LEVI LAMBERT HAD piloted many birds during his service in the United States Air Force. He’d gone on missions he still regretted and some he never would. Made plenty of mistakes in his twenty-nine years. Some of them irreparable.
But this. Well. This might just kill him.
“Please. Please go to sleep.” Levi gently rubbed his six-month-old daughter’s back.
Moonlight spilled through the cracked blinds in Grace’s bedroom. It was two o’clock in the morning, and she wasn’t interested in sleeping. She didn’t need her diaper changed, had just had a bottle of formula—warm...he’d checked—and he’d located her pacifier under the blanket and stuck it in her mouth. She spit it out with a face that said, “Nice try, sucker.”
Levi was no stranger to zero dark thirty, but this was plain cruel. No sooner had he calmed her down and gently set her in her crib than she screamed bloody murder again. A few nights of that would have been fine, but after six straight weeks of it, he was beginning to feel the strain. Strange, but the only thing that kept her quiet was being held. Held and walked around the house, as if it were the middle of the day.
Weren’t babies supposed to sleep 24/7? What was wrong with his baby? She didn’t seem to like him very much. Still, he’d known she was his the minute he’d seen her blue eyes, so much like his own. Just for kicks he’d asked for a DNA test. Yep. His. No doubt, even if he’d had the pleasure of being with Grace’s mother, Sandy, only once. Only one night of mutual, temporary pleasure during a two-week leave in Atlanta, Georgia, he’d now officially never forget.
When he’d received the news of Sandy’s accidental death, it had taken Levi a minute to remember her. Talk about life changing and rearranging. He’d assumed he would die in the air force. His plan was to stay until he retired or was killed in action. It wasn’t like he didn’t have friends who’d left earlier than planned, among them his two best friends in the world, Stone and Matt. But Levi was a lifer. Supposed to be, anyway. He’d been raised for service. Until Grace had come along and changed all that. It would have been too much of a hardship as a single father piloting long missions. At the time he’d been located and informed of Grace, he’d been flying the U-2 spy plane and gone for months at a stretch.
She’d quieted down again with his swaying and rocking, so Levi tried to lay her down in her crib. Grace scrunched up her little pixie face and wailed, as if the very idea that she would go to sleep was an insult to her intelligence. He picked her up again. Definitely not suited for this, although some people had thought it would happen to him eventually if he didn’t settle down and stop sowing his wild oats.
The first thing his mother, Gemma Lambert, had said upon hearing that Levi had become a father was “Bless your heart. I told you so.” His father, retired General Lambert, had decided to address the situation in his usual way: he ignored it. Easy to do, since both of his parents were on their
