LITMIR.BIZ

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she didn’t intend to shed any, she decided, fighting the burn at the back of her eyes. She had always despised crying women.

      She hadn’t broken down when the Agency had “disciplined” her. Or in those first few terrifying hours after the crash. She wasn’t going to do it now. Not in front of a man who had kept his sense of humor and his will to live intact, despite the battle of survival he had been fighting—and was now losing.

      She recognized that the causes of her emotional vulnerability ran even deeper than her anger over Mike Mitchell’s treatment. There was also the gnawing uncertainty about what was going to happen to them, as well as the frustration of having no control over whatever did.

      Despite Stern’s insistence that they be afforded the same protections given prisoners of war—an insistence that had earned him the butt of a rifle in his stomach the last time he’d made it—the conditions under which they were kept had been both primitive and deliberately intimidating. Her immediate fear that she might be subject to sexual assault had thankfully not proven true.

      Of course, neither had her hope that the men who held them would ransom them to some of the friendly forces in the area come to fruition. And again, frustratingly, she knew that those forces were very close.

      For one thing, they had been moved three times in as many weeks. In the distance behind them they had heard both small-arms fire and the sounds of heavy bombardment. Not surprisingly, considering what she knew about the reliability of U.S. humint in the region, their captors seemed to have better information than whoever was searching for them.

      Please God, let them still be searching for us…

      Mitchell’s hand, almost skeletal now, closed over hers. She turned back, looking down at him.

      He was lying on a rough pallet of rugs and blankets, which were all they’d been provided in the way of bedding. Despite the cold mountain nights, she and the colonel had given most of their share of those to keep Mitchell as warm and comfortable as possible, even as the relentless infection spread from the bullet hole in his thigh throughout his body.

      She should have known what kind of treatment they were in for when one of the horsemen who had surrounded the downed chopper shot the pilot as he’d climbed out of the cockpit, his hands in the air. Stern’s aide had reacted by going for the weapon he’d already thrown down. He had died in the attempt.

      “It’s going to be okay,” Mike said.

      She smiled at him in response, refusing to comment on that ridiculous promise.

      “You got somebody, Grace?”

      “What?”

      “Somebody who’s waiting for you back home.”

      Mitchell had already shown her pictures of his wife and two children, a little girl almost three and a six-month-old baby boy. She couldn’t begin to imagine what these weeks must have been like for them. And for Mike, of course, thinking about what their life would be without him.

      “Not really,” she said.

      “You should have.”

      “I guess I’ve been too busy with other things,” she said, a trace of defensiveness creeping into her voice.

      “Lying here like this… Thinking about it all…” He attempted a laugh, which turned into a cough. “I guess this sounds stupid, but lying here, I’ve been thinking about life. You know?”

      Life and death. How well she knew.

      “And what earth-shattering conclusions have you come to?”

      She dipped the piece of cloth she’d torn from one of the blankets into the bucket of water at the head of his pallet. She used the rag to bathe his face, although by this late in the day, the temperature of the water she’d been allowed to bring inside the cave was almost as hot as the surrounding air. Still, it was cooler than the brow of the man who was literally burning up before her eyes.

      “That it’s all that matters.”

      “I’m sorry?”

      Her attention had been momentarily distracted by the dry heat of his skin. It seemed hotter this afternoon than she had ever felt it before.

      And she realized belatedly that it had been more than twelve hours since Mike had asked Stern to help him urinate. She wasn’t sure what that meant medically, but obviously it wasn’t anything good.

      “Having somebody to love you. Somebody you love in return. It’s the only thing that matters.”

      With her heart breaking for the young wife and children who had loved this good, strong man, she smiled at him, once more fighting the sting of tears.

      “I need to work on that,” she said, squeezing the water out of the cloth and preparing to lay it over his forehead.

      His hand lifted, grasping her wrist before she could. “I mean it.”

      “I know. I know you do. It’s just that… Not all of us are as lucky as you and Karen. Some of us…” She hesitated, trying to find words to describe the long-ago decision that had left her so alone. “Either we don’t find the right person to share our lives with or they don’t feel the same way about us that we feel about them.”

      “Is that what happened to you?”

      Her immediate instinct was to lie. To cover up the heartbreak she’d never forgotten. The one she’d tried to bury in hard work and furthering her career.

      Mike Mitchell deserved better than that from her. Besides, what in the world could it matter what she told him? They were never going to get out of here.

      At least…he wasn’t.

      “Yeah,” she said, turning her wrist gently to break his fragile hold. “That’s what happened to me.”

      She laid the cloth on his forehead and then leaned back to meet his eyes. Despite the situation, his were filled with compassion.

      “How long ago?”

      “Too long. Way too long.”

      “And there hasn’t been anyone else?”

      “He was a pretty tough act to follow,” she said, smiling at him with lips that felt numb.

      What the hell was she doing sitting in a cave in Afghanistan discussing Landon James with a dying man? Was this what her life had come down to?

      “You ever try to contact him? Reconnect? I mean… People change. Maybe…”

      Mike’s shoulders moved in an approximation of a shrug, which was followed by a pained twisting of his face. This time a small expression of discomfort emerged from between the cracked lips.

      “I don’t think he would have, but no, I never contacted him.”

      “Maybe when you get out of here, I mean…maybe you ought to try to get in touch with him.”

      “Yeah. I think I’ll do that. When pigs fly,” she added, laughing a little at her stupid joke.

      “What could it hurt?”

      My pride. My self-image. My hard-earned sense of the completeness of my life as it is now.

      Or my life as it was, she amended. Before we ended up here.

      Yeah, things were damn good before you ended up here. That’s why you came home every night with a stack of research material. Highly entertaining. Better than a lover any day of the week.

      Better than a lover who had wanted to be nothing more.

      And you always had to have it all. The brass ring. The whole nine yards. All those other clichés. You couldn’t be satisfied with what Landon had to offer. All he had to offer.

      “…just wish I’d said everything I felt.”

      She came out of her reverie to catch

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