“Those families more than deserve their loved ones home,” Anna said fiercely under her breath, barely held emotion driving her words.
“Too many wars for too long,” Kyle agreed somberly.
“Will your team come home for good, then?”
He heard the hope, the terror, in her voice. “Some will.” That wasn’t a lie. When Kyle looked over at her, he could feel her devastation. Dammit. “Tell me what’s in your future, Anna. What are you going to be doing?” He wanted off this topic for many reasons.
“Just running the ranch. After I get my head healed, I intend to start looking for a new ranch foreman. It will be a long search and it will take a while. I’m hoping by spring, we’ll have hired someone new. We can’t operate without one.”
He studied her, watching the worry leave her eyes. Thank God, Anna was easily distracted. “What about your personal life?” And Kyle held his breath, waiting.
She smiled wryly. “What personal life? I’ll be here, running the ranch. I’m not about to go out and hook up with someone else. I’ve got a bad track record, Kyle.”
“I see.” He tried to keep the relief out of his tone.
“I’m taking accounting courses online,” she offered. “I need to really get into running the ranch from the budget end. Trevor always did that, but I need to be more hands-on, Kyle. I have to know where we’re at financially.”
“That sounds like a good plan,” he congratulated her.
Her eyes sparkled and she lifted up a dollar sign she’d made and glued green glitter on it. “See? Money. Accounting. All a part of my life this year and next.”
Kyle wanted to reach out and pull her up from the table and bring her into his arms. “I think you ought to draw some gold coins, too. For good luck for the next year.”
Tonight was so perfect. It was twenty days until Christmas. And he wanted Anna to enjoy this time because, obviously, she’d had a lot of death and losses in her life that he’d never known about. Until now.
She laughed. “Not a bad idea. I think I’ll do it.” She walked forward, leaning down and touching the decoration he’d made of her. “Why did you put a heart on it, Kyle?” She twisted a look up at him.
“Because you’ve always owned my heart, Anna.” His throat tightened. He wanted so badly to touch her. “You’re important to me,” he whispered thickly, reaching out, easing strands of hair away from her shoulder.
There was hope in her eyes. Wild hope. God, how he wanted to have their lives have a happy ending. He saw color come to her cheeks over his grazing contact. Anna was a woman now. She had grown up strong and beautiful. Her lips parted, as if asking him if he would kiss her once again.
Wordlessly, Kyle framed her face, leaned down, closed his eyes and felt Anna lift her chin, wanting this kiss as much as he did. Everything faded around him as he barely brushed her lips. She was so lush, warm and responsive beneath his slow exploration of her. She touched his shoulder tentatively and he slid his hand down her spine, pulling her against him. Kyle wanted to give her the choice whether she wanted this next step, this intimacy he craved so desperately with Anna.
She stepped forward, her breasts brushing lightly against his chest. He groaned as he felt her melt against him, felt her mouth open fully to his, eager, her tongue delicately touching his. Fire bolted down through Kyle, his breathing ragged as he curved his mouth powerfully against hers. He heard a soft sound in her throat, knew she liked what he was offering her. His mind dissolved, his body came online, his erection painful against the zipper of his jeans. She could turn him on in a heartbeat. Her hair swirled across his cheek as he cupped the back of her head, wanting deeper access to Anna.
Where was this going? Where did he want it to go? In the past Kyle would not have thought enough about what the woman wanted. But Anna held his heart. She always had, and right now as she sank fully against him, letting him know she wanted him, Kyle had to think. He couldn’t just take her to bed. He had to know, understand, what Anna expected from him.
Tearing his mouth from hers, Kyle held her close, felt her trembling as she slowly lifted her lashes. He saw flecks of gold in her dark green eyes, saw yearning in them, heard it in her broken breathing, the way her fingers dug into his shoulders.
