Military Heroes Bundle: A Soldier's Homecoming / A Soldier's Redemption / Danger in the Desert / Strangers When We Meet / Grayson's Surrender / Taking Cover

“The sheriff. I need to talk to Gage.”

At least he didn’t question her again. Instead he reached for the phone she had dropped and pressed it into her hand.

“Need me to leave?” he asked. “I’ll just go unload the car...”

He shouldn’t hear this, but around his dark eyes she saw something like genuine concern. Something that said he’d do whatever was best for her, regardless of what it might be.

Her throat tightened. So few people in her life who would care if she lived or died anymore. Even the Marshals would probably just consider her a statistic on their chart of successes and failures.

“I...” She hesitated, knowing she wasn’t supposed to share her true situation with anyone. Not anyone. But what did she have to say that he couldn’t hear? She didn’t have to mention anything about the witness protection program or her real identity because Gage already knew.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Just don’t get up yet. I’ll get the rest of the stuff from the car.”

Amazing. He rose and went back to unloading as if she hadn’t just done the weirdest thing in the world: collapse and then demand to call the sheriff.

Amazing.

But she realized she didn’t want her car left unattended and unlocked with bags in it. Bags in which someone could put something. And she didn’t want her front door open indefinitely, or the alarm off. Her life had become consumed by such concerns.

Muttering a nasty word she almost never used, she brought up Gage’s private cell phone on her auto dialer. He answered immediately.

“Cory Farland,” she said, aware that her voice trembled.

“Cory? Did something happen?”

“Gage I...I got a phone call. All the guy said was, ‘I know where you are.’”

Gage swore softly. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Most likely it was just a prank. You know how kids are when they have time on their hands. Stupid phone calls are the least of it.”

“I know, but...”

“I know,” he said. “Trust me, I know. I’m not going to ignore it, okay? Stay inside. Don’t go out at all, and keep that alarm on. Do you have caller ID?”

“No, I can’t afford it.”

Another oath, muffled. “I’m going to remedy that as soon as possible. But Cory, try not to get too wound up. It’s probably a prank.”

Yeah. She knew kids. Probably a prank, like Prince Albert in the can. Yeah. A prank. “Okay.”

Gage spoke again. “Think about it, Cory. If they’d really found you, why would they warn you?”

Good question. “You’re right.” She couldn’t quite believe it, but he was right. She drew another shaky breath, and felt her heart start to slow into a more normal rhythm.

“I’m not dismissing it, Cory,” Gage said. “Don’t misunderstand me. But I’m ninety-nine-point-nine percent certain it’s some kind of prank.”

“Of course.” She said goodbye and disconnected, then lay staring at her ceiling. It was an old ceiling, and watermarks made strange patterns, some like faces she could almost identify. Like the face of the man who had killed Jim and almost killed her.

She heard the front door close, the lock turn, the sound of the alarm being turned on. The tone pierced what suddenly seemed like too much silence, too much emptiness.

She heard footsteps and turned her head to see Wade. Still impassive, he looked down at her. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“I’m fine. I’m fine.” Life’s biggest lie, and it rose automatically to her lips.

“Your color is a bit better. Need help getting up?”

“I can do it, thanks.” Yeah, she could do it. Get up, go to the kitchen, put her groceries away and resume the pretense of normalcy. Because there was no other option. All her options had been stolen over a year ago.

Sighing, she pulled her feet off the couch and rolled to her side to get up. A steadying hand was there to grip her elbow, surprising her. She looked into the rigid, unrevealing face of Wade Kendrick and wondered if he were some kind of instinctive caretaker.

She should have protested the touch. But all of a sudden, after a year of avoiding contact with other people, she needed it, even just that little bit of a steadying hand offered out of courtesy.

“Thanks,” she said when she was on her feet. “I need to put groceries away.”

One corner of his mouth hitched up just the tiniest bit. His version of a smile? “I think,” he said slowly, “it might be best if you sit for a bit. I can put your groceries away, and you can supervise.”

She should have argued. The independence thing had become of supreme importance to her since circumstances beyond her control had gutted her entire life. But she didn’t feel like arguing at all. No, with her knees still feeling rubbery, and perishables like frozen food and milk in her two shopping bags, the task needed to be done soon, and she honestly wasn’t sure she could manage it.

Adrenaline jolts had a high price when they wore off. So she led the way into the kitchen, her knees shaking, and sat at the chipped plastic-topped table while he emptied her two bags and then asked where each item went. He went about it with utter efficiency: economy of words and economy of movement both.

