Beyond Limits (28 page)

“You trust me?”

She hesitated. “Yes.”

“Then relax.” He glanced at her. “Close your eyes, clear your head. I’ll let you know when we get there.”

Luke stepped away from the throng of people surrounding the bar and pressed his phone to his ear.

“What’s that?”

“I said, it’s Hailey.”

Holy shit. He looked at his phone again. He hadn’t recognized the Boston area code.

“Hang on.” He squeezed through the crowd to the hallway outside the men’s head. It smelled like beer and puke, but at least it was quieter.

“Sorry to call so late.”

“No, it’s fine.” He checked his watch. He hadn’t expected her to call at all, and definitely not at 2200 on a Monday night.

“Are you in Boston?” he asked.

“I’m still in town. I leave tomorrow.” She paused. “Where are
you
? It sounds really loud.”

“O’Malley’s.” He pushed open the back door and stepped into the alley off the parking lot, where it reeked even worse.

“Guess that means you’re with friends, huh? I was going to see if you wanted to come over.”

He blinked out at the parking lot. “To your hotel room?”

“I was thinking the bar downstairs. I can’t sleep again, and I thought we could get a drink and talk or whatever.”

His mind whirled. He’d had a few too many beers for this conversation. She wanted to get a drink and
talk or whatever
—which in his experience was girl-speak for sex. He shook his head, trying to shake off the beer buzz and the crazy-ass idea that Hailey Gardner wanted to sleep with him.

“What, you mean now?” he asked.

Silence.

“Sorry,” he said. “My bad. I’m—”

“Sounds like you’re busy.”

“I’m not, I just—” Shit,
now
what was he doing? He couldn’t actually go over there. He definitely wanted to see her, but he was half loaded. If he got anywhere near her right now, his dick would take over, and he’d waste no time talking her upstairs.

“Luke?”

“I’m here.”

“I can tell I’m freaking you out, and I don’t mean to. It’s not what you’re thinking.” She was talking fast, like she was nervous. “It’s just that I can’t sleep, and it really sucks. And I thought maybe we could, you know, just hang out and talk.”

He tipped his head back and squeezed his eyes shut. “That’s probably not a good idea.”

Was he really turning her down? Hailey Gardner, who couldn’t sleep and wanted to
just hang out and talk?
And then it was back—the image of her cowering in the corner of that rathole back in A-bad, her face dirty and her hair tangled and her eyes . . . God damn it, of course she had trouble sleeping. But he couldn’t be around her.

“Listen, Hailey—”

“You don’t have to explain.”

“I wish I could come, but—”

“Forget it.”

“Hailey, wait. Hailey?”

She’d already hung up.

He stared down at his phone, feeling like crap. He’d made the right call, though. He knew it. He had no business going anywhere near her or her hotel room in his current state of semi-inebriation.

“Fuck.”

He turned and looked at the door behind him. The thought of going back inside suddenly had zero appeal. What he should do was go find one of his buddies who’d had less to drink than he had and catch a ride home. But he didn’t want to do that, either.

I can’t sleep, and it really sucks.

God damn it. Luke shoved his phone into his pocket and headed for the beach.

D
erek drove west, leaving the skyscrapers and the hospitals and the shopping malls behind. He drove through the suburbs until he reached the fringes of the city, and then he exited the freeway and drove some more. Finally, he turned off the highway onto a narrow asphalt road that not so long ago had been nothing but caliche.

Elizabeth stared out the window, not talking. But her body language said a lot. She was clutching the door handle in a white-knuckle grip and glancing at his phone in the cup holder every ten seconds.

Pine trees rose on either side of them. The road curved, and his headlights swept over the sign for the trailhead. The landscape looked different from what he remembered, and he nearly missed his turn.

He rolled to a stop and looked at Elizabeth across the console.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Sugarberry Dam Park.” He pushed his door open and went around back, where he unlocked the toolbox and rummaged around until he found what he was looking for.

Elizabeth slid out and glanced around. She climbed the steep incline to the ridge and stopped cold when she reached the top.

“Whoa.” She stood there, staring out over the reservoir. They were in a dry spell, and what was often a full-blown lake in springtime was now an empty field surrounded by trees. A full moon cast a silver glow over everything.

“Here.” He tossed his jacket onto the ground. “Don’t dirty up your clothes.”

“These clothes are history.” But she sat down on the edge of his jacket, looking out over the view.

He sank down beside her, and she glanced back at the truck.

“You left the radio on.”

“I know.” He unscrewed the top of his flask and offered it to her. She eyed it suspiciously before taking it.

“This is quite the setup.” She sniffed, then took a sip. “How come I feel like I’m not the first woman you’ve taken out here?”

The whiskey made her voice hoarse, and he smiled. “Woman? Yes. Girl? No.” He looked out over the meadow. “I brought Ashley Ferrell out here on her first car date.” She passed the flask back, and he took a swig.

“Do I want to know more?”

“Nah, the rest is top secret.”

She slipped her shoes off and tucked them beside her, then rested her arms on her knees. She leaned her head back and looked up at the sky.

“We don’t get stars like this in San Antonio.”

“Light pollution.” He glanced up. The stars looked nice, but it was nothing compared with the dead of night on the open ocean. Or in the Hindu Kush. On top of the world like that, the sky looked like a big dome of glitter directly over his head.

“I would have figured you for country,” she said.

He glanced over his shoulder, straining to hear the soft, soulful music drifting from his pickup.

“Yeah, well, I like a lot of stuff. Country, blues, jazz.”

“You’re full of surprises.”

He looked at her. “Maybe you need to get to know me better.”

