Ghostrider - M. L. Buchman Page 0,45

cockpit of a crashing hijacked plane, but thought better of it. In fact, he hoped that she never read the official report because he’d told the investigators about it—saying he hadn’t heard what woman they were fighting over.

Then he noticed the position of her hand. Her fine fingers, that were never still as they danced across the keyboard of the HEL-A laser firing console, lay on her abdomen just below the sling.

Perfectly still.

29

“Who’s is it?”

“Who’s is what?” Rosa jerked her hand aside but she knew it was too late.

“Neither one knew.” Pierre said it as a flat accusation.

She wilted. “I don’t either. It was a birth control failure, not a plan. I guess now, without a DNA test that I can’t ask for, I never will.” She wanted to cry again, but she’d done enough of that. And that hadn’t even been for Tango or Gutz, not really. It had been for the overwhelming madness that her life had become.

Her hand returned to her belly of its own volition. She’d heard about that, but never really believed. It was ridiculous.

Except both of her child’s potential fathers just died. And wasn’t it obvious that Pierre had something he wasn’t telling her about them. But she trusted him; she probably didn’t want to know whatever he was hiding.

He slumped down in the visitor’s chair with his hands jammed deep in his pockets, scowling in the vicinity of his boots. Papa did that sometimes, when things had been hard at his work. She knew from watching Mama that there were times to let a man sulk, but there were times to just break it apart.

“You’re doing a crappy job of flirting with me right now, Pierre.”

He barely smiled. “Half of that was because I thought you were ‘safe.’ Saw you with Tango and knew you weren’t available. Easy to have some fun when you don’t think it means anything.”

He was right, it had been fun. From the first moment they’d met, both seasoned AC-130 gunners, arriving together on the factory floor in Marietta, Georgia, to watch the first Ghostrider slide off the line. A lot of classroom hours because firing a HEL-A laser wasn’t at all like firing an M102 howitzer.

A month in the classroom, then five more of shakedown. Their Ghostrider was to be the first to be declared mission ready—available for combat after today’s tests. Not counting General JJ’s plans to do just that with it, simply not by following any orders but his own.

“What was the other half?”

“Why did you kiss me?” Pierre grunted out.

She could feel the heat flash to her face as she looked away.

“You don’t mind telling me that you’re okay with lovers in pairs without a single blush, and you can’t tell me why you kissed me like that?”

Rosa still wasn’t sure, though she’d given it a lot of thought. “How did you really break your nose?”

“Weird-ass question.”

No argument from her. Why was that suddenly important? But it seemed like it was.

“Local swimming pool. Seventh grade,” he grumbled out. “Carmen McAllister’s seventh-grade bikini curves could boil your hormones. Well, mine anyway. Watching them go by, I walked square into the high-dive board’s support pole. Broke my nose, tripped, and fell on the pool’s concrete edge hard enough to break my arm, before I fell in and had to be rescued by the lifeguard.”

“Was she impressed?”

“My aunt sure was. Almost laughed herself out of her one-piece—which would have been gross as hell because she makes heifers look svelte. She still roars with great brays of laughter when she retells it at every family gathering over the last fifteen years. Carmen never even noticed me: before, during, or after.” His grimace spoke volumes.

She couldn’t help but laugh despite everything else that was going on.

And there it was.

Not the humor, something both Gutz and Tango lacked—though Tango thought he was funny as hell.

There was a kindness there. And an honesty.

“Why didn’t you tell the Air Force investigators about…” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say it.

“Your part in the conspiracy?”

She could only nod.

“Needed to hear your side of the story first. Were you coerced? What?”

And there was another piece of it. Tango wouldn’t have hesitated to throw her under the wheels if it meant saving his own ass.

“Why, Rosa?” And she realized that he liked her far more than he was willing to admit even to himself.

Again she looked away, because there was no way to speak to the pain on his features. She made a show of patting