The Complete Mackenzies Collection Read online

  The moment of truth came all too soon. He parked in front of her quarters and got out to walk around the truck and open the door for her. There were a number of personnel going about their business, glancing at them with idle curiosity, and she knew he had perfectly gauged the situation.

  She took out her keys and unlocked the door, then turned and faced him in the colorless glow of the vapor lights overhead. Her eyes were solemn and defenseless as she stared at him, his eyes glittering like ice.

  “Hold out your hand,” he commanded softly, and she obeyed.

  His hard, warm hand enclosed her fingers, and he pulled her closer even as he bent. His mouth lightly touched hers, lifted, settled again. He turned his head slightly to adjust the pressure, and somehow the motion parted her own lips, so that they yielded to the molding of his.

  His taste was warm and pleasant and…male. The scent of him enveloped her, and she shivered in response. His mouth was still on hers, moving gently. She felt the tip of his tongue touch and tease, making her stiffen at the jumbled memory of some uninvited, intrusive kiss, but this was nothing like that. She felt enticed rather than coerced, and his taste was filling her senses. Warm pleasure shuddered up from her depths; with a little whimper she opened her mouth, and slowly he took her.

  The carnality of it was staggering, and so was her reaction to it. She heard herself whimper again, and then somehow she was pressed hard against him, her head tilted up and back to give him deeper access, an access he took with a hard male dominance that stunned her. She felt weak and hot, and her breasts tightened with an ache that contact with his hard chest both soothed and intensified. Her loins felt hot, too, as coils of pleasure tightened deep inside. She was clinging to his hand like a lifeline.

  Slowly he lifted his mouth, and it was all he could force himself to do to break the contact. He gave into the temptation to take several more quick kisses from the soft, innocent mouth that had so quickly warmed to awareness, then he had to release her hand and step back. He had promised her. He wanted nothing more than to shove her inside her dark quarters and carry her down to the floor, mounting her with quick, hard urgency, but restraint now would bring him much sweeter rewards in the future. So he controlled his rough, quick breathing and tried to control the fierce rush of blood through his veins.

  “Three seconds,” he said.

  Her eyes were glazed as she stared at him, and she was weaving slightly. “Yes,” she whispered. “Three seconds.”

  She didn’t move. He put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around. “Go inside, Caroline.” His voice was low and calm. “Good night.”

  “Good night.” She moved jerkily to obey, and as she reached the threshold she paused to look at him over her shoulder. Her eyes were huge and dark with some indefinable emotion. “That was much longer than three seconds.”

  She switched on the light, then closed and carefully locked the door. Even as she turned the bolt, she heard him drive away, telling her that he hadn’t been tempted to linger for even a second, or hadn’t considered the idea of knocking on her door. He had accomplished his mission, which was to establish their “relationship,” so as far as he was concerned, there was no reason to hang around.

  She sat down on the couch and remained there, motionless, for quite some time. She had some thinking to do, and she always concentrated better if she could just sit still and totally lock herself inside her brain, or perhaps it was more a matter of locking everything else out, and that included physical stimuli.

  It hadn’t taken any psychoanalysis for her to understand years ago how her upbringing and accelerated progress through school had combined with her own nature to make her the odd man out, but she hadn’t minded. Why should she worry that she had never learned how to associate with the opposite sex on a social and emotional level, when there hadn’t been anyone of the opposite sex she was interested in associating with anyway? So she had never regretted her out-of-sync relationship with the rest of the world—until now.

  Now, for the first time, she was strongly attracted to a man and wanted him to be attracted to her, but how did she go about accomplishing that feat? When other girls had been learning how, she had been studying physics. She was an expert in laser optics, but she didn’t know a damn thing about flirting.

  Why couldn’t she have gotten her feet wet with someone less challenging, say a fellow physicist who had also spent more time with books than people and was a little awkward socially, too? But, no, instead she had fallen head over heels in attraction with a hotshot fighter pilot, a man who could make women go weak in the knees with one look from those diamond-blue eyes. She didn’t have to be an expert at kissing to be able to tell that he was, and she had a sneaking suspicion that she had made a fool out of herself. All he had done was hold her hand, as he’d promised, and she had practically been all over him. She had a distinct memory of pushing hard against him and rubbing her front against his like a cat, and thinking that she was going to fall in a heap at his feet.

  He’d been nice to her this evening. He’d treated her as a friend, had let her relax, and she had had fun. She couldn’t remember the last time she had done something so totally useless and enjoyed it. Simple playing hadn’t been part of her childhood; her parents had carefully monitored her activities to make certain they were geared toward her educational progress. No ABC blocks for her; she had used flash cards. In defense of her parents, though, she had been an impatient child, irascible when the pace had lagged behind the speed of her inquisitive, hungry intellect. Her childhood hadn’t been unhappy, just different, and she had made her own choices in life.

  She was groping her way through unfamiliar territory, but Caroline’s approach to any problem was to tackle it head-on. She didn’t really know how to use the weapons nature had given her, but Joe Mackenzie was about to find them all brought to bear on him.

  The first step in solving any problem was to research the subject. It was early enough that a lot of people were still awake, and there were plenty of female Air Force personnel who turned out to be willing to lend her magazines with articles that she thought addressed the problem, and she was even able to come up with quite a bit of research on fighter pilots in general. She was an accomplished speed reader and sat up for several hours plowing her way through magazines offering such intriguing articles as “He’s Bad, Bad, Bad—So Why Do You Love Him Anyway?” and “Finding The Gold in The Dross—When Not To Give Up.” Double titles seemed to abound, as well as hundreds of glossy photos of women five feet nine inches tall who weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, most of which was evidently hair and breasts. She learned how to tell when he was cheating, and how to get revenge. She learned how to break into real estate or start her own company, how to win at blackjack—she committed that to memory—and where to stay on vacation in Europe. Interesting stuff. She just might subscribe.

  The material on fighter pilots was even more interesting.

  She was in the office before dawn, dressed in a loose, lightweight jumpsuit. When she had been making her selection that morning, seduction had collided with comfort, and seduction had lost without even a whimper. The temperature hit a hundred and ten during the day, for heaven’s sake.

  She hauled out the specs for the day’s tests and began rechecking them, making a mental note to ask Cal a few questions about the computer program. She had taken a second major in computer programming, which had seemed to be a good complement to physics, and it had in fact come in very handy on several occasions. She logged onto the computer and began running the tests through it, rechecking once again that everything was as perfect as they could get it.

  “How long have you been in—”

  She shrieked at the voice right behind her and came up swinging, overturning her chair in the process. Joe’s hand shot up and caught her right fist before it could connect with his face, and a split second later he caught the left one in his other hand, the twin movements like lightning.

  “Don’t do that