LITMIR.BIZ

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move back home from a lover’s house. The emotional drama was detrimental to what the military called good order and discipline, so commanders did have to deal with their soldiers’ relationship problems. She’d handled each case, using her legal authority and her common sense. Never had Helen expected to be the one in trouble, rather than the one adjudicating the situation.

      All this went through her mind in a flash: Good God, what is Russell doing now?

      But then the colonel spoke toward someone behind her and said, “Tom, you left a key fact out of your story.”

       Tom?

      “Helen.”

      That voice. Oh, that voice—it woke up parts of her tired brain, her tired body—but the word husband hadn’t made her think of Tom for even a second. Russell was her husband, had been her husband, and he was awful. More awful than she would have believed if she hadn’t lived it. But Tom? Tom was barely her husband, if he was her husband at all. She hadn’t had any time to verify that his story was true and a marriage license existed.

      Thank God, again, for military training. Helen kept her chin up as she turned around. There he was, not her ex-husband, but Tom Cross, standing there in the same uniform she wore.

      Damn, he looked good. I slept with that.

      He was in the army—had she known that? He wore the same captain’s bars as she did. She tried to remember.

      Nothing. There was no specific memory, but somehow, she had known he was in the service. Maybe it was because his haircut looked military even in the civilian world of Las Vegas. It wasn’t something she’d consciously thought about at the hotel, because every man in her world had a military haircut, but it must have registered subconsciously.

      Or maybe it was the way he’d carried himself with a confident military bearing, even when he’d been wearing no more than a towel. As she looked at him in his uniform, the vision of him gorgeously, gloriously nude was the one thing that was easy to remember. She knew exactly what his chest looked like under that camouflage. She knew exactly how his skin tasted.

      She needed to stop remembering that. Captains didn’t get flushed in their colonels’ offices.

      It was incredible to be standing in the same office as Tom. He’d known she had to report in by noon at Fort Hood, and he’d gone to the trouble of finding out where and in which unit she’d be. He’d come to find her.

      Something—hope? No. Vanity, perhaps. Something made her heart beat hard, so hard it hurt. Tom Cross must have strong feelings for her. He wasn’t letting her slip away so easily.

       Oh, Tom. I’m so sorry, but I don’t know you.

      But wait—

      Tom. The commander, Colonel Reed, had called him Tom. He’d said Tom had already told him their story. With a jolt, Helen realized Tom had tracked her down, but only so he could beat her here and talk to her brigade commander before she could. About what?

      Relationship drama, detrimental to good order and discipline. There was nothing else to talk about. This was no grand romantic gesture; this was professional sabotage.

      “I take it this is a surprise for all three of us.” Colonel Reed sat behind his desk and made a magnanimous, sweeping gesture with his hand. “Go on. You two catch up.”

      Helen walked over to the wingback chairs and, for the sake of privacy, stood close to Tom.

      He faced her as a soldier faced inspection. His face had no expression at all. Not aggression, not curiosity. No welcome. Certainly, no warmth.

      She kept her voice pitched low, although the commander could probably still hear everything. “Are you stationed at Fort Hood?”

      “Yes.” He bit the word out. So much for being a lover who hadn’t wanted to let her go. Never expect anything else, ever.

      “Why did you track me down like this? I told you I’d take care of the legalities. Did you think I wouldn’t keep my word?”

      He narrowed his gaze at that. “Did you change your mind?”

      “Of course not,” she hissed. “I promised you I’d get the divorce under way, and I will, but I just got on post half an hour ago. I haven’t had a chance to even type ‘how to get a Las Vegas divorce’ into a search bar yet. Cut me some slack. I’ve been driving for twenty hours. You knew I would be.”

      He looked at her for the longest time, an eternal moment. “I’m glad you made it here in one piece. You look exhausted.”

      “Thank you so much.” I feel worse. “So then, why are you standing in my brigade commander’s office?”

      “Because,” he said, as he turned just an inch, so she could see the unit patch on his shoulder, “he’s my brigade commander, too.”

      She rocked back on her heels as all her expectations exploded in front of her. She’d planned to make her first impression here without anyone knowing that she had a stupid, quickie, Vegas marriage to unravel. Nobody would need to know she’d had such a lapse in judgment. She wouldn’t lose their respect before she’d had a chance to earn it.

      At Lewis-McChord, when she’d had to change the name tags on her uniforms from Gannon back to Pallas, the reactions had all been negative. Either she’d been pitied as a doormat who’d let her man walk all over her, or she’d been labeled a bitch who’d driven her man away. She’d been told that she should have tried harder if she took her marriage seriously. She’d been told that she shouldn’t have ever tried to be a wife in the first place, not if she was serious about her career.

      She’d been so relieved to leave Seattle.

      Fort Hood would be a fresh start. She would arrive at the 89th MP Brigade with her maiden name sewn permanently on her uniforms, and her failed marriage to Russell Gannon would be something that no one here would have heard about. For the last twenty hours, she’d clung to the fact that no one at Fort Hood would hear about her momentary insanity in Vegas, either. She and Tom would quietly get a divorce, a mere filing of paperwork to countermand the chapel’s paperwork, and what happened in Vegas would stay in Vegas.

      Tom had ruined everything.

      She put a hand on the back of the chair to steady herself and concentrated on the grain of the leather upholstery. “Who else have you told?”

      “No one.”

      “Can we keep it that way?”

      He didn’t answer her.

      She looked up into his face, that handsome face with those bluer-than-blue eyes, and some part of her instinctively felt safe with him. It was that Pavlovian response again: he was trustworthy.

      But he was not. He’d talked to her commander without talking to her first. He’d betrayed her.

      Tears stung her eyes. She was too damned tired, just physically worn out, to deal with this now. Behind her, Colonel Reed had started typing on his laptop, but she was acutely aware that he must be watching this surprise meeting. She looked into Tom’s eyes and silently mouthed one word: Please?

      He dropped his gaze, and she realized he was looking at her left hand as she clutched the back of the chair. Her knuckles were white with the effort it was taking to keep herself together.

      “If you want this to be a secret, why are you wearing your ring?”

      She snatched her hand off the chair. She’d given up trying to twist that ring off about eight hundred miles ago. She’d forgotten she was wearing it at the moment, frankly—it didn’t feel strange or unusual. She could only assume that was because she’d had another band on that same finger for two years.

      “I didn’t want to lose it. You can have it.” She twisted it once more, but it was still stuck. She held her hand out. “It won’t come off. You try.”

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