Seven
“Say it,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “Whatever it is, just tell me.”
The words stuck in her throat, the truth she’d kept inside her for weeks and months. Years before that.
But now, today, they needed to be freed.
“When your team was hit in Korea—the warning that came in over the radio….” She swallowed hard. “That was me.”
He didn’t move. “You?”
“I was the pilot.”
“In the Sentinel?” He appeared stunned. Riveted.
“Yes. I was flying dispatch, doing a favor for the base’s sergeant to do surveillance.
I saw movement in the eastern valley. I called it in to Base Operations.
I tried to warn them, tried to warn you, but I was too late.
” She forced herself to keep talking. “An enemy patrol was hiding in the tree line. I had already told you the path was clear….” She blinked fast. “But I shouldn’t have.
I was wrong. I never expected them to rush you like they did. ”
A moment passed. “You couldn’t have known what they’d do.”
“And then the mortar hit.” Her lashes fluttered, fighting moisture. “You were injured by shrapnel. Right temple. Your men were hit, too.”
A muscle in his jaw leapt. “We survived, Jackie.”
Her glance jumped to him. “All of you?”
“Yes. My men had injuries, but they made it out with me.”
“Oh, thank God.” A fervent prayer of thanksgiving filled her heart.
Beck still hadn’t moved, just stood there in her doorway, waiting. Listening. She could only imagine the questions he must have. Maybe suspicions. Uncertainties, too.
But he had to know she had more to tell.
“You were captured after my warning, Beck, not saved by it.” Her voice dropped to almost nothing.
There was no defense left in her, no strength but the raw truth.
“Every time I thought of you, I thought of a man who might have come home free if I’d seen something sooner, spoken sooner, done more sooner. ”
“You took enemy fire, too,” he said roughly. “You tried to distract them.”
Her shoulder lifted in a shrug. “Yes.”
“Your plane crashed.”
“Yes.”
He took a step then. Out of the doorway and into her room. Closer until he was right there in front of her, so close she could smell the clean Sandhills air on him.
He held her chin with his lean fingers, and his eyes darkened to a stormy blue.
“You think I haven’t thought of you a million times since then?” he demanded huskily. “A woman pilot, crashed in a valley, left alone to die? You think it didn’t just about kill me because I couldn’t help you? Save you? That I near went crazy in that camp wondering about you?”
Tears welled. She hadn’t once thought such a thing. “Did you?”
“Darn right, I did.”
Her lower lip quivered from the guilt that would forever haunt her. For the anguish he’d suffered, too. “Even if you’d been able to help me, I would’ve told you how very sorry I was you’d nearly been killed.”
“Like you’d nearly been killed trying to save us.”
“I suppose. Yes.”
It hadn’t been easy climbing back into a plane after the crash. Every flight since had felt shadowed by the memory of Beck—hit by a mortar blast, bleeding, and captured in a valley below her.
She had one more thing to reveal. Her gaze lowered to her closed fist. Slowly, her fingers opened, and his dog tag lay cradled against her palm with the small metal rectangle warm and intact, its stamped letters still sharp.
“After I came to, I found these in the snow. I knew if you were without them, the enemy would never care who you were. Your name wouldn’t matter to them.
” The emotion refused to leave, making her weepy.
“I didn’t want you to be forgotten, Beck.
Your family deserved to know you weren’t killed in action.
They needed hope that you would come home. ”
“Jackie.” He clearly struggled with a wave of emotion of his own. He took the dog tag into his own hand, ball chain dangling. “You turned one tag into the military, but you kept this one for yourself?”
“Yes.” A small broken breath slipped free.
“Because I didn’t save you. And I couldn’t let myself forget what that cost you.
” She emitted a whispered laugh, self-deprecating and ironic.
“And then I came here, and Tom Caldwell told me you lived on the spread next to mine. And then I saw you with my own eyes, strong and alive, standing right in front of me, and I still couldn’t tell you how I’d failed you because I was afraid.
” A tear slipped free, though she made no move to brush it away.
“Afraid you’d look at me and hate me for how I’d failed you and your team. ”
“You really believed I’d hate you for that? After you tried to save us?” He shook his head once, slow and regretful. He folded his fingers around the tag and chain and slid both into his shirt pocket. “Honey, you’ve got this turned so far around you can’t even see what good you did.”
“I feel like a fraud, Beck.”
“A fraud.” He stood close enough for her to feel the warmth of him, close enough that if she swayed even a little, she would have fallen straight into him.
“Your family was so nice, and I didn’t deserve a bit of it after what they would’ve suffered, worrying about you.
Your mother and Mary Sue made all that good food.
Your father bowed his head and thanked the Lord for bringing me into your lives.
Lonnie talked to me like I was his sister, and Timmy climbed into my lap like I was somebody safe.
” Her voice broke. “And all I could think was that if they knew—if any of you knew—what happened that day, they’d never have wanted me at the table at all. ”
“Jackie, Jackie, Jackie.” His big hand cupped the back of her head and drew her against him.
“Your mom brought me lilies, Beck,” she whispered into his shirt.
He chuckled, a deep rumble in his chest. His hand slid up and down her back, over and over again, until she nearly melted into a miserable heap at his booted feet.
He drew back and speared his fingers into her hair, loosened from its usual twist at the nape of her neck. He held her face to his.
“You can stop punishing yourself now,” he said quietly. “It’s over. Neither of us will ever go back to that day.”
He was right, of course. They wouldn’t. And there was keen consolation in that.
Her heart lifted in surrender to the wisdom in his voice. Her belief in him. The truth of his words. With the smallest movement, the years of guilt and pain loosened, and she gave in to the need for his nearness, his strength and comfort.
