She cleaned the wound, got a better bandage and finished patching him up.
Then she kept...touching him.
Why was touching him such an addiction to her? Warm skin, hard muscles.
“Don’t, Sydney.” His warning.
A warning that came too late for her.
She stared at his face. At his lips. She’d heard another woman once say that Gunner had cruel lips. Tight. Hard. She’d never found them to be cruel. She’d never found him to be cruel at all. Controlled and dangerous, yes. Cruel?
Not Gunner.
“Your lip is busted.” She reached for another cloth, blotted the blood away. “You didn’t even try to defend yourself.”
Voices rose and fell from the outer room. Logan and Cale, questioning Slade.
Slade.
For months, she’d dreamed of him being found alive. Of him coming home to her. And she was glad, so glad, that he’d been rescued. She would have risked her life a dozen times to get him out of that camp.
But...
She would also risk her life a dozen times—gladly—for Gunner.
That wasn’t right, was it? A woman shouldn’t feel so torn between two men.
A man she’d once said she’d marry.
And a man...a man who had carried her through the darkness. A man who made her ache, even now, for him.
The door she’d shut banged open against the wall. “Sydney!”
Slade’s voice.
“Get away from him,” Slade ordered.
She blinked and realized that, yes, she was pretty much draped over Gunner. Her hands were on him, and he—he wasn’t touching her with his hands. His hands had flattened against the bed.
Slowly, she eased back and stood on her feet, deliberately positioning herself near the bed. Near Gunner.
“Did you get the bullet?” Logan asked her, voice cautious.
Sydney nodded. “He’s good now.”
“No, he’s not!” Slade lunged forward, and Cale actually had to grab him and hold him back. Slade had been going forward with his hands clenched into fists and rage blazing in his eyes. “He’s a bastard who deserves to suffer!”
“He just saved you,” Logan said, putting his body right in front of Slade’s. “Listen, I understand that you’ve been through hell—”
Slade’s brittle laughter broke through his words. “You understand nothing. You hear me? Nothing! You think that guy over there is your friend? That you can trust him? Hell, no, you can’t. He’ll turn on you, just like he turned on me.” Spittle flew from his mouth.
Gunner eased from the bed. He was shirtless but still wearing his pants and boots.
His body brushed by Sydney’s as he headed toward Slade.
“Yeah, yeah, come on!” Slade dared him. “Fight me like a man. Take me on...and don’t just leave me to rot in a jungle like you did before!”
Leave me to rot...
“He didn’t!” Sydney cried out, shaking her head. “Slade, we thought you were dead! That was the only reason we left. If we’d known the truth, we would never have left you in that jungle.”
His twisted grin called her words a lie. “He knew.”
What?
Slade pulled away from Cale and pointed one shaking finger at Gunner. “That bastard, my brother, knew.”
Sydney shook her head.
Gunner just stared back at Slade.
“It’s easy enough to tell if a man’s breathing or not,” Slade continued. “Especially for someone with Gunner’s special training.”
Sydney took a step forward. “We both thought you were dead! We were in a firefight. You went down, and there was so much blood...”
Slade yanked open his shirt, revealed the scars on his chest. She knew those marks. Bullet wounds. “I was down, not dead.” Then he looked back up at Gunner. “But you were hoping I’d die, right? Just leave me to bleed out, and that way, you never had to get your hands dirty.”
This was crazy.
She met Logan’s stare. Logan looked...angry? But guarded. Why? He was Gunner’s friend. He knew better than to believe these accusations. They all knew better. “You’re traumatized,” she told Slade. “Not thinking clearly. When we get back to the States, everything will be—”
“He wanted you.”
The words fell heavily into the room.
Gunner tensed. She saw the muscles of his chest and shoulders tighten.
She cleared her throat. “I—I know things are confusing for you, Slade.” Two years of hell and pain. “But Gunner loves you. He would never have left you if he’d known—”
“He. Wanted. You.”
Slade’s blazing stare seemed to scorch her skin with his rage.
Sydney shook her head.
“I was in his way,” Slade said. His eyes were bloodshot. Wild. “So he saw a way to take me out.”
“This is crazy! We were in Peru back then to save you. Your plane went down. We came in to get you out! Why come in at all if we just wanted to leave you to die?” Surely he’d realize that his words didn’t make sense. He’d start to understand, to see reason.
But his hands were fisting again. “You wanted to save me. He followed you here, because he couldn’t stop you then. He was waiting for his moment, just waiting...willing to do anything to get you.”
Gunner had asked her not to tell Slade about them. But Slade was acting as if—
“He got you, didn’t he? I can see it in his eyes.”
Her cheeks burned.
“Enough.” Gunner’s snarl.
“Not even close,” Slade fired right back. “They tortured me, for two years. And during all those months, just how many times did you make love with my—”
Gunner lunged forward. This time, he was the one who had to be pulled back. Logan grabbed him and held on tight.
“Let him come at me! Let him take me on...instead of running away with my girl!”
“Stop.” The quiet word broke from Sydney. Her head was throbbing. For all of the times that she’d imagined Slade’s rescue, she’d never imagined this scenario. “Just...stop.” Then she was marching toward Slade. “He had to drag me out of the jungle. I almost died, too. He was shot, so many times, we were both barely moving.” Why couldn’t he understand what had happened?
Slade glared down at her. “You moved well enough to survive.”
Her chin lifted. “Search parties were sent after you. Again and again. We kept looking.”
“Not hard enough.”