believe I head up the Base Emergency Engineer Response team?”
“Prime BEEF? Now I’m impressed.”
The designation didn’t begin to describe the scope of her team’s duties. The mission of Luke AFB was to train the men and women who flew and maintained the F-16 Fighting Falcon and the F-35 Lightning, the world’s newest and most sophisticated fighter. The base population included more than ten thousand active duty, reserve and civilian personnel, plus their families. Another seventy thousand retirees lived in the local area. Swish’s job was to make sure the facilities were in place to support all these people in both peacetime and wartime.
“That’s quite a responsibility,” Gabe commented. “It’s what you trained for. What you’ve worked so hard for. And why you were awarded that Bronze Star after your last deployment.”
“You know about the Bronze Star?”
She couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice. He couldn’t keep the bite out of his.
“Know that my wife...?” He stopped. Took a breath. Started again. “Know that my former wife and her team risked their lives to repair an abandoned runway outside Mosul? That they opened the airstrip despite heavy enemy fire so US aircraft could use it as a base to repel an ISIS attack? Yeah, I know about it.”
Okay, that gave her a warm buzz. Almost warm enough to mitigate the fact that he hadn’t known she was now assigned to Luke. Not quite warm enough to erase the news Ben had imparted last night, though. She looked down at her now sludgy coffee. Looked up. Took her courage in both hands.
“Cowboy told me you’re getting married again.”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“Anyone I know?”
He hesitated, shrugged. “Alicia Johnson.”
Dammit all to hell!
Somehow, someway, she managed to keep from crushing her cup and slopping coffee over the table. A bitter realization stayed her hand. As much as she disliked the nauseatingly effervescent pixie, she had no right to castigate Gabe for his choice of partners. God knows, he hadn’t castigated her when she turned to someone else out of desperate loneliness.
“Whatever you decide,” she got out, despite lungs squeezed so tight she could hardly breath, “I hope you find the ‘forever’ we were so sure we had.”
He stretched out a hand, covered hers. “Same goes, Susie Q.”
It was the silly nickname that did it. His pet name for her from the fifth grade on. Forever associated in both of their minds with the package of cream-filled chocolate cupcakes she’d brought to his bedroom when he fell out of a tree and broke his collarbone.
She tried, she really tried, to keep her smile from wobbling. Twisting her hand, she gave his what she intended as a companionable squeeze. His fingers threaded through hers. So strong. So warm. So achingly familiar.
He raised their joined hands. Brought the back of hers to his lips. Brushed a kiss across her knuckles. Once. Twice. Swish didn’t even try to pull away.
Until he gently, slowly, lowered his hand and eased it out of hers.
“I...uh...”
Gabe smothered a curse as his wife—his former wife!—stammered and tried to shrug off the impact of their brief contact.
One touch. One friggin’ touch, and she looked ready to bolt. He should let her. God knew it wouldn’t be the first time. Instead, he soothed her obvious nervousness with a safe, neutral topic.
“I didn’t get to talk to Cowboy much over the phone. It sounded like he’s enjoying his foray into fatherhood, though.”
“He is.”
She relaxed, bit by almost imperceptible bit, and Gabe refused to analyze the relief that ripped through him. He’d think about it later. Along with the ache in his gut just sharing a booth with her generated.
“Did you know his wife, Alex, designs glitzy tops and accessories for high-end boutiques?”
“No.” He gestured toward the tiger draped over her shoulder. “Did she design that?”
“She did.”
“Nice.”
Very nice. Although...
Now that he’d recovered from the shock of their unexpected meeting, Gabe wasn’t sure he liked the changes he saw in the woman sitting opposite him. She was older. That went without saying. But she’d lost weight in the three years since they’d said their final goodbye. Too much weight. She’d always been slim. With a waist he could span with his hands and small, high breasts that never required a bra when she wasn’t in uniform. Now her cheekbones slashed like blades across her face and that sparkly, stretchy black tank showed hollows where her neck joined her shoulders.
And those lines at the corners of her eyes. Gabe knew most of them came from the sun. And from squinting through everything from high-tech surveying equipment to night-vision goggles. But the lines had deepened, adding both maturity and a vulnerability that tugged at protective instincts he’d thought long buried.
The eyes themselves hadn’t changed, though. Still a deep, mossy green. And still framed by lashes so thick and dark she’d never bothered with mascara. The hair was the same, too. God, how he loved that silvery, ash-blond mane. She’d worn it in a dozen different styles during all their years together. The feathery cut that made her look like a sexy Tinker Bell. The chin-sweeping bob she’d favored in high school. The yard-long spill she’d sported in college. How many times had he tunneled his fingers through that satin-smooth waterfall? A hundred? Two?
He liked the way she wore it now, though. Long enough to pull through the opening at the back of her ball cap, just long enough for the ends to cascade over her right shoulder. Gabe had to curl his hands into fists to keep from reaching across the table and fingering those silky strands.
He sipped his coffee, instead, and tried his damnedest to maintain an expression of friendly interest as she brought him up to date on other mutual friends. Pink, getting ready to ship across the pond again. Dingo and the showgirl he’d been seeing off and on for over a year now. A real wowzer, if even half of the adjectives Suze used to describe the buxom brunette were true. Cowboy’s wife, Alex, expanding her clothing design business even faster than they were expanding their family.
Strange, Gabe thought. He always associated their friends with their call signs. Yet he never thought of Suze as Swish. There were several different explanations of how she’d acquired that tag. One version held it resulted from the detailed analysis she’d sketched on a scrap of paper during a fierce, intrasquadron basketball game. In swift, decisive strokes she’d demonstrated the correct amount of thrust and proper parabolic arc to swish in a basket.
Another version was that she’d gained the tag after one of her troops mired a Swiss-made bulldozer in mud. Suze reportedly climbed aboard, rocked the thirty-ton behemoth back and forth, and swished it out.
There was another version. One involving beer, a bet and a camel, although Suze always claimed the details were too hazy for her to remember.
Gabe knew his reluctance to use her call sign was only one small indicator of the rift that had gradually, inexorably widened to a chasm. He hadn’t resented sharing her with the Air Force or with the troops she worked with. Not at first. Not until they became her surrogate family. But she always was, always would be, Suze to him.
Or Susie Q. The pet name came wrapped in so many layers of memories. Some innocent, like the time he broke his collarbone and she’d perched on the side of his bed to feed him bits of her cream-filled chocolate treats. And some not so innocent. Like the time...
Without