by Ann Evans
She swore softly. They’d never make it up the stairs. Already her arms were quivering with the effort it took to keep him from sliding down to the floor.
“Do you have a bathroom with a shower down here?” she asked, searching for an alternative.
“Uh-huh,” he said, flinging an arm in the general direction of the kitchen. “So I don’t drag mud or snow through the place.”
“Perfect. I’ve got you. Now walk.”
Nick started off steadily enough, then cursed as he tottered and threatened to fall over. Together they lurched past the kitchen, down a long hallway, colliding noisily every so often with walls and doors until they reached a bathroom off the mudroom. There was a small shower stall in the corner. With one hand supporting Nick, Kari used her other to slide the plastic curtain back. Little by little she managed to get him propped against the back wall of the shower. As soon as she turned loose of him, he slid into a sitting position.
His head fell back, hitting the wall with an audible thunk. He lifted it, blinked slowly, looking around. “This isn’t my bedroom.”
Breathing heavily, Kari crouched on her heels in front of him. “No, it’s not. But I just want you to remember, I’m doing this for your own good.”
“Doing what?”
Instead of answering, she gave him a quick, hard kiss on the lips. Then she stepped out of the shower, pulled the curtain closed and stuck her hand back in to fumble for the faucet. The one marked “cold.”
Nick yelped as the icy water hit him, then blistered the air with a string of curses that bounced off the walls so loudly Kari wanted to cover her ears against the sound. She sat on the toilet, listening to him groan and sputter and curse some more. The water ran and ran, and long minutes passed.
Eventually Nick grew quiet. Just when she thought she should probably check to make sure he was all right, the water stopped running. Metal rings screeched across their rod as he yanked the curtain back. He was still sitting on the tile. Soaked, of course. Water streamed from his hair, running down the long length of his neck. His clothes were matted against his body as though they’d become a second skin.
He didn’t look happy. Not angry, really. But definitely not happy.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Do I look all right?”
“Are you sober?”
“Close enough.”
He blew water away from his lips and pulled his legs against his chest. His feet made little splashes of sound as they settled into the puddles on the shower floor.
“Good. Then you can manage from here, right?”
She made a move to leave the room, but he reached out and grabbed her arm. “Wait a minute. Not so fast.”
“Hey!”
The room tilted and she somehow ended up seated beside him on the tile, their legs entwined. Water soaked through the material of her jeans in no time. She struggled to put a little distance between them, but it was hopeless.
“This is no way to thank someone,” she said.
He took one of her hands, touching his lips to the back of her balled fist. His eyes lifted to hers. “Thank you,” he said softly.
She flushed. She was very much aware of his physicality, the glimpse of dark hair where the wet fabric of his shirt had parted, the way water lay in the hollow of his throat like a tiny pool, the strength of his hands, feeling like a burn in spite of the cold water.
“You’re welcome,” she said in a tight voice.
“Was I a complete ass?”
“The worst.”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t been drunk since…well, I can’t remember the last time. You haven’t been seeing a very good side of me lately, have you? First with Tessa. Now this.”
“At least you have one,” she remarked, hoping for a lighter tone. “I used to think you didn’t.”
He looked at her sharply. His mouth stretched into a small smile. “Life is full of surprises, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh. Sometimes some pretty big ones.”
He brought one hand to her face, letting his fingers drift over her cheekbones, then her lips, while the last of the water plinked from the shower head. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. There was no logic in allowing him to touch her here, now, but she felt bound by some impossible magic, some strange inertia.
“Have you ever made love in the shower?” he asked.
“No. I’m strictly a bathtub kind of girl.”
He grinned. “That can be arranged.”
“Nick…”
“You owe me a kiss.”
“How do you figure that?”
“I didn’t forget everything,” he told her, lifting a wry eyebrow. Then his face became very serious. “I’m going to kiss you now. If you’re going to say no, it may be too late.”
“I’m not going to say no.”
“Good.”
He kept his promise, pulling her closer, holding her face in his palms as he kissed her so thoroughly that it gave her an insane rush of pleasure. She heard her breath come in little gusts. She felt unnerved and powerless, while her blood moved thin and hot in her veins.
He smiled at her as he pulled away at last. “That was nice. But I can do better.” His fingers plucked against her blouse. “Shall we get these clothes off?”
“Nick…”
He pulled her against him again, his hand moving to gently cup the underside of her breast. Her legs drew up, coming against the wetness of his jeans, sliding along the length of them and finding the sensation oddly sensual. She moaned.
“Shh…” he whispered as he laid a trio of kisses against the side of her face. “I’m going to take good care of you, Kari. Protect you. Upstairs. An entire drawer full of protection.” His light laugh reverberated in her ear, making her stomach quiver. “We just have to get there.”
As though in a dream, she tilted her head away, allowing him access to her throat. He nipped and kissed and showed her his intentions, his palm continuing to travel in a slow, tender circle against one nipple even as his mouth found the turn of her neck. His touch—oh, she could not get enough of it.
