Ricochet (23 page)

That wasn’t the whole truth. Ryker sensed a deep festering wound beneath the crusted scab that he was sure kept Rachel together. In fact, he’d bet keeping that scab intact accounted for about 95 percent of the decisions she made on a daily basis. Yet another protective action he knew all about.

“I get it,” he said. “My life has always been filled with people who thrive on conflict. You’re the smart one, avoiding it.”

She exhaled and her shoulders released some tension as she focused on closing her pack. He crouched beside her, organizing his own bag. She took another long drink of water, and a dribble slipped past her lips, dripping over her chin. His hand lifted, and his index finger followed the path\. She pulled the bottle away but didn’t stop him. He followed the drop all the way to her cleavage, where it absorbed into her cotton tank.

Her pretty eyes met his and said everything she wouldn’t. She wanted him. She was tired of fighting it. Yet she still held back.

“It’s exhausting,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

Her gaze slid to his mouth, and just that little spark of heat in her expression created fire low in his gut. “What?”

“Resisting.”

Her eyes met his again.

And her phone rang.

But this time, she didn’t move to pick it up. Didn’t break his gaze. He felt her desire to jump. But there was a lot going on beneath her surface. Things he’d never claim to be able to understand but wanted to know nonetheless. Because—and wasn’t this a shitter—he
cared
.

After another ring, she growled and pulled away as she looked down at the display. Then slapped her palm to her forehead. The obvious melodrama made Ryker laugh.

“Why don’t you let me answer?” he said. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t call again for at least a day or two.”

She hit Ignore on her phone, then stuffed it back in her pocket with a familiar mischievous light twinkling in her eyes. . “I may take you up on that, Master Sargent Nathan Jefferson Ryker.”

He snorted at his official title and full legal name. “Someone’s been reading my file.”

Her smile kicked up with some heat. “Just the public information. I already know the important private details. And now I know you’re equally impressive in
and
out of bed.” She adjusted her pack and turned back toward the hill. “Are we going down the same way we came up?”

This was a good sign and gave Ryker a solid plan on settling Rachel’s nerves about their physical relationship. Showing her they could work together without issue, flirting without anyone thinking they were hooking up, could be the fastest way to get her back into bed.

He was thinking up the next step to getting closer—like naked-skin-to-skin closer—when
his
phone rang. He dropped his head back with, “Jesus Christ.”

Rachel laughed, the sound light now, pleasing Ryker to ridiculous levels. “It’s probably Jax telling us he’s here.”

As soon as he glanced at the display and saw the long-ass number on the screen, his stomach dropped. Instantly he transferred from a gorgeous country hillside to a dark room, the walls closing in on him. Fresh sweat popped out all over his body, and the breeze made it cold, creating gooseflesh.

Something touched his arm, and he startled.

“Hey.” Rachel stood in front of him, her hand still out, touching air where he’d jumped away from her. “Are you okay?”

Rachel’s words jerked him out of his mind slide. “Yeah. Sure.” He tapped Answer. “Ryker.”

His own voice sounded gravelly and breathless, and the second spanning the moment before someone spoke on the other end of the line stretched thin.

“Dude,” another man exclaimed. “It’s so good to hear your voice.”

Chappie. It was Ken Chappie calling from Afghanistan. The sound of the man’s voice hit Ryker sideways. “Are you okay? Are the guys…” He couldn’t breathe. “Are the guys okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, everyone’s fine. It’s hot as hell here and, well…you know,” his voice dipped with sadness and longing, “nothing’s ever really the same after something like that. Once a team is broken up, it’s…yeah.” He forced his voice up again. “But Ghost and Zero are still at each other the way they always are when you’re not around. Dune tries to buffer, but you know those two.”

“Yeah,” he managed, but relief almost brought him to his knees. Ryker’s muscles relaxed, and he leaned on the tripod for balance, closing his eyes. But his heart galloped in his chest, and he couldn’t catch his breath. “What’s new?”

“Nothing, bro. They build it, we destroy it. They hide it, we find it. Same old shit, different damn day.”

Now that immediate fear had dissipated, a spear of longing pierced his chest. His teammates were his family. His best friends. His stability. His sanity.

“Thanks for holding down the fort,” he said, then forced a joke—because that was the normal thing to do. “Did you call just to hear my voice?”

