Night Call Read online

  “You didn’t say you were going to cook.”

  Tristan grinned. “I was afraid to scare you away. Besides, I’m not cooking. I’m microwaving.”

  Jett hesitated but Tristan was already out of the car and headed around to the sidewalk. At the very least, Jett had to get out of the vehicle, and when she did, she couldn’t just walk away. Wasn’t really sure she wanted to. Despite Tristan’s super-confident, take-charge manner, Jett didn’t feel manipulated. Tristan pushed, but she was so casually open about it, Jett was more curious than wary.

  “I don’t want you to go to any trouble,” Jett said, climbing out and closing the door behind her. She glanced up the street, pretty certain she knew where she was. Probably no more than a mile or two from her apartment complex. She could easily walk. She could say she was more tired than she’d realized, thank this woman for the ride, and just walk away. That would be the smart thing to do. She didn’t move.

  Tristan tilted her head and regarded Jett thoughtfully. She seemed ready to bolt. Tristan couldn’t tell if it was simple shyness, or something else. Jett didn’t look like the shy type. Women who flew medevac helicopters weren’t usually shy and retiring, any more than surgeons or anesthesiologists were. When you measured life or death in seconds, there wasn’t much room for uncertainty. “It’s no trouble. As I recall, I invited you.”

  “Just the same.”

  “Just the same, let’s go get some coffee.” Tristan turned and walked away.

  Left with no choice, Jett followed her up the sidewalk, noting her long, powerful strides. Her hair shimmered like black gold in the sunlight, and her broad shoulders, narrow waist, and muscular hips and legs made Jett wonder if she was a swimmer. She had the body for it. The thought was disconcerting because Jett wasn’t accustomed to noticing women’s bodies. In the service, she’d trained herself not to. She slowed as she approached the white stone steps that led up to the porch, thinking about all the times in her life she’d been faced with the choice between stepping into the unknown, or retreating into safety. She almost always chose the riskier path because the excitement of challenge, the rush of danger, satisfied her in a visceral way. The only other thing that came close to the intensity of that feeling was sex, and she hadn’t allowed herself that in a long time. There was danger, and then there was foolhardiness.

  “So,” Tristan said, already across the porch and holding open the door for Jett, “I’m on the second floor.”

  Once again, the choice seemed clear. Jett climbed the steps and went through the door into a long hallway carpeted in a faded, dark floral print, with a staircase at the far end. She climbed up one floor and waited for Tristan on the landing.

  “Where did you learn to fly?” Tristan asked as she extracted her keys.

  “The Army.”

  “No kidding. How long have you been out?”

  Jett didn’t answer and Tristan decided it wasn’t the time to push. She slipped past Jett to open the door to her apartment. When she did, their bodies briefly touched. Instantly, her system went on full alert. All the pent-up urgency and excitement of the previous night coalesced into a simmering knot of arousal in the pit of her stomach. She’d been thinking about sex since she left the hospital, and this pilot was one attractive woman. Of course, she had no idea what Jett’s interests were, and why she was even thinking about it, she wasn’t sure. Jett hadn’t given off a single vibe in that direction, but telling her body that was pointless. Mentally sighing, Tristan opened her door and stepped inside. She smiled at Jett. “Come on in.”

  *

  “I’m awake,” Honor called at the soft knocking on her door. She smothered a smile when she saw her best friend Linda and frowned at the small, trim blonde instead. “Oh sure, now you show up. When all the hard work is done.”

  Linda, in jeans and a sleeveless yellow blouse, glanced around the room. “Where’s Quinn?”

  “I finally got her to leave. She promised to take a nap in the trauma call room until the next feeding. Did you hear?”

  “Uh-huh. A boy.” Linda perched carefully on the foot of Honor’s bed. “That’s wonderful, honey.”

  “I wish you could’ve been here.”

  “I’m sorry. I would have been, but this flu or whatever is going around has knocked out half the staff and I got called to work last night. Then it was a zoo. We spent all night in the air.”

