Full Throttle & Wrong Bride, Right Groom Page 7

  Like a nineteen-year-old blonde, Kate thought sardonically.

  “But the bottom line was he just didn’t like being beat,” Dave finished for her.

  “That’s about it.” Kate laid down her fork. “Neither do you, or so you say. Yet every contest we’ve had so far has ended in a tie. Was that by chance or design?”

  “You want the truth?”

  “I asked, didn’t I?”

  “When we raced that first morning, I held back a little. Only because I was worried about your ankle,” he added when Kate bristled. “I just about bust a gut trying to catch up to you the second time we raced.”

  That made her feel a little better.

  “What about the putt you missed today?”

  His mouth curved. “You didn’t hear the four-letter words bouncing around inside my head after that stroke.”

  She tapped her fork against her plate, wanting to believe him. After her experience with John, she needed to believe him. There was no way she could change her basic personality and it was becoming increasingly important Dave know that right up front.

  She was pushing a last, slippery little piñon seed around her plate when it occurred to her Dave couldn’t change his basic personality, either. With a suddenly sinking feeling, she remembered her conversation with the weather officer at Luke.

  “What about that?” she asked him, waving her fork at the rumpled bed. “How much of what just happened here is a game to you? One with tactical and strategic moves?”

  “Oh, babe! All of it.”

  Grinning, he pushed out of his chair and came around the table. A tug on the knotted tie of her robe brought Kate to her feet.

  “I started scheming ways to finesse you into bed three and a half seconds after I spotted that turquoise spandex coming at me out of the dawn.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Kate drawled.

  “You shouldn’t be.” Unrepentant, he dropped a kiss in the warm V between her neck and shoulder. “You, Lieutenant Commander Hargrave, are eminently finessable.”

  “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

  “Of the highest order,” Dave assured her solemnly, his fingers busy with the knot at her waist. The ties gave, and he slid his hands inside the folds to stroke the long, smooth curve from ribs to hips.

  “Now, about dessert…”

  “Yes?”

  “I was thinking of something hot and sweet.”

  Very hot and very sweet, he thought, his gut tightening as he slid his hand to the fiery curls at the juncture of her thighs. Slowly, he went down on one knee.

  Kate woke to dazzling sunlight and the sound of running water. She rolled onto her side and watched Dave slide a plastic razor through the lather covering his cheeks with sure, clean strokes.

  He must have taken another shower. The tawny gold of his hair was still damp and water drops glistened on his bare back above the waistband of his jeans. Kate swallowed a sigh as her glance lingered on his perfect symmetry. Broad, muscled shoulders. A nice lean waist. That tight butt.

  No doubt about it. The man was beautiful.

  He was also, she reminded herself, taking a new vehicle into the sky for the first time tomorrow. A shadow seemed to cloud the sun as she thought about the two Pegasus prototypes that had crashed and burned. The pilot had been killed in the first one. The crew had survived the second, but sustained severe burns.

  Kate had lost friends and associates to the vicious weather they routinely flew into. In her line of business, the risks were as great as the rewards. Yet the thought of Dave battling a violent wind shear or an engine stuck in half-tilt position made her feel sick.

  She managed a smile, though, when he caught her watching in the mirror. You didn’t talk about the odds. You just lived with them. Toweling his face, he strolled into the bedroom.

  “We slept right through our tee time this morning.”

  “Did we?”

  Kate couldn’t get excited about missing a rematch on the links. She’d stretched every muscle and tendon in her body last night, and then some. In fact, she wasn’t sure she had enough strength to make it to the bathroom.

  “We did,” he confirmed, hitching a hip onto the side of the bed. “We also missed breakfast and lunch.”

  “Lunch?” Struggling up, Kate pushed the hair from her eyes. “What time is it?”

  “Almost one.”

  “One?” she echoed incredulously. “As in p.m.?”

  “As in p.m.”

  “Good grief!”

