Read Online All for You by Jessica Scott - Free Book Online Page A

never forgot.
    And Reza’s arms bore the tributes to his lost friends.
    “You okay?” Teague’s words cut through Reza’s ragged thoughts.
    Reza shifted, scanning the room, shoving the emotions aside. Stuffing them down as he started taking head count.
    Wisniak walked in, laughing with one of his buddies. He’d gotten out of the hospital last week and had been doing, oddly enough, really well, at least as far as Reza could tell. The wonders of modern medicine apparently had worked their magic for him.
    More than once, Reza had almost approached him. Asked him if he was doing okay. But the marks on his arms burned, the pain in his soul a raging inferno, reminding him that he’d spent days chasing Wisniak around before he’d been committed to the fifth floor.
    Days that he should have been leading his boys through battle drills. He hadn’t approached. Hadn’t been able to get past how much time the kid had taken from Reza training his boys, just to make sure that Wisniak didn’t kill himself.
    He’d lost too many men to the war. He didn’t trust the mental health docs to get it right. Not with Wisniak, not with anyone. The irritation smothered any concern over loyalty or lack thereof.
    Emily’s taunt burned in his ears. That’s a stunning lack of loyalty.
    He had loyalty. To the men he would take downrange again. It bugged the living hell out of him that he couldn’t get Emily’s taunt out of his head even after that moment at Talarico’s . He didn’t do stoic introspection and the fact that she’d poked at him pissed him off.
    He cared about all of his soldiers. It was simply that Wisniak wasn’t one of them. He took from the team; he wasn’t part of it.
    On the nights when he’d lain awake, his thoughts tumbling through time and space, chasing elusive sleep, he argued with her. Told her that some people needed more help than others. That “team” was something Emily didn’t understand. Couldn’t. With her neat hands and proper hair, he’d be willing to bet she’d never gone a day without a shower, let alone held someone while they bled out.
    His breath caught in his throat as the woman he spent many nights arguing with in his head walked into the front of the classroom.
    Shit. He’d been told this was a sensing session—a group hug about everything the leadership thought was wrong.
    This was going to be so much worse.
    Clearing his throat, he slouched down in his chair in the back of the room and wondered if he could sneak out without the sergeant major seeing him. “Is the shoot house still on for tomorrow? I want to blow some shit up.”
    Teague shifted in his seat, slipping his cell phone into his jacket shoulder pocket. “As far as I know. Why?”
    “Haven’t you heard? Weapons are therapeutic.”
    Teague chuckled darkly. “Yeah, I think I learned that somewhere on the road between Baghdad and Mosul.”
    Sergeant Major Giles walked to the front of the room and some enterprising soul had the insight to call “At Ease.” Everyone shot to their feet in a show of respect for the senior enlisted man. Reza shifted behind a skinny lieutenant, not wanting her to see him. Not sure what he’d say or do if she did. He wasn’t hiding, per se, so much as he was simply using available terrain to conceal his position.
    It wasn’t like they’d slept together. They’d simply chatted at the bar.
    “All right, listen up. Give Captain Lindberg your undivided attention. No cell phones. No leaving. No interrupting. You will listen to what she has to say and you will learn something if I have to shove it up your ass.”
    Emily’s eyes widened but otherwise her expression remained neutral. There was that backbone again. Reza suppressed a chuckle at Emily’s stoicism. She kept her face carefully blank as she listened to the sergeant major. Obviously, she was not used to crazy, steely-eyed killers in the clinic. He doubted there was enough medication in the entire Darnall pharmacy to shrink Giles’s