The Last Letter(96)

“Why don’t I have a key to your place?” I asked.

“What?” He stopped abruptly when he saw me sitting at the dining room table amid the open insurance papers.

“I gave you a key to my place, and you sleep here most nights now. It just seems so symbolic, you know? I let you all the way in, and you keep everything locked up so damn tight. I only get to visit when you open the door.”

He sat in the chair around the corner from mine. “Ella? What’s going on?”

“You still have a commanding officer? Donahue?”

The way his expression faded to blank told me that answer. Ryan got the same expression whenever I’d asked him something about the unit.

“Were you going to tell me that you didn’t get out?”

He took off his ball cap and pushed his hands through his hair. “It’s a technicality.”

“I kind of view being in the military as a pregnant thing. You are or you aren’t. There’s no halfway technicality.” The dark, angry doubt I’d kept at bay started to cut through my chest, working its way to my heart. “Have you been lying to me this whole time? Are you still in? Are you just waiting until I don’t need you anymore to go back? Am I still just a mission to you? Ryan’s little sister?”

“God no.” He reached for my hand, but I pulled it back. “Ella, that’s not what’s going on here.”

“Explain.”

“Someone showed up right after I got here, asking me to return, and I declined. After what happened, I wasn’t really fit for returning, anyway, and Havoc might obey you guys, but she won’t take working commands from any other handlers.”

“Ah, another woman you’ve ruined for any other man,” I said, saluting him with my bottle of water.

“I take that as a compliment.” He leaned over the table, resting his elbows on the dark, polished wood.

“Don’t.”

“This…guy offered me a technicality, to take a temporary disability. It would allow me to keep everything army-wise the same without actually showing up. I could go back whenever I wanted if I just signed a set of papers that started with a one-year enrollment and could be renewed up to five. He completely worked the system, doing whatever he could to give me an easy way back in.”

“And you accepted.” I couldn’t even look at those eyes. The minute I did, he’d convince me he was staying, when all evidence proved to the contrary.

“I declined.”

My eyes shot up to his.

“But the night I realized I could put Maisie and Colt on my insurance, I knew I had to sign it. It was the only way to get them covered at 100 percent.”

“When did you do it?”

“The morning I went to see Jeff. It was exactly one day before the offer expired.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” A tiny bit of my suspicion faded.

“Because I knew you hated everything that we did, the lives we led. That you’d see me signing those papers as my getaway car for when I was done playing house here in Telluride. Am I right?” He leaned back and lifted his eyebrow in question.

“Maybe,” I admitted. “Can’t blame me, though, can you? Guys like Ryan, and you…and…” Chaos. “You all have the constant need for the rush. Ryan told me once that the time he felt most alive was in the middle of a gunfight. That everything in those moments happened in vivid color, and the rest of his life faded a little because of it.”

Beckett played with the brim of his hat and nodded slowly. “Yeah, that can happen. Once you have that level of adrenaline rushing through your system, that heightened sense of life and death, the normal day-to-day stuff feels like it’s just a little below. Like life is the monorail at Disney, and combat is the roller coaster—the highs, the dramatic lows, the twists and turns. Except sometimes people die on the coaster, and it makes you feel even luckier to get off, and a hell of a lot guiltier.”

“Then why wouldn’t I expect you to go back to that? If we’re the monorail, you’ve got to be bored, and if you’re not, then you’re going to be.”

“Because I love you.” He said it with such incredible certainty, the way someone said the world was round or the oceans were deep. His love was a foregone conclusion. “Because kissing you, making love with you? When we’re together, you eclipse all of that. It’s not even in the background, it just doesn’t exist. Combat never bothered me before because I had nothing to lose. No one loved me, and I cared only about Ryan and Havoc. I couldn’t leave you. I couldn’t go across the world and worry about you, about the kids. I couldn’t go into combat with the same effectiveness because I’d know that if I died, you’d be alone. Get it?”

“I’m your kryptonite.” That didn’t sound so flattering.

“No, you gave me something to lose. Other married guys, they’re okay, but maybe it’s because they didn’t come from such messed-up childhoods. Love for them was the monorail. You are the first person I’ve ever loved, and the first woman who has ever loved me. You’re the roller coaster.”

Well, if that didn’t just pop a pin into my anger bubble and burst it.

“You should have told me.”

“I’m sorry. I should have told you. But we were getting so close back then, and I wanted you so badly that I didn’t want to risk it.” He sat up straight and took my hand, looking into my eyes with such an intense expression on his face that chills ran down my spine. “If I ever hide something from you, it’s because I’m terrified to risk losing you. That whole roller-coaster thing? I’ve never felt like this. Never had my heart leave my body and belong to someone else. I don’t know how to have a relationship, and I’m bound to screw this one up.”