Until There Was You (Coming Home, #2) (11 page)

He stood stiff and straight for her inspection. His eyes were closed, his shoulders rigid, his head bowed, his breath harsh and ragged.

“You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you, Captain America?” she murmured.

Tentatively, she reached out, tracing the gnarled roots of an old oak tree, tattooed
in black at the base of his rib cage. It curled and twisted over his left deltoid, the black, gothic branches spreading over his shoulder and halfway down his bicep and the left side of his chest.

This was not a tattoo that someone did for fun. This was a memorial. This was pain. A wicked, vicious inscription carved into his flesh.

In the middle of the tree, a faded pink scar ripped through indecipherable writing. “What is this?” she whispered, tracing the lines over his back with the tip of her index finger.

“My sister. It’s a tribute to my sister.” His throat moved as he swallowed hard.

“What about the scar?” she whispered.

“When the TOC got blown up, a ricochet from the mortar blast tore off her name. I’ve been waiting for it to heal enough to get it fixed.”

Claire couldn’t speak past the block in her throat. This was more than just a flesh wound.

She’d never dreamed that Captain America—that Evan—had experienced such a loss. The depth of his pain was written all over his body. She stood near his shoulder and met his gaze, looking past the constrained façade to the torment beneath. Then slowly, slowly, she traced the black branch twisting over his biceps with the tip of her tongue.

His lips parted, the only visible reaction to the intense sensation of her mouth on him. He held his breath as she tasted the black branches covering his shoulder.

A tribute. She pressed her lips to the scar at the center of his shoulder. She wanted to ask about his sister, wanted to know more about a man who would mark his body permanently for someone else. It was the kind of thing she would have done when she was young and stupid. She pressed her lips to his shoulder, felt his muscles jump beneath her kiss. For a brief moment, she wrapped her arms around his waist from behind, pressing her cheek to the black lines covering his back, wondering at the boy he had been. At the pain that carved that boy into the man before her.

For once, the silence between them was empty of blame and hurt. Claire was moored to the spot, filled with a warmth that nearly overwhelmed her. Desire burned low and deep in her belly, but now there was more—the connection of shared loss.

He’d shared at least part of the loss that had shaped him into the man she held in her arms. But would he accept the losses that had shaped her?

She didn’t know. And her inability to trust in this fragile connection between them nearly broke her heart.

* * *

There was no reason for him to be standing in the middle of her room. He could have turned out the lights, hiding the tattoo. There was no reason for him to have shown her the ragged memory he’d carved into his body as both penance and tribute.

He wrapped his hands around hers, which were folded against his abdomen. He couldn’t see her face, couldn’t see the questions or the judgment there. Would she look at him and know he was a killer long before the army had pinned a rank on his chest and placed a weapon in his hand?

She called him Captain America. Claire looked at him and saw the man he’d forced himself to become after a single reckless night had driven him away from the home he’d once loved.

It terrified him how easily he’d handed her the power to crush him. A hundred thousand things tumbled through him, twisting and writhing, refusing to be locked down again. Never had a lover taken the time to do something so incredibly erotic and so touching all at once.

Claire shifted until she stood in front of him. She pressed her lips to his collarbone, at the edge of a single, twisted black branch. “How did she die?” Claire’s whispered question pierced the silence. The thin veil of Evan’s control vibrated like a
wall of heat rising from the pavement in August.

He shifted then, lifting one arm over her shoulder to cradle the back of her neck, struggling to find the words that were not a lie. “Car accident.” He released a shuddering breath. In the thirteen years since his sister had died, he’d never told anyone the full truth of what had happened. “She was sixteen.”

Her palm flattened over the scar where his sister’s name had been, her arms a warm and comforting embrace. Even thinking about it caused the ache in his soul to pound against his veins. “How old were you?” she whispered.

He tipped her head back until he could look into her eyes. They stood, their bodies separated by clothing and heat, the scar on his back a brand. He’d never had a lover ask about him. About his tattoo? Yes. About his little sister? That too.

