She didn’t drink. “Conversations? That means you want to…”
“Talk.” He took a drink. “Specifically, I want to tell you what happened to me.”
An inexplicable lump formed in her throat. “How you got your injury?”
“How I made the stupidest decision in my life, which I will no doubt live to regret forever.”
So it was the voice of experience she’d heard in the car. “And that’s how you got hurt?”
“No,” he said, putting down the glass and closing his hand over hers. “It’s how you did.”
CHAPTER 15
I won’t lie and tell you I knew I loved you when I got on that plane to Kuwait.”
Her eyes, even lit by the candles, showed he’d made a direct hit.
“But I think I did by the time I landed.”
She lifted her fork, then set it down again. “That must have been some flight.”
“It was long,” he acknowledged. “I spent the whole twenty-some hours next to my lieutenant, Scott Pillius. We’d done previous tours together, in Baghdad, a thousand foot patrols, a hundred near misses, a couple dozen good men and women lost. We were like brothers by then, and getting on that plane, knowing we were in it together?” He shook his head. “Well, we weren’t going back to patrol neighborhoods and train Iraqi soldiers, like I told you we were.”
She finally took a sip of wine. “You lied about what you were going to do?”
“I didn’t tell you the truth. In the military, there’s a fine distinction between the two.”
“So what were you going to do, you and Lieutenant Pillius?”
Just the way she said his buddy’s name, the sweet way it came off her lips, hurt a little. Scott would have loved her.
“Supporting Delta ops and Navy SEALs on terrorist hunts. Cleaning al-Qaeda scum from caves and safe houses. I was the platoon sergeant, in charge of four squads, about thirty-five soldiers, taking them into the inner cordon, weeding out suicide bombers, and women and children—who were sometimes one and the same—just some general housekeeping before the Deltas and SEALs swooped in to get who they came after.”
He took his own drink, Nino’s potent wine burning his throat as much as the confession he’d practiced while she’d bathed. She listened intently, her blue eyes trained on him, her body still but for that vein pulsing in her neck.
“Anyway, Scott and I, we talked all the way over. Nobody had any illusions that it was going to be easy. So, maybe to stay sane, we talked about how we’d spent our free time before deployment.”
A soft flush of color rose in her cheeks. “You told him how we spent those three weeks?”
“It wasn’t quite three weeks,” he corrected her, deliberately not answering the question. “It was only nineteen days.”
She closed her eyes. “You counted.”
“Every one.”
She put her fingers to her lips as though she were shocked by that, or just speechless.
“Didn’t you?” he asked. “Didn’t you count every day and every night?”
“To be honest, I counted the ones after you left, not while you were there.”
He sighed, shaking his head, so damn sorry for that. “Well, I counted the ones we had, because…” Because they mattered so much.
“So what happened on the plane?”
“Well, first, let me tell you that I heard you crying when I got out of the shower that morning.”
Her eyes filled. “I didn’t want you to leave.”
“You know, Sammi, for the first time since I’d joined the Army back in 2001, I didn’t want to leave. I loved the Army. It was the real family I never had, one that I’d chosen, not… chosen by fate and a mother who was trying to make a point.” He waved a hand, knowing their food was getting cold, but also knowing that neither of them cared. “But that time, I didn’t want to go back to war. I didn’t want to leave you.”
She blinked, a tear snaking down her cheek, as painful to him as if it were a trickle of blood. “And when I said I loved you?”
He swallowed. “I just didn’t know how to say it back. I didn’t know for sure yet. I didn’t want to just say it because we’d had great sex and I was leaving for war. It seemed so… cliché.”
“There’s a reason for clichés,” she said softly. “Because they’re… real.”
“I didn’t say it because I was scared to,” he finally said.
