Kabul, Afghanistan August 2021
How dare he.
He didn’t see the allure of marrying someone who was at least present?
“And there has become the baseline for your standards?” The bewilderment on Nate’s face was almost laughable.
“You’re kidding me, right?” It was a damn good thing I didn’t have anything in my hands or I might have thrown it at him. “I wonder who set that baseline?” I cocked my head to the side. “If you think my standard of showing up is low, then you only have to look in the mirror to see why that is. Out of everyone in my life, you were the one person I trusted to show up when needed, and you vanished.”
He put up his hands and backed away slowly. “I think I should leave before we get into shit we have no business dragging up.”
That extraordinary talent he had for compartmentalization, for remaining calm and cool when I was ready to throw down, was the one thing I both envied and loathed about him.
“‘Dragging up’?” I shook my head. “It’s hard to drag something up that never got buried.” Emotions I couldn’t handle welled up with the force of a tidal wave, devouring every shred of self-control I’d clung to in one all- consuming wave of love and grief and everything that had been left to die between us. “And you lost the right to know anything about my love life years ago.”
“You don’t think I know that?” He turned away from me and walked to the water he’d left on the counter, then slammed back the whole thing like it was a bottle of vodka. He crushed it in his fist before turning back to me, his customary composure slipping. “You think it didn’t kill me not to ask who you’d actually deemed worthy of marrying you the second I saw that hunk of ice on your hand?”
“Well, it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?” I lifted my left hand, showing its obvious bare state. “He’s not my fiancé anymore. Does that make you happy?”
“The better question is if it makes you happy.” He wasn’t even shocked that the ring was gone. Of course he’d noticed at some point. Nate noticed everything. But he hadn’t asked why. Because he didn’t want to know? Or because he didn’t think he had a right to?
I opened my mouth and shut it again. “It’s complicated.”
“Would you like to elaborate?” He leaned against the end of the counter, taking up more space than he should have. Everything about Nate still felt larger than life, and though I thought I’d grown accustomed to seeing him in their version of an unmarked combat uniform, I really hadn’t.
He was inconveniently breathtaking and infuriating at the same time. “Not really.” I dropped my hand.
“Okay.” He stared at me in that quiet, patient way he had, which only got my ire up.
“Stop doing that.”
“Stop doing what?” He scratched the scruff of his beard. “Stop doing everything I can to keep you alive? Stop pulling strings to get your sister’s interpreter’s papers pushed? Stop putting my body between you and whatever’s trying to kill you at the moment? Or did you want me to stop putting your needs above common sense? You’re going to have to be more specific.”
“That,” I sputtered, pointing at his face. “Stop looking at me like that.” “I’m capable of a lot of things, but unfortunately for my own sanity, I seem to be incapable of not looking at you.” He shrugged. “Whether or not you want to tell me why you’re no longer marrying Dickface has nothing to
do with my inability to ignore you.”
“He cheated on me, okay?” Ugh. That was not supposed to come out. Nate’s body tensed, but he didn’t speak.
“Did you hear me?” I shook my head and fought to get a grip. I was supposed to be helping with those files on the coffee table, not spending precious time fighting with Nate.
“Oh, I heard you.” Nate’s voice dropped. “I’m just trying to make that statement compute.”
“What is there to compute?” I tugged my hair back behind my ears. Pulling it up would have been a much more sensible option today. “He thought it was perfectly acceptable to have an open relationship. I wasn’t enough for him.”
“Then he’s a fucking fool.” He said it with so much conviction that I almost believed him.
My heart stuttered. “Don’t say things like that. You don’t know . . .” Heat rushed to my face.
“I know.” The way his gaze heated made my breath catch. “And if you weren’t enough for him, then he’s going to spend his life totally and completely miserable, because there’s no one in this world who measures up to you. If he cheated, then my guess would be that it wasn’t because you weren’t enough—it was because he wasn’t.”
I covered my fluttering stomach with a hand. Why hadn’t I ever felt this way with Jeremy? Why was all my desire, my driving, insatiable need, reserved for Nate? Not that sex with Jeremy hadn’t been good. It had. But he didn’t make the rest of the world disappear with a single touch, or brand my soul with a kiss.
I only felt that way with Nate. Hadn’t that always been the problem?
An irrational laugh bubbled up through my lips. “And yet he was just my type, wasn’t he?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Unavailable in every way that mattered.” I shrugged, stroking my thumb over my naked finger and reveling in the lightness there. “I didn’t even realize just how heavy that obnoxious ring was until I gave it back. How much everything about it weighed me down.”
He took a deep breath and pushed off the counter, walking past me toward the door. “We should both get back to work.”
“You know it wasn’t the infidelity that made me break it off with him.”
He jerked to a stop.
“I mean, if we’re going to get it all out in the open, then let’s get it out,” I said to his back.
“You don’t want to go there with me.” “I do.”
Slowly, he turned to face me, and my pulse leapt. It wasn’t Sergeant Green staring back at me. No, the war raging in his eyes belonged to my Nate. The Nate I’d had at Georgetown, in Illinois, in Tybee.
“It wasn’t the infidelity,” I repeated, my voice softening. “I knew about it for six weeks before I took Newcastle’s place, and I didn’t do a damn thing. I smiled for the cameras at his campaign rallies and I kicked him out of my bed, but I didn’t break it off. Ask me why I broke it off, Nate.”
He shook his head. “Ask me.”
“Why?” The word came out strangled.
“Because I didn’t love him in the way I know I’m capable of.” I swallowed as my heart thundered in my ears. “I knew it the second I saw you again.”
His jaw flexed and his shoulders rose as he struggled to maintain his temper, but I didn’t retreat. Nate would never hurt me, and we’d put this off for nine days too long.
“Say it.” I moved toward him, and he backed away, keeping the distance between us as he walked into the kitchenette. “Whatever you’re thinking, just say it.” Hadn’t he demanded the same that first night at the embassy?
“If you knew that you didn’t love him enough, then why did you say yes in the first place?” His tone rose, bordering on a shout as his legendary self-control finally slipped. “You know what? No. Forget I asked. I don’t want to know why. God!” His hands slammed down on the counter, and he hung his head. “Three fucking years, and we’re right back here.”
“I never left here!” My chest squeezed down like a vise as I tapped above my heart. “I’m stuck, Nate. I’m eternally twenty-five years old, frozen in place, in time, standing in that hallway, waiting for you to come back.”
“That’s bullshit and we both know it.” He lifted his head, and the pain I saw etched into every line of his face somehow compounded with the agony I felt. “You never wanted us. Not really. Not when push came to
shove. You may have been the one arguing for us to take our shot back in Fiji, but when I pulled the trigger, you didn’t. Fucking. Want. Me.” Hurt dripped from every word.
“That’s not what happened in New York. How can you even say that?” My mouth hung open in shock.
“How can I say that?” He yanked the knife out of the sheath at his thigh with one hand and pulled his necklace from under his shirt with the other, revealing the taped silver tag. He glanced down as he made a clean slice through the tape, and then sheathed the knife before prying something from beneath the tape. “This is how I can say that.” A click sounded as he set something on the counter between us.
He shoved the remains of the tag beneath his shirt and withdrew his hand from the counter.
Revealing a diamond ring.
The diamond ring.
Oh God. I couldn’t breathe. There wasn’t enough air in the world to fill my lungs, to oxygenate the blood that my heart refused to pump.
“I’m the one who carried you with me every goddamned day.”
