She nodded, the hint of detachment in his tone reminding her that he was a medic. These palms against her face, so dry and warm, were his clinical tools, nothing more. She’d do well to remember that.
“I’m fine, unless you have a different diagnosis.”
“Minor smoke inhalation, no burns. I declare you fit to return to duty.” He dropped his hands and indicated the oven. “What was that, anyway?”
“Meatloaf.”
“For lunch?”
“Maybe it was a little ambitious.”
He smiled down at her, his eyes bright with amusement. “Hamburgers are known to do wonders for smoke inhalation. Especially when obtained from a drive-through window.”
“Is that how combat medicine works? The healing power of fast food?”
“It’s in the manual.”
She turned to cast a final, forlorn look at her charred meatloaf but he grabbed her arm, then slid his hand down until his fingers interlocked with hers. She looked up at him with wide eyes, and if her heart hadn’t floated right up into her throat it probably would’ve been beating double-time.
Kiss me, goddammit. Put your head down here and kiss me like I know you can. Like I know you want to.
Instead he squeezed her hand once, gently, and dropped it. “Don’t worry about all that, we’ll clean it up tonight. Let’s go grab some burgers before I have to get back to work. How does that sound?”
She brushed away one of the wet locks of hair that had escaped the towel in her dash to the kitchen. She wanted his lunch hour to end in rumpled sheets and bare skin, not ketchup packets and a grease-stained paper bag. Instead she’d flipped out over some stupid letters and left all that effort and grocery money to char in the oven.
Goddamn, she pissed herself off sometimes.
She managed a weak smile. “Perfect,” she lied.
Four
“You sure you’re going to be warm enough?”
“I’ve got thick skin.”
Chance kept the flashlight trained on the ground ahead of them, but he had to smile at Tara’s assertion. He didn’t believe it for a second.
“Credit goes to my daddy for blowing the electricity money on whiskey. No better way to learn how to withstand low temperatures in skimpy outfits. Spending your high-school years living in an unheated trailer is such an important part of girlhood.”
“Man’s got to have priorities.” He climbed atop the wooden pasture fence, extended his arm to tug her over, then slid down behind her.
“I think he figured radiators and liquor had the same warming effect, only one was better at helping him sleep. What does your mama drink?”
“Depends on who’s buying. If a man’s hitting on her at the bar she’ll order something she thinks is classy, like a glass of chardonnay. But if she’s on her own at the store it’s bottom-shelf gin every time.”
“Guess we’re both lucky we’re just garden-variety fuckups as opposed to the raging alcoholic kind.” She frowned at the long prairie grass, needlessly lifting the hem of her already short skirt. “Here I was worried about needing thicker tights, but I reckon a snakebite’s a bigger threat than hypothermia.”
“I’m not sure Kansas is known for its abundance of poisonous snakes. It’s not much farther now. See that barn over there? Bonfire should be just the other side of it.”
Sure enough, after another couple of steps the glow of firelight reflected on the sagging wooden structure. His pulse quickened as a chilly breeze carried the sound of laughter. He hoped he was doing the right thing.
The end of the week had seen his relationship with Tara progress from the stiff politeness of an unfamiliar houseguest to the tentative camaraderie of two friends reconnecting after years apart. It was a step in the right direction, but it was still worlds away from a marriage, especially one about to be tested by a six-month deployment.
Now that he’d admitted to himself that she was way more than a one-night stand, he hoped bringing Tara to this party might accelerate things between them. The host was one of his civilian buddies, the only local mechanic he trusted to touch the Challenger, but there would be a few soldiers in attendance too. His plan was to start introducing Tara to a network of people she could lean on while he was away, show her there was more to him than wild nights and fast cars, pray it was enough for her to wait for until he got back. As the number of days before deployment ticked lower, the stakes felt higher and higher, and he hoped presenting themselves as married in public might help them act that way in private.
Not that he’d contributed much on that front, he thought ruefully, recalling the previous night’s conversation in which he’d insisted she take the bed since the next day was Saturday and he didn’t have to work. He could’ve sworn he saw a flash of disappointment in Tara’s face before she recovered her default expression of slightly defiant indifference, then convinced himself he’d imagined it. After all, he didn’t want to make the first move and suffer her rejection. Better to let her dictate the tempo.
Bullshit, a voice accused in his mind. She put in all the effort to find you, to turn up out of the blue and pray you didn’t slam the door in her face. You’re not afraid of offending her—you’re afraid you won’t measure up to her rose-tinted memories.
“You’ve gone awful quiet over there. Thinking deep thoughts?” Tara peered at him through the darkness.
“Just wondering if we should’ve brought a second bottle of tequila. It sounds like there are a lot of people here.”
“You were planning on sharing that? I figured it was just for us, and even then it seemed a little stingy.”
He caught the teasingly sulky note in her voice and grinned. “I’m driving home so you can have the whole bottle to yourself, how about that?”
“Sounds like a quiet night at the library, but I’ll take it.”
They were rounding the barn, and as a handful of people standing on the periphery of the party came into view Chance slung his arm across Tara’s shoulders, pulling her into his side on an impulse borne of unexpected pride.
He hadn’t used the word girlfriend in relation to a woman he was sleeping with since high school. Just the idea of that much emotional attachment and the weight of another person’s expectations was enough to make him restless and uncomfortable. He knew he was one of those guys women hated, who say all the right things and flatter and charm and then disappear, ignoring calls, deleting texts. He hated himself for it, but that didn’t stop the fidgety, prickly itch that spread through him whenever anything in his life started going well. One minute he’d be smiling as he drove to a woman’s house, looking forward to spending the evening with her, and the next he was frantically U-turning, gravel flinging up from the back wheels as he floored the accelerator, desperate to escape the panicked sensation of entrapment closing in.
One by one he’d left women in the lurch, his guilt at their pain obscuring the relief of separation. Eventually he quit dating altogether, deciding the mutual insignificance of mostly anonymous one-night stands was the only way for him to be with a woman without hurting her.
When Tara first returned his smile that night in the bar he assumed they were agreeing on exactly that. He never imagined two days later he’d find himself sneaking out of a hotel room while she slept, for once not to relieve himself of the chafing bonds of commitment, but to protect her from him, from his insatiable hunger for mayhem, from the tumult and pain that followed him like twilight shadows.
She hadn’t pulled away, and as a few people recognized him and lifted their hands in greeting he squeezed her more tightly. He was excited to introduce her as his wife, proud to have won over this unwinnable woman, already imagining his friends’ impressed murmuring that crazy-ass Chance McKinley had managed to hang onto someone so sharp and sexy.
