She woke at 4:00 a.m. Although they’d said everything and nothing already, she wasn’t going to make the mistake of leaving when no one would see her again.
Missy took her phone from her backpack and remembered that she’d turned the sound off when she was being held at the old barracks.
A base-wide text message popped up saying that the lockdown had ended at zero two hundred that morning.
She took a breath and opened her Expedia app. Within six minutes she had a flight booked for Florida. She’d already decided to go there directly. She was sure that if she returned home with Conrad, he would persuade her to stay with him. Either for the sex or her weapons skills. And she didn’t want to stay for either of those reasons. But the sex, she was afraid, would persuade her every time.
She would ask one of her girlfriends to supervise the military removal people who would descend soon enough to pack up her belongings.
A clean break was the best option. She got up and went to the bathroom to shower and by the time she came out, Conrad was already awake, understanding in his eyes.
“You’re leaving. You got a text while you were in the shower reminding you to check in for your flight.” He briefly held up her phone that she’d left on the bed.
“Yep. I’m heading directly to MacDill.” She wasn’t going to apologize for her decision, nor explain it. He would move on, as he always did.
“At least we can share a cab to the airport.”
“You’re leaving too?” she asked.
“There’s nothing keeping me here. The exercise has all but been abandoned, and I just want to go home. Back to some kind of normality.” He laughed. “They always say exercises can be more dangerous than the reality of war. I’m beginning to think they’re right.”
Missy laughed. They had been through some interesting times. Good war stories that would keep people amused, and shocked, at dinners for the rest of their lives. It felt strange to be saying goodbye to all of that, and even stranger to be saying goodbye to Conrad.
She’d loved him for so long. She could actually put that into words now. Because leaving him was horrible, but staying and being replaced by another woman would be worse. And whatever you could say about Missy’s life, she was great at self-preservation.
And that made her ask, “Do you think that guy last night was really after me?”
Conrad sat up. “I don’t know. I think this year’s Red Flag was so fucked up, it’s impossible to say.”
“Eleanor texted me yesterday. I sent some stuff to the hospital for her.” She smiled. As she was about to tell him what she said, her phone beeped with an email. She grabbed it and read it, scrolling down at the information. “It’s from Bowman. They’ve made an arrest.”
“What do you mean?”
“The guy I identified as being the person in the hangar was arrested, with the approval and help of TGO. The CEO—Danvers—said he was unhinged. That he tried to kill Eleanor and the British pilot. The CEO apparently thought he was doing a favor to a troubled ex-military guy by hiring him, but that he had been in the process of firing him for a series of bad judgment calls. He confessed to trying to get rid of Eleanor and the Brit, because they had fought with him in a casino a few nights previously. He said he’d been drunk and they’d attacked him. So, he dicked with their aircraft.” She looked over at him. “Obviously I’m paraphrasing there. Wow. That’s a whole other level of unhinged. Talk about bad judgment calls.”
A load lifted from her shoulders. A weight of tension she hadn’t really realized she’d been carrying. She giggled. “I was nearly put away for espionage.”
“What do you mean nearly? You were. I had to break you out. I will always be the one who broke you out of jail.”
He was already thinking in terms of memories. She had made the right decision. She smiled, trying not to let a hint of sadness through. “Yes. You will always be that guy.”
Conrad watched as she put her stuff together. It felt as if she were packing pieces of his heart in various zip pouches and pockets to her backpack. All this time he thought he’d locked away his emotions. He was the nerves-of-steel pilot. But maybe she’d had his heart all along anyway. He was kind of okay with that.
He couldn’t ask her to stay and put her career on hold for him, and he knew that offering to move, or even quit the air force, would put way too much pressure on her.
If only they’d started this months ago. If only they’d gotten together gradually, so they would have been able to figure everything out as they went along. But instead they had come together like a lightning strike, wrecking everything it its path.
They caught a cab to the airport, and an alien feeling of loss came over him. Her decision to go to MacDill was her rejection of him and their life together—such as it was. He wasn’t going to badger her into making a different decision. He wasn’t going to beg or tell her how he felt about her, because clearly, despite all they’d gone through, this was something she had to do for her own career. He had to respect that.
Neither of them checked in bags for their respective flights, so they went through security together and sat at her gate since her flight would be the first to depart.
They waited in silence, until the last people had boarded her flight. He stood up and held his hand out to her. She took it and stood next to him toe to toe. “I guess this is it, then,” he said, wanting to lengthen the seconds out by days.
