Shattered (22 page)

“At least it was,” she said. “Until a few minutes ago. Not that we actually did anything,” she hastened to tack on, just in case her hostess might fear they’d been spreading bodily fluids all over that lacy bedcover.

“Ah.” Sabrina lifted a brow. “So, that’s why he didn’t drop into the kitchen to say good-bye.”

“Needed some time alone,” Titania said knowingly. “Isn’t it handy, since males so often are unwilling to share their feelings, how their bodies do all the talking for them?”

Even as she shared in the laughter, Kirby felt herself tingling again in places she’d forgotten she could tingle.

“You realize, of course, that all you’ve done by telling him that is present a challenge,” Sabrina said. “SEALs are unbelievably competitive. They don’t take no for an answer.”

“Marines are the same way,” Titania said knowingly. “The more I turned Nate down, the more determined he got.”

“Just like Zach,” Sabrina agreed. “Although, I have to admit that I’m the one who seduced him.”

“Only because he let you,” the other woman said. “I think, after the bombing, he probably wanted to let you make the moves. When you felt ready.”

“If he’d made love to me when I was really ready for him, I would’ve given up my virginity in high school,” Sabrina said. “It may have also been his PTSD. I think he may have worried that I’d have trouble dealing with it.”

“But you didn’t?” Kirby managed to keep her tone conversational while the mention of PTSD rang alarm bells.

“It helped when he had something else to focus on,” Sabrina said thoughtfully. “Like falling in love.”

“And then there was always the Swann Island Slasher to deal with,” Titania said. “He had to get his act together for that one.” She smiled at Kirby. “Funny what the power of love can do.”

“It hasn’t been that easy,” Sabrina admitted. “But we’ve worked through it. And,” she told Kirby, her expression serious, “if my husband had any worries about flashbacks on the mission, he wouldn’t be going.”

Kirby decided to believe her.

“I watched him in the Kush,” Kirby said, wanting to ask about that so-called slasher, but deciding she could just Google it instead, rather than force her hostess to relive something that sounded as if it had been horrible. “After what had to have been some terribly difficult hours. And he was fully in control. I haven’t a doubt he will be as cool and professional in Monteleón.”

“Zach said you were the doctor who saved Shane’s life when they went across the border into Pakistan.” Sabrina’s voice went up a little, turning the statement into a question.

“The doctors in Bagram and Landstuhl saved his life. I merely stabilized him so they could fly him out.”

“That’s not the way my husband sees it,” Sabrina countered. “I doubt that Shane does, either.”

“I don’t want him to think of me as a doctor who saved his life.”

“Oh, I didn’t get the impression that was what he was thinking at all when he was fixated on your butt while following you up those stairs,” Sabrina said.

“Well, it’s why I didn’t ask him about it directly,” Kirby said. “But, since you brought it up, do you happen to know if he’s displayed any PTSD symptoms since he’s been Stateside?”

“Are you asking as a doctor? Or a woman?”

“I’m not sure I can separate the two. But more as a woman.”

“Well, I can tell both of you, the doctor and the woman, that he seems to have escaped any problems. Which seems to me somewhat surprising, given that of the three men, he’s the one who suffered the most physically.”

“But your husband was in charge,” Kirby said. “Which had to have added burdens for him.”

“That’s exactly it,” she agreed. “Plus, while I admittedly haven’t known him that long, Shane seems to possess an unrelentingly positive attitude.”

He always had.

Until Germany.

“Well,” Sabrina said, picking up her wineglass, “this is skating close to a depressing topic. So, how would you like to be bored to tears looking at our wedding pictures?”

“We love to show them off,” Titania said. “But everyone on the island has already seen them at least twice, and we’re running out of victims.”

“We had a double wedding,” Sabrina said. “Cait, Quinn’s fiancée,” she reminded Kirby again, “was maid of honor.”

“Which, when you meet her, you’ll realize what a huge leap of girly friendship that was,” Titania said. “Though it did take a bit of arm twisting.”

“I don’t believe anyone could say no to the two of you.” They were a formidable pair. Kirby liked that about them.

“Cait’s tough,” Sabrina said. “But we won her over. Shane was an usher.”

“And was to die for in his blues,” Titania said.

