commissioned-officer corps, Kate outranked an air force captain. The fact that Scott had just watched a senior officer pluck thorns out of her bottom appeared to afford him no end of amusement. His eyes glinting between those ridiculously thick gold-tipped lashes, he introduced himself.
“Dave Scott. Airplane driver.”
To her profound disgust, Kate discovered her inoculation against handsome devils like this one wasn’t quite as effective as she’d thought. Or as permanent. Shivers danced along her skin as she gazed up at him. He was so close she could see the beginnings of a bristly gold beard. The way his cheeks creased when he smiled. The reflection of her sweat-sheened face in his mirrored glasses.
She got an up close whiff of him, too. Unlike Kate, he still carried a morning-shower scent, clean and shampooy, coated with only a faint tang of dust. No woodsy aftershave for Captain Dave Scott, she noted, then wondered why the heck she’d bothered to take such a detailed inventory.
This wasn’t smart, Kate thought as her heart thumped painfully against her ribs. Not smart at all. She’d learned the hard way not to trust too-handsome charmers like this one. If nothing else, her brief, disastrous marriage had taught her to go with her head and not her hormones where men were concerned.
Added to that was the fact that she and Scott would be working together for the next few weeks. In extremely close proximity. Despite her flamboyant looks and sensual figure, Kate was a professional to her toes. A woman didn’t acquire a long string of initials after her name and the title of senior weather research scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency without playing the game by the rules.
“Do Not Fool Around With the Hired Help” ranked right up there as rule number two. Or maybe it was three. Within the top five, anyway.
Not that Kate was thinking about fooling around with Captain Dave Scott. Just the opposite! Still, goose bumps danced along her spine as he took her elbow to assist her into the pickup’s passenger seat. Once she was comfortably ensconced, he rounded the front end of the truck and climbed behind the wheel.
“So how long have you been on-site?” he asked, putting the vehicle into gear.
“From day one.”
When his boot hit the gas pedal, Kate braced herself for the thrust. Instead of jerking forward, however, the pickup seemed to coil its legs like some powerful, predatory beast and launched into a silent run. Obviously, Scott had installed one heck of an engine inside the truck’s less-than-impressive frame.
Interesting, she thought. The captain was a whole lot like his vehicle. All coiled muscle and heart-stopping blue eyes under a battered straw cowboy hat and rumpled white shirt.
“So what’s the skinny?” he asked. “Is Pegasus ready to fly?”
Instantly, Kate’s thoughts shifted from the man beside her to the machine housed in a special hangar constructed of materials designed to resist penetration by even the most sophisticated spy satellites.
“Almost,” she replied. “Bill Thompson had his heart attack just as we were finishing ground tests.”
“I never met Thompson, but I’ve heard of him. The AF lost a damned good pilot.”
“Yes, it did. So did Pegasus. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” she warned him, “and not much time to do it.”
“No problem.”
The careless reply set Kate’s jaw. She and the rest of the cadre had been hard at it for weeks now. If Scott thought he was going to waltz in and get up to speed on the top secret project in a few hours, he had one heck of a surprise waiting for him.
Unaware that he’d just scratched her exactly the wrong way, the captain seemed more interested in Kate than the project that would soon consume him.
“I saw your career brief in the package headquarters sent as part of my orientation package. Over a thousand hours in the P-3. That’s pretty impressive.”
It was, by Kate’s standards as well as Scott’s. Only the best of the best got to fly aboard NOAA’s specially configured fleet of aircraft, including the P–3 Orion. Flying into the eye of a howling hurricane took guts, determination and a cast-iron stomach. Honesty forced Kate to add a qualifier, though.
“Not all those hours were hurricane time. Occasionally we saw blue sky.”
“I went up once with the air force’s Hurricane Hunters based at Keesler.”
Kate stiffened. Her ex-husband was assigned to the Air Force Reserve unit at Keesler Air Force Base, on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. That’s where she’d met John, during a conference that included all agencies involved in tracking and predicting the fury unleashed all too often on the Gulf by Ma Nature.
That’s also where she’d found the jerk with his tongue down the mouth of a nineteen-year-old bimbette. Kate had few fond memories of Keesler.
“So how was your flight?” she asked, shoving aside the reminder of her most serious lapse in judgment.
“Let’s just say once was enough.”
“Flying into a maelstrom of wind and rain isn’t for the faint of heart,” she agreed solemnly.
He cracked a grin at that. When he pulled his gaze from the road ahead, laughter shimmered in his blue eyes.
“No, ma’am. It surely isn’t.”
Kate didn’t reply, but she knew darn well Scott was anything but faint of heart. When the air force had identified him as Bill Thompson’s replacement, she’d activated her extensive network of friends and information sources to find out everything she could about the man. Her sources confirmed he’d packed a whole bunch of flying time into his ten years in the military.
Flying that included several hundred combat hours in both the Blackhawk helicopter and the AC–130H gunship. A highly modified version of the air force’s four-engine turboprop workhorse, the gunship provided surgically accurate firepower in support of both conventional and unconventional forces, day or night.
Kate didn’t doubt Scott had provided just that surgically accurate support during recent tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq. After Iraq, he’d been sent to the 919th Special Operations Wing at Hurlburt Field, Florida, to fly the latest addition to the air force inventory—the tilt-wing CV–22 Osprey.
Since the Osprey combined the lift characteristics of a helicopter and the long-distance flight capability of a fixed-wing aircraft, Scott’s background made him a natural choice as short-notice replacement for Bill Thompson. If—when!—Pegasus completed its operational tests, it might well replace both the C–130 and the CV–122 as the workhorse of the battlefield.
Thinking of the tense weeks ahead, Kate chewed on her lower lip and said little until they’d passed through the second checkpoint and entered the compound housing the Pegasus test complex.
The entire complex had been sited and constructed in less than two months. Unfortunately, the builders had sacrificed aesthetics to exigency. The site had all the appeal of a prison camp. Rolls of concertina wire surrounded the clump of prefabricated modular buildings and trailers, all painted a uniformly dull tan to blend in with the desert landscape. White-painted rocks marked the roads and walkways between the buildings. Aside from
