She slapped Becky’s hand away. “Where is he?”
“Did you pull some strings? Did you bully some people into getting your way?” Eyes exactly like hers flickered up to her face. “And why would you?”
“Becky, please, you’re not the only one who would like to get on with the day. Point me in the right direction or don’t. I’ll find him with or without you.”
Becky jotted down the room number on the back of a receipt. “All the way at the end. He’s tired and has made it clear that he wants to be alone. Go easy on the man.”
“Easy on the man,” she muttered. “Sure. Thanks.”
With a toss of her hair and faked confidence, she walked away from her sister and down the overly bright hallway. Nerves tweaked beneath her skin. She hated hospitals, the sterile smell of them, the hushed tones. Technically, this wasn’t a hospital, but to her it smelled like one.
She stopped short in the doorway of his room. Every suppressed emotion from the past five months hit her like tsunami. She braced herself against the door; afraid she would fall to her knees with gratitude that he’d survived. Tears welled up in her eyes for all they’d lost. She blinked them back and stepped into the room.
He had lost weight. Hair the color of milk chocolate skimmed his ears and fell across his forehead. He slumped in his chair, head propped up against a closed fist as he stared out the window. Dressed in a baggy blue sweatshirt and matching sweatpants, he looked less like a Marine and more like a patient.
That unnerved her more than she had expected.
Note to self: buy Michael new clothes.
Now was not the time to be emotional, he’d hate that. Reject it. She took a deep breath, coached herself to chill out, stuffed her shaking hands into the depths of her pockets and willed herself to speak.
“Hey, Michael,” she whispered.
His head snapped up and toward her as if expecting to see a ghost. Shock transitioned to longing. Longing morphed into regret. Regret hardened to anger.
“Get out and never come back,” he said.
“Such a sweet welcome.” She forced one foot in front of the other. “I feel all warm and fuzzy inside.”
“I knew you’d show up, knew this was some kind of trap.” He moved his chair away from the window and toward the kitchen table. “I knew you arranged this relocation. I’m not your fucking puppet.”
“If you were my puppet, the past five months would have gone a lot differently.” Screw emotionless. With an opening like that, sparks ignited in her veins. She tossed her leather coat on the sofa. “You have no idea how pissed off I am at you.”
He shook his head and avoided eye contact. “Can’t you leave me alone? Can’t you take a hint? How much more obvious do I need to be to get you out of my life?”
Stinging from his words, she paced around the suite and soaked up every detail while trying to suppress the urge to strangle him. Yellow walls. Worn sofa. Generic tables. Family photos. Spring flowers in a vase on the counter. Overblown cheerfulness. It gave her a headache.
“McGee warned me that you were indulging in self-pity and needed someone to shake you up.” Walk. Grin. Stay cool. She dropped the fast food bag in his lap. “They called in the cavalry, that being me.”
He looked at the bag, a muscle clenching and unclenching in his jaw. His silence weighed heavily in the room. “This is unfair.”
“Yes, it is.” She stared at his bent head and curled her fingers into her palm to keep from touching him. She sat in the chair closest to him. “I really should kick your butt for how you’ve treated me. Slap you. Scream at you.”
“Do it then. I dare you.” For an unguarded moment, raw need had flashed in his eyes before he expertly concealed it with blankness.
“I brought you another present, not that you deserve it.” His eyes narrowed when she reached into her messenger bag for a bottle of ouzo. “I believe I promised you this if we made it back to the States. Looks like we made it.”
He narrowed his eyes at the bottle before reaching for it. He turned it over in his hands and frowned.
She sat in the chair opposite him and watched him turn the bottle around in his big hands. Her foot tapped madly in the air while she waited for him to speak.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“I needed to see you.”
“Mission accomplished. Good-bye.”
“I do what I want.” Inside she screamed while outside she ripped the cheeseburger in half and took a bite.
Hands folded in his lap, he stared at her without saying a word.