Her senses slowed. She opened her eyes, looking down. “You’re right. You do have big feet.”
“What?” he asked, barely lifting his head.
“Nothing.”
She gave up trying to make sense of any of it. Desire such as this had been a long time coming. She had fought and struggled and yearned to find magic in her life, and finally here it was. She wasn’t going to deny it any longer. There was something, something she had to find out—she couldn’t name it, but could identify the longing.
Somehow it was all connected to Nick. This charming, dangerous man who had come roaring into her life. She turned her head quickly and kissed him back. Hard, wanting him to know how much she needed this.
She felt the twitch of his mouth as it curved into a smile.
She’d been wrong earlier. They could make it up the stairs and to his bedroom.
Eventually.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A LONG WHILE LATER, in the dusky lavender of twilight, Kari sighed. Even to her own ears, it greatly resembled a contented purr.
“My sentiments exactly,” Nick whispered, touching his lips to her cheek.
They lay naked in his bed, bodies tucked close, satiated and warm beneath the covers. Their clothes, both wet and dry, had been discarded with little fuss. They had made love, slept a while, and now there was just this soft silence between them. A sweet silence. The kind neither one of them felt compelled to break.
For one insane moment she wished they could remain like this always. This pleasure upon pleasure, the feeling of weightlessness and freedom—the sensations Nick had coaxed from her body were exquisite. And so, so much more powerful than she had ever dreamed possible. It felt strange and raw, to be filled with such a terrible need for his touch.
And when she went away, when she left Lightning River Lodge and Nick D’Angelo far behind her…what then?
; Emotions she couldn’t begin to sort out pounded through her head. The one thing she was certain of was that, in his arms, her body surged ahead of her brain and she felt lost. As though a tornado had picked her up and then deposited her in some strange land.
The telephone rang and Nick stretched to answer it. She hoped it wasn’t Renata, looking for her. Kari had already called from her cell phone, asking for the night off. How easily a lie had come to her lips with Nick’s mouth teasing her throat. Of course, the older woman had said yes. They could manage. Kari was free to do as she pleased.
And oh, she had. With Nick, she definitely had.
She waited, her head pressed against his chest, her fingers absently stroking across the silky dark hair that whorled around one nipple. She could tell whoever was on the line wasn’t family. His words were sharp and short, and beneath her ear, his heart went into trip-hammer rhythm.
“Thanks for calling me,” he said. “I’ll be in touch soon.” Then he replaced the receiver.
He remained quiet, but she felt his arms tighten around her, as though he could take strength from that embrace.
“Everything all right?” she asked.
A long moment. Then he said, “They found Bran.”
The silence, so wondrous only minutes ago, seemed suddenly oppressive. She waited for Nick to continue, but he didn’t. She lay still in his arms, watching the moon through the window moving up in the night sky like a huge white coin. For a moment she teetered between regret that this beautiful interlude had come to an end and a feeling of bottomless sympathy for what Nick must be going through right now.
“He’s not dead,” he added in a bemused tone, sounding as though he couldn’t really absorb that news.
She lifted up on one elbow. In the coming darkness, his features were nearly indistinguishable. “That was Roxanne,” he said. “Bran’s girlfriend. He’s in a rehab center in San Diego. Checked himself in to get help for his drinking.”
“What about his clothes on the beach?” she asked in surprise.
“He told her he’d intended to kill himself, but after he got into the water and sobered up, he’d realized he couldn’t do it. The current took him out. Some fishermen picked him up, stark naked. They loaned him a pair of shorts and dropped him at the nearest dock. Bran walked down to a pay phone and called the local center for alcoholic rehabilitation.” He blew a gusty, relieved breath against her hair. “Damn his sorry hide. I could kill that bastard with my bare hands.”
Elated for his sake, Kari slid closer, planting soft kisses against his chest, across the line of his collarbone. “Oh, Nick. That’s wonderful. Wonderful.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it is.”
He seemed in shock, as though he’d never considered the possibility of a happy ending for Bran. Kari settled against him again, and they remained like that for a long time, just holding one another. He let his fingers play through her hair, rubbed his hand gently along her arm again and again, and when those movements finally ceased, she thought he might have fallen asleep.
But then, suddenly, in the softest of voices, he said, “Bran and I flew Black Hawks together. In the war.”
“Desert Storm?”
She felt his nod against her hair. “In Bosnia, too.”
“Were you close?”
“Closer than brothers. You get that way in places like that.”
She was relieved to hear him talk of the relationship at last. She sensed that whatever burden he carried from the past, it needed to be taken out of isolation and set free. “Was it horrible?”
Nick paused, then said, “You have no idea what men will do to one another for a cause they believe in. We were young, scared most of the time and trying not to show it.” He snorted. “I think the guys we were picking up were more scared than we were. When we came over a sand dune to scoop them up, you could see they wanted to weep, they were that glad to see us. Bran and I thought what we were doing there was important. Not because of any political statement being made. Just in support of the guys who needed us.”
