“I had been on a battlefield, in an op that went bad, screaming, helping to pull the injured out of the blood and dust, and then … I’m home. I couldn’t function at the neighborhood barbecue. I couldn’t field the question, ‘What do you do for a living, Duke?’”
“I imagine that must have been the strangest feeling. You’re in a life-and-death situation one day, and someone’s asking you howyou like your burger cooked the next. How do you reconcile that?”
“Exactly. I thought I was doing okay. Hell, I thought I was hiding the worst of it. But the nightmares … they didn’t stay hidden. I jumped when a car backfired. Sometimes I had to step outside a crowded restaurant just to catch my breath.” I shake my head. “It wore on her. She loved the man I was in uniform. The one who had a mission, a title, a purpose. She didn’t know what to do with the broken man who came back.”
“I’m sorry.”
“One night, after a bad tremor, she said …” I have to swallow hard before I can get it out. “She said she didn’t sign up to be my nurse.”
Roxanne’s face softens. “That’s awful.”
“She wasn’t wrong,” I add. “I wasn’t easy to love back then. I still might not be, but after she left me I realized healing isn’t something you can rush for somebody else’s comfort. It was for the best, but it still hurt like hell.”
The storm rumbles again outside the tent, but in here, it feels like we’re suspended—breathing in the aftermath of truths neither of us had really talked about before.
I turn my hand under hers so we can lace our fingers together.
“That’s why I built Firebird,” I say, squeezing gently. “Because everyone deserves a place to come home to, even if they’re still learning how to live there.”
Roxanne shifts closer, her forehead bumping lightly against my shoulder. “Most people wouldn’t have turned their own hurt into something that saves other people. You could’ve stayed bitter. Angry. Closed yourself off like me, but you didn’t.” Her voice drops a little. “You built something better. Youaresomething better.”
I swear to God I almost lose it. My heart feels like a cup that is trying to catch a waterfall. I shift, barely breathing, still proppedup on my elbow. Roxanne’s lying beside me, hair splayed against the sleeping bag, her hand still curled inside mine like it’s the most natural thing in the world. I can’t stop looking at her.
I lean in a little closer, close enough to catch the scent of her shampoo and the rain still clinging to her skin. Close enough to ruin everything if I make the wrong move.
Mercy, I want to kiss her. I want to nibble on her neck and find pleasure centers on her body even she didn’t know existed. But when she flinches every time a streak of lightning flashes outside, I know romance is not what she needs right now.
Damn.
I’m falling.
Hard.
There’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to stop it. I press my forehead lightly to hers before I pull back and lie down beside her again. “Thank you for that.”
“I appreciate you letting me in, Duke.”
“Hey, now that you said the magic word, I will always let you in … to my tent, I mean.”
She giggles and inches closer.
“How do you feel?” I ask. “Better?”
“A little better. It does feel good to talk about what happened.”
“When you do, it doesn’t have to have power over you anymore.”
“Are you saying this to yourself or me?” she asks, gazing up at me.
I smile. She got me. “Yeah, saying it to both of us.”
She gives a small nod.
“Does this mean that you’re ready to make peace with Colorado, now?” I ask.
She looks past me for a minute and pulls her hand back from mine. She sits up and tucks her hair behind her ears. “You know, Ialways have a special place in my heart for Colorado, but every time I look outside, it feels attached to him … to what happened.”
“So you don’t think you could ever live here again?”
