Point Of Departure

Hating the crutches, she made her way on bare feet back out to the kitchen, from which wonderful scents were originating. Hungrily, Callie inhaled the aroma of frying bacon. Automatically, as she entered the kitchen, her pulse began to bound a little. Ty Ballard had tied one of her aprons around his waist. His sleeves were rolled up to just below his elbows, and he stood happily stirring eggs in the skillet. As if sensing her presence, he lifted his head and turned to look at her.

“Smells great, doesn’t it? Come on, have a seat. I’ve set the table.” Ty quickly moved over to pull out a chair for her. Trying not to stare like a slavering wolf, he forced himself to pay attention to the scrambled eggs. Callie looked like the proverbial girl-next-door in her simple slacks and blouse. And he liked the fact that she went around barefoot. Despite being one of the elite academy ring-knockers, she possessed an intriguing innocence that he ached to explore.

Callie moved to the table, which had been set with her good china, pink linen napkins rolled neatly beside the plates. A cup of recently poured coffee and a small glass of orange juice awaited her. Everything was perfect. She sat down and set the crutches aside.

“I’m in shock,” she said.

Ty twisted to look over his shoulder as he added cream cheese and bacon bits to the scrambled eggs. “Over what?”

“You. This.” Callie waved to the table. “Everything is so neat—thoughtful, I guess….”

“Brother, you must have had some bad experiences with men,” Ty teased as he whipped the scrambled eggs furiously. “Some of us are kitchen trained.”

His heartrending smile shattered her tension, and Callie laughed lightly. “I guess I had that coming, didn’t I?”

“I don’t know,” Ty said smoothly as he brought the skillet over and served half the scrambled eggs to her and half to himself. “Maybe you haven’t run into very many thoughtful men of late.” He put the skillet in the sink, ran water into it, then quickly brought over the just-popped-up toast. Untying the apron, he laid it on the drainboard, then sat down at her elbow and grinned. “A meal fit for a queen. Dig in, Callie. You need some color back in those cheeks of yours.”

Nonplussed, Callie picked up the knife and buttered her toast. Ballard seemed like a happy little boy instead of a serious navy pilot. “I don’t know what to make of you,” she muttered between delicious bites of the scrambled eggs.

“Why?”

“You’re different.”

Shrugging, Ty launched into his meal with gusto. “My ex-wife said the same thing.” She might as well know he had a failed marriage. If nothing else, he had learned to be honest and keep all his cards on the table when it came to relationships. He knew he didn’t want to make the same mistakes twice. Especially not with Callie. Even as the thought passed through his head, Ty wondered what kind of crazy magic had come over him. From that first moment of seeing her helpless in the parking lot, something had sprung loose deep within him. What was it? Loneliness? God knew, he’d been like a lost wolf without a mate since the divorce.

It was impossible to ignore Ty’s upbeat presence. Callie glanced over at him when he mentioned the divorce. “You’re single now?” she asked pointedly. Once, she’d fallen in love with a pilot who’d said he was divorced. It had been a lie, but he had strung Callie along, getting what he wanted from her. When she’d discovered the lie, she’d confronted Mark. He’d laughed and shrugged it off as if it didn’t matter—as if she didn’t matter.

Ty held up his left hand to show the absence of a wedding ring. “Single.”

“How long were you married?”

“Five years.”

She pushed the eggs around on her plate. “That’s a long time for a navy pilot. Most of them seem to get married and divorced in two years.”

“Or less,” Ty agreed. He saw the wariness in Callie’s face again. There was a lot of unspoken pain there, too, and he surmised that she’d been burned by a pilot at some point. “I liked marriage,” he went on. “I liked the idea of having a home.”

“Do you have any children?”

He shook his head. “No….”

“Is your ex-wife a civilian?”

“Yeah. She lives in San Diego. She’s a bright, intelligent woman.”

Callie heard the hurt in his voice, although he tried to hide it with bravado. “You said she called you ‘different,’ too.”

“Well,” he sighed, “‘different’ wasn’t used in a complimentary way, Callie.”

Callie thrilled to hear her name slip from his lips. Trying to ignore the feelings it invoked, she found herself wanting to continue pursuing Ballard’s past. Why? she asked herself. Callie had no answers, and it left her feeling terribly vulnerable.

“Five years is a long time to spend with someone. You must have meant a lot to each other,” Callie hedged. She saw her comment strike Ballard with a direct hit. His smile slipped, and a shadow came across his eyes.

“Jackie wanted the divorce,” he said quietly. “I didn’t.”

“Oh.”

Ty felt Callie’s interest. He hadn’t meant to get into a discussion about his personal life—at least, not this morning. He’d wanted to come over, cheer Callie up a little and head to work. He frowned, pushing the last of the eggs onto his fork. There was pain from the past to deal with, now, too.

“I guess I wasn’t around when she needed me,” he began. “I was gone a lot. Most of the time I was out on carriers—I didn’t get the land-based assignments I’d hoped for.”

“That ruins a lot of marriages,” Callie agreed soberly. She reached over, placing her hand on his arm for just a moment. “I’m sorry. You seem nicer than most of the navy pilots I’ve known. It’s too bad it had to happen, Ty.”

Ty rallied under her soft, hesitant touch and the use of his first name. It was a start, and for that he was grateful. “Yeah, well, as the saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Look, I gotta run. I’m due to teach a class at 0800 over at Fightertown.” He pushed the chair away and stood up. Before he left, he placed his dishes and silverware in the sink.

Callie blinked at the abruptness of Ty’s departure. She sat back and watched a mask drop over his rugged features. Unable to take offense at his sudden retreat into silence, she felt deeply for him. Ty had really loved his wife. That was a new twist for her. Most navy pilots loved ’em and left ’em without so much as an “I’m sorry,” in her experience.