  “Not to worry. I called down and arranged a late check-out.” He waggled his eyebrows in an exaggerated leer. “So what do you want to do until two?”

  “Well…”

  By the time they finally abandoned their room and grabbed a late lunch in the hotel’s dining room, it was after three. Yet Dave didn’t seem any more anxious to end their stolen hours of freedom than Kate.

  She’d checked in with her roommates by cell phone. Twice. Jill had already pinpointed their location via the tracking devices embedded in the IDs issued to both Kate and Dave, so there wasn’t any use trying to deny they’d spent the night together. Promising to fill her and Caroline in later, Kate confirmed Captain Westfall hadn’t returned from D.C. yet and hung up.

  With no briefings or meetings pulling at them, she and Dave decided to take the slow way back to the site. From Ruidoso they headed south toward Cloudcroft. En route, the road meandered through the high mountain ridges and produced spectacular color at every turn. To Kate’s delight, it also produced a turnoff for Sunspot.

  “Who or what is Sunspot?” Dave asked.

  “It’s the home of the National Solar Observatory. The premier research facility for solar phenomena in the country. I’ve been wanting to visit for years.”

  She took a quick look at her watch, another at the mile indicator on the signpost, and calculated they could squeeze in a quick visit.

  “Think they’re open this late on a Sunday afternoon?”

  “Not to the general public, maybe. But I’ve done some work with the observatory’s director. If I drop his name a few times, maybe they’ll let us poke around.”

  The sixteen-mile drive up to the observatory took a half hour and climbed over four thousand feet. Considering they were already at five thousand, Kate felt as though they’d reached the top of the world when they arrived at the cluster of buildings that constituted Sunspot, New Mexico. There was no restaurant, no grocery store, no services of any kind, so she could only hope the pickup had enough gas in it to get them back down the winding twists and turns.

  What Sunspot did have, though, was a searingly blue New Mexico sky known for its clarity and transparency. For this reason, the U.S. Air Force had asked Harvard University to design a geophysics center on the site back in 1948 to observe solar activity. They started with a six-inch telescope housed in a metal grain bin ordered from Sears Roebuck. The site had since developed into a complex that included two forty-centimeter coronagraphs, high-tech spectrographs to measure light wavelengths and the Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope—an instrument that was thirty stories tall and weighed some two hundred and fifty tons.

  Kate couldn’t wait to see it. Being able to show Dave some of her world was an added excitement.

  “Park there by the gate,” she instructed. “Let’s go name-drop.”

  As it turned out, the only name Kate had to drop was her own. The director wasn’t available, but his deputy happened to be on-site and came personally to escort her. Fence-pole thin and tanned to leather by the high altitude and thin air, the scientist pumped her hand.

  “Dr. Hargrave! I’m Stu Petrie. This is an unexpected pleasure. I read your paper on the effects of ionization on water droplets spun up into the atmosphere by hurricane-force winds. Most impressive.”

  “Thank you. This is Captain Dave Scott, United States Air Force.”

  The deputy greeted Dave with a polite nod, but it was clear his interest was in Kate. So was Dave’s, for that matter. />
  “Are you here on business? I didn’t see a request from NOAA to use the facilities, but maybe it hasn’t reached my desk yet. Sometimes the paperwork takes weeks to process.”

  “No, this is strictly spur of the moment. Dave and I were driving down from Ruidoso and saw the sign for the observatory. I couldn’t resist taking a quick peek.”

  “We can do better than a peek. Please, let me give you a guided tour.”

  Dave’s travels had afforded him the opportunity to view a good number of the world’s marvels, both ancient and modern. The Dunn Telescope certainly qualified as the latter. The telescope’s upper portion was housed in a tall, white tower that rose some thirteen stories into the air. The lower portion lay underground. The entire instrument was suspended from the top of the tower by a mercury-float bearing. The bearing in turn hung by three bolts, each only a couple of inches in diameter. Thinking about those nine meager inches didn’t make Dave feel exactly comfortable when he followed the two scientists out onto the observing platform.

