Page 27 of Hotter than Wildfire

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.