She knew some of his preferences but not nearly enough. And he was learning hers—including the mind-blowing fact that she liked to take control during sex.

And maybe she could read his mind, because she looked away.

He took another sip from his flask and tried not to think about sex, because it wasn’t going to get him what he wanted, which was to get back into her bed not only tonight but the next time he had leave, too. And the time after that.

It would have to be her call, like he’d said, so he was playing it cool, trying to make her comfortable.

She gazed up at the stars again. “It’s nice here.”

“Yep.”

He handed her the flask, and she took another sip. Sometime in the last hour, she’d lost the anguished look that had been eating away at him since he’d first seen her standing in that hospital. But still she looked edgy.

A warm breeze stirred the trees as they sat there, not talking. It felt good to be home, surrounded by the familiar scent of dirt and pinesap. It seemed unreal that seventy-two hours from now, he’d probably be strapped into a C-17 over the ocean.

He should tell her. At least mention it. But she had enough to worry about right now, and he didn’t want to add to it.

“Alison Krauss, ‘Killing the Blues.’ ” She looked at him. “My dad liked to listen to her when she played with Union Station. They’re from the same town in Illinois.”

“Illinois, huh? How’d you guys end up in Virginia?”

“He went to law school there. UVA.”

“Your alma mater,” he said, hoping she’d keep going. She never talked about her family, and he knew it was a nut he needed to crack if he wanted to understand her. “So he practiced law there?”

“He was an assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Fairfax.” She cleared her throat. “I guess I never really told you how he died.”

“No, you didn’t.”

She paused and seemed to be collecting her thoughts. “It was a convenience-store holdup. He had this concealed-carry permit because of some of the people he’d helped prosecute. He always had his Beretta on him, and he tried to intervene in the holdup. The perp was roughing up this clerk, but there were two of them—one in the back, which my dad didn’t realize, so . . . it all went sideways.”

Derek reached over and squeezed her hand. “You and your dad were close?”

She nodded.

“And your mom?”

Wrong question. He could tell by the way her shoulders tensed. She slid her hand out from under his and rested her arms on her knees. “She remarried a few times. The latest guy’s okay, but I don’t know.” She shrugged. “There’s still a lot of resentment there.”

“You should patch that up,” he said, venturing an opinion she probably didn’t want to hear. “I used to have shit like that, too, with my dad. He rode us pretty hard growing up. For years, I thought I hated him.”

He looked out at the meadow bathed in moonlight, not so different from the conditions they’d had during the raid in A-bad.

He looked at Elizabeth, and she was listening. “But then a couple years ago, we lost our CO. He was killed in a helo accident.” It hadn’t really been an accident, but he didn’t want to go into all the details. “He was tough as hell, and he’d always reminded me of my dad. Then one day, he was just gone, no warning. And I realized you can’t take people for granted. Life’s too short.”

She held his gaze for a long moment, and then she looked away. Evidently, she didn’t like his advice.

The silence lengthened, and they stared out over the reservoir. A distant pair of headlights bumped over a road on the other side. It was so quiet, with just the wind and the music drifting over them, the low hum of the cicadas. He’d always loved this spot. When he came here, it was hard to believe the sprawling city of Houston was only a few miles away.

She glanced back at his truck again. “I have this album on my iPod.”

“Yeah?”

“I couldn’t sleep, like, the entire month of May. So I’d sit on my balcony at night and listen to this.”

She looked so pretty sitting there, and he reached out to stroke her hair away from her face. “Because of what happened?”

She shrugged. “I had trouble sleeping before that. Getting the shit beat out me didn’t really help, though.”

He gritted his teeth at the reminder and glanced at her scar.

She looked at him. “I thought about you a lot, you know.”

She held her breath, waiting for what he’d say. Her own words surprised her. They were the first truly honest words she’d said to him about the time when he’d been gone. She didn’t know why she was telling him this now, but it seemed to want to come out.

“I thought about you, too.” He covered her hand with his in the dirt.

“I thought about you getting shot down in a helicopter, or driving over some roadside bomb, or jumping in front of a bullet for one of your teammates.”

“We generally try to avoid bullets.” The corner of his mouth lifted in a smile. “IEDs, too. First thing they teach you in SEAL school.”

“I’m serious,” she said.

“I am, too.”

She looked out at the meadow, and the tension was back again, bunching up her muscles, making her neck tight. He always wanted to defuse any tension with a joke, but she was trying to be honest with him. Honest about why things would never work. Why she felt adamant about not sleeping together again when she knew he wanted to, and she wanted to, too.

“I ever tell you about my first tour?”

She turned to look at him. He’d never told her about any of his tours. When he talked about his work, it was usually about the training.

“This was up in the mountains,” he said, and she took that to mean Afghanistan. “End of the fighting season, so it was getting cold at night. Your breath would turn to frost in the air, and you’d have to stomp your feet to keep from freezing. We’d spent the whole summer assaulting cave complexes—which is hot, filthy work—and we were glad to finally get some cold, even though we knew we were going to be hating it in only a few weeks.

“Anyway, we get this intel from one of the terps at base camp in the valley. And this isn’t just any valley, it was a snake pit—that’s what we called it. The whole place was crawling with TAQ—Taliban/Al Qaeda fighters.”

“What’s a terp?”

“Sorry—interpreter. This one was working with the Army guys at the base. He brings us this intel that an HVT—that’s a high-value target—is hiding out in a cave complex in the neighboring valley. This target was tops on our list. We knew he’d been recruiting kids in the villages for suicide missions in Kabul—marketplaces, security checkpoints, that kind of thing.”