More Than a Touch (Snowberry Creek #2) (24 page)

As the final notes died away, he kissed Zoe, taking his time to do the job right. Their lips and tongues slow-danced just as the two of them had done out on the dance floor. He loved the way she was an equal partner in the process, letting him lead for a while and then taking charge herself. Coaxing and being coaxed in equal measure.

He had thoroughly enjoyed the sweet press of her breasts against his bare chest. Not to be outdone, she upped the ante by unfastening his trousers and then kneeling to pull them down and then off.

Zoe remained on her knees, staring up at him. What was she planning next? Was she going to do what he hoped she was? Oh, hell, yeah, she was. He gently cradled her head as she worked him to a fevered pitch, only to stop as quickly as she’d started.

Leif feared for his sanity.

Zoe thought she had him at her mercy. Fat chance. He outweighed her by sixty pounds of muscle and bone. Desperate men were capable of amazing feats of strength and endurance. She would pay for the torment and love every minute of it.

He stared down into the pure temptation of her midnight blue eyes. “May I remind you that payback is a bitch?”

Before she could respond, he hoisted her to her feet. With no warning, he tossed her over his shoulder fireman-style. Zoe squeaked in protest, but he ignored her. If she was worried about his damn leg, he didn’t want to hear it. Luckily, her bedroom was only a few steps away. He’d make it that far or die trying.

They reached her bed with his dignity and determination both intact. After tossing her to the middle of the mattress, he grabbed one of the condoms she’d left on the bedside table and prepared to take this to the next level and well beyond.

Zoe watched his every move. “I have something I want to say. Please let me finish, Leif.”

He nodded, not sure where she was going with this. “Okay.”

“Carrying me like that might not have been the smartest move you’ve ever made, and I wouldn’t recommend a repeat performance anytime soon—”

She paused long enough to give his left leg a pointed look. “But I’ve got to say that it was the sexiest thing imaginable.”

“Well, honey, if you liked that, I promise you’re going to love what comes next.”

Then he joined her on the bed and proved himself to be a man of his word. Repeatedly.

C
hapter 25

Z
oe hovered at the edge of consciousness, afraid to give in to the growing need to sleep. There was no way she could let down her guard that completely, not with Leif there. What if her nightmares chose tonight to return for a repeat performance? She couldn’t risk it.

Besides, the last time they’d been together like this, with their passion on the back burner, it hadn’t ended well. She didn’t want anything to spoil this night for either of them. In the near future, when she was once again alone, she would need the memory of this night to remain pure and untarnished by anything close to reality.

If only their time together didn’t have to end.

The problem wasn’t that they were ultimately wrong for each other, not when everything about Leif felt so right. Under other circumstances, she could imagine spending a lifetime’s worth of nights just like this one, with him beside her. If she were honest with herself, she knew it wouldn’t take much to send her tumbling over the cliff to fall in love with him. Heck, maybe she’d already made that leap.

It didn’t matter. It couldn’t.

She’d meant what she’d said about tonight. No promises. No strings. No hope.

If she had met him years ago, they might have had a chance of making it together. Back when she still felt whole and ready to take on whatever the world threw at her. But a part of her had been badly broken by her time spent in the war. It was as if she’d absorbed the pain and suffering and death deep inside, where the wound remained unhealed even after all this time.

She’d walked away from her military career and patched herself back up as best she could, but the repair job was shoddy at best. Too much pressure and she would shatter.

Leif stroked her shoulder. “Want to talk about whatever it is that’s keeping you awake?”

She’d been so hoping he wouldn’t notice, or at least wouldn’t ask. Complete honesty would come with too high a price, so she settled for a smaller truth. “I don’t want to miss a minute of this.”

“As flattering as that is, Zoe, I’m not buying it. You’ve already seen me at my worst and haven’t kicked me out of your bed. I’m a big, tough guy. I can handle whatever you have to throw at me.”

It was so tempting to share, but he had enough of a burden to bear without taking on hers as well. Besides, the problems he had stemmed from his time in combat, and he’d come close to dying because of his injuries. He bore the scars to prove it. Even now, despite the pain and everything he’d been through, he was fighting with everything he had to get his life as a combat soldier back.

And her? She’d quit the first chance she’d gotten and come slinking back home to lick her wounds.

“It’s nothing, Leif.”

Unable to look him in the eye as she lied, she rolled onto her side to face away from him. She expected an explosion, but instead she got cuddling. He curled up along her back and put his arm across her waist to hold her close.