And she felt very awkward, unable to engage in conversation. She’d lost most of her conversational ability over the past year because she didn’t have a past, at least not one she could talk about, and lying had never come easy. So she had become limited to the most useless of topics: the weather, work, a recent film. No depth or breadth of any kind.

And when faced by a man like this, one who seemed disinclined to talk, all she could do was sit in her chair and squirm.

“There,” he said when the last item was put away. Then he faced her. “If you’re okay now, I’ll take my stuff upstairs.”

She should have said thank-you and left it at that. That’s what she should have done. But all of a sudden, maybe because of the phone call, being alone was the last thing she wanted. Solitude had been her fortress for a long time, so why she should want to breach the walls now, she couldn’t understand. But she did anyway.

“If I make coffee,” she said, “would you like some?”

One eyebrow seemed to lift, but she couldn’t be quite sure. This was a man who seemed to have lost use of his face. Either that, or he had trained himself to reveal absolutely nothing. And the question about coffee seemed to give him pause. He treated it as if it needed real consideration.

“That would be nice,” he finally said.

Only then did she realize she was almost holding her breath. Maybe she feared rejection of some kind. How could she possibly consider a no over a cup of coffee to be rejection? God, was she beginning to lose her mind?

It was, of course, entirely possible. In the past year she’d come perilously close to living in solitary confinement with only her memories.

“Okay.” She tried a smile and it seemed to work, because he nodded.

“I’ll just take my stuff up and be back down in a minute,” he said.

She watched him walk out of the room and noticed his broad shoulders and narrow hips. The ease with which he moved in his body, like an athlete. Yes, she was definitely slipping a cog somewhere. She hadn’t noticed a man that way in a long time, hadn’t felt the sexual siren song of masculinity, except with Jim, and since Jim not at all.

She didn’t need or want to feel it now.

Shaking her head, she rose and found that her strength seemed to have returned. Making the coffee was an easy, automatic task, one that kept her hands busy while her mind raced.

Surely Gage had been right. The killers wouldn’t warn her they were coming. So it must have been kids pulling a prank. When she thought about it, her own reaction to the call disappointed her. There’d been a time when she would have reached the same conclusion as Gage without needing to consult anyone at all. A time when she hadn’t been a frightened mouse who couldn’t think things through for herself.

She needed to get that woman back if she was to survive, because much more of what she’d gone through the past year would kill her as surely as a bullet.

Piece by piece, she felt her personality disassembling. Piece by piece she was turning into a shadow of the woman she had once been. She might as well have lopped off parts of her own brain and personality.

How long would she let this continue? Because if it went on much longer, she’d be nothing but a robot, an empty husk of a human being. Somehow, somewhere inside her, she had to find purpose again. And a way to connect with the world.

As one of the Marshals had said when she argued she didn’t want to do this, “How many people in this world would give just about anything to have a chance to start completely fresh?”

At the time the comment had seemed a little heartless, but as it echoed inside her head right now, she knew he’d had a point. She hadn’t liked it then, didn’t like it now, but there was a certain truth in it.

A fresh start. No real reason to fear. Not anymore. If they were going to find her, certainly they’d have done so long since.

Wade returned to the kitchen just as the drip coffeemaker finished its task. “How do you like it?” she asked.

“Black as night.”

She carried the carafe to the table, along with two mugs and filled them, then set the pot on a pad in the center of the table. She always liked a touch of milk in hers, one of the things she hadn’t had to give up in this transition. She could still eat the foods she preferred, drink her coffee with a little milk and enjoy the same kinds of movies and books.

Maybe it was time to start thinking about what she hadn’t lost, rather than all she had.

Brave words.

She sat across the table from Wade, trying not to look at him because she didn’t want to make him feel like a bug under a microscope. But time and again her gaze tracked toward him, and each time she found him staring at her.

Finally she had to ask. “Is something wrong? You keep staring at me.”

“You’re a puzzle.”

She blinked, surprised. “You don’t even know me.”

“Probably part of what makes you a puzzle,” he said easily enough. His deep voice, which had earlier sounded like thunder, now struck her as black velvet, dark and rich.

“Only part?” she asked, even though she sensed she might be 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.

The man she had loved with every cell of her being.

Their last dinner together. Jim had taken her to one of the best restaurants in Tampa to celebrate a positive pregnancy test that very morning. They’d laughed, coming up with silly names they would never in a million years give their child.

And shortly after midnight, everything that mattered in her life vanished. At least she didn’t mourn the pregnancy as much as she might if she had had time to get accustomed to the idea. That little mark on the stick had scarcely been real to her yet when the gunshot ended it all.

But Jim...Jim had been everything. Jim and her students. The life they had barely begun to build together after only two years.

