All for You (5 page)

It was fate. It had to be. A slow warmth unfurled inside him as the doctor he could not get out of his head looked up at him, her cheeks flushing pink.

She was all buttoned up at work. Tonight, she looked different. Looser. Unbound.

Compelling. That’s what she was. Her fire at work. Her refusal to let him bully her. He’d admired her backbone before.

Tonight, he admired her in an entirely new light. Her hair framed her face in careless curls. He hadn’t expected to see her outside of work. He damn sure hadn’t expected to see her here. An old familiar need rose inside him. A need for touch, human and warm. A need to lose himself for an interlude in sweat and sex and stunning pleasure. He’d given up drinking but women had apparently fallen into that category as well.

It had been months since he’d felt a woman’s hands on his body.

This woman was not someone he needed to be talking to at the bar tonight but he found himself walking toward her anyway.

After the week of confrontation they’d had, he’d be lucky if she didn’t slap him the minute he approached her.

He could do this. He could talk to a woman without drinking. Right?

Emily met his gaze as he approached. He almost smiled.

“Not your usual scene?” he asked, leaning against the bar.

She shifted, putting a little space between them. That slight reclamation of power. He made a noise of approval in his throat. “I’m surprised you’re talking to me.”

“I’m surprised you’re here. Shouldn’t you be home reading medical journals or something?” Her cheeks flushed deep pink and he wondered how far down her body that color went.

She tipped her chin then and looked at him. “Have you been drinking?”

He looked down at the bottle in his hand. “I don’t drink anymore,” he said quietly. No reason to delve into his abusive history with alcohol. “You?”

“Glass of wine,” she said.

Reza shrugged and leaned on the bar, taking another pull off his water and being careful not to lean too close. She looked like she’d bolt if he pushed her. “That would explain why you’re talking to me. We haven’t exactly been friendly.”

Her hair reflected the fading sunlight that filled the room from the wide-open patio doors. He wanted to fist it between his fingers, watch her neck arch for his mouth.

She motioned toward his bottle with her glass. “‘Anymore’?”

He simply took another pull off his water. He was going to be damn good and hydrated after tonight. He wondered what she’d do if he leaned a little closer. “Long story.”

“One you’re not keen on sharing?” she asked. She leaned her cheek on one palm. The sun glinted across her cheek.

“Let’s just say alcohol and I aren’t on speaking terms. Bad things happen when I drink.” It was nothing to be ashamed of but there it was. Shame wound up his spine and squeezed the air from his lungs. He was just like his dad after all.

“You say that like giving up alcohol is a bad thing,” Emily said quietly.

Reza snorted softly. He should have guessed she wouldn’t let it alone. She had stubbornness that could last for days. “It’s not something I’m proud of.”

Her hand on his forearm startled him. Soft and strong, her fingers pressed into his skin. “But stopping is something to be proud of.”

Reza stared down at her hand, pale against the dark shadows of his own skin. A long silence hung between them.

He lifted his gaze to hers.

“It takes a lot of strength to break with the past,” she said softly.

“What are you doing?” Her eyes glittered in the setting sun and he thought he caught the sight of the tiniest edge of her lip curling.

Her fingers slipped from his skin. “Offering my professional support?”

His lips quirked. “Was that a joke?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I’m working on developing a biting sense of humor. Defense mechanism against raging asshole commanders.”

Reza barked out a laugh. “You look different out of uniform,” he said lightly, pressing his advantage at this unexpected truce.

“So do you.”

He angled his body toward hers. “You like my makeup?” he asked.

Her lips parting as she tried to figure out if he was kidding or not. Finally, she cracked the barest hint of a smile.

Something powerful woke inside him and he moved before he thought about it. He reached for her, brushing a strand of hair from her cheek. The simple gesture was crushing in its intimacy. Her lips froze in a partial gasp, as though her breath had caught in her throat.

“Sergeant Iaconelli,” she said quietly, her voice husky. But she didn’t move away. Didn’t flinch from his touch.

“Reza.” He swallowed the sharp bite of arousal in his blood, more powerful without the haze of alcohol that usually clouded his reactions. “My name is Reza.”

“Reza.”

His breath was locked in his lungs, the sound of his name on her lips triggering something dark and powerful and overwhelming.

He wanted this woman. The woman who’d stood in opposition to him this week. The woman who lifted her chin and stood steadfast between him and his soldiers.

There was strength in this woman. Strength and courage.

“I’m Emily.” Her words a rushed breath.

