And my gut is telling me I’ll keep right on falling in love with you more and more every day.”
He kissed her before she could answer back, and she so very much wanted to share the words bubbling up inside her. Love for him had rolled over her fast and fierce, but then she wasn’t a woman to shy away from a challenge. And one thing was certain: Wade Rocha was a brick-headed, sexy, loyal-to-the-end kind of man who’d taken her whole heart.
Cupping his beard-stubbled face in her palms, she vowed, “I love you too, so much I can’t even come close to telling you in just one night. I’m going to need lots of nights and days, months, years, to express it all.”
His forehead fell to rest against hers. “I’m sorry we don’t have longer before I leave.”
She grazed her heel up the back of his leg, already planning a homecoming to remember. “Then we’d better start making every minute count.”
Epilogue
Patrick Air Force Base—4½ months later
He’d never looked forward to a homecoming more.
Inside the cavernous C-17 cargo plane, Wade lined up with his PJ team and other airmen returning from their rotation in the Middle East. Beyond the open load ramp, the sun beat down on the crowd of waiting families and friends with flags and banners. A military brass band played, but it was tough to tell which was louder, the music or the cheers.
He’d gone from Alaska to his deployment in Afghanistan and was returning to his new duty station at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. All his household goods—not much to speak of—were in storage. But he had somewhere to bunk in the meantime. At Sunny’s place.
The fact that she’d actually moved here still stunned him, humbled him. In fact, she’d embraced the adventure of it all, as he should have known she would. After seeing Misty through her surgery and recovery, Sunny had landed a job at the Patrick AFB gym and even found a tiny bungalow to rent, tucked away in a marshy cove. Nothing here would be as isolated or open as Alaska, but she assured him an ocean view provided some of the vastness her pioneer soul craved.
One shuffle at a time along the cargo deck, he moved forward as they gathered gear and made their way toward the back ramp. Anticipation hummed inside him as tangibly as the idling jet engines. He ached to hold her, catch the scent of her hair, the taste of her. They’d spent every day together before he deployed, but still had spent eight times as many days apart as with each other.
They’d done their best to stay connected, talking and cyberdating via Skype, and true to his word, he’d stuck to webcam, face-to-face discussions where they’d actually learned a lot about each other—beyond where to touch to drive her over the edge fastest. Although he was looking forward to resurrecting that knowledge the second they got to her bungalow.
As much as he’d missed sleeping with her, he most regretted not being with her during all the massive changes in her life. Not everything that had come into the community via email had been a lie. The surgeon Misty had communicated with was real and the offer to perform her surgery at his teaching hospital had been valid. It hadn’t been completely free by a long shot, but she had her hearing back. She and Flynn had decided to move back home, raise her nephew, and lead the community in rebuilding with a more open environment.
Not that a mountainside on the Aleutian Islands was ever going to be a vacation playground. But there would most definitely be watchful eyes on that little off-the-grid village from now on.
The records recovered from the boat wreckage had rocked the intelligence community. He was privy to just the tip of the iceberg, and only that much because Lasky needed help connecting some dots. Asking Wade sat better with the agent than letting Sunny in on such explosive, top-secret information. Wade was still rocked to his boots over learning Brett Livingston had been aiding Russian mob groups smuggling terrorist spies into the U.S. through Alaska. Deputy Rand Smith had been his hired assassin. Sunny had been that close to death so many times. That bastard Livingston had cut a deal to avoid the death penalty. Already over a dozen arrests had been quietly made, all prior members of Sunny’s community. She and the rest of the village would never know