“Stop talking.” She slid her hands slowly up over the hard muscles of his chest and the pounding veins in his neck to cradle his cheeks. His two-day-old beard was nearly soft beneath her touch. “I don’t care what you did over there, Cam. I only care that you’re safe.” She breathed each word against his lips, pressing them into his skin. “That you came back to me.”
“What if I hurt you again?”
She inhaled deeply, breathing in the scent of liquor and soap and something earthy that was all Cam. Deep and primitive and darkly sensual. Awareness sang in her blood and she felt the matching rhythm in his heartbeat.
“So don’t.” She kissed him sweetly, softly, rubbing her heat against him.
He kissed her then and there was nothing sweet in the promise for later.
She felt the shadows in that kiss, the darkness he tried to hide. There was danger in his kiss. In his touch. In the way his mouth claimed her and made her feel like she was the only person in the world.
She reached between them and guided his cock from his pants, easing her slick heat down onto him, inch by agonizing inch. And then she set the pace.
She felt Cam surrender to the goodness in her touch, the feeling of wholeness. Maybe, he could finally release some of the poison inside him that was eating him alive. Maybe, he could hold on to her long enough to let it go.
All she could do in that moment was hold onto him and move, taking them both higher, closer to the moonlight that shimmered over their skin. Closer to the pleasure that drew them together. Closer to the brink.
And then finally, as their climax crashed through them and dragged them under, she held that hope close to her heart.
And held on as long she could.
Chapter 28
SUMMONING HIS ENERGY for the parade, Cam sat for a moment in his high school parking lot, in the same spot he’d used every day his senior year. He used to make out with Hayley there before World History. He’d been sitting in that parking spot when he called up to get information about joining the Army.
There had been no illusions in Cam’s mind about what he was signing up to do. He’d wanted to be an infantryman. But he’d had no idea how the job would change him. He tried to think back to the enthusiastic innocence he’d had the day he’d left, but all he could remember was the way he thought of guns and shooting and more guns.
He’d never dreamed of all the blood. Of spilling it. Tasting it. The constant flood of it in his dreams.
Even in basic training, the emotions the drill instructors had inspired in him had driven him to insomnia. He couldn’t eat but when he didn’t have access to food, he was starving. He’d fall asleep on the rifle range with his M4 firing beneath his cheek but he would lie awake at night, watching the hours blink past in neon numbers.
“Oh shit,” he mumbled. He closed his eyes and retraced his steps through the kitchen that morning. The kitten had been angrily protesting her departure from her new littermates. He’d been distracted, and he hadn’t taken his anxiety meds. And now he was going into a crowd of people he didn’t know in a place he hadn’t been in ten years.
He reached into the back seat and found, by divine intervention, a warm beer. He slammed the contents, wincing as it flooded into his empty stomach. He could do this. He wanted to be there for Hayley today.
A quick rap on his window scared the living shit out of him. He jumped, his heart slamming against his ribs. He flushed hot when he saw Hayley’s smiling face peering in at him.
He swallowed the panic and rolled the window down. “Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
His body tightened in automatic reaction when she licked her bottom lip, more out of nerves than anything else. It was still dead sexy.
He got out of the car. “How are the, ah, parade preparations going?”
She tipped her head. “Thought I’d warn you, my mom is hoping to invite you over. She wants to pump you full of questions about Afghanistan to better understand what Ashley’s doing.”
Cam pressed his lips together and nodded, not really listening as the crowd continued to grow in the high school parking lot.
He couldn’t really hear her over the roar in his ears. He couldn’t do this. He needed to get away from the noise and the people.
The clamor of the crowd beat a rhythm in his skull until his palms were slicked with sweat and his gut twisted with nausea. His lungs felt tight, like he couldn’t get enough air. His breaths came in short and fast.
“Cam.” Hayley’s hand was cool on his forearm, creating a dramatic shift in temperature. Her touch pulled him from the haze blurring his vision. He focused on her face as if it were a lifeline. “Are you—”
“Cam, you made it!”
Cam’s breath hitched as he recognized Hayley’s mom waving from the crowd. Cam’s panic edged back to a low simmer. It was just a Fourth of July parade and Cam was just another soldier. Hayley shifted on the balls of her feet, rubbing her upper arms with her palms. Cam followed her gaze to a crowd of about ten hipsters heading toward them.
Milo was leading the pack, wearing a grin that bordered on triumph. Cam bit back his irritation and smiled. Milo was family. He’d be nice, if only for Aunt Ellen and Uncle Richie’s sake.
Even if it killed him.
And it might. It just might.
Hayley slipped her fingers into Cam’s. “Look, just leave Milo alone. I know he’s an arrogant ass but—”
“Cam! So glad you could make it today. It gives us extra ammunition,” Milo announced, shifting the rolled-up poster he held beneath one arm. “We’re hoping to make the local news and then have a national affiliate pick up the story.”
The panic returned, mixing now with dread in the pit of Cam’s belly. “What story?”
“The Die-In? That’s why you’re here, right?”
Cam’s palms were wet as he balled his hands into tight fists. “Die-In?” His mouth went dry. The words locked in the back of his throat had to be forced out.