  “Right, and we all know how much you hate flying around in that helicopter.” Honor wasn’t really angry, or even hurt, but it still bothered her a little bit that Linda had left the emergency room after years of being one of the senior charge nurses to join the medevac crew when the hospital had been approved as a flight base. She missed Linda. Not just her competence, but her friendship. Even though they lived right around the corner from each other, their schedules often didn’t match, and even when they did, Linda had a toddler of her own at home, which made impromptu socializing difficult.

  “Well, the scenery is nice,” Linda said, grinning.

  Honor groaned. “Do you still have the hots for that new pilot?”

  “Only metaphorically. You know I’m completely faithful in mind and body.”

  “I know you can’t walk past a good-looking butch without feeling a tingle.”

  “Wait just a second.” Linda lifted her wrist and pretended to feel for her pulse. “Yep. Still got one, so I guess you’re right.”

  “You are so full of it. So, are you still flying with her?”

  “The mysterious, and yummy, Jett McNally?” Linda gave a satisfied smirk. “Not only am I still flying with her, I got her to eat pizza with the gang last night.”

  “Why are you so bound and determined to get her to socialize?”

  Linda suddenly looked serious. “She seems sad. I hate that.”

  “I love you, you know that? But you can’t fix everyone.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes it’s just a matter of giving fate a helping hand.”

  “Oh no.” Honor knew Linda’s penchant for matchmaking and thought ahead to the pre-playoff softball bash Linda and Robin always hosted. “Don’t tell me you invited her to the party?”

  “I didn’t,” Linda said with a note of excitement. “But it’s a really good idea. After all, it worked with you and Quinn.”

  “And just exactly who do you plan on fixing her up with?”

  “I haven’t worked that out yet. Mandy?”

  At the thought of the much younger, incredibly well-built, seductive blonde, Honor felt her temperature climbing. “If you bring her within five miles of my lover, there will be bloodshed.”

  Linda laughed. “Like Quinn would even notice.”

  “The problem is, Quinn doesn’t notice. Even when Mandy is practically molesting her. And God, she just won’t quit.”

  “Well, it hasn’t even been two years. Obviously, Mandy is slow.”

  “One thing she isn’t is slow,” Honor snarled.

  “All right. Don’t get worked up. It’s not good for the baby when you’re breastfeeding.”

  “That’s an old wives’ tale,” Honor muttered, fussing with her covers and feeling decidedly fat and frumpy all of a sudden. “And now with this damn incision, it’s going to take twice as long before we can have sex.”

  Linda leaned over and whispered dramatically, “For you to have sex. Not for Quinn. Even right after the babies are born, Robin always manages to take care of m—”

  “All right,” Honor interrupted sharply. “I get the picture.”

  “You can’t really think Quinn minds?”

  Honor glowered. “I mind. Do you have any idea what it’s like watching her walk around in the morning and not being able to do anything about it?”

  “Oh God. I wish.” Linda patted Honor’s leg. “Let me go check with the nurses and see if it’s time for Jack’s feeding. I want to watch.”

  “Pervert.” Honor relaxed as Linda started for the door. “You’re the best medicine I could possibly have, next to burning up the she
ets with Quinn, that is.”

  Linda turned from the door and waggled her eyebrows. “Always glad to take care of a woman in need.”

  Chapter Five

  “Here you go.” Tristan handed Jett a cup of coffee, set the coffee cake she’d nuked on a side table, and stretched out on a lounge chair next to the one Jett occupied on the small porch off her kitchen. The second-story porch overlooked a grassy backyard. A large old oak grew beside the house, its massive branches shading the area where they sat.

  “Thanks.”

  Tristan leaned her head back and sighed. The sky, visible through the canopy of green, was robin’s egg blue and crystal clear. In two hours, the day would have surrendered to the July heat, but right now, she felt the slightest hint of a breeze. She was almost too tired to think, and her mind wandered in the midst of her pleasant torpor. She remembered all those carefree, lazy summer days of her youth, when the greatest crisis in her life was whether a particular girl might be interested in her “that way.” Now, what seemed like a lifetime later, she lay next to a woman still wondering the same thing. All that had changed was her—she still asked the question, but somewhere along the way she’d stopped looking for anything beyond the simple answer. If it was yes, they’d share a few hours’ pleasure. If no, she’d move on. And right now she was too damn tired to wonder why that was.

