The Edge of Courage (Red Team) (12 page)

Her hand moved up to his shoulder, across his collarbone, to his neck. A muscle in his jaw bunched as his dick responded to the feel of her palm against his skin. She caressed his jaw, his cheek, his temple.

“Your eyes are unbelievably sad, Rocco. Why?”

“Don’t ask me questions I can’t answer.”

“Make love to me.”

Words failed him. He could only nod.

“I’m going to change,” she said, smiling. “I’ll come right down.” She slipped free from his hold and trotted to her porch. Rocco made his way to the bunkhouse. He tossed his hat on the table.

It hit him then, the answer to the question he’d asked himself earlier.

Nine months. He’d last been with his wife
nine months
ago. A cold sweat dampened his arms and chest and face with its stink. Their second child would have been born this month.

“You did this. You killed us.”

He ripped at the buttons of his shirt, tearing it from him, checking his arms for the ghost flesh that he felt sticking to him as tears made hot tracks down his cheeks. He kicked his boots off and stripped out of his T-shirt, jeans, briefs, and socks, leaving them where they fell in the hallway to the bathroom. He flipped on the shower, feeling the burned flesh drying, shrinking, pulling at his skin. The smoke choking his lungs.

He lunged into the shower stall. Grabbing the soap, he fell to his knees, swiping the bar over his arms, building a thick, white lather to wash away the burned flesh. He reached for the washcloth and began scrubbing the dead skin from his arms, even as his mind gave in to the screams that had haunted him since that day.

Mandy took a quick shower, dried her hair, and pulled on a sexy babydoll. It was sheer white, with satin push-up cups and lacy briefs that matched. She’d bought it a couple of years earlier, but had never worn it—hadn’t even removed the tags until tonight. She started out of her bedroom, feeling very naked walking through the house in something so revealing. At the door, she paused. What if she stayed the night there? She couldn’t walk back to the house in the daylight dressed as she was.

She slipped into a pair of flip-flops, then grabbed her raincoat and shoved her arms through the sleeves as she hurried from her house down to the bunkhouse. She knocked on the door. No answer. She cracked it open and realized Rocco was taking a shower. She stepped inside, feeling suddenly very shy. She took her coat off and wandered into the bedroom that he used, wondering which was his bed. Neither of them looked as if they’d been used lately.

It seemed terribly bold waiting for him in one of the bedrooms. She went back into the small living room. One of the armchairs had been pushed into a corner. She sat in it. His shotgun and a box of shells were on the floor next to it. That seemed odd, but she didn’t give it much thought. Sitting still seemed to highlight her nervousness so she went to stand in the shadows by the kitchen. That was best. She felt better standing up.

Still he showered. From her vantage point, she could see the clothes he’d stripped out of on his way to the bathroom. His space was otherwise very tidy. She smiled, imagining his haste to get showered before she came over.

The water kept running. Like before, when he’d taken that long, freezing cold shower. Something wasn’t right. She ventured down the hall and knocked on the bathroom door. No answer.

“Rocco? I’m here.” No answer.

She poked her head around the door, expecting a room full of steam. It was cold, like a grave. Rocco was in the shower, washing himself with a red washcloth. She pulled back, realizing he hadn’t heard her. No sooner had she shut the door than it dawned on her that she hadn’t provided any colored linens. The towels and sheets she’d stocked the bunkhouse with were all white.

She hurried into the bathroom, and pushed open the sliding shower door. “Oh, my God. Rocco stop!” Cold water lashed across her back as she reached inside and grabbed hold of Rocco’s hand, stilling the white terrycloth that was red with blood.

Chapter 9

Rocco looked at her with unfocused eyes. Mandy wasn’t certain he saw her.

“I have to get it off.”

“Get what off?”

“The blood. The skin. I have to get it off.”

“Rocco, you’re making yourself bleed. Come out of the shower. Let me look at what you’ve done.” She kept the cloth pressed to his forearm as she helped him to his feet and out of the stall. Lowering the lid on the toilet, she had him sit there. Kneeling before him, she prayed he hadn’t slashed his wrist as she peeked beneath the cloth. He hadn’t. The blood was from an abrasion farther up his forearm.

