“No. I began to try, but everything was a dead end.” He finished off the cookie and gave her a sad look. “I sometimes have these dreams that she’s dead. I dream of her in an alley, laying there, unmoving. When I found out from my father that she was diagnosed as bipolar, I tried to understand and read up on the condition. All it did was scare the shit out of me because I was trying to hunt her down and find her. All my dreams were about a drug overdose, her becoming addicted to drugs or trying to get better, but dying, instead.”
Reaching out, Sloan eased her fingers down his forearm. “Just because she was bipolar doesn’t mean she’d do any of those things.”
“Well,” he said, “I knew that, too.”
“But dreams often reflect our fears, whether they’re right or wrong.”
“I dreamt about her just now,” he admitted, looking away for a moment.
“Dan, you nearly died. It’s normal to have dreams of those you love dying. You’re in the midst of wrestling with your mortality.”
“Yeah,” he said heavily. “That’s exactly where I’m at. The last couple of days it’s really come home to me.” Placing the cup on the tray, Dan pushed it away, centering his focus on Sloan. He drew her hand between his. “I remember everything now. Our talk on the beach after we dived in the Red Sea. I want that second chance with you. Nothing’s changed. Has it changed for you since I got shot?”
Sloan released a long, slow breath, trying to gather her thoughts.
“I’m so relieved you remember our talk,” she began, her voice low. “Nothing’s changed from the moment we had that talk. At least, not on my end. Has it from yours?”
“No, it hasn’t,” he said flatly, relief sizzling through him. He tightened his hands around hers, seeing hope flare in her eyes. “I’m scared as hell that I’ll screw this up with you again. I want to try and be the man you need, not the one you got four years ago. I’m not sure I can do it. There’s so much I don’t know about you—about myself.”
Easing her hand from his, Sloan stood up and set her coffee on the other bedstand. She walked around to his right side and settled carefully on the mattress. Her hip rested lightly against his, and she framed his face with her hands, leaning forward, her lips brushing against his. The moment she skimmed his mouth, she heard a groan begin deep within his chest and felt his hands upon her face, drawing her deeply against him. The heat, the urgency and hunger all combined as he took her mouth gently beneath his own, his hands against her face, angling her, taking her deeper.
Sloan became lost in the promise as he worshipped her mouth. She knew Dan’s sexual hunger, knew the power of his dominating kisses from years earlier. But this kiss? It was so different. So…wonderful, that she moaned, leaning into his exploring mouth, desperate for his tenderness toward her, even if he didn’t call it love. This was the man she had always sensed but had never seen. Until now. In seconds, her lower body flared to life, and a deep, needy ache throbbed through her core.
Dan didn’t want the kiss to end. He wanted Sloan’s soft, full lips against his forever. It was the rightest thing in the world for him—for them.
How long Sloan had waited for just this moment! She didn’t care if Dan didn’t know what love was, that he couldn’t recognize it if it stared him in the face. He was showing her in the best of ways that he loved her whether he ever used the word or not. She had never felt so cherished as right now in this exquisite, unexpected moment. She tasted the coffee and the peanut butter cookie on his lips and allowed herself to fully open to him, to all possibilities. Sloan sensed he needed that kind of silent commitment from her. She knew how tentative, how scared he was that he’d screw up and chase her away once more.
If Dan could open up to her like this less than two weeks after nearly dying, she knew they had a real chance with one another. This was the man she’d starved for, the man she knew existed all along.
She silently promised him that she would help him and support him, but Sloan didn’t fool herself. She knew she was in a rough testing time with Dan. The wounds in his soul caused by his parents were deep and still open. But he was trying, and that’s all she could ask of anyone.
Slowly, he eased her away from him. Dan lifted his lashes, meeting her barely-opened eyes as she stared down at him. There was arousal in them. That was something he could read well. But the other feelings he couldn’t translate.
He moved his fingers through her silky hair and watched her eyes smolder with heat and need for him in other ways. “I want to get to know you. All of you,” he stressed in a rasp. “And I’m going to open up to you even if it kills me.” His fingers tightened against her face. “I don’t want to lose you again. I’ll do whatever it takes to win back your heart. I know I’m going to stumble. I’ll sure as hell fall and make mistakes with you, but keep giving me a chance? I’ll pick myself up. We’ll talk. We’ll figure out what’s going on between us. I know I’m no prize, but there’s something damn good and solid between us. Give me this last chance? Let me try to prove to you I’m not the bastard I was before?”
CHAPTER 15
Sloan held on to her joy as Dan spoke words that she never believed he would say to her. Easing back, allowing her hand to slip into his, she whispered unsteadily, “We have to take it a day at a time. To be honest, I want you. I want this to work between us. But I have the past with you, and I’m afraid.”
His mouth crooked and he gently moved his fingers across the back of her hand. “I’m no one’s poster child,” he agreed. “I guess,” he began, his voice strained, “nearly getting killed has forced me to take a different slant on my life. Maybe a different perspective? The last couple of days my brain has been avalanching me with the times we spent with one another at Bagram. I’m right in the middle of something that I can’t give words to. I’m changing. I don’t know the outcome, and I’d be a liar if I said I did.”
Nodding, she swallowed hard, holding his pleading gaze. But was it love or sympathy? Sloan didn’t know. “I’m going through my ups and downs, too. I got shot in the leg. I wasn’t going to die from the wound, but it still affected me deeply.”
She looked down at their hands entwined with one another. “I took a bullet several years before I met you. It hit my right upper arm, but it wasn’t a big deal because it just went through the meat in my bicep.”
“Getting shot is always a big deal,” he growled. “Don’t ever make it less than what it is.”
“You’re right.”
“How did it make you feel after the first time?”
“I sat in Bagram Hospital with a lot of crazy emotions skewing through me like a tornado. I had no one at that time I could talk to. I had the A-team guys I was with, but you know how black ops are? They never talk about their feelings. I spent three days in a ward with other soldiers who were wounded. I was the only woman among them. I had all these feelings running around in me, and I didn’t know what to do with them. I used to jam my face into the pillow after the lights were shut off in the ward at night and sob until I didn’t have any tears left.”
“How did that change you?” Dan asked.
Shrugging, Sloan said, “It made me realize that life was precious. That at any moment, I could be gone. I thought about my parents, how much I loved them, what it would do to them if I suddenly died out in Afghanistan, so far away. I thought about all my growing up years, how happy I was at the ranch, riding horses, herding cows, canning with my mom…little things…but important things to me.” She shook her head. “All of this awareness didn’t hit me all at once. It took months to filter down through me, and as it did, it changed me.”
“How did it change you?”
She heard the sincerity in his voice and understood Dan was in the middle of so many emotions, unable to sort them any better than she had when she’d been shot. “It made me appreciate that I was allowed to survive. I began to take the small moments and absorb them fully instead of just seeing them, but they didn’t touch me deeply as they do now. I stayed in closer contact with my parents. I valued the friendships I’d made even more.”
“How do you do that?”