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  Andrea looked up at him, the devil light in her eyes. “You’re pretty sure of that promotion.”

  “I’m positive about it.”

  “Nothing like a pilot’s ego, I always say. Has something to do with the ‘right stuff,’ I guess. Maybe it adds lift to the plane.”

  Chuckling, he stole a kiss. “Actually,” he said, when she was suitably breathless, “I got the word this morning. I pin on my stars April first.”

  “Dare! That’s wonderful!” Her green eyes shone as she looked up at him.

  “I guess that means I’ll outrank you for at least a couple more years.”

  But Andrea was in no mood to joke about it. Her joy for him seemed to swell until she felt she could barely contain it.

  “I’m so pleased for you,” she said softly.

  That softness got him every time. Forgetting his determination to drag out every moment of this evening, he scooped Andrea up into his arms and carried her to his bedroom.

  “Celebrate with me, Andrea,” he said as he lowered her to his bed.

  “I’ve never made love with a general before,” she whispered, drawing him down with her.

  “Big deal. You’d never made love with a colonel before, either.”

  The soft smile lingered on her lips and in her eyes as he hovered over her.

  “I’d never made love before,” she answered.

  “Me either,” he murmured as he released the clasp of her bra.

  Before she could wonder at his meaning, he closed his lips and teeth over her swollen nipple and sent shock waves of pleasure radiating outward to join with the ache that had been building all evening.

  He had one intention and one intention only: to love Andrea so well, so perfectly, that if she never again allowed him to give her anything, he would already have given her the best he had in him. In seemingly no time at all, she reached a fever pitch, but he refused to give in to her pleas and tugs. Instead he trailed his mouth in lazy, tormenting spirals lower, across the sensitive skin of her stomach. Millimeter by millimeter, he drew down the zipper of her jeans, teasing her with hesitations. And finally he sent his hand foraging where she wanted his mouth, then his mouth where she wanted him.

  All he wanted, all he needed, all he sought, was her pleasure. Only when he at last could please her no other way did he join himself to her and give her the gift of his own pleasure.

  Sunday afternoon came all too swiftly. Andrea sat between Dare’s legs on the floor of the living room, her back resting against his chest. They’d been sitting in companionable silence for some time, and she found herself thinking how nice it was to be able to share a comfortable silence with someone else.

  She also found herself thinking about the swift passage of time. She was racing against it neck-and-neck now. One more weekend. Nine more days. The more she dreaded her departure, the faster it bore down on her.

  Looking back over the past two years, she had the uneasy realization that time had been racing past her all along but she had been too busy to notice it. Hadn’t she promised herself when she arrived here that she would make the terrible climate tolerable by taking the time to go cross-country skiing? Not once in two years had she taken her skis out of the closet. Instead she’d put her nose to the grindstone, determined to make her squadron the best in SAC.

  And what had that gotten her? A slightly bigger squadron in the same execrable climate. Two years had passed in the blink of an eye, and the next two years would probably pass even faster, and maybe she would garner a somewhat bigger command with all its attendant extra headaches. By then she would surely have made major, and she would immediately set her sights on light colonel.

  Some morning, inevitably, she would wake to discover that twenty years had flown by in the blink of an eye. Would she look back at those twenty years and think that the only time she’d ever really lived was during her last few weeks here, on these too-short weekends with Dare?

  As for Dare, Andrea was no fool. She knew very well that men like him didn’t grow on trees. He was strong enough to be gentle and secure enough not to be threatened by her. In her experience, that was a very rare combination.

  “Something wrong?” he asked when she stirred restlessly against him.

  “Time,” she said obscurely, but he understood.

  “Little enough of it in a lifetime, let alone a week.”

  Slowly, she tilted her head and looked up at him, wondering not for the first time if he could read her mind. “Yes,” she said on a soft sigh.

  No time like the present, Dare thought, to take that forward step and see if his foot landed on solid ground. “I’ll visit you on weekends, Andrea. If you want me to.”

  “Will you?”

  Her misty green eyes held a flare of hope, and he smiled as much from relief as pleasure. “Yes.”

  Andrea turned over, still lying between his legs and against his chest, and kissed him. “Thank you,” she said.

  He wrapped his arms around her, holding her snugly. “My pleasure. You won’t be that far away. I’ll just avail myself of one of the prerogatives of my position and fly out there. Things can almost always be managed if you want to badly enough.”

  “You won’t mind?” she asked him.

  “Are you kidding?” Tilting her chin up a little more, he looked into her eyes. It still shocked him to realize that his calmly confident Captain Burke was truly confident only in her job and her uniform. If he’d had a magic wand, he would have used it to give her all the personal self-confidence she lacked. But there was no magic wand, and all he could do was hope she would eventually get the message.

  “Andrea, darlin’,” he said gently, “the only thing I’d mind is never seeing you again.”

  Her eyelids fluttered closed, and he was horrified to see a silvery tear squeeze out from beneath one lid.

  “Andrea? Andrea, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said shakily, and managed an unsteady smile. “Damn, every time I turn around, you’re making me cry. I hate to cry.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “I can’t help it. You say the damnedest things sometimes. Nobody’s ever said so many nice things to me.”

  He gave her a bruising hug. “I’m just being truthful, sweetheart.” And only partially truthful, at that.

  For a long time they sat like that, her head on his shoulder, arms wrapped around one another, but finally Dare’s stomach started rumbling. Reluctant as he was to disturb the cocoon of closeness they shared, he was going to have to do something about dinner.

  “Give me a few minutes to get dinner started, Andrea.”

  “Can I help?”

  “Nope.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “When I come to visit you, you can do the honors.”

  “Every time?”

  He caught the wicked sparkle in her eye. “Well, maybe just sometimes.”

  She let him go reluctantly and stretched out on the floor, unwilling to disturb the warm glow she was feeling. He was going to fly out to see her. She hugged the thought to her, more relieved than she could say. Even though he wanted nothing but an affair, at least he wasn’t casual in his feelings about her. He cared, or he certainly wouldn’t be willing to visit her in Minot.

  Now, if she could just catch their homegrown saboteur. Why couldn’t there be some way to smoke him out, right into a trap?

  Toying with the idea, she wandered out to the kitchen and helped herself to one of the carrot sticks Dare had set out on the counter.

  “I can almost smell smoke,” Dare remarked as he lifted a steak off the electric grill. “What’s got your brain on overdrive?”

  Andrea shrugged. “Just wondering if there isn’t some way to lay a trap for our saboteur.”

  “To lay a trap you need some kind of enticement to draw your quarry out. We don’t know enough about him to come up with the right bait.”

  “That’s what has me stymied. But maybe we do know enough and just can’t see it.”

  “You keep sayi