Delayed Orders

Regensburg, Germany — Fifteen years earlier

Evie noticed him primarily because he was losing a deeply intense, entirely physical argument with a beer mat, and he was losing it badly.

He had been trying to flip the battered cardboard square from the precipice of the sticky table and catch it in mid-air for the better part of a minute. The pub was a cavernous, low-ceilinged German establishment that smelled densely of ancient wood smoke, spilled pilsner, and the unwashed dampness of a hundred military uniforms. It was loud enough that coherent thought was an absolute luxury, but Evie had spent the last twenty minutes covertly watching him anyway.

His first attempt violently struck his scarred knuckles and bounced onto a heavily embossed coaster. The second landed squarely in somebody else’s dark beer, earning him a sharp, aggressive shove that he laughed off with infuriating, liquid ease. The third sailed entirely past his grasping hand, skittered across the warped, beer-stained wooden floorboards, and finally came to rest directly against the scuffed toe of Evie’s leather boot.

She looked down at the soggy piece of cardboard, then slowly lifted her gaze across the crowded, smoke-hazed bar.

The American was already looking at her. He raised both of his large hands in a gesture of exaggerated, mocking surrender.

He was handsome, which was instantly and viscerally irritating. It wasn’t a polished, delicate sort of handsome, which she could have easily and happily dismissed. It was significantly rougher than that. His nose had been broken at least once, leaving a slight, arresting bump in the bridge, and a pale, jagged scar nicked the outer arch of his left eyebrow. His plain, dark grey T-shirt was stretched taut across a broad chest and heavy shoulders that made civilian clothes look faintly fraudulent on him, as if a set of combat fatigues were waiting just out of sight to reclaim him. But it was his grin—crooked, completely unguarded, and weapons-grade in its sheer charm—that was the absolute worst part.

Evie leaned forward and picked up the beer mat. It was slightly damp.

“Third time lucky?” he called out, raising a deep voice to carry over the thumping bass of the glowing jukebox in the corner.

“That was your third time,” she called back, her tone clipped and precise.

“You were counting.”

“Everyone in a five-metre radius was counting. It was a spectacle.”

Beside Evie, her friend Tash made a delighted, predatory little noise deep in the back of her throat. “Oh, hello. He’s American.”

As if the broad, flat vowels rolling lazily across the room had left any conceivable room for doubt.

The American pushed himself away from his table and came over. He threaded his way between the packed, shouting tables with the casual, rolling confidence of a man who was entirely accustomed to other people instinctively and immediately making space for him. Up close, under the dim, flickering amber light of the pub, he looked surprisingly young. Twenty-one, perhaps. Twenty-two at the absolute most. Yet there was a stark, shadowed tiredness etched deeply around the corners of his dark eyes that didn’t quite belong with that easy, devastating smile.

He stopped directly in front of Evie, deliberately crowding her personal space just enough to make her heart kick a frantic rhythm against her ribs, and held out his large hand. “I believe you have something of mine.”

“You abandoned it,” Evie said smoothly, lifting her chin.

“I sent it on a highly sensitive, classified diplomatic mission.”

“It requested political asylum.”

His smile widened, the corners of his eyes crinkling in a way that made her breath hitch. “Then I suppose I’ll have to sit down and negotiate.”

Evie knew she should have just handed it over. She should have rolled her eyes, handed him the soggy cardboard, and turned back to her gin and tonic. Instead, she looked him dead in the eye, took the beer mat, and tucked it deliberately into the plunging neckline of the emerald-green top Tash had aggressively persuaded her to wear. It disappeared instantly between breasts the flimsy garment had never been designed to contain.

His eyes dropped. It was only for half a second, a dark, consuming flash of sudden, sharpened focus, but it was long enough to send a jolt of pure heat straight to her core.

When his gaze snapped back up to hers, he looked almost apologetic, though the dark heat simmering in his irises told a vastly different story.

“Complicated territory,” she said, her voice dropping a fraction of an octave.

“I respect the border.”

Tash choked violently on her vodka and cranberry.

Evie did not laugh. She held his burning stare for nearly three solid seconds, refusing to blink, refusing to let the heavy flush creeping up her neck reach her cheeks. It felt like a respectable tactical victory when he was the one who finally broke the heavy silence.

He laughed—a rich, genuine sound that he shared with her, not at her—and something cold and tightly coiled deep inside Evie’s chest suddenly shifted loose.

“Cody,” he said, extending a hand that was entirely too large and calloused.

Of course he was called Cody. He couldn’t possibly have been called James, or Thomas, or William, or anything that might reasonably occur within the British Isles. Cody was a name that fundamentally belonged on the back of a wild horse, or painted aggressively on the side of a rusted pickup truck, or printed beneath a photograph in a Midwestern high-school yearbook under the superlative Most Likely to Get Away With Murder.

“That’s not a name,” she noted, deliberately ignoring his outstretched hand. “That’s a hazard warning label.”

“And yours is?”

“Evie.”

He tilted his head, the pale scar on his eyebrow catching the amber light. “That all I get?”

“For now.”

“Fair enough, For Now. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Depends. Are you going to throw that one on the floor too, or are you actually capable of holding your liquor like a grown man?”

“Only if conventional diplomacy fails and I desperately need to create a distraction.”

It should have been exactly five minutes. A single drink accepted solely because Tash was viciously kicking Evie’s ankle beneath the wooden table, and because the gruelling month-long joint NATO exercise was finally, mercifully over, and because tomorrow morning they would all be crammed onto freezing transport planes back to Britain, uniforms securely fastened, shoulders squared, utterly serious and sensible once again.

Five minutes seamlessly bled into a hazy, intoxicating hour.

