Free Red, Hot & Blue 09 - A Prince Among Men by Cat Johnson

now he didn’t care. For once there was something awaiting him in the hut worth looking forward to.
    He opened the door to find Vicki sitting at the room’s only desk, which was really just an old piece of plywood Ryan had supported with two makeshift sawhorses. She had her laptop out, set up right where he usually used his.
    The scene was extremely surreal, kind of a warped glimpse at normalcy. It could be happening in any town back home in the States. Ryan, coming home from work to find Vicki busy on the computer, except that they both wore body armor and he was about to go out on a mission that had the potential to result in multiple deaths, hopefully not his own or any of his men.
    When he’d opened the door, a startled Vicki had spun around in the chair. There was fright in her eyes until she saw it was him, then she looked relieved. Ryan wondered if he should start to knock on his own door before entering, at least while they had company.
    He pulled the wooden door of the quarters closed behind him, beyond happy that she’d seemed to relax the moment she saw him. “Hey, Vicki. What have you been up to?”
    “Ryan. Hi. I was going to type up some of my notes to kill some time, and when I booted up I found there was a wireless connection. Here, in a mud hut in Afghanistan. Isn’t that funny?”
    Amused by Vicki’s nervous babbling, Ryan stripped off his helmet and vest and reached to hang both on a nail stuck in the wall. “Yeah. All the comforts of home. And keep the connection on the down-low if you don’t mind. I kinda hijacked the signal from the operations center.”
    “Okay. I will. I promise.” Her smile illuminated her face.
    His hand faltered and the helmet clattered to the floor. The sound knocked him out of the trance caused by Vicki.
    Ryan resisted the urge to physically shake his head to rid himself of the haze that had clouded his brain when Vicki had smiled at him. He finally broke eye contact, glanced at her screen…and found his blog up on her laptop.
    He nearly faltered again and tripped into her lap as he leaned forward to make sure he was really seeing what he thought he saw. Something niggled at the back of his brain, and he struggled to bring it forward.
    Noticing his interest, Vicki moved farther to one side so Ryan could see the laptop better. “Have you ever read any of these milblogs? I started reading them regularly for research, especially once I got approved to come here. They’re pretty interesting. This guy, Groundpounder, is my favorite.”
    Her favorite.
    Then it hit him. He glanced at her luggage tag again and read her full name written there, which only confirmed his suspicions. His biggest fan, the woman he flirted with online and then jerked off to in the shower, screen name Vicki V, was reporter Victoria Ann Vanover, Vicki for short, and she was sitting right here before him.
    It took him a second to wrap his brain around this new development. Ryan bit his lip to stop himself from telling her who he was. Instead, he decided to play dumb a bit longer and pick Vicki’s brain. “Why is he your favorite? What do you like about him?”
    Vicki shrugged. “Lots of things, I guess. He’s really a talented writer. He makes the reader, well, at least he makes me, laugh one minute and cry the next.”
    What he wrote reduced Vicki to tears? Ryan felt ridiculously happy at that revelation. What exactly did that say about him?
    “And the imagery he uses, it’s so descriptive you practically feel like you’re there. He’s amazing.”
    Vicki thought he was amazing. That thought made Ryan even more squirrely in the drawers. Feeling guilty about letting her go on and on about how wonderful she thought he was, Ryan considered confessing, but then he realized that would mean confessing he was also the one who wrote those very sexually suggestive comments in answer to hers. He’d written all that stuff under the assumption they would never meet, yet here she was. What if she’d