Strategic Engagement

“Thanks. I figured that.”

Mary Elise tapped Austin’s mouth. “What’s wrong, hon?”

“Got no jammies. Want my sailboat jammies. Crap.” His thumb popped back in his mouth.

Daniel flinched over the curse, but couldn’t bring himself to reprimand his brother. Poor kid had lost his parents and everything familiar in the span of a couple of weeks. “You can both wear my T-shirts. I have one with an airplane on it, just for you, pal.”

“Mary ’Lise got no jammies, neither.”

An image he did not need, thank you very much. “She can borrow a T-shirt, too.”

Another image no less tormenting than the last splayed across his mind in a tangle of long red hair and even longer legs. In his bed.

“And a toof brush and shampoo?”

Daniel blinked back to the present and Austin’s latest question. “We’ll buy some.”

“For Mary ’Lise, too?”

Already he could see, smell her shampoo in his shower.

The little hammer picked up speed and force in his head, pounding in time with each thud of his boots across cement. “You bet.”

“And toof paste? Bubble-gum kind.”

“Yes,” he promised, rushing to add before the three-year-old question machine could preempt him, “for Mary Elise, too.”

Blessed silence echoed for four strides across the tarmac before Austin’s thumb popped back out of his mouth again. “Need my pull-ups.”

He turned to Mary Elise for interpretation. “Pull-ups?”

Trey snorted. “Diapers. For babies.”

“Am not a baby!”

“Are so.” Trey sniffed. “And no way am I sharing a bed with anybody who still wears a diaper to sleep. Yuck!”

The pounding behind Daniel’s eye morphed into a jack-hammer.

Mary Elise guided Trey alongside while explaining to Danny, “They’re like underwear.”

Daniel willed Austin silent. Please Lord, no mentions of Mary Elise’s underwear from the peanut gallery. “We’ll make a quick stop by the base shoppette for necessities and buy the rest tomorrow. No worries, boys.”

End of bedtime ritual discussions. Life back in control, Daniel forged ahead into the late-morning sun.

Yeah, order. Control. Gained from a logical act of the will.

He led them toward the military ambulance, his old Air Force Academy pal Doc Kathleen Bennett waiting as promised. His freshman year at the Academy, he and his classmate Tanner Bennett had both followed her around like lost puppies. Bennett had ultimately won. For the best, since those two were meant to be together, and he sure as hell hadn’t harbored any feelings deeper than a teenage case of the hots.

The flight surgeon braced her boot on the bumper, tucking a stray strand of wind-whipped red hair behind her ear. Daniel paused in his tracks. How damned strange he hadn’t realized something until just that moment. Every woman he’d ever dated or been attracted to had red hair.

Control spiraled into a nosedive.

Chapter 5

Mary Elise gathered her red hair in one hand and flung the rope over her shoulder. Amid a string of stilted houses, Daniel’s condo complex loomed ahead through the windshield of his truck. Their visit with the doc had been followed by a quick-mart trip and a refueling stop at McDonald’s, which stretched her never-ending day into late afternoon. Finally she could sleep.

In Daniel’s home. Uh-oh.

She eyed the singles-type setup, a sleek soft-gray cement three-story complex complete with a pool, hot tub, tennis courts, set on marshy beachfront property that guaranteed they couldn’t let Austin out of their sight for even a second.

At least Trey was healthy according to the flight surgeon, apparently an old classmate of Daniel’s, a married classmate with a baby. Mary Elise stifled the rogue twinge of relief. No, she didn’t need to confuse herself by combating strange twinges of jealousy over women like Kathleen Bennett or the copilot, Darcy Renshaw. Instead, she faced something far more unsettling. More proof of how Daniel had made a new life with new friends—friendship far more important than fleeting flings.

While she guided a bleary-eyed Trey toward the door, Daniel unbuckled the sleeping Austin and grabbed the shopping bag of pull-ups, silent. As he’d been for hours. Not that she intended to risk chitchat before a long sleep.

An hour later Mary Elise stood at the sliding balcony doors in Daniel’s bedroom, Austin snoozing in the queen-size bed behind her. She pressed a palm to the screen separating her from the glistening breakers crashing against the shoreline. Egrets bobbed on spindly legs, long beaks pecking the sand while gulls dipped and soared to find a late-afternoon snack.

A prickle of awareness tingled up her spine as she felt him, Daniel, enter the room, and she didn’t even have the energy to deny she felt him. He cruised to a stop just behind her, his heat warming her back in contrast with the gentle sea breeze caressing her front.

She glanced over her shoulder, the sleek silver and gray decor of his bedroom somehow matching the man’s precise mathematical mentality. “Trey’s asleep?”

Daniel definitely resembled the part of an overwhelmed father, hair askew, weariness stamping his handsome face. “Yeah, hopefully the dinner kept them up long enough to nudge them toward sacking out through the night. Trey didn’t even balk at the prospect of a sleeping bag on the computer room floor once I mentioned the alternative was bunking with Austin in pull-ups.”

Mary Elise offered him the obligatory chuckle he obviously expected and shifted her gaze to the artwork gracing his walls rather than the laugh lines crinkling the corners of Danny’s eyes. The framed Escher-style print of a winding staircase seemingly leading nowhere pretty much summed up her life.

Daniel leaned a broad shoulder against the molding framing the sliding doors. “You sure you don’t mind sharing a bed with the little guy tonight?”