Rules of Engagement

Cody’s friend, a fair-haired, impossibly loud American named Nate, joined them shortly after the second round of drinks. Tash, sensing an immediate opportunity, instantly began mercilessly interrogating him about the unforgivable linguistic crime of calling trousers ‘pants’, and why Americans insisted on relentlessly butchering the Queen’s English. This flawless manoeuvre allowed Evie and Cody to be effectively cordoned off, left entirely in that strange, insulated privacy that sometimes miraculously exists in the exact centre of a crowded, deafening room.

They established ground rules almost immediately.

No surnames. No military ranks. No units. Absolutely no asking what either of them actually did for a living while wearing muddy camouflage in the freezing Bavarian forests.

“Why?” Cody asked, leaning his heavy forearms on the table, closing the physical distance between them until she could feel the heat radiating off his skin.

Evie lifted one shoulder in a smooth, dismissive shrug. “Because every single conversation I’ve had for the past four weeks has violently revolved around acronyms, armoured vehicles, or mud. I’m fundamentally bored of it.”

“There was a truly alarming amount of mud out there.”

“You people brought most of it with you.”

“We bring freedom,” he corrected smoothly, tapping his sweating glass gently against hers. “Sometimes freedom is just inherently muddy.”

“And incredibly loud.”

“That’s exactly how you know it’s working.”

She rolled her eyes, but he was watching her with such open, mesmerised amusement that she had to abruptly look away and pretend to be deeply interested in the melting ice of her drink.

The blunt truth was, she didn’t want to tell him what she did because the answer was not yet impressive, and Evie absolutely despised not being impressive. She was nineteen years old, newly commissioned out of Sandhurst, and so painfully junior that half her working day seemed to consist of being given entirely conflicting sets of instructions by gruff, exhausted men who called her ‘ma’am’ while making it abundantly clear they believed she required strict adult supervision just to cross a motor pool. She wanted one single evening in which absolutely no one knew how young she was. She wanted one night where she didn’t have to forcibly lower the register of her voice and speak with manufactured, razor-sharp certainty just to be taken seriously.

“All right,” Cody conceded, his dark eyes tracking the subtle movement of her throat as she swallowed. “No work. The military does not exist. We are entirely civilian. What can I ask?”

“Anything else.”

“Anything?”

“Within reason.”

He considered her closely over the rim of his condensation-beaded glass. “What’s the absolute worst film you’ve ever forcefully pretended to like just to impress someone you desperately wanted to sleep with?”

It was such a ridiculous, jarringly specific question that she actually threw her head back and laughed, a genuine, startling sound, before answering honestly. She confessed to sitting through a pretentious, three-hour French black-and-white film about a clinically depressed pigeon that she had endured for a self-obsessed university student back in Manchester.

Then she ruthlessly turned the tables, demanding to know which aggressively awful pop song he knew every single word to but would aggressively deny under a court oath. He named a track so universally appalling that she flat-out accused him of lying. In response, he put a hand solemnly over his heart, closed his eyes, and sang the entire chorus loudly and badly enough that three burly Germans at the adjacent table stopped talking completely and turned to stare at them in sheer bewilderment.

She laughed until her ribs physically ached.

He leaned in closer, the scent of him invading her senses, and told her the story behind the jagged scar on his nose. He had broken it at seventeen because he had drunkenly tried to jump from the pitched roof of his parents’ garage directly into their backyard swimming pool, only to learn—whilst suspended helplessly in mid-air—that the pool was significantly further away than his alcohol-addled brain had calculated.

“You missed an entire swimming pool?” Evie asked, genuinely aghast.

“Only by about a foot.”

“Is that meant to make it sound somehow better?”

“In America, a foot is a very small, highly precise unit of measurement.”

“It’s the exact same size everywhere on the planet.”

“That sounds like European socialist propaganda to me.”

She fired back without hesitation, telling him about getting suspended from her strict all-girls grammar school at fourteen. She had punched a boy from the neighbouring comprehensive who had aggressively snapped her bra strap on the bus one too many times.

“Did he deserve it?” Cody asked, his dark eyes dancing with absolute delight.

“Entirely. Without question.”

“Then that isn’t a confession of guilt. That’s a highly commendable public service announcement.”

“I broke his front tooth cleanly in half.”

Cody winced, touching his own shadowed jaw in sympathetic phantom pain. “Okay. Highly aggressive public service.”

“He was so deeply embarrassed he told everyone he fell off his bike into a lamppost.”

“Smart man. I wouldn’t want to admit you bested me either.”

She fully expected him to make a cheap, leering joke about her chest then. Men had been treating her body as public property since she was thirteen years old: staring openly, commenting under their breath, assessing her dimensions as though the rest of her intellect and personality were merely an inconvenient life-support system attached to her breasts. Cody did absolutely none of that. His attention remained fiercely, respectfully locked on her face. When his gaze did occasionally wander, a heavy, smouldering desire warmed it, but there was never a trace of sleazy, aggressive entitlement.

That distinction should not have felt as extraordinary as it did. At nineteen, currently swimming in a toxic sea of aggressive military bravado, it felt like an absolute revelation.

The bar slowly thinned around them as the hours vanished into the smoky air. Grumbling staff began turning heavy chairs upside down on sticky, empty tables, signalling the imminent end of the night. Tash and Nate had vanished completely onto the tiny, cramped dance floor, if the pathetic patch of stone beside the glowing jukebox could charitably be called that. Evie completely lost track of how many drinks she’d had, though she fiercely ensured she never lost track of herself. Cody had seamlessly switched to sparkling water after his second beer, and he quietly pushed a fresh glass of water towards her every so often without passing judgement or making a patronising comment about pacing herself.

“You’re rapidly ruining my deeply held, carefully constructed prejudiced opinion of Americans,” she murmured, tracing the rim of her glass with one finger.

“Was it really that bad?”

