Shattered (6 page)

Shane wasn’t the only one taking a stroll down memory lane. Since the appearance of the Americans, the entire camp had suddenly gone quiet. Those who had shelters had gone indoors, and the terrorists with Imam Jalaluddin’s son had disappeared back into the mountains.

Telling Lita and Anne that she was going to try to steal twenty minutes to see if a nap could do anything for the jet lag that crashed down on her, Kirby went into the green tent next to the hospital tent, lay down on one of the narrow cots, and closed her eyes.

But she couldn’t sleep. Instead, her mind kept spinning back to that time in Iraq. Especially that day Shane had surprised her by showing up again at the CSH.

Kirby had never taken sex casually, but she hadn’t been able to get the handsome-as-sin Night Stalker out of her mind.

Which was why, even though he was the kind of man mamas the world over warned their daughters about, and even though she could be the poster girl for safe sex, without allowing herself to consider all the reasons it might be a mistake, she’d given him her keys.

Then, in case he hadn’t gotten the message of the keys, which certainly hadn’t been the least bit subtle, and worried he might mistakenly believe she was just feeling doctorly toward him (and giving him a private place to rest), she’d flat-out assured him that he was about to get lucky.

Later, as she walked from the building—which had once been a private hospital for Saddam Hussein and his friends and family—to her trailer, she found herself wishing that she’d instead suggested meeting for kung pao chicken and fried rice at one of the two Chinese restaurants near the Imperial Palace.

That would’ve given her time to clean up. To get the stench of disinfectant, blood, and death out of her skin, hair, and clothes.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she muttered.

But she’d always been a pragmatist, and since she doubted that some fairy godmother was suddenly going to appear in the Green Zone with a pumpkin coach and turn her scrub shirt and cammie trousers into a sparkly white ball gown, and her bloodstained boots into glass slippers, she was just going to have to make the best of it.

Kirby needn’t have worried.

She’d no sooner walked in the door when he stood up from the too-short couch he’d been lying on, pulled her into his arms, and before she could utter a word of welcome or protest, took her mouth.

The shock was instant and reverberated through her like a nuclear blast.

“I need to take a shower,” she managed to say as his ravenous mouth created havoc with every cell in her body.

“Later.” His teeth nipped at her lower lip.

“Later.” Refusing to stop to think, Kirby twined her arms around his neck and pressed her body even tighter against his.

While she might not indulge in one-night stands, Kirby was no virgin. She’d had sex. Good sex. Even, on occasion, great sex. But she’d never experienced such instantaneous, raw, hot need.

Her mouth turned as greedy as his, as desperate. Swamped with sensations, drowning in desire, she let her head cloud and surrendered to the sensations caused by his hungry mouth and wickedly clever hands.

He was kissing her like he wanted to eat her up.

Which was exactly what Kirby wanted him to do.

“God, I want you.” His voice was thick and harsh as he roughened the kiss.

Because she was on the verge of coming—from a kiss! she thought through her spinning senses—she dragged her mouth from his.

“I can tell.” She drew in a deep breath that was meant to calm, but didn’t. “I just have one question.”

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” His hands moved down her body, skimming over her breasts before tackling her belt.

“Do you have any blood left in your head?”

He laughed, a deep, rumbling sound that vibrated through her. He pulled the belt through the loops and tossed it onto the floor. Then unzipped her BDU trousers and slipped a long, dark finger between her distressingly practical cotton nude-colored panties and her flame-hot skin.

Two fingers replaced the one, combing though the curls between her thighs before probing moist, feminine folds.

Somewhere in the distance, a mortar exploded, causing the trailer to shake.

As his thumb began doing incredible things to her tingling flesh, Kirby didn’t care.

Wanting to make him as needy as he was making her, she snaked her hand between their bodies and ripped open his own trousers. He was going commando, which made it so much easier to wrap her fingers around him.

He was hard as marble in her hand. But much, much hotter.

“You keep that up, Captain,” he groaned as her hand began to move, “and we’re going to have an early blastoff.”

“That works for me.” She tilted her head back, giving his wickedly clever mouth access to her throat.

“But not for me.” His tongue dampened the hollow where her pulse was hammering like a rabbit’s. “I’ve been thinking about this a long time and decided that I want to be in a bed the first time I’m inside you.”

“Ah.” Her body ached for release. “A traditionalist.”

