be back at 0600.”
“No, you won’t. We’re not operating today, remember? It’s Thanksgiving. Father Gerard and the regular staff will look after the children. Now go. Sleep till noon. All afternoon if you want. I’ll save a drumstick for you.”
Leah crossed the darkened compound with the aid of a pocket-size flashlight. In her room she lit a candle, grabbed a towel and a clean set of scrubs and headed for the showers. The water was cool, so she didn’t linger beneath the spray. She dressed hurriedly and wrapped a towel around her head, then headed back to her room. She was so tired she could barely stand, and no wonder; she’d been awake for more than twenty hours. But even though she was exhausted she knew she wouldn’t sleep. Not until she found Adam and assured herself he was all right.
He had barely let Ahn Lyn out of his sight from the moment she was lifted from the overturned van until the moment she’d opened her eyes in the tiny, ill-lit hospital room. Tests had determined that the injury to her neck was less severe than Adam had first feared. Surgery on her spinal column wouldn’t be required, but he had remained in the OR to assist the orthopedic surgeon in the repair of her shattered left leg. He’d stayed by her bedside with Leah until she’d awakened, and then he’d disappeared.
She opened the door to the screened porch fronting the women’s lodgings and stepped inside. The dim circle of light from her flashlight picked out the toe of a man’s running shoe. She sucked in her breath.
“Don’t scream, Leah. It’s me.” The voice was low and rough and male, the words quietly spoken.
She let her breath out in a rush. “Adam?”
He lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the beam of her flashlight. Leah switched it off. The moon was riding low among the clouds, but the candlelight spilling from the window outlined Adam sitting with his back against the wall, his legs drawn up to his chest. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
She dropped to her knees beside him. “Where have you been?”
“Walking. I saw the light in your window, but you weren’t here.”
“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