Milo smiled and unrolled a poster with Melanie West’s name emblazoned in blood-red block letters over her official military photo.
“I’m dying for Melanie. We’ve coordinated Die-Ins all over the country today, to protest the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“You’re dying for Melanie West.” Cam felt numb, unable to comprehend the absolute blasphemy on his cousin’s sign.
Milo’s smile faded just a little and he took a tiny step backward. Cam barely noticed the crowd surrounding them. He could no longer feel Hayley’s fingers threaded in his. His hands were cold and his lungs closed off.
“Yeah. We’re showing the world the faces of our dead soldiers. We’re making sure the nation never forgets the cost of the war. We’re going to lie in the parade route, each of us representing a soldier that’s died in these wars for oil and profit.”
Cold rage built inside Cam as he stared at the photo of Melanie West. Her bright smile. The ill-fitting uniform that everyone had to wear for basic training photos. The hope. The potential in her young eyes.
“You have no right.” His words were choked and ragged behind the well of emotion in his throat.
“We’re on your side,” Milo said, his voice rising to carry over the crowd. “Melanie’s death was pointless. She died for nothing. The Iraqis don’t even appreciate what we’ve done. Melanie is a symbol of the cost of the war.”
By now, Milo was feeding on the emotion in the crowd, drawing its energy in and using it to amplify his voice and his views.
Cam’s muscles trembled as he stepped toward his cousin. “Do you have her family’s permission to use her memory like this?”
“We don’t have to ask anyone’s permission.” Milo declared. The protesters behind him nodded and murmured their assent. “She’s a public figure. A soldier is a symbol.”
Milo’s face exploded with blood and tissue before Cam’s hand registered the blow. The rage felt cold coursing through Cam’s veins, like a long-forgotten addiction. “You
have no right to use our dead like this.”
He punctuated each word with a blow.
Somewhere far off, he heard someone shouting for the police. Hands dragged at his shoulders and he swung his arm wildly, but they were too late to stop his fist from colliding with Hayley’s cheek. She collapsed to the ground before Cam could catch her.
Someone wrestled him to the ground as panic gripped Cam’s lungs. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. Everything was violent and red as he struggled to reach Hayley to see if she was okay.
Ben’s face filled his field of vision a moment before he was dragged back from the violence that threatened to drown him.
Chapter 29
HE HELD THE bottle up to the light. He was going to need a refill soon. Something moved near his feet. The kitten was sitting on the arm of the couch, silently judging him with her fuzzy kitten face. “What the hell are you looking at?”
He could still see Hayley’s eyes watering as she’d pulled herself off the asphalt after he’d clocked her with the right hook meant for his cousin.
Jesus, he was lucky Ben hadn’t arrested him.
He shouldn’t have lost it like he had. He should have smiled and turned away and done the stupid parade like he’d wanted. Instead, he’d given in to the dark rage inside him.
All he wanted now was to stay in the darkened house and drink himself stupid, so that maybe he had half a chance of forgetting the things he’d done because of this damn war.
And then he heard her clear voice. “Do you always swear at your pets?”
He looked away, out the back door and across the field to the tree line. Anywhere but in Hayley’s eyes. He didn’t want to see the damage he’d done. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Yeah, I figured that out.” She tried to pull the glass from his hand but he resisted, squeezing it tighter. She pried it from him, finger by finger until she slipped it from his hand. He didn’t have to glance in her direction to see her toss back a swallow of the amber liquid.
He wished he didn’t see the remains of her drink glisten on her lips. Or her tongue trace it away, stirring a familiar, unwanted need in him.
He didn’t want her here. He didn’t want to see her black eye because it was a reminder that to the people he cared about, he was toxic.
He’d thought he could be a normal citizen but he was poison, just another messed-up former GI. He’d become the stereotype he hated. The vets of his generation were joining the messed-up Vietnam vets and the other vets of all the wars from the twentieth century.
He cleared his throat, wishing the world would stop spinning long enough for him to get rid of her. He’d hurt her enough already.
“You need to go.”
She shook her head, a pale blond curl falling across her forehead. She brushed it behind one ear. “You need to stop drinking. Let’s see which one of us gets what they want first.”
He folded his arms across his chest, bracing his arms against his knees. “I don’t want you here.”
“I don’t care.”
He reached for the bottle of Crown. She kept him from lifting it. “No more booze, Cam.”
“I’m not your problem.”
“Yes, you are.”
With that one sentence, she defeated him. He dropped his head into his hands and covered his face in his palms. Guilt left a sour taste in his mouth.
“Talk to me.”
He snorted and pushed away from the counter, swaying dangerously on his feet before he caught himself on the edge of the fridge. When he was steady, he swung a wide circle around Hayley and headed for the stairs.
“There’s nothing to say. I’m just enjoying my freedom from Army life. It’s a celebration!”
He made it to the bottom of his stairs before vertigo took hold again. He closed his eyes and held on until it passed. When he opened them, Hayley stood on the bottom step, blocking his way up the narrow staircase.
There was anger and fear in her beautiful green eyes. He looked past the black splotches in his vision and into her soul. She had a good heart, his Hayley. She was good at fixing things.
