Military Heroes Bundle: A Soldier's Homecoming / A Soldier's Redemption / Danger in the Desert / Strangers When We Meet / Grayson's Surrender / Taking Cover. Merline Lovelace
getting into dangerous territory here.
“Well, there is another part.”
“Which is?”
He set his mug down. “It seems odd to find a woman so terrified in a place like this.”
She gasped and drew back. His gaze never left her face, and he didn’t wait for a denial or even any response at all.
“I know terror,” he continued. “I’ve seen it, smelled it, tasted it. You reek of it.”
She felt her jaw drop, but she couldn’t think of one damn thing to say, because he was right. Right.
“Sorry,” he said after a moment. “I suppose I have no business saying things like that.”
Damn straight, she thought, wishing she’d never asked him if he wanted coffee. Wishing she’d never agreed to share a house with him. Those dark eyes of his saw too much. Way too much.
He’d stripped her bare. Anger rose in her and she glared at him. How dare he? But then, hadn’t she all but asked for it?
He looked down at his mug, giving her a break from his stare, from his acute perception.
She thought about getting up and walking into her bedroom and locking the door. Hiding, always hiding. The thought stiffened her somehow, and instead of fleeing she held her ground. “Is it that obvious?”
He shook his head. “Probably not to anyone who hasn’t been where I’ve been. Except for when you got that call, you put on a pretty good act.”
“My entire life is an act,” she heard herself snap.
He nodded, and when he looked at her again something in his gaze tugged at her, something that reached toward her and tried to pull her in. She looked quickly away. None of that. She didn’t dare risk that.
“Look,” he said finally, “I don’t mean to upset you. I just want you to know...” He trailed off.
She waited, but when he didn’t continue, she finally prodded him. “Want me to know what?”
“I’m not useless. Far from it. So if...if you need help, well, I’m here.” Then he poured a little more coffee in his mug and rose, carrying the mug away with him.
She listened to him climb the creaky stairs and wondered what the hell had just happened.
* * *
Wade made up his bed with the skill of long years of practice in the navy. Perfectly square corners, the blanket tight enough to bounce a quarter off. His drawers were just as neat, everything was folded to fit a locker though, so the items didn’t exactly match the drawers, but the stacks were square.
Old habits die hard, and six months of retirement hadn’t killed any of them.
He sat on the wood chair in the corner of the room, and focused his mind like a searchlight on the present, because looking back got him nowhere, and the future seemed impossible to conceive.
That woman downstairs was as scared as any green combat troop he’d ever seen. As scared as the women and kids he’d seen in situations he didn’t want to remember.
He hadn’t expected to find that here. Hadn’t bargained on the feelings it would resurrect. He’d come to this damn county in the middle of nowhere because Seth Hardin had promised he’d find peace and solitude, and that everything here was as far from his past as he could possibly get.
Right.
Apparently Seth hadn’t known about this woman. Corinne Farland. Cory. Regardless, who the hell would have thought that he’d find this mess through the simple act of renting a room?
He leaned over and lifted the coffee mug from the top of the dresser, draining half of it in one gulp. Good coffee.
The back of his neck prickled a little as he thought about the situation, and he never ignored it when the back of his neck prickled. That sensation had saved his skin more than once, or someone else’s skin.
But he couldn’t figure out why the hell Gage Dalton had brought him to this particular woman. There must be other rooms for rent in this county. Surely.
Well, maybe not. The place didn’t exactly look huge. So it could just have been coincidence. But he didn’t believe much in coincidence. At some level, conscious or otherwise, Gage had thought of this woman, her terror and her room.
And there was a reason for that, a reason that made the skin on the back of his neck crawl. Cory’s level of fear suggested a long-term, ongoing threat.
And here he was, smack in the middle of a place he thought he’d left behind. A place he wanted to leave behind.
He needed to normalize, to stop being a SEAL and start being a reasonably ordinary member of society again. He needed to stop sleeping with one eye always open, constantly ready for death to lunge out of any shadow or hole. He needed to let his reflexes slow again, at least to the point where someone wouldn’t risk death simply by trying to wake him from sleep, or by moving too fast in the corner of his eye. That’s what he needed, and that had just skittered out the door of his immediate future.
Because downstairs there was one hell of a scared woman, and she shouldn’t feel that way. And a phone call, a simple phone call, had caused her to collapse.
From what he’d seen of Conard County and Conard City so far, he would have called the place bucolic.
Well, that was a hell of a reaction for a bucolic place.
It wasn’t normal. It didn’t fit.
Apparently he would have to keep sleeping with one eye open.
He could leave, of course, but that didn’t even truly appear on his menu of options. He couldn’t walk away from her terror.
Someone that terrified needed protecting.
For a change, he decided, he’d like to provide the protection, rather than the terror.
A bitter smile twisted his mouth. That, at least, would be a change. A much-needed change.
And wasn’t that what he’d come here for?
* * *
The phone didn’t ring again, thank God. Cory ate a small salad for dinner, then tried to settle in with the TV. She didn’t think she could focus on one of the library books stacked on the small table beside the rocking chair, because her mind seemed to have turned into a flea, insisting on hopping from one thing to another, all totally unrelated. Even the sharpness of fear didn’t seem able to get her full attention.
So it was easier to turn the TV on, for the noise, for the visual distraction, for the occasional moments in which she could actually tune into the program, whatever it was.
She noted that her roomer upstairs had grown quiet, utterly quiet. Probably sleeping, but with her senses on high alert, the inability to guess what he was about made her uneasy. Solitude was her friend, her fortress, her constant companion.
But she’d invited in an invader, and his silence was worse than the noise he’d made while settling in.
She flipped quickly to the weather station, but too late, because the image of a crime-scene team entering a home where a man lay dead, just a reenactment, was enough to set off a string of memories she tried never to visit.
Jim lying there, bleeding from multiple wounds. Trying to crawl to him despite the wound in her own side, gasping his name, knowing somehow as she crawled that he was lost to her forever.
She squeezed her eyes shut as if that could erase the images that sprang to mind. Gentle, determined Jim, a man with a huge smile, a huge heart and a belief in making the world a better place. A man who could talk to her with such kindness and understanding, then in a courtroom or deposition turn into a circling shark, coming in for the kill.
A gifted man. An admirable man.
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