He took another sip from his flask and tried not to think about sex, because it wasn’t going to get him what he wanted, which was to get back into her bed not only tonight but the next time he had leave, too. And the time after that.
It would have to be her call, like he’d said, so he was playing it cool, trying to make her comfortable.
She gazed up at the stars again. “It’s nice here.”
“Yep.”
He handed her the flask, and she took another sip. Sometime in the last hour, she’d lost the anguished look that had been eating away at him since he’d first seen her standing in that hospital. But still she looked edgy.
A warm breeze stirred the trees as they sat there, not talking. It felt good to be home, surrounded by the familiar scent of dirt and pinesap. It seemed unreal that seventy-two hours from now, he’d probably be strapped into a C-17 over the ocean.
He should tell her. At least mention it. But she had enough to worry about right now, and he didn’t want to add to it.
“Alison Krauss, ‘Killing the Blues.’?” She looked at him. “My dad liked to listen to her when she played with Union Station. They’re from the same town in Illinois.”
“Illinois, huh? How’d you guys end up in Virginia?”
“He went to law school there. UVA.”
“Your alma mater,” he said, hoping she’d keep going. She never talked about her family, and he knew it was a nut he needed to crack if he wanted to understand her. “So he practiced law there?”
“He was an assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Fairfax.” She cleared her throat. “I guess I never really told you how he died.”
“No, you didn’t.”
She paused and seemed to be collecting her thoughts. “It was a convenience-store holdup. He had this concealed-carry permit because of some of the people he’d helped prosecute. He always had his Beretta on him, and he tried to intervene in the holdup. The perp was roughing up this clerk, but there were two of them—one in the back, which my dad didn’t realize, so . . . it all went sideways.”
Derek reached over and squeezed her hand. “You and your dad were close?”
She nodded.
“And your mom?”
Wrong question. He could tell by the way her shoulders tensed. She slid her hand out from under his and rested her arms on her knees. “She remarried a few times. The latest guy’s okay, but I don’t know.” She shrugged. “There’s still a lot of resentment there.”
“You should patch that up,” he said, venturing an opinion she probably didn’t want to hear. “I used to have shit like that, too, with my dad. He rode us pretty hard growing up. For years, I thought I hated him.”
He looked out at the meadow bathed in moonlight, not so different from the conditions they’d had during the raid in A-bad.
He looked at Elizabeth, and she was listening. “But then a couple years ago, we lost our CO. He was killed in a helo accident.” It hadn’t really been an accident, but he didn’t want to go into all the details. “He was tough as hell, and he’d always reminded me of my dad. Then one day, he was just gone, no warning. And I realized you can’t take people for granted. Life’s too short.”
She held his gaze for a long moment, and then she looked away. Evidently, she didn’t like his advice.
The silence lengthened, and they stared out over the reservoir. A distant pair of headlights bumped over a road on the other side. It was so quiet, with just the wind and the music drifting over them, the low hum of the cicadas. He’d always loved this spot. When he came here, it was hard to believe the sprawling city of Houston was only a few miles away.
She glanced back at his truck again. “I have this album on my iPod.”
“Yeah?”
“I couldn’t sleep, like, the entire month of May. So I’d sit on my balcony at night and listen to this.”
She looked so pretty sitting there, and he reached out to stroke her hair away from her face. “Because of what happened?”
She shrugged. “I had trouble sleeping before that. Getting the shit beat out me didn’t really help, though.”
He gritted his teeth at the reminder and glanced at her scar.
She looked at him. “I thought about you a lot, you know.”
* * *
She held her breath, waiting for what he’d say. Her own words surprised her. They were the first truly honest words she’d said to him about the time when he’d been gone. She didn’t know why she was telling him this now, but it seemed to want to come out.
“I thought about you, too.” He covered her hand with his in the dirt.
“I thought about you getting shot down in a helicopter, or driving over some roadside bomb, or jumping in front of a bullet for one of your teammates.”
“We generally try to avoid bullets.” The corner of his mouth lifted in a smile. “IEDs, too. First thing they teach you in SEAL school.”
“I’m serious,” she said.
“I am, too.”
She looked out at the meadow, and the tension was back again, bunching up her muscles, making her neck tight. He always wanted to defuse any tension with a joke, but she was trying to be honest with him. Honest about why things would never work. Why she felt adamant about not sleeping together again when she knew he wanted to, and she wanted to, too.
“I ever tell you about my first tour?”
She turned to look at him. He’d never told her about any of his tours. When he talked about his work, it was usually about the training.
“This was up in the mountains,” he said, and she took that to mean Afghanistan. “End of the fighting season, so it was getting cold at night. Your breath would turn to frost in the air, and you’d have to stomp your feet to keep from freezing. We’d spent the whole summer assaulting cave complexes—which is hot, filthy work—and we were glad to finally get some cold, even though we knew we were going to be hating it in only a few weeks.
“Anyway, we get this intel from one of the terps at base camp in the valley. And this isn’t just any valley, it was a snake pit—that’s what we called it. The whole place was crawling with TAQ—Taliban/Al Qaeda fighters.”
“What’s a terp?”
“Sorry—interpreter. This one was working with the Army guys at the base. He brings us this intel that an HVT—that’s a high-value target—is hiding out in a cave complex in the neighboring valley. This target was tops on our list. We knew he’d been recruiting kids in the villages for suicide missions in Kabul—marketplaces, security checkpoints, that kind of thing.”
“He was getting kids to do this?”
“Yeah, this guy was a real scumbag, no moral code whatsoever. That was something I learned on my first tour: some of the top TAQ guys were the biggest cowards. So this guy’s high-priority, and we get this tip about him, but of course, we’re wary. Single-source intel tends to be unreliable. But the commanders get together and decide to send some guys in, see if we can get the dope on this cave complex. It wasn’t on any of our maps.”
“Sounds like a red flag.”
“Yeah, but you never know. Especially back then. This was early days in the war, and we didn’t have all the intel we have now. In some of the more remote places, we were still using Soviet maps, if you can believe it.”
“So I’m guessing you were on this team they sent in?”
“Me, Gage, Luke, and this guy Kevin Bunker. You haven’t met him, but he’s big. He was in the BUD/S class ahead of me, aced all the PT. He could bench-press three-fifty, but he was fast, too—always smoked everyone in the timed runs. He got the nickname ‘Hill’ because of his size.”
“As in Bunker Hill?”
“You got it.”
He offered her the flask again, and she shook her head. She wanted him to keep talking freely. He’d never shared so much about his job before, and she was lapping it up.