“It was very efficient. Stars, stripes, excessive volume, and completely unearned, baffling confidence.”

“Hey, we do have a lot of confidence. It’s our primary global export.”

“You have a lot of flags. Why are there so many flags literally everywhere?”

“What if we suddenly forget where we are?”

“In your own country?”

“It happens, Evie. It’s a very, very large place. We get easily confused.”

He leaned significantly closer to hear her laugh. The bar had become oppressively hot, the air softened by stale beer, sweat, and too many bodies pressed closely together. Beneath the sharp tang of cigarette smoke that aggressively clung to everyone’s clothes, she caught the clean, deeply masculine scent of hotel soap and something inherently him at his collar. His thick, muscular forearm rested on the scarred table right beside hers. Not touching. Just generating a blistering, magnetic heat.

“Where in the large place are you from?” she asked softly.

“Colorado, mostly. My parents are out there right now. Mountains. Snow. A lot of empty space.”

“Mostly?”

“We moved around a lot. My dad’s job.”

There was a tiny fraction of a pause before the word job. Another rigid piece of the military uniform neither of them was supposed to mention. A military brat, then. It explained the easy adaptability, the way he effortlessly occupied space like he belonged everywhere and absolutely nowhere.

“Do you miss it?”

“Colorado? Yeah. The sky, mostly. It’s so big you can literally see the weather coming from a hundred miles away.” He looked thoughtfully towards the leaded, condensation-streaked window, where the German night pressed black and freezing against the glass. “What about you? Where’s home when you aren’t willingly playing in the mud?”

“Near Manchester.”

“Is that an actual answer, or are you aggressively protecting British state secrets again?”

“It’s an answer Americans usually understand without needing a map drawn for them in crayon.”

“I know British geography.”

“Do you really?”

“London. Manchester. Hogwarts.”

She stared at him, utterly deadpan.

“Scotland,” he added triumphantly, flashing that devastating grin again.

“You’ve saved yourself by a hair.”

“I knew I would.”

He said it lightly, throwing the words casually away, but something sharp inside Evie caught on them. The utter, unbreakable certainty of the statement. Cody behaved as if the entire world would simply give way and obediently rearrange itself to accommodate him if he just smiled at the correct angle. Evie, conversely, had spent the last brutal year at Sandhurst painstakingly learning to give absolutely nothing away, to violently fight for every single inch of respect.

“What?” he asked, his smile faltering slightly as he studied her face with unnerving intensity.

“Nothing.”

“That wasn’t a ‘nothing’ face. That was an incredibly loud face.”

“You know me well enough to accurately catalogue and categorise my facial expressions now?”

“I’m a very quick study.”

“There’s that obnoxious American confidence again.”

“Deflection,” he noted quietly.

She narrowed her eyes, her defensive instincts instantly flaring. “Excuse me?”

“You asked something real. I answered it honestly. Then you looked like you had another, much more real question in your head, and you actively decided not to ask it. Classic deflection.”

For the first time all evening, she felt genuinely, entirely wrong-footed.

Most people—especially the men in her battalion—mistook her calculated silence for shyness. Or obedience. Or a fundamental lack of intellect. Cody appeared to instantly recognise it as a deliberately locked door, and he had the sheer, arrogant bad manners to knock heavily on it anyway.

“Fine,” she snapped, leaning in closer. “Do you always get exactly what you want?”

His expression changed. It wasn’t a massive shift, but the careless, boyish charm vanished completely, leaving something much older, harder, and infinitely more dangerous behind.

“No.”

It was the very first unadorned, utterly serious answer he had given her.

“Do people think you do?” she pressed, unable to stop herself.

“Usually.” He broke eye contact, rubbing his thumb slowly over a deep knife scratch carved heavily into the table. “My family has a master plan. Always has. It spans entire generations. Good prep schools, good military career, the right friends, the right sort of girl to marry. They mean well. They really do. It just… sometimes it intensely feels like my entire life was decided in a boardroom I wasn’t invited into.”

Evie studied the hard, tense line of his jaw. “And what do you actually want?”

“Tonight?”

“In life.”

He smiled, but this one carried absolutely no swagger. It was quiet, slightly fractured, and deeply genuine. “I don’t know yet. That’s the real problem.”

The answer hung suspended in the heavy, smoky air between them, startling in its raw honesty.

At nineteen, Evie possessed ambitions with the clean, razor-sharp edges of newly forged steel. She knew exactly what she wanted to prove to every man who had ever dismissed her, even if she was slightly less certain about what she actually wanted to become in the gruelling process. Admitting profound uncertainty out loud felt far more intimately terrifying than admitting fear.

“What about you?” he asked, his gaze slowly returning to hers, heavy and impossibly warm. “What’s the grand plan for the girl from Manchester?”

“To be uniquely excellent at something incredibly difficult.”

“That’s highly specific.”

“I didn’t say I actually knew what the ‘something’ was yet.”

“You like danger?”

“I like problems that actually have concrete answers.”

“Most real problems don’t, Evie.”

“Then I shall simply have to specialise.”

His eyes stayed securely locked on hers, searching the dark depths of her irises. “I believe you.”

It shouldn’t have mattered. He was a nameless American soldier with a ridiculous cowboy name in a dingy pub in Bavaria, and in twelve hours she would be firmly strapped into a C-130 headed for Brize Norton, never to see him again. But he said it without an ounce of indulgence. There was none of the faint, patronising smile older men always wore when a nineteen-year-old woman fiercely described the formidable person she intended to become. He just fully, unreservedly believed her.

“What are you most afraid of?” she asked, the deeply personal question slipping out before she could stop it.

He breathed out a short, incredulous laugh, shaking his head. “Man, we got serious fast.”

“You started it.”

“Did I?”

“Deflection,” she threw his word sharply back at him.

“Oh, is that exactly how it’s going to be?”

