Five Days Grace Read online

  "You look like your head is about to explode," she said.

  "It is. I can't do this. I..."

  Jesus, he was going to have to tell her.

  At least part of it, so she'd know that she couldn't just waltz into a relationship with him, that she didn't want to.

  He was going to have to think about it and talk about it, and it felt practically like setting himself on fire. He didn't want her to know there was anything that ugly in the world, wanted to shield her from such things forever. And he was going to have to bring something like that into this beautiful place between them?

  "Aidan, are you all right?"

  God, he wanted her. "You're killing me, honey."

  She just grinned. "I don't know exactly what's going to happen with us, but it's going to be good. Really good."

  Which meant... what?

  Sex?

  She couldn't mean sex. He couldn't get a damned hard-on, so he didn't see how the sex was going to be good. Although he was getting to the point where he wanted anything he could have with her. As humiliating as he feared it would be to try and fail... He'd get to touch her, maybe anywhere and in any way he wanted. He'd get to kiss her, see her, feel the way her body moved, hear the sounds she made, taste her.

  Grace laughed, as if she could read his mind and loved every idea he had at the moment.

  He shook his head. "Please, stop."

  "I'm stuck on the time thing. We have the rest of today and two days after that, and then I go back to my pitiful, sad little life," she said with a grin. "Two and a half days. How do you want to spend them?"

  Oh, that hurt. He was going to have to let her go way too soon, and... She meant it, it seemed. Anything he wanted from her, right here, right now. Either that or she was teasing him. "You are manipulative as hell. Did anybody ever tell you that?"

  "No, everyone loves me and thinks I'm the sweetest thing. Practically an angel, remember?"

  His angel-girl was beaming up at him, looking happier than he'd ever seen her. He'd made her happy, for a while, at least. And he wanted her more than he would have believed it was possible to want a woman, especially without getting a hard-on.

  He made a growling sound.

  "Aidan, I've been thinking about this. Someone's going to be the first man I'm with after my husband, and I want it to be you."

  Shit, she just came out and said it. Just like that.

  "I can't. You know that—"

  "No, I don't know that, and you don't, either. But forget that part of it. Sex is a lot more than an erection. I know you know that. Don't pretend that you don't. And the important part, for me, is not what we can or cannot do, but that it's you. I just want it to be you."

  And how the hell was a man supposed to turn that down? She wanted him, his obvious limitations and all. Aidan squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced, pictures of her naked and clinging to him rushing through his head.

  She took advantage of his closed eyes and moved in, wrapping her arms around him and nuzzling her face against his chest. "We could make it a game. You liked the last game I came up with."

  A game? Another one?

  "Angel, my ass," he said.

  She laughed at him again. "No, this is a good idea. It's perfect. Remember, back in high school? Those girls who would call themselves virgins, but only in the most technical sense of the world? The anything-goes-but-that girls?"

  "Yes, Grace."

  "Pretend I'm one of them—"

  "Pretend you were one of the good girls? There's no pretending to it. I know you were."

  "I wasn't that good," she protested.

  "Oh, honey, I'd bet every dime I have in the bank that you've never had casual sex in your life."

  "Well, so? I've had sex. And not just with my husband." She sounded so proud of that fact. "Besides, we are not going to have casual sex. I mean, I'm not asking you for any kind of promises. I don't need promises from you. But I know what kind of man you are. I trust you. I want you, and I know you want me. So, what's the problem?"

  "The problem?" He nearly growled the words out.

  He wanted to make promises to her. That was the problem. And he couldn't. He had no idea what his future held. Until recently, he hadn't cared if he had a future. And she didn't know any of that. Which was another big part of the problem.

  "I want it to be you," she said again, his stubborn little angel. "And if it helps, you can't actually have sex with me. I won't let you. I'm a good girl with just a little bit of a bad streak. You can do anything you want to me, as long as I'm still, technically, a virgin when you're done."

  "Anything?" he asked, thinking maybe he could scare her out of this with just a look and that one word.

  She looked doubtful for the first time since she'd made this particular offer. "Yes... Anything."

  "You don't sound so sure now, Grace."

  "I... I'm sure. Anything," she insisted.

  He swore softly and stared up at the ceiling, thinking of the incredible luxury of having her completely naked and not just willing, but eager, giving blanket permission to do whatever he wanted to her.

  She stood up on the tip of her toes and whispered in his ear. "I want your hands all over me. And your mouth. I want you naked, and every inch of your skin pressed against mine."

  He felt like the words scorched his skin. His whole body felt hot. He was breathing hard, his heart thudding inside his chest, hands itching to touch her. His body seemed to be doing everything it was supposed to do—except get hard. It was so odd. Of course, he didn't need to get hard, because she wanted to play her little game. Or so she claimed. His anything-but-that girl.

  "You've had a helluva day, honey," he tried.

  "Helluva year," she countered.

  "Not an hour ago, you were trying to kick down a tree you were so mad at your brother."

  She nodded. "Look, if you want to pretend you don't want to, that's fine. Or if you're scared—"

  "Scared?" He practically spit out the word. "Oh, you play dirty, Grace."

