Soldier's Christmas (Wingmen Warriors 8)

Only another hour till sunrise and he could scatter the wolves, climb down. Too risky in the dark, though, where the wolves could lurk behind a tree under the cover of darkness.

Brief flashes of the stars overhead helped him gain his bearings again after their off-course run. How he could see the North Star so clearly through the storm clouds, he didn't know. And he didn't intend to question.

A miracle? Maybe. All love of science aside, he would take help any way he could tonight. He would do anything to keep Alicia alive. No way in hell would he let her be the victim of a holiday siege.

Like before.

He'd only been fifteen years old, that growth spurt no-damned-where in sight. With the gunman waving his AK-47 and extra ammo around, Josh couldn't do a thing but sit at his desk with a half-completed final exam for Advanced Incompressible Aerodynamics in front of him.

After twelve hours of tense negotiations, the masked gunman had opened fire. Josh had thrown himself across the aisle, toward his classmate who had a houseful of kids at home. His chin still ached from

cracking on the floor.

Seven students had died before the gunman turned his weapon on himself. Still Josh had sprawled over the silent woman who'd been dead before she hit the ground. Memories focused in on only the blood dripping off desks and splattered on the wall, crimson against white like the dead wolf in the snow below.

The next day, he'd marched into the ROTC office to discuss joining up once he was old enough. His goal had shifted. Working for NASA after graduation had become his intermediary job until flight training.

Red as a holiday color carried a whole different meaning for him.

"Fa-la-la-la-la," Alicia rounded off the holiday classic, "La-la-la-laaa."

"Bravo." He clapped his gloved hands together in the bitter cold. Even his damned nose hairs were frozen together. "You should take your show on the road."

"Sure hope Carnegie Hall leaves a message on my voice mail. Oh, or what about a USO tour? My sister could haul me around in her cargo plane to perform for the troops. Ah, but there's just that matter of my job. Got my own plane to fly. Too bad we can't harness those hounds like reindeer and pilot us out on Santa's sleigh. And oh, man, am I getting loopy."

"You're doing great. Just hang on and keep singing if you need to."

"You pick the next s-s-song." Her teeth chattered. "What kind of holiday tunes did you sing growing up?"

Amazing how they'd fought about everything except their differing faiths. "Nah, you go ahead with your next riff."

With memories still clogging his head like an oncoming sinus infection, he didn't want to be funny. He glanced down his stretched legs to his squadron scarf tied around a leg of his survival pants to cinch where the wolf had torn the fabric—jarring loose his radio. Frustration kicked through him again.

"Alicia? More serenades?"

"I've pretty much caroled through the whole Renshaw canon of Christmas tunes."

He scrambled for a new topic that would launch her into a lengthy explanation. They really didn't know much about each other's holiday traditions since they'd been apart last December for different deployments. "What did your family do for the holidays?"

"Regular stuff, the tree, church, Santa, presents. Lots of fruitcake and peppermint hot chocolate. Ah, man, what I wouldn't give for hot chocolate." Her voice went dreamy. "Sometimes we celebrated on a different day than the twenty-fifth...like the year Dad shipped out before Desert Storm cranked into gear."

"Sort of like how Hanukkah dates float from year to year."

"Never thought about it that way, but yeah. It was all about being together for us anyhow because we never knew for sure when Dad would fly out again."

She shifted on her branch, rustling pine needles to the ground in a shower that brought a yip from below.

"This one year movers lost a box of my mother's Christmas decorations."

"I imagine she'd collected things from all over."

"Sure, but those weren't the ones lost. The missing box had the decorations we'd made in school. There was a star with my picture in the middle. And some from when we painted ceramic Twelve Days of Christmas. Hank Jr. and I whipped through eleven days in ten minutes. Darcy worked on her lords-a-leaping for an hour, then realized she'd forgotten to paint the back."

"Ah, man, that bites." An only child, he had different memories. Not bad, just lonely sometimes, which had more to do with being so many grades ahead of everyone else. Probably part of the reason he wanted lots of kids.

He wondered, not for the first freaking time, if she'd wanted kids with that other guy who'd left such a mark on her life she wouldn't even talk about him to her husband.

So why didn't he just ask? Easy answer. Because it was one thing to think she still loved the poor dead bastard and another altogether to hear her say it.