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He couldn’t ignore the frizzy red tendrils that always caressed her temples, and those high cheekbones of hers. That untamable red hair was more than just a sign about her personality, it was an absolute symbol. Willow was fiery, willful, assertive and her confidence was a turn on to him. She walked like she owned the whole damned world even now. Her shoulders were thrown back with natural pride and her gaze was focused like a laser on him. She didn’t blink. Hell, she was a combat pilot. Why would she blink when she was in the midst of a dangerous fray? There was NOTHING, dammit, that turned him off to her as she walked with purpose toward him and his following team.
Willow never wore makeup. In fact, she disdained it as Shep recalled from one of their after-sex talks. It was the time he’d enjoyed the most, feeling exhausted physically, but his mind crisp and clear and centered on sensual, wild and untamable Willow. She had been his wife. How many times had he awakened in the middle of the night in some foreign country, wondering why the hell they’d split up and divorced? She had enriched his life, made it exciting, unexpected and spontaneous. He was none of those things without her. As an engineer, he was a man absorbed in the details of numbers, measurements, building things and making them work correctly. Willow walked into his life that one night at Bagram and blew his world to smithereens and he’d never looked back.
Her red braid lay against her back and he realized she had allowed it to grow even longer after divorcing him. As a combat pilot, wearing a helmet all the time, she’d kept her hair mid-length between her shoulder blades. Now? Three years later and a civilian, her long hair stirred his desire, and his fingers itched to tangle themselves in that frizzy mass that crinkled in the Lake Tana humidity. Sweat was beginning to stain his long-sleeved khaki shirt even at this coolish time at dawn. He excused himself from his people, who were led away by the airport attendees, and he walked toward the two women pilots.
Shep didn’t know the other woman, but she had the look of eagles in her gray eyes. Nothing to mess with was the intuitive warning he got off the copilot who flew with Willow. There was a dangerousness to that woman, but things were distracting him too much for Shep to hone in on the sense any further than that. Both women wore holsters with .45s in them. A reminder that Ethiopia was not a safe place in many respects.
Shep took the lead, extending his hand to her as they slowed. “Willow? Nice to see you again.” He was SUCH a liar! He wanted to grab her, kiss her senseless and then carry her off to a bed where they’d slide into sexual oblivion together. Her fingers met his, slightly damp, long and beautiful, nails cut blunt. So many little things slammed into Shep as her fingers closed around his work-roughened, calloused hand. Remembering on one dawn that was crawling up into the night sky and chasing it away, Willow telling him she hated fingernail polish. She felt it was like putting a toxic poison on her nails that would be absorbed into her body. It was horrid stuff. A hundred small, everyday actions and reactions between them when they were married, slammed through him. Her fingers curved around his, not weakly, not overly strong either, but a solid connection, nevertheless. He saw something in her eyes, some momentary flicker of emotion in them that she quickly covered up.
“Nice to see you, Shep.” She quickly released his hand, as if burned. Turning, Willow said, “I want you to meet my copilot, Dev Mitchell.”
Dev stepped up, shaking his hand firmly. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Porter. Welcome to Ethiopia.”
“Call me Shep,” he insisted, “and thanks for the welcome. I know you ladies are really busy with details you don’t normally have to deal with.”
Willow pulled up her clipboard and said, “We’ve divided our duties to get your two groups some downtime and rest, to get over the jet lag, after they finish their passport stamping inside the terminal.” She turned, pointing at three bright-yellow school busses parked along the curb of the airport terminal outside the chain-link fence behind them. “Dev is going to take your security and construction teams to a nearby hotel where they can rest up, get a shower and some food. They’ll stay there until tomorrow morning.” She lifted her gaze from the clipboard. “You have a condo rented for you and your head of security. It will be in the same building Dev and I have our condos. That way, you’ll have ease of communication with us whenever you come back to Bahir Dar for a few days R&R from your construction assignment.”
Shep nodded. Willow was all business, but he couldn’t help but allow her low, smoky-toned voice to drift through him like a lover’s caress. He didn’t know if she was in a relationship presently or not. The emails they’d sporadically shared with one another never touched upon their personal lives. He had always had an almost psychic connection with her and, right now? She was wrestling with a lot of unseen emotions. But so was he. In one way? He felt like a giddy teen with this woman who turned him inside out in the best of ways. In another? Deep regret that they’d split up, both of them immature in different ways, bull-headed and too stubborn to compromise for the other. Willow had walked out on him. She had demanded the divorce, not him. Sadness filled him as she went crisply down the line on a lot of other issues that needed to be sorted and decided upon.
“Well, that’s it,” Willow said. “Do you have feedback?”
“Yeah, I’m fine with how you’ve structured this mass movement of personnel. Everyone is whipped and they need sleep and food.”
Nodding, Willow turned to Dev. “Rock it out, huh?”
Dev grinned, her clipboard ready. “Roger that,” and she took off to the awaiting groups who were beginning to file out into the passenger debarkation area.
How desperately Shep wanted to push through that hard barrier that Willow held up between them, but he understood, he thought, why it was there. She was either in a relationship with another man, which was none of his business, or, she still had feelings for him. Not necessarily good ones, either. When they’d first met, she’d had that same tough shield in place, as if to protect herself from the men who constantly hit on her at Bagram Fixed Wing Ops. She was beautiful, her red hair made her stand out, and every male in that building always noticed her, right or wrong. Only, he got lucky and was able to dissolve that first wall between them over time. And the woman that had been beneath that shield had blown his world, as he’d known it, completely apart. Willow had meant everything to him. She WAS his world. And, if he dared plumb the depths of his emotions, she still was. No woman since her had even begun to compare. He swallowed hard.