  It frustrated him as much as it made him admire her even more.

  "Well, what if I am scared? My husband felt the need to find another woman to have sex with, and I can say it a hundred times, I can say it a thousand... that he was a jerk, an ass, and I don't really know why he did it. But there's always a little part of me that wonders what he wanted that I didn't give him. Or that I didn't do for him. And then I wonder, what's wrong with me?"

  "Nothing," he said, almost growling out the word. "There is absolutely nothing wrong with you. You are beautiful and so sexy. I can hardly stand it, you feel so good in my arms. I ache to touch you, to kiss you—"

  "But you won't. You won't do anything more than that."

  "Not because I don't want to," he protested. She had to know that. She had to.

  "Okay, but I'm not teasing about this part, Aidan. Knowing he turned to someone else made me question so much. So I mean it when I say I need to know that you want me. That I can make a man happy in bed or the shower or outside on the leaves. And I want that man to be you. I feel safe and sexy with you, and I need that."

  Aidan sighed. How in the hell could she want him? Right now? In the sad shape he was in? It felt like some absurd trick the universe was playing on him.

  "God, Grace," he told her. "Sometimes, I think you are so beautiful and so perfect—and just bad enough in all the best ways—that I must have made you up. That maybe I'm still back in my damned hospital bed, all sorts of tubes and lines sticking out of me, half high on painkillers, and you're some kind of gorgeous hallucination to help me get through it all."

  She looked surprised for a moment, and then so sad, tears flooding her big, pretty, blue eyes.

  "Ah, baby, no. Don't. Forget it. Forget I ever said that—"

  "No, it's... I just hate thinking about you hurting so much. I wish I'd known you then. I wish I could have been there with you through all of it."

  He was glad that she hadn't been.

  Wa
sn't he?

  Because he was in bad enough shape now, but then... God, he'd been a wreck.

  Although... He looked at her and thought, this woman would have stood by him through it all. Fought for him. Soothed him. Loved him through every bit of it.

  "I have to tell you about it, Grace. I don't want to, but there are things you have to know before we get in any deeper. It wouldn't be fair for you to not to know."

  Chapter 14

  Grace couldn't figure out what could be so bad about whatever had happened to him that she didn't already know. And she really needed to hold him. Giving into that impulse, she pushed him down into the kitchen chair behind him, then stepped forward until her legs were right up against the front edge of his chair, between his legs.

  "Let's try this."

  She put her arms around his shoulders and eased his body forward until his face was buried against her middle. Letting her fingers slide into his thick, dark hair, she used the pads of her fingers to gently rub little circles in his scalp. She found this so soothing when someone did it to her.

  Aidan's arms came around her, low on her hips, and he made a sound that was half-laugh, half-moan. "You have incredible hands, and your touch is amazing."

  "I could say the same about you," she whispered. "I've loved it every time you've touched me."

  "Ahh, Grace. I want to. You have no idea how much I want that."

  She wrapped her arms around his head and held him to her, so he was close and, she hoped, felt safe, so he didn't have to see her face when he said it, and she wouldn't see his. Maybe that would make it easier.

  She wished he'd gotten back into bed with her this morning, wished he'd never left, and that they were two people without any baggage at all, who could just hop into bed together practically on sight for the sheer pleasure, although she'd never been the kind of person to do that.

  But now, especially, they weren't that kind of people.

  "I know you think there's something you have to tell me—"

  "I do," he insisted, his words muffled against her.

  "Let's try it this way. Let me say it for you, because I feel like I already know. You're in the military. You were either in Afghanistan or Iraq, or somewhere else you couldn't admit to being. The helicopter you were in went down—"

  "I wasn't in the helicopter," he said.

  "Okay." She tried to make sense of that. Had he said it was the crash that did it? Or was she the one who'd latched onto that particular word? "So, a helicopter crashed, and you knew the soldiers inside. Some of them were your friends."

  "Yes. It was a team of Army Rangers. We'd worked together on missions before. Really good guys."

  "You went in to try to rescue them, pulled them out of the wreckage. So, how did you get hurt, Aidan?"

  He'd turned tense as could be in her arms. She just held on and waited.

  Finally, he said, "I was on the ground. The chopper was coming in for a landing, not that far off the ground, when it was hit by enemy fire. It did something between a hard landing and a crash, and it was a mess, but survivable. They were... When I first got to it, there were guys alive inside."

  "So, you started pulling survivors out of the wreckage? And then what?"

  "The helicopter exploded. I don't know if it was a fuel leak and a spark or if we were still taking fire. It was... really loud. There was a lot of smoke and dust. I remember the boom of the explosion, the fire. Next thing I knew, I was thrown through the air. Everything went black."

  Okay, that's how he'd been hurt. And granted—it sounded horrible. But there was more, something he couldn't bring himself to tell her, something more awful than what she already knew.

  "Why do you feel so guilty about that? Because you survived?" she asked finally. "I'm sure you did the best you could—"

  "It was a rescue mission, Grace. The guys in the helicopter were there to rescue me."

  Oh.