He lowered his hand, unwilling to push any further than he’d already gone. This was new territory for him. Unfamiliar and strange and filled with potential and fear.

“It was nice talking to you tonight, Emily,” he said when he could speak.

He waited for her acknowledgment that she’d heard him. Some slight movement of her head or tip of her chin.

Instead her throat moved as she swallowed and she blinked quickly, shattering the spell between them.

He left her then because to push further would challenge the limits of his restraint. He wasn’t ready to fall into bed with someone. No matter how compelling Emily might be.

He waited and he watched for the rest of the evening. Watched her slip out with her friend, leaving an empty space at the bar.

Leaving him alone with the fear that included the empty loneliness as well as the cold silence of sobriety.

His thoughts raced as he made sure his troopers all got home that night, and Teague crashed on his couch.

He fell into bed later, need and desire twisted up, filling the cold dead space left inside him by the lack of alcohol. A dead space he usually filled with work while deployed. Tonight, though, unfamiliar pleasure hunted his thoughts, whispering that he could still love a woman, that he didn’t have to be drunk to climb into bed with someone.

But Emily wasn’t a random someone.

And she was so far out of his league, it wasn’t even funny. Even if there was some sexual attraction there, she wasn’t likely to go slumming with a burned-out infantryman like him.

He lay there in the darkness, waiting, clinging to the single, simple pleasure of her touch, hoping that maybe tonight he could sleep, avoiding the nightmares that reminded him of the monster he’d become.

A beast who had lost his compassion somewhere on the road to Baghdad.

I
think I drank too much last night.”

Reza grunted as Teague sank into the chair next to his in the battalion classroom. Reza was testing himself. Seeing how far he could push it and still stay in control. His battle with alcohol was one he would win. Because he didn’t lose. They’d gone out every night that week and still Reza hadn’t drank. “You always say that.”

Reza glanced at his watch. He needed to run down what was going on with Sloban’s packet. It had been over a week of playing phone tag with the doc and if Reza didn’t know better, he’d think she was avoiding him.

He hadn’t given her any reason to avoid him. Not at all.

He was getting pissed, though. He needed answers. Not for Marshall or any stupid briefings. He needed them for Sloban.

The kid was counting on him.

Beside him, Teague scrubbed his hands over his face. “Because it’s always true,” Teague said. “I think my liver went AWOL after the sixth shot of tequila. And you had to go run off and ruin the party because you had to go to bed early.”

Reza scoffed quietly. Teague had no idea why Reza had been called away. Being the first sergeant meant his phone was always on. Last night, Reza had spent a good portion of the evening talking a kid and his wife into marriage counseling because if the kid ended up arrested one more time, he was going to get his ass thrown out of the army.

Luckily, they’d agreed.

More than a week had passed since the incident with Emily at
Talarico’s
. A week that Reza had been chasing the hair of the dog, looking for a cure to rein in the untamed beast thrashing inside him, dancing with temptation, seeing how close he could get before the fire inside him burned.

He’d managed. A week, and temptation always just a single shot glass out of reach.

He’d keep managing if he wanted to keep his career. With the deployment looming, he couldn’t afford to screw up again. Not if he planned on being on that plane.

He wasn’t going to let his boys go downrange without him.

“I can’t help it if your tolerance is as low as a baby Chihuahua’s,” Reza said with a grin.

Teague groaned and covered his face with both hands. “What are we doing here anyway?”

He motioned around them to the classroom slowly filling up with officers and enlisted from around the unit. Some he was friendly with. Others, well, they weren’t exactly in his fan club. Reza tended to get cranky with the staff when they didn’t play nice or tried to make decisions for his soldiers. That was Reza’s job as the first sergeant and he’d be damned if any staff weenie was going to do his job for him.

Reza glanced over at Teague. “You didn’t hear?”

“Obviously not,” Teague said dryly.

“There were five suicides this weekend. The corps commander has ordered a stand down. We’re getting training from the shrinks.”

Just saying the words sent a twinge through Reza’s guts. He sat back in his chair, shifting uncomfortably. Fort Hood was a big post. It was inconceivable that he’d know any of the victims even though a couple of them had been in the brigade. And yet a nagging sense of unease stirred at the nape of his neck.

Teague mirrored Reza’s stance. “Five suicides in a weekend? What the fuck is going on?”

Reza slowly shook his head, rubbing his hand over his bottom lip. “I don’t know, man. It’s pretty bad. Three were in our brigade.”

Reza kept watching the sergeants and officers as they filtered into the classroom.

Reza’s phone vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it out. A single picture from Claire.