“I moved back to Denver six weeks ago and started working at the NBC affiliate here. I have editorial freedom, which is a sweet deal.” She sipped her soda before continuing. “I bought a loft downtown, about fifteen minutes from here,” she rambled, unable to stand the silence. “I won an Emmy for my series on Dateline about Marishka. Peter did, too,” her voice hitched on the name of her dead friend, “which he would have loved. Sally didn’t make it, I’m not sure if you know that. She…um…killed herself a few months ago. I didn’t make it to the funeral; I was in Pakistan, although I probably should have been there. Maybe I wrote that to you? I don’t remember. Did you read the article I wrote about you in the Times? Gritty Hero…loved that title. It’s good, even if I do say so myself.”
“Once a glory seeker, always a glory seeker. I guess sacrificing a few friends for an award paid off. Did you get a nice bonus for that? A raise?”
Biting the inside of her lip to keep from crying, she focused on the French fries she’d scattered on the table. After months of anticipating seeing him again, she had no idea what to say.
Silence permeated the room.
Unable to stay seated, she paced in front of the windows and rubbed the back of her neck with both hands. She hadn’t expected this to be so hard. All of the memories. Sally, why did she have to bring her up? Her audio tech, kidnapped at the ambush, raped repeatedly, beaten within inches of her life, left for dead, survived and committed suicide only months ago. Peter shot in the head only inches in front of her. She had a lot of blood on her hands. The story had been her idea. Her lead. Her fault.
“I shouldn’t have said that about Peter and Sally,” he admitted quietly. “I didn’t mean it.”
Anger ripped through her like tigers ripping meat from her bones. Pent up emotion from months of living like a freakish spinster while her husband shut her out snapped to the surface. She stopped pacing and leaned over him, her entire body shaking, both hands resting on the arms of his chair.
“Was it funny to you when they hauled me out of the hospital in Frankfurt? Did you hear me screaming your name? How did it feel? Did you hear me begging to be allowed in?” Her gaze locked onto the scar zigzagging across his forehead, nearly concealed by his shaggy brown hair. “Did you hear me begging, Michael? Did you feel anything at all when you heard me crying for you? Do you feel anything now when you see me after so long? Anything at all?”
He shook his head and kept his gaze locked on his lap. “Stop it. Just leave.”
“Or what about the helicopter? Did McGee or any of your men tell you what a fool I made of myself on the helicopter? I wouldn’t let you go. They had to peel me off of you, damn it. Peel me like some freaky banana skin off your lifeless body.” She grabbed his arm when he went to grab for the wheel. No way in hell she was letting him escape now. “Did they tell you? Answer me. Do you know what a fool I made of myself over you, how I cried, how I begged, how I threatened them? Tell me.”
“Yes, okay, yes.” Again he jerked free of his touch. “I know everything. I know how you ran back for me. I know you were shot, too. I know you bullied my men like you bully me.” His brown eyes flashed with heat. “I heard you in Frankfurt. And, yes, I told them you were nothing to me; that you lied about the marriage to gain access, that you were a heartless reporter who’d go to any lengths to get to me. I wanted you gone. What don’t you understand about any of this? We had some fun. We had great sex. We w
ere good together…over there. Now it’s over. We tried. We didn’t work out. End of story. We weren’t meant to last.”
She pulled a gold necklace from beneath her blouse. “We’re married. You’re my husband and I’m your wife.”
“It’s not true, we never filed the papers.”
“It is true.” His denial stabbed through her chest and pierced her heart. “We had the legal papers sent to my PO Box in New York, remember? You signed them…all I had to do was take them to the courthouse.”
“What happened in Greece and in Afghanistan no longer matters today.” He swallowed hard, kept his gaze averted. “If our marriage were legal, you would have used it to your advantage by now. You’re lying.”
