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showed up right on my visor, so as I didn’t even have to look aside. Simply told Clint, shifted my track, and it worked, slicker’n bat guano. Afterward, when I had a moment to inspect the area, I saw that she’d chosen the absolute optimal points for troop deployment. Now that’s what I call beautiful.”
    He almost convinced her that he was talking about her job as AMC, but his eyes slid sideways just enough to once more catch her gaze.
    Kara finally understood Trisha’s elbow. Mr. Too-Tall, Too-Handsome Texan had just called her “beautiful” in front of the entire top echelon of the USS Peleliu.
    Death was too good for what she was going to do to him.

Chapter 3
    Justin tried to beat a hasty retreat from the debriefing room.
    Escape was definitely his best option.
    He’d simply never look at Kara Moretti again. Maybe he’d wear blinders around the ship like the ones he put on his brother’s horse team when he was hitching them up for the Tri-State Fair. Rafe was the only Roberts not to serve, because a horse had kicked his knee hard enough when he was a boy that it had given him a lifetime limp. At the moment, Justin sort of wished he was the one the horse had kicked.
    But Justin made the mistake of breaking his newfound law by glancing at Kara as he was tossing out his untouched, pitch black, and now dead cold coffee.
    She very subtly pointed behind her back out toward the sunlit flight deck. Everyone else was heading down the internal ship’s ladders to the mess on the 02 Deck in time for their meal. The vast open slab of the ship’s flight deck would be about as private as you could get.
    He considered ignoring her signal, but she’d just been approved as the 5D’s AMC by group consensus. If he made her angry enough, she just might fly him into a dead-end canyon at full speed.
    This time when he beat her to the door and held it for her, she simply scowled and walked through. In silence, she led him around the base of the communications superstructure and onto the narrow service walkway, all that perched between the superstructure and the thin rail that protected them from a five-story fall into the sea.
    He rounded the corner out of sight of the flight line, and she turned to face him like a cornered mountain lion. Actually, more like one on the attack.
    “What the hell, Roberts?”
    He considered many lines of response…and retreated into the truth.
    “Y’all make a man think of many things that are completely inappropriate, ma’am.”
    “Like what?”
    Like the way I can smell you on the breeze right now slipping off the warming day. “Some things are probably best kept between me and my horse.”
    “You two that close?” She rested her fists on her hips. But instead of scowling up at him, Kara had a cocky grin like she knew the answer to everything. Her humor was sharp, biting, but always made him laugh. And the smile she put back of it always held a surprising warmth. Even as ticked as she was with him at the moment, he could see that deep kindness shining through. He wondered if she knew that about herself—he suspected not, or she might be likely to beat it into submission.
    “You might say. I can tell her secrets and she promises not to tell anyone but another horse. Way I see it, that’s a safe enough bargain.”
    “And just what exactly are you keeping between you and your horse? What’s so goddamn inappropriate that I—”
    Justin wasn’t quite sure what came over him. Kara Moretti frustrated him worse than his brother, Rafe, which was sayin’ a handful. She knew precisely which buttons to push to make him twitch.
    Justin took off his hat, because that’s what you did before you kissed a lady.
    He caught her mid-word, which turned into a muffled “Mrgrf!” of surprise. He fully expected a slap—another good reason to take off his hat and protect it from being knocked into the sea—and he’d absolutely earned it.
    But it didn’t come.
    She tasted even better than she