No bad memories. No guilt. Just the two of them giving and taking pleasure from each other.
As he leaned over her, Phoebe lay back on the bed and dragged him with her. His muscles instantly stiffened and bunched under her fingers as if he were preparing to bolt, but she held on, unwilling to let him back away a second time.
“Please stay,” she whispered in the millimeters separating their mouths and traced one of the scars on his shoulder. “I don’t care that you have scars. I don’t care what was done to you in the past or what you had to do to survive. It doesn’t change anything for me. I still want you, the man lying beside me, right here, right now, in this moment. Can you live in the moment for me, just this once?”
Groaning, he buried his face in the crook of her neck. He stayed like that for a long time, unmoving, and she held him, running her hands along the curve of his back. All that lean muscle twitched under her touch. Then his lips, soft on the underside of her jaw, caressed the line of her throat to the edge of the blanket and a thrill jittered through her belly. He tugged the blanket away, exposing her breasts to the cool air. Her nipples immediately puckered and he swirled his tongue around one, and then the other, until she was arching off the bed.
“More.” She reached between their bodies and found his length growing harder against her thigh. When she touched him, his erection bobbed in response and peeked out from the band of his boxers. She gazed down, anticipation like butterflies in her bloodstream.
Small, circular scars covered the flared head of his penis.
Burns.
She forgot everything else. The heat, the need, the promise of erotic pleasure. Tears blurred her vision. The man had suffered so much. And in that moment, she wanted nothing more than to give him pleasure to help ease away his pain. She circled her fingers around his shaft…
Seth froze, then lurched away from her like her panties had caught fire and he didn’t want to risk more burns. “I can’t do this.” Without looking at her, he tucked himself back into his boxers, found his cargo pants, and yanked them on. Next came his shirt. Then he picked up his boots and was halfway to the door before she untangled herself from the blanket and jumped off the bed. She caught his hand.
“Seth, wait. What’s wrong?”
He stopped, but wouldn’t look at her. “I’m not a pity fuck.”
She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d dropped a bomb at her feet. “A pity fuck? No! Seth, that’s not—”
“Then why are you crying?”
Oh, God. She hadn’t even realized the tears were dripping down her face. She swiped her free palm under her eyes, wiping the offending droplets away. “Because I hurt for you. For what you went through. But that changes nothing. I still want—”
“No.” He pinned her with a dead, glacial stare. “If you’re so desperate to get laid, ask one of the undamaged guys to do it. Jean-Luc’s quite the ladies’ man. Marcus, too, for that matter. Hell, I don’t even care if you try for Ian.” He freed his hand from her grasp and opened the door. “Any-fucking-one but me.”
…
Seth hated himself the moment he turned away from her pale, stricken expression. He didn’t know why he’d said that to her. It was an asshole comment that topped his already huge list of assholery and he should go back and apologize.
He couldn’t.
In the hall, he stuffed his feet into his boots without bothering to tie the laces, then stalked toward the main room. He’d left his gear in the bedroom, but whatever. Not like he hadn’t slept on a dirt floor before. Not like he even slept anymore.
“Hey, Seth,” Gabe’s voice called as he passed one of the bedrooms. He stopped, but wondered if he’d get away with pretending he hadn’t heard.
Probably not.
In the end, he backtracked and leaned into the room. “Yeah?”
Gabe sat on the bed with his bad leg elevated and that was—hell, kind of a shock to see. True, Gabe walked with a cane unless the team was training or on a mission, but the handicap had always seemed almost like an afterthought. Never had it been as apparent as it was in this moment with the big man bedridden, his ankle enclosed in a soft cast and propped up on pillows.
“Nice shooting out there today.” Gabe nodded in a show of approval. “I’m starting to see why Quinn’s so adamant about keeping you around. He said you’d surprise me and you have.”
