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It was too much, and at the same time not enough. She wished she could go back and change it all. Though whether for Kane or for herself, she couldn’t be certain. Possibly both.
‘You never found me,’ she finally managed.
‘No. Your dad caught me about to try to shimmy up that drainpipe at the back of your house. He demanded to know what the hell I thought I was doing, and I’m not sure if he wasn’t about to kick me into next week, but I ended up telling him everything.’
‘He never said.’
Not in fourteen years. And yet, if she was to understand it now, he’d tasked Hayden with contacting Kane in the run up to her wedding to another man.
‘He went straight to some high-ranking police chief he knew, and they made a deal that as long as I made a statement testifying against my brothers, they would never prosecute me. To this day I don’t know how long I was with them, answering their questions. Then your father put me in a car with some old army buddy of his who drove me to the army barracks where I signed up on the spot. He called it my one chance for a fresh start.’
‘I just can’t... It’s so...’ She stopped.
Her whole world was spinning sideways, and she had no way to stop it. For over a decade she’d believed that Kane had walked away from her. She’d even considered that her father had offered him money to leave, though a part of her had never quite been able to believe it. Not of either of them.
But she’d never contemplated that Kane hadn’t had much of a choice. Or that her own father had played such a part in getting rid of the boy she had loved.
‘It was the best thing he could have done for me, Matz.’ Kane’s voice tugged her back to the present, reading her mind. ‘I was able to reinvent myself in a way I never could have done anywhere else.’
‘You could have—’
‘No, I couldn’t have. I owe your father so much. I like who I am now. I like what the army made me. I owe them. And that’s why I can’t leave. Becoming some security firm guy—for the money—isn’t the way to repay anyone. It doesn’t make me proud.’
Mattie clenched her arms around Kane’s, wanting to respond but not knowing where to start. None of this was what she wanted to hear, yet the hardest part about it was that she understood exactly what was driving him.
She was even proud of him for it. And proud of her father for being there for Kane when no one else had been.
But in some ways that also made it that much worse.
‘So we’re back to square one?’ she managed at last, her voice flat and emotionless. ‘Fighting this chemistry yet unable to be together. That isn’t what I want either.’
It felt like losing him all over again, only this time it was worse, because this time it came down to their choices.
‘It can’t be both, Matz. I’ll leave in the morning. We did our job, we decided on new scenarios and it looks as though we’ve found the perfect location. Once we get back to the hospital in the morning, I’ll write my notes up and take them to my CO.’
* * *
Something moved through Mattie. Swift and certain. They had made their choices, as impossible as they were. And they were for the right reasons. She and Kane ought to be proud that they’d allowed logic to prevail over emotion.
She could cry about it or she could make the most of the rest of this one opportunity. The words were out before she could second-guess herself.
‘We still have the rest of tonight.’
‘We do,’ he agreed slowly.
‘After this you’ll be going back to your infantry company. We’ll never see each other again.’
‘We won’t,’ he growled, the roughness of it rolling right through her.
‘Then brace yourself, Kane.’ She lifted her hands to his jaw and held it fiercely. ‘It’s going to be a long, sleepless night.’
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘MATTIE, CAN YOU join the MERT team?’
Mattie’s head snapped up from her desk as her second-in-command burst through her office door with barely a knock. She was writing up her own notes and pretending that she wasn’t nursing an aching heart since Kane had left camp a couple of hours earlier.
But now she was up on her feet before she’d even replied.
