The Flyboy's Temptation by Kimberly Van Meter Page B

while the other scooped the pack up.
    â€œI await your delightful presence at supper.”
    And then she was dragged away, her pack in the hands of a man whose cultured smile and cold eyes gave her the chills as surely as staring down the business end of a gun aimed at her head.
    * * *
    J.T. RAN UNTIL he was certain he wasn’t being followed, and then he collapsed, his chest heaving as he caught his breath under cover of the thick jungle foliage.
    Once again, he was lost in the jungle.
    And he’d left Hope behind.
    It’d been the only way—a calculated risk to protect her safety in the only way he knew how—but it still stung like a bitch to know that she thought he’d abandoned her.
    It didn’t matter that he’d promised to come for her; she’d watched in disbelief as he’d run away, which probably made him look like a coward.
    He cringed.
    But how much worse would it have been if Hope had been shot in the back as they both ran?
    You can’t save her if you’re both dead.
    Reason was a paltry balm for his shrieking conscience.
    J.T. pulled his phone and called his brother, but the call went to voice mail, which meant Teagan was probably already in the air.
    Which also meant he had to sit tight, stay alive and wait for his brother to find him so they could go in, rescue Hope and put this wretched place in the rearview mirror.
    Staying on the ground was a risky venture—due to both roaming predators and poisonous things that bit—so J.T. took to a tree, climbing the massive thing until he found a branch that he could fashion a small bower from to spend the night. Lashing vines together with broad leaves, he tied himself to the tree and settled in for a long night.
    Closing his eyes, he kept his mind purposefully blank. It was too easy to second-guess every decision when he was getting an instant replay every ten seconds, and he couldn’t waste energy looking backward.
    The jungle cacophony became white noise and J.T. dozed here and there. Why his thoughts drifted to his last tour of duty, he had no idea, but soon he was reliving one of his worst moments.
    â€œRenegade, you are clear to engage.”
    The static voice of Mission Control crackled in his headset above his mask and J.T.’s gloved hand hovered over the button that would release the heat-seeking missile.
    â€œThis is Renegade. Target acquired,” he confirmed as his jet split the sky like a hot knife through butter. The mission was a simple one, but highly classified. Deep in the Afghan desert, the hideout of a high-ranking al-Qaeda leader had been supposedly discovered. J.T.’s squadron, the Hell Cats, were charged with carrying out a sensitive mission—take out the leader’s lair with minimal civilian casualties.
    J.T. didn’t hesitate. He pushed the button. “Fox Two is a go. I repeat, Fox Two is a go.”
    A deadly sidewinder arrowed straight to its intended target and everything went boom.
    Except...the intel had been bad.
    And J.T. had blown up a small village, killing everyone in the dead of night.
    The ensuing investigation had cleared J.T. of any wrongdoing, but that hadn’t absolved his conscience. J.T. finished up his tour and hung up his dog tags for good.
    Collateral damage, they’d said.
    His buddies couldn’t understand why J.T. was so shaken up by the mistake.
    â€œShit happens,” Rocco “Rooster” Gianni had said with a shrug. “There had to be some reason that the intel put us there. Maybe they weren’t so innocent after all. Let it go, man. You know what they say—war is hell, right?”
    â€œThey were innocent people,” J.T. said, feeling sick to his stomach. “I didn’t sign up to kill women and children.”
    â€œI’m telling you, they couldn’t have been all that innocent. For all we know, they were harboring that SOB and if that’s the case, they got what they deserved.”
    In