His knees bounced nervously as his feet jiggled against the cold tile floor. His face was pale, his lips blue, his breathing uneven. She was afraid he was going into shock. She grabbed his free hand and wrapped it around the bloodied cloth, squeezing his grip to hold it tight. She pulled a couple of thick towels from the shelf and covered his shoulders and legs with them. She flipped on the hot water tap in the shower, thinking that would heat the little room quickly—unless he’d already emptied the hot water in the tank. Fortunately, he hadn’t. Steam began to fill the room.

Finally, she turned her attention back to him, easing his hand away, murmuring low, soothing words as she would to a spooked horse. “Okay. You’re okay. I’m going to take a look. Turn your head away. I don’t want you to see this.”

He looked at one arm, then the other. “I know it isn’t there.” She straightened the towel over his shoulders. His eyes were still dilated.

“What isn’t there?”

“The black flesh. It sticks to me. I see it. I can feel it. I can smell it. But I know it isn’t there.”

Mandy couldn’t make any sense of that at all, so she didn’t respond. She needed to see how bad his wound was before she could begin processing his strange words. She peeled the washcloth away. He’d rubbed his skin raw on both sides of his left forearm. It bled freely but wasn’t deep.

“It’s going to be fine, Rocco. It’s only a scratch. You’re going to be fine.”

“No, I’m not. I’m too goddamned fucked up to be fine.”

She brushed a thick, wet lock of hair from his face, then pulled his forehead down for a kiss and held him against her mouth. “I’m not lying. You’re going to be fine. Don’t get up. I’m going to grab some Neosporin spray and bandages. Close your eyes. Focus on breathing.”

She hurried to the medicine cabinet and took out the items she needed. She gave his scrapes a quick spritz of the Neosporin, opened a couple of packages of gauze pads, then covered them with a sticky wrap that would keep the whole works in place on his arm.

Still kneeling on the hard tiles, Mandy smiled up at him. “All done.” The room was feeling comfortably steamy. Her gorgeous babydoll clung to her like a second skin, limp and dull. “What happened here?”

He shrugged. “This is why they kicked me out of the Army.”

She let out a short huff of air. “Hallucinations have a funny way of freaking people out. Suppose you tell me why you’re having them?”

“If I fucking knew, I could get it to stop.”

She stroked a hand over his chest, beneath the edge of the towel. “Do you see the flesh now?”

He looked at himself. “No.”

“Do you smell it or feel it?”

“No.”

“That’s good. Neither do I.” She rubbed her hand up his uninjured arm and back down. “You know, I don’t scare very easily. Maybe you could trust my eyes, for now, just until you can trust your own again. If I see flesh sticking to you that isn’t yours, I’ll tell you. And unless I do, you can know that it really isn’t there, that you don’t need to get it off of you, okay?”

He didn’t answer, but he didn’t refuse either. Tears welled in his eyes. She felt them pool in her own eyes as she stroked her hands up and down his arms. “When did this start happening?”

He shrugged. “Landstuhl—the hospital in Germany. I was out of my head. I had to be restrained. I’d been speaking Pashto for so long, I forgot to speak English. No one understood me.”

“Were you injured in Afghanistan?”

He nodded. “Remember that explosion I told you about?”

It all clicked for her. “Ohhh. That makes sense.”

“Does it? Because it fucking doesn’t to me.”

The long hours he worked would leave him little time for sleep. She remembered none of the beds had been slept in, and the armchair was in an odd place in the living room with the shotgun and box of shells close at hand. “You aren’t sleeping, are you?”

He shook his head. “Not much.”

Kit said he’d been having nightmares, but these hallucinations were day terrors. “After my parents’ death, when I first moved in with my grandparents, I had a lot of nightmares. My grandfather said my mind was trying to tell me something, a message that I was not allowing myself to hear when I was awake. He said we have nightmares because there’s something going on inside of us that we don’t want to face so we close ourselves off from it—but when we do, it stalks us in our sleep. Were you given sleep meds at the hospital?”

“I was, but I quit taking them when they discharged me. Left me too hung-over to function in the morning.”

“And then these hallucinations kicked in when you quit sleeping?” Again, he nodded. “Rocco, it’s your same nightmare, but now it’s a waking one. You’re trying to tell yourself something, but you’re not listening.” He looked at the wall behind her. “What happened in that explosion?”

“I don’t remember.”

Mandy studied him. “How were you injured in the explosion?”