“I don’t miss you
that
bad,” he scoffed. “I’ve got good news. Carmello was finally released from Bethesda. He’s home in Santa Ynez with Julie and Travis. That’s only three hours from LA. Isn’t that awesome?”

Ryker’s mind started to split—one side telling him he should think that was amazing, the other urging him to go to ground. Michael Carmello was the only one of Ryker’s four teammates to come out of patrol that day alive. Once he’d been stabilized, Carmello had been shipped to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland for major surgery.

Ryker’s mind filled with the image of Carmello on the medic’s stretcher, his limbs piled where they should have been attached to his body, but weren’t. And reality fragmented like pixels in a pong game. The same panic he’d experienced that day flooded in, rising slowly, compressing his gut, his chest, his throat. “I thought…” he rasped. “I thought his recovery was going to take, like, a year.”

“He’s still got a long way to go, but he’s done with surgery.” Chappie continued with gory details—the use of cadaver cartilage, the movement of Carmello’s own muscle and bone, prosthetic preparation, skin graphs… But an incessant ring had picked up in Ryker’s ears at the word “surgery” and continued to grow.

Now it was so loud it filled Ryker’s head. So loud it knifed Ryker’s ears until he heard nothing. Just a hollow, underwater-like garble. Then the garble grew louder and louder as if rising to the surface, and exploded into Ryker’s head, as if he’d burst from the water screaming.

“Carmello! Carmello, stay with me. Medics! I need medics!”

“Is it…is it bad?”

“I got you, bro. You’re okay. Look at me now.”

“Holy fuck. Holy…where’s my…where’s my arm?”

“Where are the fucking medics? Eyes here, Carmello. Right here. On me. We’ve got this.”

“Ry? I…I can’t feel my legs…”

“Dude, don’t move. Look. At. Me.”

“Oh my God. Oh my…”

“Hold on, Mikey. Medics are coming. I’m right here.”

“No. Let me go, man. I’m already dead.”

“Shut the fuck up. No shit-talk, Carmello.”

“Get out of here, Ry.”

“I’m not leaving you. And you’re not fucking leaving me, asshole. Medics! I need medics over here!”

“Tell Julie and Travis—”

“Tell them yourself, because you’re not dying, Carmello. You hear me? That’s a fucking order!”

Ryker shook his head hard, rattling the memory from his brain, clawing for sanity. The blood coating Carmello vanished. The hopelessness in his voice faded. But pain throbbed at the center of Ryker’s body and would have taken him to his knees if something hadn’t been holding him up.

“Now it’s all PT.” Chappie’s voice seemed gruesomely enthusiastic to Ryker. “And he can do that at the local VA in Santa Barbara. I know he’d like to see you, man. I’ll text you his address. And when you see him, tell him a few missing limbs ain’t getting him out of that one-on-one he challenged me to before the blast. I’ll be up there the first day of my next leave to kick his sorry ass.”

“You bet.” He pushed words out, hoping Chappie mistook the gravelly sound of his voice for the distant connection. “I’ll do that.”

“Dune says if you scratch his truck, he’ll break your face. And if you mess up his apartment…”

Ryker only caught pieces of the rest of the idle threats before he told Chappie to tell Dune where he could shove them.

Just before he disconnected, Ryker said, “Love you, man. Stay safe.”

“Love you, too, Sarg. Get your ass back here soon.”

Ryker disconnected and heaved a breath out of his tight lungs. But Chappie’s last words reminded Ryker where he was. Which reminded him there was no alcohol nearby to drown the pain. And that he wasn’t alone.

He forced his eyes open, but everything was blurry. Instructed his hand to slide his phone back into his pocket, but his arm wouldn’t move. And if this tripod slipped, Ryker would end up face-first in the dirt.

“I think we had a sudden heat wave.” Rachel’s voice sounded decadently sweet to his ears. Ryker didn’t even try to make sense of what she said. Just the fact that she was close gave him strength to keep himself from shattering. “Or maybe that climb just caught up with me.” The gurgle of water caught his ear, then the shift of her voice as she grew closer. “I’m not feeling so great. I’m hot and nauseous, and you don’t look much better, so drink. You’ve still gotta get us off this hill.”

