Sign, Seal, Deliver

Flying didn’t come easy for her; nothing came easy to a perfectionist. Michelle stood and Zach held up foot traffic to let her and Skeeter pass in front of him.

“I’ll spring for the hotel room. First-class all the way,” he offered.

“Any other guy would have asked me to dinner first.” Michelle tossed the comment over her shoulder as she continued up the aisle.

“But he’d have been thinking about getting you back to his room.”

“He’s right, you know,” Steve piped in. “All I ever think about is getting laid.”

Steve grunted and Michelle realized Zach must have given his RIO a well-deserved elbow to the gut. They were boys, both of them, Peter Pans who would never grow up.

And they deserved each other.

What had she been thinking? She didn’t miss flying with Zach at all.

“If you feel like dinner, we could order up room service,” he persisted. “But I was thinking more like breakfast.”

“Come on, Skeeter. Let’s get out of here,” Michelle urged her roommate forward.

“Just do me a favor,” Zach whispered. “Read the comic strip—”

“Prince, Dann, a moment of your time.” Captain Greene stopped them short.

“Yes, sir.” Michelle popped to attention next to Zach while everyone else filed out around them. Within moments there was just the three of them, leaving the ready room unusually quiet.

Normally, pilots were coming and going. Preflight, postflight, the one thing flyboys loved most next to flying was talking about it. It wasn’t unusual for them to evaluate each other or own up to mistakes. Especially since a single error could mean the difference between life and death.

She had a niggling suspicion about what was coming.

“At ease,” the captain ordered.

Michelle opened her stance, even though she felt far from relaxed. She focused on the captain’s bald spot and tried not to think about this little incident getting back to her father. Just like everything else she did.

After the lecture from the captain, she could look forward to one from the admiral.

“Let me start by saying I don’t create policy, I just enforce it. I know you kids grew up together and have come through the ranks together, but that doesn’t excuse your conduct…”

Michelle could tell by the lack of bluster in Captain Greene’s normally booming discourse that he really meant it this time. She found herself tuning out the rest. She knew it by rote. How many times since they were kids had Zach gotten her into trouble by refusing to play by the rules? Even though he somehow always managed to come out smelling like a rose, she took on the distinct odor of Pepe LePew.

She shifted her focus to the “greenie board” over the captain’s shoulder. Similar charts hung on the bulkhead of every squadron ready room aboard the ship.

Naval aviation was a competitive field fueled by testosterone. Not only did pilots critique themselves and each other, they were formally graded by a landing signal officer.

Color-coded boxes followed a pilot’s last name. Green for an okay landing. Yellow, fair with some degree of deviation. Red, no grade for an ugly approach. Brown, because the pilot had to be waved off due to unsafe conditions. And a blue line meant a “bolter,” which was a pilot who’d missed the wires and had to try again.

Not many aviators had the nerves of steel required to touch down on a floating airstrip at full throttle. But if a pilot couldn’t land on the deck and not in the drink he was useless to the Navy.

Though LSO scores were subjective, Michelle never lowered herself to lobby for preferential treatment. But one F-14 pilot stood out among the rest.

A line of green followed the name Prince. And it wasn’t because he was any better than she at landing the bulky F-14 Tomcats. He was simply a better schmoozer.

Captain Greene droned on. Zach shifted restlessly at her side while Michelle stewed over the yellow block at the end of her green streak.

Fair. She was better than fair.

For that particular landing she’d snagged only the third arresting wire strung across the deck. Sure she’d made a lineup correction at the start of her final pass, settling below the correct approach. But only because the carrier had been late turning into the wind. Flying low as she tried to “chase the lineup” had cost her an okay landing.

Zach never had to settle.

He flew with an instinct she envied. But no one was perfect, especially not Zach Prince.

“This isn’t the time or place.” Captain Greene’s raised voice intruded on her thoughts. “Both of you signed off on that memo I sent around last week, so I’m going to assume you read it. Fraternization among male and female pilots will no longer be tolerated, nor will any appearance of impropriety.

