Page 15 of Keeping Laryn
“Personally, I like the drink holder she added,” Chaos said with a smirk.
“It’s not a drink holder, jeez,” Laryn teased with a roll of her eyes.
“What is it then?” he challenged.
Fine, he had her. It was totally a drink holder. She’d added it as a joke.
Thankfully, before she could respond, the colonel in charge of the Night Stalkers, Asher Burgess—and to whom she reported, as far as the military went—entered the hangar. The six men around her all turned and saluted him as he approached.
“At ease. Where do we stand on getting this bird in the air?” he asked impatiently.
Laryn stepped forward and began to debrief the officer in charge. It took almost ten minutes to satisfy him that the chopper was truly ready for the trials. He turned to the pilots.
“Debrief in thirty minutes. My office. We have a lot to go over before leaving next week for the Middle East.”
“Sir.”
“Yes, Sir.”
All the pilots answered in tandem as they once again saluted their commanding officer.
It wasn’t until the colonel left that Laryn let out a breath of relief. She’d been around plenty of officers before, but something about the colonel had always made her uneasy. He was a good guy, had his pilots’ best interests at heart, but he had a forceful and no-nonsense presence that always kept her on edge.
“Darn it,” Pyro grumbled. “I was hoping we’d be able to take her up this afternoon.”
“No time,” Tate told him. “Not with the colonel wanting to meet with us.”
“I know.”
“You want to go up with us tomorrow night?” Tate asked Laryn.
Her eyes widened. “Um…no.”
“No? Don’t you want to see how your baby handles firsthand?”
“Nope. No. Uh-uh. Forget about it.”
Tate and the other men all grinned. “Why not? Don’t you trust Pyro and me?”
“Yes. I know you’re good at what you do. But I don’t do helicopters. Or small planes. I actually don’t like planes in general, but they’re a necessary evil when we need to get to a ship in the middle of a far-off ocean.”
“Are you scared of heights?” Buck asked incredulously.
“No. I’m scared of crashing,” Laryn hedged.
Now all the men laughed.
“We don’t crash,” Obi-Wan informed her.
“We sometimes land hard, but that’s not the same thing,” Chaos said with a perfectly straight face.
Laryn rolled her eyes. “Still not happening.”
“I would never let anything happen to you,” Tate said, sounding completely serious. All signs of teasing were absent from his words. Which was unusual for him. “None of us would. We’d bend over backward to make sure you were safe.”
“Because who else would keep your babies purring for you?” Laryn joked, feeling uneasy with the intensity behind his words. It was going to take a while for her to get used to this new Tate. The man who actually paid attention to her, who didn’t just joke lightheartedly with her about “his” helicopters.
“I’m serious,” he insisted.
