Page 73 of My Favorite Mistake

Thathad always felt like it was made for her body alone, and nobody else after him had been able to satisfy her like he always did. A deep ache radiated from within Liza’s body, longing for the physical closeness of their shared past. Their mouths and tongues tangled; their breath mingling; a whimper from her; a low groan from him; like nothing had changed at all. For a moment, Liza’s entire world existed at the center of their kiss, and she let herself get completely lost in him.

Connor’s fingers clawed at her waist, tugging the thin cotton of her dress in a way that was far too erotic for standing in a crowd of people, but her brain felt like it had disconnected and floated away. She was left with a dizzy feeling that only underscored the excruciating desire to consume him and allow him to swallow her whole.

A quiet moan escaped Liza’s lips and drifted into his mouth, and the dizziness intensified to the point that she noticed it may have been more than just emotions and wantonness spinning her head; that it was perhaps more than just the heat of their bodies causing her face and neck to be slick with a cool, clammy film. That,just maybe,she should’ve listened to Brennan and drank the damned Gatorade.

A cold wave washed over Liza’s whole body, and her eyes fluttered open just in time to see blackness closing in around her periphery. She only managed to murmur his name against his lips before everything went dark.

19

“Connor.”

The plea of his name exited Liza’s mouth on a shallow breath before her head fell backward, and she went limp in his arms. Her face and lips were pale and oddly cool compared to the heat of the afternoon, and even as dead weight, she was surprisingly light.

Dead. Weight.

“Liza.” Connor held her with one arm wrapped tightly around her waist, and he cradled the back of her neck with his palm. “Baby, open your eyes. Honey, look at me.”

People were turning to murmur and stare at them, but Connor couldn’t be bothered by that because Liza had gone from passionately kissing him to essentially lifeless in two-point-five seconds. This wasn’t the first time he’d held dead weight in his arms, but this time it washer. Memories of bullet-riddled chaos collided with his current reality, and Connor’s mind suddenly plunged to the depths of darkness, the likes of which he’d never seen.

And he ran.

Hoisting her into his arms, he ran. Numb to the heat and impervious to the need for oxygen, he barreled through a crowd, and instinct filtered everything out of his mind other than the picture of anything with a red cross on it. A Humvee. A chopper. A medic in camo. But everything in front of him was a blur of too-bright color, and the noises were disorienting. Not gunshots, but music. Not explosions, but laughter. Not the guttural roar of a low-flying jet, but brass and percussion, andwhere in the hell am I right now?

“Hey, Connor!”

The voice that called behind him wasn’t one he recognized as a brother-in-arms. It lacked that laser-like focus of life-or-death urgency. It was too casual; too old; too easy.

Connor wasn’t sticky with someone else’s blood. He didn’t smell gunpowder. Nothing about any of this made sense, and he still had no idea where he was.

Liza was still limp. He was still running. Eyes still scanning for the one, single thing he knew he needed: a red cross on a white square.

“Connor! Is she okay?”

The voice was farther behind him now, and the sound of it still didn’t make sense. But that didn’t matter because Connor finally spotted the symbol his mind had focused on, although it looked wrong and too small. It was centered on a background of the colors of his home; the purple, green, and gold, and it still didn’t make sense, but it was what he needed to save her. He hadn’t ever been able to save anyone, and his heart was praying to a god he didn’t believe in to make him able to save a lifejust this once.

“Medic!” Connor shouted.

A young woman in a white polo shirt emerged from the colorful flap of cloth that donned the red cross.

“Oh no,” she said, not anywhere near concerned enough in such an emergency. “What happened? Is she drunk or overheated?”

Alcohol doesn’t exist on a battlefield,his mind protested,andwho is this improperly outfitted person?

“Bring her inside.”

Connor followed orders.

There was a cot of the wrong color in the corner, but Connor laid Liza down anyway. The woman in a white polo checked her with rubber glove-clad hands and then pointed a fan on her face. The interior walls of the tent were also the wrong color. Everything about the space was wrong, and he racked his brain to force it to cooperate.

On some level, Connor knew it wasn’t the space that was wrong, but his own mind.

Someone else handed him a sweaty plastic cup of water. “Drink up before you pass out, too.”

He did. And then another person burst into the tent.

“What happened?” It was Jimmy.

Connor had to make a concerted effort to conceal his mental return to reality. “She um—”

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