Shattered (18 page)

Stunned by the admission, Kirby turned back toward him. “Why?”

Shane might not have loved her, at least not in the all-encompassing way she’d loved him, but she never could have believed he’d be so purposefully cruel.

“I wanted to make sure you went away. And didn’t come back.”

“Why?”

“Because, dammit”—he swiped a hand through his hair—“there was no way in hell I was going to saddle you with a cripple!”

“You’re far from a cripple,” she said with far more calm than she was feeling.

“Maybe not now. But I sure as hell was back then.”

She couldn’t decide whether to burst into tears—which was so not her—or scream at him or just haul off and hit him. Hard.

“What gave you the right to make such a unilateral decision about something that involved both of us? And what made you think I would have felt saddled?”

“You’re a doctor.”

“And you only figured that out when you got to Landstuhl? I just happened to be a doctor when you met me. And all those months we were, as you so colorfully put it, screwing like bunnies.”

“Yeah. But during that time we were having sex at every opportunity, I was a pilot. A Night Stalker,” he said stressing the credentials she knew he’d worked damn hard for. And was rightfully proud of. “If I let you stick around, you would’ve still been a doctor. But I wouldn’t have been your lover. I’d have been your goddamn amputee patient.”

His voice was rough. His expression even more tortured than it had been when he’d been lying in that hospital bed in Germany.

“It would’ve screwed up everything,” he insisted. “So, not having anything else to do in those days before starting therapy, I gave our situation a lot of thought. And since it obviously would’ve put a burden on you that you hadn’t signed up for when you gave me your keys to your hootch that day, I decided it’d be better to end things while we still had all those good memories to look back on.”

Kirby couldn’t believe he was serious.

“You decided?” Her voice rose high enough to shatter crystal. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. You actually, purposefully broke my heart and didn’t think that would be what I remembered whenever I looked back? Which, by the way, I damn well try not to do!”

Which hadn’t worked out at all, because even on those days she kept him from her thoughts, Shane Garrett managed to infiltrate his way into her dreams.

He looked as surprised as she felt.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you shout before. Scream, maybe, a couple times.”

More than a couple, she allowed. But only during sex. Not that she was prepared to admit that.

“But you never shout.”

“I’m not shouting!” she shouted.

He held up a hand. Blew out a long breath.

“Okay. Maybe, just possibly, I screwed up.”

“Duh,” she muttered.

He slanted her a look beneath those ridiculously lush lashes that had his brown eyes looking a lot like Bambi’s. “I don’t suppose I could claim having been in a pharmaceutical haze?”

“Too late. You already admitted the Demerol wasn’t the reason,” she reminded him.

“Yeah.” He scrubbed a hand down his face. Momentarily lifted his eyes to the roof of the truck, as if seeking divine intervention.

“Maybe we ought to start over. Pretend this is the first time we’d ever met.”

“Like that’s going to work,” she muttered.

“Probably not,” he admitted. “Since I’ve been wanting to jump your bones since you walked into the office with Zach.”

Kirby wasn’t prepared to share that she’d been thinking the same thing. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

“No.” He reached across the console again, recaptured her hand, and lifted it to his lips. “Because that day, in the Cash, I only suspected how hot you’d be. Believe me, sweetcakes, you definitely exceeded expectations.”

It was him, Kirby thought, but refused to say.

No. It had been both of them. Together.

She thought about telling him not to call her that ever again. Then decided to play it light instead. “You weren’t so bad yourself, cowboy.”

He seemed to have moved on with his life. Lecturing at the local military academy (she was still floored to learn he’d been a lawyer), teaching flying, playing basketball, and taking part in covert operations again.

Kirby wondered if moving on included women. It was impossible to imagine a man with such a strong sexual drive having embraced his celibate side all these past months. Since his injury hadn’t affected his masculinity one iota, it wouldn’t be surprising if all the available— along with some not available—women in Somersett would be more than willing to tumble into bed with him.

She’d expect that. Even understand it.

Even as she tried to convince herself she didn’t care if he had sex with every female in the Lowcountry, Kirby hated the thought of him settling down with one special woman.

“I like to think I had some moves. At least back in the day,” he said. “But it wasn’t just my excellent Special Ops sexual prowess that made us good together, Kirby. It was us.”

He looked over at her again with sex in his eyes. “You. And me. Together.”

Damn. She hated that it was happening again. The two of them sharing the same thoughts.

How was it, if they’d been so in sync, things could have turned out so wrong?

“That was another life,” she said on what she hoped looked like a casual shrug. “It’d be impossible to recapture it.”

“Maybe,” he said. But he didn’t sound as if he meant it.

“I don’t need this,” she said on a flare of emotion that had her voice shaking. “We don’t need it. Our focus should be on getting Rachel out of Monteleón.”

“And we will,” he said with a return of the cocky self-confidence she remembered so well. “One thing pilots have to be really good at is multitasking. I won’t have any trouble focusing on two things at once.”

The problem was, she didn’t want to be one of his damn tasks. What she wanted now was the same thing she’d come to realize she wanted that last night together in Iraq. She wanted to be his everything.

Like, sure. That was going to happen.

Make me fall in love with you once, then dump me, shame on you.

Do it again, shame on idiot me.

“It’s not going to happen,” she insisted, folding her arms. “Sex between you and me,” she elaborated, even as she doubted he believed that. “Besides, are you telling me there isn’t anyone over in Somersett, or maybe here on the island, who wouldn’t be ticked off by you playing house with another woman? Particularly a former lover?” she asked with what she thought was an offhand tone.

