Hot Soldier Cowboy (The Blackjacks Book 2) Page 23

  She smiled up at him in huge relief. And then burst into tears again.

  He rode out the second round of sobs with admirable aplomb and then said wryly, “Things can’t be all that bad. We both made it through the op, didn’t we?”

  She nodded, mortified. She couldn’t believe she’d fallen apart like that.

  “Better?” he murmured.

  “Yes. Except I have the hiccups now.”

  She felt his smile against her temple. “Want me to scare them out of you?”

  “No, thank you,” she answered shakily.

  He set her away from him and she looked up into his eyes, which glowed in the flickering light. Just looking at him nourished her soul. How was she ever going to survive without him?

  “I came to apologize to you, Susan. I never had the guts to do it after the shooting ten years ago. But I’m going to try to get it right this time.”

  She frowned. She didn’t want any apologies from him. She wanted his heart! Her hopes fell, dashed against the rocky, unscalable cliffs of his damned honor.

  He said soberly, “There aren’t words to describe how bad I feel about what you’ve had to go through. If I’d done my job right ten years ago, none of this would have happened. I just want you to know that I’m truly sorry. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.”

  She closed her eyes against the anguish of listening to him walk away from her again. He might not be doing it with his feet, but he was closing off his heart and shutting down his soul before her very eyes.

  “I brought something for you,” he said quietly. He held out a flat box that looked black in the yellow firelight.

  “What is it?” she asked as she took it.

  “Open it up and see.”

  It was a military medal. In the shape of a heart. She looked up at him questioningly.

  “It’s the Purple Heart I was awarded for this mission to save you.”

  She was vaguely familiar with Purple Hearts. They had something to do with getting hurt. “What’s it for?”

  “Soldiers get one each time they’re wounded in combat.”

  She looked from the medal to him. “Why are you giving it to me?” she asked, confused.

  “Because nobody else is going to thank you for the sacrifice you’ve made for your country. For identifying Ruala and making the call to us. For going through the ordeal of the last couple weeks. And for being willing to give up your friends and family for weeks, months or years while we track down Ferrare. I figure after all that, you’ve earned a medal.”

  “Why this one?” she asked, still confused.

  “Because you were wounded a hell of a lot worse than I was by all of this.”

  “How can you say that? Carlos nearly beat you to death. I got a limp and a scar out of our first encounter with Ferrare. But you—” Her voice broke. “Colonel Foley told me you may not be able to work with the Blackjacks anymore because of your broken wrist.”

  She took a wobbly breath that very nearly broke over into a sob. “God, Mac, it’s all my fault.”

  The words came tumbling out, and she couldn’t stop them. “I’m so sorry. I never meant to cost you your career. I know how much it means to you. I was so stupid to run out of the ranch house when I knew Ruala was coming soon….”

  His finger pressed gently against her lips.

  “Suzie. Stop. I don’t blame you for what happened to me. I made my own choices, and this is the price I paid. The important thing is we both got out alive. Ruala’s dead and Ferrare believes you’re dead. The mission was a success. Except for the part where I broke your heart again.”

  She heard his words of absolution, his lips granting her forgiveness, but it meant nothing to her. Her own guilt was too overwhelming to be fixed by any simple statement of exoneration.

  And then it hit her. “Oh my God,” she breathed. She gazed at him in dawning understanding. The revelation that rolled over her took her breath away. Dear God, let it not have come too late.

  “What?” he asked sharply, instantly on full combat alert. He looked quickly all around the room.

  “I get it now,” she gasped.

  He frowned. “You get what?”

  “Why you spent all those years thinking you hadn’t taken care of me like you should have.” He looked confused but she rushed onward. “Is this how you felt after the surveillance van got shot up? Like nothing I could say would ever make it right?” She probably wasn’t making a darn bit of sense. She must sound like she’d lost her mind.

  He stared at her closely. And then he nodded slowly. “Yeah. That’s exactly how I felt.”

  “Oh, Mac, when will you ever listen to me about that night?”

  He frowned. “I’m listening now.”

  She grasped his hands in desperation. She spoke slowly, willing him to really hear what she had to say. “If you hadn’t been outside the van and managed to back off Ruala with your suppression fire as fast as you did, I’d have died for sure. You saved my life that night!”

  He stared at her hard. Deep in the back of his eyes, she saw the hard wall around his heart dissolve a little.