  She turned her head and regarded Jett’s face in profile. Her hair was a mix of dark blond verging on golden brown, but she bet when she was younger it was cornsilk yellow. Up close she could make out the fine lines around her deep blue eyes. Those and her dark tan indicated a lot of time in the sun. “Where are you from?”

  If the seeming non sequitur bothered Jett, she didn’t give any indication. She answered, “New York.”

  “City?”

  “State. Up near the Vermont border.”

  “Farmers?”

  Jett shook her head and sipped her coffee. “In a way. My family has an upland apple orchard. Been in the family for a couple of generations.”

  “But you didn’t want to be a farmer?”

  “No,” Jett said softly. “I wanted to fly.”

  Tristan drew her leg up onto the lounge chair and turned on her side, curling one arm under her head. The bones beneath Jett’s smooth, bronzed skin were sharply carved, the hollows beneath her cheekbones shadowed even in sunlight. Her nose was strong and straight, the bridge high, nearly Roman. She wasn’t beautiful, or handsome, but her face was captivating. “How did you know that? That you wanted to fly?”

  “I went up in a crop duster with one of the neighbors when I was seven. She—”

  “She?”

  Jett nodded, a faint smile breaking the straight line of her mouth. “She worked for herself out of a barn and a tiny airstrip down the road from us. She let me take the rudder the first time we went up.”

  When Jett didn’t continue, Tristan said, “And that’s all it took?”

  Jett sipped her coffee. “Yeah.”

  “What did you like about it?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  Tristan wasn’t put off by the question, because Jett sounded more confused than put out. “I was just thinking about how oblivious I was when I was young, and how all the things I thought were important weren’t really.”

  Jett laughed. “Are you feeling mellow post call?”

  “Yes,” Tristan murmured. “How could you tell?”

  “Sometimes when you get stripped down to the bone, you look around and everything feels different, doesn’t it?”

  Tristan recognized the wistful edge of pain in Jett’s voice and knew it came from having seen too much tragedy. “You were in the war, weren’t you?”

  “Two tours.”

  “How long have you been back?”

  “A couple of months.” Jett placed her coffee cup on the table and her expression became remote.

  The movement had an edge of finality to it, and Tristan recognized once again that the subject was off-limits. “You didn’t tell me what hooked you on flying.”

  Jett didn’t think anyone had ever asked her that before. When her brothers realized how much she loved to go up in the rickety single-engine plane with Elenor Brundidge, skimming low over miles of green while spraying the cornfields, they’d tried to convince her father not to let her go. That had been one of the few times she could ever remember her mother taking up for her in the face of the angry, sullen men in the family. Then in the Army everyone was too busy making her prove she could do the job to care why she wanted to. Other pilots had their own reasons for loving to fly and rarely discussed it.

  Jett glanced at Tristan. She looked a little sleepy, lying there in the sun, her hair tousled and her gently questioning dark eyes regarding her steadily. Tristan’s arm still curled beneath her head, but when she smiled lazily, Jett almost sensed Tristan reaching out to touch her. She’d never felt anything quite like the pull of that invisible caress. Maybe that was why she answered.

  “The very first time I went up, I had the feeling I could keep going forever and never touch down.”

  “An adventurous spirit?” Tristan watched Jett gesture with her hands as she spoke—gentle, eloquent movements in sharp contrast to the strength evident in her wide palms and muscular fingers. Tristan remembered the helicopter hurtling through the dark only hours before, only now she could imagine Jett guiding it with those powerful, commanding hands. Her stomach tightened at the image of those hands stripping her bare, those fingers demanding and sure. Tristan took a long breath and banished the fantasy. She couldn’t help what her body craved, but she really wanted to know why Jett loved to fly, because she sensed that was a big part of who she was. And she wanted to know who she was. “Wanderlust?”

