his watch had a touch-light feature.
Hot damn. It wouldn’t be much longer now.
2210 hours
Junior officers’ quarters
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
A thump sounded at the door, and Chris Hanson reared up, snatching at
the blanket crumpled at the foot of the bunk. The mattress was so
narrow that she and Steve Strickland more than filled it in a tangle of
bare arms and legs.
Both of them were naked, and if someone did walk in, there sure as hell
was no place in the tiny compartment to hide.
Her heart raced, and she felt herself blushing.
“Hey, Lobo, it’s okay,” Strickland told her. “Relax. Just someone
going down the passageway.”
“What if someone comes in?”
“No one will. I told you, my roommates know to give us some space.
They’re hanging out down in the Dirty Shirt Mess and aren’t going to
come back until 2400 hours. We’ve got until then, okay?”
She turned in the bunk, clutching the blanket to her chest and looking
down at him with wide, brown eyes. “Good God, Steve, you didn’t tell
them what we’re doing, did you?”
“I told them I needed some time to be with you.” He slipped his hand
between her thighs, squeezing her gently. “They can form their own
opinions about what we’re doing in here. Does it matter?”
She sighed. The small, digital clock on the compartment’s tiny desk
read 2211. “I guess not.”
Lieutenant Chris Hanson did not think of herself as a shy person. She’d
joined the Navy, quite frankly, hoping to meet a man, the right man …
someone like her father, who’d been a Navy chief with twenty years in.
But something like this …
She caught the chime of someone’s laughter in the passageway and voices,
too low for her to make out. “I’m not sure why I let you talk me into
this, Steve,” she said, her voice a husky whisper.
“Hey, I thought you wanted this, babe! As much as I did!” Reaching up,
he tugged the blanket from her fingers, letting it slide off the rack
and onto the deck. With one hand, he touched her left breast, lightly
circling the nipple with his finger. She closed her eyes as a warm
shiver rippled down her spine.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I should just go-”
“Aw, c’mon, Chris,” Strickland said smoothly. “This’ll really relax
you.
You’ve been working hard these last couple of weeks. You should let
your hair down and unwind a bit, okay?”
“But if we’re caught …”
“Ah, nobody cares! I mean, everybody knows it’s gonna happen, right?
You can’t crowd grown men and women together aboard ship for months at a
time and expect them to just ignore each other! It just ain’t natural!”
She laughed, and leaned into his hand a little more.
“Of course,” he continued, still stroking her breast, “if they sound
General Quarters right now, we’re gonna look damned silly charging
around starkers in the crowd trying to find our stations.”
They both laughed at that, and Hanson felt her fear evaporating. She
knew that several of the other women in the department were making it
with various guys. Rose Damiano for one. And Cynthia Thomas. It was
all well and good to talk about professionalism and staying aloof and
concentrating on the job at hand, but damn it, people were going to act
like people, no matter what. In fact, it seemed like the more extreme
the situation–with danger, overcrowding, and a continuing,
no-holds-barred tension that would put any high-powered business
executive to shame–the more they tended to act like …
well, like people. The rules, the lectures, even the difficulty in
finding an hour’s privacy aboard ship, didn’t seem to deter them a bit.
Besides, there was something delicious about that danger, the thought
that at any minute Steve’s roommates could walk in and catch them in the
act.
Just thinking about it made her feel warm and tinglingly aroused. She’d
always had a crazy, unpredictable streak in her; her handle, “Lobo,” had
been short for “lobotomy” back at Pensacola.
Strickland’s ministrations grew rougher as he moved his face to her
breasts, taking first one nipple into his mouth, then the other, sucking
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