Page 111

That was apparently another thing he was learning tonight.

It doesn’t mean you owe her your story, though. You put Iraq behind you. You don’t have to walk through it again.

But underneath that, a smaller voice he didn’t much like the sound of said you have to if you want to make this work with Jodie.

And by God, he did want to make it work. He’d do anything to be with her for the rest of his life. He knew that now. He loved her. He wasn’t going to let his pride—or his shame—break what they’d already built together.

Mac stretched his legs out in front of him and leaned back on his hands. The nylon pressed cool against his palms.

“Twenty-nineteen,” he said. “Northern Iraq.”

Jodie’s eyebrows went up a fraction. “Iraq.”

“My file didn’t say where I was deployed?”

“No. I made some guesses.” She waved her hand like she was shooing a fly. “Somewhere French-speaking and hot. Africa. You said French came in handy on deployments and then you got a look on your face.”

“French came in handy, all right. Just not there.” He rubbed his thumb along the seam of the sleeping bag. “No. Iraq. Last rotation. I was with CANSOF by then.”

“Special operations?”

“Special operations,” he confirmed, the way he might have said accounting. “I’d started out regular infantry. Patricias, out of Edmonton. Went to Kandahar in 2010 as a nineteen-year-old with a rifle and absolutely no idea what I was doing. Then I did selection in my twenties and ended up somewhere else entirely.”

“And in Iraq you were…?”

“Training. Advising.” He shrugged one shoulder. “We weren’t doing the fighting. We were teaching the people who were.”

Jodie pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them, settling in the way he’d seen her do when somebody was telling her a good story. He’d watched her do it with her friends back home and with half a dozen volunteers who’d just needed to be heard.

She’s doing it to me now.

He wasn’t sure whether that felt good or whether it felt like being handled, and the fact that he couldn’t tell the difference told him something about his own state of mind that he didn’t care to examine closely at the moment.

“I was twenty-nine,” he said instead. “Twelve years in. I was good at it, Jodie. I want you to know that part. I wasn’t some kid who didn’t know his limits.”

“I never thought that.”

“I did.” He looked at her. “For a long time.”

Mac swallowed, then continued. “It was summer. You don’t…” He chewed the inside of his cheek, puzzling out how to explain it. “You’ve been hot before.” He scoffed. “Heck, today was a scorcher. Everybody was hot. This isn’t the same thing. It’s a different animal. The air comes off the ground at you. You’re carrying sixty, seventy pounds, you’ve got plates on, long sleeves, gloves, and there’s no shade anywhere, not for kilometers. And you’ve got this crew looking at you.”

“How many?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Mac.”

“A dozen or so.” He exhaled. “Point is, they were taking their standard off me. That’s the job. You don’t tell them how to do it, you show them, and whatever you do is the floor. If I drink, they drink. If I slow down, we’re all slowing down.”

Jodie was watching him steadily.

“We had a long movement that day. I’d been sick most of that week—some stomach thing half the camp was passing around. The medic asked if I was good to go.” He huffed out a breath. “I said I was fine.”

“Of course you did.” She tilted her head. “And a movement is…?”

“Walking.” The corner of his mouth tugged. “Fancy word for walking a long way with too much on your back.”

“How long?”