  He was on the ground. And the guys in the helicopter either came too late or something had gone wrong. Which meant he'd watched their helicopter get shot down, had to pull friends out of the wreckage, pull out mangled bodies... And then he'd been one of the ones lying on the ground, all broken and bleeding.

  "So, I guess it doesn't do any good for you to know that you were just doing your job," she said, "and they were doing theirs, and this was just one of those really shitty things that happen. Something that hurts some people and leaves others dead. And there's really no way to make sense of any of it—who got out alive, who didn't, why any of it happened. Why things couldn't have been different."

  "No, none of that seems to help. I've been through a lot of things. Some really bad things. I've seen a lot. We're a country that's been at war most of the time I've been in the Navy. But this..."

  She had her hands spread out on either side of his face, then her hands in his hair again, stroking through it, wanting so badly to comfort him in any way she could. It didn't seem to be enough.

  "Feels worse than anything you've gone through before?"

  He nodded.

  "It's the way things are. It's not like we deal with one bad thing, and then it's over, and we start fresh when we deal with the next. It's more like the stressors just keep adding up, and eventually, something will put us over some imaginary line, and we feel it. We really feel it in a way we never have before." Grace took a breath. "At least, that's what my sister the shrink says. Comes in handy to have her at times, and then, at others, you just want to hide from her, because she sees too much."

  Grace eased away, just enough so she could see him. Then she put her hands to his face again, holding him there in front of her, tears flooding her eyes at the deep lines of pain on his face, the regrets, the memories.

  "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It's terrible. I hate that we, as a country, put people in a position to have to go through things like that. It just doesn't seem fair. It seems like it's too much to ask of anyone."

  "I'm in the Navy, Grace. It's what we do."

  "You're a human being. Having to see things like that, to suffer that kind of physical and mental pain... It just seems too hard. No one should have a life that hard." She waited, and he didn't say anything. "But I'm glad you told me—"

  "Ahh, honey. That's not all of it. I wish it was, but there's more."

  More? She waited, thinking... God, more?

  He got up abruptly, started pacing around the small space. She watched him, not having any idea what else to say.

  "The thing is," he finally said, "after the helicopter exploded, we were on the ground for a while."

  A while? "Okay."

  "We were deep in the middle of nowhere. The first helicopter had been in the air for a while to get to me, and they'd been pushing it to fly at all, because the weather was getting bad. Once the first helicopter went down... You have to find another bird, another pilot and crew, another quick response group to try to rescue us. You really need to try to figure out what the hell happened to the first bird, so the same thing doesn't happen to the next one, because nobody wants to lose another one and more guys."

  Okay, she was starting to get it. Thrown through the air by the blast, injured—critically, she'd bet—bleeding, in pain, probably in shock. God. "Were you conscious?"

  He sucked in air. "Sometimes. I don't really know for how much of it. It's kind of a blur."

  More of a nightmare, she suspected. "What about the guys on the helicopter? The ones you managed to pull out of there before it blew? Was anyone still alive?"

  "For a while, a few of them were. They were... Well, you can imagine, a helicopter crash, then an explosion. It was... bad. I wanted to help them. I tried. I just... didn't have... anything to work with, not really, and I couldn't move that well..."

  With a fractured pelvis?

  He shouldn't have been moving at all. He must have dragged himself along the ground. Had he done that? Going from one injured friend to another? Grace had to bite her lip to keep from crying. If she started to cry again,
he'd stop talking, and she wasn't going to make this harder for him.

  "I just couldn't do anything to help them," he said finally.

  "How long? How long were you there after the explosion without any help?"

  "Hours," he admitted.

  "How many?" She needed to know.

  "Nineteen."

  "Oh, my God. They left you there for nineteen hours?" She was furious.

  "A dust storm hit. What are you gonna do? We had shit luck, all around. Helicopters are delicate pieces of machinery. We've lost more to sand and dust than enemy fire over there. Even if you could get one off the ground in a dust storm—and it's not a given that you can—you can't land one, because you can't see shit. You can't find the ground, and you sure don't want to find it by accident. Those guys did all they could. I know that."

  "Do you know that you did all you could?" she asked, because it didn't seem like he did.

  "I... It messed me up, Grace. Guys kept dying, one by one, and it just went on forever. They were in so much pain and losing blood, and I kept thinking... They came there for me. To help me. And then, they were all lying there, dead or dying, and I couldn't do anything for them. They had mothers and fathers. Some of them had wives and kids. And I was the only one to come out of it alive. It doesn't... I just can't make sense of that."

  "Aidan, nobody understands things like that. I don't think there's any understanding to find. It just happened. It's a terrible thing that happened. I'm so sorry it happened to you, and it's selfish of me, I know, but I'm so glad you made it through that. I can't imagine you not being here in this world."

  He took another one of those long, ragged breaths. He had tears falling down the side of his face by then. She did, too, despite trying her very best not to cry.

  "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. That it took them so long to get to you. That they were too late to save your friends—"

  "The thing is, Grace, once it was just me left there... God, it seemed like forever that it was just me. I had radio contact off and on with the people back at the base, and after a while... Fuck."

  He started shaking hard, and she held him tighter, her mind racing.