She’d never seen the pilot in his dress uniform. But she’d certainly fantasized about it. Fantasized about them walking beneath crossed swords out of some pretty little church. Then fantasized about him taking it off and . . .

“I’d love to see the pictures,” Kirby said.

“I knew, from some of the stunts you pulled in that flying Winnebago of yours, that you were nuts,” Quinn said, as he and Shane sat at a table in the Stewed Clam, nursing beers and working their way through the bar menu. “But I never realized exactly how crazy you were until you got that leg blown off.”

“Well, thanks for the vote of support.” Shane took a bite of wing and felt flames scorch the roof of his mouth.

“Anytime. I just have one question.”

“And that is?” Shane took a long pull on the beer bottle to put out the fire.

“How the hell did you let that female get away?”

Shane shrugged and snagged a fry from the red plastic basket. “Good question. And one I’ve been asking myself for a while.”

“What took you so long?”

“It’s only been eighteen months.”

“Which is like a lifetime in idiot years,” Quinn countered. “So, what are you going to do about her?”

“I’m going to get her back.”

“Good idea.” Quinn scooped up a handful of popcorn shrimp. “Seems rescuing her friend will win you huge points. Maybe save you from having to grovel too much.”

“She’s a female. Which, I suspect, means that some groveling’s going to be in the cards.”

Shane wasn’t naive enough to think just because he’d given her an orgasm, she wasn’t going to make him pay somehow.

“Probably,” Quinn agreed. “But then you can kiss and make up. Which will make the effort worth it.”

Shane certainly hoped so.

“You think we’re going to have much trouble getting the doc out of the jungle?”

Even though, after hours of training and intensive PT getting used to it, his experimental bionic leg was working nearly as well as his real one had, Shane still hoped to hell that he wouldn’t screw up his part of the mission.

“Let’s see. On one side, we’ve got dozens of radical rebels who are probably drugged to the gills and armed with automatic weapons.” Quinn lifted his right hand, palm up. “On the other side”—he held up his left—“we have two SEALs, a Night Stalker flyboy, and an Army doctor who hasn’t held a weapon since Desert Storm, but just managed to beat both of us at the firing range.”

“Gotta have been a fluke.”

Shane was still stinging a bit from that. Especially since it hadn’t been that long ago, at Walter Reed’s FATS—Firearms Training System range—he’d actually topped what he’d been shooting before his helo had gone down. But when they’d all shot at the Phoenix Team range after the initial planning meeting, the former priest had beat him by one head shot.

“Or it’s more personal for him,” Quinn suggested.

“Yeah.” Shane popped a deep-fried coconut shrimp into his mouth. “If anyone was holding Cait hostage, you’d undoubtedly tear heaven and earth apart to take them down.”

“Then rip off their heads and piss down their necks,” Quinn agreed.

“Works for me,” Shane said.

For the next half hour, Kirby oohed and aahed over the pictures of the double wedding that had taken place in Swannsea’s gardens. Sabrina and Titania were stunningly beautiful, as all brides should be, and their grooms—Zach in his Navy dress whites, Nate in Marine dress blues—handsome.

As was Quinn, who, like Zach, was wearing his dress whites with the choker collar. Cait Cavanaugh was stunning, the short black dress setting off her strawberry blond hair and porcelain skin.

But in every group photo, Kirby’s eyes kept returning to Shane. She’d never seen him in anything but his flight suit, cammie BDUs, swim trunks, or naked. Looking at him in his Army dress blue uniform, with its shiny brass buttons and combat ribbons, nearly made her drool.

Both women kept up their tag-team conversation, sharing stories about their individual courtships, double wedding, but separate honeymoons—Titania and Nate to Hawaii, Sabrina and Zach to Italy. Although she’d worried that returning to Florence, where she’d almost died, would bring back bad memories, Sabrina apparently loved the country and had wanted to share it with Zach.

“Besides,” she told Kirby, “if it hadn’t been for that terrorist bomber, I wouldn’t have come home to Swann Island and reunited with Zach.”

As they’d looked through the album, Sabrina had literally glowed like a new bride. If Kirby hadn’t liked Zach’s wife so very much, she could have been jealous.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat around drinking wine and bonding with other women over conversations about men and sex and love. Even though she and Rachel had developed a working friendship, their hours were too long, their days too hard for them to do anything but collapse into bed at night, then get up at dawn and start working all over again. Which, except for the night they’d gone to dinner, didn’t allow for much girl talk.