“I’m a very quick study.”

He looked down, a reluctant, incredibly soft smile playing on his lips. When he finally raised his head again, the humour had gentled into something devastatingly sincere.

“Waking up at forty years old, looking in the mirror, and suddenly realising I’ve done absolutely everything I was supposed to do, and none of it was actually mine.”

The heavy answer landed square and true in the quiet, bruised place directly behind her ribs.

“Your turn,” he murmured.

Evie thought of giving him something easy. Spiders. Failure. Heights. Her mother’s icy, perpetual disappointment. Instead, she found herself telling the absolute, horrifying truth to a boy she had known for exactly two hours.

“Being forgettable.”

Cody’s gaze moved slowly, almost reverently, over her face, tracing the sharp line of her cheekbones, the curve of her mouth, as though physically fixing every single feature into his long-term memory.

“That,” he said softly, his voice dropping an entire octave, “seems statistically unlikely.”

Tash suddenly appeared at Evie’s shoulder like a chaotic, drunken whirlwind, heavily flushed, sweating slightly, and grinning from ear to ear. Nate hovered directly behind her, looking equally dishevelled and deeply pleased with himself.

“We’re leaving,” Tash announced loudly, slapping her hand on the table.

Evie checked her watch and blinked in shock. It was nearly three in the morning.

“Leaving for where?”

“Does it actually matter?” Tash leaned down and kissed Evie’s cheek, then whispered loudly enough for the entire table to clearly hear, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. And I would do absolutely anything.”

“That leaves me with no practical restrictions whatsoever.”

“Exactly. Be spectacularly bad.”

Nate pointed two fingers at Cody in a sharp, frat-boy gesture whose meaning seemed to fundamentally lie somewhere between don’t die and incredibly well done, man. Cody answered with a flat, chilling look that made Nate instantly retreat toward the door without another comment.

Then they were completely gone, and the sudden space they left behind felt suddenly enormous and terrifyingly intimate.

The exhausted barman slapped a wet bill on the table directly between Evie and Cody.

“I have it,” Cody said, instantly reaching for his thick leather wallet.

“We’re splitting it.”

“I invited you over here.”

“And I drank over half the alcohol on this receipt.”

“Not quite half.”

“Do you want me to violently punch one of your teeth out? I have a proven track record, remember?”

He paused, considering her seriously, his eyes gleaming. “Split it is.”

The Walk

Outside, the medieval city of Regensburg had gone silver and deathly still. A sharp, freezing rain earlier in the evening had aggressively polished the uneven cobblestones until they gleamed like wet iron under the orange glow of the streetlamps. The towering Gothic spires of the cathedral cut violently into the cloud-choked sky, and somewhere just beyond the ancient, leaning buildings, the freezing waters of the Danube moved unseen and silent through the dark.

The biting November cold immediately reached straight through Evie’s thin green top, making her shiver violently. Without missing a beat, Cody shrugged out of his heavy military-issue fleece jacket and held it out.

“I’m not wearing your jacket,” she said stubbornly, her teeth actively chattering.

“Why?”

“Because then you’ll be freezing.”

“Evie, I’m from Colorado. We barbecue in this weather. This is merely decorative weather to me.”

“That’s not a real thing.”

“Put on the damn jacket.”

She did, mostly because she was freezing, but also because the heavy material smelled intensely of him—cedar, hotel soap, and gunpowder.

They walked without consciously deciding where they were going. They drifted past heavily shuttered shopfronts and empty, silent squares, walking directly under narrow windows glowing warm and gold high above them. Cody found a tiny late-night food stand still operating near the river and bought paper cones of thick, greasy chips heavily smothered in German mayonnaise, which he regarded with profound, puritanical American suspicion.

“That is absolutely not an acceptable thing to do to a potato,” he declared, holding a mayonnaise-drenched chip up to the dim light.

“Your country literally puts marshmallows on sweet potatoes and bakes them,” Evie countered, horrified.

“On holidays. We strictly contain the damage to November.”

She boldly leaned over and stole another chip directly from his tray. “Coward.”

They eventually sat on a freezing, rough-hewn stone wall overlooking the river and watched the scattered city lights tremble and fracture on the black water. Their shoulders pressed firmly together. It was entirely deliberate. Neither of them moved a millimetre away.

“I had a really good time tonight,” Cody said softly to the water.

The statement was far too simple, too entirely devoid of games, to hide inside.

Evie turned her head to firmly look at his profile. “So did I.”

“I don’t want it to be over yet.”

Her pulse violently stumbled, kicking a frantic, heavy rhythm against her throat.

He didn’t immediately lean in. He didn’t aggressively crowd her space or try to turn the vulnerable words into a suffocating expectation. He simply sat there and waited, allowing her the total space to pull away, all that easy, arrogant confidence held carefully, respectfully in check.

“Where are you staying?” she asked, the words feeling incredibly heavy and momentous on her tongue.

His eyes darkened instantly. “A pension. About ten minutes away.”

“That sounds deeply, tragically unglamorous.”

“The towels are literally the size of postage stamps.”

“Tragic.”

“You could come back and aggressively judge them for yourself.”

“I have extremely exacting towel standards.”

“I could tell the second I met you.”

The quiet laughter faded, leaving the heavy, suffocating weight of the unasked question violently pulsing between them in the cold air.

“Evie.” His voice had dropped down into a rough, scraped-out register. He finally turned fully to face her. “You don’t have to.”

“I know.”

“And if you do, I don’t want this to be something you only did because we’re leaving tomorrow and it doesn’t matter.”

She desperately searched his face. Beneath the endless jokes, beneath the bulletproof American confidence, he looked just as nervous, just as terrifyingly unmoored as she felt.

That sudden, glaring vulnerability decided her far more than his charm ever could have.