“Where do you need me, Willow? Or do you want me to do something else?”
“No, you’re with me. You’ll ride with me in our car, that silver KIA SUV out there in the lot. I’ll take you back to your condo so you can rest. Dev is going to handle your passport stuff inside, and the logistics of moving everyone else from here to the hotel. She’ll make sure they’re taken care of.”
Nodding, Shep turned, “My head of security is an ex-SEAL, Luke Gibson. He’ll probably have questions.”
“Then, let’s go over, single him out and we’ll put our heads together,” Willow suggested, already taking off toward the group.
Shep easily caught up with her and then shortened his stride to remain at her shoulder. The temperature was in the fifties and she was wearing a heavy denim jacket over her flight suit. She had always looked so carefree. Such a risk taker. None of that had changed from what he could see. He yearned to have some quiet downtime with her in private but knew well enough at least to keep his mouth shut about their past. And he wasn’t going to let anyone know about it on either team, although he knew Luke was aware. But Luke was black ops; he wasn’t gonna say shit. It was on a need-to-know basis only. Shep had made that clear from the start when they’d had a second meeting with Luke at Shield Security. One out of several briefings that had followed.
Once they’d singled Luke out, Shep made introductions. He felt a bit of jealousy as he saw Luke’s game face falter for a moment when Willow shook his hand. He instantly felt like a male lion protecting his lioness, but then he harshly reminded himself to stand down. Jealousy had been one of his weaknesses as Willow had heatedly pointed out to him time and again during their rugged two-year marriage. What he’d never told her was that his father had had an affair that had destroyed his mother. They’d then divorced and his mother Bess, a well-known children’s book illustrator, had taken care of him, loosely speaking, on her own. He had been thirteen at the time. And he’d seen his mother slowly falter and die before his eyes. It had served to put Shep on notice that men weren’t to be trusted in a marriage situation. He’d grown up thinking his parents were forever, but they weren’t. And it had wounded him in a way that played into his marriage with Willow. And now, dammit, that green-eyed monster within him was back on red alert over the way Luke had looked at Willow.
“I’ll be riding back to the condo with Flight Officer Mitchell,” Luke told them. “See you then, Shep.”
Nodding, Shep was relieved. It would be just him and Willow. Alone. And there was so damned much he wanted to share with her. One of her main issues with him was that he was too self-centered, that he never asked how she was, what was she thinking, or commit in other ways to any real communication between them. But this time, Shep was determined to at least show Willow he could be unselfish and share, and communicate with her. That was something he could fix. What he couldn’t fix was her broken heart or his. That was the pain he felt in his chest, and he’d thought nothing would make it go away. But it had when their hands had touched, and he’d gently squeezed her fingers. Getting to touch her had been a thrill. Heat had tunneled through his heart.
The clouds were lessening over the busy airport. Porters brought the luggage out to the front of the building as people began sifting through the bags, finding their own, and moving toward the awaiting, assigned busses. Shep found his two dark-green canvas duffle bags and gripped one in each hand. They were damned heavy, but that couldn’t be helped. He followed Willow to her SUV parked outside the guarded fence. He saw passengers from a British Airways flight disgorging and several families of locals crossing the two-lane asphalt road, hurrying into the airport to meet them. There were big palm trees and a lot of jungle-like greenery around. Ethiopia sat a bit north of the Equator and the Northern Provinces, where Tana Lake was, were the coolest areas of the country. Shep was glad. He’d run construction crews for years in the hot, unforgiving deserts of Afghanistan before the U.S. had erased their presence from that country.
The smells in the air were of jet fuel mixed with the mouth-watering aroma of some kind of bread baking, perking his tummy’s attention. The women were beautiful in his eyes, different shades of ebony to mahogany, the colorful saris, and hajibs they wore making them look like dazzling, colorful tropical birds. He followed Willow, appreciating her from behind. Once, his hands had freely roamed her body, lavishing her with pleasure. She was as untamable as that naturally curly red hair of hers. A part of her was still a wild child, there was no doubt, but that part of Willow only came out to play when he allowed his own self to become loosened up and playful. So often, as she’d accused him regularly toward the end of their marriage, he was always serious, always away, lost in his head and his damnable engineer logic, and not in his heart. He was closed up tighter than Fort Knox, she’d told him many times. Willow was loose, free, risk-taking, empathetic, and he was the opposite. At least she had stopped just short of calling him anal.
Willow unlocked the very dusty silver SUV, much in need of a wash, but no one washed their cars here. She opened the rear hatchback door, allowing Shep to heft his bags into it.
“Thanks,” he said, catching her gaze as she stood to one side.
“What?” she drawled. “You think I’m not going to be my old self around you? Did you think I’d make you open the hatchback on your own?”
He grinned wearily, watching that shield of hers thin, amusement darting in her green eyes for a split second. Relief swept through him. He didn’t want her ice-queen game face on all the time. “I was hoping you’d be your old self when we were alone,” he admitted, grateful, settling the second duffle bag into the cargo area. He pulled the hatchback down, latching it in place. A bare three feet separated them but to Shep, it might as well have been the Grand Canyon yawning between Willow and himself.
With a snort, she muttered, “I didn’t change that much over time, Porter.”