“The way I hear it, the two of you make regular treks to each other’s quarters. Those visits are to cease and desist at once. Here’s how it’s going to go down. This time you get off with a warning. Next time it goes in your record. And if it happens a third time—” he paused for effect “—one of you is out of here. Is that understood?”

The two of them?

Once again she’d been lumped together with her rule-breaking running mate. Guilt by association. And she could guess which one of them would be shipping out.

“Aye, aye, sir,” they responded in unison.

“You have a job to do. I expect you to do it in a professional manner. That’ll be all,” he dismissed them. “And Prince,” the captain called Zach back. “No more harassing Lieutenant Dann over the airwaves. It doesn’t set a good example…”

As the captain continued to rag on Zach, Michelle hurried to the hatch. She’d really had it with Zach this time. Seething with pent-up anger, she didn’t trust herself to say two words to the man. And she sure wasn’t about to wait around and let him smooth-talk her out of her fit of righteous indignation.

“Michelle!” Zach called from the other end of the narrow passageway, but heavy foot traffic kept him from reaching her.

Ignoring his pleas, she picked up her pace, weaving her way between shipmates.

As she headed toward the ship’s elevator, which would take her to the squadron changing room and then up to the flight deck, she cursed herself for being a class-A fool. Captain Greene’s warning was a serious one. Fat chance Zach would listen. She’d be better off putting in for a transfer now, before it became compulsory and a smear on her exemplary record.

Damn, Zach.

Why did she always have to be the responsible one?

Michelle pushed the elevator button repeatedly until it finally arrived and passengers emptied out. Then she quickly stepped inside and held down the close-door button.

“Michelle, wait up.” Zach reached in and sent the doors sliding in the opposite direction. “Going my way, Lieutenant?” he asked with a sheepish grin as if nothing was wrong.

“Do I have a choice, Lieutenant?” She waited just long enough for the doors to close, shutting off the two of them from curious onlookers. Then she turned and vented her anger by socking him in the arm. “I told you so!”

As the elevator started its ascent, he rubbed his shoulder. With his little-boy charm, he exaggerated the harm she’d inflicted “You don’t have to be so smug about it.”

“Smug? Because you’ll receive a slap on the wrist while I’ll get booted out of the Navy? If you won’t think about your career, at least think about mine. Do you have any idea how serious this is? We were lucky to get off with just a warning.” She faced forward and folded her arms.

“I know how serious I am about us…” The doors started to part. He moved to the control panel and held down the close-door button despite the rumble of protest from those waiting outside the elevator.

Because he stood directly in her line of vision she had no choice but to look at him. He stared at her with such burning intensity it would have been hard for her to ignore him, but whatever the promise in his eyes, she didn’t want to see it.

“There is no ‘us,’ Zach.”

“There’s always been an ‘us,’ Michelle.”

She could almost hear the sincerity in the deep baritone of his voice. But it only made her want to lash out, inflict more pain until he was feeling as conflicted as she felt every time she looked at him, every time she got behind the controls of her Tomcat. There was no room in her life for the two things she wanted most.

In the end she could only have one.

She knew what to expect from a machine. Her expectations for this particular man could only lead to heartbreak. The ability to compartmentalize one’s mind was a critical skill for a pilot. Zach didn’t fit neatly into any aspect of her life. Friend, boyfriend? Lover, squad leader?

Competition.

She had no option left but to cut him out completely.

“Get it into that thick skull of yours, Prince. I don’t love you! I’ve never loved you. Why can’t you just leave me alone?” She batted his hand away from the hold button and fled as the doors slid open. She didn’t wait to hear if maybe, just maybe, his answer would give her the one thing she didn’t need right now.

Hope.

CHAPTER TWO

LEAVE HER ALONE? Zach stood in the wake of Michelle’s words and his own total disbelief. Like hell he would!

He was just about to start after her when the elevator began to fill up around him, bringing him back to his senses. She needed space. And he needed…damn, he couldn’t think of anything he needed except her.

He changed direction midstep. Jostling a senior officer on the way out, Zach mumbled a hasty apology. The commander growled something in return. Great, that probably cost him a grade on his next landing. The guy had a reputation for being a hard-ass LSO. But Zach didn’t feel like sucking up today.

