Trust Me (Paris Nights #3)(64)

Yeah. That seemed about right.

He drew a lock of her hair through his fingers and wondered how sappy he was going to get. If he might cut a lock of her hair to take with him on his next deployment in Syria, for example. That was ridiculous—he’d be much better off with a tablet full of photos, five gigabytes of photos he could set to slideshow in his hooch. He shifted awkwardly to pull his phone out at the thought and stretched out his arm to take a selfie of them. Lina didn’t realize what he was doing in time to pose for it, and it turned out just perfect—her nestled peacefully against his shoulder, all right with their world.

I want to keep this. Not just a little. Not just a few months of the year. Not on a tablet. All the time.

A whooshing swirl in his gut. He’d walked the path he’d chosen for eleven years, always laid out before him, always clear. Any woman he met was supposed to handle who he was. Change, adapt, tough it up. It had never occurred to him before that maybe he should be the one to adapt.

Maybe for a long time, he’d delayed coming up on this fork in the road because the road he was used to traveling on was so comfortable, even if it wasn’t a comfort most people would understand. It was so familiar—a road where he himself was filled with strength, where he had a band of brothers, where orders came down to tell him what to do, orders that meant he never had to make the wrong choice, he was always his country’s hero and had the medals to prove it.

But now his own craving for what was missing had left him standing at the biggest fork in the road of them all.

On his left hand, the path was clear: dust and desert and bullets and strength, saving his brothers, killing his enemies. Things he knew how to do.

And on the right, the road he’d never traveled was perplexing, tangled with strange and powerful emotions. He couldn’t make that path out, couldn’t tell exactly who he would be on it or if he would always make the right choices. He might not have the right skills for that road, he might have to learn new ones, and who knew if he would be as good at living as he was at fighting for others to live? He didn’t know who he was on that road.

And yet part of him longed to find out.

Her fingers kneaded down over his belly, as if she liked the texture of him. “So that’s why people date?” she said softly. “The unknotting? I never knew that.”

Oh, so she’d never felt it before either? That was a…really important thing to know.

“I thought dating was because you had to try to make something work, even when you knew it never would,” she said.

Jake tensed. Was she talking about the fact that he was here only four more months? The fact that neither of them really knew how to believe in a future?

“You know what I mean?” she said. “When you don’t have the right tool, and you try to improvise with whatever you can even though it’s scary as hell to have to rely on it in a pinch?”

Ye...e..ss. He knew that feeling. Yes. You hooked up with someone who hit on you in a bar, then sometimes in the morning you felt you couldn’t keep living like this, surviving on hook-ups, you had to try to make it work. And so he did try, and it usually felt like trying to cobble together some desperately needed piece of equipment in the field out of chewing gum and scrap metal. You could make it work, but you always felt uncomfortable about having to rely on it in a matter of life or death. It might be better than nothing, though.

Yeah, he knew that feeling. But it wasn’t the way he felt about dating her.

Jesus. And she did? He had gotten himself so far in over his head—no, in over his heart—in this relationship.

“It’s so different from this,” Lina said softly. Her hand slid around his ribs, until she was holding onto him possessively, and his tension relaxed with a little hint of fear, as if he was going under even as they wheeled him to the operating block. Having to trust someone else to do the right thing by him in a situation he had no power to control. “Going out with you is more like…nurturing those tulips of yours. Because if they get a chance to grow, you know they’ll be beautiful.”

Oh.

Such a tangle of sweetness and hope and all of it painful in its intensity and precariousness. He tried to swallow to clear that tangle, but it didn’t really work. “Tulips can survive in very harsh conditions,” he reminded her.

“Not the ones they grow up in the Netherlands,” she said, and found his hand, linking fingers. “But maybe the kind we’re talking about…maybe they do.”

His fingers squeezed gently on hers. Yeah. Maybe they did.

“Not that this feels very harsh,” he said quietly.

Lina turned his hand over, drawing patterns in his palm. Feeling his calluses. Stroking the more sensitive skin right at the center of his palm, where the tickle of her finger made his own curl over hers. Spreading his fingers back out and tracing up their calluses, too.

Such a profound sense of rightness filled him whenever he was with her. Of security, oddly enough. As if the emotions he’d kept tight-reined all his life had found their safe space.

They’d been dating a month now, all through Paris’s warm, relaxed August. Usually Lina would have gone on vacation somewhere in August, she had told him. But this year, Vi had been in the hospital for half of it. And Jake liked to think that he himself had been more important to her than escaping to a real beach, instead of the great sandbox on the edge of the Seine.