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“Yup. I’ve been working my ass off. I need a break.

And you’re right, I also need sleep. Lots of it.

” Since Laryn was a contractor, her hours weren’t as rigid as those of the military guys she worked with.

And since she was the boss, she had more leeway to come and go as she pleased.

But it wasn’t as if she took unfair advantage of that.

She was usually the first to arrive and the last to leave.

Many nights she’d still been working at one or two in the morning.

She hated leaving things unfinished, and when she thought about what could happen if she got lazy on the job—namely, pilots getting hurt because of something she’d done or not done—it made her physically nauseous.

But Chuck was right, she’d worked her ass off to get this chopper up to speed, and it was as ready as it was going to be. She had no doubt that Tate and Pyro wouldn’t find anything wrong when they took it up to test it out.

“Wow, okay. Enjoy your time off,” Chuck told her, sounding sincere .

“Don’t fuck with my machine,” Laryn warned, narrowing her eyes. “I mean it. Keep everyone away from her.”

“I will,” he reassured her. “We all know how you are with your choppers. We wouldn’t dare touch so much as a bolt without your say-so.”

Laryn internally winced. There she went, being overcontrolling again. It was a good thing she worked with all men; women wouldn’t be able to take her brash and demanding attitude. She had to admit that she’d gotten worse over the years while trying to fit in, be one of the guys.

Now, for the first time in a long time, she didn’t want to be a guy.

She wished she had some girlfriends she could call up for a girls’ night.

Wine. Relaxing. Watching ridiculous reality TV and eating junk food.

Instead, all she had was her empty apartment, coworkers who were half-scared of her and way too young for her to hang out with, and a man she pined for who didn’t know she existed, except when he had a question about his precious chopper.

Not for the first time, she had the thought that she needed to get out of the rut she was in.

Maybe she should consider taking one of the offers she’d received and move away from Norfolk.

Go to Turkey to work for the Gendarmerie Special Operations Unit.

They had a couple of MH-60s and had been desperately trying to recruit Laryn to come work for them.

Tate Davis and his fellow Night Stalkers wouldn’t even know she was gone.

She was just another mechanic. Someone else could maintain their helicopters.

Of course, it wasn’t that easy, considering what she did now was top secret and the US government wouldn’t just shrug and let her go work for another country. There would be nondisclosure agreements to sign and tons of other legal hoops to jump through.

But she was being ridiculous. She wasn’t leaving. No matter how much money was dangled over her head to try to woo her away from her current position. Not as long as Tate Davis was flying her choppers. The thought of leaving his safety to someone else was…unfathomable.

Laryn nodded at Chuck and headed for the hangar door, bracing herself for the heat. It was the end of August and the weather was still hot and muggy here on the Virginia coast. Soon the cooler air would move in, and Laryn couldn’t wait.

She was so out of it with hunger and exhaustion, and with all the thoughts swirling in her head about her future and her pathetic social life, that she almost ran smack dab into someone entering the hangar.

“Whoa!” the deep voice said. His hands landed on her shoulders, keeping her from falling back on her ass.

Looking up, she saw it was the one man in the world she both desperately wanted to see, and the last man she wanted to be face-to-face with at that moment.

Tate.

“Where ya going? I thought you lived here at the hangar,” he joked.

But Laryn wasn’t in the mood. Even if he wasn’t exactly wrong. “Home. I’ve been here all day and I’m fried. I’m assuming you’re here to check my work. If you find anything off, let Chuck know. He’ll pass along your complaints when I get back tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’m not here to check up on you. I was just curious as to what you’d gotten done,” Tate protested. His copilot, Pyro, was behind him. He clapped him on the shoulder and continued toward the chopper Laryn had just left behind.

“I’ve gotten everything done,” she told him with a sigh, and without her usual sassiness.

“It’s more than ready for you to test her out in a couple days.

And I’ve told the colonel that I won’t sign off on the chopper being ready until I’m one hundred percent sure it is ready and that you, the pilot, thinks it’s ready. ”

“I know, that’s what makes you an amazing mechanic,” Tate told her.

She stared at him, and a pang hit her as it always did when she looked into his blue eyes.

He had a twin brother, Nate, but she thought Tate was the better looking of the two.

Which was kind of silly, considering they were identical.

But to her, there were subtle differences.

Tate was more confident, outgoing, and even though he was only thirty-four, he had a bit of silver in his hair that his twin didn’t, giving him a more distinguished air.

His hair was also a little longer than military regulations stipulated, but she supposed as a hotshot Night Stalker, he had a bit of leeway where that was concerned.

And she couldn’t deny the freckles on his face were adorable. She wondered if they covered him…everywhere.

Aware that her thoughts went where they always did when she was around this man, Laryn was more abrupt than usual. “We done here?”

Tate blinked. “Yeah.”

Laryn gave him a nod and stepped to the side and continued on her way. Her skin tingled, as if she could feel his gaze on her as she walked, but she refused to look back at him.

She was going home to heat up a frozen meal, shower, then crash for hopefully a good eight hours.

But her intentions of not looking back at Tate faltered, and before she walked out of sight of the hangar, she couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder.

Her heartrate increased when she saw Tate standing where she’d left him. And he was indeed staring right at her. He gave her one of those chin lifts she saw him and his fellow pilots using all the time. He wasn’t smirking at her, as usual. He looked serious and…concerned?

No, she had to be imagining that, because Tate Davis didn’t look at her with concern. Ever. She was simply the mechanic he relied on to keep his chopper running at top form .

But something about the way he was looking at her, and hadn’t moved from where they’d had their short conversation, struck her as…

atypical. In fact, ever since he’d crashed in Iran, he’d been acting a bit differently toward her.

She wasn’t sure why, or even exactly how different it was until right this moment.

Now she realized the old Tate would’ve shrugged off her words and continued into the hangar to check out how the work was progressing on his chopper.

Also in the last month, she’d found his gaze on her more than once. Caught him staring at her, almost as if he was trying to figure her out.

Under no circumstances could he ever learn that she’d had a massive crush on him for years.

Was that even the right word? Crush? She didn’t think so. She wasn’t thirteen. She was a grown-ass woman. She admired Tate. Respected him. Loved him.

Sighing, she continued on toward her car.

It was her dad’s old 1990 Honda Civic Hatchback.

It looked ancient, but Laryn kept her running as smoothly as a brand-new car.

Sure, she’d had to replace the engine and most of the parts, but every time she saw it, she smiled, because it made her think about her dad and all the time they’d spent in it together going to and from races.

It was the first car she’d changed the oil in all by herself…

under her dad’s watchful eye, of course.

She was barely awake by the time she arrived home.

She stumbled up the stairs to her second-floor apartment and decided food and a shower could wait.

She collapsed onto the couch after taking off her steel-toed boots and reached for the fluffy blanket carelessly draped over the back, where she’d left it.

She was asleep in seconds, not even the mystery of why Tate was acting so differently around her enough to keep her awake.