Free The Edge of Courage (Red Team) by Elaine Levine

smiled at him. “Do you like it?”
    He liked the way she was looking at him. “Yes.”
    She gave him a bite of the salad. “Does it taste okay?”
    “It tastes cold.”
    She fed him a forkful of lasagna. “And this? How does it taste? It was my grandmother’s recipe.”
    “Warm.”
    “Those are temperatures, not flavors.”
    “Mandy,” he sighed, “food doesn’t taste like anything to me right now. Just temperatures and textures.”
    “Oh.” She looked at the plate she held. “I suppose that’s part of your not having an appetite.” She served him another bite.
    He took the fork from her. Cutting a small bite, he fed it to her, watching as her lips closed over the tines. He slowly drew the fork from her mouth, feeling the pull of her lips against the thin strips of stainless steel. Again, the warm flush spread across her skin. He swallowed, anticipating the next bite she would feed him. He suddenly realized he’d sit here and eat the whole goddamned lasagna with her if she’d keep looking at him as she was.
    Mandy took the fork back and used the side of it to cut another bite. Instead of lifting it to him, she pushed it around on the plate as if she were preoccupied with a thought. He waited, knowing she would broach the topic that was bothering her once she found the right words.
    “Rocco, what did you do in the war?” she finally asked.
    “I was a linguist.”
    She lifted the bite of lasagna to him. “What does a linguist do?”
    He watched her as he chewed. How would she judge him if he were to tell her how he’d spent the last decade. Three years in training, then seven in the field? “They do different things. Translate stuff.”
    She paused in feeding him another bite. “You were Special Forces, like Kit, weren’t you? A linguist in the Green Berets doesn’t just translate, does he?”
    “I wasn’t in the Special Forces.” Nor was Kit, but she didn’t have a need to know that. He considered how to explain to her what he’d been. There wasn’t even a classification for it.
    “How long were you over there?”
    Rocco met her look. Her questions were making him uncomfortable. “A long time.”
    She smiled and lowered her gaze to the lasagna as she cut another piece and fed it to him. “Is it easy for you to learn another language? What did you speak over there?”
    “Pashto, Dari, Arabic, Farsi, among others.”
    Her eyes widened. “You can speak all of those languages?”
    “Fluently. And read and write them.” And know the differences in hundreds of regional variations of each. He sighed. “Kit says I’m a linguistic savant.”
    “You’re a Rosetta Stone. Was it always like that for you?”
    “I think so. There were only two languages spoken on our ranch when I was a kid—English and Spanish. I grew up bilingual. In high school, I mastered French and German as well.” He looked at her. “Both in my freshman year. That’s when I knew I was different.”
    She gasped. “How do you do that?”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. I was surprised to learn that most people can’t do that. Language to me is simply vocalization of emotions. We all have the same emotions, the same need to communicate. We speak because we desire something or we’re sad or angry or scared. We just use different sounds.”
    They’d finished his lasagna by then. She gave him the last bite of salad, then retrieved her meal from the table and sat next to him again, her hip against his thigh. It seemed to him that she sat closer, which he didn’t mind. He took the loaded fork from her and carried it to her mouth. She was so wrapped up in feeding him that she wasn’t eating any herself.
    She chewed and swallowed. He cut a piece of lasagna. He figured he could keep her questions to a minimum if he kept her mouth full. It didn’t quite work as planned.
    “So you’re a genius.”
    A breeze started up, tousling her hair, pulling a wide strand of it against her cheek. What he would give to be able to brush