My ambition muscled out my patience and sense. I was interested before even hearing the details. “What’s the second part?”
“It’s optional.”
“Okay.”
“You come to Abu Ghraib with me.”
“With?”
“Here it is. Straight out. Friends with benefits has been great, but I’d like to spend more time with you.”
My ambition sat down, crossed her legs and arms, and scowled. “Christ, Ronin. Is this a unicorn too?”
“I’m not looking for a long-term commitment or anything big, but—”
“But I won’t sleep with you in Balad, so you want to push me because I need to be pushed?”
A smile stretched across his face. “You get me.” When I rolled my eyes, he took my hand. “In the past week, I realized I like you more than I thought. I know, I’m being a typical male, but I’m not lying. I want you, and if that means cornering you into a new job, I’ll do it.”
“You put the brutal in brutally honest, did you know that?”
I pulled my hand away, but it was too late. Caden had come back into the room. Our eyes met, and he was not smiling. I could hardly think sandwiched between these two men. One of them had to go away, and it wasn’t Caden.
“Give me a day,” I said to Ronin, picking up my tray. I wanted to get out of there before I suffocated. I needed to consider the half of his offer that wasn’t wrapped in carnal payoffs.
“You want to put me second in line after Captain Fobbit over there, that’s your call. He’s going to put you in a cage and throw away the key.”
The way he thought he knew me was exhausting enough. He couldn’t have a clue about Caden.
“You’re wrong.”
“Give it time. He will.”
“No, I mean I’m not putting you second in line. There is no line.”
I put my tray on the pile and went to Caden. A string between us pulled taut enough to trip anyone that crossed between. A string of my intentions. My forward motion and his patience as I walked in his direction, my determination to tell him exactly how I felt even as I defined my feelings to myself.
I didn’t owe him an explanation about Ronin or any other lover. I could do whatever I wanted with my body, and if he’d expected some kind of fidelity, he should have brought it up. I didn’t owe him my time or my attention.
I owed him none of those things, but I wanted him to have them. My fidelity. My time. My attention, my honesty and respect—all given as gifts whether he wanted them or not.
My mother told me the moment a person falls in love is often quiet. It often comes in the night, or when you’re paying attention to something else, but it’s always in the rearview. You don’t meet love in the moment. It’s not an ambush. Someone chips away at the stone façade around it, breaching your fortifications, crippling your defenses, and the moment you fall in love is the moment you realize what you’ve built the wall around was love. You fall in love with your conqueror.
I didn’t love him.
Not yet. But bit by bit, he was chipping away at my battlements.
Walking toward him, his face softening as mine hardened, I knew I could love him. One day, I’d look in my rearview and see what had been there all along.
I was two steps away. I could see the hair on his face and the set of his jaw. Another step and I could whisper to him. I still didn’t know what I would say or which part of love’s barricades I’d start with. I didn’t know if I’d open with reassurance or a challenge, but I was sure, when I got there, I’d say the right thing.
“Hear ye! Hear ye!” Lieutenant Farrow stood on a chair with his arms wide, a clipboard in one hand.
Caden and I were eyelocked with a few feet between us, stock still at the first “hear ye.”
“Gather ‘round, soldiers and citizens, while I tell you a statistical tale of eight days in hell.”
Caden took the last two steps in my direction, closing the gap completely, but we were now surrounded by the entire camp.
“The medical team in the combat support hospital saw 231 casualties for 208 hours.” He read the team’s achievements like a carnival barker. “Not one of three operating rooms was empty for eight days.”
“I need to know,” Caden said softly. “What’s going on with him?”
“Why do you need to know?”
His eyes lit up like the end of a short fuse, getting brighter when ignited with a little anger.
Farrow went on in the background. “Brogue’s on the other side of the wire, so it falls on yours truly—”
“I don’t want to share you.”
“You’re not sharing me.”
“—and so! In the spirit of giving out trophies before the game’s even done—”
“I hope you mean that the same way I do, Greyson. Because I don’t just mean your body. I don’t want to share your time or your heart or your happy fucking thoughts.”
“—most likely to have a juice box handy… Lieutenant Keston! Come up—”
“Nobody owns me, Caden. Those things are given freely or not at all.”
“Give them to me then.”
He was getting them, but he wasn’t entitled. His tone made my hair stand on end and my palms sweat. I didn’t know whether to fuck him or run away.
“You can’t demand any of that.”
Behind him, Lt. Keston received a bedpan filled with foil juice bags. She thanked the Academy.
“Give me everything or nothing. If it’s no, just say so now. Is it no?”
I felt cornered. Caught in the middle of a tunnel as the walls shook from an oncoming train.
“—likely to be mistaken for a medical machine—”
“Yes or no?”
“Maybe.”
“This game you’re playing isn’t a game to me. You can hurt me.”
Again, I was caught. This time between reassuring him and telling him I wouldn’t be emotionally blackmailed. Between admiring his willingness to be vulnerable and disdaining his manipulations. All and/or/but nothing.
