has to be hard on you, too.”
Gabe snorted. “Hell, I’m stateside. What’s gonna happen to me? Get bit by a pissed-off rattler because I ran too close to the manzanita bush he was resting under? Find a scorpion in my sleeping bag and get stung?”
Bay shook her head, laughing. “God, you make my day, Griffin.”
How badly Gabe wanted to reach out and simply touch her flushed cheek, kiss her lips, feel Bay lean into him, her arms sliding around his neck. His throat tightened with those intense memories.
“I’m glad I do,” he said. “I want to see you smiling and happy over there.” He wondered if she felt him come to her at night when she slept.
“You make me feel happy,” she whispered, losing her smile. “I’m busy, so it takes my head out of missing you so much.”
“You’re not too busy, are you?” Gabe demanded, frowning. Bay had promised him to not wear herself out like she had before.
Holding up her hands, she said, “I’ve been a good girl. Reza is here, and he’s like my guard dog, taking your place. He meets me at my house every morning, and then we have MREs at HQ. Every morning, he sizes me up. ‘Baylee, you have shadows under your eyes. Baylee, you look thinner. Baylee, aren’t you eating enough?’” She smiled a little. “He’s a miniature you, Gabe. Trust me on that one.”
“Tell him thank you from me. That’s a stroke of luck Reza is there with you. For how long?” More relief tunneled through Gabe. He’d worked with Reza before, and the man was solid gold.
“Another two weeks. He’s busy showing the team new rat lines up in the hills and mountains above our village.”
“He’s a damned good person.”
“He’s someone I can confide in. I can trust him with my secrets.” She gave him a teasing look.
She was such an imp, but how he loved her. “Things you should be telling me instead?”
“Ohhhh, I keep it aboveboard,” she promised, her lips curving more. “But I have active dreams at night. Can’t talk to anyone about them, however, and you aren’t here to tell them to....”
Gabe grinned and chuckled. His spirits lifted just hearing her voice, seeing her face and making sure she was really all right. He couldn’t ask her details about anything; that was forbidden. Top secret was exactly that. “I sent you a care package. You should be getting it soon.”
“Ohhh, surprises?”
“Yeah, surprises just for you. I know how much you love them.”
“Listen, do me a favor? Can you go to some of the NGOs that the SEALs work with? This village is so poor, Gabe. All the kids need shoes. Could you check into this when you get a chance? I’d really like to have about seventy pairs. The children are all running around barefoot.”
He nodded. “Can do,” he said, thinking that Bay, as usual, was watching out for the children. She was going to be one incredible mother someday. And she would be carrying his child. His lower body burned with need for her.
Bay looked at the watch on her wrist. “My time’s up. I got two SEALs standing in line waiting to talk to their loved ones, so I’m outta here, Shark Man.”
He grinned, wanting more time with her. Wanting to capture her laughter and replay it so he could feel her near him. “Okay, next week?”
“Maybe. I’ll try as often as I can.” Bay smiled sweetly, touched her heart with her hand and then extended her hand toward him. “I love you....”
He sat there and returned the hand signal to her. A lump formed in his throat. “I love you, too, baby. Stay safe out there....”
The screen went blank. Gabe sat there feeling euphoric and, at the same time, horrible dread. His emotions were up and down like a roller coaster. Never before had he experienced something as intense as his love for Bay. One of the SEAL wives who found out Bay was overseas had told him the same thing. There wasn’t a day that went by when she didn’t feel abject terror to dizzying joy, too. It was just part of a human’s emotional makeup when their loved one was overseas and in harm’s way.
Rubbing his chest, Gabe scowled, hating how emotional he’d become since Bay had left. No other woman had ever affected him like that. He sighed. Well, the tables were turned, weren’t they? Instead of the man going overseas into combat, the woman went instead. And he was the one left home to do the worrying and the not knowing. Getting up, he ran his fingers through his hair in frustration.
Gabe went into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. Leaning his hips against the counter, he stared through the quiet condo. When Bay had been here, the place filled him with warmth, bubbling vitality and life. Now, it was sterile, gray and damned depressing to him. He sipped the coffee, his brows knitted. Bay was in what was considered a “hot” valley, a place where frequent, ongoing clashes with the Taliban were happening all the time. It didn’t help him sleep at night. Dammit, anyway. If only she’d been assigned to a SEAL team, he’d have breathed a helluva lot easier. She was in a bad place with an enemy who hated Americans with a fanatical passion.
When he’d talked with Chief Phillips a week earlier, the SEAL had been blunt about Bay’s location.
“It’s a damn snake pit. Mustafa Khogani, cousin to Sangar Khogani, that a SEAL sniper team just took out last year, is heading up the Hill tribe efforts to put new rat lines through that Shinwari tribe valley. Mustafa is a sick son of a bitch.”
“Aren’t they all?”
“This guy is real special,” Phillips had snarled. “He sweeps down on a Shinwari village, kidnapping little boys and girls between six and twelve years old. He’s a sex slave trader. Some of our teams have found these children dead, dropped like garbage along rat-line trails a few days after they had been kidnapped. They were children who were badly injured during the kidnapping. The bastard is killing these children, not giving them medical aid to survive. We want this monster.”
A cold shiver had moved up Gabe’s spine as he’d heard Phillips’s icy rage. “I wouldn’t want to find one of those children,” he’d admitted, his voice hoarse. It would be the last thing he’d want to do—discover a dead child on some trail out in the middle of nowhere.
“It’s upsetting the platoon plenty. A lot of these guys are married and have children themselves. You can imagine them stumbling upon one of Khogani’s victims. Mustafa is a sociopath. He doesn’t care. He just discards them, keeping the healthy, uninjured children and then selling them to the highest bidder once they get them across the Pakistan border.”
“Jesus,” Gabe had whispered, rubbing his face. He couldn’t imagine the terror and grief of the Afghan parents. Worse, discovering their young son or daughter was found dead. Even more sorrow-compounding, finding out how the child had suffered and died. Gabe had seen the ruthless brutality in the Taliban ranks for too long, but this was new. And horrifying. “Can’t you get a sniper team tracking that bastard?”
“That’s what we’re doing. We’re coordinating a team with the SF captain over in that valley. That’s the one Bay is assigned to. The captain came crawling over here last week pleading, hands out, begging us to interfere and provide him a SEAL sniper