  “Maybe. I never felt like I really fit in where I was.” Jett laughed shortly, sounding raspy, as if she were out of practice. “More likely I wanted to escape my two older brothers. Somehow, I always ended up doing half their chores.”

  From the bitter edge to her words, Tristan suspected there was more she wanted to escape, but she didn’t probe. When Jett fell silent, Tristan missed their brief moment of connection. “I understand the sibling thing. I’ve got three sisters, all beautiful, all successful, all super straight. We didn’t have that much in common.”

  “You can’t be that much different than them,” Jett said, turning slightly to face Tristan. “You’ve got two of the three covered.”

  Tristan had been hit on enough times in her life to know when she wasn’t being hit on. She might have been disappointed except for the unexpected surge of pleasure at Jett’s words. She rarely thought about her own appearance or how women looked at her. She wasn’t often called beautiful, although her appearance did sometimes elicit comments. She had her Greek mother to thank for her dark Mediterranean hair and skin coloring and her English father for her blue eyes. Either parent could be responsible for her fiery temperament. Her mother blamed her father for her womanizing, as she called Tristan’s lack of a regular girlfriend, which only made her father laugh. For his part, he insisted her stubbornness came totally from her mother. They both claimed credit for her brains and her passion. They hadn’t always been happy about her choices, and it hadn’t helped that her sisters all led storybook lives.

  “I love them,” Tristan said, “but I wish I’d discovered airplanes when I was younger. There were plenty of times I wanted to disappear.” Aware that Jett was still watching her, Tristan tried to sound casual. “Did I mention that I’m a lesbian?”

  “No.”

  “I am.”

  “Was that a problem for them?” Jett asked. “Your family, I mean.”

  “I pretty much knew the way I felt when I was in high school, so I told them. It didn’t exactly go over well. It took me quite a while to convince them it wasn’t a phase.” Tristan thought back to the heated discussions with her parents, who were convinced that she was just trying to be different from her sisters. And her sisters all wanted her to be like them
. But she wasn’t like them, and never could be. “The first few years were interesting. My sisters kept trying to fix me up on dates until I was almost out of college. When they didn’t wear me down, we all reached a truce.”

  “So you still see them?”

  “My family?” Tristan nodded. “How about you?”

  “Not so much.”

  Shadows eclipsed Jett’s sharply etched features, and Tristan imagined the story wasn’t a happy one. Jett’s gaze had drifted to some distant point in the yard, and her body had become unnaturally still—almost frozen. Tristan felt as if Jett was behind a wall of invisible glass, and if she tried to touch her, she would not be able to. That feeling of being locked outside made her want to touch her all the more.

  With a shake of her head, dispelling the irrational urge, Tristan said, “Can I get you more coffee, or are you going to be too wired to sleep?”

  Jett tilted her head back to look up into Tristan’s face. “I’ll sleep. How about you?”

  If Jett had been any other woman, Tristan would have tried out a line. I’ll sleep better if you’re with me. I won’t have any trouble falling asleep if you join me for a little workout first. I’m sure you can think of a way to put me to sleep. Practiced lines designed to let a woman know she was interested. The kind of line that suggested an isolated encounter, a mutually enjoyable diversion, perhaps even the first of a few hot sweaty afternoons stolen from the relentless demands of work that were constant reminders of the fragility and, at times, the inhumanity of life.

  “Coffee never keeps me awake,” Tristan said instead. She thought Jett was a lesbian, but she’d guessed wrong before. That wasn’t what kept her from making a suggestive response, however. And it certainly wasn’t because she didn’t find Jett attractive. A few days before, she would have sworn she knew exactly what she liked in bed, and the kind of woman she wanted. Those brief few hours of submitting to another woman’s desire had taught her that there was more than one way to give pleasure. Or to receive it. When Tristan looked at Jett, she imagined herself beneath that lean, strong body, with Jett inside her. Silently groaning, Tristan forced the image from her mind. She was just exhausted after two nights without sleep, which was why her bodily urges seemed to be running rampant. Jett gave off very clear unavailable vibes, that was easy to see. Why, Tristan wasn’t sure, but she’d like to find out.