“Did you seriously just use ‘dallying’ in a sentence?” Flynn laughed.

Van Horn reddened slightly. “I read a lot of old British mysteries. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anybody. Your secret is safe with me.” Then he sobered up. “But, no, as it happens, I wasn’t messing around with my senior officer’s wife or daughter. Or his girlfriend.” He raised an eyebrow. “So you think of me as a Don Juan type, huh?”

“‘Don Juan’? Now look who’s the nerd!”

Flynn gave her an abashed smile of his own. “Yeah, I majored in English Language and Literature and took tons of humanities courses in college. Definitely non-STEM.” He tapped his chest. “Hence the lack of pilot’s wings.”

“I can see that I’m not the only one around here with a somewhat dubious background,” she commented archly. “But no, Nick, to answer your sort of desperate question, you don’t come across as a Don Juan.” Then she chuckled. “Or maybe I just haven’t gotten to know you well enough yet.”

Well, that seemed promising, Flynn thought a bit smugly.

“So if you weren’t caught with the wrong woman, what did you do to piss off the powers-that-be enough to get stuck out here? I mean, making sure the polar bears don’t decide to walk off with Barter Island’s nice, rusting radar station doesn’t seem like a good match for your skills.” Van Horn looked at him with a puzzled expression.

“It’s classified.”

“Classified? Classified as in ‘It’s embarrassing and I’d rather not tell you’? Or classified as in ‘Seriously spooky stuff’?”

Flynn tried to adopt a casual attitude of indifference and knew he’d failed miserably. Finally, he said, “The spooky sort.”

“And whatever happened still really pisses you off,” she realized, reading the look on his face.

He made himself shrug. “Well, it has forced me to seriously reevaluate my military career. For example, my whole ‘get promoted to general and live a life of idleness and luxury’ plan might need to be scrapped.”

“You know, civilian life isn’t so bad,” Van Horn said in an obvious bid to help change the subject. “Sometimes I don’t even cry when I head out from Elmendorf-Richardson to go home.”

Flynn couldn’t help laughing. “Yeah, you’ve got a point there. So, uh, Laura . . . what do you do when you’re not wearing a uniform?” Casually, he took a sip of his coffee.

Van Horn coughed out a laugh. “Is that your way to wrangle an invitation to see me out of my uniform?”

Startled, Flynn said, “No, no, that’s not what I meant! I mean, well . . . I just meant, um, what do you do in your civilian life?” He focused intently on his coffee.

Pleased at the reaction she’d provoked, Van Horn grinned broadly. “Sorry, but that was an easy setup. Actually, I fly for a company that hauls air freight between here and the Lower Forty-Eight. We handle a little bit of everything—airmail packages, crates of wine, medications . . . all kinds of stuff. Once we even hauled a red Corvette.”