‘Like I said, a hell of a leader,’ he said quietly. ‘Risking their lives to save our buddies. It gave us the morale boost we needed. We just threw ourselves into that firefight knowing that even if we went down, at least two of us had made it out.’
‘I heard the firefight went on for eleven hours,’ she told him softly.
‘Yeah, about that. But because of you we were determined not to give up. And then suddenly it was all over and we’d won.’
‘I know. We couldn’t believe it.’
‘Neither could we.’ He grinned, a bitter-sweet twist of his mouth. ‘But want to know what the cherry on the icing on that admittedly bloodied cake was?’
‘Tell me.’
‘Both our buddies made it. Thanks to you.’
‘Thanks to you.’ She shook her head. ‘We weren’t the guys who tabbed out of an ambush, in the middle of a sandstorm, with two stretchers.’
‘And what difference would it have made if you and the pilot hadn’t brought the chopper through with the MERT team?’ he countered. ‘No one else was coming. We knew that. As far as the guys and I were concerned, that godforsaken, abandoned village in the middle of nowhere was going to be our final resting place.’
‘We kept up with your team.’ Mattie nodded. ‘We couldn’t believe you’d got out.’
She could remember the shock as her team had heard the news back in the field hospital—such as it had been on that tour. An initial numbness. And then a feeling of absolute euphoria. It had been like their own personal miracle and they’d ridden that high for the rest of the tour.
‘But we did.’
‘Yes, you did,’ she agreed fiercely, pulling out of his arms until she was sitting back on her heels, facing him.
She wasn’t sure whose gaze was trapped in whose. Frankly, she didn’t much care.
‘Life is so precious, Kane,’ she whispered. ‘I know it, and yet I forget it. But every now and then something rams it home to me and I realise that we have to make the most out of this short time we have.’
‘And everything we said back in your office?’ he bit out, his hoarse voice scratching over her.
Inside her.
She swallowed, her head dipping closer to his. Inviting him without a word.
‘Mattie.’ He breathed her name and it sent charges of electricity through her. ‘I need you to be sure about this. I want to hear it.’
‘You don’t need to hear anything, Kane.’ She barely recognised her own voice. ‘Don’t they say that actions speaker louder than words?’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE SLOW BURN that had smouldered in him ever since he’d walked into her office in her field hospital had turned into a full inferno, ripping through him as though nothing could ever douse it.
As though he never wanted anything to douse it.
He was dimly aware of a muffled voice, deep inside his brain, warning him that if they did this, there could be no going back. That they could no longer pretend they were beating this...thing that arced between them. They could no longer profess that their army careers were the most important thing that mattered to them.
Everything would change. It would have to.
If he were a stronger man, a better man, he surely would have resisted. For both of them. Got them through this weak moment now that they’d found themselves alone in the middle of the deserted prairies where there was no chance of anyone intruding on them.
But he wasn’t a better man. He never had been. It had been his distinct lack of respect for the law that had brought him to the army in the first instance—even if he hadn’t knowingly committed the crime, a good man would have gone straight to the police when he’d realised what his brothers were doing. It was probably why a part of him had always felt like an imposter all these years, even when his career had started to soar.
Especially when his career had started to soar.
So now, as the moonlight sliced through the broken roof of the old building lending the space an ethereal glow, bathing Mattie in a romantic light, he felt a fervour pouring through his whole body. Dark and powerful. Filling him up and making him ache.
Making him yearn when he’d never yearned in his life.