Just one moment. I knew he wasn’t the Matt I’d loved, my Matt, but for just one moment, I wanted to pretend. Maybe it made me a fool, but I didn’t care. It had been so long since someone had touched me. Since he’d touched me.

I ached for him to touch me.

I lifted my hand, my fingers skimming across his cheekbone, ghosting across the burgeoning bruise. He flinched beneath my touch, but he didn’t step back. My fingers trembled.

“I don’t want this,” he murmured, the sound swallowed by the groan that escaped his lips, his hands coming to rest on my hips. Despite his words, his hands didn’t push me away. Instead, his fingers stroked the strip of skin exposed above the low waistband of my shorts, tracing my hipbones.

“This is a bad idea,” he growled, pulling me forward so that his cock brushed me, his temple rubbing against mine, his lips grazing my cheekbone.

That was all it took.

He was hard. Big. Powerful. Exactly what I wanted right now.

“Uh-huh.”

One of his hands left my hip, stroking up my body, the heat of his fingers branding me through my thin cotton tank top.

He sucked in a deep breath, his entire body heaving with it, as though he held himself back, his desire on a tight leash.

I wanted to snap the tether. Wanted to watch him lose control. Maybe it was anger. Maybe it was madness, or the feeling that this was still somehow little more than a dream. Whatever it was, I didn’t care about logic or sanity or rules or caution.

Just this.

My nipples pebbled as I arched in his arms, rubbing myself over him. His hold on me tightened, leaving no doubt that he’d noticed. I wanted his hands on my breasts. I wanted it hard, and rough, and dirty. I’d basically been re-virginized at eighteen, and my body craved the sex it remembered and had lost.

Craved him.

My hand slipped down between us, stroking him through his briefs. He was hard as fucking rock.

Whatever else, however much had changed between us, this hadn’t.

Matt leaned forward, his hips arching toward me, his head bowing down to the curve of my neck. I felt his breath against my skin and then the scrape of his teeth. A shiver slid down my spine, my breasts aching for his touch, my body coming alive as I grew wetter.

Just pretend. Just for a moment. Pretend nothing changed. Pretend he never left. Pretend you can go backwards.

His palm cupped my breast, his thumb rubbing over my nipple through my thin tank top, back and forth, the motion evoking a sigh from my lips.

“Tell me to stop touching you,” he whispered against my skin.

I slipped a hand inside his boxers, his erection brushing against my palm, a hiss escaping his mouth as his fingers dipped under the fabric of my shirt. I arched into his touch like a cat, fisting his cock as his hand teased my breast, tormenting my nipple.

His head moved up, his lips inches from mine.

What would it feel like to kiss him again? Would it be the same as it was between us or had that changed, too?

“Come to bed with me,” I whispered.

I didn’t care if this was a mistake, didn’t care if I’d regret it in the morning. I wanted him now. Needed him now. The rest didn’t matter. I’d loved him my entire life, had thought I’d lost him, and now he was here. What else was there?

His hand froze.

No.

Matt released me, slipping out of my grasp, the distance between us as jarring as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over me.

His mouth tightened, pain etched on his face. His chest heaved as though he were having trouble catching his breath. “I can’t do this.”

“Why?” I ground out, my body protesting the loss of his touch, my heart hating the distance between us.

He ran a hand through his hair, his gaze hooded. “I’m not back. Tonight—me being here—was an accident. Nothing has changed. It’s not safe for me to be back in D.C. with you.”

“Is there someone else in your life?” I asked, the possibility of it skewering me.

“What? No.”

Relief flooded me.

“Then why?”

“I’ll stay until we can’t get you out of this. Stay until I know you’re safe. But I can’t stay past that. I’m not going to be responsible for something happening to you. I have a target on my back, and I don’t want it on yours, too.”

“I love you.”

As soon as I said it, I regretted it. The words just escaped, as natural as breathing, but complicating everything.

I saw the flash of pain in his eyes before he masked it behind the wall he’d built between us.

“No, you don’t. You love the boy who died in Afghanistan. You don’t know me. Don’t know the things I’ve done. I’m not the boy you knew and I’ll never be him again. I’m a killer and I’m caught up in something that will get you killed.

“There’s no love inside me. No softness. I destroyed it so that I could do what I had to in order to stay alive. I watched my friends die around me. I laid in a pile of their dead bodies for hours, not sure if I would live or die, and the only thing that kept me going, the only thing that kept me sane, was imagining you safe. I’m not going to risk your life. I can’t. I shouldn’t have touched you tonight. I’m sorry for that. I fucked up, but it won’t happen again.”

Tears spilled down my cheeks. “Why did you come back tonight? Why were you watching me? Tell me you don’t still love me. Tell me that there isn’t still something between us.”

His tone gentled, the softness in his eyes made worse by the fact that for the first time all night, he gave me back a piece of the boy I’d loved. And then his words tore that piece away.

“I don’t have anything left to give. We have a history and I’ll always want to know that you’re safe. I’ll watch your back, but there’s nothing else inside of me. You need to let me go.”

My heart cracked open and spilled out into the living room until it lay at his feet. Without a word, I turned and went into my bedroom, shutting the door behind me.

I cried myself to sleep.

Chapter Four

Kate Reynolds is in the news again …

—Capital Confessions blog

Matt

It started the same way it always did. I was awake, lying in a grave of sand. I struggled to move, my body sluggish, my limbs weak. A burning pain filled my stomach, my chest. I tried to breathe, but my lungs were full of sludge—some kind of sticky liquid and the sand that shrouded me now. I needed to move. Needed to get up. I needed to move or else I’d die here.

The pain in my stomach grew worse. Jesus, it fucking hurt. I reached down, grasping my side, trying to figure out where the pain came from. When I looked down, blood engulfed me.

Something landed next to me with a thud, kicking up a cloud of dust and dirt. The urge to cough was undeniable, but some instinct inside me resisted.

They can’t know I’m alive.

Another thud, this time something landing on my lower body. Then another one, closer to my face. I turned my neck an inch, the eyes of my buddy Jason staring back at me, his face covered in blood and dirt.

Dead.

Then another body. And another. A scream built inside me, desperate to escape. I wanted to move, to claw my way out of the grave filled with my friends’ bodies, but they kept falling, until all I could see and smell was death.

And then the blackness took over.

I bolted upright, my chest heaving, a thin layer of sweat covering my body. My hand gripped my gun, my knuckles white. My gaze darted around the room, taking in my surroundings, ready for whatever horror awaited me. Slowly, reality sunk in.

I was on the couch in Kate’s living room. I wasn’t in Afghanistan. I’d lived.

I repeated the words over and over again, my elbows propped on my knees while I dragged in air, the fucking burn in my chest nearly unbearable.