Page 79 of Silent Threat
She watched him as she sat on the bed and scooted back far enough to rest her back against the headboard, taking her cards with her. “Do you miss the navy?”
After a couple of seconds of thinking, he said, “I miss my team.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
He picked up his cards. “Only child.”
“Sounds like your mom really cares about you and worries about you. I’m glad she talked you into coming here. Do you feel like the therapies are working? It’s not that bad here, right? It’s good to learn new things.”
“Let’s say, I’m less resistant to ecotherapy than I was in the beginning. It’s not completely uninteresting.” Nobody was more surprised than he was.
A smile softened her face. He felt like a bastard for giving her such a hard time before. He could have been more open-minded. It wouldn’t have cost him anything.
“Human beings evolved as part of nature,” she said, “and lived in nature for ninety-nine percent of our history. Locking ourselves away in cities is a recent development.”
“Like taking a tree, putting it into a small pot, and bringing it inside.”
She smiled wider. “You were paying attention.”
“You were so earnest. I didn’t have the heart to tune you out completely.”
“I’ll take what I can get.” Then she said, “I love the holistic approach of nature therapy. That neither the body nor the mind is isolated, but part of a system. And that system is part of an even larger system. Working on depression with meds is like working on the motor of a car. But without changing the oil. Without changing the broken motor mount. Without putting gas in the tank and water in the radiator.”
She paused, her gaze searching his face. “What? You think me talking about cars is stupid, don’t you? OK, I don’t know that much about cars. I just try to come up with stuff guys can relate to.”
“I think you talking about cars is unbearably sweet.” And it made him want to kiss her again. He tried not to think about the fact that they were in her bedroom, behind locked doors, with her in bed, not three feet from him.
“We use the systems concept in the SEAL teams,” he told her. “Going after insurgents, we didn’t just go after insurgents. We went after why they were in a place to start with. Did the locals support them? Why? How do we turn that support to our side? Stuff like that.”
“Exactly.” She played the last of her cards.
He almost felt bad about showing her his.
She groaned.
He gathered up the cards and shuffled. “Want to play another round?”
“Sure.”
So they played cards and talked until six in the morning, Annie losing while enthusing about the role of nature in healing, Cole listening and beginning to see her point.
God, he wanted to get into that bed with her. The need for her thrummed through his blood. She reached for a pillow to put behind her back, and, for a second, her shirt stretched over her breasts. He wanted to ...
He had to hold his cards over his lap to cover his body’s response to that thought.
At six o’clock she said, “I want to take a shower before I grab some sleep. I think I’ve stayed awake long enough.”
“Don’t lock the bathroom door. The second you feel dizzy or faint, you crash something to the floor. I’ll feel the vibration.”
Was she blushing? She turned away so fast, he couldn’t tell.
She grabbed clean clothes and retreated into the bathroom. He put away his cards and paced the room, thinking about the hit-and-run, needing to figure out what he could do to keep her safe.
She was out in fifteen minutes, wrapped only in a large towel, and Cole had this instant fantasy of her dropping it and stepping toward him. But even as his body responded to the images in his head, her hand clutched the towel tighter. Her gaze skipped him completely, darting to the door of her room.
“What’s going on in the hallway?”
Something’s going on in the hallway?He hadn’t heard a thing.