  “The telescope is set to look at the quiet side of the sun right now,” Petrie said apologetically as Kate peered through its viewer. Dave took a turn and saw a dull gray ball.

  “We use a monochrome camera to record the video image,” Petrie explained. “This one is being taken in hydrogen alpha light, at about sixty-five hundred angstroms.”

  “Right.”

  Thankfully, Kate drew the scientist’s attention with a comment. “You must use an electronic CCD to record the color images captured by your spectrographs.”

  “We do. With the Echelle Spectrograph we can measure two or more wavelengths simultaneously, even if they’re far apart on the spectrum. We can also conduct near-ultraviolet and near-infrared observations.”

  Like most pilots, Dave had studied enough astrophysics to follow the conversation for the first few minutes. He knew near-ultraviolet and near-infrared light were just outside the visible range. After that, the two scientists left him in a cloud of dust.

  He trailed along behind them, as fascinated by Kate’s excitement and animated gestures as by her seemingly inexhaustible knowledge. She wasn’t wearing a trace of makeup. She’d caught her hair back with a rubber band she’d snagged from the reservations clerk on the way out. Her knit shirt showed more than a few wrinkles from lying where Dave had tossed it the night before. She looked nothing like the spit-and-polish officer he’d worked with at the site. Even less like the runner in tight spandex.

  Strange. Dave wouldn’t have imagined she could replace either image in his mind, but her lively questions and the impatient way she tucked a loose strand behind her ear gave him a kick to the gut. Not as big a kick as Kate all naked and flushed from his lovemaking, of course. But close.

  Busy studying her profile, Dave missed the comment that drew her auburn eyebrows into a quick, slashing frown.

  “How much activity?” she asked Petrie.

  They were talking about sunspots, Dave realized after a moment. The real thing, not the town. Evidently the folks at the observatory had recorded a buildup of energy in the sun’s magnetic fields.

  “There’s definitely potential for eruptive phenomena.”

  That sounded serious enough for Dave to display his ignorance. “What’s going to erupt where?”

  Stu Petrie gave him the high school version. “Sunspots occur when the magnetic fields on the sun start to twist and turn. This movement generates tremendous energy, which is often released in a sudden solar flare.”

  “How much energy are we talking about?”

  “Roughly the equivalent of a million hundred-megaton hydrogen bombs all exploding at once. The radiation is emitted across virtually the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves at the long-wavelength end to optical omissions to X ray and gamma rays at the short-wavelength end. Given their tremendous speed, these waves can reach the earth in as little as eight minutes after a major flare and produce some very spectacular results.”

  “Like the lights of the aurora borealis,” Dave finished, feeling somewhat redeemed. Maybe he hadn’t forgotten everything he’d learned about astrophysics after all.

  “Solar flares can cause more than just lights in the sky,” Kate put in, giving him a severe reality check. “They can knock out power and fry electronics. In 1985, a flare blacked out Quebec. Another flare in 1998 knocked out the Galaxy 4 satellite and interrupted telephone pager service to some forty-five million customers.”

  That caught Dave’s attention. He was only hours away from going up in an aircraft crammed with the most sophisticated electronic circuitry yet devised. He wasn’t real anxious for it to get fried while he was in the air.

  “So, Doc,” he asked Stu. “What’s the prognosis on this activity you’re talking about?”

  “We don’t feel there’s any cause for alarm at this point, but we’re watching the energy buildup. Closely.”

  “So will I,” Kate muttered under her breath.

  She left the National Solar Observatory considerably less relaxed than when she’d arrived. Her day didn’t totally turn to crap, however, until Dave stopped to gas up in Chorro.

  Chapter 7

  “Be right back,” Kate said as Dave inserted his credit card into a gas pump. “I need to hit the ladies’ room.”