“I’m going to miss you,” she said. Then she raised her eyes to the ceiling and continued. “I’ll miss some things, at least.”
He put a hand over his heart. “Only some things?”
“Well, I won’t miss the morning-after stories of all your conquests, all the fajitas you’ve eaten, and their rating out of ten, nor will I miss you bailing on every social occasion. But I will admit that there are some things I will miss now that I didn’t even know about before.” She bit her lip and gazed at him, her eyelashes fluttering.
His heart sank. She really had believed him every time he talked about the imaginary women he’d been with. But he couldn’t blame her because that’s what he had intended. That was his excuse for not hanging out with her, his way of ensuring that she never looked at him the way she had the past three days. Because he would not have been able to resist her. And would never have been able to walk away. He still wasn’t, which was why it was best that she was doing the walking.
“I’ll text you my new details when I get there,” she said. “Maybe you can come for a visit sometime?”
That was a bad idea. A bad, bad idea. “I’d like that.” Yeah, this was never getting any easier. He took her other hand and kissed her gently on her lips. Their last kiss. “Don’t forget me now.”
She frowned. “I’m sorry. What did you say your name was again?” She winked at him.
He shook his head. “So hurtful. So, so hurtful.”
She picked up her backpack, took a boarding card from her pocket, raised her eyebrows. “See ya.”
He nodded once in reply and watched her go. She disappeared onto the walkway and out of his life. He sat down again, watching the workers outside move around the plane. He wanted to sing some power rock ballad about a broken heart. He was in his world, and all the workers were in theirs. He wanted to rip that plane to shreds like he was the Hulk.
But he knew he had to get his shit together and move on. He stood, grabbed his bag, and rolled his neck around on his shoulders, trying to ease some of the tension.
Just as he was turning to leave, unable to actually watch the aircraft push back, a man in green shorts and a white button-down ran up to the gate. “Am I too late?” he asked, thrusting his boarding card at the airline employees.
“No, Mr. Janke. You just made it.”
Conrad looked at him. Wasn’t that the name of the guy who had tried to get Missy to confess?
“It’s Colonel Janke,” the man complained.
Yes, it was definitely him.
“I’m sorry, Colonel Janke,” the employee said, swiping his boarding card. She gave it back to him and he ran down the Jetway. As soon as he was out of sight, the employee rolled her eyes.
I’m with you, sister. Conrad took a beat. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Why would a JAG be flying to MacDill? Why would a base JAG be going anywhere?
He tried to walk casually up to the desk. He grinned at the employee. “Hi. I’m Colonel Conrad, but you can call me Mr. Conrad. In fact, you can call me whatever you want to call me.”
She smiled slowly and leaned forward on the counter. “Can I call you anytime?” Humor lit her eyes.
He laughed. “Anything, anytime. I just wanted to tell you that we’re not all like him. And, man, he was lucky you let him on the flight, right? I mean, it’s not your fault he was running late.”
“He only decided an hour ago where he wanted to go. Like, his ticket was only purchased at eight this morning.”
Eight a.m. was about the time Missy and he had gone through security. It would have only taken him a call to the base travel office to see where she was headed. Cold trickled down his spine. Janke was following her. There was no other explanation.
He grabbed his phone and dialed his number-one speed dial.
“Hi, this is Major Malden. I’m sorry I can’t get to the phone right now but if you leave me a message, I’ll call you as soon as I can. Thank you.”
He looked out the window and saw the plane pushing back. Tension seeped through his body again. He couldn’t even fucking remember the last time he was relaxed.
“When’s the next flight to Tampa?” he asked his new friend.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard. “The next one leaves in three hours. Are you going to go and have a word with Mr. Janke for me?”
“You better believe I’ll be having a word with him. Can you get me on that flight?”
Her eyes flirted with him. “I can get you wherever you want to go.”
He smiled back her. “I just bet you can.”
He handed her his credit card, and she handed him a new ticket. He looked at her name tag. “Thank you, Nancy. It was an absolute pleasure doing business with you.”
“Likewise, I’m sure.” She went back to her colleague on the other side of the desk.
He watched the plane depart, while committing half of his attention to figuring out how long Missy’s flight would take and how soon he would see her again. To be safe, he left a voice mail. Hopefully she would turn on her phone as the plane was still taxiing to the gate when they landed. It would give her time to figure out the safest place to go.
His fists clenched. She had to stop fucking leaving him. Every time she slipped out, left, or sneaked off, something bad happened.
And he couldn’t help but notice that Janke was about five foot ten.