Chapter 6

Trina woke in the dark, heart pounding, jolting her upright before she was fully awake.

There was a sound from upstairs. One of the girls, crying.

She turned on her bedside lamp and went to the door, pushing it open farther. She always slept with it slightly ajar so she’d hear the girls call out if they needed her. In a whole year, they never had, but she liked to know she’d hear them just in case.

She crept past the foldout couch where Linda slept—snoring like the Amazon she was—and up the steps. It seemed crazy to imagine that Clara, who hadn’t wept once when her father had left for Afghanistan last summer, might be going to pieces now over the thought of a surrogate mother’s departure. But Clara had been even more upset than Phoebe when she’d learned that Trina was leaving, and not at all ready to embrace a few extra days as a consolation prize.

And someone had called out in the night.

It came again, another cry, and she hurried upstairs and into the hallway. She pushed the girls’ door open and peeked in. The nightlight in the hallway cast enough of a glow into the room that she could see that both slept soundly, not moving.

Maybe she’d imagined it. Or dreamt it. She’d woken from a deep sleep before, certain she’d heard a sound, only to be unable to trace its source.

She closed their door quietly behind her and started back toward the stairs.

She heard it again.

A groan. A sound like a broken half no.

Hunter.

He was alone in there. Asleep, dreaming.

She knew soldiers back from deployment often had terrible nightmares, even the ones who hadn’t suffered physical trauma.

She also knew she should continue toward the stairs. She had no right. No right to intrude into his bedroom, into his sleep, into his dreams.

But his voice came again, strained, like something not quite human, utterly ground down, and the sound of him suffering mattered to her more than the fact that he couldn’t remember her or that he’d pushed her away. It was more primitive and more important than her pride.

She turned his doorknob slowly and went in.

He’d gone to sleep naked, or mostly naked—she thought he might be wearing underwear, but she couldn’t tell because he’d twisted the covers around himself, and he was fighting against them. In the nightlight’s dim glow, a sheen of sweat covered his skin, and his face was contorted with terror.

I should leave.

But she didn’t, and when he cried out again, she didn’t think, she just climbed onto the bed with him and put her arms around him.

“Shh. Shh, Hunter. It’s okay.”

He made a muffled, startled sound, and in the almost dark he turned to her and lifted his face to hers. Took her mouth without a word.

In that mysterious middle-of-the-night time, outside of rational thought, she didn’t protest or try to stop him or ask him what he thought he was doing. She just pressed herself closer to him and wrapped around him tighter and opened to him. And it was so familiar, the pressure, the heat, the taste of his mouth. The sounds he made—relief, hunger, demand. More grunt than groan, but only barely, and his arms were around her, too, his hands in her hair, on her face. The kiss so dark and sweet, so full of emotion, that tears welled up in her eyes, until she could taste salt.

Then he broke it off.

“Shit. Trina. I was—” He sat up abruptly. Reached for the lamp switch.

She scrambled out of his bed and stood, blinking in the light.

“You were in my bed.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

His eyes were startled, the pupils huge, though from desire, shock, or the sudden light, she had no way of knowing.

He was shaking his head. “What—?”

“You were asleep. Having a nightmare. And I—I wanted to help, and I didn’t think. God, you must think I’m—”

“No. No.”

Her face was hot with frustrated desire and fresh humiliation. She covered it with her cool hands.

He reached for her hands and pulled them back, one by one, from her face. Took them in his and shook them as if to restore her to her senses. “I know I have nightmares. They told me in the hospital. The nurses would come sit with me sometimes.”

“I—”

“Trina—”

“No, I’ll go.”

“Wait.”

If he hadn’t been holding her hands, she would have been back in her room by now. Anything to get away from him, from the pity in his eyes. Anything to get away from what she’d done—taken advantage of a man who was asleep, suffering, a man who’d made his feelings about her plain enough.

“Trina, this is a fucked-up situation. There’s no road map. We’re going to make mistakes.”

“I—I can’t believe I did that.”

“Trina, stop beating yourself up. I did it, too.”

“You were asleep.”

His gaze tugged away from hers, sought refuge in a corner. “Not the whole time.”

