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It had been wartime sex.

Well, okay. Not wartime, but it came down to the same thing.

Sex when your life was on the line was different from regular.

He’d come back from missions totally hyped, needing more than a hot shower and a hot meal—needing a woman under him, a woman reminding him that he was still alive, still in one functional piece.

The only difference this time had been that the woman had been right there with him. Available. Eager. Hot.

And smart and funny and tough and tender and, Jesus, he missed her, he missed her…

She was okay. He knew that. He’d been barely conscious when he’d asked Chay if she was all right and Chay had assured him she was.

But where was she? Why hadn’t he heard from her?

Once he was off the drugs, up and moving, he’d waited for her to call. To show up on the ward. Surely she’d figured out that he hadn’t meant what he’d said in those last couple of minutes.

Right. But what if she hadn’t?

Anything was possible.

He’d told himself he should have thought of that sooner, but it wasn’t too late. He could call her.

Call her? He didn’t have her phone number. He didn’t have her address.

Wait. She’d said she lived in Manhattan.

Alessandra Bellini. Or Alessandra Wilde. Or, because she was a smart woman, she might have just listed herself as A. Bellini. Or A. Wilde. Yeah, but what if she didn’t have a phone? A regular phone. There were no directories for smartphones.

The next time Chay came to visit, he told him what he needed.

Tanner,” Chay said, “listen, dude…”

“You told me she was all right,” Tanner had said. “She is, isn’t she?”

“Yeah. She’s fine.”

“Just get me her numbers.”

Getting telephone numbers wasn’t difficult when you had STUD’s resources. Chay gave him two the next morning.

“One’s a cell. The other’s a land line.”

“Thanks, man,” Tanner said.

“No problem.”

Not true.

It was a problem. First working up to making the call, then planning what he’d say. In the end, though, all the planning turned out to be meaningless. The cell was no longer operational. That figured. It was probably still in San Escobal.

The land phone, however, was still good.

He punched in the number, waited while the phone rang…and heard Alessandra’s voice say, Hi, you’ve reached 555-765-1430. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.

The message he left was messy. A bunch of mostly incoherent words, spoken by a desperate man. In the end, he stopped in the middle of a sentence, took a hard breath and said, Call me. Please. I need to talk to you. Call me, sweetheart. Please.

But she didn’t.