One Night with her Bachelor(45)

Gabriel tensed, his voice turning rough. “He can still have a full and happy life.”

“I know he can. I know. But life is hard enough. I’ve always thought my most important job as his mom was to prepare him to face life’s challenges. How can I prepare him for things I’ve never experienced? For things I can’t even anticipate? So many unexpected hardships have slammed into us over the past few months that sometimes I feel like I’m at breaking point.” She shook her head, trying to dislodge the negative thoughts. “Sorry. You don’t need to hear these things. We’re here to have a good time with each other and forget reality, right?”

He stared at her for a few quiet seconds before giving her a terse nod. “Right.”

Next thing she knew, he’d gently pushed her off his lap, dealt with the condom and got out of the truck.

Instead of rounding the hood to get into the driver’s side, he walked into the clearing in front of the truck, stopped, and stared into the dark woods. He didn’t look like a man who’d just had incredibly satisfying sex. Every inch of his bearing projected frustration. He ran his hands into his hair, tugging hard. His shoulders were so stiff they looked frozen.

He had to be freezing. He wasn’t wearing his coat—just a white cotton shirt and jeans.

She grabbed her coat from behind the seat, shrugged into it and climbed out of the truck. “Gabriel, what’s going on?”

He didn’t move. Didn’t even acknowledge he’d heard her. Fear welled up inside her, and she crunched through the snow to him. Coldness seeped through her boots and made her toes numb, but she ignored it. Touching his elbow, she encouraged him to turn and face her.

His face was tight with emotion he was clearly struggling to fight off. “Go back to the truck.”

“No.”

“Molly—”

She shoved him, and he blinked as if she’d shocked him out of a trance. “No. We just shared the most intimate experience I’ve had in a long, long time. You don’t get to shut me out anymore. That’s part of the unspoken contract you made when you had sex with me. You have to talk to me. Whatever’s going on, I want to know.”

His jaw gritted and for a second he almost looked like he would walk away. But he squared his shoulders even harder and said, “Undress me.”

She drew back in surprise. “Here?”

“Yeah, here.”

“It’s freezing. You’ll—”

He gave a low, disbelieving laugh. “I’ve been in worse situations. Getting naked in the snow won’t hurt me.”

The way he said it, emphasizing getting naked in the snow, implied that something else would hurt him. Her jaw was already trembling from the aftermath of her orgasm, the adrenaline of the past few hours and the cold. His behavior made every one of her nerves light up in hyperawareness. Something was so, so wrong here, and she didn’t know if she should follow his orders or try to get him back into the truck.

“You want to know what’s wrong? Why I wish like hell I hadn’t touched you?”

The words ripped through her heart, leaving her with a gaping, bloody wound. “You’re being cruel.” Her voice broke. “If you have regrets, you don’t have tell me like this.”

He grabbed her hand and put it to the buttons at the neck of his shirt. “I never wanted to hurt you. That’s what I regret, Molly. That’s what I’ve been trying to avoid. But you won’t understand until you undress me.”

Her half-numb fingers fumbled as she slipped open each button. When she reached the end, she shoved the shirt off his shoulders and pushed the white T-shirt he wore beneath it up to his neck. He stripped it the rest of the way off, standing in the snow in just his unbuttoned jeans and boots.

“I saw Scott’s helicopter get shot out of the sky.” His voice was rough, thick as if he were choking on it. “We always flew out in two choppers, in case something happened to one. His was flying in front of mine. Its tail boom was shot off. It crashed.”

Tears burned her eyes. She pressed her palm against her lips to force herself to stay silent. He never broke his gaze away from hers. She could see the memories haunting his eyes.

“We landed as close as we could and scrambled to rescue Scott and the others. He was alive. Badly hurt, but alive.”

“Oh God.” She’d never had an eyewitness account of her brother’s death. She’d always prayed he’d died so quickly he’d had no idea what was going on—laughing with his buddies as they flew through the air, then nothing but heaven. Her throat swelled and she couldn’t control the tremors in her jaw. But she couldn’t tell him to stop. She needed to know as badly as he needed to tell her.

“My jeans.”

Her fingers shook as she hooked them in his waistband.

“We knew we had to get out of there quickly. We had to get everyone back in our chopper. I grabbed Scott, lifted him in my arms and started running. All of a sudden, it felt like my whole world exploded in agony. Take off my jeans, Molly.”

She pushed down. They caught around his thighs, but his hard gaze silently commanded her to keep pushing. She did, and she gasped when they landed around his ankles.

No—his ankle. Because below his left knee, only a thin metal prosthetic went down to his boot.

“I stepped on an IED.”