Red, Hot & Blue 09 - A Prince Among Men Read Online Free Page B

was as quiet out there as Afghanistan during the poppy harvest,” Ryan joked.
    As he stripped off his weapons, Ryan watched Hawk crack a small smile and nod at the truth of what he’d just voiced.
    “Anything exciting happen here?” Ryan fully expected the answer to be a no given the game he’d seen. If something had happened, the guys wouldn’t be out there spiking the volleyball.
    “Yes, unfortunately.” Finally, his staff sergeant looked up from the paperwork in his hand. “We had a mail call.”
    With a flick of his wrist, Hawk sent an envelope flying in Ryan’s direction.
    While he wondered why mail call was an unfortunate event in Hawk’s opinion, Ryan grabbed the sailing envelope in mid-air and glanced quickly down at the return address. It was from his pseudo-girlfriend back at the garrison in Germany. He’d read that later. He’d share his hut and his stuff, but Gretchen was the one thing Ryan was definitely not going to share with his roomies.
    Ryan turned his attention back to Hawk’s inexplicably unhappy face. “Yeah, I thought I heard Lou’s chopper coming in with the mail while I was out on patrol.”
    Lou’s sporadic mail deliveries from Bagram were usually cause for excitement, so why was Hawk frowning? Ryan debated whether he should risk asking.
    “Oh yeah, you heard Lou’s bird, all right. Take a look at what Emily sent me.”
    A magazine came flying in Ryan’s direction, and he had to use both hands to catch it and not rip the glossy colored pages. Ryan turned it right side up and frowned at the cover. It appeared innocent enough, nothing for Hawk to look so pissed about.
    “Open it to the place she marked.” Hawk didn’t seem any happier as he watched Ryan flip through the pages.
    Though he tried not to, Ryan started laughing the moment he found the page in question. It was one of the Army recruiting ads that Hawk had recently been photographed for, much to the unwilling model’s embarrassment. This one was a full-page advertisement for the US Army. Hawk’s head was nearly life sized, and in living color to boot.
    The opportunity to tease his roomie was too good to pass up. “I don’t know what your problem is, Hawk. You’re a natural. In fact, you look very sexy.”
    Holding the page up to face toward Hawk, Ryan waggled his eyebrows, his smile so wide his face would start to hurt soon if he didn’t control himself.
    “Yeah, yeah. Get it all out of your system now, Pettit, because I don’t want to hear a word about it again after this.”
    With a final chuckle, Ryan took one last look, shut the magazine and handed it back to his leader. “Are you going to show it to Wally?” Ryan pushed Hawk’s patience one step farther, just for fun.
    “No.”
    He watched Hawk shove the magazine under his bedding. Normal men hid their contraband porn under the mattress. Hawk hid his modeling photos. It was the most amusement Ryan’d had in all his time here.
    “And that’s not even the worst of what happened while you were gone,” Hawk continued, his features still screwed up, showing just how unhappy he was.
    Ryan raised a brow as he considered that. Something that was worse, in Hawk’s opinion, than his magazine ads? What the hell could that be? Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.
    Hawk finally ended the suspense. “I’ve got to go to frigging KAF again.”
    “Again? Why?”
    “Same damn reason as before. I have to pick up some Afghanis from finance.”
    It wasn’t Afghani people Hawk would be transporting from the finance department located at Kandahar Air Field, but rather Afghani dollars. The money would purchase from the locals things their forward operating base needed but couldn’t easily get from the States—mainly building supplies and labor, but more importantly, it would stimulate the still-struggling Afghanistan economy.
    Hawk had been on this journey for the same purpose before. Transportation delays had left him cooling his heels way too much for a man of