Target Lock On Love Read online

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  Mick had made love to women in odd places before.

  He’d lost his virginity in his bunk aboard the family crabbing boat while it was tied at dock. He and Wilma Cutter, the boat’s cook hired on when he’d gotten old enough to work the lines, had multiple trysts there. They’d also used the galley a time or twenty at sea where the storm waves did most of the work for them. And any other place they could find.

  Her send-off to college—which had also been her pre-agreed Dear John because though he was staying local at University of Alaska ROTC program, she was off to Berkeley—had been particularly memorable. She’d taken him to her uncle’s cabin near the Artic Circle where they’d made love for as long as the sun was above the horizon…most of twenty-two straight hours.

  Since then he’d found willing women in war zones, on Italian beaches, and in the back of a British Challenger main battle tank—a very flexible Company Sergeant Major who had offered an exceptional fringe benefit during a US-UK joint training exercise.

  But the upper slopes of Mount Hayes was definitely the most surprising.

  It wasn’t the location and the circumstances; it was the woman in his arms. As with everything she did, Patty O’Donoghue was enjoying herself completely. Rather than being coy, she threw herself at him.

  Every time he touched her it elicited a hum or purr of pleasure. When he did something she particularly liked, she made sure he knew it. Most women left it to the man to guess what they wanted, a mystery to be discovered and learned. And a complaint if he didn’t figure it out.

  Not Patty.

  “Hey, cut that out. Oh God! That! Yes! Do more of that! Never, ever stop doing that!”

  Making love to her was neither a quiet nor a languid act; it was an incredible, joyous sport.

  When he finally cupped her, she yelped loud enough that he wondered if the distant PJs could hear her despite the storm, then she pressed herself into his palm with a happy burble into their shared kiss.

  If only he had—

  “You really are a meathead, Quinn.” Patty stuffed a foil-wrapped condom into his hand.

  “I didn’t think that I’d be—” Dear God! Patty was giving back as good as he’d given. Her long-fingered hands explored and caressed while he hesitated.

  “My oh my! No wonder you’re called The Mighty Quinn.”

  He kissed her again because he really didn’t want a running commentary and he did want to taste her again. He couldn’t get enough of how she—

  Finally she pulled away, “Now, Quinn. For crying out loud, now!”

  He sheathed himself and slid into her heat, doubly powerful when compared to the cold wind raging so close by. Her body was exceptionally conditioned as only a Special Operations soldier ever achieved. And she knew exactly what to do with it as she gave him more pleasure than he’d ever found with another. He did his best to return the favor and she flew in his arms until they cried out together.

  He was wholly spent when the last of the ripples slid along her slender frame down to where they were anchored together, by his need and her legs hooked behind his.

  Unable to stop himself, he wholly collapsed down on her, past even propping himself up on his elbows. Missionary was about the only position permitted by the two sleeping bags and he couldn’t find the energy to roll them onto their sides.

  Patty giggled in his ear as she held him close.

  “Damn but you’re good at this. If only I’d known how good. Quinn?”

  “Uh,” was the best he could manage.

  “I can’t believe how much time we’ve wasted not doing this.”

  “Give me a break, Patty. We do that again and I’m a dead man.”

  “Hmm,” she clamped herself more tightly about him as if his death by superior sex would be a small price to pay.

  At the moment he wasn’t sure he’d argue with that conclusion.

  He did finally manage to find his elbows and lift some of his weight off her, far enough away that he could see her by the light that came in through the small gap at the top of the sleeping bags.

  Her smile was huge, he expected that it mirrored his own. Her fine features, slightly bruised lips, and just the hint of the long line of her neck were visible. And her sparkling blue eyes. He’d always thought that to be a ridiculous cliché, but he was looking right at her eyes and that’s exactly what they were doing. Her beautiful red hair remained mostly covered by her ridiculous knit hat, the only clothing she still wore other than thick woolen socks that presently had their heels pressed into his butt.

  He yanked the hat down over her eyes because the joy in them was too dynamic, like an avalanche coming straight at him, and he kissed her.

  Her kiss was so sweet, that he knew he was gone. Acerbic, funny, joyous, and beautiful. What wasn’t to like about her?

  Then he laughed, a single bark. Wasn’t it just two nights ago he was thinking whoever Patty became attached to was going to need all the luck in the world to survive?

  “What?”

  He kissed her again to distract her, because no way was he answering that question. It wasn’t a question of who Patty latched onto; it was a matter of who was lucky enough to get her. And somewhere between teasing a North Korean frigate and camping on an ice-cold mountainside, it had turned out to be him.

  Mick let himself sink back down on her, because there was no way he could get enough of Patty O’Donoghue.

  Chapter 5

  Patty shrugged on a parka so that she didn’t freeze when she straddled Mick Quinn for “breakfast.”

  The PJs had called on the radio, “Half an hour to first light. Be ready to go.” The call had been the only sound on the mountainside. The storm was gone and the silence was vast.

  She’d unzipped the upper half of the sleeping bags to get some maneuvering room and took a moment to admire Mick’s chest by the soft light of the headlamp she’d flicked back on. A man was so differently shaped when he’d been born to hard work rather than when he developed it as a gym workout. Mick’s chest was spectacular even by fisheryman standards.

