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

They reached the door and went inside, resetting the alarm. Without a word, he followed her into the kitchen, evidently ready to get his first cooking lesson. She started pulling things out, preparing to make a dish with Italian sausage and pasta and fresh vegetables. The recipe was one that had emerged one day from a scramble through the cupboards and the realization that the only way she could put together dinner was the stone-soup method.

“I can’t trust myself anymore,” she muttered, at first unaware that she was thinking out loud. When you lived alone long enough, having conversations with yourself often moved from the mind to the mouth. “Everything’s been so screwed up for so long. But then how do I know my thinking wasn’t screwed up before? I was living in some kind of enchanted universe before. A place where bad things didn’t happen.”

She turned from pulling a package of frozen Italian sausage from the freezer and saw Wade standing there, arms folded, watching. And that’s when she realized her muttering hadn’t been private. Her cheeks heated a bit. “Sorry, sometimes I talk to myself. Bad habit.”

“Don’t mind me.”

“Well, you don’t want to hear it. And I’m not sure I want anyone else to hear the mess that’s going on inside my head.”

“I can go upstairs if you like.”

She shook her head. “Stay. I promised to teach you some cooking, and this is a great dish to start with.” She passed him the package of frozen sausage. “Microwave, hit the defrost button twice, please.”

He took the sausage and did as she asked. Soon the familiar hum filled the kitchen. Green peppers and tomatoes were next, a true luxury these days, washed in the sink and readied for cubing. “Do you like onions?”

“Very much.”

So she pulled one out of the metal hanging basket and peeled it swiftly before setting it beside the other vegetables. As soon as she reached for the chef’s knife, though, Wade stepped forward. “I can slice and dice. How do you want it?”

“Pieces about one-inch square.” She passed him the knife and as their hands brushed she felt the warmth of his skin. All of a sudden she had to close her eyes, had to batter down the almost forgotten pleasure of skin on skin. Such a simple, innocent touch, and it reminded her of one of the forms of human contact she absolutely missed most: touch. Even simple touches. She almost never let anyone get that close anymore, certainly not a man.

A flood tide of forgotten yearnings pierced her, and she drew a sharp breath.

“What’s wrong?”

He was so near she felt his breath on her cheek. Warm and clean. A shiver rippled through her as she fought the unwanted feelings, and forced her eyes open, ready to deny anything and everything.

But the instant her gaze met his, she knew she could deny nothing. His obsidian eyes darkened even more, and she heard him inhale deeply as he recognized the storm inside her. There was a clatter as the knife fell to the counter, and the next thing she knew she was wrapped in his powerful arms.

He lifted her right off the floor and set her on the counter, moving in between her legs until she could feel his heat in places that had been too cold and too empty for so long. This was not a man who hesitated, nor one who finessed the moment.

He swooped in like a hawk and claimed her mouth as if it were rightfully his. An instant later she learned that thin mouth could be both soft and demanding. That his hard chest felt every bit as hard as it looked, and felt even better as it crushed her breasts. His arms were tight and steely, and she should have been afraid of their power, afraid of what he could do to her whether she wanted it or not.

But all she could feel was the singing in her body as it responded to needs more primal than any she had ever imagined. Somehow the dissenting, cautious voices in her head fell silent. Somehow she lifted her arms and wrapped them around his neck, holding on for dear life.

Because this was life. Here and now. Like Sleeping Beauty awakening from a nightmare, she discovered she could want something besides freedom from terror and pain, and that good things were still to be had despite all.

Her body responded to life’s call as her mind no longer seemed able to. His tongue passed the first gate of her teeth, finding hers in a rhythm as strong as her heartbeat, a thrusting that echoed like a shout in a canyon until it reached all the way to her very core and came back to her in a powerful throbbing.

A gasp escaped her between one kiss and the next. Her legs lifted, trying to wrap around his narrow hips, trying to bring her center right up against his hardness, trying to find an answer to the ache that overpowered her. Any brain she had left gave way before the demands of her body for more and deeper touches. Her physical being leaped the barriers that had existed only in her mind.

He moved against her, mimicking the ultimate act, not enough to satisfy, but enough to promise. She wanted every bit of that promise. Every bit.

He drew a ragged breath as he released her mouth, but he didn’t leave her. No, he trailed those lips across her cheek, down the side of her throat, making her shiver with even more longing, causing her to make a small cry and arch against him. One of her hands slipped upward, finding the back of his head, pressing him closer yet. She wanted to take this journey as never before.

Then the microwave dinged.

All of a sudden, reality returned with a crash. He pulled away just a couple of inches and looked at her, his eyes darker than night. She stared back, hardly aware that she was panting, suddenly and acutely aware of how she had exposed herself.

