Winter Soldier

“I was in the shower.”

“I can smell your soap.” He touched her cheek. “Lemon. You always smell of lemons.”

“Adam, are you all right?”

He dropped his hand to his knee, but not before she felt the faint tremor in his fingers. “I’m fine.”

“I don’t think so. If you were fine you’d be in your bed asleep, not sitting here in the dark.”

“I hate to sleep.” His words were clear but unutterably weary. He was still wearing the scrubs he’d worn in the OR. He smelled of hospital soap and warm skin.

“Why, Adam?” she asked softly. She covered his hand with hers. He had strong hands, with long blunt fingers, a surgeon’s hands. She hadn’t imagined the trembling when he’d touched her. He was shaking all over.

“It all comes back when I sleep,” he said simply. “They’re always in my dreams. Twenty-five years of nightmares. Back home I can deal with it. Here, they’re too close. I hate this place.”

So coming back to Vietnam hadn’t been the healing time for him that it was for some vets. She had suspected as much, and now she was sure. “Did you hope coming back here would make the nightmares go away?”

“I came for B.J. I knew it wouldn’t help. Nothing has helped.”

“A therapist?”

“I’ve talked to the best of them. No one had a clue.”

“Did you tell them the truth? Did you tell them you’re suffering from post-traumatic stress dis—”

His words were like rapier thrusts. “What makes you think it’s post-traumatic stress disorder I’m describing? I wasn’t in combat, Leah. Not like the guys who went before me. I was only here at the end. One hundred and seventeen days to be exact. I never set foot outside Saigon. It wasn’t war then—it was only cleaning up the mess.” He didn’t shake off her touch, but his hand had balled into a fist beneath hers. “Maybe I’m just losing my mind.”

“Are you on medication?”

He gave a harsh bark of laughter. “Pills give me the shakes. I don’t take them. No one wants a surgeon with the shakes mucking around in his brain.”

“You’re shaking now,” she said.

“I know. For hours. It won’t go away this time.” He lifted his left hand, the one she wasn’t holding and held it in front of him. “Children should never die.”

The statement confused her, but she answered the desperation in his tone as much as his words. “All the children are going to be fine—all of them.”

He came to his feet in one smooth movement, pulling her with him. “She didn’t go sour after I left?”

“Ahn Lyn is awake and stable.”

“Ahn Lyn. Is that her name?”

“Yes.”

“When I saw her trapped in that damned van...” He lifted his hands and bracketed her face. “I can live with all the rest—the dreams of the shelling and the sniper attacks and the riots—but I can’t live with the memories of the little ones dying. I can’t.”

The hopelessness in his voice chilled her heart. “Adam, please tell me—”

“No! I don’t want to remember. I want to forget. Help me forget, Leah. Please, help me.” He pulled her into his arms, lowered his mouth to hers, and she tasted his desperation and his desire. “With you in my arms I can forget, at least for a little while.”

She knew some of the grief that gnawed at him. She’d had friends who’d died young. She’d seen children die. She could no more deny him now than she could fly. He pulled the towel from her hair and threaded his fingers through the strands, holding her face still for his kiss. Her mouth opened to the urgency of his. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. She longed to take away some of his pain and sorrow and lose some of her own, which she kept locked away in a very small corner of her heart.

But somehow, in a heartbeat, the kiss changed and became completely sexual, purely a man and a woman and the fire that can consume them. She didn’t let herself think, only feel, and her response urged him to do the same. They were as alone as they could be in the crowded compound. Kaylene would be with the little girl for hours. The others were asleep or keeping watch over patients in the hospital. Adam slid his arm behind her knees and lifted her as though she weighed nothing. She let her head rest on his shoulder and felt the wild beating of his heart against her fingers. She was naked beneath the thin, much-washed cotton of her scrubs; Adam probably was, too. She could feel the heat of his skin, the roughness of hair, the rock solidness of bone and muscle against the side of her breast.

He set her down on her bed and stripped off his shirt. She fumbled with hers and he helped her draw it over her head. Adam’s hand went to the drawstring of his pants. The candle had blown out with their movements; now there was no light except the moon’s glow through the window. She shimmied out of her pants, wanting nothing between them. He stood for a moment looking down at her, all moon shadows, darkness and secrets that could cause her pain, as well. When he lay down beside her and took her in his arms, Leah forgot everything but her desire for him.

His hands cupped her breasts. His lips covered hers and she felt his tongue inside her mouth. She returned the intimate caress with a hunger that matched his. Then Adam kissed her cheeks, her eyelids, the curve of her ear. He splayed his fingers through her hair and held her head still for another mind-emptying kiss. Then he moved his mouth to kiss her throat, her collarbone, the upper swell of her breast. His beard was rough and exciting against the softness of her skin. He took one hardened nipple into his mouth and Leah sucked in a breath, swallowing a moan. She reached up and held his head close to her, feeling pleasure arc along a glittering pathway from her breast to her womb.

