“You need to get some sleep.”
“When I close my eyes...”
“I know.”
He did know, she realized. The places he'd been, things he'd seen. Anne had spoken about it, and Cate.
“Hold me.”
Simple contact, the need to feel anything but the pain, to be able to block out everything else, for just a little while, a few hours. It was there in her voice, and anything but simple, in the heat of her body beside him, in the way her breath caught at her throat as the words whispered between them.
He should leave. She would be all right, she was strong, at the same time, she moved closer.
“James…” She needed more...she needed him.
Didn't she know what this was all about? he thought. Didn't he?
Anger, the raw pain that filled her voice, her fingers as she touched him.
It didn't matter.
His hand went back through her hair, thick strands running though his fingers, and another sound, a different sound as her mouth found his. The tears were there, and something else that had been there from the beginning—anger, sadness, and strength. He tasted all of it, and swore again as her hand stroked low at his belly then moved beneath the waist of his jeans.
He touched her, edging the lace down at her shoulder, her breast filling his hand, then tasted her again as her back arched and she pulled him closer. He watched her eyes, that dark place that he knew too well, then the way her breathing changed. Her teeth grazed his shoulder, then a different sound as her hands moved low at his back and she pulled him inside her.
Four a.m.
A record for someone who rarely slept.
She moved without waking in the bed beside him. He pulled the comforter over her and tucked it in.
Bloody fucking hell!
That was the only word for it, and with more than a little sarcasm, he realized that is exactly what they'd done. More than once. Something close to insane, as if they could both drive away painful memories with the physical need to feel something, anything, except the pain.
He pulled on his jeans then reached for his jacket and took out the pack of cigarettes. He tapped one out of the pack and lit it, going to the window.
Bad for his health. Another irony everything considered.
“Do you ever think about ending it?” the psychiatrist had asked during one of those counseling sessions to determine if he was mentally fit to return to duty.
Only every single bloody fucking day, he thought at the time; sometimes several times a day.
It was Cate who had brought him back from the edge. No psychobabble, no suggestions from someone who'd never been in-country, who had no idea what it was like to lose men in combat, to see their bodies blown apart, only pieces left. It was all just notes in an I-pad, fingers tapping away, a report filed somewhere later, and not a clue about any of it. It wasn't in any text book, or endless case studies. It was inside him, like a cancer.
“You have to find your safe place,” Cate once told him from behind that scarred bar at the Tavern.
“Sometimes it's a place...sometimes,” she said, in that way she had of hitting the mark, “it's a person.”
Her safe place had been the Highlands where her father was born, out at the Tavern on the outskirts of Inverness, and those solitary hikes she made into the mountains.
“The trick is to find your way back,” she had added then. “Something worth coming back for.”
The books had been her reason to keep coming back, the stories she wanted to tell, needed to tell, people she'd met and known, friendships she'd made over the years—truth in a world that seldom wanted to hear the truth.
He glanced back at the bed. Kris had been part of that, as Cate's editor, then as a friend. Loyalties, a handful of people you could trust. The others were just faces, people who passed through your life, strangers.
He scrubbed his hand back through his hair. It came back again in the shadows of the room staring down at the streetbelow, the inn quiet that time of the night. Something in the back of his head—an impression, a word, that instinct.