She’d had a few women friends in Iraq, but people were constantly getting rotated in and out of the CSH, and again, by the time she finished a shift, all she wanted was a shower and bed. Except for those months with Shane, when the shower and bed had come with a side of sex.

Even in medical school, while everyone had been focused on getting their degrees and planning active military careers, perhaps there’d been other people living a Grey’s Anatomy, all sex, all the time, lifestyle, but she certainly hadn’t known any.

Which hadn’t left her much to talk about on those occasions the women students would get together.

Which was also why, although Kirby certainly didn’t leave college a virgin, she’d actually begun to worry that she might be undersexed.

Then Shane had come crashing into her life and blown that concern to smithereens.

“You’ll have to come back for some R and R after the mission’s over,” Sabrina said. “When was the last time you had a spa day?”

“Actually, never.”

“Well, we’ll just have to change that,” Sabrina said.

“Absolutely,” Titania agreed.

“You can meet Cait, and we’ll all book a day at the Shores,” Sabrina decided. Kirby could practically see her making the appointment on a mental BlackBerry. “The owner, Beatrice, promises ‘a stress-free sanctuary from daily life,’ which, I’ll admit, when I first came back to town, sounded like a redundancy, since the island isn’t exactly the big city, but her sea salt glow body treatment leaves your skin feeling like silk, and the hot stone massage is the next best thing to sex.”

“Sounds interesting,” Kirby said a little hesitantly. She figured, after all these years in the sun, it would take a lot more than sea salt and heated rocks to make her skin feel like silk.

Compared to these two ultrafeminine females, she was beginning to feel a bit like G.I. Jane.

Titania reached over and patted her hand. “Don’t worry. You’ll love it. And afterward we’ll take the ferry over to Somersett, have ourselves high tea at the Wingate Palace, then go shopping. Because, girlfriend, I think you’ve been in cammies too long. You have a fabulously sexy body you’re hiding beneath that nun’s habit.”

“Though we can understand why you wouldn’t want to show off your sexuality down in your clinic in Monteleón, which could be dangerous,” Sabrina said, “there’s no reason why you can’t polish the package just a bit.”

She exchanged a look with Titania.

“Makeover!” they both said at once.

Oh, God.

“I’m not exactly an America’s Next Top Model candidate.” Kirby would rather be poked in the eye with a flaming sharp stick than be “polished.”

“Who is?” Titania, whom Kirby thought could win that reality show without breaking a sweat, said with a toss of her dark, braided cornrows. “At least let us trim your hair a little. It looks as if you’ve been hacking away at it with a Swiss Army knife.”

Kirby lifted a hand to the hair in question. “Actually, it was a pair of surgical scissors. I like to think of it as a shag.”

“There are shags. And hatchet jobs.” Titania leaned across the table, her fingers playing with Kirby’s blond hair. “And you definitely fall into the second category.” She turned toward Sabrina. “I’ll cut it, while you do something with those nails.”

“Oh, I really don’t think—”

“Exactly,” Sabrina jumped in as Titania’s wingman, and cut off the planned protest. “It’ll be painless. And fun.”

“Like a sleepover,” Titania said. “The way we used to when you’d come to the island for the summer in high school.”

“Though without the ’N Sync and Backstreet Boys tapes,” Sabrina said.

“We don’t need Justin Timberlake when we have Usher on my iPod,” Titania said. “We’ll just hook it up to your speakers, and we’re set.”

Which was how Kirby found herself wearing a white terry cloth robe, sitting on a padded stool in the bathroom adjoining the guest room, her bare feet soaking in scented water, a towel wrapped around her neck while Titania snipped away, and Sabrina smoothed some magical potion onto her hands to make her ragged cuticles disappear.

“I don’t suppose you happen to have any makeup?” Titania asked as she added a fringe of bangs.

“It melts in the jungle.” Kirby cringed as she watched a long piece of hair fall to the marble floor.

“Well, you’re not going to be in the jungle all day tomorrow while you’re on the plane,” Sabrina said. “Trust me, men tend to have a certain image of us stuck in their brains. I know Zach was surprised to see I’d grown up when I came back to the island.”