“Anna,” he rasped, “tell me what you want.” He searched her face. When he had left her at twenty-two, they’d made love one last time. And Anna had broken down in tears afterward, clinging to him, never wanting to let him go. Kyle had never felt like such a bastard. He was going to leave her and he was hurting her as he held her, weeping, in his arms. He didn’t want a replay of that. Ruthlessly, he stared down at her, their hearts racing wildly against one another as the moment strung tautly between them.
“Love me?” she whispered, sliding her fingers across his stubbled jaw.
Closing his eyes, he heard the closeted grief in her voice. “You know I have to leave,” he told her harshly as he opened his eyes. Kyle had to warn her. “God, Anna, I’ve done nothing but hurt you over the years. I’ve left you crying….”
She drew in a deep breath, fearlessly holding his burning gaze. “I’m older now, Kyle. Hopefully a little more realistic.” Anna looked away for a moment, her hand moving restlessly across his shoulder. “I know you’re going away. I accept it…. I don’t like it, but I’m accepting it….”
Just as she was accepting of her miscarriages. Kyle winced inwardly, seeing the pain in the recesses of her eyes. God, he couldn’t do this. “I can’t… I don’t want to hurt you again, Anna.” He slid his fingers through her thick ginger hair, watching her eyes close, feeling her absorbing his touch, remembering him. Remembering what they’d shared before.
She smiled sadly. “Life is full of pain and joy, Kyle. We both know that now. You make my heart come alive. I’ve never felt so alive as when you’re near me. We have until the end of December. I want that time with you. I want to love you. Hold you. I want to sleep at your side every night.” Anna gave him a pleading look. “Don’t turn me away, Kyle. Let me have this much with you. It’s a gift. You’re a gift to me. I—I don’t want to waste one more minute of it.”
His heart crumbled. Just the anguish, the arousal and need of her turned Kyle inside out. When she leaned her head against his shoulder, brow against the column of his neck, drawing him forward against her with her women’s strength, something broke deep within him. What was he doing? Why the hell had he left the person he loved most in this world behind? What was propelling him to make that kind of decision?
The quietness surrounded them. The Christmas music embraced Kyle. The crackle and pop from the massive fireplace made the sense of homecoming even more intense and powerful within him. He was home. He had the woman he’d never stop loving in his arms, pleading with him to love her.
Dammit.
Anna shouldn’t have to ask. Shouldn’t have to beg. He leaned down, kissing her cheek, sliding his fingers across her nape. His voice was low and thick with emotion. “I love you, Anna. I’ve never stopped loving you….”
CHAPTER FOUR
ANNA’S HEART SQUEEZED with joy and pain as Kyle’s low, growling words caressed her temple and ear. He loved her! Hadn’t she always known that? So much anguish from the past flowed through her in that bittersweet moment. Lifting her head away from his shoulder, she drowned in Kyle’s turbulent, stormy gaze. Sensing his pain, his apology, she leaned up, capturing his mouth, rocking his lips open and giving him all those years of waiting for him in that one kiss. A groan reverberated through his chest and he hungrily met and melded against her questing mouth, as if to reassure her all over again that he loved her with a power he’d always carried in his heart for her.
In moments, he’d swept her up into his arms and she sighed, slipping her arms around his shoulders, content to be carried down the darkened hall to his bedroom. Kyle nudged the door open with th
e toe of his boot and carried her inside. There was a small hurricane lamp on the dresser that shed just enough light so he could take her over to the bed and deposit her on it.
Kyle sat down beside her, turning her toward him, his hands resting on her shoulders. “I don’t have any condoms on me,” he told her. His brows dipped as he held her upturned gaze. “I never thought this could happen, Anna.” He grazed her cheek, giving her a look of regret.
“It’s all right,” she said, resting her cheek in his calloused palm.
“Are you protected?” he demanded.
She lifted her cheek from his hand. “No.” Kyle’s face grew concerned. She picked up his hand, so large and spare against her own. “I don’t care, Kyle. Do you understand?” She clung to his widening gaze. “I don’t think I can get pregnant, anyway.”
“I’m sorry, so sorry, Anna,” he growled. “I know how much family means to you.”
