“Oh, Ian. I’m so sorry,” she said, her beautiful eyes glittering with compassion. “I had no idea.”
“Maybe I am insane, to want to come back to a place with such bad memories—”
“There must be other memories, too, good memories that helped draw you back here. Or maybe you unconsciously sensed that you needed to forgive to heal. I would never call you insane for returning to your family or for worrying about how your more recent past might come back to haunt you, either.”
“No, I guess you shrinks have fancier words for it. You’d call it paranoid, right? Or delusional or some other psychobabble. But I didn’t make up those gunshots, did I? You heard them, too. You saw the reflection from the gun above us.”
She hesitated, and his heart stumbled. He wasn’t really crazy, was he?
She nodded, and he breathed again. “I heard the shots, Ian, and I saw something. Which means it’s possible the reason for your fear might be real, too. So let’s explore that for a moment—”
“I don’t want to explore it. I don’t want to dialogue about it, or own my feelings, or any of that BS you picked up in shrink school. Can’t we just talk, Andrea? Talk the way we used to, back before you kicked me to the curb?”
Her cool look lasered through him. “I’m going to blame that on your memory, but the fact is, I didn’t kick you out of my life. You made that choice, refusing to tell me where you’d been when you disappeared without a word two days before our engagement party. Refusing to tell me why, when I was worried enough to call the army post where you’d told me you were stationed, the MPs I spoke of had no record of you.”
“And I said I couldn’t tell you,” he said, more pieces of the puzzle spinning together in his brain.
“Couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.” She looked away, but not before he saw pure anguish shifting through her expression. “And all I could think of was that, for all the counseling I’d gone through, everything I’d done to start a healthy new life, I was repeating my mother’s mistakes after all...”
“Your mother’s?”
She nodded. “Yes, my mother’s. You don’t remember, do you?”
He grimaced, his mind snatching at memories that darted from his grasp like minnows. Unexpectedly, he caught one. “Your mom’s dead. You found her, after. After she’d taken a whole bottle full of—”
Seeing the pain flash over Andrea’s expression, he cut himself off. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to blurt it out like that. It’s just—when something comes back—”
“No, it’s good. It’s true, that’s what happened,” she allowed. “And I’m glad your memory’s returning. That’s a good sign.”
He opened his mouth to ask her what their breakup had had to do with her mother’s “mistake,” as she’d put it. But something else occurred to him first, something he couldn’t wait another minute to get off his chest. “I’ve remembered other things today, too, when I was climbing up to try to see the shooter.”
“Flashbacks?” she asked. “I was worried the gunfire might’ve triggered—”
“I know the reason I lied to you in California. Why I felt I had to.”
She dabbed at her dripping forehead. “I thought you might be married, but I didn’t see a word about a wife or ex-wife in your file.”
“You thought I might be—? Hell, no. I’d never do that. Lie to you like that, I mean. There was no other woman.”
“But you did lie to me, about your military post, at least.”
He sighed. “Believe me, it wasn’t by choice. But when you’re involved with clandestine services, it’s easier to use a cover story than—”
“Clandestine services?” She blinked at him. “Do you mean—you were some sort of spy or something? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Not a spy, exactly,” he said. “My work with the CIA involved cultivating relationships with foreign resources.”
“So you were a spymaster, then. Really?”
“Something like that,” he admitted, though even now, with his once all-consuming career in tatters, it went against the grain to talk about his work.
“Then what were you doing in California?” she asked. “I thought people like that were all overseas or in D.C.”
“Not all of us, not all the time. But as I’m sure you guessed, I was called on to travel quite a lot—especially when there was a lot of chatter about planned terrorist activities targeting our country’s citizens.”
“So you were overseas, then, when something went wrong?”
The dark city street came back to mind, followed by a blinding flash, a deafening boom and crumbling masonry—then nothing. “It sure as hell wasn’t like the army claimed, but there was an attack when I was on my way to meet a potential asset who’d promised to turn over sensitive information. An explosion, and then...”
Overcome by a dizzying sensation, he sank down to sit beside her on the boulder. He couldn’t think, couldn’t speak, panic racing with his pulse as the ravine whirled around him. Panic that pushed back the onslaught of memory that threatened, the tidal wave of shame that left him shaking. If he’d only seen it coming, recognized the subtle clues that he was being set up for an ambush, he could have avoided capture and the torture that had made him—
“No wonder they want me to die,” he murmured, rising to stagger away where he could retch again and again, bringing up nothing but his own icy terror. What the hell did I do? How many deaths did I cause?
* * *
Rising from the boulder where she had been sitting, Andrea fought to hold herself back, to give Ian the space to pull himself together. Not so much for his benefit, she realized, but because she felt so vulnerable herself. So at risk of forgetting who she was and what she’d come to do.
I’m here as a psychologist, she reminded herself, drawing on my professional experience with PTSD survivors. Not so much as a friend, no matter what had been said, and definitely not as Ian’s lover. So why was it she ached to touch him, to comfort him not with words, but...?
