Nori's Delta (Delta Team Three #1) - Lori Ryan Page 0,54
That was all there was to it.
She swallowed. “Hey.” There was a heartbeat where he thought she might give him a genuine smile and everything would go back to how it was between them. To how it should be.
Then she spoke and it passed. Hope passed.
“I want to thank you for all you did for me, Heath.”
He took her hand and sat by the bed but she didn’t grip his hand back. Her hand sat in his.
“I’m going to be moving to rehab tomorrow. They say I’ll be there a month. Maybe a little less.”
“I’ve got leave time saved up—” he started but she was shaking her head.
“You’ve done enough for me, Heath. You’ll never know how grateful I am, but I can’t ask you to stay here any longer with me. You’ve done enough for me.”
Now he shook his head. “I wanted to do it. I want to be by your side through this, Nori. Look I know I said it couldn’t be anything more than a temporary thing, but I was an idiot. I don’t want this to end, Eleanor. I want to be with you. Now that we’ve found each other again, I don’t want to let this go.”
She looked away from him and he froze.
“But you don’t want that,” he said, realization dawning. He was such an idiot. She hadn’t wanted more than what they had in Kazarus. He’d been the only one hoping for more.
Hell, she had probably been wondering why he was still hanging around.
She looked back to him. “I want to put all this behind me, Heath. I don’t want to remember what happened over there.”
Her words hit him like a sledgehammer to the chest and he thought his heart might just give out right then and there.
He was such an idiot.
“So, that’s it, then.” He said, his words laced with the shock that was coursing through him. How had he not seen this coming? How had he so misread her?
“Thank you for all you did for me, Heath.”
He nodded at her words and stood, his motions stiff and awkward.
“Yeah,” he said, and he threw a smile he wasn’t at all feeling onto his face. “Well, you know. Here to serve and all that.”
He winked at her and turned away. He didn’t want to see her reaction. Couldn’t watch the pity that would enter her eyes if she realized he was reeling from the blow of her telling him she didn’t want more with him. He couldn’t take pity from her.
He should say something more. Do something more. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t speak. He could only walk woodenly from the room, fighting to keep from breaking down and begging her to tell him why she didn’t want him. Why she didn’t feel the same incredible connection he felt between them. The connection he’d felt when they were younger. The one that had never, in all those years, gone away.
Chapter 33
Heath was going through the motions of a night out at The Ugly Mug with his team, but it was just that. He felt dead inside.
He barely tasted the beer in his hands. Nothing tasted good. In fact, nothing had any taste at all. And every time he let himself think, Eleanor was the only thing that he could focus on. The look on her face when she told him goodbye.
He wanted nothing more than to throw himself into the next mission or at the very least a solid PT session. Physical training was what his body needed to forget everything that had happened with Eleanor. To forget how much he wanted her and that she would be lost to him for good this time.
Instead, his team was going to be at the base for the next few weeks. He’d been pissed when Trigger and the guys got a callout while he and his team were left home sitting on their asses, but at least that meant he didn’t need to watch those guys with their women at the bar.
It was shitty of him to be so fucking jealous of their happiness, but there it was.
His team had been assigned to do their five-year renewal of Code of Conduct Certification to cover COC applications in wartime, peacetime, and governmental or hostage detention environments. Which meant being deskbound in a classroom with a lot of time to think about what Eleanor was going through without him.
He couldn’t stop himself from wondering how she was doing. He wanted to know if she was hurting. How