Maybe it said something about the partners he’d chosen. But before this moment, he’d never wanted to explain about the sister he’d killed, the parents he’d let drift away because it was easier to ignore his pain than face it every time he looked into their eyes, eyes that reminded him so much of Casey. It was easier to turn away from their crushing blame.

“Seventeen.” His breath shuddered from his body. Her fingers curled against the scar, her nails a light pressure on his skin.

Claire said nothing, but Evan met her searching gaze. He stood beneath her scrutiny, his soul open and bared, and he waited. For pity. For some pithy comment. For anything to shatter the moment, giving him a reason to leave. Claire was not the only one running from what she’d been, he thought ruefully.

Instead, she simply leaned into him and kissed him. Her tongue slid against his, a warm, welcome caress, saying so much without words. He surrendered to her touch, to the sweet taste of her mouth, and for the first time in his life, he dared to want something without the overwhelming need to control it.

She pulled away for a moment and looked him in the eyes. Her palms gently
cupped his face. “I’m sorry that you lost her,” she whispered.

He lowered his face to her neck and said nothing. He couldn’t speak. His throat closed off, his voice crushed beneath a wave of grief that was so strong it threatened to cut off his air supply. “Me, too.”

It was all he could manage.

Somehow, it was enough.

* * *

Evan’s arms were tight and strong around her. Claire simply stood in his embrace, resting her cheek against the solid muscle of his chest, the lines of his tattoo burning into her skin.

She had not felt a man’s arms around her in … forever. The simplicity of the embrace unnerved her and unlocked a craving for so much more than she’d ever allowed herself to feel. It terrified her, the depth of the want inside her.

An eternity passed, but the weight of the silence between them felt warm for once, a comfort instead of a frigid chill.

Their breathing was the only sound, pulsing with the solid, steady beating of Evan’s heart beneath her cheek. The tenderness, the quiet connection with a man who held so much loss inside him. She knew loss. She’d simply never thought that someone as polished and rigid as Evan had lived through something so soul-crushingly sad.

In the silence, a quiet beeping interrupted their requiem. He shifted then and lifted his head as she pulled her wrist around to glance at her watch. “We’ve got to go soon,” she whispered.

“Yeah.” He stepped away from her then and she watched his body twist and flex as he pulled his shirt back on. He tucked it into his belt, his eyes dark and watchful.

“Claire?”

“Hmm?” She could find no other words.

He stepped close, tracing his fingers over her cheek. “This would have been a mistake.”

She flinched, pulling away from his touch, the unexpected bite of his words. His fingers snapped to the back of her neck, halting her retreat. “It would have been a mistake I would have enjoyed making,” he finished.

Her mouth went dry, her heart beating in time with the echo of his words as they penetrated the shields around her soul. She let him go, because anything else would have shattered the remnants of self-preservation to which she was so valiantly clinging. The door closed softly behind him. Too late for him to hear her whispered response.

“Me, too.”

Late that night, long after the briefings had finally been completed and Colonel Danvers had released them from PowerPoint hell, Claire sat in the crowded restaurant, utterly alone in a sea of eating, swearing, laughing humanity recovering from a day on the mountain. A deep, unsettling disquiet danced in the shadows of her heart, stealing her focus.

Evan had gotten under her skin, and she couldn’t shake the image of his tattoo from her memory.

His revelation had been a powerful trust, a trust she did not deserve. And yet, he’d given it to her. She shook her head and tried to push away the panicky sensation in her belly. She didn’t do trust. Not this kind of trust. Trust to guard her six on the battlefield? Hell, yes. This? The kind of trust that made a man put his heart in her hands? This was not her area of expertise. Not by a long shot.

She didn’t usually think of herself as a coward, but then again, she didn’t usually make out with a coworker because she’d had a bad day at work. She pushed the chicken on her plate around with her fork.

“You look like you’re going to puke.”

She glanced up as Reza set a heaping plate of food down across from hers, and took a seat in front of it. She hadn’t seen him come in. “Hey” was her only reply.

“Who pissed on your leg?”

“Colonel Danvers, for starters,” she grumbled. In truth, there were more important things for Claire to worry about. Like the man sitting across from her. The man who’d missed the makeup briefing tonight. Claire wished she didn’t suspect where he’d been.

