Regardless, she suddenly understood why women risked everything. Because right now, she would risk all to have more than just one kiss to remember Drew Cullen by.
A door slam jarred her back to the present. Feet thumped, picked up pace, pounding down the hall. Urgently, faster than the regular nocturnal activity of this never-sleeping group.
Curious, she crossed to the door, peered outside left, smiled briefly at the poor guard stuck watching her. Then looked right. Monica double-timed toward her.
Yasmine slid out into the corridor. "Is something wrong?''
Her sister slowed only briefly, tucking a wayward strand from her braid behind her ear. "Nothing for you to worry about."
Yasmine gripped her arm. "Then why are you running?''
"Work." Monica pulled free and sprinted past.
A niggle of concern tickled. Why would her sister, a doctor, be running? Yasmine trailed Monica and let the guard worry about keeping up. Breathless, she caught her at the stairs. "Since you don't have time, I will run alongside while you talk."
Monica's exasperated sigh hissed through her teeth. "Something went wrong on a training exercise."
"Training accident? A flight?" The tickle turned to a painful pinch, but she kept pace.
"No. The Army. A gunshot wound, one or two. There are too many damned stories coming through for me to get anything straight but that they need me at the medical transport before the ambulance brings in the wounded."
"Will you have to leave?"
Monica stopped, sighed. Ill-disguised anger snapped from her eyes. "If it happens that someone is so mortally wounded that we have to fly out, I'll be sure to put in a good word for you to get a spare seat."
Her sister's words smacked over her. "That's not what I meant."
"I'm sorry, then," she acquiesced, backing away. "But I don't have time to talk."
Monica pivoted and jogged toward a door opening onto the parking ramp.
How long would she have to wait for answers?
Not as long if she followed her sister. Yasmine crossed, paused in the doorway, searching for a benign place to wait where security would not drag her back to her room. Wind lifted her hair.
Her hair?
Her hand drifted up to her bare head. She'd been so concerned about Drew she'd abandoned twenty-three years of training by leaving her scarf behind.
All because of a man she'd known less than a week.
The wind whispered her mother's voice over her. Ah, sugar, five seconds after I set eyes on your daddy stepping out of that Mercedes, I knew. He was the one.
As much as she loved her mother, she wasn't sure she wanted the kind of emotion that made a woman do reckless things. But what if she never had the chance? What if the ambulance speeding in the distance held Drew?
Yasmine's feet carried her a step farther outside, as far as she dared. She did not want her escort hauling her back inside where no one would care to give her answers to the questions already tumbling over themselves in her head.
She watched her sister sprint toward the open end of one of the planes. Light poured from the gaping back ramp, people massing into a clump of desert-tan uniforms. She would have thought she could recognize Drew anywhere, but there were too many, too far away.
A military ambulance streaked across the cement. Stopped. Unloaded, the mass of uniforms blocking her from viewing the patient.
Who?
Night wind whipped all around her as it had her first night cooking the goat stew. The chilly gusts were nothing compared to the icy fear stinging through her veins. Only a handful of days before she had stared into intensely beautiful blue eyes and everything changed.
She inched deeper into the biting wind's path. Time was precious. She should have remembered after her mother's and father's deaths too early in life from a fluke flu epidemic.
Just as the unrelenting gusts tore away facades with brutal force, she felt her own self-delusions strip away. She wanted more than just a memory to take with her when she left. She craved the freedom to be with Drew.