“It’s my seventh day today,” I replied, smiling at a station staff member as we passed each other in the corridor.
The man looked at us with open curiosity.
Daniel abruptly stopped walking, and I almost knocked him off his feet, bumping into him. He stared up at me.
“Just seven days?”
The smell of his citrus hair gel wafted into my nose. At our heights, his head came just below my chin. The perfect height to tuck him into my embrace.
If he would only let me.
He was dressed in a crisp white shirt, the sleeves precisely rolled up to his forearms, buttoned up to his throat, wearing thin-wire glasses just like I remembered. He had always looked out of place among our unit of soldiers. A doctor was rare enough in a clandestine special ops mission.
But it was more than that. It was his personality. His neatly combed thick dark hair, always parted to the side, his delicate bone structure due to his part-Asian heritage, his gold-rimmed, thin-framed glasses that somehow managed to survive bullets, dust, and death, and just the way he carried himself.
Like a prince despite being covered in dust and blood in a tiny war-torn country.
“Reed?”
I blinked. “Ah, yes. Your call was my first rescue gig here.”
“Did you know…?” His voice dropped to a whisper, though there was no one around except us in the corridor.
I nodded. “I did. Been trying to track you down for the last four years. I looked for you everywhere. Across all of the U.S.”
Daniel’s beautiful brown eyes went wide. Peace-time Daniel looked even more royal.
I bent down and spoke low enough for only his ears.
“I have missed you, my prince.”
His call sign was Prince because we teased him about his immaculate hygiene in the middle of a war. The joke was on us, though. It turned out that the man had nerves of steel underneath that smooth exterior. Something my Australian unit realized soon enough.
You come to know a man’s character pretty quickly when he is holding your lieutenant’s heart in his bare hands through an open chest cavity while simultaneously instructing you in a calm voice on how to stop carotid artery bleeding. Every man in my unit, all special-ops-toughened warriors, had ended up owing our lives to Prince and respecting the hell out of our “cute” American physician.
His breath hitched deliciously.
“Reed.”
I was no fucking poet, but my name on his tongue right then felt like a benediction.
I wanted to kiss him so badly it was a physical ache. But we had unresolved tension, and I needed to chill. I knew my husband. He was methodical and deliberate. He didn’t rush into anything.
I wanted us back.
The way we used to be.
I was doing everything in my power to get him there, and the way he had been responding to me had me wanting to fucking cry with joy.
However, Daniel was a man of legendary restraint. I had to follow his lead. One thing was clear to me.
He still cared.
Now that I had found him, I was locked on like a missile to a target. I was never letting him go again.
Back inside his clinic, he shoved me unceremoniously into the bathroom with stern instructions to take the sleeping pills afterward. The shower felt cool against my heated skin. I wrapped a hand around my cock. I had been semi-hard the entire time I had been with Daniel.
Closing my eyes, all I had to do was bring his image to mind. Daniel had long, slim fingers and a surgeon’s steady hands. During our deployment, he had applied the same methodical attention to my body as he did to everything else. But it wasn’t his touch alone—it was the way he lost all composure when we fucked.