“Whatever it is, babe, I’ve got you. Go to sleep.”

Did he notice her tears? Probably, because he kissed the top of her head and brushed the pad of his thumb across her damp cheek. He didn’t yell. He didn’t make a single demand. No, he did something far worse: He held her close and warm until blessed sleep finally claimed them both.

•   •   •

Leif awoke to the sound of whimpers quickly escalating into screams and a sharp kick right to his balls.

“What the fuck?” he grunted as he turned onto his back and drew his knees up and tried to breathe through the pain. What the hell was going on? Someone was in pain. Well, besides him.

It was Zoe. She was thrashing around on her side of the bed, her eyes wide open but blank and unseeing. Nobody was home in there, even though words poured out of her mouth in a steady barrage of near gibberish. He made sense of some of it and almost wished he hadn’t.

“I can’t stop the bleeding! Somebody get over here and help me! God, he’s going to bleed out before we can get him into OR.”

Leif still hurt from where she’d unwittingly kicked him, but right now he was more worried about Zoe than about the condition of his equipment. And if that wasn’t proof of how much she meant to him, he didn’t know what was.

He sat up and tried to pin her down to keep her from hurting herself or him. That only made her more frantic. “Let me go to him. I’ve got to prep him for surgery.”

She gasped and shook her head in denial. Whatever response she heard inside her head set off another attack. She pounded on him with her fists. “Bullshit! He can’t be dead. David was breathing just a minute ago! I took his pulse myself!”

Despite the difference in their sizes, Zoe had Leif at a disadvantage because he didn’t want to hurt her. In the meantime, she did her damnedest to claw her way straight through Leif to reach the man from her past, drawing blood as she sobbed. Leif ignored the scratches. He would cheerfully let her beat the hell out of him if only she would pull out of this nosedive.

“Zoe, honey, wake up! You’re having a nightmare. It’s not real.”

Although for her maybe it was. He repeated a steady litany of soothing nonsense as he fought to remain calm. One of them needed to be, and it sure wasn’t Zoe. Despite his best efforts, he suspected he sounded increasingly desperate. She wasn’t caught up in an ordinary nightmare, the kind most folks had once in a while.

No, it was the other type, the ones reserved for people who’d lived through hell. The dreams attacked when defenses were down, forcing their victims to relive each horrific moment over and over again in stark detail.

He should know. How many nights had he woken up begging Spence to forgive him for being alive? Every time it happened, he relived the whole fucking tragedy all over again, starting with the panic as the three of them tried to find a way back to their unit, knowing there was greater safety in numbers. The only sound was Spence laughing like a loon as he slammed their vehicle around corners and raced through the narrow streets.

Funny, Leif never heard the explosion, but he remembered the weird realization that their vehicle had gone airborne. The final twist in the dream was him looking down from above to see himself sprawled on the street, his ankle a twisted mess of mincemeat as poor Nick tried to decide which of his friends to save first. He’d blacked out for a short time right after the explosion, but he had no doubt that the images were accurate.

He fought hard against the current of his own memories. Zoe needed him too much right now; he couldn’t let himself get sucked back into his past. “Please, Zoe, wake up. You’re safe. I’m safe.”

And whoever this David was, there wasn’t a doubt in Leif’s mind that the man was long dead. He’d been special to Zoe, and she’d been there when he died. When her fury slowed a bit, he gathered her in his arms and rocked her. “Come on, Zoe, let it go. I know it’s hard, but you can’t change what happened. David wouldn’t want you to hurt this much.”

God knows Leif wouldn’t.

Just when he was growing desperate enough to consider calling for help, Zoe quit struggling and went limp in his arms. She stared up at him, her face tear-streaked and her eyes full of panic.

“Leif?”

“It’s okay, Zoe. You were having a bad dream.”

•   •   •

Zoe snapped her eyes shut to hide from the sympathy in Leif’s dark eyes. Oh, God. This was her worst nightmare come true. Literally. When she struggled to get free of his arms, Leif let her go, but only reluctantly. She scrambled to the far corner of the bed and yanked the sheet up to cover her naked body, needing to shore up her defenses any way she could.

Leif didn’t move an inch. He remained perfectly still and made no effort to cover himself. “Don’t shut me out, Zoe. Tell me what I can do to help.”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

Okay, half of that was a lie. There was truly nothing Leif could do to help her right now, but she was far from fine. Right now she could feel all those patched-up cracks inside her head shifting, creaking, and coming apart.

