Who Do You Trust? Read Online Free PDF Page A

I hear you made lieutenant in the Air Force, fly-boy McCluskey.”
    “Squadron leader, actually. I would have made it my career, but the boys need me home more than the life can give.”
    She glanced at him as she poured the coffee, afraid to ask the obvious question. “So what are your plans? Are you still going to work with planes?”
    He leaned against the counter, watching her as if refreshing his eyes with her face—just her face. “I’m setting up a country-based courier business here. I have two planes, as well as a Maule bush plane I keep for fun, and I do aid drops for the Vincent Foundation every once in a while.”
    She grinned. “Don’t tell me, I’m-Gonna-Save-the-World-Rebel McCluskey. You do all the runs for kids in crisis, and you’ve risked your neck to save a few.”
    Mitch laughed at the perception of old friendship. Oh, yeah, she still knew him all right—better than any other woman ever had, or would. He could no more turn down a kid in need of help than he could live without flying—but she, so protected and innocent, would never understand his new, hidden work.
    Just as well she didn’t know he’d left the Air Force for the almost two years ago; that his usual job description entailed flying over and into the world’s war zones to smuggle out captives and civilians unwittingly locked inside the unstated boundaries of heated battle. As for his adventure in Tumah-ra, and its potential repercussions with little Hana, if he couldn’t—no. There was no way he’d tell her; he didn’t want to shock her.
    But lying to Lissa had never been an option.
    He grinned and said, “Guilty as charged.”
    She grinned in response, and the sweet warmth of it fired his soul, as well as more intimate places. “You haven’t changed a bit. Still the world’s softest touch for a kid in need.” She bit her lip and shoved him his coffee mug over the counter.
    He didn’t touch it, barely noticed it. He knew he was staring at her, but he couldn’t stop. She’d changed from the fragile, hauntingly lovely woman-child who’d married his best mate at nineteen. She’d filled out, matured. She held herself with a quaint, unconscious dignity, standing aloof from the hedonistic angst of the world. But she still had the incredible mouth that made men thank God He made women—and she wore the same unique scent of sunshine and earth and grass and a touch of something wilder, sweeter beneath. Just like Lissa herself—a heady mixture of natural, glowing sensuality and sweet, untouchable purity. Lines touched her face, marks of the woman’s rite of passage: the strength and beauty of pain of childbirth and motherhood, the stress of unspoken sorrow and abandonment.
    God, she was beyond beautiful now, but in a way that almost hurt him to look. She was a fairy-tale heroine straight from the mind of the brothers Grimm: a shackled maiden lost in the forest. A figurehead carving they put on the bow of old ships, like the Flying Dutchman. Forever sailing on, standing at the front of a boat flying unstoppably through a world and time she had no control over. Beautiful and cold, so untouchably cold. In those eyes of sweet country mist, shadows ran rampant. Shades of fear. Specters of isolation and emptiness. As they did in her heart. The ghosts of the past owned her soul.
    But she was free of Tim—which was a greater miracle than any he’d hoped for—and he’d take her any way he could have her.
    And he would have her. He’d fight for her with everything he had in him, every ounce of strength and skill he’d learned. He’d fight clean if he could, dirty if he had to. This time no man was coming between them.
    He had to force himself to answer her teasing in the same light vein. “So I’m obsessed with saving kids? Says she who took my kids in for the past five months, no questions asked.”
    She stilled, looking anywhere but at him. “Are you going to take the boys away from me?”
    He stared at her, shocked by the