Snowbound - Harlequin.com

JANICE KAY JOHNSON 183
he thought it was his shouted warning that came simultaneously
with the blast, as if his subconscious wanted to
remind him over and over again that he’d been ineffectual.
As if he didn’t know? he raged at himself. He was
just goddamned lucky that his subconscious didn’t seem
to realize that ineffectual was the least of it. In his
bumbling naïveté and with his good intentions, he had
invited the horror.
Sitting there in the dark, still shaking and battling the
nausea, he thought, I am the angel of death.
Fiona wouldn’t have been so grateful if she’d known.
She wouldn’t have trusted him. She wouldn’t so easily
have brushed off the incident when he’d seen the boys
fall and blood color the snow.
What if he’d told her? he wondered, but was shaking
his head before he could pursue the speculation. His life
goal was to repress all memory of those few minutes.
Only once had he described what had happened, when,
from a stretcher, he’d had to identify the suicide bomber’s
body—the scattered bits of his body. John never intended
to tell another soul. Words had power. Stories once told
lived on, refusing to be corked inside a bottle.
He got up and went to his bathroom. After splashing
water that was just this side of freezing on his face, he
looked at himself in the mirror. The angry scar stood out
like a brand. How had Fiona looked at his face and seen
anything but the scar?
The fact that she had was a miracle. Miracles were
rare and precious. He’d be a fool to turn his back on
this one.