Page 15 of Surrendering To The Forbidden Mountain Man

Chapter Five

REID

Aweek. Seven days of waking up in Mira Cross's bed with her hair across my chest and her knee wedged between my thighs and her alarm going off at 5:30 because she opens the clinic by seven.

Seven mornings of coffee in her kitchen while she gets dressed down the hall. Seven evenings of takeout from Mabel's or something she cooked after work because she's better at it than I'll ever be. Seven nights of learning what she sounds like when she comes, what her face looks like when she's trying to stay quiet because the walls in this building are thin, what her hands feel like on my back when she's half-asleep and pulling me closer.

A week. And my boots are by her door next to her hiking boots, and my razor is on her bathroom shelf, and my flannel is draped over her desk chair because she stole it Tuesday morning and wore it to the clinic under her scrub jacket.

Saturday. She's at the clinic for a half day. Left at six with a kiss on my jaw and a reminder that Ray expects us for dinner at seven tonight. Her apartment is quiet. Coffee's still warm. Sun through the kitchen window. The kind of morning that makes you forget you don't deserve what you have.

My phone rings at eight. Hank, asking about a camera on the south gate that's been glitching. Standard issue. Takes fifteen minutes of troubleshooting over the phone to determine it's a wiring problem, not software. Hank says he'll have Jasper look at it Monday.

After the call, the apartment feels too still. My kit is at my own place. Clothes running low. Mira mentioned I could bring a bag over. "There's room in the closet," she said Thursday, casual, folding laundry. "Top shelf is empty."

The closet is a narrow double-door in the bedroom. One side is her scrubs, organized by color. The other side holds jeans, sweaters, a winter coat. Top shelf is empty, just as she said. Beside it, a cardboard box. Shoebox size. Tucked against the wall.

It's not hidden. It's just there, the way things are in a small apartment with limited storage. My hand bumps it while checking the shelf space, and it slides forward, and the lid shifts.

Inside is a card. Cream-colored envelope, no return address. My handwriting on the front. "Mira Cross, 411 Ridgeway, Bear Creek Valley, CO." The card inside is plain, white, with four words in blocky print: "I'm sorry, Mira."

I sent this from Kandahar. Eight years ago. Her mother had died in a car accident on the pass, and Ben called me on the sat phone at three in the morning, and I walked to the base post office the next day and sent a card because I couldn't get on a plane and I couldn't call her and I couldn't do anything useful except put four inadequate words on paper.

She kept it.

Under the card, a photograph. Ben's high school graduation. Me at twenty-one, standing with Ben in the parking lot of Bear Creek Community Church, both of us squinting into the sun. My arm is around Ben's shoulders. In the background, barely in frame, a girl with blonde hair in a ponytail is watching from the church steps. Fourteen years old. Watching me.

The photo wasn't Ben's. This is from a different angle. Someone else's camera. Someone who was standing near the church steps.

Mira took this picture. At fourteen. She was fourteen, and she was taking pictures of me, and she kept the photo for sixteen years in a box in her closet next to a condolence card I sent from a war zone.

My hands are steady. They've been steady through firefights, through extractions, through six weeks in a German hospital bed with my knee rebuilt and shrapnel in my ribs. Steady is what I do.

They're not steady now.

The math runs in my head, automatic. She was fourteen in this photo. I was twenty-one. She started watching me when she was a child, and I was old enough to be in the Army. By the time she was eighteen and I left for my first deployment, the fixation was already four years deep. By the time she was twenty-two and walked into Hank's bar in that red dress, it was eight years. By the time she called me at two in the morning from Denver, it was fourteen years of building her romantic life around a man who was never available.

She waited for me. She told me that, in this bedroom, a week ago, with my hands on her body and her eyes on mine, and I heard it as devotion.

Looking at this box, I hear it differently.

She was a kid. A kid with a crush on her brother's older friend, and the crush calcified into something she called love because I never put enough distance between us to break it. Every time I came home on leave, every time I showed up at a family dinner, every time I answered Ben's phone and she heard my voice in the background, I fed it. Not on purpose. But intention doesn't matter when the result is a thirty-year-old woman who's never been with another man because she couldn't let go of a fantasy she built when she was fourteen.

The card goes back in the box. The photo goes back in the box. The lid goes back on.

My hands are shaking.

The apartment is too warm. The coffee is cold. The flannel on the desk chair smells like her perfume because she wore it against her skin for nine hours.

By the time I hear her key in the front door at one o'clock, my boots are on and my jacket is zipped and the shaking has been replaced by something worse. The flat calm that used to descend before a mission. Operational stillness. The kind that makes you efficient and accurate and completely incapable of feeling anything.

"Hey." She's in the doorway, keys in one hand, takeout bag in the other. Mabel's. "Brought lunch. Mabel says you're too thin, which is her way of saying she approves." She smiles. The real one, full, aimed at me. "Why are your boots on?"

"Heading home for a bit. Need to grab some gear."

Her smile fades by a degree. She reads people for a living. Vital signs, body language, the micro-expressions that tell a nurse whether a patient is lying about their pain level. My operational stillness is transparent to a woman who's spent six years watching people pretend they're fine.

"What's wrong?"