Snowbound - Harlequin.com

126 SNOWBOUND
the girls’s, a little husky. A woman’s laugh. But she
stomped with all the enthusiasm of the two girls, her
arm linked with one of them.
His stomach churned again. Would she think he was
crazy?
How could she not? He’d thought insurgents were
shooting at them and he’d knocked her to the ground.
He wanted to lie to himself and call it a life-saving
instinct that had to be retrained: the bang of a mortar,
the crack of a rifle, you hit the deck. Returning soldiers
from every war in the last century and in this one had
the same instinct, one that he assumed dulled with time
and then was forgotten.
But it hadn’t been just instinct. For a minute, he’d
been half there in Iraq, half here in Oregon. He’d known
snow was around them rather than sand. He’d known it
was Fiona he was throwing his body over. But the boys
had suddenly worn camouflage, and the blood… The
blood had been as real as his would be if he cut himself
open right now. He could still close his eyes and see the
moment, a snapshot to join the album full of others he
carried in his head.
Hopper’s face, mouth open in a soundless cry of
alarm as he tried to run toward them. The jerk as the
round entered his body, the spurt of blood, the fall.
How the hell could he have made it so real? John
asked himself. It wasn’t just a memory, it was…a
hybrid. As if he’d done a computer search, he came up
with the right image, frozen in his brain.
He’s in a Humvee, looking up a street in some
shithole of a town. Three M-16 toting soldiers ahead,