CHAPTER TWO

      THE WARPLANE HANDLED like it was the 1940s and the war was on again. Harmony strapped into the cockpit of the old bird with the giddiness of a child and took to the sky, climbing high, the nose reaching for the blue, white-peppered expanse.

      “No tricks today, ace,” the voice of her radioman advised. “Just do some nice fly-bys and get the people going.”

      “You’re a buzzkill, James,” she called back. “I’m just stretching the lady’s legs.”

      What legs! The engine had fire and pizzazz. It was bred for dogfighting and hell-for-leather maneuvers. The idea brought gooseflesh to Harmony’s skin as she banked, coming around.

      The trim airfield spread out below her, a jutting green carpet. Two lines of exhibition planes were queued on either side of the runway. Hundreds of faces from the metal bleachers were turned up to the sky, watching the fighter live again. “Hold on to your hats,” Harmony warned, going low.

      A curse blew through the headset of her flying helmet as she dipped over the bleachers and climbed again, gaining airspeed. “Well. Hats are in the wind,” James observed. “You nearly ripped the blouse off the congressman’s wife.”

      “Then we’re certain to make the papers.” She banked again. “Relax. Are the good people smiling?”

      “They’re verklempt. Nobody ever said you don’t put on a good show.”

      “Just sit back and enjoy it, why don’t you?” she suggested. “Coming in again...”

      Even she whooped as she made the next sweep. This was worth all the hassle they’d gone through to get the summer show off the ground. They’d haggled for weeks with FAA regulations. With well-trained pilots, they’d managed to rustle together all the right paperwork and get the all-clear from the powers that be.

      God, it felt great to be in the cockpit. No way she would ever give it up again. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t give to stay airborne.

      Well, there was one thing she wouldn’t give. Harmony’s gaze strayed to the three-by-five photograph she’d taped to the control panel for luck. Her daughter smiled back at her over a ruffle-lined shoulder, curly-headed and coquettish. She was the reason Harmony couldn’t try any of her old barnstorming maneuvers, though the temptation sang. She was the reason Harmony heeded James’s warning and performed fly-bys instead of loops.

      Gracie Bea, who’d lost one parent before she was born, was the general reason Harmony toed the line. Because no matter how trained she was, no matter how well-maintained the warbird might be, she couldn’t take risks. She took enough on a day-to-day basis. Aerial application wasn’t low-level aerobatics, but it still held its share of dangers.

      Harmony liked being the pilot mama who taught her daughter not to slow down but to run and climb, whoop and holler. Yet she knew her limits, and she heeded them as she’d heeded few other limits in life, even gravity, because no child deserved to grow up an orphan.

      It hurt enough that Bea would never know her father, Petty Officer Benjamin Zaccoe—Benji.

      “Last pass,” Harmony informed James through the radio. “Ready down there?” A frown pulled at her lips when he didn’t answer. “James?” She was already going in for a dive. She pulled off the final fly-by and tapped her headset. “Tower, do you read?”

      Communications must be down, she mused. Wheels down, she executed a safe, only somewhat flashy landing that brought the bird to a standstill in front of the rows of spectators who clambered to their feet and cheered her as she rose from the cockpit and waved. She’d dressed the part in a vintage flying helmet and sheep-lined leather jacket. As had been her trademark in flying days past, she wore her hair in a thick braid over one shoulder.

      The warm reception brought her flight buzz to a satisfying conclusion. She stood on the wing of the fighter, gave a salute, and prepared to hop to the grass before she saw James approaching.

      “Nice flying, ace.” He nodded, impressed.

      She pulled off her helmet. “I lost comms.”

      He reached out to grasp the wing’s edge. James was well over six feet tall and had aged well. Very well. His hair and beard were still thick, with some salt and pepper sprinkled through. His tan face only looked worn around the corners of his eyes where laughter had inscribed itself. “Sorry. It was me,” he admitted.

      “Why?” she asked. “What happened?”

      “I was distracted,” James told her. He turned toward the row of B.S. personnel on the ground. “You can blame that one over there.”

      Harmony squinted. Well-worn T-shirt, cargo pants, battered baseball cap over hair that curled brown under the rim and bordered on unruliness. The beard was full enough to rival James’s, and the smile wove a wide path through it. Blue eyes winked at her from under the brim of the hat.

      “’Ey, Carrots,” he greeted.

      She nearly shuddered. “Kyle!” Hopping down to the grass, she got a running leap on him.

      “Umphf!” he groaned under the impact, breaking into a low-rumbling laugh as he grabbed her up off the ground in a fierce hug.

      Some hugs had the power to heal all manner of woes. Some were as vital as the bodies they brought together. Harmony tightened her hold around Kyle’s neck. For a moment—a small moment—she let all her anxiety bleed through to the surface where she never let it stray. Not when he was away. She couldn’t think about what he and her brother, Gavin, did. She couldn’t think about the risk of losing either of them where she’d already lost too much.

      Ducking her head into Kyle’s shoulder, she felt her brow creasing and the muscles beneath quake with the effort to hold it back. Beating it under, she breathed deep and smelled sunshine, Zest soap and sea salt—smells that were so very Kyle.

      He was back. It was her turn to feel verklempt.

      “Talk about a hero’s reception,” he murmured.

      Her lips curved. “Mmm-hmm.”

      “Harm?”

      “Hmm?” she mumbled. She felt a bit fuzzy-headed as she pulled back in his embrace. “Oh.” Loosening her grip, she let him set her on the grass. “Sorry. I just... I missed the hell out of you.”

      All the fuzziness faded, and her focus sharpened, everything zeroing in on him. As a girl, she’d felt a magnetic pull toward him. He might’ve known her since she was a baby, but Harmony was a woman, damn it, and Kyle Bracken was a man, a soldier, that women noticed.

      “You look the same,” he said.

      She swore sometimes Kyle still saw her as his best buddy Gavin’s little sister. Did he look at her and see the four-year-old who’d wrecked her bicycle in earth-scorching fashion on the gravel outside his mother’s flower shop? Or the eighteen-year-old he’d tossed into a mud puddle in front of his navy friends? “Is that good?” she asked.

      He reached up, touched her hair. Just a brush above the temple where some flyaway strays had pulled free of her braid. “Couldn’t be better.”

      She ignored the missed breath and balled her hand into a fist. Throwing it into the rock slab of his shoulder, she knocked him back half a step and startled a short laugh out of him. “You don’t call. You don’t write. You just show up out of the blue to let us know you’re—” She stopped herself just short of saying alive. She licked her lips and shook her head. “You’re nearly as bad as my brother.”

      “Ouch,” he said, his good humor fading by a fraction. He touched his shoulder. “You’ve been working on that