A Facade to Shatter(57)

“It doesn’t seem to be hurting you,” she said, though she stopped anyway, folding her arms around her body. “And you’re wrong. I do want to hear what you have to say.”

He shoved his wet hair back from his face, but he didn’t make a move to come inside. Thunder rolled in the distance. A flash of lightning zipped along the sky, slicing it in two for a brief moment.

“I should have known better,” he said. “I should have known it was a mistake to think this could work between us.”

Her chest filled with chaotic emotion, tightening until she thought she wouldn’t be able to breathe. But she held herself firmly, arms crossed beneath her breasts, and refused to let him see how much he hurt her. He thought she was naive, trusting. Unworthy.

It stung. But, worse, the idea she was a mistake threatened to make her fold in on herself.

“You can’t mean that,” she said tightly, though her brain gibbered at her to be quiet. To detach. To roll into a ball and protect herself. “These past couple of weeks have been perfect.”

“Which is why it was a mistake,” he snapped. “There’s no such thing as perfect, not where I’m concerned.”

“Because you don’t deserve those medals?” she threw back at him, anger beginning to grow and spin inside her belly. “Because you have bad dreams and think you’re so terrible?”

He took a step toward her, stopped. His hands clenched into fists at his side. He was close enough he could have reached out and touched her. But he didn’t.

“You want to know the truth? I’ll tell you,” he grated. “The whole, sorry story.”

He turned his back on her, walked over to the railing. The rain was lessening, but it was still coming down. When he turned back to her, his expression was tight.

“You’ve heard part of it. I broke my leg during the ejection. It hurt like hell, and I couldn’t move much. But I’d landed near a protected ravine and hunkered down to wait. I expected the enemy to find me first. But they didn’t. The marines did. Only the enemy wasn’t far behind.”

Lia imagined him alone like that, imagined him waiting, and fear crawled up her throat, no matter that she’d heard him say this part before. She wanted to go to him, but she knew he didn’t want her to. It made her desperate inside, but all she could do was listen.

“The medic drugged me,” he said. “And I couldn’t help them defend our position when they most needed me. Hell, I think I drifted in and out of consciousness. I have no idea how long it went on, but it seemed to take forever. They hit us with grenades, small-arms fire. It was ceaseless, and air support wasn’t coming no matter how many times the marines called for it. One by one, the enemy picked off the marines, until it was one sergeant and me.”

He didn’t keep going, but she knew he wasn’t finished. He turned away again, and she could see the tightness in his jaw, his shoulders. Zach was on edge in a way she’d only ever seen him when he was in the grips of a dream.

“Zach?”

He turned his head toward her. “Here’s the part you don’t know. The part no one knows. He gave me a pistol. Put it in my hand and removed the safety. And then he told me it was my choice when the enemy came. Shoot them, or shoot myself.”

“No,” she breathed as horror washed over her.

Zach’s gaze didn’t change, didn’t soften. “Obviously,” he said, “I didn’t shoot myself. I didn’t shoot anyone. Sometime in the night, the last marine died. And I wanted to shoot myself. I wanted it pretty badly.”

“Oh, Zach …” Her eyes filled with tears.

“What you need to know, Lia, is that I tried to do it. I put the gun under my jaw.” He put his finger just where he would have stuck the gun. Her heart lurched at the thought of him lying helplessly like that with so much death and destruction all around him. “But I couldn’t pull the trigger.”

The words hung in the air between them, like poison.

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Lia said fiercely, her throat a tight, achy mess. How close had he come? How close had she been to never, ever knowing him? It didn’t bear thinking about.

“I can’t forget that night. I can’t forget how they all died, and how I could do nothing about it. I can’t forget that I should have died with them.”

Lia put a hand over her belly without conscious thought. “You weren’t meant to die, Zach. You were meant to live. For me. For our baby.”