He turned aft down the amidships passageway toward the nearest officers’ mess. He’d long since chewed the sugar out of his gum, but he punctuated his thoughts by snapping bubbles in rapid-fire succession.

Michelle had brought him as close as he’d ever come to losing his cool. As a rule, he had the easygoing nature of a middle child. With an over-achiever for an older sister, he’d naturally learned to keep up or get left behind. And because his kid brother worshiped the ground he walked on, he’d made sure the squirt came along for the ride. They were a competitive family.

But with Michelle, it was just that much easier to let her be the boss. He didn’t mind taking the back seat in their as-yet-undefined relationship. What he did mind was being dumped out on the highway at ninety miles an hour, mowed down and left as roadkill.

I don’t love you! I’ve never loved you. Why can’t you just leave me alone?

He didn’t believe her, but something was definitely wrong. She’d grown distant these past few months. He could feel her slipping away with each passing day. And he didn’t know how to hold on. So he’d taken the action of a man desperate and damned.

He’d bought an engagement ring.

Duty free. Right out of the Navy Exchange Catalog. Zach almost groaned out loud thinking about his lack of sensibility. He considered himself a pretty smart guy. He knew better than to purchase a diamond sight unseen.

For one thing it didn’t have any romantic appeal. The parcel had arrived yesterday at mail call—dripping wet after the helicopter had dropped a couple of mailbags into the ocean during transfer. The bundles had been retrieved by divers. Postal clerks had somehow managed to sort through illegible ink smears and soaked care packages to find their disgruntled recipients.

When he’d taken the ring from the soggy box, the plain gold band with its substandard crystallized carbon looked just about perfect nestled in the palm of his hand. From that moment on he couldn’t wait to slip the logical, if somewhat flawed, token of his esteem onto Michelle’s finger.

Hell, he could always buy her a bigger rock. And he’d have a lifetime to get used to the idea of being married.

Marriage. A big step. Maybe the biggest he’d take in his lifetime. Making the decision to leap felt kind of like an emergency ejection during an aborted takeoff. Damned if you did, and damned if you didn’t. Odds were you’d survive a crash in front of the ship only to be dragged under and drowned.

And that was what he felt like right now. A drowning man. But Michelle was his life preserver.

As he neared the mess, the deceptive smells of sizzling bacon and frying eggs—any-way-you-like-’em as long as you liked them runny and scrambled—ambushed his senses. There hadn’t been eggs on board since the last port of call.

Above the cacophony of sounds from the busy kitchen and several simultaneous conversations from the dining area, he zeroed in on his RIO’s street-smart, New York accent.

“Yo, Zach! Over here.” Steve waved from a corner cloth-covered table where he sat eating breakfast with Skeeter. The white linen was supposed to remind them they were officers. And somehow make them forget they were eating the same chow as the enlisted personnel.

Zach nodded as he entered and picked up a tray. Moving quickly through the breakfast buffet line, he chose his favorite preflight carbo load—a short stack of pancakes drowned in imitation maple syrup with a tall glass of powdered milk on the side.

God, he missed whole milk, fresh eggs and a long grocery list of other favorite foods. But this far into deployment just about everything came reconstituted.

Welcome to shipboard life, haze gray and under way.

Plastering a smile on his face, Zach pulled out a chair next to Skeeter and sat down.

“The old man rip you a new one?” Steve asked.

“You could say that,” Zach admitted “Where’s Michelle?”

“I’ve already had this conversation once today and it’s not even 0600. He’s all yours, Marietta.” Skeeter got up, leaving the rest of her breakfast untouched.

Plucking the dusty plastic rose from the bud vase, Zach held it out to her. “Are you sure you have to go?”

Skeeter rejected the faux flower and his insincerity by turning away.

“I don’t think she likes me,” Zach confided in his RIO once the other navigator was out of ear-shot. Not that he cared. Sticking his gum on the side of his plate, he picked up his glass.

“Aren’t you barking up the wrong skirt?”

Zach almost choked on a swallow of chalky milk headed down his windpipe. He coughed to clear his throat.

