Chapter Five
Her cell phone rang as she was pulling up to the house twenty minutes later and she looked at the display. Mary. She would have to call her back after she changed and let the dogs out. She sent the call to voicemail.
Dragging on lightweight sweats and a t-shirt, she headed to the laundry room to let the dogs out. Louie had chewed a corner of her white wicker laundry hamper. “Oh, Louie. What the hell, dog? You have perfectly good Kongs to chew on. Why do you have to destroy my stuff?”
He danced around her legs excitedly, glad to see her, and BB laughed. “You are such an ornery little bastard, dog.” She looked at Frankie. “You need to be teaching him better, lady.”
She let them into the back yard to play, then returned to clean up the hamper mess. By the time she returned Mary’s call, it had been almost half an hour.
Mary answered on the first ring. “Get your ass to the base! Now! They’re flying in.”
For a moment, the words didn’t compute, then her brain started to fire and her heart to race. “Are you serious?” she gasped.
“Yes, go! They’re probably on the ground now, or almost.”
She hung up, dazed. BB stared at her phone for a long minute, trying to absorb the fact that Lincoln was here. Or at least she thought he was. There was a chance Justin had received bad information, but that was unlikely. His info had always been spot on. Retired didn’t mean disconnected.
She looked at her phone. Mary had called her six times over the past half hour. Damn it! No calls from Lincoln, though.
BB darted to the back door to call the dogs in and Louie decided he didn’t want to come in. She physically had to go outside and chase his ass down, which he thought was an absolutely brilliant game. Her balance had changed, though, and more than once she had to catch herself on the outdoor furniture before she fell. BB had a feeling she would be paying for this chase for a long time, in more ways than one. She dropped Louie into the laundry room, kicked the chewed hamper out into the hallway and put up the baby gate to keep them in the room. Then she looked down at herself. Did she have time to change? No, probably not. She still had her party makeup on and her dangly Christmas ornament earrings, but Link would have to be happy to see her in gray sweats. Grabbing her purse and keys she darted out the door to her car.
The drive to the base had never taken so long. Every plane that flew overhead she wondered if Link was looking down at her. There were no other missed calls on her cell phone, so she was a little confused. Surely, he would have called her to let her know that he was coming home?
Or what if he was injured? Was that why he hadn’t called? Her stomach clenched and she fought to keep her breathing under control. She wasn’t borrowing trouble. In just a few minutes she would be able to see with her own eyes what was going on.
Pulling to the hangar where he’d landed last time, she looked around. The lot was crowded with vehicles, but she didn’t see a lot of people moving around. Were they all inside the hangar? Jumping out of the car she jogged toward the massive building. As soon as she stepped through the door, she knew Justin’s intel was solid gold. She immediately began to recognize faces of the men in Lincoln’s team. Toro and his wife Brittany were right in front of her. But where was Lincoln? She scanned the crowd, desperate. Had they left him behind for some reason? If he was injured, they would have wheeled him off first…
Strong arms wrapped around her from behind, pulling her against a solid chest. A grizzled face immediately nuzzled into her ear. “Hey, baby,” he rasped.
BB burst into tears and twisted in his arms. There he was, looking strong and dirty and worn out, like he’d just come through hell. Cupping his face she leaned in to meet his lips, breathing him in. The relief she felt was almost crippling. “You didn’t call me,” she gasped.
He pulled back enough to press a kiss to her forehead. “I dropped my phone and it went black screen. I’m sorry, baby. We’ve got some housekeeping to do because I didn’t even have you listed as my next-of-kin or anything, so I didn’t even have your phone number.”
BB shook her head. No, he’d been called up suddenly and they hadn’t had a chance to do a lot of things. “You’re here now,” she breathed, the tears easing. “I have so much to tell you.”
“I love you,” he said, cupping her face. “I’ve missed you like you would not believe. You are so beautiful to me. I worried that you wouldn’t know we were back in country and I would be meeting the plane alone again.”
Just the thought of that made her heart ache. “Justin,” she said simply. “Mary called me like, forty minutes ago. That’s why I’m in sweats. I didn’t have time to dress for you.”
“I don’t need the dress, just you.”
BB looked down at herself and realized that the lightweight sweats weren’t concealing her as well as they used to. She glanced up at Link. He’d gone still and was very pointedly looking down at her little belly. At five months it was barely noticeable, but of course he had noticed. He blinked and looked up at her, his mouth open. “Is that…are you?”
She nodded, tears flooding her eyes again. “Yes. And yes,” she laughed. Link’s eyes glistened and she realized he was tearing up as well. “I found out a couple months ago.”
One of
