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
sipped her coffee. So he tried a little indirect prompting. “Big changes can do that. You’d think, though, that since I knew I was going to retire I could have planned better.”
A perfect opportunity to say her changes had come without time to plan, or even any choices, but she didn’t say anything. Which left him to try to find another way in.
For the first time, it occurred to him that talking to him must be as frustrating for others as talking to Cory was for him. Okay, regardless of his reasons for preferring silence, that wasn’t going to work this time. If he was right, and he was rarely wrong about things like this, she had to learn to trust him.
But he’d never had to win anyone’s trust in this way before. Oh, he’d gained the trust of his team members in training, during operations and eventually even some of it by reputation. But none of those tools were available to him here. A whole new method was needed and he didn’t have the foggiest idea how to go about finding it.
Nor, if he was right, did they have months to get to that point.
Maybe he had to keep talking. He sure as hell couldn’t think of any other way. The problem was that most of the past twenty years of his life contained so much classified information, and so much that he couldn’t share with the uninitiated, that his own memory might as well have been stamped Top Secret. And what did you talk about besides the weather if you couldn’t refer to your memories?
But then Cory herself opened the door to a place that wasn’t classified but that he wished could be. She asked, “Do you have any family?”
His usual answer to that was a flat no. But given his task here, he bit the bullet. “None that I speak to.”
“Oh. Why?”
“It was a long time ago.” Which meant he ought to be able to elaborate. It had nothing to do any longer with who he was. In fact, he’d removed them almost as cleanly as an amputation.
Then she totally floored him. Before he could decide what to tell her, and what to omit, she said gently, “You were abused, weren’t you?”
Little had the power to stun him any longer, but that simple statement did. “What, am I wearing a mark on my forehead?”
She shook her head. “I don’t mean to pry. But just a couple of things you’ve said... Well, they reminded me of some...people I worked with.”
Still hedging her way around her past, while asking about his. The tables had turned, and he’d helped her do it. Didn’t mean he had to like it.
“Well, yes,” he finally said. “What things did I say?”
“It doesn’t matter, really. You’re not that child any longer, but there were just some echoes of things I’ve heard before. Most people wouldn’t even notice.”
The way most people wouldn’t notice her omissions. His estimate of her kicked up quite a few notches. In her own way, she was as observant as he.
She reached for the carafe between them, and poured a little more coffee into her mug. Then she added just a tiny bit of milk. “Sometimes,” she said, “I guess things stay with us, even when they’ve been left far in the past.”
“I guess.” How could he deny it when she had picked up on something he’d buried a long, long time ago? “Yeah, they were abusive.”
“Physically as well as emotionally?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.” Her brown eyes practically turned liquid with warmth and concern. “Did that play a part in you becoming a SEAL?”
He was about to deny it, because he had, after all, been out of the house for nearly a year before he joined the navy. But then he realized something, and saw how it dovetailed into what was going on here, and he made a conscious decision to breach a barrier so old and so strong that he was hardly aware of it any longer.
“Yes,” he said finally. “In a way I suppose it did.”
“How so?”
Well, he’d opened the vault. “After I got out of high school, I couldn’t shake them off fast enough. I worked my way through a few jobs, feeling at loose ends. Confused.”
“Confused?” She repeated the word, and he could tell she felt the connection to her own situation. He could have waited for her to add something, but he suspected she wouldn’t.
“Confused,” he said again flatly. “I’d lived most of my life with one goal, to survive and to get away from them. And once I was away, I didn’t have a goal anymore. I felt like a stranger to myself. I finally realized that the way I was drifting I wasn’t going to get anywhere, so one morning I walked into a recruiter’s office. Then I had a goal again, something more than merely surviving. They gave me one.”
She nodded. “I can understand that. I really can. I’d like to have a goal again.”
He took a gamble, sharing a little more of himself. “When you’ve lived for so long thinking of yourself in one way, looking at life in one way, and then something dramatic changes, it’s like the earth vanishes from beneath your mental feet. Your whole identity can vanish.”
“That’s exactly how it feels.” Her face reflected pain.
“Especially when everything you thought you were was a reflection of the life you were living.”
He heard her draw a small, sharp breath. So he plunged on, laying himself out there. “For so long I’d identified myself in opposition to my parents, partly by denying all they told me I was, and partly in reaction against them and everything they did and believed. And all of a sudden I didn’t have anything to push against anymore. Any goal to fight for. Well, I’m kind of there again.”
Her head jerked up and she looked straight at him. “Because you retired?”
He nodded. “For twenty years, the navy gave me an identity and a goal. Now it’s all gone again.”
“Oh, Wade,” she said quietly. “I know how hard that is.”
“Somehow,” he said pointedly, “I think you do.”
Her eyes widened a shade. Then she confided something for the very first time. “I was...my husband died a little over a year ago. Before I came here. Everything went up in smoke.”
Still evasive, but at last a nugget of the truth. He waited, hoping she would say more, but she didn’t. And he’d said about all he could stand about himself. Admitted more to her than he had really wanted to about himself. Voiced out loud the struggle he’d been facing for six months now without any success.
God, he felt exposed. And life had taught him that when you exposed yourself this way, all you did was give someone ammunition to use against you.
He could have used a ten-mile run right then, but he fought down the urge to get up and walk away. Only two things stopped him: this woman might be at risk, and he realized he couldn’t keep running from himself any longer.
He’d been running an awful long time. All the way back to the age of four. Running inside his head, running with his career, always running.
One of these days he needed to stop, and apparently today was going to be the day.
Wade excused himself to go shower. Cory placed the coffee carafe back on the warmer, put the milk away and washed their mugs. She smothered another yawn, considered getting dressed, then discarded the idea. It was just too early to bother, especially when she didn’t have anywhere to go.
But she did have a lot to think about. Wandering into her living room, she curled up on one end of the couch, tucking her robe around her legs, and put her chin in her hand thinking over all Wade had shared with her that morning.
She