Her palm flattened over the scar where his sister’s name had been, her arms a warm and comforting embrace. Even thinking about it caused the ache in his soul to pound against his veins. “How old were you?” she whispered.
He tipped her head back until he could look into her eyes. They stood, their bodies separated by clothing and heat, the scar on his back a brand. He’d never had a lover ask about him. About his tattoo? Yes. About his little sister? That too.
Maybe it said something about the partners he’d chosen. But before this moment, he’d never wanted to explain about the sister he’d killed, the parents he’d let drift away because it was easier to ignore his pain than face it every time he looked into their eyes, eyes that reminded him so much of Casey. It was easier to turn away from their crushing blame.
“Seventeen.” His breath shuddered from his body. Her fingers curled against the scar, her nails a light pressure on his skin.
Claire said nothing, but Evan met her searching gaze. He stood beneath her scrutiny, his soul open and bared, and he waited. For pity. For some pithy comment. For anything to shatter the moment, giving him a reason to leave. Claire was not the only one running from what she’d been, he thought ruefully.
Instead, she simply leaned into him and kissed him. Her tongue slid against his, a warm, welcome caress, saying so much without words. He surrendered to her touch, to the sweet taste of her mouth, and for the first time in his life, he dared to want something without the overwhelming need to control it.
She pulled away for a moment and looked him in the eyes. Her palms gently cupped his face. “I’m sorry that you lost her,” she whispered.
He lowered his face to her neck and said nothing. He couldn’t speak. His throat closed off, his voice crushed beneath a wave of grief that was so strong it threatened to cut off his air supply. “Me, too.”
It was all he could manage.
Somehow, it was enough.
* * *
Evan’s arms were tight and strong around her. Claire simply stood in his embrace, resting her cheek against the solid muscle of his chest, the lines of his tattoo burning into her skin.
She had not felt a man’s arms around her in … forever. The simplicity of the embrace unnerved her and unlocked a craving for so much more than she’d ever allowed herself to feel. It terrified her, the depth of the want inside her.
An eternity passed, but the weight of the silence between them felt warm for once, a comfort instead of a frigid chill.
Their breathing was the only sound, pulsing with the solid, steady beating of Evan’s heart beneath her cheek. The tenderness, the quiet connection with a man who held so much loss inside him. She knew loss. She’d simply never thought that someone as polished and rigid as Evan had lived through something so soul-crushingly sad.
In the silence, a quiet beeping interrupted their requiem. He shifted then and lifted his head as she pulled her wrist around to glance at her watch. “We’ve got to go soon,” she whispered.
“Yeah.” He stepped away from her then and she watched his body twist and flex as he pulled his shirt back on. He tucked it into his belt, his eyes dark and watchful.
“Claire?”
“Hmm?” She could find no other words.
He stepped close, tracing his fingers over her cheek. “This would have been a mistake.”
She flinched, pulling away from his touch, the unexpected bite of his words. His fingers snapped to the back of her neck, halting her retreat. “It would have been a mistake I would have enjoyed making,” he finished.
Her mouth went dry, her heart beating in time with the echo of his words as they penetrated the shields around her soul. She let him go, because anything else would have shattered the remnants of self-preservation to which she was so valiantly clinging. The door closed softly behind him. Too late for him to hear her whispered response.
“Me, too.”
Chapter Seven
Late that night, long after the briefings had finally been completed and Colonel Danvers had released them from PowerPoint hell, Claire sat in the crowded restaurant, utterly alone in a sea of eating, swearing, laughing humanity recovering from a day on the mountain. A deep, unsettling disquiet danced in the shadows of her heart, stealing her focus.
Evan had gotten under her skin, and she couldn’t shake the image of his tattoo from her memory.
His revelation had been a powerful trust, a trust she did not deserve. And yet, he’d given it to her. She shook her head and tried to push away the panicky sensation in her belly. She didn’t do trust. Not this kind of trust. Trust to guard her six on the battlefield? Hell, yes. This? The kind of trust that made a man put his heart in her hands? This was not her area of expertise. Not by a long shot.
She didn’t usually think of herself as a coward, but then again, she didn’t usually make out with a coworker because she’d had a bad day at work. She pushed the chicken on her plate around with her fork.
“You look like you’re going to puke.”
She glanced up as Reza set a heaping plate of food down across from hers, and took a seat in front of it. She hadn’t seen him come in. “Hey” was her only reply.
“Who pissed on your leg?”
“Colonel Danvers, for starters,” she grumbled. In truth, there were more important things for Claire to worry about. Like the man sitting across from her. The man who’d missed the makeup briefing tonight. Claire wished she didn’t suspect where he’d been.
Reza frowned and opened his mouth to speak but snapped it closed, leaving her with her nagging sense of worry. He pointed at her with his fork. “Ass-chewings are good for you. They build character.” He smeared butter on his broccoli. “How can I help?”
“I wish I knew,” she said, chasing a french fry around her plate. “If I was heading back downrange, I’d want them to learn how to react to chaos, and who better to provide that than someone who knows weapons and explosives? But I don’t get a vote.” She sighed. “We can’t deviate from the plan, even though it kills me to say so.”
