I exit the elevator car with several other people and walk with them right past the nurses’ station where the same nurse is still on duty. I keep my head down when I approach Beaux’s room, yet I notice a flurry of activity that makes my heart fall because I immediately fear that she has taken a turn for the worse. Not caring about anything but her, I rush to the doorway, only to be met with the sound of her voice.

“Beaux?” Her name falls from my lips, relief mixed with anger, and I must say it loud enough because I catch a very fleeting glimpse of her before John and two other men are in my face with hands on my arms pushing me out of the doorway. “Beaux!” I struggle against them.

“She doesn’t want to see you,” one of the guys says harshly in my ear as they start to pull me away.

“Not until I hear her say it!” I shout, my muscles burning and head pounding, but my resolve is stronger than ever. We’re causing such a scene that staff are starting to come out of other rooms, and a nurse at the station picks up the phone to dial for more security, but I just can’t let this go. “Not until she tells me herself!” I shout, hoping she’ll hear me and call out to me.

“Fine!” John says, which makes the men cease their forceful advance, but their grip on me remains firm. He walks over to me with a fuck-you smile on his lips and fists a hand in my shirt. I try to jerk back from his grip, but the men have too strong a hold on my arms. “You want to hear it yourself? Go right ahead before you’re escorted from the hospital for good.” I match him glare for glare. “Hey, Beaux, do you want to see your lover?” he says toward her open door. All I can see from my position is her feet beneath the sheet, but his mocking tone and his knowing chuckle hit me like a knife in the back.

“No. I don’t care if I ever see him again.”

If John’s words were a knife in my back, Beaux’s soft but steady voice is equivalent to her twisting the knife over and over in the open wound. And that sliver of hope I was hanging on to – that when she woke up, she’d want me, choose me, and not John – dies a quick and horrid death.

I’m escorted from the hospital grounds by the base police after the military clearance I need to do my job effectively is threatened if I don’t go peacefully. I follow their orders without resisting, my head and heart trying to wrap themselves around the fact that the worst part about Beaux’s lying to me isn’t the lies themselves.

No, it’s the fact that after everything the two of us shared, she didn’t think I was worthy enough to warrant her telling the truth.

Chapter 24




“Rafe.” It’s the only greeting I have for him because frankly I don’t want to speak to anybody right now.

“It’s a miracle. You actually called me back.”

“There’s been shit reception since I got back.” I grunt the lie as I look around the chaos in the hotel room.

“Convenient, don’t you think?” I greet his sarcasm with silence. “So you got my messages, I take it?”

“No.” I sigh as I run a hand through my hair, not wanting to get into it with him about how many times he’s called. And luckily he’s filled my voice mail with unlistened-to messages, so at least I know there will be no more.

“No? What’s going on with you, Tanner? Pauly says —”

“We’ve got a problem here.” I cut him off as I look around the destruction of Beaux’s room. Dresser drawers tossed through, cords left plugged into outlets but unattached to the cameras and laptops they were charging, her things upended all over the place in the careless robbery.

“You’re right, we have a lot of problems… especially if you don’t get back in the saddle.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about, Rafe.” I wave a hand at the chaos in the empty room around me; tears of frustration that I don’t even understand are forming, burning the back of my eyes. “Someone broke into her room.”

“What in the hell are you talking about? Beaux’s room?”

“Yeah, Beaux’s room,” I answer, irritated that he has to even ask. “Who else did you think I was talking about?”

“Wait…” He exhales slowly in obvious frustration. “Why are you in her room?”

“Because —”

“No. Don’t answer that!” he says, cutting me off. “For someone who told me that nothing was going on between the two of you, you can’t seem to let anything about her go.”

“Someone broke into her room and stole all of her shit,” I say, completely ignoring his comment, not having the wherewithal to go there right now. It’s been almost seven days since I left her in the hospital in Germany. Seven days where I sat in my damn hotel room in an attempt to avoid every memory of her and move the fuck on because I’m a guy and that’s what guys do. That’s what I do.