Reza frowned and opened his mouth to speak but snapped it closed, leaving her
with her nagging sense of worry. He pointed at her with his fork. “Ass-chewings are good for you. They build character.” He smeared butter on his broccoli. “How can I help?”

“I wish I knew,” she said, chasing a french fry around her plate. “If I was heading back downrange, I’d want them to learn how to react to chaos, and who better to provide that than someone who knows weapons and explosives? But I don’t get a vote.” She sighed. “We can’t deviate from the plan, even though it kills me to say so.”

He swiped a roll from the basket in front of Claire and tore it open. She could have taken that moment to talk to him about his drinking but she didn’t. She couldn’t. And it made her a coward.

The trust she had with Reza was not the same as the trust that was building, slowly, between her and Evan.

“So are you going tell me what’s eating at you,” Reza said, “or am I going to have to drag you to the gym and beat it out of you?”

She cracked a smile. “I don’t feel much like fighting at the moment.” She felt like she had a massive scarlet letter tattooed on her forehead.

“It’s Loehr, isn’t it?”

“That apparent?”

“Hello, Captain Obvious. You two have been swiping at each other for so long, I figured it was only a matter of time before you realized that you’re just two sides of the same coin.”

“How long have you known him?” she asked suddenly, hoping it wasn’t glaringly transparent why she was asking.

“A few years,” Reza said, spearing a broccoli tree.

She cleared her throat. “He helped me bring you home the other night.”

“Glad he felt compelled to help out.” Reza stiffened slightly, avoiding her gaze.

“I didn’t expect him to.” She studied him quietly before asking a simple, loaded question. “Why, Reza?”

He cleared his throat, a deep flush creeping up his dark skin. “What’s the big deal? Shit happens in combat. It’s not like he’s my hetero life mate or anything.”

“Rules, Reza. Evan doesn’t break the rules. Any of them.”

Reza set his fork and spoon down and folded his arms over his chest. “Have you ever been faced with two choices? And neither of them are good?”

“Yeah.” She’d learned about hard choices long before she’d ever donned a uniform. Decisions you could never take back. Her chest tightened as she thought again about her father. Reza cleared his throat, then wiped his mouth with a napkin.

“Choices suck sometimes. And they’re permanent. For the rest of your life, you have to live with them. No do-overs. No instant replay or living with regrets. Loehr is a hard man to work for, but when you need him to make a hard choice, he’ll do it.”

Claire retreated into silence for a moment, heading away from awkward territory. She knew about hard choices. About weighing the loss of her career over the loss of a friend’s life. “So what’s your point?”

“My point is that it’s not about the rules so much as it’s about choices. You just think it’s about the rules with Loehr.” Reza shifted uncomfortably. “So, ah, speaking of bad choices, sorry about the other night.”

“About what?”

“Falling on you and shit.”

She gave Reza a hard stare and said nothing. He had been a heavy drinker since they’d first met. There was nothing new in his getting drunk. But an old, familiar fear made her want to protect Reza in a way she hadn’t been able to protect her dad.

The problem was that the demons at the bottom of the bottle always got a vote. Sometimes more than one. It hurt Claire every single time she watched those demons tear at Reza’s soul, slapping at her with the knowledge that no matter how good she was at her job, she wasn’t good enough to figure out how to say the words “stop drinking” to him.

Such a simple thing. But sometimes the simple things were the most difficult. The girl she’d been hadn’t been able to say those words to her father. The woman she was now could not say them to her friend.

* * *

Evan turned down Old Holman Road before he knew where he was going. He’d been driving aimlessly in the snow, the wipers working harder and harder to keep the windshield of his rental car cleared. He drove past Purchase Farm, past the trailer park where his best friend from high school had grown up.

He hadn’t spoken to Billy Meir since the accident. He’d barely spoken to anyone for the remainder of his senior year. He’d been lucky to graduate and if he hadn’t already been accepted into West Point before the accident, he might never have gone to college. He rounded the corner, driving past the small pond where he and Casey and Billy had learned to skate.