He swiped a roll from the basket in front of Claire and tore it open. She could have taken that moment to talk to him about his drinking but she didn’t. She couldn’t. And it made her a coward.
The trust she had with Reza was not the same as the trust that was building, slowly, between her and Evan.
“So are you going tell me what’s eating at you,” Reza said, “or am I going to have to drag you to the gym and beat it out of you?”
She cracked a smile. “I don’t feel much like fighting at the moment.” She felt like she had a massive scarlet letter tattooed on her forehead.
“It’s Loehr, isn’t it?”
“That apparent?”
“Hello, Captain Obvious. You two have been swiping at each other for so long, I figured it was only a matter of time before you realized that you’re just two sides of the same coin.”
“How long have you known him?” she asked suddenly, hoping it wasn’t glaringly transparent why she was asking.
“A few years,” Reza said, spearing a broccoli tree.
She cleared her throat. “He helped me bring you home the other night.”
“Glad he felt compelled to help out.” Reza stiffened slightly, avoiding her gaze.
“I didn’t expect him to.” She studied him quietly before asking a simple, loaded question. “Why, Reza?”
He cleared his throat, a deep flush creeping up his dark skin. “What’s the big deal? Shit happens in combat. It’s not like he’s my hetero life mate or anything.”
“Rules, Reza. Evan doesn’t break the rules. Any of them.”
Reza set his fork and spoon down and folded his arms over his chest. “Have you ever been faced with two choices? And neither of them are good?”
“Yeah.” She’d learned about hard choices long before she’d ever donned a uniform. Decisions you could never take back. Her chest tightened as she thought again about her father. Reza cleared his throat, then wiped his mouth w
ith a napkin.
“Choices suck sometimes. And they’re permanent. For the rest of your life, you have to live with them. No do-overs. No instant replay or living with regrets. Loehr is a hard man to work for, but when you need him to make a hard choice, he’ll do it.”
Claire retreated into silence for a moment, heading away from awkward territory. She knew about hard choices. About weighing the loss of her career over the loss of a friend’s life. “So what’s your point?”
“My point is that it’s not about the rules so much as it’s about choices. You just think it’s about the rules with Loehr.” Reza shifted uncomfortably. “So, ah, speaking of bad choices, sorry about the other night.”
“About what?”
“Falling on you and shit.”
She gave Reza a hard stare and said nothing. He had been a heavy drinker since they’d first met. There was nothing new in his getting drunk. But an old, familiar fear made her want to protect Reza in a way she hadn’t been able to protect her dad.
The problem was that the demons at the bottom of the bottle always got a vote. Sometimes more than one. It hurt Claire every single time she watched those demons tear at Reza’s soul, slapping at her with the knowledge that no matter how good she was at her job, she wasn’t good enough to figure out how to say the words “stop drinking” to him.
Such a simple thing. But sometimes the simple things were the most difficult. The girl she’d been hadn’t been able to say those words to her father. The woman she was now could not say them to her friend.
* * *
Evan turned down Old Holman Road before he knew where he was going. He’d been driving aimlessly in the snow, the wipers working harder and harder to keep the windshield of his rental car cleared. He drove past Purchase Farm, past the trailer park where his best friend from high school had grown up.
He hadn’t spoken to Billy Meir since the accident. He’d barely spoken to anyone for the remainder of his senior year. He’d been lucky to graduate and if he hadn’t already been accepted into West Point before the accident, he might never have gone to college. He rounded the corner, driving past the small pond where he and Casey and Billy had learned to skate.
And then there it was. The old farmhouse where he’d grown up. He’d taken his first steps there, but he hadn’t been back since his high school graduation. The first steps of his adult life had been to walk out the front door. He didn’t recognize the cars in the driveway anymore. He wondered when his parents had bought them.
He could stop. He could ask. Make small talk. But Casey’s ghost would stand in the middle of the room until the awkward silence twisted with regret and everyone was desperate to escape.
He ground his teeth, remembering the day they’d buried Casey. Evan’s arm had been bound in a sling, strung across his chest. No one had helped him get the suit on. He hadn’t been able to knot his tie with one hand.
The snow blanketed the road as he rolled past the place that would never again be his home. Crushing loneliness pressed in on him from all sides. He’d always been on his own. Ever since he’d come to in the twisted metal of the car wreck, he’d been alone.
He drove past his parents’ home and headed back to the lodge and the one person who’d touched the frozen core of his soul since his sister had died. And as the walls around his heart melted, he craved the thing he wasn’t sure he could hold on to.
Claire Montoya’s heart.
* * *
Claire dragged her hands through her hair and stared at her computer screen as the snowstorm continued to rage at the mountains outside. The whole team had made it back to the lodge from the last of the late-night inspections just before the storm hit and it showed no sign of letting up. Claire was taking the extra time to figure out how she could layer in more actual training during the events that were already planned. Trying to get the most bang for her buck, so to speak. She’d give anything for more time.
