Free Shattered by Joann Ross Page B

relationship, while revolving mostly around sex, had also been easy.
    Even natural.
    This was not.
    “I owe you a huge debt of gratitude,” he said with a distressing formality she’d never—ever—heard from him before. “The doctors at Bagram said I could’ve had my ticket punched if it hadn’t been for what you did for my leg in that camp.”
    “You don’t have to thank me, Shane,” she said. “I was—”
    “Just doing your job,” he cut her off.
    “That wasn’t what I was going to say.” She untangled her fingers to rake a hand through her hair, appalled when she realized it was shaking. “I was going to say that when I saw you lying on that SKED, so horribly wounded, although I know it’s medically impossible, I thought my heart had stopped. I’ve never been so nervous working on a patient in my life.”
    There. She’d given him an opening, let him know how much he meant to her. Not just professionally, as his doctor. But personally.
    “Well, I guess that just shows what a super doctor you are,” he said. “Obviously, the nerves didn’t affect your work, because the surgeons in Afghanistan and here both said you’d done a bang-up job.”
    They could have been two strangers stuck sitting next to each other on a plane.
    This conversation also wasn’t getting them anywhere. It was time to try a different tack.
    Rather than hold her own hand, she took away the remote, which he was still holding, from his. Then linked her fingers with his on top of the crisp white sheet. The gesture, which she’d done countless times before, now felt uncomfortably awkward.
    “You’ve no idea how worried I’ve been about you.”
    “Well, as you can see, short of losing half my leg, I’m just doing jim-dandy.”
    The Shane she’d once known had been self-deprecating. Although it seemed he intended for her to take his words lightly, she knew they were no jest.
    “Unfortunately, I knew you’d need amputation the minute I saw it.” She lifted their joined hands and pressed her lips against his knuckles, which were still bruised and scraped from the crash. “But they’re doing amazing things with prostheses these days.”
    “Yeah, that’s what my therapist keeps telling me.”
    “So. I guess it could be worse.”
    God. How could she, a doctor used to discussing bad news with a patient, have said anything so ridiculously trite?
    “I figured that out back at the crash site. When I didn’t die like my copilot, or the LT. Or all those Marines and Rangers.”
    He pulled his hand back. Picked up the remote again.
    “This isn’t going well, is it?” she asked.
    He sighed. Pinched the bridge of his nose. His eyes—framed by thick, long lashes that most women kept cosmetic companies in business trying to duplicate—were flatter than she’d ever imagined they could be.
    “What do you want, Kirby?”
    “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “But I’ve been thinking about those days in Baghdad a lot lately, before you showed up at the camp—in fact, even on the drive up from Kabul, when I was wondering if you were flying up there above me—and I think maybe we were wrong.”
    “About what?” He could not have looked any more edgy if she’d tossed a grenade with the pin pulled into his lap.
    “About our relationship just being about wartime sex.” She took another deep breath. “I know that’s what we used to joke about at the time. And what you’d reminded me the night before you flew off to Afghanistan.”
    Which had admittedly stung. Which was why she’d been uncharacteristically remote with him when he’d finally called her. She still regretted that display of feminine pique.
    “But what if it was more than that?”
    “Kirby—”
    “I think it was more,” she cut him off, determined to finish what she’d come here to say. “I think maybe I’d begun to fall in love with you. Which was, to be perfectly honest, even scarier than those mortars being shot into the Green Zone.
    “But then you