Dan fumbled in the dark to set his cup down on the bedside table. His eyes were adjusting to the dark, and he could see the defiant set to her arms.

“You’re going into combat?”

“I have no idea where we’re going. They’ll tell us just before we need to know. But Kolhammer decided he wants us there. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, I guess.”

“But—”

Julia made a chopping gesture.

“Let’s not do this scene, okay, the one where you tell me it’s no place for a woman, I could get hurt, you’re only trying to protect me.”

“But all those things are true.”

“They’re not. Not all of them.”

“But—”

“No. Dan, I’ve seen more combat than you. End of story. I’m touched that you feel strongly enough to be an asshole about it, but if you and I are to have any sort of future, you’ll have to accept that it’s me you’re with. Not your idea of me, and what I should be. I don’t know what’s coming, but I know my job. Ninety minutes from now I clock on again, so drink up. We’ll split a ride back to Pearl. They’re sending a couple of Humvees. They’ll be downstairs in half an hour.”

Dan Black was in free fall. He had never been spoken to like that, had never even heard of a woman speaking like that. Julia stood there in the dawn an intruder, raking at the secret places in his heart.

“Will you marry me?” he asked.

She didn’t even give him the benefit of a slight hesitation.

“No, Dan, not yet anyway. I’d like us to live together for a while first. See how we go with the daily grind when we don’t have all this bullshit to keep us entertained. If we’re still fucking like rabbits at the end of that, ask me again.”

“You want to live in sin?”

“Yeah. It sounds really sexy when you put it like that, doesn’t it.”

He was completely unbalanced by her. Women weren’t supposed to bat away a proposal of marriage. That’s not how it worked in the movies. They were supposed to collapse into your chest and burst into tears. Julia was stuffing her running shoes into a gym bag and Dan wondered if he might actually get teary. Up to now he’d always suspected there was nobody special for him—and then she’d stepped through a rupture in space and time.

“I think I’m falling in love with you, Julia.”

She stopped stuffing the bag and came over to sit down next to him, placing a hand on his thigh.