I brushed the dust from my hands onto my already too dirty cargo capris, well aware that I looked like I’d been on the dig site all day. “God, I’m a mess,” I said, trying to think of something to say that wasn’t I’m sorry, I’ll do whatever you want, move wherever you want to, lose myself to support your crazy need for special ops stuff, just love me. It was so tempting to say, to heal the rift between us, but it would be shoving a Band-Aid on an arterial bleed.
“You’re perfect,” he said softly, tucking a sweat-curled strand of hair behind my ear. “Perfect and exquisitely beautiful.”
I barely stopped myself from kissing his hand as it skimmed down my face, his thumb dangerously close to my lips. “I can’t believe you’re really here.”
He smiled, and my heart skipped. “I’m sorry it took so long. I got to the airport about ten minutes too late. You’d already taken off, and then I had to go through all the redeployment stuff, and we just now got leave.”
And I think I might have melted. “You came after me at the airport?”
He nodded. “Yeah, well, I realized that everything we’re fighting about…none of it matters if I lose you.”
“But aren’t you supposed to be at SOAR assessment?”
He shook his head. “I declined. I’m not assessing.”
My chest felt like every rainbow in the world had crammed itself in there. “You did? You’re not?”
“I never really wanted it. I applied because it was what Will wanted, and I was going to talk about it with you when I got home. But then you said you were giving up all this”—he gestured to the ruins around us—“for me, and I couldn’t let you do it. I couldn’t let your career, your dream, get run over, not even for our relationship. You’ve already given up so much for me. So when you felt like you had to choose, I did the only thing I could think of—I took myself out of that equation. I’m so sorry. You deserved to make the choice.”
“I would always choose you.”
“I know.” He cupped my face in his hand and stepped closer, bringing our bodies to a near-touch. The small distance was sanity and ache all in one. “We’ve always said it’s you and me against the world, and these last few months, we’ve been letting the world win because we’ve been divided. You were right. I’ve been making decisions about my future based on guilt, while your future widened into this world you’ve worked so hard for. I got caught up in this idea that I had to be your foundation, and I was…cracked. Then in trying to fix myself, I forgot that what we’re built on isn’t just you and isn’t just me. It’s both of us. We’re strong because we carry each other. We build our relationship on equal ground, and I’m so sorry that I lost sight of that. It’s unforgivable.”
“Nothing is unforgivable. You weren’t trying to hurt me. I know you never would. You were trying to be a better man for me, but you have to know that you’re already the best. Even when you were wounded, and bleeding, and a little broken, you were…you are mine. There’s no one else for me.”
His eyebrows lowered with his voice. “I’m sorry I ever made you doubt it. Can I fix this? Did…” He sucked in a shaky breath. “Am I too late?”
“I’d wait forever for you,” I answered, slipping my ring out of my shirt on its chain to show him. “I love you. I have always loved you, and I will always love you. These last few months have sucked, but that’s what marriage is, right? For better, for worse? So maybe we get the worse out of the way now. There’s nothing you can say or do that could push me far enough away that I would stop loving you. I was…I am willing to wait as long as you need, but I’ll never give up on us, Josh. Whether I’m in Turkey, or you’re in Afghanistan, or we’re both at home, my heart is always with you.”
He glanced down at the ring and back to my face. My breath caught at the love that poured out of his eyes.
“I’ll put it back on, if you want. I never emotionally took it off. I’m sorry I even threatened it. It was childish, and untrue.”
Josh looked over my shoulder at the mosaic I was uncovering. “That’s lasted thousands of years under all this dirt?”
A smile tugged at my lips. “Yes. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
His eyes dropped to my lips. “Yes. And there’s no way I’m letting you ruin it with a piece of jewelry. Besides, I don’t need a ring on your hand to know that you’re mine.”
Josh brushed my mouth in a sweet kiss. Our lips lingered as our breaths mingled, restoring gravity to our world in the space of a heartbeat. I leaned into him and brought my hand to his neck, savoring the warmth of his skin. He deepened the kiss, and I moaned my approval, the sound echoing off the stone walls.
There was nothing in the world that compared to kissing Josh. Except maybe being kissed by Josh. He used his lips to tell me he loved me, the strokes of his tongue against mine to say how much he’d missed me, missed us.
I answered in kind, forgetting everything around me and abandoning all logical thought. There in his arms, standing in the middle of a room that was thousands of years old, in a foreign country thousands of miles from the States, I was home.
This was all that mattered.
Need spiraled through my nerves, tightening in my stomach as Josh’s grip turned more possessive, more demanding. It had been so long, and I was starved for his touch.