Until There Was You (Coming Home, #2) (8 page)

Reza started to argue but instead shut his mouth, grinding out a harsh “Roger. Sir,” before he stalked off, irritation lining the hard set of his shoulders.

Evan let him go, distracted by thoughts of Claire, her body moving as she attempted to ease her mind. There was a new tension between them, and it had nothing to do with their different approaches to being an officer. No matter how much he might want to pretend otherwise, he wanted to taste her again. Wanted to touch the fire that was
Claire Montoya.

He wanted her. He could at least admit that to himself now.

He just had no idea what to do about it.

* * *

The sun had not set. No, it was too cold for that. Instead it froze behind the cold, grey clouds, sending the world into darkness. Claire threw her battle book onto the table and stripped off her wet uniform and boots. She’d spent the entire day freezing her ass off in the snow, trying to inspect a company that didn’t even know the meaning of the word inspection. She pulled on a dry sweater and jeans along with her boots and stepped out onto the balcony, needing the cold air to calm the burning anger in her lungs. Sarah had been embarrassed that Claire had seen her unit so jacked up, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

No, Lieutenant Engle had decided to take a particularly bad moment to argue with Claire. She’d made a dozen excuses why they weren’t ready to deploy and she’d actually had the gall to raise her voice. Claire had locked her heels, putting Engle at the position of attention, and had proceeded to go up one side of her and down the other. Claire might have received quite a few ass-chewings in her day but she also knew how to give them, and Engle had struck a nerve. Not because the inspection had gone so poorly, but for whining about it instead of pulling herself up by her bootstraps and fixing it.

Engle was an officer, damn it. Officers were not supposed to make excuses. They were supposed to get results.

The sky was gunmetal grey, casting shadows across the suite.

The overcast sky reflected Claire’s mood, and she stood for a long moment and just watched the snow fall. Tugging the sleeves of her light blue ski sweater down, she leaned against the railing. The cold wrapped around her, penetrating her layers of
clothing, and she shivered even as she took a deep, cleansing breath of crisp, biting air.

Everything about this mission was a disaster. Colonel Danvers, the brigade commander here at Fort Carson, was focused on the wrong things. He wanted his lieutenants to learn how to brief, how to do inspections, instead of training for combat. Not only that, but the inspections had not even gone well. The officers here might be able to brief well, but Claire doubted they could lead their way out of a paper bag. Not a single weapon had been touched yet. Not one piece of ammo fired. Their commander back at Fort Hood, Colonel Richter, would never have focused on checking the block. No, he was a warrior, focused on training. Real training. The kind that saved lives.

At least she didn’t have to worry about burning down Fort Carson. No, that thought wasn’t sarcastic. Not at all.

The thought did nothing to cheer her up. Idly, she piled some snow into a small mountain on the rail, then started forming it into a snowball, needing to do something with her hands as her mind tumbled over the problems with the evaluation.

It was killing her that one of her only friends was going into combat unprepared, untrained. And there was nothing she could do about it.

From the information she had, the brigade commander wanted to go into all of the exercises, from the shoot house to the mock-up of the city, without any ammo at all. He wanted the noise and the chaos more than he wanted people to actually get shot at with dummy rounds. And instead of tailoring each evaluation for the mission each company was doing, he was making everyone do everything.

So while Sarah’s company would spend the bulk of their time running convoys in Iraq, they were going to waste their precious training time doing shoot houses and inspections, instead of doing convoys with simunitions and pyro, which was probably the best way to get soldiers prepped for actual combat.

It was a waste of precious training time. Troops had a hell of a lot less bravery when there were actual rounds shooting at them from the end of a weapon instead of
someone shouting bang-bang-bang.

She chafed under the restrictions. They limited the value of training and made it harder to re-create the realism of actual combat. The more realistic it was, the better prepared the soldiers would be. She set the first snowball down and started forming another one, ignoring the biting cold in her hands.

Lost in thought, she didn’t hear Evan’s door open on the balcony next door. Or the incoming projectile, until it landed with a splat against the side of her neck. Frigid snow slipped down the neck of her sweater and she shrieked, swatting at the cold wet stuff. She looked in the direction the missile had come from and glared as Evan melted from the shadows on the deck outside his own room.

