Page 107 of Iron Shield
It wasn’t working.
She set down the knife. “You just assumed I’d stay, without ever asking?”
The question hovered between them with more weight than she’d intended. She heard it after it was out, heard all the things she hadn’t said directly but that had been building since the night she’d climbed into his bed because her body knew it before her heart ever caught up.
Rome held her gaze for a moment.
Then he pushed off the doorframe and crossed to her. She met him halfway without thinking about it, her arms going around his waist and her face turning into his chest.
He pulled her in with both arms and held her there.
“I told Cannon,” he said, low against her hair, “that if I found you I was never letting you go.”
She stilled against him. Then she tipped her head to look at him. “In those words?”
He nodded.
“Out loud?”
He nodded again, eyes glimmering with amusement and more.
“In front of witnesses?”
“Yes.”
Her chest ached with all the things she felt for him.
She thought about the pass. The rock face, the man with the rifle, and underneath all of it—even then, even in the middle of that—the awareness that Rome was out there somewhere moving toward her.
She hadn’t doubted it for a second, and she understood now that the certainty had come from him.
From the man standing in front of her who had ordered her copper pots after one afternoon in an abandoned kitchen and told his commanding officer out loud that he wasn’t letting her go.
She reached up and cupped his angular jaw.
“I told Jolie I didn’t know if I’d recognize a good man,” she said quietly. “That I’d dated so many wrong ones I might not know the difference.”
He waited.
“I was wrong,” she said.
Emotion flickered across his expression. After a long heartbeat, he turned his face into her palm for just a second and pressed his lips to it.
Then he pulled her back against his chest and she slipped her arms around him breathed in the scent of the man she needed as much as air.
Silence throbbed between them for a heartbeat.
Rome brushed his lips over her hair. “I love you, Stina.”
His voice was low, his words simple, as if he’d been carrying them in his heart and waiting for the perfect moment to share them with her.
She issued a low cry and surged onto tiptoe. Against his mouth, she said, “I love you too, Jack Rome. So very much.”
All talk faded to the brushing of lips and tongues as they shared an endless kiss.
When they pulled back, they shared a smile. But she was still tense. Why?
Then it hit her.