“I’m a country boy.” His teeth closed on the lobe of her ear. “We’re real big on tradition.”

He was stroking her, inside and out, causing her legs to tremble and begin to go weak. “Though I’m up for swinging from the chandeliers in the Imperial Palace,” he said, “we’ve got forty-eight hours to work our way up to the kinky stuff.”

The idea of getting kinky with this man, along with the final flick of his wicked thumb, sent her over the edge.

Before the last of the ripples had faded, he pulled his head back.

Desire burned like flames in his eyes as he looked down into hers. “I’m considering changing my mind.”

That wasn’t what his body, which was grinding against hers, was saying.

“Oh?”

“Maybe the first time, I’ll take you in the shower.”

“That’s not too far from traditional,” she said breathlessly.

He released her, going down on his knees, his tongue creating a hot, wet swath up her thigh.

“Or maybe I’ll take you this way in the shower.”

His arrogance was pure Night Stalker. But as his mouth clamped on the damp crotch of the panties he hadn’t yet taken off, the heat alone nearly making her come again, Kirby decided it was well deserved.

“Then, after I wash every inch of that delicious cover-girl body, and make you come with just my mouth, I’ll carry you, wet and slick, to bed.”

He stood up and scooped her off her feet, bloody boots and all.

“Then,” he said, “after I helmet up, I’m going to come inside you.”

“Oh, God.” She never realized she was multiorgasmic, but just that promise was nearly enough to push her over the edge.

“Did I tell you I grew up on a ranch?”

“I believe you mentioned it.”

It was then that the image of that tight butt in boot-stacked Wranglers, smelling of sweat and hay and horse, had become permanently emblazoned on her mind.

“Well, we have a saying out West,” he said as he carried her the few feet into the bathroom that was scarcely large enough to turn around in.

“Save a horse.”

He bent his head and gave her a deep, tongue-tangling, soul-stealing kiss she could feel all the way to her toes.

“Ride a cowboy.”

“Oh, God,” she practically whimpered as he sat her on the undersized trailer toilet, turned on the shower, then got busy unlacing her boots.

It was the last thing she would say for a very long time.

Landstuhl, Germany

Although it wasn’t easy finding out information on any member of the Special Forces, Kirby called in some markers throughout the military medical community.

It took a while, but eventually she learned from an Army captain, who’d heard it from a SEAL, who’d heard it from a member of the 160th Airborne, that the Russian copter had taken Shane first to Bagram, where he’d been stabilized, then to Ramstein Air Force Base, and then to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.

Using a bit of political pull from her Army days, aided by the lucky fact that one of the surgeons at Bagram had been her superior officer at the 28th CSH, two weeks after Shane had shown up at the refugee camp, Kirby managed to hitch a ride on a C-17 carrying six wounded soldiers—one who was unconscious from a head wound, two with shrapnel wounds to the legs, lying on litters, and three ambulatory, one of whom told her he was suffering from severe headaches and PTSD—and the attendant medical crew.

Landstuhl was not only the largest military hospital in Europe, it was also the best. With a survival rate of nine out of every ten soldiers who reached the LRMC, Kirby took heart in the mere fact that Shane had made it here.

After landing at Ramstein, she and the others were loaded onto bulky American buses. The buses, painted dark blue with white crosses, looked like toys next to the gigantic cargo jet.

Weaving in and out of rows of parked aircraft, the buses made their way across the tarmac and through a base the size of a small city.

After passing though the gates, they continued down a long, wide highway off-limits to the public, then beneath the autobahn, on through the wooded mountain hamlet. Unlike Heidelberg, her last posting, which had been a bustling German city of one hundred forty thousand, Landstuhl was charmingly picturesque, with winding, narrow streets befitting its fourteenth-century beginning. There were several stone churches, houses were mostly whitewashed with red tile roofs, and a few trees were beginning to sprout early spring green leaves.

At any other time, Kirby might have enjoyed the scene that could have appeared on a postcard from the local tourism bureau.

But not today.

With nerves in a tangle, she waited until the wounded were helped off the bus and met by waiting medical teams clad in cammie BDUs and purple latex surgical gloves.

There was also a woman chaplain, who, Kirby noted, greeted each patient—even bending down to the unconscious soldier—by name.

“Your work is done for the moment,” the chaplain told each of them soothingly. “You’re in Germany now. And you’re safe.”

As eager as she was to get to Shane, Kirby paused to comment about the greeting.