“I was scared, too,” she said. “But I said it. And I planned to keep saying it. I thought I’d send perfume-scented love letters or be on the phone with weepy, emotional calls. But they never happened.” Her voice cracked, but she swallowed a sob. “So then I thought maybe I’d say it again when you swept me into your arms at some kind of patriotic homecoming where we both ran to each other with flags waving and bands playing. I never dreamed I’d never hear from you again.”
Her tears rolled now, and his heart cracked with every whispered, pain-filled word she said.
“There were no bands when I came home,” he said softly.
She wiped her face, digging for composure. “So what happened on that plane?”
He blew out a long, slow breath. “Scott told me that his wife was pregnant with twins. Which, of course, being one, I thought was pretty cool. They knew it was a boy and a girl, and before he left, they bought a house in Columbus, where the seventy-fifth was stationed. His plan…” He laughed softly just thinking about Scottie and the way his eyes danced when he’d made his admission. “Was to finish this tour, get out, and be a stay-at-home dad. Milly, his wife, was an accountant making good money, and they’d decided he was going to be Mr. Mom.”
She smiled. “That doesn’t sound like an Army Ranger.”
“I know,” he agreed, thinking of his buddy beaming over a diaper change. “He was so excited about it. He just wanted to cook and do laundry and go to the park, and raise those babies right up to college. He wanted the whole nine yards, a life with… a wife.”
“And you…”
“I realized I kind of wanted the same thing. With you.”
Her throat made a soft sound, a mewl of pain, and it cut him like a dagger to the heart.
“I told Scottie that, well, I might have found my girl. My wife. My life.”
She just stared at him, her eyes pools of tears. “Zach.”
“He was killed two days after we got there.”
“Oh, no.” She blinked, and the tears fell. “What a horrible shame.”
“They’re all a horrible shame, Sammi.” He heard the hitch in his voice, too. “Every single senseless death is a travesty. And every single soldier leaves behind someone. A wife, a mother, a child. Every one of them leaves a wake of pain and misery for the person they love.”
“So you changed your mind.” He heard the defeat in her tone, saw it in her eyes. “No love, no life, no wife… no one gets hurt if you die.”
He shrugged. “I decided the day he died my odds sucked, and that if I wrote to you or called you or kept this… this… going, you’d end up folding the flag at my funeral. I thought you deserved a chance to move on to something a little more stable. I thought if I just let you go, you’d naturally find someone else.”
He let his words fall on the table, final and precise.
“You thought wrong.” She shoved the cold food to the side and leaned on the table. “And you could have asked me what I thought about being that wife, living that life. Didn’t I get a say?”
“I knew what you’d say, Sam. You’d say you’d wait. You’d pray. You’d build a relationship with my family and have my picture next to your bed and live for emails that hardly ever came and phone calls that came even less. Then you’d have to face the man at the door with the inevitable news.”
She slammed her hand on the table and pushed her chair back, anger coming off her in waves. “Well, you were wrong, Zach. It wasn’t inevitable. There was no man and no funeral. And, damn it, I lived for those emails and phone calls anyway.” Her voice cracked. �
�I waited for that… that… that fucking postcard that never came.”
“I’m sorry.” Hollow, hollow words.
“No, you’re not.” Her tears were dry now, but her fury fresh. “How long have you been home, Zach? A year? And you had to have come home at least once or twice before that, right?”
“Twice.”
“Oooh!” She punched her fist in the air as if she could hit him. “And you couldn’t call? Even when you were alive and healthy and fine?”
He didn’t even wince. “I was home for a few weeks and didn’t even see everyone in my family on those leaves.”
“And when you came home for the last time?”
“I was injured.” He said it simply, as though that explained everything.
“And your point is, what? That I wouldn’t be interested in a man with one eye?”
He stood slowly. “This conversation wasn’t supposed to be about my injury.”
“Oh, no?” She held her hands up as if she had to stop everything. “Well, sorry, but we just can’t avoid it anymore.”
“I don’t even think about it, Sam.” He scooped up the dishes, hardly touched.
