On the Line (Special Ops) Read Free Page A

couldn’t take it. It hurt too much. So I…”
     
    “Ran away?”
     
    She nodded sheepishly. “Coward that I am.”
     
    “Well that makes me one too in a way,” she said.
     
    “Your situation was different, Ariana.”
     
    “Yes, it was. Preston was the love of my life. He saved my life. But he also broke my heart. I thought we had something until he was packing his bag one day and he said to me, Air Force all the way, that’s who I am, what I am, and it’s the most important thing in my life right now . What was I supposed to think about that? Our marriage should have been the most important thing in his life. I should have been important in his life. I never asked him to give up his career. I never asked him to ask for modified duty—if he could even get it. I never asked him to give anything up and in that one sentence he told me just where I stood in his world…I was the mistress and his career was the love of his life. I didn’t want that. I wasn’t the woman for him—his career was. So I filed for divorce and sent the papers. I guess it was perfect for him because he signed them the same day he received them. He didn’t even call to ask me why or if we could work on it. If he had I would have known I meant something to him…that we meant something to him…but we didn’t, I didn’t. Whatever,” she pushed her curls back out of her face. “I have moved on. He has moved on. Everybody is happy.”
     
    “Liar,” Zahara said. Ariana knew the woman was too close to her. She never got this close to any of her students but she had with Zahara. Zahara knew more about her than anybody did, and far more than any student should know, but Zahara seemed a lot like a sister to her and that made her more than just a student. She was twenty-seven years old now. She had worked hard to get where she was and she had gone far for a young woman of her age. She had defied the odds and proved that age really was just a number. She finished her PhD studies in six years instead of eight and she didn’t look back. Ariana admired her. She was a woman who knew what she wanted. Maybe that’s why they got along so well. Ariana was the same way. She didn’t have a PhD under her belt, but she did have several world championship belly dance trophies. She had won in Morocco for six years straight until she stopped going over there for competitions—her hotel blowing up kind of put a damper on going to compete. Plus she got married and she decided to stay in the states to compete. She had been in Hollywood blockbuster movies, interviewed more times than she cared to keep count of, and had built her dance school and troop. She was forty-six now and her empire was established. She still danced and would probably dance until the day she died, but she spent more of her attention on training the next of the American based belly dancers than she did performing across the nation.
     
    “You’re right,” she finally admitted. “I still miss him. I still miss him and that makes me such an idiot because clearly he doesn’t miss me. It’s been eighteen years. Eighteen! And I still can’t get over the way he used to look at me—like I was the sun rising in the east in the morning and the moon guiding him through the dark at night. And the way he made me feel when he touched me…heaven.” She smiled.
     
    “That good huh?”
     
    “That spectacular,” she admitted. “You know how it is.”
     
    “Uh…no. We haven’t really broached this conversation but I’m still a virgin, Ariana.”
     
    “Really?”
     
    “Yes, really,” she said with a hint of annoyance.
     
    “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
     
    “Thanks. I can’t tell you how many idiots I have to set straight when they think just because I’m twenty-seven I should have fallen in the bed with a man by now. Their life is their choice. My life is my choice. When I do it I’m doing it for love. It’s going to be special. It’s going to be right.