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oozed a simultaneous “fuck off” and “fuck me” vibe that Ian’s neglected libido picked up, absorbed, and translated to an embarrassing boner that forced him to shift behind the nearest chair.
    “Ian,” the lovely woman stepped in front of him. “This is Nick, my brother. Nick,” she pulled the reluctant, handsome man out of the doorway. Ian could see Nick’s jaw clench and his shoulders shift. “This is Ian, Gavin’s brother.”
    Nick held out a hand. Ian stared at it, unwilling to touch him and admit what his every nerve ending was screaming but realizing how rude he must appear. The moment stretched way out beyond anything resembling polite. Gavin cleared his throat startling Ian into action. He stuck out his hand. Nick took it without help, as if sensing what to do, how to reach Ian’s palm. Ian’s life was never the same again.

Chapter Five

     
    Nick
    The dream was back. Nick knew it. Yet he was, as always, unable to stop it. He flinched, inhabiting that in-between state of sleep and wake, of before and after, of a whole Nick and a fractured one. The dream kept coming.
    Yelling…fire…sand…pain. Over and over again. He heard it a split second after he spotted the seemingly innocuous wire on the side of the road. He started to speak, to warn the driver, then…yelling…fire…sand… pain became his entire universe. He opened his eyes expecting the bright, hot, blue sky. And saw nothing. He thrashed around, tried to find his weapon, remembered Dan was in the Humvee behind him and panicked all over again. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, and…shit…he couldn’t see. And his right leg was a flaming ball of agony.
    His ears rang, but he kept hearing the screams of men and women all around him. With a huge effort, he finally pulled loose from the safety harness and fell over onto all fours, trying to make his eyes and ears function. His hand connected with what he believed was a man’s boot. As he felt his way up, he made contact with the bloodied flesh of the man’s leg, and he soon realized the limb was definitely not attached to anything else. He yanked his hand away, and brought it to his face. The sickening coppery smell of blood made him gag.
    He sat, blinking, but his eyes burned and watered so he shut them and kept crawling, trying to find the source of all the yelling. Dan. He had to find Dan. As he called out, picturing the younger man’s handsome face he put his hand out to thin air and tumbled down to the sand. Yelling and cursing as his knee connected with something sharp sending a fresh bolt of pain up his spine, he froze when he heard it.
    “Nick!”
    He rolled over onto his side, keeping his eyes clenched shut to spare the agony of trying to force them to work, and attempted to stand. The horrific stench of burning flesh suffocated him. He held out a hand again, hoping to find something to grab onto to guide him back to the truck Dan had been in. “Nick!” the voice was hoarse, weak, but he recognized it.
    He and Chief Warrant Officer Daniel Anderson had been together for nearly two years. Dan was from Ohio, career military, and a computer super geek, like Nick. They were both high up on the “need to know” list and were able to manipulate more information between them than was probably healthy as they led the small, secretive counter intelligence effort in this particular corner of hell.
    Nick was due to rotate back to the states in two weeks, and Dan was going to join him when he finished his tour a year later. Nick was as close to being in love as he would allow himself to admit with the tall, dark and handsome fellow Marine. The sound of Dan’s voice fading to his left in the chaos was freaking him the fuck out. That, and the fact he still could not see no matter how much he rubbed his eyes. His nasal passages and throat burned, but he ignored it all and dropped back to all fours, muscling through the agonizing pain in his knees and hips and half-crawled,