“So,” Titania picked up the conversational thread, “you need a new look that will knock Shane’s socks off.”

“I’m not going on a date,” Kirby complained, closing her eyes as Titania became more emboldened with the scissors. She’d never thought of herself as a coward. Until now. “I’m going down there to rescue a friend from terrorist rebels.”

“Not looking like a frumpy nun and rescuing friends need not be mutually exclusive,” Titania countered, unknowingly echoing Shane’s multitasking claim.

Frumpy? Surely it wasn’t that bad? Having hated the sexist comments boys had started throwing her way since her breasts had popped out during puberty, Kirby had always concentrated on being smart rather than sexy.

“Not that you’re at all frumpy,” Sabrina said soothingly, while looking up from applying polish to Kirby’s now neatly trimmed and filed nails to shoot Titania a warning look.

“Well, okay, that may have been an overstatement,” Titania allowed. “But still, entering into an affair with a hot guy is like going to war. A girl’s gotta use all the weapons at her disposal. And you have a lot, girlfriend, that just have been sitting there rusting away from disuse.”

“Not that you’d be one to push a metaphor,” Kirby said dryly as the two women continued to happily play with her as if she were their own personal life-sized Barbie doll.

Two hours later, after they’d raided Sabrina’s closet, Kirby was standing in front of the mirror, staring at a stranger.

No, not a stranger. She was still her. But better—make that sexier—than she’d ever looked before.

Although Sabrina was taller, Titania, proving herself a wizard with a needle as well as the scissors, had hemmed the midnight blue silk dress covered in white tropical flowers, so that it swirled romantically around her calves.

“The fit will be comfortable for traveling,” Sabrina, proving herself the more practical of the two women, said.

“But still be hot enough to get your flyboy’s juices flowing,” Titania said.

Some more closet raiding unearthed a white cashmere cardigan sweater with a crocheted collar—for that obnoxious overhead airline air-conditioning, since the dress bared her shoulders, Sabrina said—and a pair of espadrilles that lifted her height nearly three inches.

“I’m going to fall off these and break my neck,” Kirby complained.

“The ribbon ties will keep them on,” Titania said. “And they’re still sexy, but comfortable enough to wear through an airport.”

“Just try them,” Sabrina suggested. “You’ll have your sneakers in your carry-on. So if they don’t work, you can always change.”

That made sense, Kirby decided as she turned sideways and skimmed her hand—with its newly white-tipped nails—over a hip. The dress flowed over her body like a silk waterfall. It really was stunning.

“The color exactly matches your eyes,” Sabrina said. “I’ve no idea why I bought it, since mine are green and the color never worked on me, so I’ve never worn it.” She picked up the scissors Titania had been using and snipped off the still-attached price tag. “But it was so gorgeous, I couldn’t resist.”

“This is incredibly generous of you.” Kirby hadn’t dared look at the tag, since she suspected the dress probably cost more than her monthly salary at WMR.

“Oh, it’s been fun,” Sabrina said.

“Like high school,” Titania seconded.

The past two hours certainly hadn’t resembled any of Kirby’s high school experiences. Having been the class nerd, and pudgy to boot, she’d never experienced a sleepover. She’d assured herself that they were undoubtedly silly and a waste of time, while never quite convincing herself of that idea.

There’d always been a secret part of her who’d suspected that the pretty, slender girls, the ones who got elected to cheer squad and had the football stars drooling over them, had had all the fun. But until tonight, she’d never been sure.

Downstairs, she heard the front door open. Footsteps walked across the marble foyer floor.

“Sabrina?” the male voice called.

“We’re up here, darling,” Sabrina called back. “Come and tell us what you think of Dr. Campbell’s magical makeover.”

Kirby had been surprised by how much she’d enjoyed having the two women fussing over her. But now, as she heard the masculine footfalls on the stairs, her stomach clenched.

Then Zachariah Tremayne was standing in the doorway, his amazing kaleidoscope eyes skimming a judicial look over her.

“Well,” Sabrina said with the first touch of impatience Kirby had heard from her since they’d met. “What do you think?”

He grinned at Kirby and winked. “I think,” he said in his deep Lowcountry drawl, “that the Army flyboy’s toast.”