Ride the Thunder by Lindsay McKenna

Author:Lindsay McKenna [McKenna, Lindsay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, Fiction, Romance
ISBN: 9780373048793
Publisher: Mills & Boon
Published: 2001-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Six

January 10: 0200

C ursing softly to himself, Nolan tossed and turned in the darkened tent. How badly he wanted to crawl those two feet into Rhona’s arms. Throwing his forearm across his eyes, he lay on his back and keyed his hearing to a C-141 jet that had just landed. The tent shook and shuddered from the turbulence as the pilot reversed the engines once it was on the ground.

That was how he felt: like a powerful aircraft in a brutal chokehold. Nolan was wild with grief, unshed tears, guilt and hurt. Why hadn’t he just talked it out with Rhona today after he got back? Why? He was afraid, he admitted. Afraid of the soft look he saw in her eyes when he’d met her in Laura Trayhern’s room after returning from Oceanside. Yet, wisely, Rhona had said nothing to exacerbate his raw feelings and chaotic state as they’d headed back to the flight line.

All afternoon and into the evening he’d wanted to somehow broach the subject, but didn’t have the guts to do it. And in the chow hall, they’d sat across from one another, tense silence filling the void between them. Rhona, at least, didn’t try to cover things with airy chatter. No, she knew he was stoved up emotionally, and she had the intelligence to back off and say nothing. It was up to him to open up. He couldn’t expect her to pry like a can opener into his grieving, flailing heart. Automatically, he rubbed his chest beneath the goose down sleeping bag.

The ground was hard and unforgiving. Just like life was, he decided grimly. Focusing his hearing inside the tent, he felt soothed by Rhona’s soft, shallow breathing as she slept. As soon as they’d come back from the chow hall and stumbled into their tent, reeling from exhaustion, she’d pushed off her black leather flight boots, crawled into her bag and slept—deeply.

Nolan didn’t have the heart to wake her. She had flown just as much as he had today, and she was a workhorse behind the collective and cyclic. Nolan had been grateful for her professionalism in the clutch. Again he reminded himself that Rhona was a veteran. She had seen combat. He never had, so in the unspoken hierarchy among pilots, he was less a pilot than she was. That made him respect her despite the fact that she was a woman.

Snorting softly, Nolan removed his arm from his eyes and glared up at the grayish tent ceiling. The engines of the C-141 were now winding down to a warbling shriek as it made the turn at the end of the ten-thousand-foot runway. The craft would now trundle back to the revetment area, to have its insides disgorged by hardworking ground crews. Starlifters could carry more supplies than any plane in the military fleet, and Nolan knew that teams of marines would immediately attack, moving the goods to the helicopters that were now down for maintenance, refueling and resupply. At 0500, the pilots would get up, and by 0600, they’d be in the air once again.

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