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He grunted and kissed her temple. “Some secrets will be buried with us.”
Wasn’t that the truth? Sierra whispered, “My nightmare was about the attack on our hide, Mace. I relived the whole shooting, Jeb dying in my arms on that helo racing to Bagram to try and save him, all over again. My miscarriage…”
“I understand. You’ve been through a lot in the last twenty-four hours, Sierra. When shit happens like this, the nightmares from our past get stirred up, too. The damned things rise to the surface. It sucks.”
She managed a slender smile, nestled into his arms, never wanting to leave. Wanting to love him fully. But she couldn’t. Not here. And she had a concussion and who knows what might happen if shedidtry to love him. Blood pressure went up, she knew that. And her brain was fragile at this point. Wanting to love Mace would have to wait.
“Even worse,” she admitted thickly, “was that I didn’t even know I was pregnant. So often, because of the stress of the job, I wouldn’t have a period monthly. I’d sometimes skip months before having another one. So, I didn’t think anything of it when one didn’t come along on our last mission together. I’d never been pregnant before and I didn’t know the signs…” and she shook her head, closing her eyes, absorbing Mace’s strength, his care.
“Don’t blame yourself,” he growled. “You didn’t know.”
“Looking back on it,” Sierra whispered, “I did have signs. I was more emotional than usual. Moody. And I felt different. But I was so focused on our mission… I just blew it all off. I didn’t put it together.” She dragged in a ragged sigh. “To this day, I wonder if I had put it together, if I’d realized I was pregnant, that I would have left the field immediately. I’d have gone stateside. Jeb might have had another partner. Or they might have moved him out of that area to a safer one—”
“Don’t go there,” Mace warned her heavily, stroking her hair and shoulders. “Don’t do that to yourself, Sierra. You have to stay with what happened. All it does is continually tear you up at moments like this when the nightmare returns.”
A violently harsh crack of thunder reverberated in through the cave entrance, beams from the momentary flash of its brilliant bolt painting waterfall shadows of tears down both their faces, mingling with the real ones. And then they were back in merciful darkness once again.
“You know the drill,” she admitted, voice low with grief. “You understand.”
“Yeah, I do. I can’t tell you how many times I replayed Ana Beth’s situation. In her case, she knew she was pregnant. The night’s I spent wondering why the hell she didn’t tell me…”
Squeezing her eyes shut, Sierra slid her arm around his shoulders, trying to hold him with her woman’s strength, feeling his deep grief. “That had to be so hard on you, Mace.”
“If I’d have known, I would have immediately pulled out of the field. I’d have come home to take care of her and the baby. She didn’t even give me that choice.”
Sierra heard the raw, unresolved grief in his voice, the tremble of emotions behind it, barely contained. Desperately, she wanted to ease his pain, but the two of them were so caught up in their own separate pain, that neither of them was likely to have happy endings. It had no kind of ending written at all. Their futures together just dangled out there, swaying back and forth in front of both of them from frayed threads.
“You can’t go there either, Mace. You know that.” Sierra said.
“Yeah,” he breathed, “I know. But my heart, my emotions, don’t. I just keep reliving it from different perspectives and angles. Asking myself how I could have made it different.” He caressed her cheek. “She never trusted me. Not fully. I could never figure out why, Sierra. I never did anything to show Ana Beth that I wasn’t loyal and totally in love with her. I was crazy in love with her for all those years. I never stopped feeling my love for her…”
Pain drifted through Sierra. Pain for Mace. For the unanswerable confusion she heard in his voice. She caressed his neck and shoulder. “Well, I trust you. Obviously,” and she leaned back to look up into his rugged, hard face. His eyes glittered. Alive with raw emotions. Hers felt equally raw. “At least, Mace,” she said quietly, holding his gaze, “I trusted you. You know things about me no one else ever will. That means something, doesn’t it?” and she searched his eyes. They were filled with grief, with loss, with what might have been. As he swallowed hard and then gazed down at her, she saw the turmoil in his face recede and something else, something warming to her heart, take its place.