“Thanks for coming by…for everything,” she managed in a small voice. She wanted to apologize for raking up the painful coals of his past. His suffering was obvious.

“Thanks for letting me barge into your life,” Ty said. He picked up his cap and settled it over his military-short hair. “I’ll be seeing you around. Maybe I’ll call you in a couple of days—see how you’re recuperating?” He’d never wanted anyone to say yes as he did now. Callie’s upturned features were bathed with a pink blush that made her blue eyes sparkle with life—and suddenly Ty realized that his presence had helped her a bit. He felt good about that. He was just sorry he couldn’t hide his hurt over the divorce. He cursed himself for bringing it up in the first place.

“A phone call would be fine,” Callie agreed quietly. She saw a fierce longing burning in his gray eyes as he stood so proudly before her. The aura of a navy pilot was enough to knock any woman off her feet, she thought dizzily. And Ty Ballard was a very special man. Very special.

“Great.” He smiled and lifted his hand in farewell. “I’ll see you later, Callie. If you need anything, just call me at the office.” He pointed to her ankle. “With that injury, you aren’t going to be able to get to the commissary to buy groceries. Sure you wouldn’t like me to help in that department, now that I’ve proved myself in the kitchen?”

With a laugh, Callie shook her head. “No, thanks, Ty. Maggie is going to shop for me after she gets off work this evening.”

“I’ll be seeing you around,” he promised thickly.

Chapter Four

“Ty, Captain Martin wants to see you,” Jean Riva said.

His cup of coffee in hand, Ty halted in the passageway of the Top Gun facility. He had exactly fifteen minutes before he was scheduled to start class. As always, the facility buzzed with muted excitement. Still euphoric over the possibility that Callie might actually like him, he nodded and stepped toward his commanding officer’s office.

A short, dark-haired woman with piercing brown eyes that missed nothing, Riva was a GS-12 in Civil Service and was Captain Martin’s very able assistant and secretary. But right now she looked unhappy. Ty halted at her desk.

“What’s up, Jean?”

“A lot,” she muttered. Leaning over, she announced Ty’s arrival to the CO.

“Send him in, Jean,” the gravelly voice on the other end ordered.

She straightened and nodded. “Go right in, Commander.”

“No hints?” Ty teased. The woman was a no-nonsense, strictly-by-the-book civil servant of the best kind. She was famous for her organizational ability, because it was she, more than anyone else, who kept the facility glued together and functioning properly.

“No hints, Commander,” she announced brusquely and gave him a cardboard smile.

Ty never liked that smile when Jean chose to use it. It meant she was holding back a lot of feelings about something—and usually it meant bad news. Girding himself, he sighed and opened the door. Bob Martin was one of the youngest captains in the navy. He was a highly decorated Vietnam veteran—an ace with six kills to his credit—and was even more no-nonsense than his vaunted assistant.

Martin’s head snapped in his direction as Ty closed the door behind him. “Come in, Ty.” He gestured toward one of the two chairs in front of his large walnut desk. “Have a seat.”

“Yes, sir,” Ty murmured, sitting down and balancing the cup of coffee on his left thigh. He often thought that Martin looked snakelike—but in the most positive way. He could keep his narrow face absolutely devoid of expression, and he had coal black eyes that never seemed to blink. They just stared down the other party with such an intensity that Ty figured Martin could mesmerize them into immobility—much the way a cobra would hypnotize its prey.

Martin’s black hair was peppered with strands of gray at the temples, and now he was wearing his summer white uniform, the four gold stripes on black boards positioned on each of his shoulders shouting his authority.

“I understand you were a witness to the assault on Lieutenant Calista Donovan?”

Ty felt as if a bomb had been dropped in Martin’s office. He straightened unconsciously. His CO must have received Dr. Lipinski’s report via the legal department, he realized. “Er…yes, sir.”

“Tell me exactly what you saw and what happened,” Martin demanded in a clipped tone.

“Yes, sir,” Ty said, and he launched into a brief sketch of the incident. He watched Martin’s thin, black brows dip lower and lower as he completed the report. The man’s mouth was a flat line by the time he’d finished, his dark eyes flashing with anger.

Leaning back in his chair, Martin turned and looked out the window that viewed the revetment area where the jets used for training sat. “Commander, I was hoping against hope that Dr. Lipinski was embellishing this whole damn thing.” He turned around and placed his hands on the desk. “Obviously, she wasn’t.”

“No, sir.”

“You’ve recently returned from a two-week stint at the War College, where you took accelerated courses in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, right?” he barked out, so abruptly that Ty almost jumped.

The UCMJ, as it was known, was a huge, legal compendium of articles that applied to every phase of military organization. Ty nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Picking up a file near his left hand, Martin opened it. “And you were number one in standing, out of fifty attending officers?”

Flushing a bit, Ty murmured, “Yes, sir.”

“Do you realize that somehow, by someone, this incident involving Lieutenant Donovan has been leaked to the major newspapers in San Diego and Los Angeles, as well as to press organizations around the United States?”

Stunned, Ty sat frozen, his grip on the coffee cup tightening. “No, sir, I hadn’t.”

“Any idea who did it? Not that it matters anymore—the horse is out of the corral now.”

“I have no idea, Captain.” Ty began to sweat. Did Martin know that he had fraternized with Callie after the incident? He felt as if the walls had suddenly grown eyes and ears. The discussion was on shaky ground, and he didn’t know what Martin wanted from him.

“Well, within the next couple of hours, our station is going to be inundated with media attention. After that newspaper article by the Donovan sisters, things were already explosive.” With a shake of his head, Martin muttered, “We’ve got a real problem, Ty, and we’ve got to move quickly to institute damage control, or the navy could end up looking very bad—not only to our own tax-paying public, but around the world.”

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