“Not funny,” she said, rubbing the cold from her neck.

“Yeah, actually it was.” His laugh was warm and unfamiliar. Claire paused, unable to remember the last time she’d heard him laugh. It sounded foreign and reserved, but it was a laugh nonetheless. Something warm unfurled inside her at the sound, and she watched him walk across the snow-covered balcony to the barrier that separated their two rooms. Snow dusted the top of his head and he brushed it off.

“I take it you’re not mad at me anymore?” she asked him, brushing the snow from her neck.

“I’m too cold to be pissed at anyone. I just want to be warm,” he said, leaning on the rail in a move that dredged up old memories of the first time she’d met him. “What has
you
so distracted?”

“The entire day was wasted. They need at least a week to unscrew the inspections. It’s ridiculous that they’re trying to run an entire operation like this.” Her voice broke and she looked away as the fear finally slid through the cracks in her control. “They’re not ready for this. Sarah’s company … their lack of training scares me.”

“Are we ever really ready for stuff like this?” His voice was steady and low, but not warm enough to chase the creeping cold away. She shivered, and his gaze slid down
her body. The gesture alone was enough to send heat running through her veins. “We should go inside,” he said. “I prefer to have my training doctrine conversations when I’m not freezing my balls off.”

“Have you been drinking?” She narrowed her eyes, studying him, looking for signs of imbibing.

“No, why?”

“Because you just made a joke.” She slid the door to her suite open. “I’m going to make some coffee. Do you want any?” She didn’t trust this unspoken truce between them, but she was too cold and too tired to argue with it. Or him, for that matter.

“Yeah. I’ll be over in a sec.”

He wasn’t lying. He climbed over the rail, and Claire took a step back to give him space. “Seriously? Climbing over railings and snowball fights? Who are you and what have you done with Captain America?”

Lines of fatigue attempted to pass for a smile. His day had not gone well, either. “You’ve always said I needed to relax. Guess I’m taking your advice to heart.”

“Since when?”

“Since now,” he said roughly, and she caught the dark edge of strain in his voice.

“Being home is really doing a number on you,” she murmured, opening the door and leading him through.

“Doesn’t going home throw you off balance?” he asked. The door closed behind him with a muffled click, shutting out the cold. But the warmth in the room wasn’t nearly enough to chase away the chill that had penetrated down to her very bones.

“Yeah, well that would imply that I had a home to go back to. Home is where the army sends me.” She dug into the small fridge for a bottle of water, avoiding the scrutiny of his gaze.

“Really? No family?”

Setting the bottle down, she started making the coffee. “Not really. The army is
the only thing I’ve got going for me.”

Evan’s eyes were warm and speculative as he studied her for a long, silent moment, and she tried not to flinch beneath his scrutiny. “Kind of makes it a bigger deal when your career is on the line, doesn’t it?”

She swallowed the lingering resentment that he’d played a role in that. In truth, she only had herself to blame. “Yeah.” She took a long pull from the water bottle, then finished dumping the grounds into the filter. “I’ll manage, though.”

“You always do. So what’s got you so worked up that you’re not sleeping?”

She frowned. “How do you know I’m not sleeping?”

“Your lights reflect on the snow when you turn them on,” he said softly. He came around the large table that sat in the center of the living area, leaning on it. He was entirely too close. Close enough that she could feel the heat radiating off his body.

She took a step back, uncomfortable with the warmth his nearness sparked. It felt too much like need, too much like a want that went beyond pure sexual attraction. Lust she could do. Need?

Need was not something she could control.

“Yeah, well, that only means you’re not sleeping either.”

“I don’t. Much. Maybe four, five hours at a stretch.”

“That’s a whole lot of free time. What do you do with it?” Oh, but she didn’t want to know. Knowing what he did with his downtime made him less cold and calculating and significantly more human. More appealing. More desirable.

