Pueblo, Colorado
FASTER. FASTER. HE ran the gears, his foot heavy as he edged up to ninety miles an hour. The road ahead was straight and empty. Plains stretched in every direction. He relished the power of the used Corvette that had cost him nearly every penny he had and hundreds of hours of work.
The road was perfect for his purpose. Rarely, if ever used, it connected one Texas ghost town to another. A fellow chopper pilot, who was also a car enthusiast, had told him about it. A forty-mile strip of pavement from nowhere to nowhere.
He had finished restoring the car two weeks earlier. In ten days, he would be back in Afghanistan. This was his last chance to put the Corvette through its paces.
The sun danced and shimmered on the pavement ahead. His foot lightened on the gas pedal as the road took a turn and mounted an incline. An old battered truck appeared from nowhere, turning into... He slammed on the brakes...
Clint Morgan, former army warrant officer and military helicopter pilot, jerked awake as the bus stopped. It took him several seconds to realize where he was. Some place going to no place.
“Hey, mister,” the bus driver said. “Your stop.”
Clint reluctantly stepped through the open doors into the first day of the rest of his life.
He was the last passenger to leave the bus, an indication of his total lack of enthusiasm for his new reality. He glanced around. He had been told someone named Josh Manning, also a vet, would meet him at the bus in Pueblo. But Clint saw no former-military-looking guy.
Damn but he hated being dependent on a stranger, even a fellow vet. It was bad enough that occasional blackouts and blinding headaches kept him from driving, but the helplessness he felt now was searing. What in the hell was he doing standing here in the middle of nowhere on a blistering September day?
The other bus passengers quickly dispersed. He was alone with a large duffel at his side. As he contemplated his alternatives, which were few, a van roared onto the street and squeezed into a parking spot. A woman emerged and strode quickly toward him.
“Clinton Morgan?” she asked.
“Clint,” he corrected. This woman did not look like a Josh.
“Sorry to be late,” she said. “I hope you haven’t been here long.” She thrust out her hand. “I’m Stephanie.”
He took her hand, and her grip was as strong as his. She was nearly as tall as his own six feet. No makeup, but then she didn’t seem to need any. Her eyes were a dark blue, and her skin was tanned, the kind that came from working outdoors. Her hair was a mass of unruly rich copper curls, some of which escaped the braid that reached below her shoulders. Clad in jeans and a checkered cotton shirt splotched with dirt, her body was more lean than curved. Athletic.
“I volunteered to pick you up since I was inoculating some cattle not far away,” she continued. “I had a bit of a problem and ran late. Thus, my less-than-suitable chauffeur attire. I had planned to change and wash. I’m afraid I smell like cow and sweat.”
She said it all in a hurry and without apology, although her tone was friendly. Husky. Sexy as hell.
Things were looking up, even if the odor of cow was strong. He was intrigued. She was good-looking now, but add a bit of lipstick and a dress, and she would be striking.
“But a very pretty chauffeur,” he said with a grin that usually had a positive effect on the opposite sex.
The friendliness seeped from her eyes, replaced with something like wariness.
“Is the duffel all your luggage?” she asked, ignoring the compliment. Her question had a definite edge to it.
He felt duly kicked in the rear. “That and my laptop,” he said. “You learn to travel light in the army.”
She started for the duffel, but he beat her to it and hefted it over his shoulder.
Without another word, she led the way to the dusty red van with the words “Langford Animal Practice” on the door. “I hope you don’t mind dog hair,” she said in a businesslike tone. “My dog, Sherry, usually rides with me.”
“Fine with me. It’s not as if I’m going to the opera,” he quipped. “And I like dogs.” He went to the passenger’s side. The door was unlocked and he climbed inside.
“Darn good thing,” he heard her mutter in a barely audible voice.
Before he could respond, she started the van and roared out of the parking lot, obviously ignoring the thirty-miles-per-hour speed-limit sign. He glanced at her, but she concentrated on the road ahead. He admired a good driver, and she was that. He looked at the speedometer. The van had a hundred and fifty thousand plus miles on it, and she was going over the speed limit. Both said something about her.
He felt an immediate kinship. Interest sparked in him, the first since the accident that doomed his military career. He definitely wanted to know more about her. Particularly whether she was already taken. Not that he was interested in any long-term involvement. He sure as hell didn’t have anything to offer a woman. Struggling for conversation—strange as it usually came easier—he asked, “Are you the Langford in Langford Animal Practice?”
She shrugged. “I’m not Langford, but I do own the vet practice or at least the small part that’s paid off. I bought it from Tom Langford and never changed the name on the van. Never really saw a good reason to do it. I’m Stephanie Phillips.”
“Dr. Phillips?”
“No one calls me that. It’s just Stephanie.” Her tone seemed to cut off any other questions.
He took a deep breath and shifted restlessly. He ached to take her place at the wheel. Just as everything in him ached to reach for the controls of a chopper. Ached to be in the house he shared with other chopper pilots on the base or even a tent in Afghanistan. Sitting in a passenger seat, dependent on a driver—even an interesting woman—was his idea of hell.
He stared out at the plains spread out in front of him. Arid desert.
The blurb he had read online called this area of Colorado high desert. To him, it resembled parts of Iraq and Afghanistan. So did the heat.
“Is it always this warm?” he asked.
“This is a bit unusual. It’s usually in the low nineties in July and then starts going down. This year, it’s hanging around. It’s a bit cooler in Covenant Falls. We’re higher, altitudewise, from here, and the town is nestled next to the mountains.” Her tone was cool. It had lost something since he’d said she was pretty.
He shifted uncomfortably in the seat and stared ahead. He had been doing that a lot since leaving the hospital. The journey to Pueblo from Denver had been agonizingly long, or maybe it had just seemed that way. He had been a passenger on a plane, in a car and on a long-distance bus. Brutal. He yearned for his seat in a chopper, in controlling a complex machine that both protected and destroyed. He had been doing both for most of his adult life. Flying was his life. His identity. At gut level, being a pilot was who he was. Who he had been since he was