“It was just a bad dream, Leif. Sorry if I worried you.”

The smiling lover who’d held her in his arms was long gone. In his place was this implacable warrior.

“Don’t bullshit me, Zoe. I know a flashback when I see one. I’ve had too much personal experience to mistake it for anything else. Whatever was going on in your head right now wasn’t a dream. It was a full-blown blast from your past, courtesy of the time you spent in Iraq.”

He didn’t immediately say more, maybe trying to give her a chance to come clean on her own. That wasn’t happening. Not now while her entire being was wounded and scraped raw from the inside out. And maybe not ever.

“All right, we’ll do this the hard way.” He crossed his arms over his chest and played his trump card. “Who was David, Zoe?”

She flinched, the name alone enough to send her plunging right back down into the hell inside her mind. She didn’t want to think about David, didn’t want to remember him right now, but Leif wasn’t going to let up until he ripped the truth right out of her by the roots.

“He was . . . my lover. We met right after I was deployed. He came in with a minor injury. While he waited until it was his turn to get stitched up, we got to talking.”

David’s image filled her mind. That fiery red hair, those bright blue eyes, and that wicked, wicked smile. He had the confident swagger all of the recon marines did, but without being a jerk about it. She’d liked him from the moment they’d met. A lot of the guys flirted with her, but he’d been different, and they’d gone from zero to sixty in record time.

“Go on.”

She hadn’t realized she’d been talking out loud. Most men wouldn’t want to know the details about a woman’s former lover, but then Leif already knew that David was no competition. Not anymore.

“He spent most of his time out on the front lines, but we’d steal a few minutes together whenever we could. There was a lot of that kind of thing going on.”

She made herself look directly at Leif. “You know how it is.”

“Yeah, I do.”

Sitting still was impossible. Rocking helped, the rhythm soothing. The motion started off slowly, but quickly picked up speed until she was reeling out of control again. She found herself being picked up again, but this time it wasn’t sexy. Unable to muster up even a token protest, she gave in and let Leif drag her, blankets and all, onto his lap. He surrounded her with his gentle strength and held her still.

“Take it easy and slow, Zoe. I’ll listen, no matter how long it takes.”

With her head tucked under his chin, his words were a deep rumble coming straight through his muscular chest. She swallowed hard and forced the words out. “But for us, it was more than just good sex. Our relationship went from flirty fun to serious pretty quickly, although we both knew better than to think much beyond our current deployments. Sometimes what works over there doesn’t hold up when you get back home. Even so, neither of us really believed we wouldn’t have a future together.”

She sighed. “I’ve only felt that kind of special connection with a man one other time before or since.”

To make sure Leif knew she was talking about him, she gave him an awkward hug. “I suspect that’s why the nightmares came back. Somehow my mind had connected what I felt for David with how I could feel about you.”

“Could or do?”

Damn, he sure had a knack for asking the hard questions. She blinked back a new surge of tears. “Does it matter? We both know . . .”

When she didn’t finish the statement, Leif did. “We both know that I’ve been talking about going back.”

Her shakes returned instantly. “And I can’t live with that fear again. I did it once, and it damn near killed me.”

And if she was going to deny the two of them a future together, then Leif needed to know about her past. “My deployment was almost over, and things between me and David were still going strong. He was due to rotate back to the States about a month after me. Of course, we both knew he’d be sent back eventually. Me, too, if I stayed in.

“About a week before my time was up, his unit got hit hard. I recognized several of his friends when they started bringing in the wounded. Some made it. Others didn’t. A typical day at the office.”

If she sounded bitter, so be it. She hated seeing so many lives changed forever. “The flow of new cases was slowing down when they brought in one last group. David was one of them.”

It all played out in her head. Desperately trying to stop the bleeding. Screaming for them to get him into an operating room even knowing they were all already in use. It wouldn’t have mattered. Her medical training knew that much even if her heart and mind didn’t want to believe it was true.

“I watched him die. He knew I was there, holding his hand. I couldn’t do anything else for him. I was useless.”

Once again Leif stubbornly took the opposing view. “Like hell. You weren’t useless, Zoe. You were there for him, and that mattered to David just like it mattered to every other patient that’s been lucky enough to have you at their side. Never doubt that for a minute.”

The dam holding back years’ worth of tears shattered, the sobs wracking her body. “There were so many, Leif. Too many to count.”