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

head. The man had what polite company called issues.
    She didn’t flinch when Giles told everyone to take their seats. But then she scanned the crowd and her gaze landed for a moment too long on him. He refused to look away, taking in the single lock of hair brushing her forehead. The indentation of her lip as she chewed it.
    Behind her professionally bland expression, he saw a flash of uncertainty. This was new for her, he realized. She might go toe-to-toe with a disgruntled sergeant in her own clinic, but right then she was facing an entire room of them. It would be disconcerting to a seasoned veteran, let alone a freshly minted army doc. He wondered if this was her first time outside of the sanctity of the hospital walls. If she’d never been around knuckle draggers before, how could she possibly understand the world that Reza’s soldiers were describing?
    If she’d never smelt the burned sulfur of spent ammunition, how could she explain away a nightmare of burning cloth and charred flesh? If she’d never been blown up, how could she possibly understand the momentary flashback between the boom of the thunder and the crack of the lightning and the gut-clenching terror as you tried to figure out if the explosion was an imminent threat or not.
    Her gaze flickered back to him. An instance of acknowledgment and then it was gone. But in that moment, Reza knew they were worlds apart and that nothing would ever span that distance. He knew war. He’d lived it.
    She knew nothing but talk of war.
    As she shifted her notes, a quiet revelation whispered across Reza’s skin. She was innocent. She truly thought she could make a difference.
    She wasn’t slick-sleeved because she sought to avoid the war. She was running toward the conflict in her own way—trying to help the soldiers she admired and respected.
    As she lifted her gaze and faced a room of roughneck infantry and armor officers and sergeants, he realized that she would never again be the same. Even as she sought to understand the war and what it had done to him, to his men, he knew she’d barely touched on their darkest memories and fears. Her innocence would be tainted today. Just by being around them, some of the war would leave a smudge on her innocence.
    He should have felt some bitter satisfaction that she would no longer be as sanctimonious if she lived through the war he’d fought. That she would descend to his level, would no longer be unblemished. But watching her shuffle her papers, he felt something new sidle up against his heart. The unfamiliar urge to protect: the fleeting hope that she would never face the war as he’d lived it.
    But she wasn’t his. Not his to protect, not his to keep safe.
    Reza was no white knight, charging into battle to defend his lady’s honor. No, never that. But as he watched Emily lift her chin and square off with a group of roughneck infantrymen, he knew she would never be the same after today.
    And neither would he.
    *  *  *
    Emily shifted her notes and grasped a pen in her right hand, flicking the cap on and off. It was a nervous habit that had driven her father insane but today of all days, she was allowed. The blatant hostility from the room full of men was…well, “disconcerting” was too light a word.
    She was nervous. Nervous but not afraid. There was a difference. And after her weekend of pulling double shifts in the ER, hers was a no-fail mission.
    Something was drastically wrong at Fort Hood and these men were key to helping figure it out. They were the ones who knew their soldiers the best. They were the ones who could identify the soldiers on edge before she could.
    They could save lives. But they had to trust that the system would work, and if her previous conversations with Reza were an indicator, there wasn’t a lot of love lost between the men in the ranks and the docs in her office.
    Having so many eyes on her at once was unsettling at best. And when you considered what she was there to talk to them