Mackenzie's Mission Read online

  "The kind that do more harm than good. Look, you're the head honcho. If anyone sees you walking me to my quarters, within two days I'll be hearing snide comments about how I wouldn't be on the team if I wasn't playing footsie with you. It's a hassle I can do without."

  "Ah," he said as understanding dawned. "You've run into this before, haven't you? No one thinks you can look like that and have a brain, too."

  She stared at him belligerently. "What do you mean, 'look like that'? Just how do I look?"

  She had the temperament of a hedgehog, but Joe had to fight the urge to put his arms around her and tell her that he would fight her battles for her from now on. She wouldn't appreciate the gesture, and he wasn't certain why he wanted to make it, since she appeared more than capable of waging her own wars. If he were smart, he would play it safe, make some noncommittal comment to keep from treading on her toes any further, but he hadn't become a fighter pilot because he wanted to play it safe. "Fetching," he replied, and his eyes were hard and bright and hungry.

  She blinked, as if startled. She took a step back and said, "Oh," in a soft, befuddled tone.

  "You have to know you're attractive," he pointed out.

  She blinked again. "Looks shouldn't enter into it. You look like a walking recruiting poster, but it hasn't hurt your career, has it?"

  "I'm not defending discrimination," he said. "You asked the question, and I answered it. You look fetching."

  "Oh." She was watching him warily now as she sidled past

  He put his hand on her arm, stopping her. The feel of her smooth, warm flesh under his palm tempted him to explore, but he resisted. "If anyone here hassles you, Caroline, come to me."

  She darted an alarmed look at his hand on her arm. "Uh-yeah, sure."

  "Even if it's a member of your own team. You're civilians, but this is my project I can have anyone replaced if he causes trouble."

  His touch was making her visibly jittery, and he studied her for a long minute, his brows drawing together in a slight frown, before he let her go. "I mean it," he said in a gentler tone. "Come to me if you have any trouble. I know you don't want me to walk you to your quarters, but I'm going in that direction anyway, since I'm turning in, too. I'll give you a thirty-second head start, so we won't be walking together. Is that okay?"

  "Thirty seconds isn't very long."

  He shrugged. "It'll put about thirty yards between us. Take it or leave it." He checked his watch. "Starting now."

  She immediately turned and fled. That was the only word for it. She all but hiked up that tight skirt and ran. Joe's eyebrows climbed in silent question. When the thirty seconds were up, he left the building and caught sight of her slim figure, barely visible in the darkness and still moving at a fast clip. All the way to his own quarters, he pondered on what had turned an Amazon into a skittish filly.

  Caroline slammed and locked the door to her Spartan quarters and leaned against the wood as she released her breath in a big whoosh. She felt as if she'd just had a narrow escape from a wild animal. What was the Air Force thinking, letting that man run loose? He should be locked up somewhere in the bowels of the Pentagon, where they could use him for their posters but keep the susceptible women of America safe.

  Maybe it was his eyes, as pale blue and piercing as the lasers she worked on. Maybe it was the way he towered over her, or the graceful power of his muscular body. Maybe it was his deep voice, the particular note in it when he said she was "fetching," or the heat of his lean, callused hand when he'd touched her. Maybe it was all of that, but what had all but panicked her had been the hungry, predatory gleam in those eyes when he'd looked at her.

  She'd been doing well up until then. She had definitely been at her off-putting best, both arrogant and dismissive, which had never before failed to keep men at a safe distance. It was a trade-off; it kept her from being friends with her co-workers, but it also stopped any sexual advances before they started. She had battled her way out of so many clinches during college and graduate school and her early days on the job, that she had learned to go on the offensive from the beginning. With all of that experience, she should have been able to keep her composure, but one look from Colonel "Laser-Eye" Mackenzie, one slightly admiring comment, and she had lost both her composure and her common sense. She had been ignominiously routed.

  Well, that was what happened when you had Ph.D.s for parents. They had seen the signs of superior intelligence in their only offspring and taken immediate steps to give her the schooling she deserved. All through elementary and high school she had been the youngest in her class, due to her accelerated progress. She hadn't had one date in high school; she had been too weird, too gangly and awkward as she went through puberty two or three years after her classmates.

  It hadn't been any better in college. She had started her freshman year right after her sixteenth birthday, and what college man in his right mind would go out with a girl who was legally still jailbait, when there were so many legal lovelies both willing and available?

  Isolated and lonely, Caroline had devoted herself to her studies and found herself finishing her senior courses during her eighteenth year. At about the same time the guys in her classes had realized that the Evans girl might be an egghead, but she was easy on the eyes. This time, there was no issue of age to protect her. Having never learned dating skills with anyone her own age, she was totally at a loss on how to handle these… these octopuses who suddenly couldn't seem to keep their hands off her. Disconcerted, alarmed, she had withdrawn further into her studies and begun developing a prickly shield for protection.

  Her transformation as she reached maturity wasn't drastic enough to equal that of an ugly duckling into a swan; she had simply grown from a gangly adolescent into a woman. Her menses had been late in coming, as if her body had to balance nature by dawdling along while her mind raced ahead. It was all a matter of bad tuning. When her classmates were going through puberty, she was still literally playing with dolls. When she went through puberty, they were already settled into the dating game. She never matched them in terms of physical or emotional maturity. When she was ready to begin dating, she found herself being groped by boys accustomed to a much more sophisticated level of intimacy.

  In the end, it was just easier to drive them all away.

  So here she was, twenty-eight years old, genius IQ, a bona fide specialist in light amplification and optic targeting, possessed of a Ph.D. in physics, reduced to idiocy and panic because a man had said she was "fetching."

  It was disgusting.

  It was also a bit frightening, because she sensed Colonel Mackenzie hadn't been alienated as she had intended; instead, he'd looked like a man who enjoyed a challenge.

  She hit herself on the forehead. How could she have been such an idiot? The colonel was amp; jet jockey, for heaven's sake. He was a member of a different breed, a man who positively thrived on challenge. The way to keep from attracting his attention was to appear meek and mild, with maybe a little simpering thrown in. Problem was, she didn't know how to simper. She should have gone to a finishing school rather than graduate school. She would have taken Simpering 101 over and over until she had it nailed.

  Maybe it wasn't too late. Maybe she could act sweet and helpless enough to fool him. No-that would invite attention from the men who did like that sort of behavior in a woman. She was caught-damned if she did and damned if she didn't.

  The only thing left to do was put up a good fight.

  When Joe reached his quarters he stripped out of his uniform, then stood under a cool shower until he began to feel human again. The desert in July was a real bitch, sucking the moisture from his body until even his eyeballs felt dry, but Baby required tight security, and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada supplied that, in spades. Despite the discomfort and spartan conditions, he was grateful for the security and didn't look forward to taking the wraps off Baby, as would happen when Congress voted on funding. The media would see her then, not that her revolutionary nature was