  Patty leaned down to rub her own chest over his. The powerful sensations of last night hadn’t been diluted by a night sleeping in his arms. Well, mostly sleeping. She’d spent part of it awake and watching him in the darkness as the storm quieted. There hadn’t been anything to see in the pitch darkness, but she’d listened to his breathing, felt the rise and fall of his chest where her arm lay across it.

  That he was an amazing lover wasn’t a surprise. Her own intense response to his slightest touch had been a very pleasant surprise. So often she felt that she ultimately didn’t satisfy the men she was with, but Mick couldn’t have faked the joy he took from her. The joy they took from each other. Maybe the problem hadn’t been with her, but with the men she chose. A comforting thought. And if it was true, she’d chosen a home run this time.

  Was it going to change things between them? She hoped not. Let them both revel in the glorious sex until he tired of her or she of him. Then that would be settled between them and they could return to just flying together. If this flew the course of her normal relationships, it would be over and gone before command could even begin to care. They’d just stay under the radar while it lasted.

  But oh! The way he felt in the meantime.

  Finally she’d been lulled back to sleep until the radio had awakened her. The call had only shifted Mick from asleep to groggy.

  She’d teased him half awake, and sheathed him. His eyes had fluttered open slowly, definitely not a morning person. He cupped her cheeks and pulled her into a kiss.

  Now his body was awake enough and with a judicious shift of her hips, she slid him into her. There was a deep grunt of pleasure transmitted through their kiss and it tickled right down inside her.

  “Not much time,” she whispered.

  “Okay,”
and he didn’t waste a second of it. He drove up into her with a power that flooded her system with happy nerve signals trying to blow their little circuit breakers. She and Mick were rooted together at hip and mouth. He had one hand clamped on her butt and the other holding her hand where she had it pinned next to his shoulder. Under the warm cloak of the parka they pumped, thrashed, climbed, soared, and with a shared moan that ripped from somewhere deep inside them, the dam broke and the waves of heat pounded through her.

  “Never freeze to death. As long as.” Her heart was racing so hard and the aftershocks crashing so hard that she couldn’t get enough air to complete the sentence in one go. “We can find a way. To do that.”

  He slapped her butt lightly. “Let’s go,” long before she was ready to shift off him, but he was right.

  She sat up, still straddling his hips, and began dressing.

  Mick lay on the sleeping bag a few moments longer like a dead man, except for the rise and fall of his chest as the skin rapidly goose-bumped because she’d taken the sleeping bag with her. And his dark eyes tracked her slightest motion.

  Undressing together last night had been an awkward and self-conscious act in a space far too small for the purpose. This morning, dressing was intimate and fun.

  She wiggled into her thermal underwear, then yanked up the shirt’s hem to flash a breast at him.

  He grinned and she slapped away his hand when he reached out to caress. Mick was much more insistent about leaning in to kiss her breast and she was only too happy to give him his way.

  “You are so good at this,” she finally pushed him away and continued dressing. “Whatever woman trained you, I want to shake her hand.”

  “I have a good imagination,” he grumbled though she could see there was someone back there he was thinking of. “Though my imagination wasn’t good enough when it came to you, Patty.”

  “Was that a flirt? From Mick ‘The Mighty’ Quinn? Shocked I am. Shocked!”

  He brushed a finger along her cheek. Just that slight contact was almost enough to have her collapsing back into his arms, especially as he was still lying there naked and beautiful.

  “Shocked,” she managed in a soft mumble that sounded dangerously like a girlish giggle of contentment.

  When he began dressing, Patty managed to suppress a very womanly sigh of disappointment. It was okay, there would be a later. There had to be. A smart woman didn’t use a man like Mick Quinn just once or twice and throw him away. Whatever her other shortcomings, Patty knew smart was one of her strengths. Too smart for most guys.

  That thought surprised her enough to make her stop while working her way into snow pants over her green flightsuit.

  Had that been the problem?

  She was Special Operations which meant she was smarter than the average soldier, but also than the average guy. Mick Quinn wasn’t average. He was a Night Stalker, too. Even more, he was an officer Night Stalker. That meant he was damned motivated and twice as smart, and that was completely aside from his stellar flying.

  Not only did he keep right up with her jokes, but he also encouraged her when she thought out-of-the-box. Like the candy drop on the KPN frigate. She hadn’t needed to explain how fractious it would be to have all of the sailors of their largest ship going on to their mates back in North Korea about the wonders of Western candy. He’d trusted her idea without knowing what it was and then lauded it to others afterward, once she’d told him what she’d done.

  She’d always gone for guys who looked like Quinn, or close enough, which in retrospect had been pretty damn shallow of her even if it usually proved to be very fun. But not a one of them had thought like Quinn or treated her so well.

  “Here, eat this, Boston.” He shoved an opened and heated MRE into her hands. Vegetarian Cheese Tortellini for breakfast, could be worse.

  While they chewed, they finished dressing and packing everything inside the tent. Finally it was down to just themselves and two packs.

  “You ready?”

