He swallowed.
“Fuck them,” I said more to myself than him, standing.
The army had broken him. The army was going to fix him.
I stormed out into the morning sun. I got thirty feet away. The Humvee tire we’d used as an end zone was at the other side of the field, another thirty feet away. My mind was strategizing who to tap for help and where they were when the mortar hit.
The earth shook, and with a sharp pain in my ears, everything went silent. When I landed on my back, I couldn’t even hear the breath exit my lungs, but I felt it with the agony in my chest.
The silence was more disorienting than the rain of rocks and shrapnel.
I got my feet under me. Dizzy. Planting my feet. Breathing soundlessly with a sharp pain in my chest. I looked down at myself. I was covered in blood. When I looked back up, I realized I’d been turned around. Caden stood at his door, awakened by the blast, his blood-soaked shirt mirroring mine, crying out without a sound.
The ground rotated under me.
I was falling.
I would hit the dirt at the acceleration of gravity.
I couldn’t break my fall, but I didn’t need to.
A man was under me, catching me, holding me in his arms as he ran.
Deaf but not blind, I could only see the blue sky. The black smoke from the mortar bounded my peripheral vision on one side.
When he looked down at me for a second, he wasn’t broken anymore. The eternal sky was captured in his eyes, deadly and comforting, alive with purpose.
* * *
I remembered cool sheets under my head.
I remembered a drowning feeling.
I remembered bright light through the fog of my vision and choking on a tube.
I remembered the blood cooling on my skin when they cut off my clothes.
I remembered his eyes set over the rectangle of a surgical mask, cutting through the fog with unguarded concern and utter confidence.
I could never forget the love in them.
Chapter Six
A single shard of metal had missed my heart by two millimeters.
“There’s more ways to miss a heart than hit it,” Caden said from beside my bed.
He’d used his R&R days to fly into Baghdad after me. The incision was small. I could have recuperated in Balad, but Caden had stepped in, making sure I was in the best-equipped hospital whether I needed it or not.
“I prefer to think of myself as lucky.”
“Preference noted. They’re sending you back to the CSH.”
He was making an assumption that I was going back to Balad based on the fact that I was going back into the field. I was indeed going back into the field—but not to the CSH.
“What happened out there?” I asked. “Outside the wire?”
He shrugged and looked away. “The usual intense shit.”
“I saw Brogue.” My CO was down the hall with another injury so close to deadly it confirmed the existence of luck for me—and the existence of statistical probability of survival for Caden’s patients.
Brogue being down the hall had its benefits. I’d wheeled down there and checked on him. He was going home, but he was still the commanding officer of the First Medical Brigade. He could task me out of my unit up to Abu Ghraib to work with Army Intelligence for a while.
He’d agreed it was an opportunity to go from a specialty no one respected to something where I could move up, make a difference, release myself from the constraints of a unit for a while and decide how I wanted to work. He’d do the paperwork as soon as he could sit up in his goddamned bed.
If I went through with it, I wasn’t going back to the support hospital with Caden.
“He said you saved his life and a few others,” I continued. “He’s recommended you for a commendation.”
“I get a nice pat on the back whenever I do my job.” He squeezed my hand and ran his finger along my forearm with a touch that was uniquely his.
“Why did you go out?” I asked. “There are field surgeons who could have gone.”
“You asked me this, Greyson.”
“And you deflected, which I let you do because I was post-op.”
Four fingertips went back down my forearm with a tenderness that could only be described as worshipful. “You don’t let stuff go, do you?”
“Nope.”
“I want to be with you. Do you want to be with me?”
“Yes. More than anything.”
“And if we are a couple, this is what I can expect? You to lock onto things?”
I didn’t want to turn him off, but I wouldn’t lie to him either. “Yep. But I’m also patient. I won’t forget, but I’ll let you tell me things in your own time.”
He stared at the way his thumb stroked the scars on my wrist. “I went out to prove that I could.”
That wasn’t news. I could have told him that. But having him say it so plainly was unexpected and earth-shattering and a chest-spreader, exposing my heart to his attention.
“You didn’t need to do that.”
“I did. Not for you. For me. And maybe you a little. I knew you’d say it didn’t matter, but I didn’t want to look in your eyes in ten years and wonder if you ever thought you could do better.”
Ten years?
I was crazy about him. Infatuated. I wanted nothing more than to continue this relationship for all it was worth. Bleed him dry emotionally. Suck him to the bare, delicious, raw core.
But ten years? How was that even possible?
“Caden.”
“Greyson?”
So impossibly blue, his eyes were holes to the sky.
“I can’t do better,” I said.
“Well, I know that.”
We smiled, and I looked away. “But you’re not staying in the military, and this is my life.”
“I do catch movies sometimes. Guy’s off on deployment and calls his woman from base. She’s always in the kitchen of some suburban house, holding the phone with both hands because she loves him. We can just switch it. You call me. I’ll hold the phone with both hands.”