“Maybe I was all bullied out, ever think of that?” Worn out, all of the fight beaten out of her, she removed her wedding ring from the chain and slipped it onto her finger. She loved this ring with its gold band and diamond encrusted Greek infinity symbol.
“Do not put that on. It doesn’t mean anything anymore. You really don’t want this marriage and I know I damn well don’t.” He rubbed his hand over his eyes.
For the first time in her life, she had no idea what to do. She had been the loud-mouthed reporter in a war zone who had fallen for the sexy Marine with a bad attitude.
Months of carrying on their relationship in secret had ended with them taking a leave to Greece with a few close friends and getting married by a Greek priest on a cliff on Mykonos. She had skipped down the makeshift aisle of stones. They’d laughed through their vows with the sunset at their backs while their friends had cheered. Now he wanted to deny it had ever happened. He wanted to erase it.
In a war zone, secrecy had made sense. Hell, it’d been essential to their survival. If insurgents had discovered that a commanding officer’s wife was in town...well, it would have been bad. But now...here...him wanting to pretend it had never happened hurt worse than the bullets she’d taken in the back.
“You had to be a glory-seeker, it’s in your blood, right?” He clenched the arms of his wheelchair. “Go back to the war zone and get another Emmy, babe. It’s what you do. Damn it, I loved danger, too, but I can never go back and we both know you can’t stay away. I’ll hold you back and you know it. You’ll hate me for that one day.”
“I’m not a glory-seeker. Stop saying that. It’s not true.”
“That’s what you were doing that day, working for that Emmy. I told you not to leave the city, I couldn’t tell you why be—”
“—Because it was classified. I know.” She grabbed his wrist. “I had to do that story about Marishka. It was important. Someone had to tell it.”
“And it had to be you.” His eyes shot accusations at her.
“You were thanking God it was me later that afternoon when I dragged you from that Humvee. You said it,” her eyes flooded with tears she refused to shed, “you said thank God it was me that crawled in there, that it was me that dragged you away, that it was me who…” She couldn’t finish.
“I wish I were dead.”
“Don’t ever say that.” Her hand trembled against her forehead.
“It’s true.” His eyes spit accusation at her. “If you had listened to me, your crew would be alive, Peter would have met his only child, and I would be dead. That has got to be better than this.”
“And Dalton would be fatherless, your parents would have lost their only son, and I’d be a widow.”
“Spare me. I see the guilt in your eyes. You know I’m right.”
“Go to hell.”
“I’m already in hell. You should’ve left me to die.”
“Stop talking, would you please just stop talking?” She swallowed the sob and looked everywhere but into his face.
“Divorce me. No one will ever know about us. I swear to God. You’re not obligated to me.”
“Screw you.” She wanted to shake him, make him see that he was wasting away like this. She’d been so lonely without him, had ached for him, and had been tortured by his silence. “I’m done giving into your wishes. I left you alone for five months and went through my own personal hell because of it. No more.”
“I hate you.”
“I love you,” she whispered.
“I wish I’d never met you.”
“Me, too, damn it.” She looked at him, no longer strong enough to stop a tear from escaping. “But we did meet. We loved each other. We got married on a cliff in Greece with our friends by our side and we laughed through our vows because we were so goddamn happy. I’m not leaving here until you acknowledge that. You married me. You loved me.”
“The man you loved died a long time ago.”
Frustration clawed inside her skull, aching for the right words that would break his resolve. She rubbed trembling hands over her hips and struggled for clarity. This was one argument she intended on winning...and it had been a long time coming.
“None of us are who we were. Do you think I’m the same person I was before seeing my best friend killed? Before stepping over Marishka’s body and the bodies of her murdered children? Before seeing you face down in the dirt? Do you think I don’t see corpses in my sleep? Do you think that hasn’t changed me?” she asked.
“You look the same.” His gaze flicked over her before sliding toward the window.
