Bo's hands clenched along with his gut. He issued instrumentation updates, keeping himself grounded with his reason for being here in the first place, to check up on Paige Haugen and her daughter. He wasn't sure why he felt so damn responsible for her after what her traitorous bastard husband had done—
Okay, he did know why, and it sucked even remembering tagging along with his own teary-eyed mother on her weekly visits to her convict husband. His father. Father being a damn loose term for a dirtbag who cared more about jacking cars than hanging out with his wife and son.
Bo rechecked his five-point harness. Not that he'd felt any loss over his father being locked up. He couldn't remember ever having Jackass Dirtbag around the apartment.
Then—surprise, surprise—Jackass had filed for divorce after his release. Teary-eyed Teresa Rokowsky had opened a vein rather than live without him.
As a kid, Bo had blamed himself for not being enough reason for his mama to live. As an adult, he knew where the blame belonged, but that still didn't stop his heart from squeezing at the lost look on Paige Haugen's face when she'd walked into the police station the night of her husband's arrest. The disillusioned expression had multiplied exponentially in newspaper photos after her husband's mob-hit death in prison.
Bo tried to blink away the haunting image even now. Damn it all, he preferred his dreams be filled with visions of luscious babes in bikinis. Instead his sleep was packed with nightmares of a widow with troubled eyes and a kid who was better off without her old man but probably missed him all the same.
Bo braced for landing and closure. Outside the windscreen, the runway waited in the cracked expanse of Dakota soil and cluster of military buildings. Planes dotted the parking area, other craft for the weekend's air show scheduled to start tomorrow.
Lower, lower still they descended. Small clumps of people gathered to watch today's arrivals.
Was she there already? Regardless, he would find her.
After he checked on Paige Haugen and her daughter, he would be free to decide his future in or out of the Air Force. He already had his dream custom ordered for that first night of peaceful sleep. By Monday evening he would be snoozing his way into a Caribbean fantasy, his guitar in hand, serenading a coconut-oil-scented blonde with a penchant for skinny-dipping.
A woman without glasses framing pain-filled eyes.
Paige Haugen nudged her glasses straight on her nose again, righting her view of the landing cargo plane. Military fire trucks and security police shrieked onto the runway toward the hulking gray cargo plane touching down, slowing, smoke puffing from the tires and screeching brakes.
er 1
"Hey, I thought you said there was a woman behind every tree here." Captain Bo Rokowsky stared through the windscreen of his C-17, broken clouds revealing the barren landscape of Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota.
Not a damn tree in sight.
Laughter rumbled through his headset from the loadmaster "Tag" and the in-flight mechanic "Mako."
"Yes, sir," Mako drawled from the cargo hold. "Suckered you right into working this air show with that one, didn't we?"
"You dudes got me good." Bo gripped the throttle and let them have their victory. Better to take the ribbing over being "tricked" than to admit his real reason for signing on to this mission.
"The clue bird should have hit you like a whole flock smacking the windscreen when old, married Tag told you that Minot joke about the trees." Mako continued to gloat. "His wife would kick his butt if she thought he was checking out the female population. I just tell my girlfriend you keep them all too busy, anyway."
"One at a time, pal." Bo eased back on the throttle, as usual using a casual tone and attitude to mask a deep-seated attention to detail. "Always one at a time."
Stick in hand, Bo guided the craft toward the base, a mere speck ahead in the middle of flat, flat and more flat farmland, where he would spend the weekend at Minot's annual air show—dateless.
Okay, so he had a reputation around the squadron as a player. But he wanted a steady relationship, wife and kids someday as much as the next guy. Maybe even more, since he'd never had a real home of his own.
If that meant he went through a lot of breakups in the search, such was life. It seemed damn shallow to keep dating a woman once he realized she wasn't The One. Some dumped him, too. He figured he was running fifty-fifty when it came to broken hearts given and received.
Painful? Sometimes. All told, though, the journey wasn't a major hardship. He loved women. After growing up in a boys' home, drifting off to sleep every night with sweat and gas hanging in the air, what guy wouldn't prefer to spend the rest of his life pressed up close to a soft, jasmine-smelling woman? Or rose-scented.
Or even spring-flowers-deodorant scented. He wasn't picky.
Still, he was grateful for Minot's treeless state. Now wasn't the time to shuffle those fifty-fifty odds either way. He had more important things to attend to on the ground than his exhaustive and sometimes tantrically exhausting quest for a Mrs. Rokowsky.
He wasn't working the Minot Air Show to meet flyboy groupies, but rather to meet one woman in particular. And no way in hell would she be open to sex with him.
From the left seat, the squadron commander snapped his critical gaze Bo's way while the boss evaluated. Scowled. "If you boys are done discussing your dating prospects in the Land of Tatanka, let's see about getting this plane on the ground."
Bo clamped his jaw shut. Fun time over, thanks to Lieutenant Colonel Lucas Quade, a gloomy micromanaging pain in the keister kind of leader, better known unofficially around the squadron as "Darth Vader." To be fair, the guy was a solid flier and a technically perfect commander.
Overly perfect.