“We always call them by name,” the chaplain, who said she was an Episcopalian priest, explained. “And assure them that they don’t have to worry anymore. Knowing that they’re safe is an important part of the healing process. We welcome the unconscious ones, as well, and tell them the same thing, because you never know what they might be able to hear.”

As a doctor, Kirby knew that was true. Although civilian visitors were not encouraged at Landstuhl, her former superior had called ahead. A nun, obviously one of the many civilian employees, told her in German-accented English how to find Captain Shane Garrett’s room.

After walking what seemed a five-mile-long corridor (which, one of the medical team on the C-17 had informed her, was actually a mile and a half long), she reached his door.

She took a deep breath to calm her jittery nerves. It didn’t work. As a physician, Kirby was familiar, even comfortable, in a hospital setting. But it was so much more difficult being here as a woman concerned about a man she’d begun to think she might be falling in love with.

He was watching television. Feeling uncharacteristically shy, not wanting to just barge in on him, she knocked on the open doorjamb.

He glanced up from the screen. A range of expressions moved across his face before he could garner control of them. First surprise, then something that looked like happiness, then discomfort, then . . . nothing.

“Hi.” Since he hadn’t invited her in, she stayed in the doorway.

“Hi, yourself.” His cautious tone was one she’d never heard from him before. “This is a surprise.”

“I had a little time off from WMR.” She didn’t share how many strings she’d pulled to find a doctor willing to take her place at the Pakistani relief camp.

“So you figured, hey, why go to Cancún or Paris or even back to the States when you can spend your R&R at a military hospital?”

“I didn’t feel like going to the beach, my French is about as strong as my Farsi, which is to say barely functional, and there’s no one in the States I wanted to see.”

She paused.

Nothing. He just sat there in the bed—his eyes a little glazed from pain meds in a gray and haggard face, his newly amputated leg heavily bandaged—looking at her as if she were a stranger instead of the woman he’d spent so many hours having hot, crazy sex with.

Maybe even making love with.

“May I come in?” she asked finally.

“Sure.”

He shot another glance up at the TV, then muted the sound. But did not, Kirby noticed, turn it off.

So far, this wasn’t the most encouraging welcome she’d ever received. It wasn’t even as heartfelt as that unconscious patient had received from the chaplain. But reminding herself that depression was to be expected with new amputees, Kirby forced the smile to stay on her face as she crossed the room to stand beside the bed.

“You’re looking a lot better than last time I saw you.”

“Yeah. I’ve been told I clean up well.”

She wondered if he remembered that she’d been the one to tell him that. Their first night together.

“I was talking about your color.”

Her hand itched to brush some sun-streaked mink brown hair off his forehead. Since he didn’t look all that thrilled to see her, she linked her fingers together to keep her hands to herself. For now.

“You were the color of chalk the last time I saw you. Obviously, you’re receiving excellent care.”

“You know what they say.” He shrugged the broad shoulders that had filled out his flight suit so well. “If you make it to Landstuhl, you’re good to go.”

“That’s certainly true.”

She and Shane had always been amazingly comfortable with each other. Their relationship, while revolving mostly around sex, had also been easy.

Even natural.

This was not.

“I owe you a huge debt of gratitude,” he said with a distressing formality she’d never—ever—heard from him before. “The doctors at Bagram said I could’ve had my ticket punched if it hadn’t been for what you did for my leg in that camp.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Shane,” she said. “I was—”

“Just doing your job,” he cut her off.

“That wasn’t what I was going to say.” She untangled her fingers to rake a hand through her hair, appalled when she realized it was shaking. “I was going to say that when I saw you lying on that SKED, so horribly wounded, although I know it’s medically impossible, I thought my heart had stopped. I’ve never been so nervous working on a patient in my life.”

There. She’d given him an opening, let him know how much he meant to her. Not just professionally, as his doctor. But personally.

“Well, I guess that just shows what a super doctor you are,” he said. “Obviously, the nerves didn’t affect your work, because the surgeons in Afghanistan and here both said you’d done a bang-up job.”

They could have been two strangers stuck sitting next to each other on a plane.

This conversation also wasn’t getting them anywhere. It was time to try a different tack.

Rather than hold her own hand, she took away the remote, which he was still holding, from his. Then linked her fingers with his on top of the crisp white sheet. The gesture, which she’d done countless times before, now felt uncomfortably awkward.