“Maybe I’m still walking on both of my feet, but that doesn’t mean other parts of me aren’t paralyzed.” She scrubbed her fists against the tears and hated herself for being weak. “I’m pissed at you for denying me access to you in Frankfurt. You have no idea—none—how much I needed to be with you when you were hurt and you made me out to be a liar. I’m your wife, for God’s sake.”
“Stop saying that word.”
“You’re a selfish bastard.” She shoved her hands through her hair and counted silently to twenty. “Say what you want, I don’t care because I’d rather fight with you than mourn you. I’d rather you hate me than feel nothing.”
“I do hate you.”
Blowing a strand of hair from her face, she grabbed the ouzo bottle, opened it and slammed cabinet doors looking for a glass.
“I know you’re lying,” she said.
“Get the hell out of here,” he yelled.
“Where are your goddamn glasses?” she asked between clenched teeth.
“How would I know? I’ve been here less than six fucking hours.”
“Who needs a glass, right?” She took a long swig of the liquor. The alcohol burned her throat but felt damn good. She took another swig before meeting his gaze.
“Is that how you’re dealing with your guilt? Drinking it away?” he asked.
She held the bottle out toward him. “Want a taste?”
He looked at her through narrowed eyes, muscle working overtime in his jaw.
“C’mon, babe, look at it this way…maybe a taste will kill you,” she said.
For the first time since entering the room, a flicker of humor shot through his eyes. With a shrug, he grabbed the bottle and drank without breaking eye contact.
“I’m still alive,” he said.
“Sorry to disappoint you…again.” Needing to touch him, she reached for the scar that zigzagged across his forehead.
He flinched away from her touch.
“You need to leave. You don’t owe me anything,” he said without looking at her face.
She caught her lower lip between her teeth and studied his bent head before answering. “This isn’t about owing you anything.”
He met her gaze then, annoyance flashing in the brown depths. But there was something else there, too...pain so intense she took a step back.
“What is wrong with you?” he asked. “Just because I’m in this chair doesn’t mean that you can bully me.”
“Am I bullying you?” She grinned at the idea of bullying him. He’d always been the badass Marine with more arrogance than necessary. Her independence clashed with his attitude more often than not, but that had been a good thing. Maybe...just maybe...he’d miss
ed it. “I brought you fast food and alcohol. We even had a fight. I think you like that I’m here. I’m livening things up. You looked pretty bored when I walked in.”
He grabbed her hand before she could snag another fry. He squeezed her fingers so hard she thought her bones would snap. “Look at me. I’m not the man you married. I’m not even a Marine anymore. Look at me.”
She only saw the man she loved who stared back with desperation in his eyes. She saw his hair thicker and longer than she’d ever seen it before and liked it. She saw his teeth sink into his lower lip and wanted them sinking into her skin. She only saw Michael.
“You’re still the sexiest man on the planet,” she said.
“You’re delusional.” He dropped her hand as if the mere touch of her skin sickened him.
“Maybe I am.”
“What are you getting out of this?”
“A headache.”
“I can’t…I’m changed. We’ll never be able to be like we were.” He looked at his legs. “Not like how you remember me anyway. I’m different now.”
“So am I. We’re all different.”
“It’s more than that and you know it. You and me...sex...there will be...expectations.”
“I see, so I should pretend you don’t exist because you feel awkward about sex? You must not think much of me, Colonel.” She bit out his rank between clenched teeth.
“When I see you that’s what I want, are you satisfied now? Right now I would like to throw you up against that counter, rip those jeans from you and fuck you. I remember how we were together. That’s what I want. I can’t do that. Do you hear me? I can’t have what I want and seeing you is torture for me. I can’t have you.”
Silence quaked in the room.
She put both of her hands on his knees, conscious that he couldn’t feel her touch. “You keep talking about what you’ve lost, but you haven’t lost me. Don’t you see that? You may not be a Marine anymore and you may not be able to walk anymore, but you have me. I love you. I need you. Can’t that be enough? And you have your son. What about him? He needs you, too. You haven’t lost him.”