“Maybe I’m doing it because we’re here tonight,” she whispered.

He kissed her.

It began carefully, almost excruciatingly politely. One large, warm hand settled gently at the hinge of her jaw, his rough thumb brushing her cheekbone, while his other hand braced firmly on the freezing stone wall beside her. His mouth was incredibly warm in the biting air. Evie instinctively gripped the front of his T-shirt, her knuckles turning white, and kissed him back with a sudden, desperate ferocity, and whatever polite restraint remained between them simply did not survive the collision.

He tasted dark and rich—of Bavarian beer, salt, and raw, unfiltered male hunger. He made a quiet, low sound of pure need against her mouth that sent liquid heat racing straight down her spine and pooling heavily, wetly low in her stomach. When she finally tore her mouth away to drag oxygen into her burning lungs, both of them were breathing far too hard.

“Postage-stamp towels,” she reminded him, her voice entirely wrecked.

“Right.” Cody stood up so quickly she actually laughed. He grabbed her hand, pulling her effortlessly to her feet. “Immediate inspection required.”

They only made it half a street before he abruptly caught her waist, dragged her forcefully into the pitch-black shadow of a medieval stone doorway, and kissed her again, pressing her spine flush against the ancient wood.

Postage-Stamp Towels

The pension room, when they finally reached it, was predictably cramped, aggressively overheated, and possessed sloping, claustrophobic ceilings. The window was covered by atrocious curtains aggressively patterned with faded yellow flowers. Cody slammed the heavy wooden door shut behind them and flipped the deadbolt. For a long, electric moment, neither of them moved or spoke.

The deafening quiet made the decision abruptly, terrifyingly real.

“Still sure?” he asked, his broad chest heaving, his dark eyes entirely black in the dim light.

Evie stepped forward, slipped his oversized fleece jacket from her shoulders, and deliberately draped it over the back of a rickety wooden chair.

“Are you?” she challenged.

“I’ve been painfully sure since you annexed my beer mat.”

She reached a hand into the plunging neckline of her green top and slowly produced the bent, slightly crushed cardboard square.

His mouth actually fell open. “You kept it?”

“Evidence.”

“Of my complete diplomatic failure?”

“Of your sheer, unyielding persistence.”

She stepped sideways and set it gently on the battered bedside table.

When she turned back to him, his expression had lost every single trace of performance. The cocky boy was entirely gone. He crossed the short space between them slowly, heavily, giving her every opportunity in the world to put a hand against his chest and physically stop him. She didn’t even twitch.

His rough fingers brushed the bare skin at her waist, making her shiver violently despite the stifling heat of the room. “Tell me if—”

“I will,” she promised fiercely.

“I mean it, Evie.”

“So do I. Stop talking.”

She closed the final inch and kissed him, and there was absolutely nothing tentative, nothing careful left in either of them.

Cody’s hands closed bruised-tight around her waist and he hauled her flush against his hard body. The sheer, solid impact of him stole the next breath right out of her lungs. He kissed her as though he had been brutally starving himself all night and had finally been granted permission to feast: deep, punishingly hungry kisses broken only by the abrasive scrape of his shadowed jaw along her cheek, the corner of her swollen lips, the wildly sensitive pulse point beating frantically below her ear.

Evie tipped her head all the way back to give him vastly better access, her hands tangling desperately in his thick dark hair.

“There?” he murmured roughly against the frantic pulse in her throat, his teeth scraping the skin.

“Don’t sound so fucking pleased with yourself,” she gasped.

He chuckled darkly and did it again, slower, harder, sucking a heavy mark into the tender flesh.

Her fingernails bit into the corded muscle at the back of his neck. “Insufferable.”

“But it feels right?”

She answered by fisting his hair and dragging his mouth violently back to hers.

They stumbled backwards, tangled completely together, and hit the wooden chair. Cody caught it blindly with one hand before it could topple, the loud clatter making them both freeze like guilty teenagers. Somewhere beyond the paper-thin wall, a German man coughed irritably.

Evie pressed her hot face into the crook of Cody’s shoulder, her shoulders shaking violently as she tried desperately not to laugh.

“Very seductive,” she whispered against his skin. “Real smooth operator.”

“You aggressively attacked me.”

“You were clearly overpowered.”

“Completely helpless.”

His smile brushed against her cheek. Then his large hand spread wide across the small of her bare back, pressing her pelvis flush against the undeniable, rigid evidence of exactly how much he wanted her. His mouth found her throat again, and all laughter instantly dissolved into a full-body shiver.

The contrast of him was dizzying, intoxicating. The sheer physical strength of a soldier held in iron-clad, careful restraint; the abrasive roughness of his stubble against her sensitised skin; the agonising gentleness with which his calloused fingers skimmed the strip of bare flesh just above the waistband of her jeans. Every single time his touch mapped higher up her ribs, he paused, waiting for her breath to hitch. Each time, she leaned closer, silently demanding more.

“Cody,” she gasped.

He ripped his mouth away and lifted his head instantly. “What? Too fast?”

She could feel his heart hammering a violent, erratic rhythm against her palms. For all his bulletproof American confidence in the bar, standing here in the dim light, he looked almost entirely undone by her.

“You keep stopping,” she complained bitterly.

“I am trying very, very hard to be a gentleman here.”

“Why?”

The startled, helpless laugh that tore out of him made her feel incredibly reckless and dangerously powerful.

Evie caught the hem of his dark T-shirt and ruthlessly dragged it upwards. He helped her rip it over his head, then tossed it blindly into the corner. Her palms landed flat on intensely warm skin, hard, defined muscle, and a sparse dusting of dark hair. She felt the narrow, jagged line of pale scar tissue wrapping just beneath his ribs, and Cody’s breath caught sharply when her fingertips traced it.

“Garage roof?” she asked, her voice breathless.

