Driving Her Crazy - By Amy Andrews Page 0,52

a very generous lover. Making him laugh, making him want, making him hope more than he had since the accident.

All he’d wanted for two years was to feel better and here on a rooftop in the middle of nowhere, under a canopy of stars, he doubted he’d ever felt better.

She had sat in front of his camera tonight and bared more than just her body to him. She’d been naked and vulnerable in the truest sense of the word.

Maybe he could reciprocate?

‘I hear Dwayne Johnson crying out for his mother.’

The words fell into the cold night air, stark and tinged with anguish, dragging Sadie out of a drowse. It had been quiet for so long, Sadie had assumed he’d drifted off or just wasn’t going to talk about it at all.

For a moment she wasn’t even sure what she should do or say. But then her hand automatically smoothed along his chest from one nipple to the other and she said, ‘That must be difficult.’

Kent was relieved when Sadie didn’t try to go all amateur psychologist on him. A few days ago he wouldn’t have even contemplated telling her, worried that an intrusive, chatty, stacked twenty-four-year-old would go all Freudian on him.

But he’d learned a lot about Sadie Bliss in the last couple of days. She was much more than an arachnophobic girly.

‘It’s not every night,’ he said. ‘But it’s...disturbing when it happens.’

Sadie pressed a kiss to his shoulder without conscious thought. She couldn’t even begin to imagine the trauma Kent had been through. ‘Tell me about Mortality.’

Kent tensed. ‘That bloody picture,’ he murmured.

‘You don’t like it?’

Kent shook his head. ‘You told me that when you saw it, in New York, you couldn’t look at it because it was too private.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s the way I feel about it too.’

‘So how’d it make the cover of Time?’

‘A journo friend of mine handed the camera over to my editor when I was in emergency surgery. I lost some days immediately after the crash. They operated four times in thirty-six hours and it was all a bit of a fog. The pictures were the least of my worries. When I finally came to my senses they were all over the media.’

‘Couldn’t you have them withdrawn?’

He nodded. ‘I tried, but Dwayne’s parents asked me if I would reconsider. They wanted the world to know that their son had died defending his country.’

‘Bit hard to say no to that,’ Sadie mused.

Kent chuckled at her understatement, surprised that he could laugh amidst it all. He gave her shoulder a squeeze. ‘Yes.’

Sadie lay there absorbing the information for a while. ‘At the risk of annoying you...’ she said tentatively, not wanting to kill the mood. Obviously Kent talking about this torrid time in his life was not an easy thing but something was bugging her. ‘I know you think I talk too much and—’

‘Just say it, Sadie,’ Kent interrupted on a sigh as tension crept into his belly muscles.

Sadie could feel the cosy mood evaporating but she’d come too far to back out, and if she was the only person he ever spoke to about this then maybe it was up to her to ask the difficult question. The question that had crowded into her brain when she’d first laid eyes on the photograph in that swanky New York gallery.

‘I don’t understand...how you even...took the photos in the first place?’ There was more silence from Kent so she pressed on. ‘I mean you were injured, right? Trapped in the body of a crashed helicopter, pinned by your ankle? Men you’d been embedded with for two months were dead and dying.’ She pushed herself up and looked down at him. ‘How do you stay on task when there’s chaos around you?’

Keeping his cool in a situation had never been an issue for Kent. He’d cut his teeth in war zones. It was hard for anyone who didn’t live that kind of life to understand.

He didn’t look at her as he answered.

‘It’s my job to snap pictures when all around me is going to hell.’

Sadie would have to have been deaf not to hear the defensive tone in his voice. ‘I’m not judging you, Kent. I’m just...curious.’

Kent grappled with telling her politely to mind her own damn business and the strange urge to talk to her. She’d been about the only person he’d ever met who hadn’t tried to blow smoke up his arse about Mortality. She’d told him how unsettling the image was and he had