Read Online The Scarlet Empress by Susan Grant - Free Book Online Page A

Asia under one flag and one language before the war. But English? In Asia? It was hard to believe that any one person could have had that much power, charisma—and trust. Cam had thought the modern world incapable of producing leaders like that anymore. A tragedy that that the extraordinary man was now dead. His successors, too.
    Cam reached across the space dividing their two small beds and gave the girl’s hand a welcome-home squeeze.“It’s good to see you back. I missed your company. And you’re right—I was thinking about the past. Bree, specifically.”
    “Surely she wasn’t as good a friend as me!”
    Cam smirked at the ceiling. Zhurihe seemed at times to have the simple mind of a child. And yet Cam had witnessed too many examples of her feisty cleverness to believe it to be true. She was an enigma. “We couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds. It didn’t matter. Bree was the sister I always wished I had.”
    “You had five brothers.”
    “Five older, overprotective brothers.” Zhurihe never seemed to tire of Cam’s descriptions of her family. “I miss them.” A persistent ache, much faded now, clutched at her chest. She let her hand drop. “They’re dead now, all of them, and no matter how much I think of them, they’re not coming back. I know that. I’ve accepted that. But not when it comes to Bree.” Cam searched Zhurihe’s shadowed, earnest face. “She could be alive, you know. She’s the one person who could have followed me into the future. I’m going to find out what happened to her, Zhurihe.” It was why she battled her clumsy, aching body every day, desperate to be strong again, so she could take charge of her fate—and Bree’s.
    Zhurihe pursed her lips and shook her head. “It’s too dangerous outside of the valley.”
    “All my life people have been telling me to give up. I’m used to it.”
    “Listen to me, Cam. Do
not
try. You won’t get far. Maybe not even past these mountains.”
    It was always the same story. Zhurihe underestimated her. Everyone did. Even when dressed in a flight suit andcombat boots, a .45 strapped to her thigh and an againstthe-regulations switchblade wedged in her pocket, Cam knew her blond rich-girl looks and bred-in grace screamed that she was something else, that she was a woman like her mother, a Southern belle from a wealthy Georgia family, raised in a world of old money, cotillions, and rigid expectations. No one could believe it when she pursued an appointment to the Air Force Academy, and that she actually graduated. No one had thought she could do it. They never said it aloud, though, they were too well mannered for that, but she’d seen it in their faces. It made her victories all the sweeter. Defying expectations every step of the way, she was one of the few females accepted into Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas, finishing as a distinguished graduate, and at F-16 training, too. One by one by one she’d shut the cynics up. But there were always more of them, fixing to doubt her wherever she went, even after she’d received the coveted Gabreski Award for being the top air-to-air student in the USAF. It seemed if you were shapely, blond, and soft-spoken, no one figured you could kick ass. But not Bree Maguire. Never Bree. When Cam had gotten to her assignment in Korea, the infamous Banzai had, after flying a single mission with her, told the squadron at the bar that night that “If Chuck Yeager had made a kid with Scarlett O’Hara, it would have been Cam.”
    It was the finest compliment anyone had ever given her.
    The roosters crowed some more. Outside, the tinkling of cowbells rang in the morning calm. Cam pushed to a sitting position. “Enough lolling around in bed. I canhear the goats calling my name.” She grabbed for one of the two crutches leaning against the wall by the bed and used it to push off the mattress. The floor was icy cold under her bare feet. “Want me to fix you