“You fucking liar.”
He clunked the plates back to the table. “I am not a liar,” he said. “I just told you the truth. From my heart, all that talking you wanted, I gave it to you. And now you want to pin me to the wall and give me shit about my eye?”
“It’s the elephant in the room, Zach. You try to act like it’s not there, but it is. Like you are normal, but you’re not. Like you don’t want pity, but when someone calls you a monster you—”
“I do not.” He ground out the word. “I do not want pity.”
“Then what do you want?”
Us. Love. Forever. Sight. Wholeness. You. Nothing Zaccaria Angelino could ever have.
“What do you want?” she asked again, more softly, defeat in her voice.
He went with the easiest. “You.”
“I want you, too, Zaccaria.” She whispered his name and held out her arms. “I want you so much.”
But he couldn’t move into those arms. “You deserve better.” And that, he knew, was the real reason he couldn’t write that fucking postcard. Even when he was whole.
So she closed the space between them, taking that one step that he couldn’t. And his heart folded in half with love for her.
“Zach.” She cupped his face like she had in her apartment, her warm, dry palm closing over his scar. “I don’t want better.”
He just looked at her.
“I want you,” she said. “Just like you are. You.” She grazed the scar, threatening to slide her finger under the patch. He tried not to flinch. “I want that man who left me crying. The man who talked all night and made me laugh and drove me crazy. I want that man, no matter how he looks. Because that man, that man you used to be and that man I know you still are, that man looks…” She lifted the patch, inched it over his forehead, slid it off his head. “Exactly the way he’s supposed to look.”
She traced her fingers over the sewn flesh, the bumps of skin where an eye used to open and close, the burn incendiary now. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t utter a word that was in his heart. Couldn’t say what he was feeling because he’d sound like an idiot.
But Sam didn’t notice, because she was still touching him.
“That man who made decisions on a plane and then unmade them without consulting me… that man is still the most beautiful man I’ve ever known.”
He gritted his teeth. “Now I know you’re lying.”
“I am not lying, Zach.” She inched up on her toes and kissed his good cheek. Then his scarred cheek. Then his mouth. Heat coiled up inside him, his body betraying his brain, his need so much bigger than his pride. “I want to make love to you,” she whispered. “And then I want to talk all night long.”
“At least you’ve got it in the right order.” He wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her into him, closing his mouth over hers, folding her against him, devouring her lips and tongue. He could almost feel her melting, softening, angling her tender woman’s body against his hard man’s need.
He bent over and scooped her up, buckling her knees in one arm and draping her shoulder over the other, then bringing her face up to his to continue the kiss. She wrapped her arms around his neck, arching up to him.
The kiss didn’t end until he had her halfway up the stairs, where he kicked open the bathroom door, inhaling the lemony smell lingering from her bath as he leaned over to stuff his hand in his hygiene kit.
“We’re gonna need these tonight.”
She kind of smiled and sighed and nestled into his arms to let him get what he needed. “Just bring the whole box.”
He did, all the way up to her bedroom, where he laid her on the bed. She stretched like a cat and practically purred, spreading her arms and bowing her back in invitation.
He started with the tank top, easing it over her head slowly like a striptease, revealing inch after inch of luscious skin, the soft curves of her breasts, the budded berries of her nipples.
His mouth watered for a taste.
She dipped her head out of the top and shimmied it over her arms, half naked under him.
“Oh, my God, Sam. Oh, my God.” He stared at her breasts and tenderly touched one, circling the baby-soft skin, lowering his head to kiss the other. Her fingers threaded his hair, guiding his head to her nipple, a soft, gentle moan from her throat as he suckled her.
He finally released the skin from between his lips, sitting up again to rip off his own T-shirt. Her gaze dropped over his chest, lingering on the tattoo, then lower to where his erection made an obvious bulge in his jeans.
“Nice gun.” She grinned, indicating the holster and weapon he still wore.