She reached down and wrapped her fingers around him. He gasped, then entered her slowly, but when he realized how ready she was for him, he began to move more strongly within her. She met him thrust for thrust, each giving and taking what they needed from the other. His mouth sought hers once more, muffling her moans of pleasure. Finally he climaxed deep inside her, and his release pushed her into her own.

She had never responded to lovemaking this way before, going beyond thought, beyond reason in a realm of pure sensation. It frightened her a little, how well she read his desires, and he hers. But she didn’t want to analyze what had just passed between them. She only wanted to feel. She became aware of the weight of Adam’s body on hers, the fullness of him still buried within her. Then he shifted his weight and lay beside her. Leah listened to the deep evenness of his breathing. He was asleep, and in moments so was she.

ADAM AWOKE from a dreamless sleep with Leah in his arms. No, not dreamless he realized groggily, but sleep not filled with nightmares and the cries of dying children. Instead, his dreams had been filled with images and sensations of the woman beside him. He turned her head gently and kissed her awake. A small, cold corner of his mind told him not to do this, to let her sleep. Making love to her again, unprotected and uncommitted, was as wrong and irresponsible as something a boy Brian’s age might do, but he couldn’t stop himself. The taste and touch and scent of her had become as necessary to him as his next breath.

“Leah.” He whispered her name in the darkness.

“I...I must have fallen asleep,” she said, but her arms came around his neck and she kissed him back.

“So did I.” He wanted to tell her what a gift it was, but was unable to find the words when she was so close, her breasts pressed to his chest, her legs tangled with his.

“I’ve never done that before. I...I never lose myself that way.”

“I never do, either. Thank you, Leah...” He stopped himself from saying my love. He didn’t mean it, and she would know he didn’t. But somehow it sounded right and so he whispered it to himself.

“Are you okay? Really okay?” she asked, and he could feel her searching gaze on his face as her fingers moved to touch his mouth. He turned his head and kissed the inside of her palm.

“I’m fine.” He wasn’t, not really. Already the darkness was pushing at the edges of his thoughts, but when he covered her mouth with his, the darkness receded, and light, along with bits and pieces of longing and dreams that couldn’t be, filled his thoughts. She was drawn to strays, the hurt and injured. If he told her everything he’d kept inside him for so long, she would stay and try to heal him. As much as he craved her solace, he wouldn’t take advantage of her that way.

The kiss was long and hungering, and when it was over he was hard again and she lay panting beside him. “What time is it? I don’t want Kaylene to find us,” she said.

“It’s very, very late, or very early. But still hours before dawn.”

“I don’t want the dawn to come,” she said softly. He knew she didn’t like being in the dark. He knew she was offering him a part of herself with those words, and it humbled him.

“Neither do I.” He pressed himself against her and she opened her legs. This time their lovemaking was not so gentle, and was over more quickly. They didn’t sleep afterward, but lay twined together. Her hands, moving in small circles over his back and shoulders, were almost enough to keep the demons at bay, but not quite, and he took her once more to hold back the darkness. She seemed to sense his desperation. She met him halfway, and they joined and melded and once more found oblivion.

A baby crying somewhere in the compound awakened him, and this time even the warmth of Leah’s arms around him couldn’t hold back the memories....

The Orphan Plane. It was April 4, 1975, a week after his nineteenth birthday; 243 children and sixtytwo adults took off in the C-5A Galaxy cargo plane heading for new homes and families in the United States. He had helped carry the little ones on the plane, strapped them in the seats, two by two by two. An hour later he was helping carry their bodies out of the wreckage of the huge aircraft. It had crashed into a half-flooded rice paddy trying to return to Than Son Nhut with a malfunctioning hydraulic system.

All around him were dead and dying children, and there was nothing he could do about it. One little girl he remembered more than the others. He had found her alive in the wreckage and held her head above the water so she wouldn’t drown. But she couldn’t be saved and had died in his arms. He had watched her die, and then he’d gotten up and gone about doing what he could for the others. In one way or another he had been repeating those motions every day of his life since..

There had been good times, too. After Brian was born he held his son in his arms and thought he might be able to put the past behind him. But when Brian was ten he’d crashed his bicycle head-on into a mailbox. Adam had been out in the yard watching and rushed to his side and cradled his bloodied face in his arms all the way to the hospital. From that day on the nightmares had come back and never gone away.

He looked down at his hand. He was shaking like a leaf. What was worse, he was shaking inside. He couldn’t operate in this condition. Hell, he didn’t even know if he could set foot inside the hospital again. He had to get out of this place or lose what little was left of his reason and his soul. Adam slid Leah’s arms from around his neck. Forced himself not to kiss her again. Pulled on his clothes and walked out into the night.

IT WAS DAYLIGHT when Leah awoke again. There were tears on her cheek, as though she’d been crying in her sleep, but she couldn’t remember any bad dreams. And then she realized she was alone. She dressed in haste and smoothed the rumpled sheets on her bed, drawing the blanket up just as Kaylene entered the room.