He felt her lips curve against his chest and he smiled. “Yes and we’re going to do it again as soon as I catch my breath. I was thinking of a more verbal kind of show-and-tell. I’ll answer your question if you answer one of mine.”
She stiffened in his arms and he could feel the tension rolling off her. Pushing her away was the last thing he’d meant to do. Her chest expanded as she breathed in and when she exhaled, she seemed to relax.
“Fine. One question each but you answer mine first.”
“Deal,” he said, ignoring for a moment how fucked up it was that they could be naked and twisted around each other like a sweaty hydra but it was a question that pushed the boundaries of intimacy.
“So how did you get them?”
Her fingers made butterfly-soft caresses over his scars as he tried to figure out how to put what happened into words. Scar tissue made it hard to feel her touch but it didn’t make him any less aware of the presence of her hand. Or of her waiting silently for his answer.
“I had command of a unit stationed just outside of Kunduz.” As he spoke, the heat of the air and the abrasion of the sand came back to him. For months, it seemed like everything he owned was covered in grit. “It was a normal day. They all are, or at least as normal as war gets. We were moving toward the city, stopping at the villages to make sure our presence on the ground was stronger than the insurgents’ and that we wouldn’t get flanked as soon as we passed.” He didn’t know how to explain to her how hard it was to move through an area, not speaking the language or even knowing who they were fighting against. He’d gone into the service wanting to leave the world better than he found it, but it didn’t take long for the sense of self-preservation to start to override his more noble intentions. “You have to assume anyone could be the enemy because the truth is they could. The Taliban fighters hide behind women and children—hell, even hospitals.”
She was a warm, still weight in his arms, her hand pressed to his chest in a gesture that was more comfort than demand. He checked his feelings, trying to decide if he was okay to go on and found he actually wanted to tell her. He wanted Andy to know.
“We had a translator with us, but you still spend a lot of time yelling at people in a language they don’t understand. There are so many dialects and it’s so different from English. It was hard to pick up more than a couple of words. Anyway, we were in this village—kind of a more primitive suburb of the city—trying to figure out what was going on.”
He’d played the scene over and over in his head, trying to decide if there was something he could have picked up on, something that would have changed things. He kept drawing a blank. The villagers might have known what was going to happen. Hell, they probably did, but he doubted there was anything aside from never going there in the first place that would have made a difference.
“The translator and I stopped to talk to one of the elders while the rest of the unit moved ahead, clearing a section of the street. Dunman, one of the newer guys, got cocky. We hadn’t seen any action in weeks. He got too comfortable and too far ahead of the rest of the unit.” Ten steps was too far ahead in the situation they’d been in but it might not have made a difference anyway. If they’d been closer together, they might have all died instead. “He tripped a wire.” Liam wouldn’t ever forget the expression on the kid’s face. The IED didn’t go off the way it was supposed to. Dunman stood there for a moment as the realization of what he’d done set in, and then he’d gotten this almost goofy look of relief on his face. “It didn’t go off right away. The IED. They make them out of whatever they can find and they don’t always work right. Everyone else knew to get back but the kid froze.” The translator started yelling. The villagers started yelling. The kid was the only one who’d stayed quiet. “I was running toward him when the blast finally went off. I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital.” He’d read it worked like that sometimes. When the body suffered trauma, the brain didn’t lay down memory traces because it was too busy surviving. If that was the case, he wished it would have taken the kid’s goofy relieved expression instead of replaying it in his nightmares a hundred times over.
Andy pressed her lips to his skin. She didn’t offer him useless sorrys or tell him she understood. She just wrapped her arms around him and let the comfort of her body sink into him.
“Your turn,” he said, more than ready to turn the attention away from him.
“I can’t imagine what you’d want to know, but I’ll answer your question.”
He thought about phrasing the question in a way that let her know he knew about her past, but holding her naked in his arms, it seemed like cheating. Part of him wished he’d never read Gabe’s report. He wanted her to share everything with him, but he wanted her to want to do it.How fucked up was that?
“Why did you buy the farm?” That was close enough to the question he’d asked when they were making soap.
She took a breath and let it out again. He expected her to launch into an explanation of why she wanted to help the vets but after a few seconds, it felt like she was struggling with more.
“I convinced Millie and her husband to mortgage the farm their family had owned for generations. I was going to make them some easy money. That’s what I told them, anyway. Really, I was just trying to up my commission. It never occurred to me anyone would get hurt.”
He heard the bitterness in her voice and felt her start to curl in on herself. Pressing his lips to the top of her head, he stroked her back, trying to return some of the comfort she’d given him.
“The market tanked and they defaulted. Sourwood was going up for a bank auction. There were a couple of developers interested in it but no one who was willing to pay full price. Not only were they going to lose the farm that had been their family legacy, they were going to end up owing money. It was my fault. I had to fix it.”
She said it like everybody fixed the messes they made. In his experience, that had been far from the truth.
“I convinced the bank to let me pay off the mortgage to keep it from going to auction.”
“That had to be what—a quarter of a million dollars? How did you come up with the money?”
“That’s two questions. We agreed on one.”
“You’re right. We did.” It was killing him to know things about her past he shouldn’t, but he wasn’t going to push her. When she told him, he wanted it to be because she trusted him enough to open up to her.
“I used to be really good at making money.”
Liam waited to see if she’d offer anything else. When she didn’t, he wrapped his arms tighter around her and rolled her up onto his chest, needing to get close to her. He didn’t want their collective pasts to set up residence in the bed with them. He didn’t want anything but Andy.
Propping herself up on his chest, she reached up to cup his face, the calluses on her hand a reminder of how much her life had changed. She ran a fingertip over the scar that cut through his eyebrow and searched his face. For a moment, the space between them felt so charged, so honest. It was as if everything else receded, leaving her golden-green eyes locked on his, seeing parts of him he’d never shown anyone.
“I want another question.”
“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” he said, shocked to find he actually meant it.
