His head immediately came up, his eyes flaring. “What the hell?” He stared down at her, obviously back to his normal, taciturn self. “Karina? What are you doing?”
She bit back a giggle because she wasn’t sure how he thought she’d managed to get underneath him to “do” something. “Welcome back to the real world, Brighton. That was a hell of a dream you were having.”
He shook his head and finally managed to roll off her. “I was dreaming about something that happened a while back.” He shoved a hand across his hair. “Did I hurt you?”
Karina moved toward him. It was instinctive, she told herself. She comforted people and Derek was obviously in need. It had nothing to do with how much she wanted to put her hands on him again, how much she longed to be close to him. “You didn’t hurt me, Derek. I’m fine.”
She placed a hand on his shoulder, but he was on his feet in an instant, looking down on her, his eyes narrowed. “You’re just lucky. You can’t be anywhere near me when I get into that state. I could have hurt you. You have no fucking idea what goes through my head.”
Oh, she’d heard enough, knew enough about his history to guess. “You were going to put your hand across my mouth to keep me quiet, Brighton. It wasn’t exactly a vicious attack.”
His jaw hardened, every word coming out of his mouth in a harsh grind. “So you thought it would be a good idea to try to get some? What the fuck was that, Karina? If you want a little cock, all you have to do is ask. I already told you I’m more than willing to fuck you while we’re on the case. But I don’t like being manipulated.”
Oh, she was done with him. “You know what, Brighton? Screw you. The next time I hear you crying out in the middle of the night, I’ll ignore it and let you stay wherever the hell it is you go. I was trying to help you.”
“By having sex with me? You really know how to help a guy.”
He was an ass. She got off the floor and got into his space. He needed to understand that he couldn’t intimidate her. “Well, I had two choices in how to deal with you. I could kiss you and hope that brought you out of it because I’m betting Jones wasn’t someone you would exchange saliva with, or I could have brought my knee up and made sure you could taste your own semen. I know which one I’ll pick next time.”
She turned to go, but he gripped her wrist. “I’m not done.”
With two sharp twists, she was out of his hold. “I am. Good night, Brighton. Sweet dreams.”
She slammed the door between them and immediately the tears started. She turned and put her back to the door, sliding down. There was zero point in getting back in bed. She wouldn’t sleep.
He was such a bastard. Screw him. She didn’t need him. She was perfectly fine on her own. She would keep the door closed between them and in the morning they would go right back to being somewhat chilly strangers. That was the only way to deal with him.
She would ignore the heat between them because he couldn’t possibly feel it. If he felt it, he would be kinder, want more from her. He wouldn’t bat her away like a wounded bear.
“It was Afghanistan.” His voice was quiet, but she could easily hear him through the door. She felt it the minute he put his back to the door on his side.
She didn’t care. Not a bit. Nope. She didn’t give a shit that he’d been in Afghanistan and served his country and apparently still had nightmares about it. “Did you get pinned down?”
Yes, she was just a little curious. No more than that.
There was a long sigh from the other side of the door. “Yeah. We were close-quarters fighting. We got into a firefight in Fallujah and me and Jones got cut off from the rest of the team. You got to understand. The streets are really narrow and when your adrenaline is up, you just kind of react. It was a part of the city we hadn’t been in before. Taliban held.”
“So you were surrounded?”
“Not exactly. It was just the two of us and he’d taken some fire. I had to get him out of there. I thought I remembered the way back, but I just took us deeper in.”
She closed her eyes, not wanting to think about how horrifying that must have been. On the run without the rest of his team, Brighton would have felt a deep sense of responsibility for Jones. “How bad off was your teammate?”
“He’d taken a couple to his right leg. By the time we could stop, he was bleeding pretty freely. I found an abandoned building and we slipped inside. It was rat infested, a real pit, but I didn’t have another option. I had to stop the bleeding.”
“And keep him quiet. He was probably in a lot of pain,” she guessed.