  “Do you hate me for running out of the house because I was upset that you called me a cripple?” she pressed, frantic to make him see the truth.

  He jolted. “Hell, no! I never should have said that. I was frustrated and blurted it out to shock the guys into agreeing with me. I understand why it upset you. Why would I hate you for that?”

  She stared deep into his eyes, searching for comprehension in them. “Don’t you see? I never hated you, either.”

  He frowned. “But—”

  She interrupted him. “Am I right that, at some level, part of why you came to the ranch on this mission was to get my forgiveness for whatever wrong you perceived you’d done to me?”

  He thought about it for a second. And nodded slowly.

  “When I saw you tonight,” she continued, “my first thought was to hope I could get you to forgive me for wrecking your arm and your career.”

  She leaned forward, her body thrumming with need for him to understand. “But, Mac. Neither one of us needs to forgive the other. What we both have to do is forgive ourselves.”

  His hands squeezed hers painfully tight. “Suzie.” His voice was hoarse and he paused to clear it roughly. “Suzie, are you telling me that, after everything that’s happened, you don’t blame me for the things that have happened to you?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you ever since you got here! I chose to get in that surveillance van ten years ago, and I chose to be bait this time around to lure out Ruala. What really counts is how you feel about you. In here.” She touched his chest over his heart.

  He frowned as if he wasn’t quite sure he bought it.

  She pressed the point. “You said it before. We each make our own choices. Life throws us all curve balls we don’t expect, and we have to deal with them and move on as best we can. I can forgive myself. Can you forgive yourself?”

  He looked at her a long time. The fire hissed quietly while he considered her words. He ran a hand through his hair, a sure sign that he was struggling with difficult thoughts.

  Panic hovered close to the surface, just beneath her skin. Her future, their future, hung on what he was thinking. “Talk to me, Mac,” she urged.

  “Dammit, Susan. Every time I come into your life I bring you disaster. If I were going to do the right thing by you, to act on that sense of obligation you keep accusing me of being lost in, I would get up right now and walk out of your life forever.”

  “Because you love me,” she stated flatly.

  “Yes. I love you enough to leave, so you’ll be safe from any further harm from me.

  She whispered past her constricted throat, “Love is never safe, Mac. It’s the biggest risk of all. And whether you like it or not, I love you. I’ve already taken the risk. Leaving me won’t change that. It’ll only cause me pain.”

  He turned his anguished gaze on her. His words soun
ded literally torn out of his throat. “I don’t want to leave you, dammit. I want to get down on my knees right now and beg you to marry me. To ask you to spend the rest of your life with me and make babies with me and grow old together.”

  He buried his head in his hands.

  She waited him out, praying he would work it through.

  Finally he looked up again. “I can’t be noble any more. I can’t do the right thing and walk away again. It’s killing me.”

  A tiny, little warm feeling started way down in her toes and started to grow upward. “You don’t have to walk away to be noble, Mac. Sometimes staying is the courageous choice.”

  He visibly absorbed her words into himself. Something relaxed around his shoulders like a weight was lifting from them. He spoke carefully. “I don’t know how to convince you that I want to take care of you because I love you, not because I’m hung up on some twisted sense of duty.”

  It was her turn to stare in shock.

  “Do you really mean that?” she whispered.

  “God, yes! I love you. Just for you. No strings attached, just the way you asked me to a couple weeks ago.”

  Her skin started tingling and a flush heated her cheeks.

  “I can’t lie to you,” he said low, each word ripped from his gut. “I won’t ever completely forgive myself for any part I’ve had in causing you a single second of pain. That’s just the way I am. But it’s not the basis of my feelings for you. Can you accept that?”

  The warm feeling in her heart transformed into blinding light, shining like the sun, illuminating her soul from the inside out.

  “Mac,” she said carefully, “I’ll never forget watching you take that beating for me. I’ll never forgive myself completely for it. I’ll carry that memory around with me till the day I die. But—” she took a deep breath and then plunged ahead “—I believe it’s possible for a relationship to have its scars and not only survive but be strong and wonderful and beautiful.”

  He reached out and touched the scar on her neck lightly. “Just like people,” he murmured.

  She reached up out of habit to hide her scar.

  Mac intercepted her hand and drew it to his mouth, kissing her fingertips. “Baby, I even love your scar and your wrecked knee. I love everything about you.”

  “I love your scars, too,” she answered quietly. She touched the place over his heart lightly. “I especially admire the ones in here. But can you live with them?”