As if he read her awareness on her face, he stepped back a little farther. The absence of pressure between her thighs made her ache even more, made some part of her want to cry out in loss. But with the return of awareness came a bit of sense.

He didn’t pull completely away, as if he knew how sensitive this could become. How dangerous for her, and maybe for him.

Instead, even as she let her legs fall away, he reached out to gently brush her hair with his hand.

“You’re enchanting,” he said huskily.

Enchanting? No one had ever called her that. She remained mute, unable to speak, knowing that her eyes, her face, her breathing must be telling a truth she didn’t want to hear herself say. Not yet, maybe never.

“I forgot myself.”

He wasn’t the only one. She didn’t know what to say, could only stare at him, torn between yearning, loss and the returning shreds of common sense.

He leaned forward, giving her the lightest of kisses on her lips. “I think,” he said, “that I’d better cut those vegetables.”

She managed a nod, awhirl with so many conflicting feelings she doubted she could ever sort them out. He turned to pick up the knife, and moved down the counter about a foot to the cutting board and vegetables.

“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” he said, his voice still a little thick. “I’ll behave.”

Another odd choice of words. As she fought her way back from the frustration of awakened, unmet desires, she tucked that away for future consideration. Right now, the thing she most needed was some equilibrium. Thinking could come later.

Wade, just about to start slicing the vegetables, put the knife down and turned toward her. He gripped her around the waist and set her back on her feet. “Sorry,” he said. “Should have thought of that.”

She could have slid off the counter on her own, but hadn’t because she still felt so shaky. Unable to tell him that, she mumbled her thanks and turned desperately in another direction, away from him, seeking something to keep busy with. This was a simple meal, and he was about to do the major part of the work.

Finally she measured out the penne into a bowl, then walked around him to get the sausage from the microwave. Just act as if it never happened, she told herself. Maybe it never had.

But her traitorous body said otherwise. Oh, it had happened all right, and she suspected the internal earthquakes had just begun. Even the light brush of her own clothing over her skin, especially between her legs, reminded her that something primal had awakened.

She coated the bottom of a frying pan with olive oil, then began to slowly cook and brown the sausage on medium heat. Her hands still shook a little when she pulled out the stockpot she used for cooking pasta. A cheap pot, it wouldn’t have served well for anything that wasn’t mostly liquid, and she found herself pausing, suddenly locked in the most ridiculous memory of her previous pasta cooker, an expensive pot with a built-in colander and a smaller insert for steaming vegetables.

It was an odd memory, coming out of nowhere. She had long since ceased to care about the things she had lost during her transition to this new life, but for no reason she could almost feel the weight of that pot in her hands and with it the tearing edge of memories, ordinary memories, the simple kinds of things that should hold no threat whatever. It wasn’t a memory of Jim, of their life together. It was just a memory of a damn pot, one she had bought long before she married Jim. Nothing but a memory from the life of a woman who had once slowly built up a kitchen full of all the best cooking utensils because she loved to cook, and part of that expression was using the best of everything.

On a teacher’s salary, many of those items had truly been an indulgence. She had scrimped to buy them, until she had had a kitchen that would have pleased a world-class chef.

And now she was using a five-dollar aluminum stockpot and a chef’s knife she’d bought on sale at the grocery store.

How odd, she thought, looking at the pot. How very odd what had once seemed important to her. And how little she usually missed those things now that they were gone. In fact, even had she been able to afford them, she doubted she would have replaced them.

They didn’t matter any longer. Who had that woman been, anyway? Had she ever known? She certainly didn’t know who she was now.

A faint sigh escaped her, and she put the pot in the sink to fill it with water. Indulgences. Her past life had been full of them, her new life was empty of them. In the midst of the storm, all she could say about it was that she had never known who she was? Had no idea who she had become?

When she started to lift the heavy pot full of water, Wade stepped in and lifted it for her. “Don’t call me a pig,” he said. “I’ve just been trained to act a certain way.”

She arched a brow at him. “So a woman can’t lift anything heavy?”

“Why should she when I’m standing right here?”

Once again she was left wondering how to take him. But this time she asked, emboldened, perhaps, by the fact that he had called her enchanting. “What exactly do you mean? That I’m too weak to do it?”

He shook his head. “No.”

That awful answer again, the one that told her nothing. “Then what?” she insisted, refusing to let him get away with it.

He put the pot on the stove. “Would it make you feel better if we had an argument?”

That yanked her up short and hard. Was that what she was doing? Trying to get angry so she could forget the other things he made her feel? Or was this some kind of insistence on independence that actually made no sense? She bit her lip.

He faced her again. “It’s my training. It’s my background. Call it a simple courtesy.”

And he’d done it even though he’d expected her to object. In fact, he’d tried to deflect the objection before it occurred. Would she have even thought he was being chauvinistic if he had not shot that defense out there to begin with?

