“I’ve never smiled so much in my life,” he confessed, knowing he was probably giving away too much, but he didn’t care if he left himself vulnerable. He liked Amaryllis—a hell of a lot. He needed to quit dancing around the issue and just come out and tell her he was very serious and wanted her to go home with him when he went.
Doing the dishes, listening to her exchange banter with Jacy and Marie and including him in their circle as they teased one another made him feel part of her. He knew he was getting the genuine Amaryllis, just as he was giving her the real Malichai.
“You don’t smile very often?” She turned her head to look at him.
He kept looking at the stars, knowing he shouldn’t give her any more, but he couldn’t stop himself. For him, this was real. This woman. His chance. The more he was in her company, the more he was certain she was the one.
“I’m not a man given to smiles, mostly I save them for Wyatt’s little girls and Nonny.”
“That’s so crazy.” She rubbed the pad of her finger over his lips. “You have a beautiful smile. I noticed the first time I ever saw you laugh. Why wouldn’t you want to smile?”
He resisted pulling her finger into his mouth. “I guess I didn’t have a lot to smile about after my drug-addicted mother thought that renting out her little sons to men for sex for drug money was a good idea.”
“Oh my God.” Amaryllis sat up straight, looking horrified. Her eyes shone with unshed tears. “Seriously? She seriously did that? Malichai.”
“I have an older brother. Ezekiel. He’s not all that much older, but he took Mordichai and me and hit the streets with us. We learned to steal food, pick pockets, do all kinds of very bad things.” He flashed a small grin at her. “Ezekiel used his fists to protect us and the territory we claimed. Eventually, he taught us to fight and then made us get schooling. He found two other boys that knew nothing about the streets and brought them in. They’re still with us.”
She lay back down, blinking up at the stars. He could see the little teardrops that looked almost like diamonds on the ends of her lashes.
“That’s just horrible. I don’t know what I thought—or hoped. Maybe that all mothers were like Marie. She’d do anything for Jacy. She would have done anything for her husband. I think he felt the same, yet he died. Life sometimes doesn’t make any sense to me.”
He rolled to his side, propped himself up on his elbow and reached across her to curl his fingers around the nape of her neck and sweep his thumb from her high cheekbone to the corner of her mouth.
“Amaryllis, the last thing I wanted to do was make you sad. I remember being scared, but after a while, I wasn’t scared anymore. I got strong. I learned survival skills. Those skills allow me to do the work I do. I can save other men, good men like Marie’s husband, men who belong home with people who love them. Their wives. Their husbands. Their children. What those lessons taught me so long ago gives me the skills I need now.”
He watched her throat work as she swallowed, nodding as she did so. “Your injury isn’t a small one, Malichai. You hide it very well, but I could see when you were standing too long, like when you did dishes, that it really bothers you. Now, I’ve seen it and I know it’s bad. Please don’t tell me it’s all right, because I know that it isn’t. What really happened to you?”
“I seem to be doing all the talking, honey, and I’m not used to it.” He bunched her hair in his fist and ran thick strands through his fingers. She remained silent, just looking at him with those sapphire eyes that seemed to look right through him.
“I told you, we were getting some very courageous soldiers off a mountain. We’d destroyed most of the enemy’s weapons, the ones capable of taking out helicopters, or at least we thought we did. As we were trying to load the wounded, we came under fire. More fighters had arrived, and they were manning a few of the guns that hadn’t been destroyed. The hell they unloaded on us was murderous. We were exposed and they had enough ammunition to take down the mountain, or at least it felt that way. It was bad. It happens all the time.”
Malichai rolled back over and stared up at the stars again. They were beautiful. Bright. A field of diamonds overhead. He needed that kind of beauty in the world after witnessing so much ugliness. To his shock, she slipped her hand into his, threading her fingers through his as if she were weaving them together, and then she leaned into him, her soft body nearly blanketing his. She didn’t speak, she just waited.
He felt like a fool talking about it. He didn’t want to. He was no hero and he knew it would come off to her that way. Or bragging. He wasn’t bragging. He didn’t want to even think about it. He had no choice. In order for the wounded to be brought to the helicopter rendezvous safely, he’d had to clear those bunkers and get rid of the weapons.
“I charged straight into the gunfire.” He’d used his enhanced speed, going low and then high. “The bombardment of gunfire was horrendous, never stopping, and I felt bullets whipping around me, some so close they ripped my clothing and in a few cases skin.”
He touched his arm without thinking. “Sometimes I can still hear that sound. It was like continuous thunder rolling right over top of me. Worse.” He shook his head. “It was bad.”
“Keep going.”
If anyone else had asked him, he would have told them to go to hell. “I tossed grenade after grenade into the bunker while the enemy continued to fire at me until the grenades exploded. Some of the enemy must have split up, spread out and went to the other bunkers we thought we’d destroyed in the middle of the night. Or they brought weapons and ammunition with them. Who knows? In any case, they began firing at me too.”
She sat up and turned around to face him, tucking her legs tailor-fashion, but still holding his hand. Her eyes shone like twin jewels, never leaving his face.
“The smell of blood and death is difficult to get out of one’s nose. The images of blood and shrapnel and what’s done to a human being are equally as bad to purge. I had to go into that mess because the firepower coming from the second bunker was a steady stream. I used the still-intact mortar gun and immediately engaged the enemy. I was lucky because Rubin was there with his rifle and he’s damn good. He picked off a couple of them.”
He fell silent, rubbing his thigh without thinking.
“Malichai?” She said his name gently. “Tell me what happened.”
He shrugged. “Everything went quiet and I stepped out to check the bunkers, to make certain they were clear so the wounded could be loaded into the helicopter.” He shook his head, remembering the silence. The smell of gunpowder, of blood. Even of death. The wind was blowing, he remembered it on his face.
He almost hadn’t heard the sound of the machine gun as it spat out angry bullets, all with his name on them. “I don’t know how many times I was hit, but it felt like a dozen, maybe more. All up and down my leg, from my calf to my thigh. I knew I was a dead man. I went to the ground. The bones in my leg were shattered. There was so much blood. I had field dressings with me, and I slapped them on as fast as I could in order to try to stop the bleeding.”
He couldn’t tell her what those field dressings were or that second-generation Zenith had saved his life.