“I don’t know. I blacked out.”

“You have to try to remember that day, remember the explosion.”

“No.”

“This won’t stop until you do.”

He looked down at her. Tension distorted his face, like a cable drawn too tight. “I’m going back to Cheyenne. You don’t need to deal with this crap.”

She sat back on her haunches. Her hands were still on his knees. He’d stopped jiggling his legs, and his breathing had calmed, but his eyes were still wild.

“Good,” she agreed with his decision. “Do that. Because this war injury is shameful and should be hidden. You should have to deal with it alone.”

Anger flashed across his eyes at her sarcasm. He stood and lifted her in one smooth movement, pinning her against the wall, his hands under her armpits. She could barely touch the floor with her toes.

“I’m out of my fucking mind. What if I hurt you? What if I black out, mistake you for the enemy?”

Mandy set her palms against his cheeks, willing him to look at her. “Have you ever mistaken a friendly for an enemy?”

No, he hadn’t. But he’d mistaken an enemy for a friendly, an error that had cost his second child’s life and had put Zaviyar in so much danger. “When I flashback, I lose track of myself. I’m not aware of what I do.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

“
I’m
afraid of me. I’m afraid for you.”

“Rocco, I don’t want you to go. I think this is where you need to be.”

He stared at her. He looked at the hold he had her in—if he needed more proof, he had it right there. Shaking his head, he eased her to her feet and pressed his hands flat against the wall on either side of her head. His towels had dropped away when he stood up. His penis leaned against her belly, a hard rod throbbing to life. The feel of her body against the head of his cock sent a shiver through him.

She lowered her hands from his face to his chest and rubbed in small circles. “Please. Stay. Strangers won’t understand you. They will make things worse. And Kit will be here soon, I know it. He’ll be able to help, too. And you said Ty’s coming home. This is where you need to be.”

He sighed and slowly lowered his forehead to hers. His nose was next to hers. She could feel his breath on her mouth. “I’ll stay. For a while. Unless this gets worse.” He pulled back to look at her. His face was shuttered. He wasn’t letting her in and he wasn’t letting himself out. It was her luck, Mandy thought, to have a man she could be crazy about walk into her life, only to have him walk right back out again. She lowered her gaze to stare blindly at the light furring of dark hairs on his chest. Tears spilled down her face. She didn’t want him to leave. Ever. But it didn’t matter. Clearly, she wasn’t enough of a reason for him to stay.

Rocco swiped his thumbs across her cheeks. Her tears robbed him of words. He pulled her against his chest, holding his arms loosely around her. Her arms wrapped about his ribs, her hands flat on his back, her face pressed into his chest. He tightened his hold about her. He could feel the slippery moisture of her tears on his skin, feel the cool pull of her breath.

His dick was throbbing, alive, aware of her in a way he tried futilely to ignore. He tried to calm the deep breaths he drew, but every slight movement he made brought his body in contact with Mandy’s in new and exciting ways.

If he didn’t pull away now, he would be lost. There was nothing gentle in the way he desired her.

Mandy’s hands eased around his sides, moved up over his chest. Her tears had stopped—for that, he was grateful. Her lips pressed against his sternum. Her tongue, hot and moist, tracked up, then across his collarbone. She lifted her face to his neck. He kissed her temple, drew the sweet scent of her hair into his lungs. She smelled like Mandy, not Kadisha. His relief was intense. Grounding.

His hands cupped her shoulder blades as he drew her up against himself. He kissed her cheek, followed the line of her jaw to her lips, and there he paused. “Tell me you want this as much as I do. I want you to be sure about this. Very shortly, I won’t be able to stop.”

She smiled against his lips, and breathed, “I want this.”

He nodded. “Good.” He felt a wave of possessiveness—something he had no right to feel. She was not his forever, only his for now, this moment. He eased her down to her feet and stepped back. Fishing through his shaving kit, he found a couple packs of rubbers. He ripped one open and slipped it down over his cock, which helpfully, was standing at a rigid right angle to his body.

Mandy watched him. She licked her lower lip. Her eyes met his, green eyes gone black with desire. He reached into the shower and shut off the water, which had long since turned cold. He pulled the shower door shut. Lifting her hands, he pressed one to the grip on the shower door, the other to the towel bar on her other side. “For support,” he said, grinning.