“You already did,” she said wryly, before looking away. “I wondered if I would ever see you again. I wanted the chance to tell you… Well, doesn’t matter now.”
“What doesn’t matter?” he pressed. “We have all night.”
“It’s best we don’t go there, not now.” Her face closed up fast. “I had thought we could use this time to talk some things through, but I’m realizing this isn’t the time or the place to go into that after all. I just can’t afford to risk losing it. Not now. I have to focus everything on keeping myself together until we’re out of here.”
He pulled back, raising his hands. “Okay, okay.”
“I apologize,” she deflated. “I’m just on edge. I was really starting to lose hope back at the compound.”
He could see she was about to crumble now. She needed an outlet of some sort, comfort, but she wouldn’t want his comfort. So he opted for something she would accept. Humor.
“Sorry if we didn’t mobilize a major rescue operation quickly enough for you.”
A smile tugged the sides of her cracked lips. “I’m an ingrate, aren’t I?”
He passed her lip balm from his survival vest. “Olive branch?”
She touched her lips. “Are you saying I look like hell?”
“You look… alive.” That one word was everything.
Slowly, she took the lip balm from his hand and slicked it over her mouth. She put the cap back on with careful precision. “Alive is definitely a bonus today, one I wasn’t sure I would get.”
His eyes held on her mouth, the night and frenzy of what they’d been through gathering in his gut, making him thirsty for a taste of her.
He wanted to hold onto his sobriety coin right now so damn bad. “How did they capture you?”
Shadows chased through her green eyes, like clouds over the midnight moon. “I got careless.”
“I know you. You’re never careless. I’m the impulsive one.”
She shook her head. “It’s my fault two people died. I should have done something.”>And God bless him, Jose seemed to understand. He didn’t say a word to stop her. He didn’t even look at her like she was nuts—the way Sutton was eyeing her as Bubbles disinfected cuts and assessed bruises. But then Jose knew her, he understood her, even if he didn’t want a future with her.
A month into her relationship with Jose, she’d confessed she loved him, that she’d fallen for him the first time she saw him and wanted to spend forever together. He’d said he felt the same—but she fast realized their ideas of settling down were vastly different. At first, she’d deluded herself into believing he simply wasn’t ready for the white picket fence and a couple of kids because he was two years younger than she was. She wanted to believe with time he would come around to her way of thinking. Building a family someday was everything to her.
Apparently he didn’t really feel the same, not in the ways that counted. Could he really expect to stay in this high-octane sort of rescue environment until the day he died? She couldn’t and she’d told him so.
Her daddy had always said not to make ultimatums unless you could live with either answer.
She scrubbed her wrist over her cheeks, swiping away grimy tears. “Sorry about that.”
“You’re okay,” Jose said simply, keeping that wall between them.
“Thanks to you I’m okay.” She wished there could be some kind of middle ground between them, a way to—what? Stay friends? That wasn’t possible and she knew it. Being around him reminded her of those lost dreams, and that simply hurt too much.
“Not just me.” He brushed aside her thanks. “We all worked together.”
Sutton snapped his fingers, leaning back against a fat tree trunk. “Uhm, hello? I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. Where I’m sitting we’re stuck out in the middle of nowhere so the rescue thing still feels iffy.”
Bubbles looked up from spreading out medical supplies to stitch a gash in Sutton’s arm. “Wanna go back?”
“You’re a comedian.” Sutton winced at the press of an antiseptic wipe.
“Not really,” Bubbles said.
“Then why the hell do they call you Bubbles?”
Jose tossed smaller branches and leaves along the tarp to add to the camo effect. “Ever heard of irony?”