Steve offered a sheepish grin. “So Skeeter doesn’t like you and Michelle is pissed at you—what else is new?” Steve sopped up the gravy on his plate with his last bite of biscuit, a Navy specialty called SOS.

“‘Pissed’ is an understatement.” Zach dug into his pancakes. “Michelle acts as if I’m out to destroy her career,” he managed to say between bites.

“And you probably will. Admit it, Prince, you’re a nonconformist. You don’t give a damn about your career. But you’re a helluva F-14 pilot, which is why the Navy puts up with you. Your call sign isn’t Renegade for nothing, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.” Even before this latest ass-chewing, he’d been thinking about what he had to offer the Navy and what he wanted in return. But despite what anyone thought, it bothered him that Michelle thought he was out to destroy her life when all he wanted to do was be a part of it. Maybe he’d have been better off following in his father’s footsteps to the SEAL teams, instead of pursuing Michelle into aviation.

He loved to fly, but his laid-back approach in a world that moved at Mach II sometimes made him look indolent. Maybe he’d be better off out of the service altogether. “If I start submitting my résumé now—”

“Whoa. Back up.” Steve pushed aside his plate. “You want to fly for a commercial airline?”

“Why not? I’m at the end of my obligated service. I could have a civilian job by the end of the cruise.”

It was no secret the airlines recruited military pilots right out of flight school. He and Michelle could both easily get real jobs. Was that what he wanted to do with the rest of his life? A commuter run between Sioux Falls and Cedar Rapids? Two point five kids? A white picket fence?

He wasn’t sure.

But sometime during the past four months the idea had taken hold and wouldn’t let go. Now all he had to do was convince Michelle.

“Wipe those thoughts right out of your head. Talk about conforming—” Steve reached for Skeeter’s bowl of unfinished cereal and started shoveling soggy shredded wheat into his mouth “—that is not what’s going to make you happy, my friend.” Steve let his less-than-objective opinion be known between swallows of slop. Zach was used to his friend’s garbage gut and his convictions.

Steve’s eyesight had kept him from becoming a pilot and fulfilling his own dream of becoming a Blue Angel, the Navy’s elite exhibition fliers. Even after laser surgery corrected his vision, the Navy rejected his request to retrain from a designated NFO—naval flight officer—to a pilot. Retreads, as the Navy liked to call them, had a higher percentage of crashes. But that didn’t stop Steve from trying to cut through the red tape, however.

“Don’t take it personally, Magic Man. You’re the best radar I’ve ever had in my back seat. And you’d make one helluva pilot. Even Greene is pulling for you on this one.”

Beyond that, Zach didn’t offer any encouragement. Whether or not Steve would ever find himself behind the controls of a jet all depended on the needs of the Navy.

“You can’t be serious about giving up jets, Prince.”

Do you have any idea how serious this is? We were lucky to get off with just a warning.

“I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.” Or anyone. His deepest personal thought caught the tail end of his sentence and went along for the ride.

It didn’t matter what he did as long as they were together.

If he and Michelle married while in the service, they’d see less of each other than they did now. There’d be long separations. Restrictions when they were together. And he didn’t have a clue how they’d ever manage a family. But if he could convince her they had other options…

The ensign leaned forward in his seat. “Take my advice, Prince. Forget about it. You’re a naval aviator, there’s JP-5 running through your veins. If the Navy wanted guys like us to have families, they’d have issued a wife and kids along with the seabag.”

Steve spoke the truth. Not too very long ago the Navy hadn’t even allowed married men to train as pilots. Single guys were discouraged from tying the knot. Firstborn sons from two-parent families with stay-at-home mothers and domineering fathers were considered ideal candidates, according to one Navy study, because of their natural arrogance.

Opportunities for women, once nonexistent, were just now opening up. Michelle’s pride was all wrapped up in being among the first female fighters. And he was going to ask her to give that up?

She’d never go for it. Even he had to admit how much she loved flying.

What had he done?

“I appreciate the warning, Magic Man. But it’s too late.” He’d already popped the question, so to speak. But he was no longer sure about her answer.

