Page 52 of My Forbidden Commander

Outside, the rain starts again. His breathing evens out first. Mine follows slower as I listen to him resting against me like maybe he finally stopped running.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about any of this in the daylight. I don’t know how a colonel keeps a specialist in his bed and a task force intact and a war from swallowing either of us whole.

But tonight, in the dark, with his heartbeat under my palm and his ghosts finally purged, I don’t want to be anywhere else.

26

NOAH

I’m checking my gear, but my hands keep drifting back to a strap I’ve already tightened twice. It takes me a full minute standing outside the supply hut to admit to myself that it isn’t about the strap. It’s about the way Gabriel looked at me last night—just a few hours ago—when we talked about Callahan requesting me for the overnight push.

“Two nights,” he said, sitting on the edge of his bunk. He held his bad shoulder stiffly, like even the idea of me being gone that long put weight on it. “Deep, past Hill 604, right up against the pass.”

“I know the brief, sir,” I replied.

“I know you know the brief.” He rubbed a hand down his face. “I’m not cleared to go with you.”

“I know that too.”

“That’s not reassuring, Reyes.”

I climbed into his lap instead of arguing, because arguing wasn’t going to change the mission and it definitely wasn’t going to relax him. I rode him slowly as both of us tried to be quiet. His good hand was splayed across my hip, and his bad hand was resting on the mattress while I did all the work, just like every night since he tore that stitch. He came apart under me with his teeth pressed into my shoulder to keep from making noise, and after, lying tangled together in that narrow bunk, he said the thing that’s been rattling in my skull since 0400 this morning.

“Come back in one piece. That’s an order, not a request.”

Daddy bear. I didn’t say it to his face, because he would have found some way to turn me over his knee for real, but that’s what he is. A man who runs task forces and buries soldiers for a living, worried sick about one specialist heading out with a team he barely knows.

I shoulder my ruck at the wire and force my brain to switch tracks, because I can’t be thinking about Gabriel Wolfe’s hands or his dick or the sounds he makes when I ride him into next week. I’m walking into unfamiliar mountains with four men I’ve hardly worked with, and a hard-on at the wrong moment could be embarrassing. Or dangerous. One of those.

Callahan meets me at the gate. “Reyes. Glad to see your team let you off the leash for this one.”

“Isn’t much of a leash, Sergeant,” I reply.

“Sure,” he mumbles. “You’re walking three, behind Wilder. He likes a second set of eyes on his blind side.”

Wilder’s already at the front of the file, and when I fall in behind him, he greets me with a nod before turning forward again. Always alert, it feels.

Sykes brings up the rear with the radio, and Liu walks behind me with the aid bag. Together, we step off into a morning so cold, I can literally see my breath freeze.

We climb for six hours before Callahan calls the first real halt, and by then my legs have stopped complaining and started just doing the work I require from them.

“Water,” Callahan says, and we drop into a loose perimeter behind a shelf of gray rock, five men facing five directions.

Sykes opens his canteen and looks at me like he’s been dying to ask me a question the whole time we climbed. “You’re the one who found the range card.”

I shake my head. “Wasn’t just me.”

“Wolfe’s report said it was.”

“Wolfe exaggerates.”

Sykes snorts. “Guy doesn’t seem like the exaggerating type.”

He doesn’t, and I don’t have a good answer, so I drink my water and look at the ridge instead of Sykes’s face, which looks a bit too curious for my comfort.

“You believe the stuff about the red thread?” Liu asks, not looking up from where he’s retying his boot laces. “My last posting, a guy swore up and down he found one tied to a fence post, right where a sniper had been dug in for three days.”

“I’ve heard it,” I say.