She’d been burned badly by Natalie’s biological father. He remembered the first time he met her. He’d been at BookPeople in Austin, one of his favorite haunts when he wasn’t working.
He’d seen her standing in the politics section. She’d looked adorable in a pale blue and white sundress. It had taken him a minute to recognize her from work. A lot of military women looked completely different out of uniform, and Sam was no different. Her hair had been down, spilling down her back and brushing over her shoulders.
Then she’d glanced toward him, and he’d seen the tears streaming down her face.
Before he’d seen those tears, he’d been on the fence about approaching. About saying hi. But those tears had punched him in the gut. She was always so strong at work. So confident.
In that moment, he’d made a decision that had changed the course of both their lives.
He’d approached cautiously. “Whoever it is, I’m sure it’s nothing a good kick in the balls can’t solve.”
She’d been embarrassed. She’d tried to shrug off his concern.
But he’d convinced her to cross the street with him and let him buy her lunch.
She’d confided in him that day. Told him about the boyfriend who hadn’t just run out on her, but had emptied her bank accounts and run up her credit cards first. He’d left her broke and betrayed everything Sam thought that she’d had with him.
They’d been dating for a month when she’d dropped a land mine on both of them.
She was pregnant. And since they hadn’t yet made love, she hadn’t had to tell him that it wasn’t his.
God, he could still see her face when she’d told him the news. She’d braced for him to walk out on her.
But he hadn’t. And over the years, he’d gotten used to the careful balancing of her independence with her relationship with him.
“I never pushed you on the paperwork for Natalie because I never thought I’d have to,” he said now, sitting on a snow-covered road behind a stopped tractor-trailer in the middle of central Maine. “And we managed to make this stuff work without being married.” He looked at her then, and crossed the boundary he’d never broken with them before. “I get that you have your stuff. We all do. But I never thought you’d take her away from me. I never thought through what would happen the day you decided you’d had enough. I loved you—I still love you—and I always thought that was enough.”
“You make it sound so simple.” A ragged whisper. “It’s not.”
“Yes, actually it is.” He forced his voice to remain level. To stay calm and not shout at her that she was destroying everything he loved in this world. “That this isn’t just about Natalie, but about the life we’ve built together. This is about you and it’s about me and about us. And things are a little fucked up right now but you’re doing exactly what you’ve always been afraid I would do to you. You’re running away.”
Her mouth opened, then closed again. He wanted her to fight, to deny what he said. To tell him he was imagining things. But she didn’t. She simply bit her lips together and looked away, avoiding his eyes.
It was an old familiar story in the military. Too many soldiers deployed to return home to find their spouses shacked up with someone else. Too many soldiers strayed while they were deployed, figuring deployment meant they didn’t have to honor their marriage vows.
He’d done neither. He’d always believed she would do the same.
But now the ugly suspicion settled around his heart, and he had to ask. Had to know. “Is there someone else?” he asked flatly.
Better to excise the wound than to let it fester.
“No.” She turned away, looking out into the swirling snow. “There’s no one else.”
He dropped his head back against the headrest, lashing at his temper that was fraying at the edge. “Then explain to me what happened, Sam. Because if you’re going to destroy everything we built together, I deserve to know why.”
She flinched when he spoke. His deceptively calm words hurt. He knew that. Could see the evidence on her face.
She didn’t answer. Not right away. He waited patiently, let the silence stand between them, growing until it was a live thing, crackling with energy that snapped and hissed.
“Because I don’t feel anything anymore.” Words like shattered glass. “Because nothing between us feels alive. It feels like we’re going through the motions, waiting for bedtime when we can both roll over and pretend to be asleep.” She finally dared to look at him. “I can’t pretend to feel something that isn’t there anymore. I can’t do that to Natalie.” She looked away again. “And you deserve someone who can make you laugh. Someone who isn’t broken.” Her voice cracked on the last sentence.
He glanced at the truck in front of them. Let her words sink in. Weighed them against the woman he knew. The woman he loved.
She was lost, utterly and completely lost. He remembered feeling that way, feeling the need to hide it from the world. Being unable to see his way out of the darkness that surrounded him.
And he’d missed the signs in her. For a thousand pointless reasons, he’d missed them. He’d left her alone in the dark.
Because he could do nothing less, he reached for her then. Cradled her cheek until she turned to face him. “You’re not broken, Sam.” He gave up on his plan. Abandoned it in the nearest snow bank, needing only to be there for her. To hold her and let her know he was there. At that moment and forever. He’d never leave her alone again. He brushed his lips against hers. “You went to war. You lost people you care about.” A gentle nudge. “You’re not broken. You’re just different. We’re all different when we come home.”
She closed her eyes, avoiding his.
It was a long moment before she nuzzled his hand with her cheek. “I don’t want to be different.” Tired words filled with sadness. She leaned in, resting her forehead against his. “I want to feel normal again.” She pressed her lips to his. Slid her tongue against his. A hesitant touch. “Make me feel again, Patrick.”
And he was lost.
I
t started as something gentle. Something hesitant.
And then it wasn’t. Not gentle. It was not tame or timid or questioning.
It burned her down to the roots of her soul. It touched something deep and dark and hidden.
Something she’d thought was long since dead and buried and gone.
His tongue slid against hers, stroking to life the very sensations she thought she’d never feel again.
It was electric, the feel of his mouth against hers. The scrape of stubble against her chin, the taste of him. The smell of his skin.
He nipped her. Pinched her bottom lip between his teeth and sucked it. And she sighed at the pleasure, at the raw ache his taste and touch aroused in her, pushing aside the darkness that haunted her.
She felt him. Felt everything. The heat of his skin. The warmth that drew her closer. That made her want to crawl into his lap and unzip his pants and push up that damned flannel shirt until they were skin to skin and there was nothing between them but sweat and heat.
