Cindy Gerard - The Way Home

It hadn’t stopped her, though. She’d traded her standby gold studs for a pair of dangly copper earrings sculpted into the shape of feathers. Her necklace matched. The local artisan who had made the set had called the necklace a cleavage piece, and as Jess felt it warm against her skin, she felt a tiny stirring of arousal that self-consciousness quickly undercut.

Maybe she shouldn’t have worn it, because not only had she noticed Ty’s gaze on her left hand, but once or twice, it had also drifted to the feather between her breasts before he’d quickly looked away again.

And whoa, he was watching her face now, she realized, about the same time that she realized she’d been so busy second-guessing the effort she’d taken to look nice that she hadn’t responded to his compliment.

She met his eyes across the table and blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “You look pretty, too.”

“Thanks. I think.”

They both smiled at that, and she worked hard at stalling a blush. His dark hair wasn’t overly long, but the tips had been wet when he’d arrived, which had conjured an immediate and vivid picture of him naked under a steamy spray—along with a jarring olfactory memory of how wonderful a man smelled fresh from a shower.

She’d be lying if she said she didn’t think about and miss sex. And yes, nights when the bed felt so empty and she ached with loneliness, she’d call on a memory or a fantasy and make the occasional solo flight, and oh, boy, she needed to steer clear of that arena right now.

Except that the man watching her with compelling and inquisitive eyes made that next to impossible. He really did look pretty. She’d told him to dress casual—everything in the summer in northern Minnesota was casual—and he’d taken her at her word. He’d traded his white T-shirt, jeans, and deck shoes for a soft butter-yellow T-shirt, olive-drab cargo shorts, and brown leather sandals. When he’d pulled up, he’d been wearing aviator shades that hid his eyes—eyes that had latched on to her from behind those dark glasses for several long, humming seconds that started up that muscle clenching she didn’t seem to have much control over when he was around.

He was tan and buff and self-assured, and if that wasn’t enough, every time he smiled, something inside her melted a little bit more and reminded her, again, that while Bear had taken away some of the sting of being alone, a snuggly puppy was no substitute for a man.

However, a man like Ty—so much like J.R.—was fine for dinner and conversation, but beyond that, he was way too risky.

He’d ordered a bottle of red wine, and she reached for her glass. “I meant to ask earlier. How are your friends? And your brother? Mike, right?”

A smile came over his face that conveyed how much he loved his brother. “Joe and Stephanie are fine. And Mike—well, Mike is Mike. There’s not a lot more to say… except that he’s living in the States again, so I get to see him a little more often.”

“What is it that he does, exactly?”

Another fond smile. “Let’s leave it at Mike has one of those jobs where if I told you what he does, he’d have to kill me. ”

“You two don’t work together?”

“As a rule? No.”

She didn’t miss the implication. All Mike had to do was call, and no matter what he needed, Ty would be there. Yup. Way too risky. Been there, done that. Had the condolences of the U.S. military to prove it.

Time for a new topic. “Did Shelley get you settled at the resort?”

He lifted his wine, too, and something about the way his strong, lean fingers wrapped around the delicate stem of the glass captivated her.

“She did. Nice lady. Very nice resort.”

“Shelley and Darrin—her husband—run a tidy ship.” The Whispering Pines boasted twelve rustic log cabins with varying numbers of bedrooms, all charmingly furnished with an eclectic mix of new and antique furniture and art that Shelley had collected locally over the years, and all with gorgeous lake views.

“Been a long time since I breathed deep and all I smelled was pine. Makes me think of home.”

She stopped with the wine almost to her lips. “Florida’s not home?”

“It is now, yeah. Key West. But I grew up in Colorado. Very rural. Our log house was a lot like the main lodge at the resort. Huge native stone fireplace, open beams, big wraparound porch.”

The wistfulness in his voice and the soft smile on his lips told her that home for him was a very fond memory. “You miss it.”

He shrugged. “Like I said. Been a long time since I’ve smelled air this fresh. Substitute horses for motorboats, and I’m almost back there.”

“Are your parents still there?”

“Yeah. Saw them last month. They’re doing great.”

“So why Key West?”

He settled back in his chair, looking very male and very comfortable with himself. “That’s where my business is. Air cargo.”

It had taken several months for the full story to emerge about the events of the night Ty and his brother and Joe and Stephanie Green had rescued Stephanie’s parents—her mother was now secretary of State—from would-be assassins. “We can’t comment for reasons of national security,” had been the answer most given when reporters had knocked on doors attempting to ferret out the facts. But a local reporter had been dogged about digging up all the details he could. Airport personnel had confirmed that Mike Brown had indeed successfully landed a small private jet at the International Falls airport in the midst of a blizzard and that Ty had been his copilot.

“You were military.” She’d known the first time she’d met him that he was or had been in the service. All it had taken was a look. J.R. had been Special Forces. All those guys had a look about them. Edgy, intense, focused.

“Right. Navy.”

“Navy what?” Every man in uniform was a special man, but again, she had recognized him from the beginning as something more.

He looked out over the lake, then back at her. “HSC-23. Wildcards.”

She shook her head. “Sorry. I’m not familiar.”

“Air ambulance. We choppered casualties in and out of combat zones in southern and western Iraq to supplement the Army’s Dustoff operations.”

Because she’d been married to a Green Beret, she was semiliterate in spec-ops speak, but this was a new term for her. “Dustoff?”

“A credo attributed to a guy named Kelly—Major Charles L. Kelly. Back in the Vietnam era.” He stopped. Shook his head. “But you don’t want to hear this.”

“Actually, I do. Tell me about Kelly and Dustoff.”

He shrugged. “Kelly—Combat Kelly—was commander of the 57th Medical Detachment, helicopter ambulance. He was some kind of man. ‘Dustoff’ was his call sign. When there were wounded, in came Kelly, no matter what. July sixty-four, Vietnam, he approached a hot area to pick up wounded, as usual, and started taking fire. The red cross on the bird’s fuselage made a nice bull’s-eye,” he added, with the insight of one who knows and has been under fire himself.

“Anyway, ground support called him off over and over, but he didn’t listen. ‘When I have your wounded,’ he told them. Not long after, he was killed by a single bullet.”

Ty became quiet and reflective for a moment. “Anyway, Kelly’s gone, but ‘Dustoff’ became the call sign for all aero-medical missions in Vietnam. And since then, ‘When I have your wounded’ has become the personal and collective credo of all Dustoff pilots who followed him.”

While he’d said very little about himself directly, he’d revealed a lot. J.R. used to tell her about the bravery of the medical-evac crews. Because the Army and Navy air ambulance birds have a red cross painted on their sides, the Geneva Convention rules don’t allow them to arm themselves with machine guns or mini-guns. Pilots like Kelly and Ty flew into hot zones with nothing but personal weapons—M-4 rifles and handguns—for protection against RPGs and small-arms fire. This practice was supposed to ensure humanitarian treatment of wounded during war, making aircraft, ships, corpsmen, trucks, facilities, and anything else displaying red crosses off-limits to enemy fire. Big surprise, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda—like the Vietcong in Kelly’s era—were not signatories to the Geneva Convention, so they use the red crosses as targets.