“There can’t be any better reason than that.”
“There was this time, just once, when I doubted…”
He stopped, and she felt his chest rise quickly as his lungs hitched for air. She angled her head up at him, trying to find his eyes. “Nick, please talk to me. I want to help if I can.”
“I’ve never believed in rehashing the past. Especially when there’s nothing you can do to change things. But Bran…maybe if he’d talked to someone, maybe if we’d both talked about it…”
She reached up, cupping the side of his face with her hand. “Talk to me about it. Let it out. I would never judge you.”
He was silent so long she thought he meant to refuse. She forced herself to keep quiet and wait. Just wait.
“We were in Iraq,” he said at last. “Orders came through to do a hot extraction of some coalition forces trapped in the Euphrates River valley.”
“Hot extraction? You mean, get them out?”
“Yeah. They were in the middle of a firefight, getting the crap knocked out of them by the Republican Guard. As soon as we got there, we could see that our guys were pinned down in a drainage ditch in a field. There were dead goats and camels everywhere—some of the Bedouin shepherds were firing on our men, too, because they thought they’d get cash rewards from the Iraqi army. It was chaos.”
His lips came against her temple, as if needing contact. She wondered if he was even aware that he’d touched her there. “An F-16 came up to give air support. Dropped a cluster bomb right on top of the enemy to shake things up. It only got worse after that. Everyone running for cover, flares going off to mark positions.”
“I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”
“It was like hell. Smoke and confusion and men screaming. Bran and I just wanted to pick up as many as we could and get out of there, but I couldn’t see the ground, much less land the bird. I knew Bran was having the same trouble. He was yelling for his door gunners to get ready for the hit. He slammed down, then I landed almost on top of him. So close, I swear I could see the freckles on his copilot’s nose. I told my gunners to lay ground cover. Then our boys started scrambling into the bay. Some of them were getting picked off even as they climbed aboard.”
“I don’t know how anyone goes through something like that,” Kari whispered. Her heart was hammering in her chest.
“The thing is, it’s all happening so fast. Your body just reacts, even if your mind can’t accept it.” He sucked in a deep breath, as though trying to gather courage for the rest. “So there we were, bullets ripping into the birds, men yelling and trying to find some corner to get into. The smoke and dust started to clear a little. Then over the radio I hear Bran yelling, ‘Watch it, Delta Two! Watch it!’”
“You were Delta Two?”
“Yeah. Only I couldn’t see a damned thing and neither could my gunners. Bran shouted to his miniguns, ‘Left flank! Left flank! Take ’em out. Get ’em the hell off of us!’ So they did. They just started firing.”
He stopped. Took another deep breath. The images were in Kari’s head now, too, unbearable, and she could barely breathe herself.
“It was just a couple of frightened shepherd’s kids, running through the smoke, probably trying to find their folks. A boy and a little girl, probably no more than six.” When Kari gasped, he moved against her, as though trying to both give comfort and find it. “We lifted off right after that.” A pause. “I always thought that from the air they looked like rag dolls, just lying there as if someone had thrown them out in the trash.”
Horrified, Kari shut her eyes momentarily, trying to dislodge the picture from her mind and finding herself unable to do so. “Oh, Nick—”
“You don’t have to say it. I’ve replayed it in my mind dozens of times, what we could have done differently, how we could have known. But I know it wasn’t anyone’s fault, really.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Kari said firmly. “It
was just the…the horrible tragedy that war brings sometimes.”
“Bran blames himself, of course. Says he can still see those kids coming out of the smoke at the last moment before the minis went off. That he should have waited one more split second before giving the order to fire. That he shouldn’t have panicked.”
“How could he have made any other choice, given those circumstances? He was trying to save lives. Yours included.”
“I’ve said the same thing to him, but I don’t think he believes me. His drinking has gotten worse since he got out of the service. He can’t hold a job. Looking back now, I realize I should have tried harder to get him real help.”
She hugged him closer. “Bran is alive. It’s not too late to help him. And you will. You know that you will.”
“Roxanne says he can’t have visitors for at least a month with the program they’ve got him on. But yes, after that, I plan to go out there. See what I can do to help.”
A month. In a month she’d be long gone from here. Most likely, she would never see Nick again. She could not contain it, the pure pain of loss that cut deep into her heart.
What was she feeling for this man she’d known less than two weeks? A man whose past was still so much of a mystery and whose future was one she couldn’t imagine sharing? It didn’t seem possible. This was lust, not love. And yet, she was suddenly filled with amazement that, against all odds and common sense, she might very well be in love with Nick D’Angelo.
He sighed heavily and made a fretful movement. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Not now.”
She recognized that she couldn’t press him any further. Deliberately she gave him a more playful glance. “All right. What would you like to talk about?”
“Who said anything about talking?” he asked, a smile buried low in his voice.
He pulled her suddenly on top of him. In the calculated way he moved against her, Kari realized that he was determined to put all talk of the past behind them. No more tales of death or pain. His touch was almost a desperate reach for life.