“You’re a very difficult man to understand,” she said finally. “Not that you try to make it any easier.”

“No. I don’t.”

“Thank you for lifting the pot.”

“You’re welcome.”

Feeling a bit stiff and awkward now, she returned to cooking. Maybe she should never have agreed to this whole cooking thing. Maybe she should have kept him at a distance, as a roomer she hardly saw.

Because right now she felt too much confusion for comfort.

Confusion and fear. Great companions.

Chapter 5

Wade went to ground for the night. He had no problem staying out of the way upstairs until sometime in the morning. He had a finely honed instinct that warned him when it was time to become part of the background. Wallpaper. Just another tree in a forest. Now was such a time.

The hours ticked by as he read a novel he’d bought during his bus trip but had never really started. He had plenty to think about anyway as the hours slipped toward dawn. The past he still needed to deal with, the future he needed to create out of whole cloth and finally because he could avoid it no longer, a woman who slept downstairs.

Not quite two days ago, he’d met Cory Farland for the first time. There had been no mistaking that she lived in a constant state of fear, though he didn’t know why. Now, in an extremely short space of time, she had made several attempts to break out of that fear, to become proactive, to take charge of even little things. And she had come perilously close to having sex with a total stranger.

He recognized the signs of someone emerging from a terrible emotional trauma. Her actions were a little off center, her reactions misaligned. He didn’t even have to try to imagine the kind of confusion she must be experiencing within herself because he’d lived through it.

He wanted to kick himself, though, for giving in to the sexual desire that had been so plainly written on her face in the kitchen. Yeah, she was a helluva sexy woman, but she wasn’t a one-night-stand kind of woman. If he’d pursued the matter any further, he might have given her another wound to add to the seemingly heavy scars she already carried.

His own actions had taken him by surprise, though. He usually had much better self-control, and he couldn’t imagine why she’d gone to his head so fast. Yeah, it had been a long time, but that was a poor excuse. He’d quit enjoying pointless sexual encounters many years ago. Lots of women were eager to hop into bed with a SEAL, and there’d been a time when he had been glad to oblige.

Not anymore. Not for a long time now. The hero worship, the sense that he was another notch on a belt, had palled ages ago. Nor did he have the least desire for notches of his own.

What he wanted was a connection. And he knew he couldn’t make them. As he’d already told Cory, he didn’t make them at all. Couldn’t afford them, sure. But couldn’t make them, either. And he’d long since given up trying to pretend he could. Best to just hold the world at a distance.

But trying to hold the world at a distance didn’t mean he could ignore that fact that Cory might need his protection. She seemed afraid in a way that suggested the threat, whatever it was, still lurked somewhere, that she had found no resolution.

It also fascinated him that while she had shared Marsha’s story of an abusive husband, she had shared nothing at all about why that phone call had terrified her so. Secrets meant something. And in this case, since her first call had been to the sheriff, he doubted she was on the run from a legal problem.

Which left...what?

And then something clicked together in his brain.

He sat up a little straighter as the circumstances he had so far observed came into focus. Moved here about a year ago, deliberately censored her speech when she spoke about where she came from. Her silences were more revealing than her speech. No offered comparison of her situation to Marsha’s. High-tech alarm system when she had little money. And terrible, terrible fear. Collapsing because some anonymous person had said, “I know where you are.”

WITSEC. Witness Protection.

He knew the protocols, had been part of WITSEC teams abroad. Usually the protected person was in some kind of trouble up to his neck, and was being protected because he’d agreed to inform against his own cohort.

But he’d bet his jump wings that this woman had never done anything more illegal in her life than speed on the highway. Which meant she had been an innocent witness to a crime and her life was in danger because of it. A crime that had yet to be solved. Nothing else would put her in the protection program. And nothing else would have caused the Marshals to spend so much money on that alarm system. Your average confessing criminal didn’t get that kind of care.

He swore under his breath and stared at the closed door of his bedroom. Every instinct and every bit of his training rushed back to front and center.

No wonder that call had terrified her. No wonder she seemed as jumpy as a cat on a hot stove. No wonder she hadn’t been able to create a life for herself here.

Then he remembered something from their walk home that afternoon, and gave himself a huge mental kick in the butt.

Without a thought, he jumped to his feet, dressed in his darkest clothes and his favorite boots. Then he switched off the motion sensors, wishing there was some way to silence the squeal, and headed downstairs. Six months of trying to be normal vanished in an instant.

* * *

HE BARELY REACHED the foot of the stairs before Cory came staggering from her bedroom, her eyes heavy-lidded with sleep, a blue terry-cloth robe held tightly around her with her arms.

“Sorry,” he said. “I just needed to move around.” Check the perimeter. “I didn’t think it would do much good for your sleep if I clomped around upstairs.”