  “Sure, let’s get off this little hill.”

  “Bundle up.”

  “Why? Storm is gone. It’s so quiet that the helos will probably just pluck us off the hillside.”

  He laughed in surprise and then amusement.

  “What?”

  “Have you been a little short of breath this morning?”

  “I thought that was the sex.”

  “It was,” he kissed her and she’d never get enough of that. The way she went so unexpectedly soft inside every time he did was just…weird. Wonderful, but weird.

  Then he yanked down her hat and pulled her parka hood over it. He snapped a rope into her harness and his.

  “There is another reason.”

  # # #

  Mick unzipped the tent carefully, battering at the snow so that it didn’t pile into the tent.

  He heard Patty’s gasp behind him, but he had to concentrate. He didn’t know how deeply they were buried, or what he’d find at the surface. Packing the snow off to either side, he tunneled upward. He was past kneeling and up to a crouch before his hand finally broke through into clear air. Six feet of drift.

  A wash of fresh, bitingly cold air blasted down at him mixed with a flurry of snow.

  Mick looked up through the six-inch hole he’d punched and saw the blizzard ripping by above them. The wind had little to roar against on a flat surface of powdered snow, so it passed by relatively quietly…and very fast. It would be deafening as soon as they climbed out onto the surface of the snow. It was daylight, but barely.

  He ducked back into the tent and saw Patty sitting unmoving in the darkness.

  “It’ll be okay.”

  “Duh!” She shook off or buried whatever nerves he’d seen on her face for that brief instant. “We’re Special Ops,” and in that moment she was.

  He squeezed her arm to let her know how much he appreciated her ability to adapt to a changing situation. It was pretty damned impressive even by Night Stalker standards.

  “Some things they don’t prepare you for so well,” she said softly but began cinching up the closures on her hood and prepping to enter the blizzard. So, she didn’t have nerves of steel, she just knew how to act as if they were—which had the same result but made her all the more impressive.

  Personally, he’d rather stay in their little cocoon than go out in that weather.

  “Caspar,” he keyed the radio, “this is Mick. Have you punched out yet?”

  “Yeah, ugly as ghost slime out there.”

  “Are we safe to move?”

  “Have to,” he answered. “And not just because our ‘survivor’ won’t last another night on the mountain. Reports say that this storm gets way worse before it gets better and there’s another front behind it. Three days minimum. See you in five minutes.”

  “Roger that.”

  “ ‘Roger that’?” Patty snarked at him. “We’re leaving our warm and cozy love nest to crawl into a storm from hell and ‘Roger that’ is the best you’ve got?”

  Mick keyed the radio, “Patty says that’s a ‘no go’ until after you deliver her hot chocolate, a three-egg omelette with hash browns, and an English muffin with blueberry jam.”

  She sputtered at him.

  “I lost the draw,” Caspar replied. “I had to eat the penne with those vegetable sausage crumbles. No sympathy from this tent.”

  “Sorry, Boston,” Mick told her.

  “Strawberry jam, Doofus,” she shot him one of those radiant but smarmy smiles. “Then apricot and after that blueberry. Certain things you need to know about me if you’re going to go on bedding me.”

  As he definitely planned to go on doing that, he committed the information to memory. It was easy to do as her tastes alternated right down the color spectrum: red, skip orange, yellow, skip green, blue, skip indigo, then violet?

 
“Bet you hated grape juice as a kid.”

  “But I loved cranberry and apple. You broke my color code, which is better than my parents ever did.” Her grin was wicked, then she went serious. “You lead. I’ll collapse the tent behind us.”

  Even though he’d never met them, he could feel pity for parents with such a precocious child. He crawled back out and worked on building tall steps that would get them out to the surface. Mick hoped that it was just a local drift, because if they had to battle six feet of fresh snow the whole way down the mountain, they were in trouble.

  Jostling close enough together to evoke memories of last night’s hot sweaty moments, they collapsed the tent in the hole it had kept open in the snow, folded it well enough that it wouldn’t cause them trouble during the descent and tied it onto his pack.

  Ice axes out and crampons on, they roped up with the PJs and the two toboggans. One the descent, the PJs didn’t stop for training lessons, which made the key lesson most obvious: do whatever it takes to get out alive.

  They took turns battering a channel through the snow. When Patty had volunteered to take a turn, Caspar had gently blocked her.

  “You’re too narrow, Patty. We need a path wide enough for us to fit through as well.”

  Mick appreciated how tactfully the man had done it, Patty was out near her limits—not that it stopped her.

  She’d passed the same trials he had. They trained Special Operations soldiers for mental stamina far beyond the physical, because it was when the body gave up that the true soldiering began. Patty didn’t back down for a moment; “quit” had been knocked out of her vocabulary as long ago as it had been knocked out of his own.

  It was a grueling six hours. Finally they reached the second team and the snow was down to three feet of powder. The second team had spent the morning fighting a trail upward and the storm had only partially refilled it.

  They should have picked up speed at that point, but all it did was keep them from losing speed. At the line where blinding snow shifted to driving rain from above and chilling slush to freezing mud beneath their feet, the third team relieved them of their burdens. They all headed down the mountain together.