“Thank you, sir.” It took a huge amount of willpower not to salute the guy. After all, Lieutenant Commander Gabe “Stonewall” Bristow was the stuff of legends. He had a whole fruit salad of medals and would probably still be earning them if not for the car accident that ended his SEAL career last year. Had to wonder if the guy resented where he’d ended up. Didn’t look it. He seemed at peace sitting there, content to be ordered to bed rest for the night by Jesse, the ever-sensible medic.
So what was his secret?
Gabe said nothing more and, not wanting to stand there like an idiot, Seth started to back away, sure he’d been dismissed.
“What do you think we’ll be up against tomorrow?”
Gabe Bristow wanted his opinion? This was a change and he couldn’t quite keep his shocked expression under wraps. “Uh…more of what we faced today. And they’ll probably come down on us hard once they discover the bodies of their buddies in the valley.”
Gabe nodded. “I agree. We did it Phoebe’s way—tried to be quiet and respectful—but I think today proves we need a more aggressive approach. Tomorrow, we’re going in like operators, not kids playing dress-up in their mother’s clothing.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I’m putting you in charge of Phoebe.”
Another shock, and not necessarily a pleasant one. “Me?”
“She trusts you. She’ll listen to you.”
“Uh, sir, you have met her, right? I’m not so sure she listens to anyone but herself.”
“She listened to you today,” Gabe pointed out. “You told her to stay put, stay covered, and she did. It could have ended badly for her if she hadn’t.” His lips thinned into a grim line. “To be honest, I’d prefer to leave her here. It’ll be rough going tomorrow and I don’t want her caught in the crossfire. Is there any way you can talk her into staying behind?”
Seth winced, the memory of his final words to her filling his chest with heavy regret. “No. That won’t happen. I just…kinda…pissed her off. She’s not going to talk to me unless I apologize.”
A wide grin split Gabe’s face. “If she’s anything like my wife, probably not even then.” He sobered. “Apologize anyway. That’s an order.”
“Yes, sir.”
Gabe settled against the wall behind him. His jaw tightened as he shifted his bad foot, but otherwise, he gave no indication that he was in pain. “All right, listen. I don’t have to tell you this mission is personal for every man on this team. Hell, it’s more personal for you than any of us, isn’t it?”
Seth didn’t dare speak, afraid of what might come out of his mouth, so he merely bobbed his head.
“And we’re going to bring Hendricks home. I promise you that, but”—he pointed in the general direction of Phoebe’s room—“I don’t want Hendricks’s rescue to be at the expense of that woman’s life.”
A chill of dread crawled down Seth’s spine. “Nor do I.”
“So you do whatever necessary to keep her safe, you hear me?”
“Roger that, sir.”
“Good.” Gabe waved a hand in dismissal. “Oh, and, Harlan? Drop the fucking ‘sir’ already.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Kabul
“Paulie, wait!”
Quinn froze halfway out the shelter’s front door as his surroundings snapped to sudden, vivid clearness.
What the fuck? Where was he? What was he doing? And what had Zina just called him…?
He spun and found her standing under the archway between the foyer and the dining room, chewing on her thumbnail.
“What did you just call me?”
&
nbsp; “Um, Paulie.” As if realizing she was gnawing her nail to the nub, she winced and folded her arms over her chest. “You’ve been insisting that’s your name since you got back this morning.”
“Paulie?” It felt like a foreign word on his tongue. Yeah, it had been his at one time, but he hadn’t been Benjamin Paul Jewett Jr. or Paulie in nearly twenty years. Hadn’t even thought of himself by that name since he legally changed it to Travis Benjamin Quinn, after his maternal grandfather and his adoptive parents. “No, I’m Quinn. Call me Quinn.”
Her eyes all but bugged out of her pretty face. “Okay. I have to ask, are you all right? You’ve been acting…strange and insisting I call you by a different name for the last several hours. That’s not normal and I don’t want you around my girls if—” She seemed to search for the right words. “If you’re not healthy.”
“If I’m crazy, you mean?”
“I kind of think your whole team is crazy, so that’s not saying much.” She shook her head, huffed out a breath, and turned to go back into the dining room. “Just try to avoid the girls as much as possible, okay?”
