Lost time.

She gasped from the revelation. Damn it, why hadn’t she seen it? Garrett had gone through a year of hell too. He’d endured her funeral, for God’s sake. While she’d assumed he was alive—no, somehow she’d known it—and clutched to the hope of that to keep herself going every day, he’d been learning to live without her. No wonder he’d gawked like she’d turned into a zombie. Maybe to him, she still was.

Oddly, that thought gave her a surge of hope as Rayna walked her back to the room. It was almost lunchtime, but she declined her friend’s invitation to the cafeteria. Her eyes were swollen from crying and heavy as bricks with exhaustion. The second her head hit the pillow, she plummeted into sleep.

Though a bomb could’ve hit the embassy and not roused her, she felt Garrett’s presence the second he got back. Her senses were instantly alert to his every sound—not that he made a lot of those. She listened to the rasps of his boot laces, the clunks of the dog tags tied to them, the thuds of the shoes hitting the floor. After a few seconds, she expected to hear the sough of his pants coming off. He always stripped them off after his boots. At least a year ago, he did. And hell, had she loved it.

Against the backs of her eyelids, she hit the play button on a beautiful scene of him peeling off his bottoms after a day at the base. She stood at the door like she always did, openly ogling as his powerful thighs and calves got bared, breaking into a grin as he turned, erection a bold silhouette against his briefs. Many times, he’d follow that by crooking his finger, beckoning her to come to him. Or sometimes he’d pace over and get her for himself, gaze filled with blue flames while exposing his intent for her evening’s “appetizer.”

A light touch at her forehead jerked her from the fantasy.

She popped open her eyes. He was just a breath away, on his haunches, gazing at her. His hand hovered near her temple, his fingers wrapped in a strand of her hair.

Wow. He’d gotten really good at the sneaky thing. Fantasy or not, he hadn’t made a single noise in crossing the whole room.

After getting over her initial shock, she gazed at him. The sight…was heaven.

Or maybe not.

“Hey.”

His rasp matched his appearance. Rough. Tangled. Tired. And something else, weird and intangible, making her hitch up on an elbow in confusion.

Especially when he dashed his gaze away from her as fast as he’d given it.

What the hell?

Where had he been?

His case of cagey deepened, digging into the creases at the corners of his eyes. Sage stared harder, as if that would peel back his walls and reveal…

What?

She hauled in a deep breath—as if that would help.

Let the air clutch in her throat…and when it did…

Oh, God.

Sweat. Booze. Cheap soap.

And cheaper perfume.

She lowered to her back and squeezed her eyes shut. Like that was going to cut out the humiliation and agony. Nausea assaulted her thankfully empty stomach—though her brain made up for the reprieve. Her stupid imagination was stuck on the freeze-frame of him from the bedroom back home, still beckoning to her. Still wanting her.

She shook her head, setting free a bitter laugh. The embassy honchos who’d greeted them had talked about medals waiting stateside for Rayna and her. She had a good idea of what they could put on hers. We award this medal to Captain Weston for bravery, valor, persistence of will, and enduring a fatal strike to her heart after her rescue…

“Idiot.” She slammed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “I’m such a damn idiot.”

“Sage.”

“Don’t. Can’t you leave me with a shred of dignity here?”

“Sage.”

“I get it, okay? My body isn’t what it once was. I don’t fire your chamber anymore. Done. Let’s move on.”

“Sage, damn it!” The bed sagged with his weight. He leaned over her. Hell, even in her fury, her body woke up to his nearness, his heat, the spiritual zipper that refastened every cell inside her to him again. God, she really hated that connection right now. “Look at me. Fuck…please. It’s not what you th—”

“Seriously? You’re going with that one? I’ve been on the run in Africa for the last year, and that’s old even for me, buddy.”

He pressed closer. “I’m sorry that you think—”

“Shit. That one, too?”

“Are you going to listen to me?”

“No,” she snapped. “There’s nothing for you to say. There’s nothing you have to explain, all right? You thought I was dead. You moved on, to whoever—whatever—it is that you do now. I understand. So at least you tried, and thank you, but—”

Suddenly, he’d plunged his hand into her hair, clawing her scalp, forcing her head toward him. “The fuck I moved on!” It seethed from his locked teeth. “My life stopped the second I walked into your parents’ living room and saw the chaplain sitting there.” He stopped, his chest pressing against the confines of his T-shirt with his hard breaths. “I couldn’t move, Sage. I didn’t move.” He shook his head. “I could only move again when the rage set in. It sucked, but at least it filled the goddamn crater inside after they told me you were—” He cleared his throat with a ragged cough. “After they told me you were gone. But at least I could function again. At least I could think again—if that’s what you could call it.

“I started with Franz first. Yeah, I woke up my commanding officer in the middle of the night at his house, demanding that we scramble a team and head for Botswana to try to find you. Maybe I knew even then that you really weren’t dead. I just felt like we had to try.” He dropped his hand, pulling hers into it. “He let me bawl like an infant on his couch, but he still told me no. All those fuckers shut me down at every turn.”

“Shit.” As it came out beneath her breath, fresh tears brimmed. She wrapped her other hand over his, loving him with new depths of her soul. “Baby, I’m sorry.”

He lifted his face again. His lips twitched, as if a smile brewed there. It never materialized. The cobalt smoke had returned to his gaze, thicker than she’d ever seen it. “Well, I wasn’t sorry.” He said it with leaden determination. “I left sorry behind when I left Franz’s house that night. Something took the place of it, for good.”

“Something like what?” she asked softly.

He stiffened. “I don’t know.” His lips compressed. In the silence of his contemplation, a breeze fluttered the curtains across the room, throwing a shaft of afternoon sun at him. For a moment, the anguish of his face was edged with light. The glow kissed the moisture at the ends of his hair, fringed his tawny lashes. The sight made her want to stop time, though her soul filled with crushing sorrow. Even the light from the galaxy’s most powerful fireball couldn’t penetrate the shadows in his eyes.

And she doubted she ever could again, either.

“Sage, it was something…dark, okay? Something hard and savage and vicious.” He jutted his jaw, and his free hand fisted tight. “But it kept me going, at least. It kept me alive.”

She looked away, trying to let his words sink in completely. Something on the nightstand glinted in the late afternoon sunlight. It hadn’t been there when she’d taken a drink of water prior to falling asleep. Somehow, she already knew what it was. The gold band was as magical as the day they’d picked it up from the jeweler. She held up the ring at an angle in order to check the inside. As she hoped, the inscription was there. She read it through a haze of tears.

My hero.

Even engraved on the inside of his wedding ring, the words had always been a lighthearted tease between them, a fun reminder of what he’d done to get her attention that first night in Tacoma. Okay, “fun” probably wasn’t the best phrasing on that. He’d come out of the brawl with a busted lip, a black eye, and nasty cuts on his knuckles, though the bawling-out she gave him in the tavern’s kitchen afterward was certainly as painful. At the end of the night, they’d exchanged phone numbers. Along with his digits, he’d written, Garrett Hawkins: Your on-call hero.

She’d given him the words just ten hours ago, in King’s Quonset hut. When she had, the meaning of the syllables changed forever. They weren’t just stamped on her heart. They were branded in her soul.