The spiral was getting harsher than she’d expected.
“I think we’re in real trouble.”
“No shit, Tech Sergeant Rosa.” Pierre could always make her laugh.
Tango totally tapped her wild animal fantasies.
Gutz, however, was like a long pull on a bottle of good tequila—the burn slow, deep, and powerful.
She’d hinted once or twice about a threesome, but neither alpha bull liked the idea at all. Now she didn’t know which one the birth control had failed on, or how to explain it to either of them.
Now the baby was going to choose for her.
She and Pierre had fun flirting, but there was one critical thing he didn’t know about her that the other two men did.
Rosa was one of the three people on the plane who had sworn their allegiance to three-star Lieutenant General Jorge Jesus Martinez.
19
Tango’s call of “Abandon aircraft!” galvanized Pierre into action.
Before Rosa knew what was happening, he’d unsnapped her harness—without even copping a feel he’d declared as his heart’s truest desire in such a jovial tone that even her normal high-alert guy-dar didn’t mind. Dragged to her feet, they were slammed against the starboard hull by the plane’s spin. At the last second he twisted to take the brunt of the blow. She landed chest-to-chest hard against him, driven together by the pressure.
“Tech Sergeant Rosa,” he always said her name that way, this time with a heavy dose of surprise. “I’m forced to question your timing if this is going to be the moment that you finally throw yourself at me.”
In a moment that should be full-blown panic on his part, and carefully displayed panic on hers, he still flirted.
But he didn’t leave her time to respond.
He pushed off the hull against the pressure of the spin’s centrifugal force. Keeping a hold on her arm, he dragged her up-pitch across the plane’s cargo bay to the forward personnel door.
They arrived as the four gun operators and the sensor tech were donning their parachutes.
Pierre released the emergency door handle and opened the door. The roar was deafening. The hot California sea air slammed in and buffeted them against each other.
Pierre grabbed his parachute from the emergency rack.
No—he held it to her like an evening coat to slip her arms into. Only then did he pull another for himself. Hard to imagine Gutz or Tango doing that for her.
The plane’s death spiral was getting worse.
The gunners began dragging themselves against the force of the spin, and then over the threshold to get clear of the plane. The long looping flight scattered the gunners widely into the air.
What would Pierre be like as a lover?
She actually regretted that she wouldn’t have a chance to find out.
In moments, it was just the two of them rapidly buddy-checking each other’s harnesses. She’d gone along with the farce of her escape. But there were only moments left. The ocean was getting very close.
What would her next choice be if she hadn’t sworn to follow the general?
But she had. For reasons that, she reminded herself, were good and valid ones.
Pierre snugged the harness across her chest—above her breasts. Most asshole jokers tried to snug it below them, which always hurt like hell when the chute opened.
Yet, a stupid plastic stick with a small pink cross had changed her world entirely. She wasn’t used to all the thoughts her Pink Stick Revelation had stirred up in the last forty-eight hours.
She wouldn’t change her career-ending choice. But she’d like to know…
“Just this once,” she shouted over the wind’s roar screaming in through the open door.
“Excuse me?” They were each holding onto the door frame with one hand and the other’s harness with the other. Checks were complete.
She grabbed his hand, shifted it onto her breast and used the wind’s leverage to drive them together so that she could kiss him.
Pierre convinced her that she’d been missing out for the six months they’d been flying together. Missing out bad!
Even this simple contact aroused everything in her—the animal, the lover, and the something deeper. The mother? Yikes! Scary-ass thought. But there anyway.
“Sweet Jesus, Tech Sergeant Rosa. I’ll definitely see you later. But I have to go help the pilots.”
“No, wait. I—”
Pierre used the leverage of his hand still filled with her breast, and the leg driven between hers—she hadn’t even noticed when he’d done so, but could feel herself pushing against his thigh—to leverage her out into the slipstream.
A flail, and she managed to grab the doorframe at the last second. The wind slammed her hard against the hull. She couldn’t hear the release, but could certainly feel when her left shoulder dislocated.
She tumbled backward away from the plane. It continued to soar away, in a long southbound loop as she fell.
Mierda! Not the plan.
Out of options, she yanked the ripcord with her good right hand and was slammed hard in the crotch by the harness. Between that and the screaming pain in her shoulder, it knocked every bit of need Pierre had aroused in her right out of her system.
Every bit of physical need.
A glance aloft. Parachute was full and flying clean. The ocean was still a few hundred feet below.
But her brain was still in high gear.
Which one of the three men would make the best father? That was a question she’d never asked herself before. Now that she had, the answer was pretty damn obvious.
There was only one problem.
She was supposed to be the third person left on the plane, not Master Sergeant Pierre Jones.
20
The spin was still pulling hard as Pierre stumbled up the ladder to the cockpit level. It was raised eight feet above the main deck, tucked inside the upper curve of the nose.
The two pilots were sitting in their seats as calmly as if nothing was happening.
“All clear. Let’s go!” He held onto the handrail several feet behind the pilots’ seats and shouted above the roar that echoed through the plane. Between the big engines and the open door just at the base of the cockpit ladder, he could barely hear himself.
Tango might have said something like, “About time.” But Pierre couldn’t have heard that right.
Rather than yanking off his harness, Gutz reached forward to the control cluster.
Pierre wasn’t a pilot, but he’d been aboard planes for his entire Air Force career. Gutz unfeathered the props on three of the engines. Suddenly the doomed Ghostrider was flying perfectly. It eased out of the spin less than fifty feet above the shining waves.
To the airmen who’d parachuted into the water, it would appear that the plane had gone down out of sight.
“Good. Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Tango eased back in his seat.
The plane was fine.
They were…stealing the goddamn plane?
It was the only thing that fit.
While he’d been briefly enjoying the best feel-up ever—despite the flightsuits and parachute harnesses—the pair of pilots had been hijacking two hundred million dollars of airplane.
Pierre slapped for his sidearm, but he’d lost it somewhere in the rough and tumble of getting Rosa to safety. A quick scan around revealed that the only handy weapons were the pilots’ sidearms.