“Not a problem.” He’d rather shoot himself in the foot than deal with a flock of teenage girls.
He stepped outside and sucked in a lungful of cool, dry November air.
Fucking blackout.
He knew stress was a trigger and should have expected it after his visit to Bagram this morning. Commander Bennett hadn’t welcomed him with open arms. In fact, Bennett’s response basically boiled down to, “Thanks, but I know about your brain injury and I don’t really trust a thing coming out of your mouth. Good seeing you again, though. Have a nice day.”
Now he got what it must feel like to be Seth, to have everyone around you think you’re crazy. And without being free to reveal how he came across the information about the nuke, he probably had sounded off his rocker.
Maybe he was.
Paulie?
What was that all about? Some kind of regression? His doctors had mentioned something about lapsing into fugue states, but they’d said it was a possibility. They’d also given him a lot of other possibilities throughout his recovery, starting with their first prognosis that he’d be a veggie for the rest of his life. Well, he’d shocked the hell out of them when he opened his eyes a month later, pulled out his IVs, and tried to get out of bed to find Gabe and make sure he was okay.
So fuck the docs and their possibilities. They even admitted they didn’t know much about the area in his brain that had been damaged when his head had an up-close-and-personal encounter with the car windshield. He knew himself and even in a fugue state or whatever the blackouts were, he wouldn’t return to the hell that had been his childhood.
Zina had heard wrong. Simple as that.
Unable to settle, he went back inside and made his way to the war room to check in with Harvard. Thank Christ the kid had been glued to his computer all morning. Last thing Quinn needed was another witness to his unraveling sanity.
Sure enough, Harvard was still in the exact position Quinn had left him, hunched over his screen. Only now, his hair stuck up from multiple passes of a frustrated hand. “Hey. Any luck locating Siddiqui?”
“None,” Harvard said with a shake of his head. “And believe me, I have all of my digital ears to the ground.”
“Where the fuck is he? He’s running for president. Shouldn’t he be out campaigning or some shit?”
“No, too early. The campaign won’t start in earnest for another few months.”
And in that time, he’ll secure himself a nuke. “Fuck.”
“Hey,” Harvard called as he turned to leave. “What’s going on with you?”
Quinn stopped dead in his tracks. Shit. Had Harvard been witness to the blackout after all? He schooled his expression into a blank mask before facing the kid again. “What do you mean? There’s nothing going on.”
“Don’t give me that everything-is-fine act. I got enough of that from my parents when I was growing up.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. When he slid his glasses back in place, he nailed Quinn with an exhausted glare that aged him well past his twenty-four years. “I’m young. I get it. But for fuck’s sake, I’m not a child. I’m just as much a member of this team as you are and I know Gabe sent you to Bagram this morning. What was that about?”
So he wasn’t talking about the blackout. Relief left Quinn light-headed. “All right. Point taken.” Gabe hadn’t wanted to tell the men about the possibly of the bomb—didn’t want to divide their attention while they were deep in enemy territory—but Harvard wasn’t up in the mountains and he needed to know. “This doesn’t go beyond this room.”
“Absolutely.”
Quinn shut the door. “In Zak Hendricks’s reports, he mentions Siddiqui is angling to buy a suitcase-size nuke. The deal is supposed to go down soon. Probably within the next few days.”
“Which is why you went to Bagram,” Harvard said, nodding. If the news rattled him, he didn’t show it. “You wanted help dealing with the bomb.”
“Yeah, but things didn’t go as planned there. I couldn’t tell them where I had gotten the information and they weren’t about to take my word for it. Now, it’s a possibility they’ll still check into it, but I feel like this is all on us.”
“We’re not an anti-terror unit,” Harvard said with a weary sigh. “But we can’t sit back and do nothing. Shit.” He straightened his shoulders and turned to his computer. “All right. Let me get back to work. I’ll call you as soon as I have a lock on Siddiqui.”