His forgiveness.
She leaned toward him, and Beck was there, their mouths seeking….
Their kiss wasn’t rushed, but tentative at first, almost reverent, as if they both understood they stepped across a line neither could uncross. The warmth of his lips pressed against hers, and Jackie’s arms circled to his back, holding him close.
A low sound unfurled from his throat, and he crushed her against his chest. Her world narrowed to feel only him—his masculinity, his honor, the astonishing tenderness of a man she had once feared would hate her.
When the kiss deepened, it did so with the force of everything they’d held inside for too long.
Grief, uncertainty, and now gratitude all fell away beneath the simple, powerful awareness of each other.
Too soon, his head lifted, but only to nuzzle the hair at her temple.
“That,” he said in an intimate whisper, “is for the woman who saved me.”
Jackie let out a sigh that might have been a laugh if it hadn’t trembled so much. Her arms still clung to him. She couldn’t make herself let him go.
“And this….” He shifted, angling his mouth to land on hers again in a lingering, sweet, blood-stirring kiss. “Is because I’ve been wanting to do it all week long.”
Jackie didn’t trust herself to answer. The tenderness in him was too much, the relief too new and too fragile.
Her forehead dipped to his shoulder, and Beck’s hand slid to the back of her head, holding her there with a protectiveness that made her eyes sting all over again.
She let herself lean, let herself take the comfort of him, the solid strength of him, and when his arms tightened, drawing her fully against him, it felt less like giving up and more like coming home to something she hadn’t known she could want. And needed.
Eventually, after long healing moments, Beck’s embrace loosened slowly, as if he knew she was still finding her footing. That they both were. His hands settled at her elbows instead, steadying without holding her in place.
“You don’t have to be afraid of my family,” he said quietly.
“I’m not,” she said quickly. “Well, apprehensive, maybe.”
“They’re not going to think worse of you for any of this.” His thumb slid across her lower lip, still swollen from his kisses. “If anything, they’ll think more of you for what you did for me and my men.”
“I want to believe that. I just never dared.”
“Now you can.”
She cocked her head, her heart lighter than it had been for longer than she could remember. “I like them a lot, you know. Your mother, your father… all of them. They made me feel welcome, even when I was sure I didn’t deserve it.”
“That wasn’t charity, Jackie. They saw you—the woman you are, not the blame you’ve been carrying.”
His avowal settled deep into her chest. For the first time since Korea, Beck helped her decide the truth might not destroy everything, after all.
By the time Beck returned to his grandfather’s old cabin, dusk had begun to creep over the Sandhills.
The cattle had gone quiet, except for an occasional bellow across Archer range.
Crickets chirped in the grass. The wind blew through the cottonwoods.
Sounds Beck had always known. Had never taken for granted. Mostly didn’t think much about.
But it was Jackie who consumed his thoughts.
The taste of her on his lips, the softness of her in his arms, the look in her eyes when he’d told her the truth she should have known long ago.
He had kissed her, and God help him, one kiss hadn’t been enough.
Two had only sharpened his wanting. And that only led his thinking to… other things.
As he did every night, Beck reached up and unhooked the flag from its pole, gathering the familiar weight of it into his hands. He folded it the way he always did—careful, exact, and without hurry—then carried the colors with him up the porch steps, held close against his chest.
He paused at the door, delaying going inside.
He could see beyond the east pasture from here.
Jackie’s new hangar, the airstrip, her house that was fast taking on a new shine after Roy Kincaid’s neglect.
He was close enough to see lamplight in her window if the night was clear.
Close enough that if she needed him, he could be there in a hurry.
There’d been nights in Korea when Beck had lain awake in the dark, aching, half-starved, and nearly sick with bone-deep fear he would never see what he was seeing now.
Not just the east pasture, but the south and north pastures, too.
The sunset from his front porch. The light falling golden over Sandhills grass.
He’d only wanted to come home and never leave again.
And now Jackie was here.
She had him thinking a different way now, not like a man who lived with land divided into the sections of a compass, but like a man measuring his life by the distance to her door.
He couldn’t much figure it, her getting deep into his bones. Maybe he’d been too affected by learning she’d been there with him in that Korean valley. Maybe it was the shock of knowing she could have been killed trying to warn him and his team, that she’d survived like he had.
Or maybe it was something else.
With a perplexed grunt, a little fixated on that “something else,” he headed into the cabin, turned on a light, and locked the door behind him.
After setting the folded flag onto the nearest table, he strode into the kitchen, retrieved the wooden step stool from beside the refrigerator, and set it in front of the cupboard.
He found the El Producto cigar box right where he’d left it, still smelling faintly of cedar. The black leather jewelry box was inside, too, and once down from the stool, he pulled out a chair and sat at the table.
Wiser now, knowing what was there, he carefully brushed the sterling silver locket aside, removed Martha Washington’s letter from its place within the cream velvet, and re-read the words she’d written on the parchment.
… to awaken its wonder one need only place the locket upon her heart, and love shall surely find its way to you…
He cocked his jaw and read the line again. Funny how it didn’t sound as crazy as it had before. A man could almost believe the old locket had something to do with how much Jackie had come to mean something to him.
But in the next moment, he pushed the idea back to its original craziness.
What was happening to him had nothing to do with Martha Washington and her old letter, and everything to do with Jackie Sinclair herself.
Civilian pilot, neighbor on Archer land.
Period. Beck set the letter back in the jewelry box, added the dog tag from his pocket, closed it, and returned the black case to its place in the cigar box.
But he didn’t return it to the cabinet’s top shelf.
Maybe later he would. When his mind quit circling over the whole crazy thing.