Joint Forces (Wingmen Warriors 7)

Neither had been picked up yet since DEA wanted to topple the whole operation. The two military links were only a small part of the larger operation.

Both men were under twenty-four-hour watch while the surveillance flights continued. Endlessly. God, the bad guys were good at this, but having closure for the shoot down would go a long way toward easing the roar in his head.

For Rena, for his kids, he would figure it all out. She wasn't the same woman he'd married, a woman who filled his life with plants and smiles and just let him be. Now she wanted things from inside him that he couldn't give. And for a man who already felt he hadn't given her near enough, damn but that blew.

Life was easier when they could use sex to work it out, reconnect while relieving stress.

By the time the training filters were being passed around, he'd decided maybe the parking idea wasn't so bad, after all, once Rena finished up with her client. Even if they didn't actually have sex. Yeah, the needy edge would still be there, but so what? Edgy was good. Didn't mean he had to act on it just yet.

He wasn't twenty anymore. He would control himself now. He would have a chance to make headway with her—without worrying about interruption. And he knew just the thing to romance her with, the last thing he would have expected to use. The toughest for him to utilize. But the only tool in his arsenal with which to breach her defenses.

Words.

Hell, talk about underarmed and untrained. He would have to bring in some emergency supplies for reinforcements to go with his pathetic stash of verbal armaments.

"Don't you want to do some word association crap or something?" Bo Rokowsky paced around Rena's sparse office space. He tapped a hanging basket in her lone little window, sent the petunias spinning into a kaleidoscope of pink and purple.

Rena tipped back in her office chair with a slow squeak and resisted the urge to tell him not to kill her favorite plant. The guy was wound tighter than the twisted macramé hanger.

For two prior sessions, her patient had tried to charm his way around answering questions. Yet if he wanted to fly again, he needed to clear the mandated evaluation. Today, she hoped for a breakthrough. She'd studied the way he operated, thought she had his number.

Scorch, Spike … J.T., they'd all been okayed after release in the psych evaluations at Ramstein AFB in Germany. But not Bo.

Every person reacted differently to stress, of course. Bo's youth, his greater injuries, his rootless past may have played a part in diminishing his coping skills. Whatever the cause, the initial debriefing called for further psychological evaluation of 1st Lieutenant Bo Rokowsky once his wounds healed before he could be returned to full flight status.

She'd been surprised when Bo requested her as his counselor since she was married to J.T. She had even gone to her boss to discuss the matter. He'd quickly pointed out that in a small base community, it was impossible to schedule around all the work and friendship connections. Doctors and counselors would forever be referring cases elsewhere. There wasn't a technical conflict of interest. The patient felt more comfortable talking to her. Budget cuts had left them short staffed. She needed to be a professional and do her job.

Bo's initial eval indicated time would likely settle his problem. Something she would have to confirm before he could return to the cockpit.

"Word association is one way to find out about you." She dropped her steno pad on the desk. "Honestly, I prefer just to talk most of the time."

"This should be pretty quick though, right? You just need to find out I'm not about to climb into a bell tower or something."

"That's one way of putting it." She flexed her foot on the chair across from her. The simple sprain, aches, immobility from her accident were making her stir-crazy. What more must Bo have gone through during the deliberate injury of both his hands? "Because of the extent of your injuries in Rubistan, the Air Force wants reassurance you're—"

"Not sporting any loose screws before they let me back in the cockpit. Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm already a wild card as far as my commander's concerned, even before this crap shook down." His dark hair gleamed in the late-afternoon sun streaming through the window as he spun the plant faster. "But you can tell the flight surgeon to tell my micromanaging commander that all the screws in my body—currently located in my arm now, by the way—do appear to be twisted nice and tight. I'm more than ready to resume flying. In fact, the only thing making me go batty these days is too much time piloting a desk."

He abandoned the mistreated petunias for a stroll around the tiny office, combat boots giving off a muffled thud on tile. "I'll admit, I was pretty messed up when I first got back. That was some scary crap over there. But I'm doing better now. Working. Got a new girlfriend, bounced back fast after the old one and I broke up."

"I'll take all that into consideration when I meet with the flight surgeon for the recommendation to Colonel Quade." She seesawed her pen between two fingers. "You don't care for your commander?"

Bo stopped short by her file cabinet. "And you expect me to answer that one? Are you looking to get me booted out the front gate on my ass? Since you're married to one of us, I figured you'd know better than to ask something like that."

So many threads to pick up on in those few words. And she'd get to them all, in time. "Our sessions are confidential. The colonel will only see my recommendation. Not the details on how I arrived at it."

"Since you've seen my file," he said, prying a magnet off the file cabinet, a clear plastic cover over a family photo taken ten years ago, "it's probably no great leap to assume I don't have a lot of experience on how to deal with male authority figures in my life."

"Why would I assume that?"

"How come you're getting paid for me to come up with all the answers?"

"Great job I have here, isn't it?" She smiled.

He grinned back. "All right. I'll play along. It's the government's nickel paying for this anyhow." He held up the family-portrait magnet. "There aren't any photos like this in my past. My old man cut out on us when I was five, cracked under the pressure of paying for all those bicycles and gym shoes. My mother opened a vein rather than live without him. Cops tracked down my old man, who still didn't want the responsibility of picking up the tab for my Nikes and Huffys."

Bo's smile, reputed to have charmed women on every continent, turned tight, hard, lending credence to his fallen angel reputation. He slapped the magnet back on the cabinet. "To give him his due, at least the bastard had enough conscience to make sure he dumped me somewhere decent rather than just cut me loose into the system."

"A Catholic orphanage."