Eagle Station

Brad laughed. “Nope.” He donned an innocent look. “And there’s no way you can prove anything, even if we did.”

“Constable decided to take some long-overdue R&R,” Nadia explained patiently. “He said something about visiting relatives in Australia and New Zealand.”

“Relatives,” Boomer snorted cynically. “I bet. More likely that Brit has a cunning plan involving a couple of curvy female flight attendants and a few cases of champagne.”

Smiling, Nadia shook her head in mock dismay. “Oh, Boomer, you really should not assume everyone shares your devious and debauched nature.”

“Moi? Debauched? Perish the thought,” the other man said, dramatically putting his hand over his heart. “I’m a reformed character these days. Drinking, dames, and dice are strictly a faint echo of my long-vanished past.”

Brad and Nadia exchanged a quick, meaningful look. They’d heard the gossip about Boomer and his copilot, Liz Gallagher. The two of them were supposed to be seeing a lot of each other outside of working hours. A lot. Maybe the rumors were accurate for once. If so, the petite redhead would certainly be a huge step up from the ditzy casino cocktail waitresses he usually chased. In fact, she was just the kind of levelheaded, highly intelligent woman who might finally be able to successfully corral the hard-driving, hard-living Hunter Noble.

“Speaking of R&R, though,” Boomer continued. “What do you guys have planned for yourselves? A couple of weeks in the Caribbean? A jaunt to Paris or Rome? Tell me all, so I can grit my teeth and bitch and moan about my hard luck being stuck here with a couple of hundred wannabe space cadets to train.”

“Well, we might—” Brad started to say.

Shaking her head sadly, Nadia cut him off. “Alas, we are not going anywhere. We have too much work to do.”

“We do?”

She nodded firmly. “Yes, we most certainly do, Brad McLanahan. As you should remember.” She started ticking items off on her fingertips. “There are guest lists to finalize. Invitations to write out and send. Thank-you notes for engagement presents to compose. Bridesmaid and groomsmen’s gifts to select—”

Brad turned pale. “Ack.” He looked at Boomer and mouthed, “Help.”

“Not me, brother,” the other man said with heartfelt sincerity. If anything, his smile grew even wider. “I’m not dumb enough to get between Major Rozek here and anything she’s got her mind firmly set on.”

“Thank you, Boomer,” Nadia said, matching his tone perfectly. “I always knew you were a wise man.”

“Gee, thanks.”

But now her own smile carried a hint of wicked glee. “No matter what everyone else has always said.”

Seven

The White House, Washington, D.C.

The Next Day

President John Dalton Farrell looked up at the sharp rap on his open door. “Yes?”

A short, pert woman with shoulder-length, silver-blond hair poked her head inside the Oval Office. “Well, J.D., those fellas you’ve been waitin’ on finally drifted in,” she said brusquely, with more than a hint of a West Texas twang. “That old hipster fart and the spaceman, I mean. You want to see ’em now?”

Farrell hid a grin. In her own words, Maisie Harrigan had been his “personal go-fer, bottle washer, and all-around ass-kicker” for decades — going back to a time when his entire oil and gas business consisted of one leased drilling rig and a couple of broken-down pickup trucks. Now, as executive assistant to the president, she ran Oval Office operations with an iron fist. It was also no secret that she saw one of her main jobs as making sure her boss and those around him didn’t get too big for their britches. “Sure thing, Maisie. Show them in, please.”

He worked even harder to keep the smile off his face when she ushered his two visitors in, lectured them not to “waste too much of J.D.’s time, you hear?” and then departed with an audible sniff.

Kevin Martindale looked after her with a hint of awe. “My God, but that woman scares me, Mr. President,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve got ex — Navy SEAL bodyguards I wouldn’t bet a dime on if they went up against her.”

“She is a force of nature,” Farrell agreed.

Martindale’s long gray hair, neatly trimmed beard, and fondness for very expensive, open-necked suits did make him look a bit like some aging and dissolute playboy, Farrell decided. But that was only if you ignored his shrewd, penetrating gaze… and didn’t know that he’d occupied this same office as president of the United States.

Since leaving the White House, the other man had thrown his energies into Scion, the private military and intelligence company he’d created. For the past several years, Martindale had recruited, organized, and equipped the ultra high-tech air and ground units and covert operatives who had helped defend Poland and its smaller Eastern European allies against Russian aggression. Now, working mostly behind the scenes, Scion was coaching America’s regular armed forces in the advanced equipment and new war-fighting techniques it had so successfully pioneered.