One hand slid down her side. Tugged at her fleece and…
“Dear lord,” he muttered against her lips. “How many layers of clothing do you have on under this thing?”
She smiled. “You weren’t wondering why I wasn’t cold?”
“Well, you’d be a champ at strip poker right about now,” he said dryly.
Then his fingers found her skin, and she was no longer thinking.
He traced the very tips of his fingers over her belly. Light, feathery strokes that made her skin quiver. She gasped when he slipped them higher, finding the swell of her breast. Every cell in her body was alert to his touch, anticipating the next stroke of his fingers.
He lifted his mouth from hers. Pressed his tongue to the corner of her lips before nipping her there.
Then he paused, pressing his cheek to hers. Just for a moment, the world fell away, and he was there, holding her, cradling her, reminding her of everything that was still good between them.
It was a moment before she felt it. His breath teasing the sensitive flesh around her ear. A quiet huff of air against her skin. Her body tensed, waiting for his touch, his tongue.
A delicious torment. An old familiar heat slid through her veins, warming her, pulling her out of the darkness at the bottom of the well.
In the silence of heated desire, of hushed passion, she heard it.
Someone gently rapping on the driver’s side window.
She pulled back, seeing the wanting smile on Patrick’s lips. “Someone’s timing sucks.”
He released her and her skin protested the loss of his touch. She shivered as he rolled the window down.
“Well,” Garrett said, leaning down on the side of the car, “it’s certainly awkward meeting you like this.”
Sam offered a guilty half smile. “I was going to call.”
“Sure. I get that all the time. Anyway, you two probably need to turn around. Bad accident up ahead, and the road is going to be closed until we get it cleaned up. With the storm coming in, you’re not getting by any time soon.”
“Where are we supposed to go?” Sam asked. “I don’t think this thing has four-wheel drive.”
“Well, maybe if you two weren’t making out like a couple of horny teenagers, you’d have paid better attention to the roads.” He pulled a single key off his loop. “My parents’ house is about a half a mile that way.” He pointed back the way they’d come.
She swallowed the resurgent lump in her throat. Her mom had told her about Garrett’s parents last year when it happened. She’d been deployed.
She’d sent flowers from Iraq because it was the only thing she could think to do from half a world away.
Patrick accepted the key.
“I’ll find you tomorrow with the key.”
“Sure.” He stepped back away from the car, using his flashlight to guide them as they turned around. “Now get your asses out of the storm before I have to dig you out in the spring.”
It was easy enough to find the Rierson’s house. Set back in an old field, the driveway that led up to the old log cabin had recently been plowed.
The silence between them was quiet. Comfortable.
And filled with needy tension.
They walked into the old house and Sam felt an aching sense of the familiar twisted now with age and experience. It was the same and not the same. It felt smaller, somehow, from the house she remembered as a teen.
She paused in the entryway as Patrick closed the door behind them. For a moment, the world fell away, taking the darkness and the sadness and the emptiness with it. Leaving a warmth, a sense of being home in its place. Funny. She hadn’t spent time in this house in years but it felt…good.
She glanced over at Patrick. Saw him watching her. Standing close, too close and not close enough. She met his gaze and in that moment, realized with aching clarity that they were alone.
Really alone.
Her mouth went dry.
He waited. In the shadows and the snow by the door, he waited.
She wanted him to move into her space and kiss her and make her feel alive again.
But she knew this man. Despite the chasm that had grown between them, she knew him.
And she knew that he would wait. Would stand quietly by until she made that first choice.
She would never be alone.
But that first hesitant step, she had to make by herself.
He wouldn’t force her.
It was one of the things she loved about him. He was steadfast and loyal and good.
And she was losing him through her own inaction.
She stood there then, taking in the sight of the man who’d stood by her the day she’d told him she was pregnant with someone else’s child.
The day he’d held her hand and told her he’d always be there for her.
The day he’d gone with her into the hospital and went through labor and delivery to bring their daughter into the world.
He’d never left her alone.
Not even now when she’d left him alone in the cold and the dark.
It was a long moment. The storm whipped against the outside storm door, slamming it open, then shut and startling them both.
Shattering the moment and leaving a chill between them. She shivered at the suddenness of the feeling.
He stepped to her then, running his hands down her arms. “I’ll start a fire.”
She let him go because she was a coward. Because she was afraid. Afraid of what he made her feel.
Of what her life would feel like without him.
Of what her life would feel like if all the emotions she’d locked away came tumbling out.
***
The fire was warm on his face. It penetrated the flannel and the wool and heated his skin.
But it didn’t heat the fear in the seat of his soul that said he was losing her. That she was slipping further away.
He’d hoped she would make that step. That after the car and the changing room, she would trust him enough to let him help with whatever was eating at her.
But she hadn’t moved, and it had
hurt
.
He hadn’t been prepared for the hurt. He should have expected it. He knew she didn’t do impulsive or rash. She always looked before she leaped.
He was asking her to leap. Without saying the words, asking her to take that step, out of the darkness and back into the light.
And so to avoid the hurt, to avoid saying something that would set his campaign back a dozen lifetimes, he let her be.
He made the fire instead and hoped that maybe this storm was a blessing in disguise. That maybe this time alone was something they’d both needed and hadn’t realized it.
Because maybe they’d gotten so caught up with being Captain Samantha Egan and Major Patrick MacLean and Mommy and Daddy that they’d forgotten how to be Sam and Patrick.
She walked up behind him. “Beer?” She held out a dark glass bottle.
“Thanks.”
“I figure we’ll replace it tomorrow when we find Garrett and give him the key.” She sank down on the floor next to him, leaning back on the old worn couch.
“Sounds like a good plan. Did you call your mom?”