But I can’t.

Shit, when I returned after Stella, sure there were ghosts I had to face, but this time was different. This time when I walked through the lobby and up the stairwell, I wasn’t only assaulted with the recent memories of my time here with Beaux, but I was also overwhelmed with questioning whether every memory was in fact real or fueled by deception.

Her panties that were tucked between the sheets and the bedspread, the game of Scrabble sitting half-completed on my table waiting for her to finish it with me, the bottle of her shampoo in my shower. It was like she was everywhere, and that simple notion made it so much worse.

So I threw every reminder of her out. All of them went into the trash can with an amazing flare of melodramatics that did absolutely nothing to make me feel better. My initial theory was that I needed to wipe her away, act like she’d never existed.

But memories are a bitch sometimes. They haunt you in the middle of the night when nightmares jar you awake with her name on your lips because you didn’t get there fast enough. They sit in a trash can you refuse to empty because if you do, that means she wasn’t real and therefore your feelings weren’t either.

And just when I thought I was getting a handle on it all, on the deception and the heartache because yes, call me a sap, but there’s no other word for that burning pain in my chest that feels like it’s eating me apart, I got the call from the hotel staff about her room. The one place that I refused to venture because if I did go in there and snoop around, I just might find something that would mess me up further: a love note to her husband or a journal entry about how much she loves me.

Not worth the goddamn risk when I’m trying to get her the fuck out of my head. And of course the minute I walked into her room, where her perfume was still haunting the stale air and her bed was unmade from when I’d propped the pillows under her hips as we’d had sex, was like a cruel assault on my senses from every possible angle.

The funny thing was, I thought I didn’t want confirmation that she was madly in love with her husband, but now seeing all of her equipment gone – laptops, cameras, lenses – it’s almost as if I need to know. To the hotel staffer who supposedly stole the items, the equipment had a monetary value, something they could sell. To me it was the intangibility of her absence, when something – possible e-mails or photos from back home – could exist, something that could answer my questions.

“Tanner? Tanner?” Rafe’s words break through the disbelief that’s deafening me and draw me back to the present.

“Yeah?”

“We’ll deal with the stuff in her room in a minute, okay? For right now, though, I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen. Capisce?”

And here comes the lecture. Probably similar to the one Pauly gave me last night. I lie back on the bed and the damn mattress springs squeak in a bittersweet sound that makes me want to jump off the bed and at the same time shift my body so that I can hear it again. One more thing to solidify in my mind that what we had was real.

And since we didn’t tell anyone, it’s not like I can admit to Rafe his assumption is true. Everyone here thinks I’m moping around because I’m upset that I couldn’t protect her from the IED and that the déjà vu of not being able to get to Stella in time has fucked with my head even more than they thought.

Too bad my head is fine. It’s my heart that hurts like a son of a bitch.

“I can’t wait to hear your words of infinite wisdom,” I say, not really caring that I’m pushing the boundaries with my boss. “Lay it on me, Rafe.”

“We’re on a strict don’t ask, don’t tell policy right now. I’m not going to ask and you’re not going to confirm what I’m asking without asking because it’s none of my business and one hundred percent my business all at the same time. You guys built a bond as partners, she got hurt, so now the bond is stronger. So strong in fact that you caused a serious scene at Landstuhl, risking your security clearance. There’s only one reason in my mind why you’d react so strongly, call me up and ask me questions about Beaux’s marital status, and then get pissed when I don’t give you answers… but that’s all supposition from the outside looking in. That and the fact that I’ve never seen you act like this before, even after…” His words trail off, the implication of after Stella died left hanging on the line like a goddamn white elephant, and I bite back every smart-assed comment on my tongue because it’s just not worth it.

The only response I give him is a low “Mmm-hmm.”

“So you hoof it back to your assignment, and have been there for what, a week? And you’re still desk jockeying the shit out of recycled material instead of following up on the story. Can you tell me what’s wrong with this picture?”