“This and that. Makes it easy to get work done when you don’t have to sleep.” He watched her move, and Claire felt the weight of his scrutiny. “You’re really upset.”

Claire finally stopped, clenching her hands on the counter in front of her. “Yeah. Sarah’s my friend. And it’s killing me that her team isn’t trained. I mean, none of us are ever ready to go, but … this feels worse than normal.”

“They’re still going. Nothing we do here is going to change that,” he said quietly.

Claire ground her teeth. “Colonel Danvers is taking a brigade downrange to the middle of the nastiest fight in Baghdad and he’s training all of his people the same instead of giving them the flexibility to train for their actual mission.”

“He’s the commander. Just because it may or may not be stupid doesn’t mean we get to disobey.” He stiffened, and the easy, relaxed Evan instantly shifted into work mode. “Claire, you don’t know this guy. Changing the training plan is admitting he’s a shitty commander to his boss. He won’t do it.”

She set the water bottle down. “They need to be more prepared. The fight is entirely different now.”

“And we’re not going to be able to get them a full-blown Training Center rotation here. We’ve got all the time we’re going to get.”

“That’s your answer? Follow the rules? Evan, these guys have such limited experience. The only people who’ve deployed with them are, God help me for saying this, folks like Engle.”

Evan pushed away from the table. “Commanders look at timelines. We’ve crossed the red line. There is. No. More. Time.”

“Did they teach you that at West Point?” He flinched, and she felt almost guilty for swiping at him about his pedigreed background. Almost, but not quite. “Commanders are supposed to set priorities. Not everything can be a priority. We could skip the briefings and the endless meetings, redo the inspections, then go to the weapons ranges. Tailor the training for the mission they’re going to do. They’re going to war, Evan.”

Finally his temper snapped and his voice rose. Just a hair, but it was enough for his frustration to seep through. “That’s right, they’re going to war. Whether or not we change the timeline, or train for twenty-four hours a day or cancel Christmas, they’re going to war. So we’ll do what we can with what we have. Nothing we do or don’t do is going to change that.”

Claire lifted her chin, folding her arms over her chest. She said nothing for a long
moment. Then she murmured, “I think you should go now.”

“What, you’re not going to argue with me?”

She smiled thinly. “You’re the officer in charge. I’m just a lowly training officer.”

“Claire …”

“No, Evan. Don’t. You made your point.”

He said nothing, letting the silence hang between them. A silence that felt normal in its frigid chill. Unwelcome, but at least it was familiar.

Evan shut the door quietly behind him. And Claire? Claire cursed the officer corps that was failing her.

The snow gods hated her. The white stuff was falling slow and steady, and it had taken every effort by the brigade staff to get Colonel Danvers not to cancel the briefings. The next day, Claire stood in the Palehorse Brigade headquarters, getting ready to watch a bunch of lieutenants get their collective asses handed to them, because they were toast if their mission briefings went anything like their inspections. They were supposed to brief their understanding of the plan to their brigade commander in order to demonstrate that they actually understood the plan. There was not enough caffeine to get her through this morning.

The army spent too much time training its officers how to give presentations and use PowerPoint and not enough time with them in the trenches, learning how to lead their soldiers. Taking a bunch of lieutenants and training them on how to brief their mission instead of training them to lead said mission was a colossal waste of time.

But she was not in charge, and Evan had effectively told her to shut up and color. All she really needed to ask was what hue of crayon she was supposed to use.

The Palehorse Brigade headquarters was obviously a new building. Or at least a recently renovated building. While the floor of the brigade headquarters back at Fort Hood was caked with fifty years of wax buffed to a greasy-looking shine, the Palehorse floor was buffed to a mirror-gloss shine. Even though the headquarters were temporary, the Palehorse staff had certainly taken over their battle space and made it their own. Claire wondered briefly if renovations had recently been done or if there were just a whole lot of sergeants major who had individuals in need of corrective training.

She suspected it was a little bit of both. Then again, some command sergeants major were known for their ability to make floors shine through sheer meanness. Claire
had learned long ago that someone who was shiny and polished probably lacked substance. She suspected the same about the brigade to which Sarah now belonged.