“You like that?” He took it off, then unsnapped the jeans, lowering the zipper.
She looked hungrily at his cock, the uncircumcised head already pulsing through the foreskin. But it was the jagged, dagger tattoo that ran up his hip, alongside the length of his erection, that stole her attention. The tour in Pakistan.
She closed her hand over his shaft, sliding the skin up and down over the head, waves of pleasure and bliss rolling with each touch. “Oh, this is beautiful.”
She’d always been complimentary. Loved the fact that he wasn’t circumcised, swore it increased her pleasure.
“When we were together,” he said, slipping his fingers into the elastic of her sleep pants. “You’d never been with an uncircumcised man. And since?”
She looked up at him, the playfulness in her eyes gone. “I haven’t been with anyone since you left.”
His fingers stilled. “No one?”
She shook her head.
“What were you waiting for?”
She closed her hand over his wrists and guided his fingers deep into her pants, over a soft mound, between her legs where sticky sweet moisture already dampened the tiny tuft of silk.
“I was waiting for you.” She raised her hips to give his hands full access. “Even though you didn’t want me to, I waited and worried and wondered.” Each word was like a blow to his gut, each inch of her flesh on his fingers sending jolts of need through him.
“I prayed and watched the news and had my fantasies that you would come back.” The hits were to his heart now as he curled his fingers against the tender skin between her thighs. Emotion warred with excitement, pain punched pleasure.
She pushed her pants down, over her knees, and spread her legs so he could see what he was touching, all he’d been missing. She lifted her hips, to show him the sweet, wet, pink skin of her womanhood as she looked right into his face, his scar, his darkness.
“I know you didn’t want me to, but I waited for you anyway, Zach.”
He tried to speak but nothing came out of his mouth, and his throat was so tight, he knew all he was good for was a sob.
He pulled her up to him so they were kneeling face-to-face-and this time he took her face i
n his hands and kissed her. He kissed her as gently as he could, trying to use his mouth against hers to say all the words she deserved to hear. Appreciation. Adoration. Affection. Love.
The kiss grew hotter, their mouths hungrier, their hands desperate to touch everything they’d missed. They stripped each other, falling back on the bed, sheathing his engorged erection, rolling and caressing, stroking and kissing. She tasted like lemon and butter, and smelled like sex and soap, enthralling every sense and cell in his body.
“All right, Sammi. Now.” He straddled her, inching her knees up as their gazes locked. As he entered her, she closed her eyes and bit her lower lip, nodding with permission to complete this. He probed farther, sliding his shaft into her body, hissing in air as her tight flesh enclosed him and magnetically, magically pulled him in.
“Thank you for waiting for me,” he whispered, fully hilted.
“Thank you for coming home.”
His pulse exploded in his ears, almost drowning out her strangled breaths, her soft whimpers, her whispered cries of his name. Lost, bursting, and seconds from detonating, he held completely still, fighting every impulse to rock against her, remembering exactly how she liked to come.
She ground against his pelvic bone, her jaw loose, her eyes closed, her face pink with pleasure. Digging for control, he stayed still while she moved beneath him, a sob escaping between her moans, then a long groan of ecstasy as she reached her climax.
Almost instantly she began a different, steady rocking, taking him in and out, pulling his orgasm from deep inside. Fire licked at his balls, need squeezed low in his back, tension twisted up his shaft until he couldn’t take it anymore.
White light blinded him, her hair tangled in his hands, her scent making his nostrils flare as he let go, hammering against her, spilling all he had over and over and over again, his own grunts distant and deafened by pleasure.
He fell on her, strangled for air, dripping with sweat, helpless and shameless and lost.
His face smashed against hers, his scars pressed against her creamy complexion, their joining skin soaked.
She inched far enough away to be able to see him, looking directly into his mutilated, scarred, stitched-up hole of an excuse for an eye.
Edge of Sight Page 19