She smoothed her fingers across the tightening flesh on his cheekbone. “Listen to me,” she whispered, leaning forward, kissing him softly. “You are my family now, Kyle. I was just too much in denial and fear to admit it.” She eased away, tasting him on her lips. “Don’t you see? You’ve always been a part of my life.”
He drew in a ragged breath, moving his fingers gently along her tapered ones. “Yeah,” he muttered, “you’re right.” He gazed over at her. “I drew that heart behind you for a reason, Anna.” Swallowing against a forming lump, Kyle uttered, “Just looking at our shared past in the decorations, the good times, the laughter we shared, the tough times when we would hug and cry in each other’s arms.”
“You were always there for me.”
He slanted a glance at her. “No…not like I should have been, Anna. Not even close after I turned eighteen.”
“You needed to go explore the world, Kyle.”
He raised her hand, kissing her opened palm, hearing her breath intake sharply, feeling her response, watching those slender, working fingers of hers close slightly in reaction to his mouth lingering against her flesh. “I was young. I was bored here at the ranch, Anna. I knew there were adventures out there waiting for me. I wanted to chase them.”
“And you have.” She tilted her head, holding his disturbed gray gaze. “Are you happy now, Kyle? I knew you were before. At twenty-two, you were high on the SEALs. You believed with all your heart in what you were doing.”
His mouth quirked. “Anna, my knees are staved up. I’ve been shot twice. I’m twenty-nine and the old man in my platoon. I can’t keep up with the younger men like I used to be able to do. I’ve broken my wrist twice, lost count how many times I’ve broken a finger, strained my ankles, torn muscles…” He held up his left hand, showing her scars from surgery on his wrist.
The silence cloaked them and Kyle cradled Anna’s hand between his. He could see the small calluses across her palm and some on her fingers. She had such a delicate hand and yet she was strong internally in ways he currently was not. Anna had the guts to call him on himself. She’d opened him up by simply being herself. And God, he was hurting inside for both of them. Finally, he choked out, “We’ve lost so much time with one another….”
She tangled her fingers among his. “It’s never too late, Kyle.” And then she added quietly, “And maybe that’s the idealist in me again. It’s been my idealism that has distorted my life in some ways…with Tom….”
“Don’t ever lose who you are,” he rasped, holding her gaze. “You don’t know this, Anna, but when I was shot the first time—” he pointed to his left thigh “—I was bleeding out on that damned Afghan desert between two boulders. We’d hit a large force of Taliban, and they had nearly a hundred fighters to our four men. I didn’t think we’d make it out of that firefight.” His mouth slashed and he held her hand more tightly. “My femoral artery had been nicked. I was trying to get a tourniquet around my upper thigh to stop it from bleeding, but my hands were bloody and slippery.” He dragged in a deep breath. “I could feel myself going, Anna. Everything in front of my eyes started turning gray.”
His fingers closed around hers and he wrestled with violent emotions. Forcing out the words, he said, “I knew I was going to die. And the one thing I regretted the most was not marrying you. I saw your face in front of me then. And you were calling me back home, Anna.” He risked a glance up at her, saw tears glimmering in her eyes. “You told me to hang on. That help was coming. That you would be there beside me.” He shook his head and pointed to his collarbone area. “I had your tattered angel in my Kevlar vest. I swear to God, to this day, there was a powerful heat that seemed to radiate out of it and flow down to my wounded leg. The heat was so damned intense, I was crying in pain. And I never cry.”
The words were so hard to say, so hard to force out, but Kyle knew Anna deserved the truth. “I remembered this scalding, burning heat in my leg. I was so damned weak at that point, my hands slipped off the tourniquet. Bullets were flying all around me. I thought if I didn’t bleed to death, that I’d catch a bullet in the head. It was that fierce a firefight….”