“—Doctor Caden Has-A-Word-Missing-On-His-Tape John—”
All eyes were on us. Farrow held up a rubber chicken, waving Caden over while everyone applauded. He curled his mouth into a smirk. Caden took a deep breath and stepped toward the guy holding the rubber chicken.
That was when the earth shook.
“Mortar fire!” someone shouted.
A dozen doctors, nurses, and medics dropped everything and ran for the door, including Caden.
He turned for a half second to address me. “We’ll talk later.”
He didn’t wait for me to agree but ran behind the last nurse. I was left with a newly buzzing chow hall and a list of questions.
I went outside, hearing the click of debris falling on rooftops. The mortar had fallen halfway between the chow hall and the airstrip. One of the supply sheds was on fire. The medical teams mobilized, and what looked like chaos of running and shouting was actually a well-rehearsed effort to get the wounded into the hospital.
My job was to stay out of the way until everyone was moved. Hoses came out. Fires were doused. The smoke in the air cleared. I went to the hospital to see if there was anything I could do.
Jenn was setting up an IV line. Her hands shook.
“That was scary,” she said when she was out of the patient’s earshot. “I was practically on top of it, but I had to pee… so…” Her eyes filled up as she put on a latex glove. “I walked over to the latrine.”
I squeezed her biceps. “You’re in psychological shock.”
“I’m fine.” She took off the glove.
“You’re shaking.”
“They need me.” She pinched her fingers together to put the glove back on.
“What’s with the glove?”
She froze, looking at it as if she didn’t know why it hung from her fingertips like a jellyfish.
“Jenn, you can’t hook up any more lines until you pull it together.”
“Oh, my God.”
“‘Oh, my God’ what?”
“I don’t remember putting any lines in.”
The hit had traumatized her, even if temporarily.
“Let’s double check what you did.”
We checked the IVs and stents. She’d done it all perfectly, as if autopilot had worked even if the plane was about to crash.
“I’m not doing this anymore,” she said. “Last deployment.”
It was the first time she’d ever said that.
While she reported to her superior, I peeked into the OR. Dr. Ynez worked on a casualty from the mortar attack. No Caden. I checked for him in recovery. Not there either. He could have been anywhere. I couldn’t ask without someone wondering why I cared where he was. Or worse, they wouldn’t ask.
“Greyson?” Jenn said, coming back from her superior.
“Yeah, hey. What did Yvonne say?”
“Sent me back to quarters.”
I walked her to the trailers. She was still shaky but managed to brush her teeth and carry on a conversation.
“You might not be able to sleep tonight,” I said.
“I don’t feel traumatized.” She spit into the sink.
“Your brain doesn’t care how you feel.”
“Fucking brain.” She looked at herself closely in the mirror. “I swear to God, what this war does to people.”
“Any war.”
“Any. All. I just wanted to go to college. I feel like I’m ruining the same brain I was trying to educate.”
I hugged her. “You’ll be okay.”
She patted my back and pulled away. “We’ll see.”
“We will. Come on. I’ll tuck you in.”
* * *
Jenn was safely in bed. I’d check on her in the morning. I should have gone to bed too. The mortar area was taped off. The casualties had been treated and assessed. There was nothing left for me to do. But I was energized. Hyper. Activated.
I wanted to see Caden. I told myself I wanted to make sure he was okay, but the fact was I wanted him to tell me I was okay.
His trailer was dark, and he didn’t come to the door when I knocked. He wasn’t in the chow hall. Or the hospital.
“Hey,” I said to a doctor in recovery.
She leaned over a patient who had gauze over his eyes. With her blond hair tied into a neat ponytail, I didn’t recognize her.
“Hi.” She smiled.
I held out my hand. “I’m Major Greyson.”
She shook it. “Ferguson. I’m stationed at the airfield.”
“Oh, nice to meet you.”
Airfield surgeons went into combat with the medevac teams. Dr. Ferguson had vibrant skin and clear eyes. She didn’t look like a woman who went to the front lines in a Blackhawk, but that assumption said more about me than her.
“I have an eye specialty, and they traded me,” she said.
“Traded?”
“For a general surgeon, oddly, not a field doc. I was going to rush back, but they’d already left on a nine-line with him. That won’t go over well.”
General surgeons were too valuable to go past the wire.
“Did his name happen to be Captain St. John?”
“Yeah. Hard name to forget. He jumped right in. Volunteered like that.” She snapped her fingers.
The medevacs did not fuck around with time. Caden must have jumped on the truck to the airfield, told them he was a doctor, and taken off.
Caden outside the wire. Everything could go wrong. What was he thinking?
He wanted to own me, but he didn’t even know me. He didn’t know I had brother in Afghanistan or that my father had been eaten alive every day by regret and guilt even as he gave more and more years in service. He hadn’t grown up with stories of blood and gore, rage and impotence. I had. The fact that I’d chosen to serve in a war zone didn’t mean I fetishized battle. It meant I went in with my eyes open.