No. She wasn’t going to chance it. To risk confusing Ian, risk disgracing herself. She pressed the damp bandanna to the wound on her head harder than she meant to, the resulting stab of pain a penance for what she had been thinking.
No, not thinking, she realized. Feeling. Succumbing to memories of falling headlong into a love affair that had proved such a bad idea on the first occasion.
She walked away, holding her hands over her stomach, knowing that, in returning to him his past, she risked losing sight of her own present, not to mention the future she had planned with Julian. She fought to focus on the man she’d fallen for, the man whose vision for the center had captured her imagination. She remembered how he’d invited her to lunch at a seminar on post-traumatic stress disorder, how his passion in describing Warriors-4-Life had lured her from a better-paying job in a place that wasn’t located in the dead center of nowhere.
He’d explained to her how costs were so much lower here in Texas. It was only by sheer chance that the vacant nursing facility the organization had restored had ended up being so close to the Rayford family’s spread. Chance, not fate, had brought her here.
But the harder she struggled to picture Julian’s face, to enumerate his noble and inspiring qualities, the more she kept glancing back at Ian, who was now crouching by the water, jeans straining against his strong thighs, his lean, muscular arms scooping handfuls to his mouth to drink. When he turned to glance back at her, the sight of him nearly took her breath away, the high cheekbones and deep tan that spoke of native blood in his lineage, the contrast of his deep blue eyes—eyes that glittered with unspeakable pain. With the need for reassurance that only she could provide.
Seeing him like that, her brain shut down completely and muscle memory took over. Her mouth drying in an instant, she started toward him. At the same moment, he moved t
oward her, his steps longer, swifter, unstoppable.
Helpless to resist, she hurried, too, her every cell crying out for the necessity of contact. When he took her into his arms, she felt the rush, heard the whoosh as her willpower caught flame, all her resolve burned to ashes the moment their mouths came together.
She tumbled to temptation, to the desperate press of lips and tangle of tongues, the hunger to taste what she’d never guessed she had been starved for. Pleasure arced through her entire body, a buzzing need that made her breasts ache for the sensation of his hands, his mouth on them. Between her legs, an even deeper yearning set in, an ache that left her wondering how she could have lived so long without his touch.
His lips slid to her neck, the hot moisture of his mouth moving over sensitive skin beneath her ear. She moaned aloud, felt herself grow hot and wet as sensation spiraled though her. Her hands rubbed at his back, pulling him even closer.
He yanked her shirttail from her jeans, then reached up beneath her top, finding and tweaking a hard nipple. She remembered how it felt—the moist heat of his mouth suckling—and the memory was so strong, her desire so sharp, that she nearly came right then. Her knees buckled from beneath her so suddenly that Ian had to make a grab for her to keep her from collapsing.
His eyes found hers, their electric blue intensity cutting through the past two years, cutting through her willpower. “I know the timing’s bad—worse than bad—stuck out here with heaven knows who waiting to take another shot at us the second we leave cover. But I’m putting you on notice that I want you. I need you. And the first chance I get, the first damn moment we can find a private, safe spot, I mean to make you forget there’s ever been anyone besides me. Because there damned well never should’ve been. It was all one big mistake.”
It would’ve been so easy to nod her head. To forget the danger, forget herself, and give in to the chatter of the little creek, the sunshine slanting through the green leaves, the unbearable hunger building in her body and provoke him to make love to her here and now. But in the depths of his gaze, she read the terror of the unknown, his desperation to latch on to those few things that seemed familiar.
That was all she was to him, a solid rock to cling to at the center of a rushing torrent. A torrent that seemed to echo his words: All one big mistake...
She pulled free of his embrace, blinking and shaking her head as she struggled to clear the flood of hormones. The physical attraction she’d already allowed to carry her far past her normal boundaries.
“No, Ian. This is crazy. I don’t know what’s got into me to—” Seeing the hurt wash over him, she ached to return to him, but she couldn’t risk the contact. “I was in the wrong here, clearly. This is totally unethical.”
“Don’t do this to me, Andrea,” he said, his gaze a raw wound that made the cut still oozing on her forehead fade into insignificance. “Don’t treat me like I’m nothing but your patient.”
“But you are my patient, in a sense, and I was wrong to forget that for a single second.” The trembling that racked her found its way into her voice. “Wrong to come here, clearly, to imagine I could put the past aside.”
“You can’t put it aside—can’t put me aside—because you still love me,” he insisted, “just the way I love you. Those old feelings, they’re all still there. I dreamed of your face, your body for so long. I followed the memory of you home.”
She closed her eyes. “Please don’t, Ian. Don’t put that on me. I do care for you, really. I think I always will. But I love another man now, a man I owe my loyalty—” She put a hand over her mouth in an attempt to stifle the sob that she felt coming. Because she hadn’t proved worthy of the trust Julian had offered. She’d been every bit the faithless cheater his ex-wife had been. Worse yet, she’d lived up to her father’s legacy—a father whose broken faith had cost her family everything.
“If you love this man so much, what are you doing kissing me?” Ian asked.
She opened her eyes, blinking away their dampness. “Getting tangled in old emotions, echoes from the past. In my own grief after learning—did you know the army sent a chaplain and an officer to notify me you were dead?”