Just her quiet presence was stabilizing to Kyle. He went on in a low voice. “I passed out from loss of blood. I remember waking up on a litter in a Black Hawk medevac. There was a woman working over my leg. I remember thinking I’d died because I’d never seen a woman combat medic before.” His mouth quirked. “She told me her name—Holly. Said I was lucky. That my femoral artery had closed itself off and I stopped losing blood. She said the way the artery was cut, it closed and it saved my life.”
Giving Anna a look, Kyle said, “But I knew different. I knew you or that angel had somehow stopped the bleeding.” His voice lowered and he kissed the back of her hand. “It sounds crazy, but you’d healed me with the love you’d always held for me, Anna.”
Tears drifted down her cheeks. There was love in her eyes for him alone. How could he have been so blind? So damned stupid? The best thing in his life was sitting right next to him. “You really are my guardian angel,” he admitted, giving her a slight smile. “You saved my life, Anna, in more ways than one.”
She released a ragged sigh. “Thank you for telling me, Kyle.” She held his gaze. “I have a secret to share with you, too. When Tom came at me, I screamed out your name.” Her voice grew hushed. “I don’t know why I did it, Kyle, I just did. He’d backed me into a corner, pushed me against the stove, and I stumbled backward and slammed into the wall. I remember so clearly that as he came forward, his fist cocked, I knew I was going to die.”
Anna touched her brow in a nervous gesture, risking a look into Kyle’s face. A bone-chilling rage smoldered in his eyes and she understood his anger was aimed at Tom, not at her. “I tried to protect myself. I screamed and begged him to stop. And he wouldn’t. He came at me again and I raised my hands, screaming out your name. He struck me here….” She touched her nose. “And the last thing I remember is seeing your face….”
Kyle stared at her, dumbfounded. “My face?”
She gave a slight shrug. “I needed you so desperately in that moment…realized all along that I’d never stopped loving you…needing you…that you and I were fated lovers. And that’s why I called out to you. Tom broke my nose, cheekbone and jaw.” Taking a deep breath, she said, “If my father hadn’t heard my screams as he walked past our house here on the ranch, I believe Tom would have finished me off. As it was, my father busted down the door, saw Tom hunkered over me and he stopped him. I have no memory of any of it, Kyle. I was bleeding and unconscious. My father, even at fifty-seven, beat the hell out of Tom. He left him lying in an unconscious pile in the middle of the kitchen, called 911 and then tended to me.”
“Jesus,” Kyle rasped, passing his hand over his face. “Why, Anna? Why the hell didn’t you get a hold of me? I’d have come home. I’d have been there for you.”
She shook her head. “I read the emails you sent your parents. You were happy do
ing what you were doing, Kyle. I wasn’t on your radar.”
“The hell you weren’t.” He wanted to cry, the lump in his throat so large that he kept swallowing it back down, afraid to let it rip out of him.
She studied him. “How was I to know?”
“I didn’t even know you were married.” He cursed and shook his head. “I know you said Tom was jealous and you couldn’t risk emailing me.” His brows gathered and he held her hand tightly between his. “I should have known something happened to you, Anna. Because you stopped emailing me six months after I left at twenty-two.”
“I’d met Tom at that time. When I mentioned you one time, he got angry. I knew never to bring up your name again. I couldn’t email you like I’d done in the past. It wasn’t until years later that I realized the depth of his jealousy toward you.”
“I always asked my mom about you. She never said anything about you being married.”
“Because I asked her not to talk about my private life with you, Kyle. Don’t you see? I couldn’t go there. I had to try and move on.” Anna touched her heart, and said in a low voice, “I loved you, Kyle. I never stopped loving you. But your job… The life you chose…”
“I’m one selfish bastard.”
“No. You were a young man full of fire, passion and adventure. You had to leave and explore the world.”
“Dammit!” Kyle released her hand and stood up, slowly pacing. “I wished to hell I could do this over again.” He halted, looking squarely at her. “I had heaven in my hands with you, Anna, and I walked away.”
“We can’t go back, Kyle. All we have is right now.”
He studied her, searching her sad green eyes. His chest felt alive with angry snakes writhing within. “I’ve made so many mistakes with you, Anna.”
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