“We weren’t acting,” she pointed out, calm and logical.
He ignored her as best he could when she stood just ten feet away, shucking the jeans and polo for gray cotton shorts and his running shoes. When he emerged, she still stood at the end of the hallway, arms folded under her breasts, her face mildly amused and mildly inquisitive. “Time for a workout?”
He nodded. “Help yourself to whatever,” he said with a glance at the shelving unit holding his outdated CD collection and a few books.
“Do you have speakers I can connect my iPod to?”
“No. Sorry.”
“No stereo either.”
That wasn’t a question. “We moved it to make room for the Xbox.” But the CDs still lined the shelves of the entertainment center.
“In Luke’s room there’s a picture of you holding an iPod.”
His fingers tightened on his hips as memories flooded back, opening the Christmas package, seeing the little device awkwardly bubble-wrapped and taped to within an inch of its life, knowing Luke would have saved the money he earned mowing lawns and shoveling sidewalks for months to buy him the iPod so he’d have the music he missed so desperately. It was, hands down, the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him.
She was seeing things, and worse, making connections.
“That was a long time ago. Luke got it for me for Christmas during my first tour.” His voice was emotionless, too much so. He forced out a breath, relaxed his hands. Sometimes you had to react a little to hide a lot.
“What happened to it?” Unlike his voice, hers was quiet, soft, and full of gentle curiosity.
He talked to the frame around Luke’s door. “When my CO told me my parents were dead and Luke was paralyzed, I had ten minutes to sprint three quarters of a mile to the airstrip and catch the first transport to Germany. I left everything behind.” He’d been wearing the sweat-stained, gritty cammies when he walked through Luke’s hospital room door thirty-six hours later, covered in Iraqi dust and sand. “A buddy packed up my stuff and shipped it to me, but he couldn’t find the iPod. Someone stole it out of my locker.” He shrugged. “Guy needed it more than I did. Everyone has their music on their phones these days.”
“But not you,” she observed.
“I’ve been busy.” When she didn’t comment on this pathetic excuse, he turned to go into the bedroom that held the gym.
“Matt.”
He stopped. “Yeah.”
“I’ll still be here when you come back.”
No problem, because the workout was going to fix this. It always had, until he met Eve. He straddled the treadmill and punched up a hill course, waiting for the belt to pick up speed before he dropped into the workout. In seconds he ran at a pace that would have left her far behind if she hadn’t been down the hall, in his living room.
Chest heaving, pulse well into the red zone, he drove himself through an eight-mile hill course in less than an hour but the emptiness never came. Fine. Going at the speed bag never failed. His fists fell into the regular five-count rhythm easily enough, but his brain would not shut down. He knew the heavy bag workout was useless before he even began, but drove punch after punch into the slowly twisting cylinder until he skidded on the sweat spattered on the wood flooring. With a low curse he tore off the gloves, fisted his hands on his hips, and bent his head.
This is not going to go away. For the foreseeable future she is in your house, in your life, and this is not going away. Face it, and deal.
Sweat dripped steadily from his jaw and temple to the floor. He grabbed a towel and dried off, then wiped the floor and walked down the hall to confront temptation. She was stretched out on the sofa, reading one of the few books shoved into the shelf next to his outdated CD collection. She’d turned on the lamp on the end table against the deepening summer twilight, and didn’t look up from the book. In the kitchen he ran water into a glass and drank. When he had two full glasses in him, she spoke.
“Did it work?” she said absently.
He refilled the glass and walked out of the darkness of the kitchen to stand in the doorway to the living room, waiting until she looked up from the book. Her green eyes were somehow both languid and heated, her skin gleaming against the dark sofa. There weren’t sparks flying between them. It was like an ambush, tracers arcing into the night sky, the shock and adrenaline of a firefight every time they were in the same room. “No.”
At that her gaze sharpened. “Sometimes you can’t shove down what you want,” she said as she went back to the book.