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  “Captain Burke is showing me around,” MacLendon said in answer to a question as he took his place beside her. “So far I’m very impressed with her handling of security.”

  Andrea shot a surprised glance at him. His blue eyes regarded her blandly.

  “In fact,” he added, “I predict that she has a very bright future.”

  Something shifted at the table. To Andrea it was an almost audible thunk as this group of men regarded her in a new light.

  “You’re an Academy graduate, aren’t you, Captain?” asked the Missile Wing Commander, Colonel Adams.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, meeting his gaze forthrightly. She was floored by what MacLendon had just done for her and thoroughly puzzled by why he had done it. She was equally puzzled by the way his opinion was accepted. He must have one heck of a reputation.

  “Shall I deal you in?” asked Adams.

  “What’s the game?” MacLendon asked.

  “Five-card stud, for chips only, no money. You know regulations.”

  “Can’t pass that up.”

  “Captain?” Adams’s gaze settled on her. “Do you play?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Deal her in, Hal,” MacLendon said. “If Burke plays poker the way she runs the security squadron, we’re all in for a run for our chips.”

  Laughter rippled around the table, and the uncertainty that had accompanied her arrival vanished.

  When a white-coated waiter appeared at MacLendon’s elbow, he looked at Andrea. “What’ll it be? I’m buying.”

  “Beer, sir,” Andrea said, gritting her teeth. No way was she going to blow this chance by looking like a prissy female. She’d just drink real slow. “Thank you.”

  Hal Adams pushed her a stack of chips. “Do you go by any name besides Captain Burke?”

  “Yes, sir. Andrea, sir.”

  “Well, Andrea, let’s see if you play poker as well as MacLendon thinks.”

  Picking up her cards, Andrea wondered if it would be wise to beat MacLendon, because she was looking at a royal flush.

  “Andrea?” Colonel Adams was waiting for her bet.

  What the heck, Andrea thought. The hand was one in a million and wouldn’t happen again. “I’ll see and raise ten,” she said coolly, pushing her chips in.

  By midnight Andrea was on her third beer and was holding her own in the poker game. A number of officers had departed, and there were only four players left: herself, Hal Adams, MacLendon, and a major named Lew Brimley, Adams’s deputy commander. She was holding her own, Andrea thought, looking at her cards but wishing desperately for her bed.

  The conversation around the table had been desultory but enlightening nonetheless. From it, Andrea had learned quite a lot about MacLendon. He’d served two tours in Vietnam and had ended the second one by being shot down. When he crawled out of the jungle after six weeks, he’d lost forty-five pounds and was suffering from so many parasites that it had taken the military doctors six months to get him back into fighting trim.

  He’d never flown with the Thunderbirds, as rumored, but he’d test-piloted at Edwards Air Force Base for a few years and had flown SR-71 Blackbirds, the high-altitude spy planes, for three years. This would be his third stint as a wing commander. In all, MacLendon sounded like an ideal selection for general.

  Andrea, her eyelids heavy from fatigue and beer, almost sighed. If she were a man, she’d be shooting for those stars, too. As a woman, however, she was aware she’d be doing well indeed to make full colonel.

  “I’m folding,” MacLendon said suddenly, putting down his cards. “It’s been a long day. Burke?”

  “Yes, sir.” Relieved, Andrea laid down her cards. “It’s been long for me, too.” Mainly because of MacLendon.

  He bid her good-night at the door of the enclosed walkway that connected the Officers’ Club with the BOQ, and Andrea watched him walk away with a sigh of relief at being once again alone. She didn’t tell him that her quarters were only two doors down the hall from his, even though it might create misunderstanding when he discovered it himself, as he inevitably would. At the moment she didn’t especially care if he took it the wrong way. Right now she could even wish for preequal opportunity days, dinosaur days, when men and women had been relegated to separate floors. Rubbing her neck to ease the tension, she waited until she was certain he would have reached his quarters, and only then did she follow.

  Shower and bed, she thought wearily. The radio on her hip reminded her that the night might be interrupted, but for once she allowed herself to believe that fortune would favor her.

  Just as she was entering her room, however, she remembered Butcher and Frankel, the men who’d been arrested for brawling on duty. Damn and double damn! All sleepiness fled as she realized she had to deal with them first thing in the morning.

  After flinging clothes this way and that in her annoyance, she stepped into the shower and turned her face into the hot spray. With her eyes closed, however, it was not Butcher and Frankel she saw, but Colonel Alisdair MacLendon. Why did he have to be so almighty attractive and virile? She couldn’t afford to be attracted to him. He was her commanding officer, her superior, her…

  Nemesis. The word floated into her weary mind like a whispered warning. So much for sleep.

  Chapter 3

  “How’d it go?”

  Andrea turned from the window where she’d been staring out at the leaden sky and found Colonel MacLendon standing in her doorway, leaning against the doorjamb. This morning it was she who was decked out in blues, her tunic and skirt sculpting a lean figure, and MacLendon who wore civvies: gray slacks and sweater.

  Irritation flared in Andrea. Couldn’t the man leave her alone? He was sticking to her like a burr. What the devil was going on? She turned back to the window, folding her arms beneath her breasts, just plain not caring that tomorrow morning he was going to be her CO.

  MacLendon saw her irritation, but before that he had seen her loneliness. There was nothing quite like the isolation of command, and when the decisions became tough, the isolation was virtually absolute. For a little while, when Andrea hadn’t known she was being observed, her shoulders had slumped and her head had drooped. Just now MacLendon was feeling a little sympathetic.

  “Demotion?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “No other way?”

  She turned, green eyes blazing, furious that he was questioning her judgment. “Does the Colonel see another way?”

  “Is the Captain requesting my opinion?”

  Her lips thinned. Funny, MacLendon thought, he hadn’t noticed just how soft and appealing her mouth was until she made it thin and hard.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, the words falling into the room like a thrown gauntlet. The sharp lift of her chin defied him to criticize her decision. She’d lain awake half the night agonizing over this, well aware that she was about to stigmatize the careers of two young men. That enormous, frightening power was hers by virtue of her command responsibility, a duty to protect the security of the United States. No amount of sympathy or understanding could permit her to abrogate that duty. It sure hurt, though, she found herself thinking as she braced for MacLendon’s answer. And all of a sudden she realized that it mattered what he thought of her decision.

  “In my opinion,” he replied quietly, “there was nothing else you could do. It wasn’t the brawl, it was the situation they were in.”

  Something in her relaxed, and she turned back to the window to conceal her relief from him. She hardly knew the man, and it unsettled her to realize that his opinion was important.

  “That’s the devil of it,” she said presently. “If they’d been on almost any other kind of duty…” She left the sentence incomplete. The military put up with a lot of things because many of its members were very young males. A brawl in the barracks would at most earn a reprimand. A series of brawls might lead to a day or two in the stockade. A brawl between two guys who were guarding nuclear warheads was something else altogether.