“In a suburban house?”
“Probably not. That a deal-breaker?”
“No. Not that.”
He didn’t ask me what the deal-breaker was. Either he didn’t want to know, or he was aware of what I didn’t yet know.
There were no deal-breakers.
“We don’t have to decide now,” he said.
“How much longer do you have here?” I shook my head. He had almost a year here in Iraq, but that wasn’t what I meant. “In Baghdad?”
“I’m on call tomorrow morning. We’re still trying to retake Fallujah, you know. But I’ll try to come back to get you.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“I know. But I worked it out with my CO and some of the other guys. We switched stuff around. We’re fine until the next offensive. And if they need me, you just have to come back without an escort.”
“My feminine heart wouldn’t stand it, sir. Imagine what could happen?”
He put his hand on my face and kissed me. “I pity the poor slob who tries to keep you from me.”
“Me too.”
We kissed again.
“You’re tired.” He told me that as if he knew me better than I knew myself, and though it seemed too soon for that to be possible, he was right.
“I can’t wait to be at a hundred percent again.”
Caden pressed the button that lowered the bed to a sleeping position. “You at a hundred percent is what I want.” He stroked my face. “Close your eyes.”
They wanted nothing more than to shut so I could fully feel his touch slide over my skin.
“Once you’re at a hundred percent,” he whispered, “I’m going to fuck you down to twenty. When your arms are limp and you’ve come so many times you think you can’t come again, you’re going to curl up next to me to try to sleep. I won’t let you. I’ll fuck you down to ten percent. I’m going to leave you at five
before I let you sleep.” I opened my eyes halfway, but he closed them with a brush of his hands. “Just sleep.”
“Stay.”
“I brought paperwork. I’ll be right here, cursing it.”
“Mmm.”
My arms and legs got heavy and my mind drifted away until I felt as if I had no body at all except for where Caden touched me and where a piece of metal had sliced a thin, throbbing hole in my chest.
* * *
Caden came back for a day when I was well enough to leave the hospital. We went to a nearby teashop filled with enough American servicemen that it was all right to have an unmarried woman and man at the same table. He left on the next Phrog out.
“I wish I could drive,” he said absently as the rotors thupped.
“It’s ten times more dangerous.”
“Yeah.”
I knew that look, and his “yeah” was more than a simple agreement over the danger of on-road travel. “Caden?”
“Major?”
“Are you afraid to fly?”
“No.” He waved away his answer. “Not in a plane. Not a ‘flight,’ with tickets and an airport. But those damn helicopters. They have a way of dropping out of the sky.”
“I think they more spin than drop.”
He smiled, and I was disarmed. I wanted to offer him the same openness he’d given me.
“Also,” I said, “me too. These things terrify me. I white-knuckle it the whole way.”
His eyebrows went up. I was glad I still had the ability to surprise him.
“The enormity of falling,” I continued. “Feeling the space around me and floating in it?” I shivered. “I’d almost rather risk an IED.”
“Good thing we don’t get to make that call.”
“Good thing.”
He held my hand, focusing on where our bodies knotted.
“There’s this jumper picture from 9/11,” he said. “A couple holding hands on the way down.”
I’d seen it, and I had to consider for a moment that it meant something for him it didn’t mean for me. Everything from that day would have layers of meaning for him.
“You think it was your parents?”
“No. It’s not. But I like to think that her last action was to refuse his hand. Tell him no.”
“Do you want me to tell you no?”
“I want to never give you a reason to.”
* * *
“I’m not going home,” I said into the hospital phone. Jenn was on the other side of the line. I had an envelope stamped with the US Army seal crunched in my hand.
“Why not?”
“The incision was nothing. It was clean.”
“You lost a ton of blood.”
“I have it back. I’m replenished like a vampire.”
“Well, it’ll be nice to have you around.”
I didn’t think it would be hard to tell her, but I had to take a second to rework what I intended to say. “I’m not staying. Not for long. I got tasked out to Defense.”
“Where?”
“I’m heading up to ABG.”
My paperwork had gone through. Brogue was laid up and on his way home but had signed the recommendation. The approval had come in the envelope my palm was sweating on.
“Abu Ghraib? Why? For what?”
“I can’t—”
“It’s Ronin.”
“It’s Ronin,” I confirmed.
“Okay, I’m saying this once, then you do what you want, okay?”
“This should be good.”
“It will be. Write it down.”
I laughed silently so she couldn’t hear me, but I had the feeling I wouldn’t need to write it down. “Go ahead.”
“You do not have the moral vacancy required to work with the DoD.”
“The project conforms to the Geneva Convention.”
“Okay, if he has to say that, then that’s a problem. And have you asked yourself what he needs you for?”
I didn’t, and wouldn’t, mention the second part of Ronin’s offer, but my pause while I decided that was enough of an opening for Jenn to jump in.
“The medical degree,” she said. “You can script and dispense.”
“It’s my job.”