Now she drew a shaky breath, trying to steady herself, trying to prevent the gasping sobs she had managed to avoid for months now.

But awake, or asleep, she still heard the banging on the door. Banging that had sounded like the police. Jim had laughed drowsily as he climbed from bed to answer it.

“Somebody probably just tried to steal my car,” he had said. His car was also a joke between them, a beater he’d gotten in law school. It was certainly not worthy of stealing, but the very expensive stereo he’d put in it was.

She had heard him open the door then...

Her mind balked. Her eyes snapped open. No, she couldn’t do this to herself again. No way. It was done, the nightmares permanently engraved on her heart and mind, but that didn’t mean she had to let them surface.

Sometimes she even scolded herself for it, because while grief was natural, and the fear she felt equally so, every time she indulged herself in grief or fear, she knew she was giving that man even more power over her than he had already stolen from her.

And he had already stolen everything that mattered.

The phone rang, jarring her. This time she didn’t jump for it, this time she didn’t think it was work calling. Part of her wanted to let it ring unanswered, but she didn’t even have an answering machine, and what if it was Gage?

Slowly, reluctantly, she reached for it, coiling as tight as a spring. So tight some of her nerves actually objected.

“Hello?”

“Cory, it’s Gage. I just wanted you to know a few other women have reported similar calls, so it was probably just a prank, okay?”

Her breath escaped her lungs in a gasp of relief. “Thanks,” she said. “Thanks.”

“And I’m getting caller ID put on your service. The phone company says you should have it within a few days. And don’t worry about the cost. The department will pay for it.”

“Oh, Gage...” Words deserted her yet again. Of all the places on this earth the Marshals could have put her, she was grateful they had put her in a town with Gage Dalton.

“Hey,” he said kindly. “We take care of our own around here. It’s not a problem.”

Before she could thank him again, he was gone.

“Is everything all right?”

Startled, she nearly cried out, and turned to see Wade Kendrick at the foot of the stairs. How had he come down so silently? Earlier his tread had been heavy. Or maybe she’d just been so distracted. She drew a few deep breaths, trying to steady her pulse.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I heard the phone ring, and after the way you reacted earlier...”

“Of course. Of course.” She closed her eyes and consciously tried to relax, at least a bit. It didn’t happen easily anymore, that whole relaxing thing. “Everything’s okay. Gage...called.” But what could she tell him about the call? Even a few words might be too much.

He waited, and it was clear to her that he wasn’t satisfied. But he didn’t ask, he just waited. And somehow his willingness to wait reassured her. She couldn’t even understand it herself.

“I got a nasty phone call earlier,” she said slowly.

He nodded. “I didn’t think it was a funny one.”

“No.” Of course not. And now she was sounding like an idiot, she supposed. She gathered herself, trying to organize her words carefully. “Gage just wanted me to know that several other women received similar calls.”

One of his eyebrows lifted. “Really.”

“Probably just kids.”

“Maybe.”

His response didn’t seem to make sense. “Maybe?”

“Well, that would depend, wouldn’t it?”

“On what?”

“On what has you so scared, and who else received the calls.”

“What in the world do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Life has made me suspicious.”

“Oh.” She bit her lower lip, realizing that nothing in her life had prepared her for dealing with a man like this. He seemed to come at things from a unique direction, unlike anything she was familiar with.

He started to turn away. “Well, as long as you’re okay...”

He didn’t ask a single question. She found that intriguing, given what little he had figured out about her in the short time since he moved in. Any other person would have been asking dozens of questions, but this man just seemed to accept that she was afraid, she must have good reason for it and that it was none of his business.

In that moment she thought it possible that she might come to like him.

“Wade?”

He stopped and turned back to her. He didn’t say a word, simply looked at her.

“I, uh...” How could she say that she didn’t want to be alone? That she was tired of being locked in the prison of her own thoughts? That even though solitude had provided her only safety for a year now, she was sick of it, and sick of her own company. Tired enough of it all to feel an impulse toward risk. Just a small risk.

“Should I make coffee?” he asked.

He had understood, though how she couldn’t imagine. She might have been about to ask him anything, tell him anything.

All she said was, “Thanks.” Because there was nothing else she could say.

She switched the TV off so she could listen to his movements in the kitchen. Everything he needed was beside the drip coffeemaker, so he wouldn’t have trouble finding it. And finally she could afford to have more than one cup each day. Imagine that, being reduced to one cup of coffee and a can of soup each day.

Sure, there were plenty of people in the world who had less, but her life had never before been restricted in such a way. She’d always been luckier than that. Always. Until recently.