needed this, too, to just be close. Any woman who’d sat by a guy’s bed for two days watching him breathe was probably well on her way to falling in love. At least that’s what he hoped.
“The doc says I’ll be out of here tomorrow. There’s going to be a debriefing at Steele Street, and then he wants to see me at Walter Reed the beginning of next week.” For a while, he was going to be Brandt’s primary work in progress, until the doc figured out a medication plan that would slowly wean him off of Souk’s drugs while allowing him to regain his memory and maintain his strength and speed.
She looked up at him expectantly, her hand resting lightly over his heart.
“That gives us a week to go somewhere …”
“Like?” she prompted.
“Like anywhere we want—Paris, Prague, Seattle, Munich, St. Croix, Saigon.”
“Saigon?”
“Sure. You’d love it, and it would love you.” He leaned down and kissed her mouth, and then lingered, loving the taste and feel of her, and wishing they were somewhere besides a hospital bed.
“Mmmmm,” she murmured when he broke off the kiss. “Are you asking me out on a date?”
“Yes.” Yes, he was. “A very long date.” She enchanted him, and he wanted more, a lot more.
“Hmmmmm.”
From mmmmm to hmmmmm? He wasn’t sure if he was making progress or not.
“Is that a hmmm yes? Or a hmmm no?” He was gunning for the yes, but she still hedged her answer.
“We had a crazy night …”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Our second crazy night together.”
Her startled gaze flew up to meet his.
“So you do remember!” A hot flush of color flooded her cheeks.
“Not the details, but when we made love, it came to me that we’d done it before—you and me—and given how long ago it must have been, that there was a good chance you never heard from me again.”
The color across her cheeks deepened.
“I’m sorry, Jane.” And he was, that he could have hurt her unintentionally. Or maybe he had been a one-night-stand kind of guy back then. He really didn’t know.
But he knew what he felt now. He knew what he wanted now.
“Give me a week, Jane,” he said, looking down into her eyes. “No matter who I am, or who I turn out to be, I want a chance with you, to see what we can be together.”
He’d never spoken truer words, and after a long moment, she seemed to believe him.
“One week,” she said, and a measure of tension slipped away from him.
Everything was good. It was all good.
She was at least half in love with him. He could tell, and so help him, he needed that. It was a good place to start. He needed someone who took him for what he was more than whoever he turned out to be. He needed this beautiful girl to be his.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Two weeks later, 738 Steele Street
“Here’s your bone dope,” Buck Grant said, tossing a classified folder onto Dylan’s desk. “As usual, we’re about a light-year and a half ahead of the dweebs in the lab, but they’ve finally confirmed that it’s not J.T. in that grave. The most the agency will give us is that the man we buried went by the code name Gator.”
Dylan lifted his gaze to the man standing at the window watching the street.
“Danny Gleason,” the man said without turning around. “He was part of a black ops team working for the CIA out of Coveñas.”
“How much of your memory have you gotten back?” Grant asked.
“Enough to know you got that limp eight years ago in Afghanistan,” J.T. said, and looked over his shoulder. “Good morning, Buck.”
A flush of some emotion washed across the general’s face, but Dylan would have been hard-pressed to define it. Relief, for sure, a serious measure of personal redemption for not having lost J.T., to have not “left one of his own behind,” and a good dose of pride that his boy had made it back, mentally and physically, from the hairiest mission to ever consume the team: the six years of J.T.’s capture and amnesia. Dr. Brandt had brought Gillian back from that brink, and from what Dylan had seen this morning, the doc was achieving those same stellar results with J.T. in record time. J.T. had made significant progress since the grueling debriefing they’d all had in the days after his release from the hospital.
“I heard Brandt was sending you back to us this morning,” Grant said. “When are you going to be ready