“I don’t like it. It bothers me.”
“You’re just going to miss me.”
“Yeah. That too.”
Chapter Seven
Caden wasn’t able to come to Baghdad to escort me back to the CSH. Despite his commission, he was and always would be a civilian—with a civilian’s confidence in his own agency. He’d always think he could make decisions, work around the rules while staying in the lines, negotiate with his superiors, charm his way through a narrow opening in his options.
On the Chinook, with my knuckles pale caps over where my fingers and my hand joined, I wondered how he would tolerate my career. Military wives had to submit to a host of indignities, starting with a loss of control over where they lived and ending with a loss of control over parenting. Their husbands were married to the military first. How would Caden manage always playing second to the army, especially when, after two deployments, he still didn’t understand how little power he had?
He wanted a life with me. I was torn between talking him out of it and agreeing to everything. Was there a middle way? Someplace between him pursuing a Stateside medical career in the army and me taking off my uniform forever?
I alternated between frustration and an uncomfortable feeling of validation. Why do I have to think about this now? soon became Being wanted by Caden feels too good to refuse.
I saw him briefly in the hospital, sitting and talking to one of four guys hit by a suicide bomber. I didn’t bother him. When we’d met, his compassionate side had been shut away so he could perform surgery after surgery, and I liked seeing that, somewhere in there, he had a warm heart.
“Welcome back,” he whispered from behind me later as I logged a script into the computer.
“Glad to be back.”
“You feeling one hundred percent?”
“Ninety-eight.”
“Close enough. When do you get off?”
“Whenever you say, apparently.”
“Good answer.” I faced him to make sure he got the double meaning, and his smile told me he had. “See you in my bunk at nine?”
“Twenty-one hundred. On the dot.”
* * *
The lamp glowed dimly, and the blinds were shut, but he wasn’t there.
There were rose petals on the bed. I didn’t know what he’d had to go through to get that many rose petals delivered to Balad Base in Fallujah in November. When I got close, I saw they were orange and purplish-red. Insane colors.
A square of paper lay on the pillow.
Naked.
A man of few words.
Languidly, I undressed, peeling off layers with increasing anticipation. Would he come in before I was through? Would he make me wait until I lay down on the bed of petals?
The trailer was heated, but the air was chilly, and my nipples twisted on themselves, hardening to erect points.
I ran my hand over the medical texts he’d brought. There were no family photos taped to the wall. No mementos or tchotchkes. He’d given me the rabbit’s foot. Outside that, he was a man without sentiment.
At a soft rap on the door, I tucked myself against the wall and rapped on the window. Caden entered in scrubs and boots, closing the door.
“You’re late, soldier,” I said from the darkness.
He joined me in the shadows. “Complications.”
He ran his finger over the little scar in my chest. It was still red and raw, messier than a surgical scar, cleaner than any shrapnel wound had business being. When he touched it, the nerve endings jumped and vibrated as if they were facing all the wrong directions.
“Ninety-eight percent,” he said, letting his finger drift down to my navel.
“Give or take.”
“I have to be careful with you.”
&nb
sp; “Why?”
“You don’t know your own limits.”
He pulled off his shirt, and I ran my hands down his chest and torso while he got his pants off, letting his erection pop out. My fist curled around his shaft, his hand stuck between my naked legs, and we kissed as if our tongues were magnetized at opposite poles. With one of my legs around his waist and my back against the wall, he put three fingers inside me. I gasped when he stretched me.
“I don’t want it to hurt,” he said into my cheek.
He rubbed circles around the nub of nerves inside my vagina wall.
“Doesn’t hurt.” My spine curved toward him as he rubbed inside me, stimulating the spot so few could find. “Quite the”—I groaned—“contrary.”
When I was barely verbal, he ran the head of his cock along my seam and slid inside, hoisting me up from behind my knees. Arms around his neck, I leaned on his shoulders as he thrust sharply, pushing me against the trailer’s wood veneer. Slow, with jerking movements that pushed on my clit and the spot inside me, he brought me close, but I couldn’t get over the edge. The logistics of fucking against a wall sapped my attention.
“I don’t think I can like this,” I groaned.
Kissing me, he reached behind him for the desk chair. He sat, slid down, and reached for me. When I went to him, he turned my back to him. I bent, impaling myself on his dick over and over. Our hands met between our legs, touching him, touching me, feeling the place we were coupled as we moved with each other.
I went blind with pleasure, speeding up with him, focusing on the hard nub where my orgasm waited.
“Can you come with me?” he asked.
“Now?”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
We came together in a twist of stiffening muscles and deep-throated grunts. When his climax dripped out of me, he used it to rub me all over again.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Do it anyway.”
With the warm liquid lubricating me, the sensation escalated all over again. I leaned my back on his chest, legs thrown over the arms of the chair as he rubbed my clit to a second orgasm.
Dark Romance Collection: A Sexy, Dark Bundle Page 29