Into the Blue (A Wild Aces Romance) Read Online Free

find a job that would be willing to take a chance on someone as transient as me, that if I passed the bar in one state and then we were moved to a state that didn’t offer reciprocity, I’d be forced to take the test all over again, studying for months and months only to repeat it again the next time the Air Force moved us, that all of a sudden my future started to look like it would always come second to his.
    We’d tried long distance when he went off to basic training, but even then the cracks had begun to show. We’d both been under so much pressure—me in my first year of law school, working my ass off just to keep up with the nightly reading, forget doing what I needed to in order to excel—him going through the process to become an officer and then getting ready to leave for pilot training in Texas. In the end, it had been too much and he’d given up and left. Or maybe I’d pushed him away. I didn’t even know anymore.
    I clicked “Send” before I could chicken out, figuring I owed us this at least. And then I was alone again in my apartment, the connection to Eric somewhere out there.
    I’d gone out tonight hoping to have fun, to get my mind off of work and my overwhelming caseload, thinking that maybe if I was really lucky, I might meet a guy and maybe get laid. Instead, the past had caught me in its talons and I couldn’t shake loose no matter how badly I wanted to or how hard I tried.

T HREE

THOR
    I read over Becca’s message three fucking times Monday morning before my flight, not to mention all of the times I read it between getting the message and landing back in Oklahoma on Sunday afternoon, trying to decode it and coming up short every single time. She hadn’t reached out to me in ten years, and now this . . . Did she want me to respond? But if she did, why hadn’t she sent me a friend request? My finger hovered over the “Add Friend” option, and then I pulled back.
    Shit.
    I seriously contemplated messaging Burn and his wife, Jordan, to get a female opinion on this, needing someone to sanity check my next move, but I did a quick mental calculation and realized that with the time difference it was the middle of the night in Korea, and I figured there’d be no end to the shit I’d get from the guys if it got around that I was this pathetic.
    Flirting with women had never been this difficult. It was Becca who always made me feel like I came up short.
    I could respond, but with what? It wasn’t like she’d left me much—
any
—room to maneuver. And I didn’t want to get into some awkward pen-pal relationship with her—talk about rubbing salt into the wound. But that was the problem. I didn’t know what I fucking wanted from her.
    I stared at her profile picture, my heart clenching at the sight of the smile that had made me feel like the luckiest guy in the fucking world every single time it came my way.
    My finger hovered over the “Add Friend” option again, telling myself she wouldn’t have sent me the message if she completely loathed me. I mean, yeah, she’d said the line about the date, but I’d sort of skimmed over that part, preferring to focus on the fact that after nearly a decade of silence, she’d reached out to me. Maybe this was her way of telling me the ball was in my court.
    I clicked the button, watching as the message, “Friend Request Sent,” appeared on the screen.
    Fuck.
    I raked a hand through my hair, sliding my phone into my locker, removing my patches, and putting my combat name patch on my left arm. I slipped on my G-suit, then my harness, affixing my lineup card to my right knee, grabbing my helmet, and slipping it into the helmet bag. I draped my earplugs around my neck, grabbed the bag with my flight pubs and in-flight checklist, swung it over my shoulder, and walked to the vault to get my classified materials.
    I left the vault and made my way to the step desk to get my step brief, the tension and anticipation building inside me as I got ready