Striking Distance

He pointed. “I took a round to the liver. It shattered some ribs. I lost a lot of blood. Here’s where they got me in the lung. Took one to the shoulder, too—not much more than a graze. And then there was my leg. I came close to losing it.”

Laura glanced down, watched as he lifted the edge of the towel, and had to fight to hide her own shock. A deep valley was carved into his upper thigh, dark red scars showing where surgeons had tried to put him together again. It was clear a bullet had ripped through him at an angle, rupturing the muscle and blowing much of it away.

She wasn’t a doctor, but she knew he’d come terribly close to dying.

“You must have been in so much pain.” She ran her fingertips over the scars on his chest, saw the suture marks, the incision lines still raised and puckered in places. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be.” His voice was soft, deep. “I’m fine now.”

At those words, she looked up and found her face inches from his.

From there, it was so easy.

The light brush of lips over warm lips. The slow slide of his fingers into her hair. The hard press of his chest as he sat up straighter, turned her in his arms, and kissed her.

It was a sweet kiss, slow and tender, the heat of it sliding through Laura like honey, warming some empty, dark part of her. Her heart gave a hard kick, a rush of tangled emotions washing through her, filling her chest, making it hard to breathe—elation, nervousness, pleasure, alarm, raw need.

Taken aback by the force of her own reaction, she gave in to the moment, focusing only on him, letting herself feel. The press of lips against lips. The teasing flick of his tongue. The thrumming of her own pulse. Sweat-slick skin against skin. The soft mingling of breath, steam, pheromone.

Ignoring the warning in the back of her mind, she parted her lips, let him inside her mouth, his taste exploding across her tongue, his scent filling her mind. She caught his face between her palms, pressed her lips harder against his, needing more of him, the stubble of his beard rough, his heartbeat thudding against hers.

It seemed a lifetime since she’d been kissed. She’d forgotten what it felt like to be touched like this. She’d forgotten how gentle a strong man could be. She’d forgotten what it was to want a man. And it felt to her that she was being kissed for the first time.

But this was no sloppy kiss between teenagers. Laura knew this man, and he knew her. Everything about him was familiar to her, his scent, the feel of his skin, the way he touched her rousing memories.

She slid her hands down his neck to the hard curves of his shoulders, his lips moving to press kisses against the pulse at her throat, his muscles shifting as he slid a hand down her spine, the damp towel falling away from her skin.

Oh, God!

Her stretch marks.

* * *

JAVIER WASN’T SURE whether he was in heaven or hell.

He’d told Laura he wouldn’t make sexual demands of her—and he wouldn’t. But being close to her like this, holding her, kissing her, was making it a lot harder for him to keep that promise than he’d imagined. He’d made love to this woman, kissed and tasted every inch of her, been inside her. He couldn’t help but want her. He’d just begun to believe this was going somewhere when Laura went stiff in his arms.

“I’m . . . I’m so sorry, Javi. I just . . . I can’t.” She drew her towel around herself and tucked the end back into place, pulling away from him so fast she almost fell.

He reached out, caught her, his gaze locking with hers.

In her eyes, he saw genuine panic.

?Puneta!

“No, bella, I’m the one who’s sorry.” Heart still pounding, he fought to rein in his need for her. “I shouldn’t have—”

She held out a hand, pressed a finger to his lips. “Please don’t apologize. You didn’t do anything. It’s just that . . . It’s . . . hard to explain.”

“You don’t owe me any explanations.”

But she seemed to think she did.

She sat down by his feet, one arm across her breasts as if to make certain her towel stayed in place. “I . . . I’m just not ready for this. I’m not sure I ever will be.”

Did she think he was upset with her?

“Hey, it’s okay. You hear me? It’s okay.”

Any rage he felt was set aside for Al-Nassar and his thugs. Seeing her like this—unable to enjoy being touched, trembling out of fear when she should be trembling for a much different reason—made him wonder how easy it would be to break into the supermax facility and kill Al-Nassar. The prison was located here in Colorado outside Florence. And certainly Al-Nassar deserved it. The hijo e la gran puta had stolen something precious from her.

He willed himself to lock that anger down, to listen to what she was saying.

“You were the last man I was with before . . .”

God, he wasn’t sure he could handle hearing details of what had been done to her.

If she can live through it, you can listen to it, cabron.

But she didn’t go there.

“When you left that morning, a part of me wished we’d exchanged numbers or e-mail addresses. I thought I’d use the postcard as an excuse to track you down. I thought I’d have time to . . .” She squeezed her eyes shut, turned her face away from him.

He’d felt the same way. He’d thought there’d be time, too.

But then she’d been gone.

“Dubai was special to me, Javi. You’re special to me.” She opened her eyes. “Being close to you like this after all these years . . . The way you make me feel . . . I want to get closer to you, and that scares me.”

So he hadn’t been misreading her signals when he’d thought she was enjoying kissing him. That was good to know. “Hey, you’re safe with me. I would never push you to do anything you didn’t want to do.”

“I know.” Her expression grew troubled, her hands moving to shield her lower belly. “But it won’t work. I’m . . . I’m different now.”

When she’d first told him she was different, he’d taken her to mean that she had changed emotionally. But something in the way she’d just said it, the way her hands seemed to shelter her pelvis, made him wonder whether she’d suffered physical wounds—some kind of mutilation or internal damage that made sex impossible or painful. He knew that some of the tribes in the area where she’d been held practiced genital mutilation on girls, a brutal way of ensuring chastity. And he’d heard of more than one woman maimed by rape, their insides battered to the point where sex was agony and motherhood impossible.

Could something like that have happened to Laura?

?Carajo!

The thought made his skin shrink, something twisting in his gut.

Forget breaking into prison. Maybe he could ambush the prison transport and kill Al-Nassar before he reached Florence.

Laura went on. “As much as I wish we could go back to how things were in Dubai, I just can’t. You’d only end up getting hurt. I couldn’t bear it if I did something to destroy our memories or our friendship.”

He dropped his feet to the floor and moved to sit beside her, taking her hand in his, caressing her fingers. “That is not going to happen. Do you hear me, bella? No matter what he did to you, no matter how you’ve changed, nothing—and I mean nada— can change the way I feel about you.”

And how do you feel about her?

He wasn’t sure. He only knew he couldn’t leave her alone with this.

“Thank you.” She gave him a wobbly smile, squeezed his hand. “I should go.”

And in a heartbeat she was gone, leaving Javier alone in the heat.

* * *