I’ve watched her shoot dozens of times. I still don’t know how
she does it.”
Bill blinked at that. He was amazed by the shot. But the man sitting beside
him was the senior Delta Force operator on the planet, and even he couldn’t
unravel the technique.
“It’s pure instinct. That’s the only possible explanation.”
Michael looked over at him. “Is that what you do?”
Now it was Bill’s turn to feel uncertain. He had trained thousands of hours
to turn learned skills into instinct.
“No, because I don’t have a gift. I have to train like any other
fool.”
Billy the SEAL is of course, as any alpha would, understating his role as the
hero of LIGHT UP THE
NIGHT (the latest installment in my Night Stalkers series that
follow the exceptional first women of the U.S. Army’s SOAR helicopter regiment
and the men they deserve). Just as the senior Delta Force operator is daunted by
this shot, Bill is daunted by the woman who saved his life, Trisha O’Malley. The
fact that he is a SEAL serving undercover in Somalia, the fact that a Delta
operator has chosen him as his right hand of a dangerous and complex mission,
and the fact that he made it to a SEAL team in the first place: none of those
are enough for him to accept that he is as exceptional as the woman who saved him.
Trisha O’Malley flies her helicopter as if it were a second skin, and it truly
is in many ways. She is as temperamental and as mercurial as her tiny attack
helicopter, the smallest and one of the most lethal in the U.S. military.
Whereas Bill is convinced that he is a plodding soldier who excels only through
perseverance and stubbornness.
For them to accept each others’ nature is the great challenge of this story, for
they serve the same end from such different personal places. He never speaks and
she is never silent. He is the steady planner and she lives to improvise on any
situation.
Each has found a path to alpha, but it isn’t until they must shift roles in the
heart of the crisis that they can begin to truly understand and live with that
initial attraction that so filled each of their hearts.
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