast. Barry lay prone over several of the bodies, but he was back off them in a moment showing that it had been a protective gesture and he wasn’t part of the body count.

  He was at her side in a second.

  She could see his mouth moving, but there was only the ringing in her ears and the heavy beat of the helicopter not five meters above them.

  It wavered. She blinked hard, but still it wavered. It wasn’t her vision, it was the Black Hawk. Five tons of airborne lethal wasn’t supposed to waver.

  The explosion had momentarily roiled the air and, without clean air, the rotor blades couldn’t get enough lift. The Black Hawk slid sideways like a stumbling drunk—then clipped a blade on the roof of a house. That signed the helo’s fate.

  Noreen grabbed the lifting ring on the front of Barry’s vest and pulled him down. He landed on her hard enough to hurt even more, but she couldn’t look away from the helo. It tumbled out of the sky like the final flip of a dying catfish in the bottom of a boat.

  Chunks of rotor blade flew in all directions.

  The helo slammed down on one side.

  The shredding rotors beat dust into the air until the Black Hawk disappeared behind a massive cloud that even her night vision couldn’t penetrate.

  The knee-high wall that hadn’t been able to protect her from the blast shielded them this time as the last flung bits of composite blade spattered against the wall mere inches above them.

  Suddenly everything was quiet—like the night had forgotten how to breathe. The Black Hawk’s turbines whined down from scream to murmur to silence—someone was still at the controls.

  She and Barry slowly turned to look. Miraculously, the helicopter was on its wheels, though it appeared to have done a full dog-in-the-dirt roll to get there.

  It had ended up with its nose mostly facing her. She could see Vince was still shutting things down. Penny was at least moving beside him. But what about—

  For the first time, fear slammed into her. It was unlike anything she’d ever experienced. Not her most extreme Parkour jump, not her first Fast Rope into an active battle, not the first time she’d been shot at for real.

  It was visceral, acidic, pummeling terror—worse than the blast.

  “Xavier.” All she could manage was a croak.

  Barry cautiously pushed off her and turned toward the downed helo.

  Xavier tried to release his harness, but all raising his left arm did was make it hurt like hell—his arm didn’t move one bit.

  He couldn’t reconstruct the last thirty seconds very well.

  His Minigun mount was all twisted up. Jiggling the gun only left it aimed at a single point in the sky. He yanked at it one-handed, still his main weapon remained stubbornly aimed upward. It wasn’t supposed to be possible to aim them upward, didn’t want to be shooting out your own rotor.

  Was that what had happened?

  He leaned forward and looked up. No whirling disc. No rotor blades at all.

  Straight ahead was a wall of unmortared sandstone blocks tall enough to block any view.

  Compound. Right. They’d been inserting into a terrorist compound, delivering aid for a rescue gone wrong.

  IED.

  The weight of his falling brass should never have been enough pressure to trigger the mine—or every passing chicken would have blown itself up. It must have been partially triggered by that first blast that had ripped apart the ground team. His stream of spent brass had only finished the job.

  “You just sitting there all day?” Mason. He was up and had his rifle in his hands.

  “My ass is kinda comfortable here,” Xavier kept it light. But trying again to reach his harness hurt like hell and it must have showed.

  Xavier released it for him.

  He turned to climb out of his seat, but his left arm didn’t want to follow.

  “Here,” Mason took his wrist with surprising gentleness and tucked Xavier’s left hand into a loop on his vest. “Feels like you dislocated your shoulder.”

  Xavier was a little surprised to discover that his right hand worked just fine. He must be more rattled than he’d thought. With his right hand, he freed his own rifle, then nodded for Mason to lead the way.

  They dropped out of the helo and onto the ground at the same time Vince and Penny rolled out their doors.

  “Four standing. Good sign,” Vince limped heavily as he turned to survey his helicopter.

  “Need to get a medic to look at that,” Xavier’s own words brought back the last image of the crash—Noreen flying through the air in th
e force of the blast.

  “Noreen!” his voice roared out across the compound.

  That’s when he became aware of his surroundings. There was still a full-on battle going down. The helicopter was mostly shielding them, but rains of gunfire crackled through the air. Chopped-off screams. Idiots shouting the name of their god as if He’d ever forgive them for what they were doing in His name.

  Mason dropped to the ground and began firing at targets from beneath the helo. Penny dragged down Vince and they started doing the same.

  Xavier ducked down and rushed toward the triage corner.

  Barry was kneeling over a prone figure—one too small, even in full gear, to be a man.

  Xavier cried her name again as he jumped over a gap in the chicken-high wall, then over the injured soldiers lying in the dirt. He couldn’t raise his hand to stop himself and slammed his bad shoulder into the unforgiving rock of the high main wall. For a long moment all he saw was white sheets of pain.

  The instant his vision cleared, he saw that Noreen was looking up at him.

  But she wasn’t getting up.

  “What’s wrong? Barry, you gotta fix her. How can I help? Shit, where are you hurt?”

  Where was she hurt?

  Her chest. Like her heart wanted to explode out of it.

  Noreen had seen Xavier jump down out of the helo, rifle raised and ready in his hand like some mythic warrior. She’d never seen a better sight in her life.

  Then the very first thing he’d done? With bullets flying around him, while others had ducked for cover, huddling behind the safety of the helo?

  Xavier had stood tall and roared out her name like a wounded beast. He’d sprinted through the hail of gunfire like it couldn’t touch him. And it hadn’t.

  “I’m fine, I think.” She had to shove at him to get him out of the way enough for her to sit up. Every muscle complained, but it didn’t feel as if anything was broken. Instead it felt as if she’d sprained her entire body.