Читать онлайн «Taking Cover»
Автор Mann Catherine
Tanner twisted in his chair. Looking. Finding. Her.
Kathleen stood silhouetted in the doorway.
His chair thudded to the barroom floor in a teeth-jarring landing. No flight suit for her tonight. She’d changed.
Man, how she’d changed.
Leather pants molded themselves to her every curve. They sealed over her trimly muscled calves, up her thighs, to cup that bottom he’d been trying not to watch all day. Her hair flowed in a fiery curtain around her face, brushing the collar of her satin shirt. Scorching his eyes from across the smoky room.
She leaned over the bar to place her drink order. Her blouse inched up, baring a thin stripe of skin along her back.
Twelve years.
Twelve years hadn’t dimmed the memory of how soft, how warm, that skin had felt beneath his hands….
Taking Cover
Catherine Mann
CATHERINE MANN
Endless thanks to my editor, Melissa Jeglinski, and my agent, Barbara Collins Rosenberg.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Chapter 1
Captain Tanner “Bronco” Bennett gripped the cargo plane’s stick and flew through hell, the underworld having risen to fire the night sky.
“Anything. Anywhere.
Anytime,” he chanted the combat mantra through locked teeth.His C-17 squadron motto had gone into overtime today.
Neon-green tracer rounds arced over the jet’s nose. Sweat sealed Tanner’s helmet to his head. Adrenaline burned over him with more heat than any missile. He plowed ahead, chanted. Prayed.
Antiaircraft fire exploded into puffs of black smoke that momentarily masked the moon. The haze dispersed, leaving lethal flak glinting in the inky air. Shrapnel sprinkled the plane, tink, tink, tinking like hail on a tin roof.
Still, he flew, making no move for evasion or defense.
“Steady. Steady. ” He held his unwavering course, had to until the last paratrooper egressed out of the C-17 into the Eastern European forest below.
Off-loading those troopers into the drop zone was critical. Once they secured the nearby Sentavo airfield, supplies could be flown into the wartorn country by morning. Starving villagers burned out of their homes by renegade rebels needed relief. Now. The scattered uprisings of the prior summer had heated into an all-out civil war as the year’s end approached.