“Different lapse in judgement entirely.”

“You have a collection of them?”

“I’m really hoping tonight drastically improves my overall average.”

He kissed her fiercely before she could formulate a response.

His rough fingers found the bottom hem of her green top. “Can I?”

Evie nodded, her throat totally dry.

“Say it.”

The gritty, dominant demand sent a rush of liquid heat straight through her core that had absolutely nothing to do with embarrassment. He didn’t want mere compliance. He wanted explicit, vocal certainty.

“Yes. Take it off.”

He dragged the fabric up agonisingly slowly, his rough knuckles deliberately grazing the sensitive skin of her ribs and sides. For a terrifying second, Evie’s arms were caught tightly above her head, her face hidden in the fabric. Cool air rushed over her flushed, newly bare skin. A violent flicker of her old, deeply ingrained self-consciousness flared up—the familiar, exhausting awareness of having a body that men always, always noticed long before they ever noticed her brain. Too much, always too much.

Then the top cleared her head, and he dropped it on the floor.

Cody went completely, utterly still.

Evie forced her arms to remain straight at her sides, fighting the overwhelming urge to fold them defensively across the sheer dark lace of her bra. “What?” she demanded, her voice betraying a hint of insecurity.

His dark gaze tracked over her torso without a single shred of apology now. The open, devastating want in his eyes fully replaced every careless joke they had made all night. When his eyes finally, slowly returned to hers, his voice had dropped into a rough, gravelly register that made her knees weak.

“I’m trying very hard to remember every English swear word I know.”

“You only know about four.”

“That’s exactly why this is so incredibly difficult. Fuck, Evie. You’re beautiful.”

She let out a shaky breath, and the very last of her self-consciousness completely dissolved under the searing heat of his stare.

He reached for her, touching her as though absolute wonder and ravenous hunger could somehow exist perfectly balanced in the same pair of heavy hands. His palms mapped the deep dip of her waist, squeezed the flare of her hips, and then moved slowly, torturously upward. He was giving her every single chance to step back. She didn’t. When his large hands finally pushed up and cupped her heavily through the fragile black lace, his thumbs brushing aggressively over her tightened peaks, Evie inhaled in a sharp, fractured hiss.

His eyes snapped back to her face, burning.

“Still good?” his voice was a harsh rasp.

“Very.”

The unhesitating answer seemed to snap the last remaining thread of his legendary control.

His mouth crashed down on hers, completely devouring her gasp. His thumbs traced a slow, ruthless path over her lace-covered nipples that made her arch violently up into his hands, and she felt his restraint completely shatter in the sudden, bruising force of his kiss. He walked her forcefully backwards towards the narrow bed. The edge of the mattress caught sharply behind her knees, but he held her upright, one arm banded like steel around her lower back while his lips travelled open-mouthed down the long column of her throat.

He used his teeth to ease one black strap off her shoulder, pressing a wet, scorching kiss to the newly uncovered skin. Then another, lower, hovering so agonisingly close to the edge of the lace cup that the pure anticipation became its own maddening form of torture.

“You are deliberately taking your time,” she managed to grit out, gripping his broad shoulders simply to stay upright.

“I’ve got a lot to remember,” he breathed hotly against her cleavage, his hot breath making her shiver violently.

The words, directly echoing his earlier promise without either of them daring to name the reality of tomorrow, violently tightened something low, wet, and desperate in her stomach.

Evie violently grabbed his shoulders and shoved him hard, pushing him down onto the very edge of the squeaking bed.

Pure surprise flashed brightly across his handsome face, followed instantaneously by a dark, wicked delight. “Bossy.”

“You like it.”

“I really, really fucking do.”

She stepped directly between his spread knees, crowding his space, and kissed him fiercely, revelling in the dominant angle. She loved the way his large hands instantly gripped her hips, fingers digging into her soft flesh as if violently anchoring himself to her. When she dragged her open mouth along his shadowed jaw, biting lightly at the hinge, he tipped his head back against the wall and groaned her name on a fractured, uneven breath.

Evie.

Not ‘the British girl’. Not ‘the officer’. Not a nameless conquest in a crowded, smoky bar. Evie.

She had never truly understood how deeply, devastatingly intimate her own name could sound until this American boy said it exactly like that.

With a sudden, explosive burst of kinetic energy that made her gasp out loud, Cody firmly gripped her waist, twisted, and threw her down. He pinned her flat against the lumpy pillows, keeping his heavy weight perfectly braced above her on his thick forearms so he didn’t crush her. His grin briefly returned, but it had lost all of its polished, boyish charm. It was entirely feral. This close, she could see the heavy, frantic pulse beating wildly at his throat, perfectly matching the hammering in her own chest.

“You cheated,” she whispered, her chest heaving heavily beneath his.

“Superior American initiative.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Tonight? I’ll call it whatever the hell you want me to call it, so long as you let me keep touching you.”

She hooked a hand securely behind his thick neck and pulled his mouth violently down to hers.

The kisses grew entirely desperate. Slower. Wetter. Far deeper. The freezing German room narrowed down to absolutely nothing but blinding heat and panicked breath, the slick slide of skin against sweating skin, the delicious, crushing weight of his body pressing her deep into the mattress. His calloused hand slid up the back of her thigh, his fingers eagerly finding the metal fastening of her jeans. He popped the rigid button with ruthless efficiency.

“Evie,” he rasped darkly against her lips.

There was a final, burning question in the way he said it. The point of absolutely no return.

She covered his hand completely with hers, shoved the denim forcefully down her hips, and answered it by pulling him closer.

After that, time completely lost its rigid shape. The world dissolved into a frantic blur of raw sensation. There were harsh, whispered checks of “Is this okay?” that were immediately met with breathless, demanding “Yes, please, don’t stop.” There was muffled, breathless laughter when his elbow violently cracked against the thin plaster wall, and the heavy, incredibly intimate silence of his sweaty forehead pressed hard against hers while they desperately tried to catch their breath.

