The Undaunted (Book 2 of The Undesirables)

Chapter 2: The Daredevil

Jack wished he could feel the wind in his hair.

That's one of the things he'd loved about flying his father's Curtiss Jenny. That old biplane had an open cockpit and there was something exhilarating about feeling the wind in your hair at three thousand feet on a warm summer night.

Jack suddenly decided that when the war was over he'd buy a convertible. There was nothing quite like being able to look up and see the stars.

He could look up and see the stars in his P-39 Airacobra, but when he did he was looking at them through the distortion of a glass bubble cockpit. It just wasn't the same.

And the truth was: it wasn't his Airacobra.

Technically the high-performance warplane belonged to the Army Air Force. But that wasn't quite true, either. Jack and his fighter unit were based outside of Nome, Alaska, where they delivered Bell manufactured P-39 Airacobras to Russian pilots as part of the lend-lease act. The Russians then flew the Airacobras across the Bering Strait into Siberia and beyond.

One of those pilots was flying right beside him. She'd be leaving with the plane he was currently piloting in the morning. In the meantime they had decided to slip away and enjoy the summer night together.

And perhaps the real reason Jack was feeling nostalgic about his old Curtiss Jenny was that he wished he could better see the pilot flying beside him. She was in the front open cockpit of a Yak UT-2 soviet trainer, her hair whipping out under her flight cap, her face lit up in a halo of moonlight.

Jack adored that face. He knew it by heart. It was round, with large green eyes. A button nose hovered over full lips. Those lips seemed always to smile, naturally curving at the corners.

Her neck was not long and sleek, but her perfect shoulders none the less made it appear so. The whole wonderful portrait was framed by natural curls of wavy brown hair.

Bel hated those curls. She said it made her hair impossible to brush.

But Jack loved them. He loved twirling his finger in them, wrapping a single lock round and round, trapping her for a moment just long enough to pull her face toward his and steal a kiss.

Because Jack loved those curls, Bel had begun to love them too.

That's how they'd always felt, from that crazy drunken night of strip poker months ago, when they'd first really noticed each other. Bel had pulled Jack away, privately, to show him her legs. She was proud of her legs. She knew the rest of her figure was far from perfect. Like her face, her body was a little bit round where she thought it should have been curvy.

But her legs were long and lean and she'd seen men notice them before. She wanted Jack to notice them, too. So she'd pulled him away to somewhere private and she lifted her skirt and stood on her tippy toes to simulate heels and she showed him her legs.

Jack was smitten, as much by her attitude as by her legs themselves. And he disagreed about her figure: he thought it was perfect.

Besides, Jack wasn't exactly an Adonis, himself. He was more Humphrey Bogart than Clark Gable. He was thin with broad shoulders, but he was only 5'7" tall, the exact same height as Bel. The funny thing was, you'd never know it unless you saw him standing next to someone. He carried himself like a tall man. He carried himself like a giant.

Bel liked his size. She liked that she didn't have to stand on tiptoes to kiss him. And he always felt just right in her arms.

It was a gorgeous Alaskan night. As horrible, as stifling as the winter had been, the summer was glorious. Giant granite tors thrust up from hilltops eighty feet into the air, looking from the sky like the teeth of ancient jaw bones. The tundra had defrosted into an emerald turf that glowed silver in the moonlight. Hundreds of twinkling rivulets crisscrossed that turf, ribbons of melting snow and ice that sparkled like strings of diamonds. In the distance a giant plume of steam rose up over the horizon.