Page 24

Malcolm grins at me, teeth white against his dark skin. “What do you call cheese that isn’t yours?”

“I don’t know, Malcolm,” I say automatically. “What do you call cheese that isn’t yours?” I dig frantically through the limbs. It has to be here, in this wreckage of bodies. It has to. I can’t remember what I’m looking for. I can’t hold it in my mind long enough, but it’s here. I know it’s here.

“Nacho cheese!” Malcolm grins.

It’s not weird that he’s telling bad jokes amid the carnage because that’s Malcolm for you, always ready with a joke from one of his kids, and anyway, he freaking loves nachos, but it’s a little weird that he’s telling it instead of looking for his legs.

“Funny,” I say, even though I don’t think it’s funny. I think it’s stupid, but I can’t tell him that. I mean, the man has no legs.

Panic claws at my chest. Where is it?

And then I see it. A wavy, copper-colored string. That’s what I was looking for, I know it. I tug on it, and everything clears.

Lila.

“There you are,” I say.

She smiles. “Seb.”

Blood erupts from her chest like a volcano. I put my hands there, but it’s too late. She’s fading right before my eyes.

“Lila!” I roar.

I startled awake, bolting upright like Dracula, hand on my racing heart. It took me several gulped breaths to understand that I was not in a desert, listening to the last joke Malcolm would ever tell me, futilely pushing Lila’s blood back inside her. I exhaled roughly, pushing my hair off my damp forehead, and collapsed backward onto my pillow.

That fucking dream. It had been a constant since my last mission nearly five years ago. Sometimes I’d go whole months without it and then bam, it was back. Different variations of the same theme, over and over again. Blood, body parts, Malcolm. Me digging through body parts, desperate to find it.

It tended to change. Sometimes it was something that was stressing me out in waking life and had nothing to do with that mission. Sometimes it was a letter or a phone, something that dream-me knew would have changed the outcome of that day, even though waking-me knew that thing didn’t actually exist. Once it had been Mother Clucker, and I had been terrified for a solid month that it was a bad omen and Holly was going to salt the earth to avenge her emotional-support chicken.

It shouldn’t surprise me that Lila was taking her turn. The way she’d nearly bled out in my arms was its own nightmare, so it made sense I would relive it in my dreams. But fuck. All that blood. My heart was still pounding, my hands shaky from adrenaline.

The room was dark, but my body knew the time before I looked at the clock. It still pissed me off when the glowing red numbers verified it. 4:40 a.m. Twenty minutes before my alarm was set to go off. Not enough time to fall back asleep, and too much time to be alone with my thoughts.

A knee rammed my thigh. Her hand landed on my face, and I grunted.

“Seb?” she asked groggily.

She wasn’t really awake. I lifted her hand from my face, kissed her palm, and settled it on my chest. “Bad dream. Go back to sleep, baby.”

“’Kay,” she mumbled, words thick and sleepy. “You can hold my boob.”

My shoulders vibrated with silent laughter. Oh, hell. How had I forgotten that? Or maybe I hadn’t really—I just wouldn’t let myself think about it.

It started when we were in Hawaii, and our Jeep got stuck in the mud. We had no cell service, and it could be hours before anyone found us. Well, this sucks, she’d said. Wanna hold my boob? And I had laughed, but hell yeah, I wanted to hold her boob. It became a running joke with us that her breasts were magic. There was no minor inconvenience that her breasts could not solve. A bad dream, a traffic jam on the Beltway, a meeting that landed on my calendar at 6 p.m. on a Friday, and she’d rub the back of my head and whisper, wanna hold my boob?

The answer was always hell yes.

It was yes now, but I wasn’t a big enough dick to act on it. There were lines a man couldn’t cross, and groping my mostly unconscious wife was one of them. She would never have made that offer if she were awake.

But then she took hold of my wrist and rolled to her side, bringing me with her. I stopped breathing when she pushed my hand under her shirt to cup her breast. No bra. Just warm satin skin, firm and heavy and so perfect my fingers couldn’t stop flexing and molding its shape. My heart rate steadied. My breathing deepened. The blood and horror that had seemed so real moments ago faded away like Lila’s boob was the literal sun burning off the morning fog.

With a sigh, I snuggled her closer and rested my chin on her silk bonnet, careful not to crush her curls, and let my eyes drift closed.

Goddammit.

Lila’s tits really did make everything better.

Lila was still sound asleep when I reluctantly left the bed and her boob. Animals tended to get ornery when they weren’t fed on time, and we had a couple of new guests who had arrived during the chaos last week, and I hadn’t had a spare moment to acclimate them to ranch life. They needed an introduction to farm chores. I enjoyed working with animals, and working with vets and first responders gave my existence purpose, but unwrapping myself from Lila’s warm body was a physical and psychological torture I hadn’t experienced since BUD/S.