The words hung there in the halo of the bedside lamp.

“Why—why are you telling me that?”

For a long moment, his eyes held hers, and something blazed hopeful and bright in her chest. Then his gaze dropped.

“I don’t want you to blame yourself. I don’t want you to feel like you accosted me and I’m some victim. We both—reacted. We both made mistakes. We’re both feeling our way. We can agree to forget it happened, okay?”

What a strange choice of words. Forget.

What she’d done had been wrong. She shouldn’t have come into his bedroom. She shouldn’t have climbed into his bed. She shouldn’t have touched him when he was powerless to give her permission.

But she wouldn’t forget that he’d responded.

She wouldn’t forget the way he’d kissed her, or the sounds he’d made, or the way his hands had felt on her hair and her face.

“We can pretend it didn’t happen.”

If he saw the vast difference between forgetting and pretending, he didn’t say anything.

And it wasn’t until she was lying in her own bed again, touching her lips, puffy and tender from his kisses, the stroke of his tongue still tingling along hers, that she said aloud what she’d been thinking:

I can’t forget, Hunter. I can’t ever forget.

When she was gone, he eased himself slowly back down on the bed.

What had just happened?

She’d heard him cry out. She’d come in, gotten into his bed, and put her arms around him. And then—

He’d half-woken from sleep and in that almost-dream zone had known her completely. Had found her utterly familiar and sought her without hesitation, his mouth desperate for hers.

He’d known how they kissed, that she liked this much pressure, this much tongue. He’d known what her hair felt like between his fingers and what her tears tasted like when they slid along his lips.

And then he’d struggled fully to wakefulness and her face was a near stranger’s face, the silk of her hair unfamiliar. Something in him recoiled and he was beset, suddenly, by that awkwardness that had occasionally overtaken him mid-encounter in his sexually busier days, particularly with women he didn’t know well. When he’d let things go too far and then come with a snap to his senses—fading drunkenness or a ringing phone breaking the spell.

It had been like waking from a dream of love to the reality of solitude.

He let himself drift back toward sleep, and in those vague, cloudy moments just before he lost himself, there it was again, like a half-remembered dream.

He could taste her, feel her against him. A vivid, desperate craving rose in him.

What kind of voodoo was that?

He couldn’t remember her consciously, but some part of him knew her. The dream part. His body.

And, God. Had it always been like that between them? Because if it had, he understood why he’d let it happen. That wasn’t the kind of attraction any man resisted, not for long. It was only that jarring sense of waking from a dream—and his confusion—that had put the brakes on.

If he hadn’t sat up and turned on the light—

He’d been seconds away from sliding his hand down and finding her bare thigh. Pushing up that scrap of insubstantial silver nightgown to discover what she wore underneath. From what the faint light had hinted at, he seriously doubted he’d find anything.

He would have brushed the slippery fabric away from her smooth skin, slid his palm up the inside of her thigh until he found the crease where her leg met her body. Until his thumb found the softness of curls—

Memory, or fantasy, that she kept a landing strip of neatly groomed hair?

Memory, or fantasy, that she got wet enough that slickness sometimes covered not just her outer lips, but her thighs, too?

Memory, or fantasy, that when he parted her and slid his thumb along her seam, her clit would be already swollen and throbbing?

His hand was on his cock.

In his vivid inner world, she made a soft sound of pleasure and assent when he kissed her and touched her at the same time. She licked his mouth as he circled her clit. She sucked his lip when he slid two fingers inside her without stopping that insistent circular motion.

His cock was at full attention, rock hard and demanding, a drop forming at the tip that he spread over the head and down, wishing it were her hand, wishing it were her mouth, her tongue, her wetness. His fist tighter now, the grip harsher, speeding up, his breath fast and ragged, too.

Maybe memory, the sound of her breathing in his ear. Maybe fantasy, the way she begged him to fill her, yanked him against her, deeper, harder, faster. Maybe memory, the way she felt clenching around him, or maybe fantasy—it hardly mattered, because either way, she took him with her over the edge, and in the strange place between waking and sleeping, between dream and reality, he came, hard, shaking and trembling with the force of it.