I pour myself a coffee and I sit back and I ask her about the scar on her collarbone.
And she tells me.
CHAPTER FIVE
ZARA
Itell him about the scar.
Not the sanitized version I give when someone at a bar notices the thin line running along my collarbone and asks if I got hurt. The real version. The eighteen year old kid named Private Jansen who took shrapnel to his femoral artery in a convoy outside Kandahar and how I held pressure on his leg for forty seven minutes in the back of a Humvee while the medic worked and the vehicle bounced over roads that felt like the earth was trying to shake us loose. How a piece of metal from the same blast clipped me across the collarbone and I didn't feel it until Jansen was in surgery and someone pointed out that my uniform was soaked with blood that wasn't all his.
He listens the way he's listened all night. Without interruption. Without that look people get when they want you to stop talking about something that makes them uncomfortable. He listens like my words are a briefing he needs to absorb completely before he can act.
When I finish he's quiet for a long time. The fire has burned down to embers and the cabin is warm and close and the snow outside has turned the windows into walls of white.
"You saved his life," he says.
"He lost his leg."
"And you think you failed him."
I open my mouth to argue. Close it. Because nobody has ever named that particular wound so precisely, so quickly, and the accuracy of it steals the air from my lungs.
"The scars we carry from protecting other people are the ones that heal the slowest," he says, and his voice is so low it's almost lost under the crackle of dying embers. "Because we never think we did enough."
He's not talking about me anymore. Or not only about me. There's something in his face, in the tightened line of his jaw and the way his eyes have gone distant, that tells me he's standing in his own battlefield right now. A place I can't see but can feel radiating off him like heat from a burn.
"Come here," I say.
He looks up. Surprised. Like he's not used to being the one someone reaches for.
"You've been sitting in that chair for two hours keeping a safe distance like I'm a grenade with the pin pulled." I set my coffee mug on the table. "I'm not going to explode. Come sit with me."
He doesn't move for three full seconds. I count them the way I count heartbeats in triage. Steady. Measured. Then he stands, and crossing the four feet between his chair and my couch takes him longer than it should because he stops halfway and looks at me with an expression that is so naked, so unguarded, that I feel it in my teeth.
He sits. Not close enough to touch, but close enough that I can feel the warmth of his body through the flannel I'm wearing and smell that pine and woodsmoke scent that I'm already starting to associate with safety.
"I want to kiss you," I say, because I've never been good at waiting for things I want and I see no reason to start now.
"Zara." There's a warning in the way he says my name. Not don't. Something more complicated. Something that sounds like you don't know what you're starting.
"I'm not asking for permission." I shift on the couch until my knees are angled toward him. "I'm giving you information. What you do with it is your choice."
The look he gives me is pure heat filtered through rigid control. I can see the war on his face. Duty against desire. Whatever principles he set for tonight against the reality of what's happening in this cabin, in this storm, on this couch where we've both said more true things in four hours than most people say in four months.
"If I kiss you," he says, and his voice has dropped into that register that makes my spine liquid, "I'm not going to be gentle about it."
"Good." I hold his gaze. "I've had enough gentle to last a lifetime."
He moves fast. One hand comes up to cup the side of my face and the other wraps around the back of my neck and his mouth finds mine with a precision that makes every kiss I've ever had before feel like a rough draft.
He kisses like he does everything else. Deliberate. Thorough. His lips are warm and firm and when his tongue slides against mine I make a sound that I would be embarrassed about if his grip on my neck didn't tighten in response. He swallows the sound like he's been waiting for it. Like he wanted to know exactly what I taste like when I stop controlling the narrative.
My hands find his chest and the muscles underneath his henley are ridiculous. Hard and warm and they flex under my palms when I drag my fingers down his ribs. He pulls back just enough to look at me and his eyes are darker now, the blue green swallowed by pupil, and the expression on his face is something I've never seen directed at me before.
Hunger. But not reckless hunger. Controlled hunger. The kind that comes from a man who knows exactly what he wants and has been disciplining himself against wanting it.
"Tell me your safe word," he says.