A CORNER OF the squadron changing room was sectioned off by a hanging bedsheet. The easy locker-room banter subsided as Michelle entered, then picked up again as she crossed to the other side of the jerry-rigged drape.

Since her introduction to the Fighting Aardvarks of VF-114, she’d seen as much of these men as their wives and proctologists. Yet the barriers remained.

The partition only served as a reminder.

It certainly wasn’t there to protect her already compromised modesty.

Michelle grabbed her G suit from its hook and put it on over her flight suit. In the post-Tailhook era male fliers acted with caution around their female counterparts. When asked, they dutifully acknowledged women as their equals, but resentment brewed beneath the surface.

Michelle shut out thoughts of equality as she shrugged into her survival vest. She had a job to do. The same as the men. For better or worse, for now at least, she was a Vark.

Hearing Zach’s familiar voice from the other side of the curtain, she realized he’d come into the room and wasn’t attempting to sweet-talk her out of her bad mood. In fact, he ignored her altogether as he carried on a conversation about weather conditions with the rest of the guys.

Michelle paused in putting on her gear.

What did she expect? She’d made it clear she wanted him to leave her alone. Even if deep down that wasn’t what she wanted at all. She’d made her choice, the right choice, and now she had to live with it. Still, it would be tough going on without him. He’d always been a part of her world.

He’d smoothed over the rough waters of squadron life. And she credited him with the fact that the men even tolerated her at all. His easy acceptance of her as his wingman made them all more comfortable.

It was her job to ride his wing. Follow his orders. But she’d always felt as if he didn’t mind being the one watching out for her, something she didn’t always appreciate, but remained grateful for nonetheless.

There were pilots who considered it bad luck to have a woman walk the wings of their parked planes, let alone ride in them.

Michelle’s gaze involuntarily darted to an eye-level rip in the sheet, searching for Zach on the other side. Some smart-ass had printed the words peep show in Magic Marker on the guy side. Skeeter had retaliated by drawing the male symbol around the hole, the arrow pointing to the words no show on the gal side.

Even though Skeeter was only on her first carrier cruise, she could hold her own with this bunch of bandits.

When she realized what she was doing, Michelle forced herself to look away. If they caught her peeking, she’d never hear the end of it.

Well, that would be one way to lose her icy reputation. Though she’d hate to think of what they’d call her then. Behind her back the Varks referred to her as the Ice Princess. Which was fine. Because the one thing they’d never call her was Quota Queen.

She’d earned her gold wings. And the price she’d paid may very well have been her only chance at happiness. Certainly it was higher than the price paid by a man.

Bending over in an exaggerated bow, she cinched her parachute harness tight, reminding herself of at least one advantage to being a woman. She didn’t have to worry about crushing her balls during an emergency ejection.

Sweeping aside the curtain, she strode past the men with all the regal bearing of a condemned royal, pausing only long enough to pick up her oxygen mask and helmet with the call sign Rapunzel emblazoned across the front.

A flight instructor had given her the tag after her first solo. In the aftermath of excitement, she’d taken off her helmet and let down her hair.

A mistake she’d never make again.

ON THE FLIGHT DECK, winds buffeted Michelle’s face. Jet engines roared in her ears and rattled her teeth, while the familiar heady scent of jet fumes filled her nostrils.

The sun put in its first appearance of the day, highlighting the light cloud cover with streaks of bright orange and pink.

A fine Navy day, as her father would say.

God, she loved this life. Nothing compared with a dawn launch off an aircraft carrier. She’d take that adrenaline rush over a man any day.

Pausing to check the safety of her 9-mm pistol, she placed the gun back in the holster pocket of her survival vest. Then ran a confident hand across the sleek underbelly of her assigned F-14 Tomcat. This was the point when she pushed aside all self-doubt and donned the persona of Xena Warrior Princess.

“I read the maintenance log,” Skeeter shouted above the din as she joined in the preflight walk-through. “The last pilot reported a problem with the left rudder, but the ground crew didn’t find anything.”

“Thanks, I’ll check it out.” Even though she trusted the “Vark fixers,” Michelle didn’t believe in leaving anything to chance. As a Navy pilot, she knew her plane inside and out.