  Busy squinting at the buttons in the dim glow cast by the moth-speckled overhead light, Dave nodded. Dusk had fallen while they were still on the narrow winding road down from the observatory, followed by one of New Mexico’s clear, star-studded nights.

  A glimpse of the gas station’s single, dingy rest room had Kate opting for the restaurant across the street. As she pushed through the doors of the Cactus Café, Bar and Superette, she was still mulling over her conversation with Stu Petrie. Solar flares were a common enough occurrence. Nothing to become unduly alarmed about unless they gathered intensity and erupted with enough force to send huge pulses of energy hurtling through space. Then it was anyone’s guess how much, if any, havoc the flares could wreak.

  She’d stay in close contact with the National Solar Observatory over the next few days, Kate decided as she wove a path through the tables. Check their Web site regularly, just to see what was happening with those flares. That way she could…

  “Hey!”

  Jerked out of her thoughts, Kate turned to face a woman in tight black jeans, a puckered chambray top that left most of her midriff bare and dangling silver earrings. She held a plastic pitcher of iced tea in one fist. The other was planted on her hip.

  “Did you just climb out of the pickup across the street?” the waitress asked Kate.

  “Yes, I did. Why?”

  The woman’s glance flicked to Kate’s left hand, noted the lack of rings, then shifted to the café’s front window. It gave a clear view of the man at the pumps.

  “I, uh, know the driver.”

  “Do you?”

  “He stopped by the café a week or so ago. We hit it off, if you know what I mean.”

  Kate felt her limbs stiffen one by one. “I’m getting the picture.”

  “He had to leave early the next morning, said he was late for some business meeting. He promised he’d call me. Never did, though.” She shook her head, smiling despite her obvious disappointment that Dave hadn’t followed through. “That was some night, I can tell you.”

  “Yes, I’m sure it was.”

  The waitress—Alma according to her name tag—heaved a long sigh. “Oh, well, maybe you’ll have more luck with him than I did. The handsome ones are always the hardest to bring to heel.”

  “That’s what I hear. Where’s the ladies’ room?”

  “Back of the café and to your left.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kate kept a tight smile on her face until she gained the privacy of the one-stall rest room. Slamming the bolt, she propped both hands on the chipped porcelain sink and let the idiot in the mirror have it.

  “You dope! You almost fell for the guy. Him and his macho, do-it-till-we-get
-it-right attitude in the simulator. And those morning runs! You let him invade your space, your solitude and your head.”

  The eyes staring back at her from the mirror blazed with scorn. “You are so pathetic, Hargrave. He told you right up front he wasn’t interested in long-term commitments. Hell, last night he admitted that he’d been scheming to get you into bed since day one, that it’s all a game to him.”

  He couldn’t have laid things out any plainer! Yet just this morning Kate had gotten all warm and gooey inside and started thinking maybe, just maybe, she might have something going here.

  “For a supposedly intelligent woman,” she said in total disgust, “you sure don’t display many smarts when it comes to men.”

  Furious with herself, Kate twisted the cold tap to full blast and splashed her face. The shock of the icy water and a thorough drying with rough paper towels went a long way to restoring her equilibrium. Forcing herself to get a grip, she leaned on the sink once more and lectured the face in the mirror.

  “What the heck are you so mad about, anyway? You got off-site for a couple days. Shot a great round of golf. Indulged in some world-class sex. No promises of undying devotion were given or received, so there’s no harm, no foul. On either side,” she said sternly. “Now it’s back to business. Strictly business. Got that?”

  Okay! All right! She got it.

  She jerked the bolt and started to march out, but remembered her original purpose for exiting the pickup. Locking the door again, she hit the stall.

  Alma was behind the counter in the café when Kate sailed through. The waitress popped her gum and flashed a rueful grin.

  “Good luck, honey.”

  Kate didn’t need luck. She had her head back on straight. But she returned the smile.

  “Thanks. How about two cups of coffee to go?”