I wished I’d had time to open his eyes, and when he got back, I was making it my job to put away all our power games and make sure he didn’t deploy again. He was going to hear about my father’s night terrors, my brother’s suicide attempt, my grandfather’s guilt. Eight days of treating soldiers who had been blown to bits was going to seem like a cakewalk.
Caden was going home after this deployment if I had to scare the shit out of him.
* * *
I couldn’t mill around the airfield like a lost lamb. I kept my eyes on the dark sky and my ears open for approaching birds. I wasn’t privy to what was happening, whether they’d landed under fire or at all. Nothing.
I should have told him the truth right away, without backpedaling or soft-shoeing. I was his. Completely. Unabashedly. Unreservedly. Instead of enforcing my will, I should have opened myself with the same nakedness he had.
My desk was piled with paperwork. Since I wasn’t going to sleep until I knew Caden was all right, and my office was close enough to the hospital to hear when they brought in casualties, I figured I’d do it.
When I pulled out my chair, I found a small manila envelope with my name on the front. I undid the string, and a dirty, blood-streaked sonogram fell into my hand. I shook it, and a folded piece of paper came out. A note.
Pfc Sanchez came in again. Head trauma.
Said to give this to the psychiatrist.
He didn’t make it.
No one had died on Balad Base unless they had severe brain trauma. We didn’t have the capacity to treat it. We could only send them to Baghdad as quickly as possible. For Sanchez, that obviously hadn’t been quick enough. Wife and two kids. Damn. Just damn.
What had he said his buddy’s name was? Grady? First name or last? I’d find his wife and tell the story if she wanted to hear it.
I put the sonogram and the note back into the envelope before I started on the paperwork.
* * *
“It was Colonel Brogue out there.”
In the dead quiet of the midnight hour, the staff nurse’s voice carried through the wall. Brogue had wanted to get off base, and it sounded as if he’d done just that. I stopped what I was doing as a less-clear voice mumbled something.
“Little bird got them after the area was secured. All the casualties went to Baghdad. We’re clear.”
I bolted up from my chair and got my jacket.
* * *
I caught a ride to the airfield and waited in the little kitchen, trying to stay out of the way, asking what I could and overhearing the rest.
From what I could glean, Caden’s Blackhawk had landed under fire, which pilots aren’t supposed to do until they do it, then they’re responsible. With a full bird colonel on the ground, it wasn’t surprising they’d taken the risk, but there wasn’t supposed to be human gold in the form of a trauma surgeon on the chopper either.
They’d taken fire. Other casualties. Local civilians had gotten involved. They’d lifted out with the wounded when they knew a little bird was coming for Caden and the minor injuries.
The lighter thups of the smaller helicopter came out of the pale morning sky, and I went outside. With the sun kissing the horizon, the ground was still dark, and the airfield floodlights were necessary. The passengers were shadows in the glass as it landed. I held my jacket tightly around me, approaching into the wind of the rotors to see him, ready to tell him everything, reassure him, give myself to him, scare him out of this life.
He got out of the helicopter after the last of the passengers as the pilot slowed the whirr of the rotor. The front of this shirt and pants were solid black, as if he’d lain in a puddle of ink.
I ran to him. That particular shade of black was the result of the floodlights hitting the deep red of blood.
He didn’t stop. He looked straight ahead, passing me by as if he didn’t see me.
“Caden!”
He got in the back seat of the Jeep, where the driver waited for him. I looked in the window. He was staring straight ahead, in a fugue state, seeing nothing.
What the hell had
happened out there?
* * *
I caught a ride behind him and ran to his trailer right out of the seat.
His door wasn’t closed all the way. I knocked. No answer. Knocked again.
“Caden,” I said.
I respected his privacy up to a point, and I’d reached it. Pushing the door, I stepped into the dark room. A band of morning sunlight fell into the corner, catching his bowed, blood-soaked figure. I shut the door, making sure it clicked closed. No one needed to see him sitting in the corner with his arms around his knees.
Crouching in front of him, I laid my hands on his arms and looked into his face. He kept staring into the middle distance.
“Caden.”
With barely any pressure on his arms, they dropped to his sides as if he were dead. Paresis. I put my fingers to his neck. Warm life pulsed there. I caressed his face with that hand, but he didn’t respond.
“I’m going to get someone in here to bring you to the hospital.”
“No.” His voice was low and flat, and hearing it cut open my worry enough to let out my sorrow.
I didn’t know what had happened, but it had broken him. This man who had worked eight days with no more than a short rest, who had let his sense of duty guide him to do the impossible, who had touched me with his vulnerability and strength… they’d broken him.
Oh sure, they’d get him functioning again, because they needed him, but he’d be thrown away because only the weak were broken by war, and the US military had no room for the weak.
“You’re not weak,” I said more to myself than him. “Do you hear me?” He gave no indication that he did or didn’t, but he’d heard me suggest moving him to the hospital, so I continued. “You didn’t have to prove anything to me. You owned me from the moment I saw you, and you never, ever shared me. Do you understand?”
Dark Romance Collection: A Sexy, Dark Bundle Page 28