Chapter 6
SIX
She was just so fucking beautiful.
Harry knew Nicole and Sam and Mike thought he was being heroic or something, not leaving her side, but it wasn’t that. Bolt cutters and a crane couldn’t make him move.
All he wanted to do was watch her, and rejoice that she wasn’t dead.
Another minute—hell, probably another second—and she would have been dead meat. Harry had seen so many dead bodies. You’d think he’d have become inured, but he hadn’t.
And a dead woman’s body…man. That just fucked with his head.
And a dead Eve. He didn’t know if he could have recovered from that one.
A second later and poof! He wouldn’t be sitting here, holding her slender hand. He’d be burying her in the cold, stony ground, not even knowing her real name.
Harry knew that once he was dead, it was over.
He’d done some good, he’d tried to anyway.
If he died before Sam and Mike and Nicole did, they’d remember him.
And Nicole and Sam’s little girl would too, because he intended to stick close and be a good uncle.
But basically when he died, that would be it.
Not Eve.
She was magic. If civilization survived, a thousand years from now people would be listening to her voice, to her songs.
Some poor fuck who was hurting in the dead of night would listen to her and get enough out of that magic voice to face another day.
A little light of beauty shining in the cold, dark world.
Who knew how much more music she had in her? She’d basically saved his sanity if not his life and she’d only recorded two albums. If he could keep her alive there was lots more where that came from.
He really respected her talent and her courage.
So…why the three day woodie?
Because, well, that was part of it too. He was ashamed of himself, but there it was.
He’d sat for three days and three nights looking at her face, memorizing the shape of it, the swooping line of her eyebrows, the thick lashes a shade darker than her hair, still and lush along her cheeks, the delicate line of her jaw, curving around to that pointed little chin with a tiny little dent in it.
The little hollow at the base of her neck where the collarbones met.
The soft shiny hair pooling around her head, forming a russet frame.
Actually, keeping that hair had not been a good idea. It was a magnet for the eye. She should have chopped it off and dyed it a dull brown.
It wouldn’t have made her less beautiful—she’d need to burrow in a gunny sack for that—but at least she wouldn’t have a beacon around her head.
Every single line of her was gorgeous—and fragile.
So fragile. The long, narrow hands with the long, slender fingers, which he just knew had coaxed that gorgeous music from some keyboard.
Even just lying there, one hand mottled from the IV line, they were prettier than any hands he’d ever seen before.
In every way, this was a woman any healthy male would instinctively protect. Want to protect.
How could there be sick fucks in the world who wanted to hurt her, kill her? How could there be sick fucks who’d hurt any woman, any child?
It still baffled him. He was 36 years old and he’d been around the world more times than he could count and he still couldn’t wrap his head around it. How could any man do that?
And this woman, with the once in a lifetime voice…he couldn’t even begin to imagine hurting her.
Fucking her…well, that was something else.
If he had to be painfully honest with himself, that was part of the reason he wouldn’t leave her side.
He couldn’t.
It was as if, even unconscious, she’d thrown out invisible tentacles and lashed his dick to her bedside. His very very hard dick.
Oh man.
He’d spent the past three days with a perpetual hard-on and nothing would make it go down.
He willed it down by sheer grit when Nicole or Sam or Mike came in to check on her.
Wouldn’t that be something? For them to come in and find him with a woodie for a wounded woman? Harry disgusted even himself.
But when they were gone, when there was no one but the silence and Eve and himself, whoa.
He’d tried everything. Tried not looking at her, but that was a no-go from the start.
He was here to keep an eye on her, make sure she didn’t crash, be able to respond to any need instantly—or that was what he told himself.
The truth was, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
Telling himself every single second that he was an asshole didn’t help at all.
He just accepted the idea and sat in his chair as if glued there.
Harry wasn’t used to hard-ons he didn’t do anything about.
True, he’d only just started having them again after a year in Afghanistan—a no-sex zone if ever there was one— and then another year-long hiatus after he’d died and then been pumped back to life again on a medevac helicopter on its way to Ramstein via Bagram.
Four surgeries and intense physical therapy just to be able to stand upright had taken the wood right out of his pecker, it did.