Too bad she couldn’t fix him. But there was no erasing what he’d done today—to Milo, to her. The anger had come out so quickly, so unexpectedly. If Ben hadn’t been there…
“You’re trespassing. Go away.”
He moved to step around her. She shoved him back but this time, he was steadier. Or at least, he’d held on to the banister when he’d stood.
The fight drained from him almost instantly and he sank to the bottom step, burying his face in his hands, his throat thick.
“Just go.” His voice sounded foreign and far off to his own ears. “Before I hurt you again.”
Hayley settled next to him, her arm resting against his. She smelled like summer sunlight and pure clean mountain air after the rain. So different from the stink and the stench of Iraq. He wanted to bury his face in her neck and inhale her, if only to banish the smells of war he could never forget.
But he couldn’t move. He was a threat to Hayley’s safety and he was sitting right next to her, on the bottom stair of his house.
Who had he been kidding?
She wasn’t safe around him. She never had been.
Chapter 30
HIS ARM WAS strong against hers. Solid and warm and a reminder that this was Cam, not her father’s ghost.
Cam only had a few days of living inside the bottle, not thirty years. She wasn’t about to surrender Cam without a fight. Not in this lifetime.
But the certainty of the coming fight did nothing to steady her hand as she raised it near Cam’s shoulder. It did nothing to stop the slight tremble beneath her touch when she rested it on his strong back.
She sat with him in silence, listening to the ragged sound of her own breathing. Cam was still, so still she thought he might have fallen asleep.
His head was cradled in his hands and his bare feet were peeking out from beneath ancient light gray Army sweats.
Blood coated the top of one foot. There were tiny flecks of it on the hem of one pant leg. She knelt in front of him.
“It’s fine,” he mumbled, pulling his foot away from her.
She retrieved it easily, settling onto her rear and pulling it into her lap, securing his calf between her knees to keep him from pulling away again. “You’re not fine, Cam.”
There was an inch-long gash on the crease between his ankle and the top of his foot. It was relatively recent because the wound separated easily, revealing at least three shards of glass deeply embedded in the flesh.
“What did you do?” she murmured, amazed he hadn’t bled more. From the look of his trashcan, he’d consumed a lot of liquor, which meant this wound should have bled a lot more.
Then she saw it. The huge stain on the arm of his couch, a lopsided circle of rust-colored blood.
She glanced back at him and he at least had the coherence to look embarrassed. “I must have passed out right after it happened,” he mumbled.
Hayley shook her head and set his foot down. “I’ve got to clean this and get the rest of the glass out.” She extended her hand. “When did this happen?”
He swallowed and avoided her hand as he pulled himself to his feet. “I don’t know. What day is it?”
“It’s Saturday.” She grabbed for him as he swayed on his feet, slipping her arm around his waist before he could pull away, and guided him to the couch.
He threw one arm over his eyes, one foot still planted on the floor. “You shouldn’t be here,” he mumbled.
“You shouldn’t be walking around with glass in your foot. I’m going to get my medical bag. Don’t move.”
She didn’t know what was going on with Cam, but she damn sure wasn’t leaving him alone again.
When she got back, Cam’s eyes were closed, and he hadn’t moved from his prone position on the couch, which was good. She’d be able to prop his foot up and clean it out without too much additional mess. She dragged a towel beneath his fo
ot and set her supplies out.
“This is going to hurt,” she said softly, wondering if he was still conscious.
“Pain is just weakness leaving the body,” he murmured and she wondered where he’d heard that stupid phrase before.
“Pain is the body’s way of telling us something is wrong.” She pulled on a pair of sterile rubber gloves and cleaned around the gash with iodine.
He was silent a long while as she prepped his foot. “What if there’s no physical source for the pain?” he asked, so quietly she wasn’t even sure she’d heard him.
“There’s always a source, Cam,” she said. “Ready?”
He swallowed and barely nodded.
She had to give him points for stoicism. Other than a sharply hissed breath, he took her probing in tense silence. His fists balled, though, and his breathing became shallower as she dug deeper, pulling the first of three shards from his skin.
She rested the trophies on the sterile cloth on his leg, sopping up the blood with clean cotton pads. “You need stitches,” she murmured, more to herself than to her patient.
She did a final sweep of the wound to ensure that she’d gotten all the glass out and then sutured him shut. When she was finished, she wrapped his foot in gauze, then secured it in place with an Ace bandage.
The muscles in Cam’s neck finally relaxed. He swallowed and Hayley noticed the dirt beneath his nails. The thick stubble on his jaw that was nearly a week’s worth of growth. The faint smell of stale beer and body odor surrounded him.
“You need a bath,” she said quietly.
He lifted his arm enough to peek out from beneath it, then dropped it back over his eyes. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She raised both eyebrows. “You stink and you have company. You’re bathing.”
Cam sighed and didn’t move. “When did you become so bossy?”
Hayley’s lips twitched but she hid her smile. “You’d think you’d be used to it by now. Weren’t your sergeants in the Army bossy?”
He snorted but didn’t respond, and Hayley felt a prickle of irritation against her heart. “All right, get up.” She poked him hard in the ribs.
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