Chapter 15
The lock click echoed in Zach's office.
Julia stood in the middle of the carpeted floor, fury and fear still battling for dominance inside her. If she had her way, fury would win hands down. She'd made the mistake of holding back with Lance, and by God, she wasn't repeating that mistake again.
But the battle would take place with her on her feet.
She certainly wasn't sitting on the sofa with all those memories of tangled bodies, sweat-slicked skin and an out-of-control need she wouldn't let have its way with her this time.
Zach turned to face her. "I'm sorry."
That threw her. For half a second. Then the disillusionment came swelling back up to clog her throat. "For what? For lying to me? Or just that I found out you lied?"
He hooked his hands on his hips, one boot forward as if formulating the most effective tactical approach. Damn it, she wasn't some strategic campaign. "How do you think it made me feel finding out you'd lied? That's the one thing I can't take, having a husband lie to me again."
Zach reached.
She backed.
He held up his hands, flight suit stretching across his broad chest. "I'm sorry Lance hurt you then, and I'm sorry you're hurting today. But you know there are things I can't talk about in my job and it's damned unfair to call that lying."
How dare he turn this all around on her? "Life isn't that clear-cut-and-dried. You could have told me something instead of making some commander-like unilateral decision for me. I hoped from those calls during your TDY that maybe we'd begun to work as partners somewhere other than with the children and in bed."
Or on the office sofa.
Julia kept her eyes firmly fixed on his face, no wandering to tempting brown vinyl. "You couldn't tell me anything to prepare me? Can you even imagine how scared I was having this drop out of nowhere?'
"You'd just had a baby." Scratching his jaw, he paced in front of her like a stalking wolf.
"How the hell was I supposed to tell you then? You already had enough on you without hearing the Inspector General had reopened the investigation into Lance's crash."
The betrayal went deeper than she'd thought. "You've known since Patrick was born?"
He stopped. His eyes narrowed, hardened. "How does it feel to be kept on the outside, Julia?"
Confusion put a temporary hold on her anger. "What?"
"You didn't tell me about Patrick having Down syndrome until after he was born. Hell, you didn't even tell me then. You left me to figure it out on my own."
Guilt seeped through her. She couldn't dodge her own culpability. She'd hurt him with that omission and he'd been carrying that around for months, perhaps an unacknowledged pain like the one Pam had dealt him, but lingering all the same. "You're right. I should have told you when the test results came back."
"Were you hoping I would say or do something wrong that day in your hospital room?"
He sauntered toward her, muscles rippling beneath his flight suit with each muffled thud of his boots. "Then you would have all the more reason to push me away. You could say,>"Confirmed."
A mental visual of the chart played out in his head, complete with a widening divergence from the route due to what he now suspected had to be a ground radio navigation system error.
Zach's grip on the stick tightened, any thrill over solving the cause of the crash killed by a primal anger. Lives had been lost, not by accident, but because of a screw-up
"Gentleman, anyone recall the sixty-to-one rule?"
"Of course." Bronco thumped his head. "Sixty-to-one. Every one degree of error on the navigation aid heading translates into three miles off course from this distance."
Radio navigation required daily re-calibration to stay true to heading. Even one missed day could make that subtle one-degree difference.
Cutter slumped back in his seat with a lengthy sigh
"Enough error for a controlled flight smack into a mountain, especially during a night flight. How the hell did the investigation team miss it? They flew this same route ,twice."