She pried the phone from his hand, not saying anything about the way his fingers clung to it as if it were a life preserver and he’d been lost at sea for seventy-two hours, then replaced it with an uncapped bottle of water.

After she stuffed the phone into his pocket, she reached up and put something cold on the back of his neck. Cold and wet. Water trickled down his back, and relief cleared his mind like a breeze blowing away storm clouds. When he didn’t drink on his own, she gently lifted his hand holding the water toward his mouth, releasing it when he took over and tipped the water back, guzzling the entire bottle in one long drink, and wiped the cool, wet rag around his shoulders and down his chest.

In those few moments, Ryker gathered all the memories and most of the pain and shoved them back into the hole they’d crept from at the sound of Chappie’s voice. He finished the water, dropped it on the ground, and lowered his head for a moment.

Rachel stood close. Quiet, but strong. She was a doer. A fixer. A mediator. He’d seen it the first day in the trailer. Her relationships with the others screamed nurturer. By the way she’d acted in bed, he knew she was a giver. And by the tortured tone of her voice when she’d talked with her father over the phone, the way she’d been hurt by her sister, Ryker was pretty sure this “no strings” rule she’d put into place was out of protection, not preference.

Which was another reason, he told himself, he should leave her the hell alone.

But then she took that last step in and slipped her body beneath his in a way that urged him to lean on her instead of the tripod. She wrapped one arm around his waist, raised one to his face and stroked his cheek before running her fingers through his hair.

Her body was warm and stable and fit beneath him like the perfect crutch. He let her pull his head down until his forehead pressed against her shoulder. Let her just hold him. Let her just keep scraping her fingers against his scalp until he thought he could fall asleep on his feet with the sweet relief.

“Can we go back?” she asked. “I don’t feel good.”

“I know what you’re doing.” His voice was low and rough, filled with the remnants of pain still ripping at his insides. “You don’t have to pretend to be sick to save my ego.” He slipped his free arm around her waist and pulled her up against him. Heaven. “But thanks for the thought. Give me just a minute, okay?”

She relaxed into his hold, and her body molded to his. Christ, she was like straight sugar directly into his vein. She tugged on his hair, urging him to lift his head, and when he finally met her eyes, the concern there, true and deep and so sincere, reopened the ache inside him, but in a whole different way.

“Are you…okay?” she asked.

He brushed her hair aside, told himself to nod, but his head didn’t obey. “That’s…highly debatable.”

“Do you always tell your guys you love them?”

“Yeah. It’s the only unit I’ve ever done it with. You just never know—” His voice caught.

She searched his eyes so diligently, he would have found it funny in a better frame of mind. He braced himself for the questions he could see she wanted to ask, answers she needed. But she just brought her hand back to his face and murmured, “I wish…I could…” With an exhale, she pressed her lips together and gave an almost imperceptible shake of her head. “Someone told me recently that it’s good to talk about stuff. I’m…an okay listener.”

“Just okay?”

“Yeah, just okay.” The corner of her mouth quivered in an almost smile. “I kinda tend to want to…um…fix things for people.”

He huffed a breath that was probably supposed to be a laugh, but he hurt too much to laugh. “You are so
fucking
beautiful. You know that?”

“No,” she said softly, stoically. “I’m very average, and I’m okay with that. You met the really beautiful ones last night. And you’ll meet more beautiful ones in a few days.” A little smile lifted her lips but didn’t make it to her eyes. “And just wait till those speed bunnies see you.”

“There is all kinds of beauty,” he said. “And some of those women may have flash, but not all guys like flash. And there’s a lot more to beauty than what’s on the surface.” Split-second images of the many gorgeous women he recovered from an Afghan nightclub after a bombing—deformed, maimed, scorched—popped into his head, but he instantly blocked them. “Which is good, because that all goes away eventually. Sometimes even sooner.” He lifted her chin, forcing her to meet his eyes. “And I can find bunnies anywhere. But there’s only one Rachel Hart.”

She slid her fingers across his cheek and slowly, gently, purposely brushed his lips, her gaze following. Then she dragged them open. The movement sparked a memory of their night together. Of her making the same motion as she’d swept her fingers down his face at the most intimate moment, in that blissful aftermath of dual climaxes as they sank back to reality. He’d filled her then, her body warm and wet and still tight around him.