  A slow smile broke across his face. “Yeah. I think I can.”

  And then he slid off the couch and took a knee at her feet. “Susan Monroe, I need you worse than life itself. I want to spend the rest of my life healing your heart. Marry me. Please.”

  Tears filled her eyes as the light overflowed her soul, bursting forth in a brilliant glow of love around them that would never dim. “Only if you’ll let me heal your heart, too, Mac.”

  She flung herself into his arms, toppling them both over onto the floor. He hugged her close, cushioning and absorbing their fall, protecting her the way he always did.

  She sprawled on top of him, alarmed. “I didn’t hurt your arm, did I?”

  “Who the hell cares about my arm?” he growled. “Are you going to marry me or not?”

  “Oh, yes, Mac. Yes, I’ll marry you!”

  And the healing for both of them began.

  EPILOGUE

  Tom Foley sat pensively in the briefing room, waiting for his team to assemble. A mission had come down the pipeline for them, and it was going to be a beast. He would need all his men for it.

  And he would need them at the top of their games.

  But lately, his rock-solid guys had been dropping like flies.

  To women. Love. The word tasted sour in his mouth.

  Not that he thought all that happily ever after crap was, well, crap. But it had no place on a Special Forces team. Sure, he got that the guys needed to blow off steam, and some of them benefitted by having personal lives outside the workplace. But the kind of work the Blackjacks did required his guys to do more, to be more, than most soldiers were ever asked for.

  They got the jobs that regular military units declared impossible or suicidal.

  That was certainly true of the mission outlined in the closed folder on the table in front of him.

  “Hey boss,” Dutch and Doc said simultaneously as they came into the secure briefing room.

  He nodded at both men. At least neither of them had lost their minds over a woman, yet.

  The team’s sniper, Howdy, slipped into the room silently and took a seat unobtrusively, like he always did. He was another man who would never lose his cool or lose focus on the job.

  Hell, he didn’t think Howdy ever picked up women in bars, not even for the most casual of hook-ups.

  Boisterous laughter in the hallway outside announced the arrival of Tex and Mac. They jostled into the room mock wrestling with each other like a pair of damned puppies.

  Cripes. They’d been acting like that ever since they’d both fallen in love a few months back. Truth be told, he hated the idea of taking them away from their fiancées, but duty called, and he couldn’t do this one without them.

  Mac closed the soundproof door and the pressure compressed Tom’s eardrums.

  “All right, gentlemen. We’ve got a Tier One tasking.”

  His guys still lounged casually around the table, but sudden, predatory intensity vibrated in the room. What the hell had he been worrying about, anyway? His guys were the best. Nothing and no one would distract them when the shit hit the fan.

  He began the briefing. “We have credible intel from an inside source that the Gavronese rebels have decided it’s time to overthrow the government of their nation.”

  “How are they financing it?” Mac asked shrewdly.

  Tom answered grimly, “Our source says Eduardo Ferrare is bankrolling the revolution.”

  Gavarone was a troubled corner of South America, and also the reputed home of international crime lord, and born-again bastard, Eduardo Ferrare.

  Mac leaned forward aggressively. “Give me a shot at him. I owe him a bullet between the eyes for what he did to Suzie.”

  Tom replied evenly, “Our assignment is to find the Gavronese rebels and establish close-range, ground-level surveillance.”

  Mac made a sound of disgust. “That’s it? We’re just supposed to watch them?”

  Tom retorted, “You know as well as I do that no mission is ever that simple.”

  As he said the words, a strange chill of intuition passed over his skin. Apprehension followed close on its heels, and he frowned, more rattled than he wanted to admit.

  He didn’t often get these whiffs of clairvoyance, but he’d learned over the years that they were never wrong. Something was going to happen on this mission.

  Something big…

  GET HOT SOLDIER DOWN

  Read Hot Soldier Down here, the thrilling tale of Special Forces operative, Tom Foley, badly wounded on a dangerous mission, finding himself helpless in the care of the very woman who nearly killed him. Worse, she has no combat experience. At all.

  As civil war erupts around her and her patient, Captain Annie O’Donnell must flee for her life with the enigmatic soldier and his Special Forces team, the Blackjacks. In the middle of a war is the last place either Tom or Annie expects to find love, but as it explodes between them, they both will be tested to their limits and beyond.

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  PLEA TO READER

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