“Thanks.” Quinn left the room and came face-to-face with a handful of giggling girls, led by Tehani. His blood went cold.
Jesus Christ. He’d rather face off with a thousand Taliban fighters than these four prepubescent kids. Especially since Zina told him to avoid them.
He tried to step around them, but Tehani blocked his path no matter which way he moved. The other three girls held their scarves over their mouths and giggled. Tehani’s head was unabashedly bare, sleek black hair hanging loose around her shoulders.
“Hand-some,” she said slowly in English and pointed at him, which set the other girls off again. “Pr—pretty yel-low hair.” She patted the top of her head.
“Uh…” He scanned left and right. Dammit, where was an enemy ambush when a guy needed one? “Thanks?”
Tehani grinned. “You…make…good husband.”
Whoa. Yeah. Definitely time to make a fast exit. He was starting to sweat and he had no doubt they could smell the fear on him.
Again, he tried stepping around her. “I have work to do.”
She said something in Pashto. He knew bits of the language, enough to pick out the word “protector,” and guilt sank its claws into the back of his neck. He stopped several paces away and faced the group again.
“Nobody’s going to hurt you as long as I’m around, okay?”
He didn’t think they understood him, but it didn’t matter. Tehani grinned and the other girls jabbered excitedly behind his back as he strode away.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Oh, yeah, she was still pissed. Not that Seth blamed her for it. He deserved the silent treatment and probably more.
Phoebe had barely looked at him all day, even though they now rode the same horse since both his and Ian’s animals had escaped during the firefight yesterday. The village had provided Ian with a donkey, which, as Jean-Luc pointed out, had the same shining personality as the bomb tech.
Phoebe had snapped a photo of the made-in-heaven pair and laughed about it with the guys—until Gabe ordered her to ride with Seth. She’d protested, of course, but it was either Gabe’s way or the highway, and her arguments had died a quick death.
At least the trip was uneventful. No more run-ins with unfriendly locals, which was either a stroke of awesome luck or a sign of bad things to come. Seth suspected the latter, though he didn’t say so out loud. No sense in jinxing it if they had just gotten lucky.
Seth tried to strike up a conversation with her several times during the daylong ride. Tried to apologize, too, but she wasn’t having it. What did he have to do to prove he really was sorry? Grovel? Yeah, probably, but that was kind of hard to do from the back of a horse when his passenger wouldn’t speak to him.
He was mulling over ideas when their ragtag caravan cleared the top of a ridge and Phoebe stiffened up in the saddle, nearly knocking him in the chin with the top of her head. “Wait. Stop.”
He pulled their mount to a halt and she climbed down.
“Oh my God. The dog’s still here.” She took off at a sprint toward the ruins of an old Soviet tank.
Gabe swung around as everyone else also came to a stop. “What is it?”
“She said something about a dog.”
“What dog?” someone asked, but Seth didn’t bother taking the time to answer. He handed his horse’s reins to Gabe and ran after her.
Phoebe was on her knees in front of a scruffy dog and spoke soothingly to it in Pashto as she reached out a hand. The animal shivered wildly and got to his feet, his tail tucked between his legs. Though on the skinny side, he had the powerful build of a German shepherd with ears that stood upright. His body was a red-brown color and his face was completely black, as if he were wearing a mask.
“Oh, you poor thing. Someone bring me water,” she snapped over her shoulder and rubbed the dog’s head. “I saw his owner tie him here when Zina and I arrived. That was days ago.”
Seth squatted down beside her and picked up the empty collar still chained to the tank’s main gun. Apparently, the dog had slipped out of it, but hadn’t run away. “Maybe his owner ties him here every day. Look, his bowls are right over there.” But both of the dented metal dishes were empty and turned upside down, like the dog had pawed at them when he ran out of food and water.
Phoebe shook her head. “Something’s wrong.” She accepted the bottle of water Jesse handed her and flipped the dog’s dish over to fill it. “Do you think he can eat one of your MREs?”
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