He’d spent many months in a wasteland of pain, acutely aware of the siren pull of death, because not even with all that he knew of hell on earth, did he believe there was a hell after death.
There was nothing after death and for a long, long time, the thought of that blissful nothingness was so tempting he knew his brothers kept a close watch on him so he wouldn’t fall into its siren embrace.
Because death sounded an awful lot like peace. At some deep level, he’d been angry at his brothers for keeping him from that peace.
And then—and then this woman and her voice came along and he’d found something outside himself that gave him the strength to go on.
She hadn’t given him peace but she’d reminded him that the world held glories still, beautiful things, even if he wasn’t seeing them.
Her voice had literally brought him back from the dead.
The hard-on was a real, real surprise because though her voice was soft and sensual, her music wasn’t sexual to him.
The woman herself was, though. And how. Man, from the second he saw her he’d been stunned senseless. It was only the realization that she was in mortal danger that punched him back to reality.
When he wanted sex and there wasn’t a woman around, well, his hand knew its way around his body. He could take care of himself.
Not this time, though. Nope. After a couple of hours of wood, disgusted with himself, he’d gone into the bathroom to take care of the problem and that’s when his little head blindsided his big head.
His fist wouldn’t do it. Just wouldn’t cut it. Little head didn’t want the fist. Little head wanted her.
Another woman wouldn’t do it either. That was the real shocker. There wasn’t one woman Harry could think of that he desired a billionth as much as he desired the wounded woman on the hospital cot in his study.
No fist.
No other women.
He was shit out of options.
So he kept the woodie while watching over her. It hurt, but it would have hurt him more to leave her side. To think that she might need something and he wouldn’t be there to get it for her, man, no way.
Eve moaned and he straightened, watching her face.
Her head shook from side to side, eyes beating behind her lids, tracking back and forth like windshield wipers.
Whatever she was seeing in her sleep was wildly troubling, scaring her.
Fierce cries were throttled in her throat as if even in her sleep she was trying to be quiet.
Her breathing speeded up, became ragged. Her legs thrashed.
A choked whimper rose up out of her throat, the cry an animal might make in the woods at the sight of a terrible predator. A minute before dying. Her heels scrabbled against the sheets as in her dream she tried to scramble away.
Tears leaked from the corners of her tightly-shut eyes and the whimper became a keening sound that made the hairs on his forearms and his neck rise.
Nightmare city.
Harry knew all about that. Knew all about the terrors of the night, particularly when they echoed the terrors of the day.
Harry reached out a hand to shake her gently awake when her eyes suddenly opened, wild and terrified. She gasped, the sound loud in the dark room.
“It’s okay,” Harry said immediately. God, he wanted to wipe that terrified expression off her face. “It’s just a nightmare. Don’t worry. You’re safe.”
“Safe,” she repeated in a whisper and shuddered. She said it as if it were an unfamiliar word, an unfamiliar concept.
Something in his chest tightened. Safe. He was going to keep her safe or die.
Harry reached out with his thumb to wipe the tear tracks on her cheeks. “Yeah,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Safe.”
Her eyes roamed around the dark room, though there weren’t that many features for her eyes to fixate on. Harry belonged to the Minimalist School of Home Decoration.
The room wasn’t giving her any clues, so her gaze roamed right back to his face.
Harry was used to masking his emotions, had done it all his life. The world was one huge knife just waiting to plunge into soft hearts. He kept a hard carapace around him at all times, surrounded by very strong don’t fuck with me vibes.
That didn’t work here. She needed reassurance and Harry didn’t know how to do reassurance. So he did the only thing he could. He let down his defences, for just a moment.
Everything down, shield, vibes, even his woodie, a little. Because the thought of this magical, beautiful woman wounded and terrified and encased in nightmares was a real downer.
He looked her straight in her huge, frightened eyes. They glowed green with an almost unearthly light in the gloom of the room, reflecting the lights in the living room. She stared at him, eyes wide, unblinking.
“You’re safe here, absolutely,” Harry said again. He’d raised his voice a little and it echoed in the room.