Someone rapped on the door and she frowned, glancing at her watch. It wasn’t unheard of for someone to swing by this late. They worked long into the night in Iraq. Still, she was surprised someone was at her door at this hour. People had to sleep sometime. Tying her hair up into a quick loop, she padded to the door, curious.
She opened the door to find Evan. Standing in the hallway, holding two cups of coffee. Clean-shaven and freshly showered and looking like he had just run a marathon instead of listening to mission briefings for a bunch of lieutenants getting ready to go to war.
He stood framed in the door, his shoulders stiff and straight, a casual tension emanating from him. Evan was not a man who was used to admitting to his vulnerabilities, and it showed.
He was unsure of himself, she realized. He’d shown her something dark and deeply personal, something she doubted he revealed very often. It filled her heart with a tender warmth to see this side of him.
Evan shifted and handed her one of the mugs. As he moved, she noticed the tiniest hint of black branches peeking beneath the sleeve of his white T-shirt.
She opened the door a fraction wider and took a single step backwards, inviting him into the suite.
“You look dead on your feet,” he said, sliding into a chair next to her at the dining table, his coffee mug in his hands.
“It’s close to one A.M. and I’ve been on my feet all day. Not exactly my prime energy time,” she said, breathing in the hot, moist aroma wafting up from her mug. “This smells like Dunkin’ Donuts.” She took a sip and the warm liquid burned her nerve endings awake on its way down to her stomach.
“It is.”
“Where did you find Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in a blizzard in Colorado? Do they even have Dunkin’ Donuts here?”
Evan grinned, and Claire looked away before she did something stupid. “I brought my own.”
“Seriously?” She raised both eyebrows and gratefully sipped the steaming coffee. There was something deeply sensual about the smell of coffee and freshly showered man. And the way his dog tags were outlined beneath his shirt sent her imagination down a dirty, gritty path filled with dark temptation. “I never would have thought of you as a coffee fanatic.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” he said quietly. “Any chance your inspections went any better than mine earlier today?” Evan asked.
She raised her eyebrows again. “You have to ask? They had the wrong markings on their ammo and their trucks haven’t been serviced in lord only knows how long. It’s a train wreck, and no one seems interested in trying to redirect the oncoming disaster.”
He looked away, down at the map she’d been studying. Red and green pushpins made small clusters around Baghdad and the Triangle of Death, the center of mass for the majority of U.S. deaths in Iraq. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for a pattern in the recent attacks so we can try to duplicate them during training.” She frowned and leaned back, cradling the mug in both hands. “I’m not breaking any rules. I just want to maximize the training time we do have.”
Mere hours had passed since they’d touched. Since he’d burned his taste into her soul, affecting her more than any man had in a decade, maybe more. Maybe ever.
She’d missed him. And the thought terrified her. They’d sparred when they’d been assigned to the brigade operations cell together, but despite the arguing, he’d become a part of her normal. A piece she’d been missing since she’d come back from Iraq.
A piece that had clicked back into place during this mission.
“Not that I don’t love your company, but what are you doing stalking the hallways, anyway?”
“I saw the light reflected on the snow from your window again. I wondered why you were up.”
She frowned slightly, shifting until there was space between them. “Why were you up?”
He shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t sleep much.”
She glanced at his shoulder, then met his eyes. “Why?”
* * *
“After my sister died, I started to have trou
ble sleeping.” It was a confession, one that wasn’t easy for him to admit. “I’d already been accepted to West Point before the accident. I stayed busy enough there that I was too exhausted not to sleep.” He shrugged and stared into his coffee. “Staying busy seems to be the best way to keep the insomnia demon at bay. But it’s hard to stay busy enough when I’m not deployed,” he murmured, his voice thick.
She offered a wry smile, leaning back to look up at him. “It’s too quiet. The quiet really gets to me. Who knew that would be what I noticed most about coming home?”
“How many times have you deployed?” he asked, shifting his stance as she rose from her chair. The movement shifted the air and it brushed against his skin. He wanted to feel the fire in his blood from her body against his.
He loved watching her body move. There was strength beneath the beauty, a strength that called to him in dark, seductive whispers. “Last tour made three. You?”
“This last one was my fourth,” he said.
She glanced at the map, releasing a quiet sigh. “Do you honestly think we’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of getting them ready to deploy?” she asked.
He watched as she transitioned in one instant from the Claire who was soft and feminine and relaxed to the Claire he was used to at work: tough and no bullshit. It was an almost physical change, one that he could see in the renewed tension in her shoulders, the slight widening of her stance.
What did it say about him that both versions of her appealed to him equally?
“I was talking with Sarah after the briefing this evening and she said that Colonel Danvers is up for his first star soon. His battalion commanders are under a ton of pressure to perform.” Claire took a long sip of her coffee. “Apparently the pressure has already made one company commander quit and a first sergeant is being court-martialed for disrespect, among other things.”
“I didn’t realize things were that bad here,” Evan murmured, watching her as she turned back to the map. For a brief moment, his mind flittered back to Iraq and to another Claire, one who was driven to protect her soldiers first and accomplish the mission second. But looking at her now, Evan felt a tug, a tug that was respect mixed with desire. A potent combination.
Until There Was You (Coming Home, #2) Page 9