A memorial. There were four of them in that picture, taken the day they were supposed to leave for Kuwait: Claire, Reza, Miles and Wacowski. Their first deployment had been in the bag. One more mission and they were going home.

God, but had they ever been that young? The Thunder Run to Baghdad felt like a lifetime ago.

Bitter resentment burned in him. He’d taken ’Ski to the docs and they’d told him to take a sleeping pill and get a good night’s sleep.

Ski had never woken up.

And Miles had died because Reza hadn’t been on that last mission. He’d been tied up, arguing with the docs.

He’d lost two men that day. This day, seven years before.

Claire never forgot.

And Reza’s arms bore the tributes to his lost friends.

“You okay?” Teague’s words cut through Reza’s ragged thoughts.

Reza shifted, scanning the room, shoving the emotions aside. Stuffing them down as he started taking head count.

Wisniak walked in, laughing with one of his buddies. He’d gotten out of the hospital last week and had been doing, oddly enough, really well, at least as far as Reza could tell. The wonders of modern medicine apparently had worked their magic for him.

More than once, Reza had almost approached him. Asked him if he was doing okay. But the marks on his arms burned, the pain in his soul a raging inferno, reminding him that he’d spent days chasing Wisniak around before he’d been committed to the fifth floor.

Days that he should have been leading his boys through battle drills. He hadn’t approached. Hadn’t been able to get past how much time the kid had taken from Reza training his boys, just to make sure that Wisniak didn’t kill himself.

He’d lost too many men to the war. He didn’t trust the mental health docs to get it right. Not with Wisniak, not with anyone. The irritation smothered any concern over loyalty or lack thereof.

Emily’s taunt burned in his ears.
That’s a stunning lack of loyalty.

He had loyalty. To the men he would take downrange again. It bugged the living hell out of him that he couldn’t get Emily’s taunt out of his head even after that moment at
Talarico’s
. He didn’t do stoic introspection and the fact that she’d poked at him pissed him off.

He cared about all of his soldiers. It was simply that Wisniak wasn’t one of them. He took from the team; he wasn’t part of it.

On the nights when he’d lain awake, his thoughts tumbling through time and space, chasing elusive sleep, he argued with her. Told her that some people needed more help than others. That “team” was something Emily didn’t understand. Couldn’t. With her neat hands and proper hair, he’d be willing to bet she’d never gone a day without a shower, let alone held someone while they bled out.

His breath caught in his throat as the woman he spent many nights arguing with in his head walked into the front of the classroom.

Shit. He’d been told this was a sensing session—a group hug about everything the leadership thought was wrong.

This was going to be so much worse.

Clearing his throat, he slouched down in his chair in the back of the room and wondered if he could sneak out without the sergeant major seeing him. “Is the shoot house still on for tomorrow? I want to blow some shit up.”

Teague shifted in his seat, slipping his cell phone into his jacket shoulder pocket. “As far as I know. Why?”

“Haven’t you heard? Weapons are therapeutic.”

Teague chuckled darkly. “Yeah, I think I learned that somewhere on the road between Baghdad and Mosul.”

Sergeant Major Giles walked to the front of the room and some enterprising soul had the insight to call “At Ease.” Everyone shot to their feet in a show of respect for the senior enlisted man. Reza shifted behind a skinny lieutenant, not wanting her to see him. Not sure what he’d say or do if she did. He wasn’t hiding, per se, so much as he was simply using available terrain to conceal his position.

It wasn’t like they’d slept together. They’d simply chatted at the bar.

“All right, listen up. Give Captain Lindberg your undivided attention. No cell phones. No leaving. No interrupting. You will listen to what she has to say and you will learn something if I have to shove it up your ass.”

Emily’s eyes widened but otherwise her expression remained neutral. There was that backbone again. Reza suppressed a chuckle at Emily’s stoicism. She kept her face carefully blank as she listened to the sergeant major. Obviously, she was not used to crazy, steely-eyed killers in the clinic. He doubted there was enough medication in the entire Darnall pharmacy to shrink Giles’s head. The man had what polite company called issues.

She didn’t flinch when Giles told everyone to take their seats. But then she scanned the crowd and her gaze landed for a moment too long on him. He refused to look away, taking in the single lock of hair brushing her forehead. The indentation of her lip as she chewed it.