He stripped the rest of her clothes away with a reverence that felt almost religious, his hot mouth following the path of his hands, praising every inch of bare skin he uncovered. When he finally went down, settling his broad shoulders firmly between her thighs, Evie completely lost her mind. The searing heat of his mouth, the relentless, expert drag of his tongue, and the filthy, muffled praise he mumbled against her slick core had her arching completely off the mattress, her fingers tangled so tightly in his hair she was sure she was hurting him. She didn’t care. The sheer, overwhelming friction built until she shattered with a muffled, sobbing gasp, her hips bucking violently against his mouth.

He didn’t give her time to fully recover. There was the brief, distinct silver flash of a foil packet being torn open forcefully with his teeth, another suspended, heavy moment to ensure she was completely ready, and then Cody was positioning himself over her. He watched her flushed face with an aggressive, predatory intensity that made the rest of the dark room completely cease to exist.

He kissed her deeply as he pushed inside, swallowing her sharp gasp of pain and intense pleasure, filling her completely.

Whatever Evie had cynically expected from a drunken, one-night stand with a soldier, it absolutely wasn’t this. It wasn’t this brutal, grinding heat. It wasn’t the agonizingly slow, deep thrusts that made her entirely forget her own name. It wasn’t the fierce tenderness threaded perfectly through the sheer animal urgency, or the way he paid such terrifyingly close attention to exactly how she reacted to every single shift of his hips.

“You’re so fucking responsive,” he groaned near her ear, his pace increasing, the wet slap of their skin echoing loudly in the dark. “God, you feel so incredibly good. Tell me it feels good, Evie.”

“Yes,” she sobbed, wrapping her legs tightly around his waist to drag him even deeper. “Fuck, Cody, yes.”

He made her feel wildly out of control. He made her feel neither fragile, nor excessive, nor too demanding. As they chased the final, explosive edge together, sweat slicking their intertwined bodies, breathing in ragged synchronization, he made her feel entirely, undeniably chosen.

The Morning After

Later, deep in the absolute dead of night, Evie lay tangled securely in the damp sheets with her cheek pressed flat against Cody’s bare chest. She listened to his heavy heartbeat slowly return to a normal rhythm beneath her ear. The narrow, lumpy bed had practically forced them to lie entirely entwined, though she privately suspected they would have ended up exactly this close even if they were in a room the size of a grand ballroom.

His rough fingers were tracing absent, soothing circles along the curve of her bare shoulder.

“What’s your surname?” he murmured, his voice thick and gravelly with sleep.

She smiled against his hot skin without opening her heavy eyes. “Against the rules, soldier.”

“We can officially amend the rules. Executive order.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Phone number?”

“Also tomorrow.”

His heavy, muscular arm tightened securely around her waist, pulling her closer against his side. “There is genuinely going to be a tomorrow, then?”

She lifted her head, resting her chin on his chest.

It was far too dark in the room to read his expression properly, but she heard the stark, unprotected vulnerability hiding just beneath the casual joke.

“Breakfast,” she promised softly. “Then we can both decide whether we actually still like each other in the harsh, unforgiving daylight.”

“I already know for a fact I won’t like you.”

“Obviously not. I’m awful.”

“Incredibly bossy. Highly violent. Excessively territorial over beer mats.”

“I also have terrible taste in men.”

“Your one and only tragic flaw.”

She laughed softly, the sound muffled by his skin, and settled heavily against him again.

“Stay,” he whispered into her hair.

“I am staying.”

“Good.”

The word rumbled deep beneath her ear, a solid, anchoring sound in the dark.

Evie fell asleep smiling.

Morning arrived pale, grey, and painfully thin, bleeding through the atrocious yellow floral curtains.

For several disorientating seconds, Evie didn’t know where she was. Then Cody shifted heavily beside her, one massive, heavy arm thrown possessively across her bare waist, and the memories of the night rushed back all at once: the smoky bar, the freezing river, the terrifyingly steep stairs they had climbed while desperately trying not to laugh, his hot mouth dragging against her sensitised skin, the desperate things they had whispered into the dark because dawn had seemed impossibly, safely far away.

He was dead asleep on his stomach, his face turned towards her, half-buried in the flat pillow. Without the bulletproof grin, he looked startlingly young. The jagged scar cutting violently through his eyebrow merely interrupted an otherwise entirely peaceful, boyish expression.

Evie lay there and watched him breathe for far longer than she had intended.

The cold daylight should have made the whole reckless encounter feel cheap and intensely embarrassing. Instead, she found herself desperately wanting the breakfast she had casually promised him. She wanted his surname. She wanted to learn whether his thick, dark hair always stood up wildly at the back like that, or if it was only because she had spent half the night ruthlessly pulling her fingers through it.

Wanting those domestic, permanent things felt incredibly, stupidly dangerous.

She carefully, painstakingly eased her body out from under his heavy arm.

Cody immediately made a rough, protesting sound deep in his throat and reached blindly across the warm space she had just left. Evie froze like a statue, balancing on one foot, one leg halfway inside her freezing jeans. When he finally sighed heavily and settled again, she bit hard on her bottom lip to suppress a genuine smile.

There was no kettle in the cramped room, and the pension’s tiny breakfast area downstairs had been completely dark and locked when they stumbled in. Across the narrow, cobbled street, however, Evie had noticed a small German bakery that had just begun dragging iron chairs out onto the pavement. She calculated she could be there and back in ten minutes flat.

She dressed silently, pulling on her heavy boots without lacing them. At the heavy wooden door, she paused and looked back at the bed.