“Not a one,” he said.

Okay. That was another surprise. Talk about having sex like bunnies. When it came to sex, Shane had been the Energizer Bunny times ten. He was also up for it, literally, anytime, anywhere.

Even more amazing was that while she’d been with him, she’d been the same way. Like pilots, physicians had to be good at multitasking, and Kirby had always considered herself one of the best. Which was why, during those times he’d be away from the Green Zone for more than a day or two, even while juggling half a dozen patients at once, there was a part of her brain counting the hours until the hunky pilot was back where he belonged.

In her bed.

In her.

There’d even been times when she’d worried she might be turning into a nymphomaniac. Which must not have been the case, since she hadn’t really missed sex all that much since their affair had been one more casualty of a tragic war.

“Are you saying you haven’t had sex since you were injured?” Having treated him, she knew his only injuries had been to his leg. Well, along with that seeming TBI.

“No.”

Ha! She’d known it!

“I’m saying there isn’t a woman in my life now.”

“But there was?”

Hell. The minute she heard the question come out of her mouth, Kirby wished she could call it back. But, like so much of her experience with this man, she was too late. She had no right to be jealous of any woman he might have been involved with over the past eighteen months.

No reason to be upset that he’d moved on. Or hurt.

But, dammit, she was.

His broad shoulders raised and lowered as he sighed. Heavily.

“Not in the way you mean,” he said.

Before she could decide whether or not she wanted him to elaborate on what, exactly, he’d meant, he turned off onto a narrow road.

“Oh, wow.” Relieved to have something, anything, else to talk about, Kirby drank in the sight of the ancient oaks lining both sides of the narrow road. “This reminds me of that miniseries with Patrick Swayze. The North and the South.”

“Don’t have big old trees like this out West,” he said. “And that’s the same thing I thought the first time I saw it.”

She glanced over at him, surprised. “You actually watched that miniseries?”

“What, you think if it doesn’t have cowboys, I wouldn’t be interested? I always liked history.”

She didn’t doubt that. Especially since he’d claimed to have minored in military history.

But while the program had its share of battles, what she remembered was more Civil War soap opera than history.

The answer belatedly clicked in. “You only watched it because you were hot for Lesley-Anne Down,” she accused.

He laughed. “Hey, what can I say? I was eleven. When I saw her in that corset, Christ, I nearly swallowed my tongue. It was also, by the way, when I first began to understand all that sex stuff my older brother and his friends were talking about all the time.”

“Well, I guess I can’t fault you,” Kirby allowed. “Since I had a major crush on Patrick Swayze.”

“Yet another thing we had in common,” he said casually. “Not the Swayze thing. But it’s kind of cool knowing that we were watching it at the same time—you down in San Diego, and me up in Oregon—for almost the same reasons. . . .

“Like I said, it’s one more thing we have in common. If we were keeping track,” he tacked on when she shot him a look.

“Which we’re not.”

He shrugged. “You’ll just have to speak for yourself on that one.”

The drive through the green alley was at least a mile long.

“I really hope Tremayne knew what he was doing when he invited me to stay here,” Kirby murmured. “Not every wife would be all that wild to have a houseguest suddenly drop in on her.”

“Sabrina’s different,” Shane assured her. “From the way she tells it, her artist parents traveled all the time, which left her staying either in boarding schools or hotels during vacations when she’d join them wherever in the world they were. I guess the staff at those hotels were more family than her folks.”

“That’s sad.”

Kirby might have had some typical teenage problems with her parents during those tempestuous years, but she’d never doubted that they loved her. Or that she was the most important thing in their lives.

“Yeah. I thought so, too, when I first heard the story. But I guess it all worked out for the best, because that’s when she discovered that she really likes the hotel business.”

“Which is why she turned her family home into a bed and breakfast?” Kirby asked. Another thought occurred to Kirby. “But if she has a family home, why did she live in hotels?”

“Like I said, her parents traveled a lot. But she spent summers at Swannsea, which is how she met Zach. Her grandmother passed on last year and left her the place. But before she ended up back on the island, I guess she really fast-tracked her way through the Wingate Palace Hotel chain. In fact, she’d just been appointed manager of their hotel in Florence, Italy, when a terrorist blew it out from under her.”

“You’re kidding!” As soon as she said the words, Kirby waved them away. “Forget I said that.”

Terrorism was not anything anyone would joke about. Especially a man who’d spent so much time fighting terrorists. And who’d lost a leg to war.

“It was one of those life-altering events,” he said.

And couldn’t they both identify with that?

“So, afterward, she came back home for a little R&R and to figure out what to do next with her life. She and Zach had a history going back to when she’d spend summers here as a kid. They hooked up, fell in love, and except for a wacko who tried to kill her, everything’s pretty much come up roses for both of them.”

Tried to kill her?

She was about to ask for a few more details about that story when they turned a final corner and an alabaster, two-story house with Grecian pillars came into view.

“Oh, wow. You didn’t tell me that Zach Tremayne was married to Scarlett O’Hara.”

“It’s really something, isn’t it?”

“It’s amazing. Next to the White House, and President Vasquez’s pink monstrosity—”

“Pink?”

“You have to see it to believe it.” Sort of like this antebellum mansion that looked as if it had been beamed in from MGM’s back lot. “Well, thinking about it, I guess you will. See it, that is.”