“I think about you.” Her voice had dropped to a husky whisper. A pause, then, “Do you think about me?”
Too much. “Slade.” It was an effort to force the name out. Like cutting open a wound that had just started to heal. “You—”
“I don’t want to crawl into the ground with him.”
He wasn’t so sure. Right after he’d brought her back from South America, he’d had to watch her so closely. Then he’d been the one to be terrified. But Sydney had healed in the past two years, become stronger and started to look more like the vibrant woman he remembered, and not a ghost.
“I want to live. I want a life again.”
His heart began to pound too heavily in his chest. What was she saying?
“You saved me that day, and, Gunner, I want to be with you.”
She rose onto her toes. Her body pressed against his. Her lips touched his—
He should have pushed her away in that first instant. Gunner knew that he should have pushed her away.
He shouldn’t have locked his arms around her as if he was desperate. He shouldn’t have held so tightly as if she were his lifeline. He definitely shouldn’t have kissed her so wildly—as if he needed her more than anything else.
But he’d never kissed her before. Never been so close to the thing he wanted the most. So he kissed her, he became reckless with his need and didn’t pull back. He didn’t push her away and tell her that what they were doing was wrong.
Because it felt too right.
His hand slid beneath her hair, tilted her head back. The kiss became deeper.
She trembled against him. Her fingers were over his chest, her right hand over his heart.
He wanted to strip her clothes away. To kiss every inch of her, to claim her.
She isn’t yours to claim.
The reminder burned through his mind. His head lifted.
“I wanted you to do that,” Sydney whispered. “For so long now.”
He stiffened. This wasn’t hands off. He tried to force his hands to free her.
She shook her head. “You want me. I want you.” She rose onto her toes and pressed a quick kiss to his lips. “Why can’t we have what we want?”
Because she didn’t know the secret guilt that he carried. If she did, Sydney would never let him close to her again. He didn’t answer her, but he did back away.
Her hands fell to her sides. “Will he always be between us?”
The question was like a punch to his gut.
“He’s gone, Gunner. As much as that truth hurts us both...Slade is gone.”
Because he’d left his brother to die in a jungle, seen him get taken down by gunfire that ripped into Slade’s chest. But I didn’t get him out of there. I got Sydney out.
Slade’s grave was a jungle in the middle of Peru. Slade had never come home, not even in death.
“Why is it me?” Gunner rasped the question when he’d meant to remain silent.
Sydney blinked at him as if lost.
But she couldn’t be lost. The suspicion that he had ate at his soul. “When you look at me, do you see him?” Was that what she wanted? A substitute for her dead lover?
Her indrawn breath was almost painful to hear. “Bastard.”