All for You by Jessica Scott Page A

bear. Soothes my PTSD.”
    She tipped her head and studied him, trying to figure out what kind of man would admit to a disorder that held such a stigma. The edge of his lips curled into a faint smile. “It was a joke, ma’am,” he said softly.
    “Emily,” she whispered. She swallowed, locking her eyes with his. “My name is Emily.”
    “Emily.” Her name a caress on his lips. A deep, rumbling sound, deep in his chest.
    She couldn’t look away from the dark intensity of his eyes. The shadows she saw there were deep, etched into the creases around his eyes. There was something compelling about the man. It went beyond the physical power. Beyond the broad shoulders and wide chest and rough hands.
    He’d been driven hard his entire career, she realized. Like an old war horse, ridden into battle again and again. A man who’d gone to war so many times, he was convinced he needed it. He loved it.
    She looked at him and wondered if he’d ever simply stopped the carousel and tried to get off. The scars on the backs of his hands, the lines around his eyes, suggested otherwise.
    “Sometimes, the jokes you guys tell throw me off,” she admitted.
    “Black humor. It’s a valuable life skill.” His lips twitched. “Now then, would you like to learn how to put your gear together?”
    And just as abruptly, the man she saw behind those eyes was gone, replaced by the surly sergeant determined to teach her how to put her “kit” together.
    *  *  *
    Her naiveté should have pissed him off. Part of him was pissed that the prim and proper little captain would try to crawl inside his head. He reminded himself that she’d only asked a simple question, a question that any cherry who hadn’t deployed asked.
    “Your ammo pouches go here,” he said. He slipped the thick strap through its slot on the body armor.
    She watched what he did, her quick gaze taking in every movement. “What is it like,” she asked softly.
    Questions like that haunted him because he didn’t know how to answer. “Which part,” he asked.
    “Deploying.”
    He swallowed. How to tell her about the long hours of boredom, the days with shitty rations and no place to sleep but on the back of his truck.
    “It sucks,” he said. “There’s not a lot of ways to kill the time.”
    “How do you pass the time?” she asked.
    He paused, figuring she didn’t need to know that his first few weeks deployed were always spent puking his guts up and generally trying to hide the crazy. Maybe this time would be different. Maybe this time, he’d beat the seductive addiction that called to him every time he’d managed to make it home. “I don’t have a lot of free time. Soldiers take up a lot of it.” He slid a pouch meant for grenades in the space that would cover her heart. “And this is a good place for a flashlight or a head lamp.”
    “You’ve lost a lot of friends.” It wasn’t a question. He felt the tingling of anxiety tightening against his heart.
    “Yes.” Please don’t ask if I’ve killed someone. Because he couldn’t bear to see the flicker in her eyes. The silent judgment.
    He closed his eyes as the sleeping demon inside him surged and thrashed, sparked to life by the memory of a question asked far too often with no regard to the weight of the words.
    As though killing was something he did for fun. Like some kind of real life video game where the person on the business end of an M4 got to hit the reset button and come back to fight another day.
    Like it didn’t claim a piece of your soul each time you had to decide between the man on the end of that front sight post and your boys. It wasn’t a hard decision.
    Until it was.
    “Where’d you go just then?” Her voice penetrated the melancholic introspection. He’d become such a buzz kill. He needed to go have a stiff drink to chase the memories back to the dark corner where he normally kept them.
    Except he didn’t drink anymore. He shook his head, avoiding her gaze. “Sorry. Got