Behind her professionally bland expression, he saw a flash of uncertainty. This was new for her, he realized. She might go toe-to-toe with a disgruntled sergeant in her own clinic, but right then she was facing an entire room of them. It would be disconcerting to a seasoned veteran, let alone a freshly minted army doc. He wondered if this was her first time outside of the sanctity of the hospital walls. If she’d never been around knuckle draggers before, how could she possibly understand the world that Reza’s soldiers were describing?

If she’d never smelt the burned sulfur of spent ammunition, how could she explain away a nightmare of burning cloth and charred flesh? If she’d never been blown up, how could she possibly understand the momentary flashback between the boom of the thunder and the crack of the lightning and the gut-clenching terror as you tried to figure out if the explosion was an imminent threat or not.

Her gaze flickered back to him. An instance of acknowledgment and then it was gone. But in that moment, Reza knew they were worlds apart and that nothing would ever span that distance. He knew war. He’d lived it.

She knew nothing but talk of war.

As she shifted her notes, a quiet revelation whispered across Reza’s skin. She was innocent. She truly thought she could make a difference.

She wasn’t slick-sleeved because she sought to avoid the war. She was running toward the conflict in her own way—trying to help the soldiers she admired and respected.

As she lifted her gaze and faced a room of roughneck infantry and armor officers and sergeants, he realized that she would never again be the same. Even as she sought to understand the war and what it had done to him, to his men, he knew she’d barely touched on their darkest memories and fears. Her innocence would be tainted today. Just by being around them, some of the war would leave a smudge on her innocence.

He should have felt some bitter satisfaction that she would no longer be as sanctimonious if she lived through the war he’d fought. That she would descend to his level, would no longer be unblemished. But watching her shuffle her papers, he felt something new sidle up against his heart. The unfamiliar urge to protect: the fleeting hope that she would never face the war as he’d lived it.

But she wasn’t his. Not his to protect, not his to keep safe.

Reza was no white knight, charging into battle to defend his lady’s honor. No, never that. But as he watched Emily lift her chin and square off with a group of roughneck infantrymen, he knew she would never be the same after today.

And neither would he.

Emily shifted her notes and grasped a pen in her right hand, flicking the cap on and off. It was a nervous habit that had driven her father insane but today of all days, she was allowed. The blatant hostility from the room full of men was…well, “disconcerting” was too light a word.

She was nervous. Nervous but not afraid. There was a difference. And after her weekend of pulling double shifts in the ER, hers was a no-fail mission.

Something was drastically wrong at Fort Hood and these men were key to helping figure it out. They were the ones who knew their soldiers the best. They were the ones who could identify the soldiers on edge before she could.

They could save lives. But they had to trust that the system would work, and if her previous conversations with Reza were an indicator, there wasn’t a lot of love lost between the men in the ranks and the docs in her office.

Having so many eyes on her at once was unsettling at best. And when you considered what she was there to talk to them about—yeah, she couldn’t really count on a warm reception and an invitation to drinks afterward. She figured it was close to what a rabbit must feel like when facing a pack of wolves. She glanced around the room, seeing that every single right shoulder sported the giant combat patch of the First Cavalry Division, a patch that covered the entire space reserved to tell the world they’d been to war. Her own right shoulder felt conspicuously naked. She was a slick sleeve. She’d learned that term recently and it was not a term of endearment.

But she wasn’t a rabbit and damn it, she was not going to back down from doing her job.

The war was far from over. She’d get her turn to deploy. She knew that but standing there, in front of a room full of combat veterans, her carefully prepared speech escaped her. The notes on her slides, which had been vetted by the hospital commander, seemed somehow…empty. Futile.

“I’m here…” She cleared her throat as her voice broke. “I’m here today to talk to you about behavioral health.” Someone coughed in the back of the room and she didn’t dare look up. She was afraid she would see Reza watching her again. Afraid she would look in his eyes and see something there that she wasn’t ready to deal with.

There were demons hiding in the shadows of his eyes. She didn’t have to be a psych doc to see it. There was something deeper, though, beneath the shadows and the sadness etched into the lines beneath his eyes. Something that called to her. That urged her out of her tight, protected box. Something that made her want to reach out and seize the risk.

To touch him. The truest part of him, not the harsh exterior he presented to the world.

Refusing to be cowed, she lifted her gaze to scan the room once more. A mistake. The hostility was not in her head. Arms were folded across chests. Jaws ground furiously at being cooped into a hot classroom. Several cheeks were packed with chewing tobacco, their owners’ spit bottles close by.

She was not going to reach anyone here. It dawned on her in that moment that the hospital commanders had no idea what the attitudes were down here in a line unit. How was she ever going to reach these men when they didn’t want to hear one word she had to say?