Driving Her Crazy - By Amy Andrews Page 0,53

the feeling she might just understand.

‘I didn’t want to take the damn pictures,’ he finally muttered, looking at her. ‘I was trapped. I could smell jet fuel and smoke. I was pretty sure I was about to die in a fiery inferno or by a bullet in the head from the guys that had shot us down.’

Kent wasn’t sure if it was the last remnants of the campfire, but he swore he could still smell the smoke. How many times had he woken with the acrid stench in his nostrils?

‘My leg hurt like hell. The very last thing on my mind was to snap off some pictures.’

Sadie raised her hand and gently brushed it over his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth. ‘But you did?’

Kent nodded, remembering that day in all its Technicolor horror. ‘The pilot, Johnny Lieberman, he was also trapped up front. He asked me if I was taking pictures.’

Sadie remembered that the pilot had died a few days later in an ICU in Germany from the wounds inflicted by the crash.

‘I said no. No, I’m not taking bloody pictures. I couldn’t believe he was even asking. I wasn’t even sure where my camera was at and frankly I didn’t care.’

‘But you found it?’

‘Johnny was adamant that I should. In fact, he ordered me to do it. Not that he could but he did anyway. Said people should know about this part of war. That helicopters crashed, that good men died. That hearing about it on the news and seeing a burnt-out shell after everything was cleaned up was different from looking at pictures taken in the middle of hell.’

Sadie traced his lips with her finger. ‘So you took them.’

He nodded. ‘I couldn’t see a lot from my vantage point. Wreckage and desert and sky.’

‘And Dwayne Johnson.’

Kent nodded. ‘He’d been thrown clear so I had a...’ Kent shut his eyes as the young soldier’s cries played through his mind again. ‘A really clear shot of him. I could see the life ebbing from his eyes through the lens. He was calling for his mother. He was frightened and I didn’t want him to die alone. I tried to get out, to free myself.’

Sadie could only imagine how frantic Kent must have felt. ‘But you couldn’t,’ she whispered.

The stars above him suddenly blurred, developing auras as if it had been raining in heaven, and it took him a moment to realise the moisture was in his eyes. He blinked rapidly. ‘All I could do was take pictures.’

Sadie looked down into his face. She could just make out a shimmer of moisture in their copper-brown recesses. She kissed him lightly. What else could she do? How was someone supposed to go through such a trauma and come out the same person at the end? For some things there were no words—just comfort and consolation.

‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she murmured against his mouth. Kissing him again.

Kent kissed her back, pushing his hands into her hair as he pulled her head down onto his mouth hard and fast, all the anguish and pain and frustration he’d felt over the last two years injected into the moment. Her lips tasted sweet and he wanted to get lost in her, in her mouth, her body, her moans and her sighs.

To not think for one night about Dwayne Johnson and a photo that still haunted him.

To affirm life.

He shifted, rolled towards her, rolled her under him as she opened her mouth to him, opened her legs to him.

He plundered her mouth as his hands moved lower, feeling her buck as he skimmed a breast and stayed to rub his thumb over the rapidly ruching nipple.

‘Condom,’ she muttered as she wrapped her legs around his waist, felt the thick hard bulk of him butting against her.

Kent blindly reached for the box inside her backpack that she’d brought up with her earlier and was stashed near their heads.

Where the hell was it, damn it?

‘Hurry,’ Sadie muttered in his ear as the temptation to have him drive into her then and there beat like insect wings inside her brain. She was ready, he was ready and she wanted to take him away somewhere far removed from an Afghan desert.

Kent finally located the box, grabbed a foil packet out and quickly donned the protection. Sadie reached for him and he settled back into the cradle of her pelvis, kissing her long and hard as he pushed deep inside her.

She cried out, the sound primal in their own rooftop Eden. Her