For one ridiculous, terrifyingly vulnerable moment, she actually considered walking back over and waking him just to tell him she was only going to get coffee. But he had slept perhaps two hours in total, and she liked the romantic idea of genuinely surprising him. She would return with hot breakfast. He would undoubtedly make some unbearable, arrogant American comment about British tea. She would finally, properly tell him her surname.

Then they would see.

Departure

The bakery was blissfully warm, smelling intensely of caramelised sugar, roasting coffee beans, and fresh, hot bread. Evie bought two large coffees, guessing he took his black, and pointed at two massive pastries thickly glazed with apricot jam simply because the stern-faced woman behind the counter aggressively recommended them. She had to awkwardly balance the rustling paper bag beneath one arm while throwing her entire weight against the pension’s heavy, sticking front door to push back inside.

Male voices were carrying clearly down the narrow upstairs corridor.

One undeniably belonged to Cody.

Evie slowed her pace on the steep stairs, a genuine smile curving her lips. He was awake. He was probably wondering where she had gone.

The wooden door to his room stood partly open, left ajar from when she had slipped out. She was exactly three steps away from pushing it wide when another distinctly American voice cut through the quiet air.

“They moved departure up. Bus rolls out in forty minutes.”

Nate.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Cody’s voice answered.

“Wish I was, man. Command’s pitching a fit. You packed?”

“Not even remotely close.”

“And the girl? The British officer? She just left?”

“Looks like it.”

Cody sounded entirely different. Flat. Deadpan. Awake in all the completely wrong ways. There was none of the gruff warmth from the night before, none of the teasing affection. He sounded like a soldier delivering a sterile sit-rep.

“Damn.” Nate laughed loudly. “That’s cold, man. Even for a Brit.”

Evie shifted the burning paper coffee cups slightly in her hands. She should just push the door open. She should laugh, say Hardly, and watch the sheer relief instantly replace whatever she was hearing in Cody’s guarded voice.

Then Nate spoke again.

“Wait a minute. Are you telling me you actually fucked that stacked British chick from the bar? The stuck-up one?”

Silence.

It was not a long silence. It was barely the space of a single breath.

But it was long enough for Cody to completely make a choice.

He laughed. A harsh, ugly, incredibly male sound.

“Fucked her? Man, I absolutely annihilated her. Trust me, she’ll be feeling me all the way back to England.”

Nate barked out a raucous, entirely approving laugh. “Jesus Christ. Nice work, brother.”

“Best kind of goodbye there is,” Cody said smoothly.

The plastic lids of the coffee cups trembled violently in Evie’s hands.

She stood absolutely frozen in the dim hallway, staring blankly through the narrow crack in the door. She could see the atrocious yellow flowers on the curtain. She could see the rumpled corner of the bed where she had been lying twenty minutes ago. She could see her bent, stupid beer mat still lying on the bedside table where she had carefully placed it.

Something deep inside her chest went very, very still. It felt like freezing ice water abruptly flooding her veins.

It wasn’t because the words were shockingly crude. She had heard significantly worse before breakfast on most NATO exercises, surrounded completely by men endlessly trying to out-macho each other. It wasn’t even because he had casually spoken about her body as if it were hostile territory he had successfully conquered and pillaged.

It was because, for one humiliating, utterly pathetic second, she had actually believed she knew him.

She had believed the quiet, vulnerable man sitting by the freezing river. The man who had carefully asked if she was sure before he touched her. The man who had listened intently when she spoke, who had held her gently in the dark, and who had whispered stay like it was the only thing in the world that mattered.

That man had vanished into thin air the absolute second another man entered the room.

Or, far more likely, he had simply never existed in the first place. He was just a highly effective tactic. A masterclass in American charm flawlessly designed to get exactly what he wanted.

Evie stepped backwards before either of them could look toward the door and see her. One careful step, then another, moving completely silently on the worn, faded carpet. Her face burned with an intense, radiating heat. The paper bakery bag crackled loudly against her uniform sleeve—it sounded impossibly, deafeningly loud to her own ears—but the oblivious, congratulatory voices inside the room simply continued.

She reached the top of the steep stairs.

At the very bottom, next to the front door, stood a small wicker bin lined with a cheap black plastic bag. Without breaking her stride, she dropped both coffees directly into it. One tipped violently sideways, the dark, scalding liquid rapidly spreading through the thin paper bag of apricot pastries, ruining them instantly.

She had kept the stupid beer mat. She knew she would brutally hate herself for that later.

Outside, the German morning had sharpened into something bright and completely unforgiving. Delivery vans rattled loudly over the uneven cobbles. A distant church bell struck the quarter hour, echoing loudly over the rooftops, while completely ordinary people unlocked their shops, lifted heavy metal shutters, and began a totally normal day in which absolutely nothing of consequence had changed.

Evie walked quickly at first. Then she walked faster, her unlaced boots hitting the pavement hard.

By the time she reached the corner of the street, the crushing humiliation had fully solidified, hardening into a bright, clean, and incredibly useful anger. She had made a mistake. That was all it was. A tactical error. One reckless, stupid night with a handsome, manipulative American who had known exactly which buttons to press to make a young woman feel totally singular, right up until his frat-boy friend arrived to applaud his conquest.

She would absolutely not cry over him. She would not stop. She would not turn around. And she would never, ever give him the profound satisfaction of knowing she had come back for him.

Behind her, echoing faintly from somewhere inside the open window of the pension, she heard Cody urgently call her name.

“Evie!”

Evie kept walking, her spine perfectly straight.

By noon, the convoy of American military buses was entirely gone, leaving absolutely nothing but diesel fumes in the freezing air.

By nightfall, as her own transport plane touched down heavily on British tarmac, she had ruthlessly reduced him in her mind to the only piece of information he had actually given her: a hazard warning label of a first name.

Cody.

Nothing more.