“You’ve no idea how worried I’ve been about you.”

“Well, as you can see, short of losing half my leg, I’m just doing jim-dandy.”

The Shane she’d once known had been self-deprecating. Although it seemed he intended for her to take his words lightly, she knew they were no jest.

“Unfortunately, I knew you’d need amputation the minute I saw it.” She lifted their joined hands and pressed her lips against his knuckles, which were still bruised and scraped from the crash. “But they’re doing amazing things with prostheses these days.”

“Yeah, that’s what my therapist keeps telling me.”

“So. I guess it could be worse.”

God. How could she, a doctor used to discussing bad news with a patient, have said anything so ridiculously trite?

“I figured that out back at the crash site. When I didn’t die like my copilot, or the LT. Or all those Marines and Rangers.”

He pulled his hand back. Picked up the remote again.

“This isn’t going well, is it?” she asked.

He sighed. Pinched the bridge of his nose. His eyes—framed by thick, long lashes that most women kept cosmetic companies in business trying to duplicate—were flatter than she’d ever imagined they could be.

“What do you want, Kirby?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “But I’ve been thinking about those days in Baghdad a lot lately, before you showed up at the camp—in fact, even on the drive up from Kabul, when I was wondering if you were flying up there above me—and I think maybe we were wrong.”

“About what?” He could not have looked any more edgy if she’d tossed a grenade with the pin pulled into his lap.

“About our relationship just being about wartime sex.” She took another deep breath. “I know that’s what we used to joke about at the time. And what you’d reminded me the night before you flew off to Afghanistan.”

Which had admittedly stung. Which was why she’d been uncharacteristically remote with him when he’d finally called her. She still regretted that display of feminine pique.

“But what if it was more than that?”

“Kirby—”

“I think it was more,” she cut him off, determined to finish what she’d come here to say. “I think maybe I’d begun to fall in love with you. Which was, to be perfectly honest, even scarier than those mortars being shot into the Green Zone.

“But then you got transferred to Afghanistan, and I was sent to Heidelberg, and, well, I don’t know about you, but I convinced myself that it was better if we didn’t try to muck up what we’d had with emotions, and maybe I’d been wrong, anyway. About our feelings.”

“If there’d been anything there, we would’ve made it work,” he said gently. “It wouldn’t have just faded away because of distance.”

That was precisely what she’d told herself. But it had become more and more difficult to believe. It was true, she’d discovered. You regretted most in life those things you didn’t do. Much more than the things you did.

“Are you sure?”

“Dead sure.”

She hated the finality in his voice. Wondered how many times he’d given the same “Hey, babe, it’s been good, but it’s over because I have to go fight the bad guys, and doing the wife and rug rats thing would get in the way of me saving the world” speech to other women.

Always having prided herself on her tenacity, Kirby wasn’t prepared to throw in the towel quite yet.

“Landstuhl looks like a really nice town,” she said.

“Since I was unconscious when I arrived, I haven’t seen the place,” he said. “But I’ll take your word for it.”

He couldn’t have been any farther away if he’d suddenly been beamed to a base on Antarctica.

“It’s really nice,” she repeated. “Quaint. And picturesque. At least, what I saw of it driving over here from Ramstein. The bus driver told me there’s a large American community living in town. Plus, a lot of the people working here at the hospital are civilians, so I was thinking—”

“No.”

“Well, that certainly sounds definitive,” she managed to say past the lump that had risen in her throat.

It took a major effort, but because he really did look as if he’d been through the wringer, she managed, just barely, to keep from pointing out that Captain Shane Garrett was not the boss of her and that now that she was out of the Army, she could work wherever the hell she pleased. Including Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.

He sighed again and looked at her with what actually appeared to be regret, or even pity, which Kirby found more hurtful than his earlier distance.

“What we had in Badghad was great, sweetheart,” he said. “Better than great. It was one of the best times in my life, which is kinda weird when you factor in that I was also having bad guys trying to blow me out of the sky on a regular basis. But I enjoyed the hell out of it. And I liked and admired and respected you a whole lot—”

“You also screwed me six ways to Sunday,” she reminded him.

“That was part of what made it so great.” His grin was forced. “But it was more than that. I cared about you, Kirby. A whole lot.”

“Me, too. About you.”

“I know.”

His gaze softened.

Oh, God. That definitely looked like pity.