The Top Gun's Return

his arm. His heart thumped and his belly warmed, and he eased himself out of her embrace as gently as he could and took her hand instead.

She's more than a little bit buzzed, he thought. And happy. After the fear and tension of the past few days, her happiness-the sparkle in her amber eyes, the glow in her cheeks-made his throat ache. She reminded him of warm, sunshiny things. She was full-blown roses and ripe peaches and hot sand beaches. And he…he was still darkness. He was rain clouds and 2:00 a.m. nightmares and cold empty rooms. Please God, he prayed, don't let me do anything to spoil this for her. Not today.

The ruins of the cloister, blunt gray fingers of stone thrusting into view above the emerald-draped shoulder of the hill, reminded her, she said, of a fairy-tale castle. A hedgehog playing dead in the grass beside the path thrilled her-she'd never seen one before, and it was just like the one in Disney's Alice in Wonderland. She cried out in surprise and delight, like a little kid finding packages on Christmas morning, over the spires of pink foxgloves rising out of the slate shale hillside on the edge of a vineyard. And when they reached the top of the hill and she saw the blue ribbon of the river far below them, curving and looping between mountain slopes covered in a pale-green quilt of vineyards, fairy-tale villages nestled along its banks, she leaned against a thick stone wall and gave a soft and, he thought, rather wistful sigh.

'It's so beautiful,' she murmured, as the wind picked up the sides of her hair and made them flutter like the wings of a butterfly. The chilly air had turned the tip of her nose pink and made her eyes glisten…but looking at her made his own eyes sting and burn, and after a moment he had to look away. 'I don't know how your father could stand to leave it.'

'There wasn't much of a future for him here,' Tristan said, more harshly than he meant to. 'Unless he wanted to work in the vineyards.'

She threw him a quick, abashed look that jolted him with a reminder of his vow not to blight her happiness. 'Oh-right. I suppose not. Your dad worked for Boeing, didn't he? He was a mechanic-for airplanes.'

Wanting to make amends, Tristan levered himself onto the low stone wall she was leaning against and propped his cane beside him. 'Dad always did love airplanes. The only thing he ever really wanted to do was fly, and when he got to Canada that was the first thing he did-joined the Canadian Air Force. He was going to be a bush pilot after that, but then he met my mother. She had other ideas-far as she was concerned, flying the Canadian bush was way too dangerous for the father of her child.' He'd told her the story before, of course, many times-about how his dad had gotten the job with Boeing, and his parents had moved to Seattle, where Tristan was born. He told it to her again now, and she listened with held breath and avid eyes, as if she were hearing it for the first time.

'Dad told me,' he said, gazing at the thickly wooded hillside below the ruin, 'that when he was a kid, right after the war, he and some of his buddies found the wreckage of a plane in these woods-he thinks it was an American fighter plane, but he couldn't swear to that. He said they used to go there to play. And look for souvenirs, I guess. Dad said from that moment on he dreamed of flying fighters someday.'

'Did he ever regret it?' Jessie asked. And there was a thickness in her voice that told him he'd already failed somehow to keep his secret vow to her. He glanced at her, and though her head was turned away from him and he couldn't see her face, he knew his cloud had covered her sun. 'Not being a pilot, I mean.'

'He says not,' he said. 'He always said Mom was right, and that he probably wouldn't have lived to be my father if she hadn't made him quit when she did.'

'And then, he had you to fulfill his dream for him, didn't he.' She tried to say it lightly, but that was a mistake. With no gentleness to soften them, the words sounded sharp and edgy. As if to deny them, or-who knows?-maybe trying to recapture the joy she could feel slipping away from her, like reaching for a butterfly that was floating off into the sky beyond her reach, she pushed away from the wall he was sitting on and went dancing across the rubble-strewn grass.

'Hey, you have a camera, you should take a picture of this-the ruins, the view. Sammi June would love it. It's incredible…' And she was scrambling up a tumbled spill of stone to where a lonely section of wall still stood, framing an arched window opening. 'Look here, you can see everything-the town, the river-and there's a boat, one of those big white ones. Tris-let me have the camera-quick, before it goes around the bend.'

He got up slowly, not wanting to remind her that towering stone walls had grim associations for him, but not wanting to dim the brightness of her mood more than he already had, either. Though the fatigue he couldn't seem to shake was catching up with him and his knee had begun to ache, he couldn't help but smile as he watched her pick her way over the stones, searching for hand-and footholds until she'd managed to climb into the window opening. Sitting there in grinning triumph, she waved at him, then held out her hand and wiggled her fingers, demanding that he hand her his throw-away camera. He felt a curious lifting, as if, he thought, there was a new and different Tristan inside him somewhere trying to break out.

He took the camera out of his coat pocket and snapped a picture of her, framed in the window opening with the sun shining through her hair. She said, 'Oh, Tris,' and laughed in an embarrassed way, and he remembered that she never had understood how beautiful she was.

He went over to the wall and reached up to give her the camera. She took it from his hand, and at the same time tried to stand up on the wide, uneven window ledge. He managed to get the word 'Careful-' out of his mouth before her foot slipped on a mossy stone and instead of standing up she gave a startled squawk and came sliding down the wall practically on top of him.

He didn't have time to brace himself, but even if he had, Jess was not exactly a tiny woman, and his strength wasn't even close to what it once had been. She hit him full in the chest. His arms went around her and they went down together-fortunately missing any significant stones-and he was flat on his back in the soft spring grass and she was lying on top of him, from her chest all the way down to the tips of her toes.

There was a moment of shocked silence, and then she gasped, 'Oh…oh my God. Tris, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Are you all right? Did I hurt you?'

Brown eyes, so well remembered, now dark pools of dismay, gazed down into his. Flushed cheeks dusted with a sheen of gold hovered above him, so close he could feel their warmth on his own face. Even through several layers of clothing he could feel her heart thumping-or was that his?

He felt the lifting sensation again, more powerful this time. And then something inside him seemed to burst and heat flooded his body like a fever.

'I'm fairly sure I'll survive,' he drawled, and she had barely begun to laugh when he lifted up his head and kissed her.

Chapter 6

It had been so many years. His body had forgotten the sensations of desire…of lust. He was like a wild thing set free, dazed at first, into frozen stillness…then all at once leaping blindly toward his freedom. The warm tumescence of her lips shocked him; his breath stilled as he lightly skimmed them as if in awe of a miracle.

He felt her breathing catch, and the smallest pulling back…a tiny hesitation. He felt his fingers sink into the sun-warmed pool of her hair, and the pressure of her mouth on his increase. Her lips softened…and opened, like a gift.

He felt thought and reason leave him and go soaring beyond his reach, and it was like watching an eagle rise toward the sun. All he knew was brightness and warmth…then blinding light and burning heat. Shuddering, like a man consumed by fever, he wasn't even aware of where and how his hands touched her. Like a starving man, he filled his mouth and arms and his very soul with her, and despaired because it couldn't possibly be enough.

He didn't know what brought him back. Her soft moan, perhaps, flowing like a whispered promise from her mouth into his. He became aware of small things-the crisp cool feel of her raincoat in his hands…the winey taste of her mouth and the smell of crushed grass. He realized that she was no longer lying on top of him, that he'd rolled her over, half under him, and that one of his legs was wedged between hers, tightly pressed against her soft feminine places. She moaned again, and he withdrew from her slowly, clawing his way toward reason like a drowning man swimming toward the light.

Lying back in the grass, he covered his eyes with his forearm and whispered, 'God…Jess. I'm sorry. I didn't mean…I don't know what-'