“Oh, Andrea. I’m sorry. I meant to change that after we—”
“It doesn’t matter now, and I don’t blame you. But it did tear open old wounds and make me think what might have been. If it—if it hadn’t been for meeting Julian, I don’t know how I would have—”
“Julian. So that’s his name. The man I’m going to make you forget.”
“I’m sorry, Ian, but Julian’s the man I’m going to marry.” A lump swelled in her throat, so painful it made her eyes brim over. “At least if he’ll forgive me, after this.”
“You’ll tell him?”
She nodded, a yawning chasm opening in the hollow of her stomach. “Of course, I will. I won’t start a life with him with secrets between us.”
“Then I hope he’s a jealous ass. I hope he—”
“Don’t talk about him. Please don’t. I feel horrible enough already. And he’s a great man, really. You’d like him if you ever met him, if you heard him talk about the center, about the need to help the soldiers coming back from war with so many terrible...” She realized she’d said the wrong thing as color suffused Ian’s face.
“You mean poor broken wrecks like me. Pathetic losers you would never dream of—”
“Stop it, Ian. Please, stop. Let’s not make this any worse.”
“I’m not sure how it could get worse,” he said, “unless the sniper—”
As if conjured by his words, the rumble of an engine silenced the singing of the birds. An arrival that drove home the realization of just how vulnerable they were.
* * *
“Ian, are you down there? Dr. Warrington?”
Ian’s tension dissipated when he recognized his brother’s deep voice, calling him from the mouth of the ravine.
“We’re down by the creek!” Ian called, watching from the corner of his eye as Andrea hurriedly tucked her shirt back into her jeans. “We’re coming up now.”
She looked up, catching his eye, and he noticed the flush of redness beneath her collar.
“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “I’m not the type to kiss and tell—even if you’re still planning on it.”
Avoiding his gaze, she went to rinse out the bandanna in the creek one last time. Once she was done, she followed as he retraced the uphill path they’d originally traveled, where both Zach and Virgil Straughn, the longtime ranch manager, stood outside of Zach’s four-door pickup, their faces drawn with worry.
“Thought you must’ve run into some trouble when the horses showed up at the barn,” Zach said. “I tried calling your phone—could’ve wrung your damned neck when I couldn’t get through.”
In spite of the harshness of his words, Ian saw Zach’s tension in the stiffness of his shoulders, saw how badly he had scared his older brother. “I had the phone with me this time, and I swear I tried to call you. But there’s no signal down there. Couldn’t even get a text out.”
Zach thumped him on the back a lot harder than was strictly necessary. “Thank God, you’re still in one piece, man. My life flashed before my eyes at the thought of having to tell Mama you’d been...”
“That makes two of us,” Virgil put in as he pulled off his sweat-stained hat and raked his fingers through his thinning gray hair. “Poor woman would’ve had another breakdown for sure.”
Zach caught sight of Andrea pressing the cloth to her forehead. “Are you all right? What happened?”
“Just a little bump,” she said, sounding surprisingly subdued. “I’ll be fine, I’m sure.”
“Here, miss.” Virgil hurried to the truck with surprising speed, considering his slight paunch and the hitch in his gait. He opened the passenger-side front door and waved her over. �
�You should sit down here in the cab, and I’ll get you some water and—how about some Tylenol? I think we’ve got some in the first-aid kit.”
“That’d be fantastic,” she said, heading for the pickup.
Hearing the exhaustion in her voice, Ian realized how rough the ordeal had been on her, both physically and emotionally. He’d been wrong to take advantage, to come on with all the finesse of a charging bull while she was so vulnerable.
But that didn’t mean he hadn’t meant every word he’d said. He wasn’t sorry he had kissed her, either—a kiss that had cut through all the fog of his confusion like a beam of pure white light. Complicated as their situation was, his feelings for her were the only thing he trusted, the one thing he could see that was still worth fighting for.
While Virgil fussed over Andrea, Zach gave Ian the full big-brother stare. “So what the hell went on here? How’d you let her get hurt?”
Ian scowled at him. “I’m glad to see you, too, bro. Especially glad it was you and not the son of a bitch who decided to use the two of us for target practice.”
“Target practice?” Zach’s gaze narrowed, sweeping the prairie in all directions. “You’re telling me someone shot at you two?”
“I am. And as you can probably imagine, our horses took exception.”
“I figured something was up when I spotted ’em making for the barn like their tails were on fire. So who was shooting? Did you see ’em? And are you sure they meant to shoot at you?”
“Damned sure, considering how close those bullets came—and how the shooter fired again after Andrea called out that we were down there.” Ian’s throat tightened as it hit him how close they’d both come to being killed out here. “And no, I never saw him or heard anything except an engine when he took off. Thought we’d be better off, though, waiting for help down where there’s good cover.”
“Smart move,” Zach allowed, “and I was damned glad to find that note you left saying where you and the doc were going.” He glanced back toward the truck, where Virgil was rattling around in the backseat cooler to get Andrea some ice. “That bump on her head—”
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