“Yeah, you trust me,” he said, fingers moving across her brow, smoothing out the wrinkles. “You’re fearless in that department, Sweetheart.” His voice grew low. “Thank you for sharing that with me. I know you didn’t have to,” and he looked deep into her eyes.
Her throat stung with her tears for Mace. “I wanted to. I knew, somehow, if I ever told you, that of all the people on this earth, you’d understand.” She saw him nod, close his eyes, and she felt wrapped in an intense, unnamable emotion as he gently squeezed her. She was torn-up, her head beginning to ache again, probably from all the tears she’d shed on Mace’s t-shirt. Easing out of his arms, she touched the damp shirt stretched across his massive chest.
“I got you so wet.”
He smiled a little, moving the thick strands of her hair back across her shoulder. “You can cry on me any time you want, Sweetheart. Any time. I’m here for you…”
Sierra forced herself not to cry the next morning as the Black Hawk came down. She gave Cale a quick hug of good-bye. And then she walked over to Mace, who stood so tall and rugged, alert for the enemy as the helo landed. The gusts of the rotor wash slapped at them. Nate had picked up her ruck and sniper rifle, already carrying them toward the opening door of the Hawk. She threw her arms around Mace’s shoulder, kissing his bearded cheek.
“Come home to me,” she whispered unsteadily, near his ear. “Any time…”
Mace hugged her tightly for a moment, and then released her.
Sierra stepped out of his arms, seeing a glitter of tears in his eyes. And then, in a blink, the tears were gone. That hard, unreadable game face of his was back in place. Would he come visit her six months down the line? Or not? Unsure of anything, she lifted her hand in farewell and turned, bowing her head to protect it from the debris kicked up by the blades. She was going home without the man that she’d fallen so helplessly in love with. It had justhappened. She’d been committed to her life as a security contractor. Now… everything had changed.
Nate guided her into the helo. The physician was sitting in one of the two jump seats. He was a Peruvian medical doctor with short, black hair and brown eyes. He smiled a hello to Sierra as she came in with Nate’s hand on her elbow, guiding her to the other seat bolted to the deck of the vibrating Hawk. The crew chief slid the door shut and locked it. Before Nate even got her harnessed into the seat, the two Army Night Stalker pilots had lifted the bird off and made a wide, swooping bank, heading back down the rocky cliffs, heading for Cusco.
Sierra caught one last glimpse of Mace out through the helo’s narrow window. He stood, M-4 over one shoulder, his gaze following the bird as it banked and turned. Her heart thrashed wildly in her chest. An ache embraced her, and she closed her eyes, fighting back her emotions, fighting back the tears that wanted to fall.
Mace would stay behind in that green hell. He would find the next HVT on his team’s hit-list. Despite the growing distance between them under the thundering rotors, she still saw the look in Mace’s gray eyes that told her so, saw the undeniable commitment. And Kushnir could kill him… Nate and Cale, too, on any given day when the cards on the table turned against them. Now, she knew the dangerous dance they all played against one another. She pressed a hand to her heart. She couldn’t even put on a helmet to protect her hearing because of the huge swollen bump on her head. Instead, Nate retrieved her a pair of safety earphones that fit easily over her head. They would guard her eardrums from the cacophony that was the shaking, roaring helicopter. Reaching out, she gripped Nate’s hand.
He sat on the floor next to her. Close by. A guardian. And he looked up at her, his eyes so serious as he squeezed her hand in return, as if to silently tell her everything was going to be all right.
These A-teams that hunted in the jungles of Peru were brave men on a mission that no one back in the States would ever find out about. All heroes. All in such a deadly, daily game. Swallowing against a lump, Sierra closed her eyes. Six months. Six long, torturous months until Mace would be finished in this jungle. Would he and his men make it out or not? There was no way for Sierra to know. Now, she was scared for them. Scared because she cared for the whole bunch of them. Nate and Cal had become like brothers to her.