Her brown eyes regarded him groggily. “What time is it?” she asked finally, smothering a yawn.

He glanced at the highly complex dive chronometer on his arm. He hadn’t worn it in months, but for some reason he’d put it on during the night. As if something had niggled at him, saying it was time to go on duty. “A little past five,” he answered.

“Good enough time to start the coffee,” she said, yawning again.

“I can do it. Why don’t you go back to bed?”

“I’m one of those people. Once I’m awake...” She gave a shrug and shuffled toward the kitchen.

“I’m just going to walk around the block,” he said.

“Fine.” She didn’t even look back, just waved a hand.

So he turned off the alarm and turned it back on again so he could slip out the door. He was going to hate that alarm before long. It hampered him. He should have been able to do this without waking her at all.

On the other hand, he was glad he didn’t have to leave her unprotected in there. Outside the sun was rising already, casting a rosy light over the world. He walked around the house, then set out to jog around the block.

He should have noticed it sooner, but the guy who had parked beside them at the store, then met them in the aisle had been the very same man who had driven past them on Cory’s street in a different car. Evidently he’d relaxed more over the past six months than he’d realized, because he never would have failed to notice that immediately when he was on the job. Now that he’d made the connection, he had to know if they were still being watched. Had to make up for lost time.

But neither the mystery man nor either of his cars showed up.

Which of course meant nothing except that if the guy was indeed shadowing Cory, his prey was in for the night. Reaching the house again, his breath hardly quickened by his fast jog over such a short distance, he stepped inside once more, tended the squealing, annoying alarm and made his way to the kitchen.

Cory sat at the table, chin in her hands, eyes half-closed as she waited for the coffeemaker to finish.

“Do you ever hate that alarm?” he asked as he pulled mugs out of the cupboard and put one of them in front of her.

“Sometimes.” She gave him a wan smile. “I never love it, that’s a fact.”

“I’ll get used to it,” he said as he reached for the coffee carafe and filled both their mugs. Then he got the half gallon of milk out of the fridge for her and placed it beside the carafe on the table.

“Thank you. You do get used to it.”

“Sorry I woke you,” he said again. “But I just couldn’t sit still another moment.” Not exactly as simple as that, but just as true.

“No need to apologize. I may not get back to sleep now, but I usually can manage a nap in the afternoon if I need it. I’ll be fine.” She poured maybe half a teaspoon of milk into her coffee, then raised the mug to her lips and breathed the aroma in through her nose. “Fresh coffee is one of the greatest smells in the world.”

“It is,” he agreed. He pulled out the chair across from her, but looked at her before he sat. “Do you mind?”

Something crossed her face, some hint of concern, but it was gone fast and he couldn’t make out what it meant. She waved toward the chair. “Help yourself.”

He turned the chair so he could straddle it, then sat facing her. “Looks like it’s going to be a nice day out there.”

“Probably. I miss the rain, though.”

“Rain?”

She covered her mouth, stifling another yawn. “Back in...back where I used to live, this time of year we’d be having afternoon thunderstorms almost every day. I miss them.”

“But you get some here, too, right?”

“Sometimes. Not nearly every day, though. In a way, they’re prettier here.”

“How so?”

“You can see so far you can almost watch them build out of nothing. Sometimes anyway.” She gave a little shake of her head. “No trees to get in the way if you drive out of town.”

“True.”

“But there’s not as much lightning with them. I used to love the lightning shows in—” Again a sharp break. An impatient sound. “We used to watch them some nights. One storm in particular, there must have been a lightning bolt every second or so. And when they’d hit the ground, you could see a green glow spread out from them and rise into the sky. I only saw it in that one storm, but I was fascinated enough to research it.”

“What was it?”

“Corona discharge. It’s actually quite common in electrical discharges, but often we don’t even see it. The air around gets ionized as the charge dissipates. Most corona discharges aren’t dangerous, but when lightning is involved, it can be.”

She sipped her coffee, then held the cup in both hands with her elbows on the table. “You must have seen storms all over the world.”

“I have. Monsoons, hurricanes, typhoons and then just the regular buggers, which can be bad enough.”

“Yes, they can. There’s so much power in a thunderstorm. Incredible power. I used to te—” Another break. She looked down, effectively hiding her face behind her mug.

Teach? he wondered. Deliberately, he let it pass. The last thing he wanted to do was cause her fear because she’d revealed something she felt she shouldn’t. Not yet anyway. It wouldn’t serve any useful purpose to make her more afraid.

He fell silent, enjoying his coffee while his mind turned over the things he should do, and might do, to help protect her. Maybe one of the first things he should do was find a way to speak to the sheriff. But given WITSEC procedures, he doubted Dalton would give him anything useful. No, he guessed he was on his own with this, at least until he had something more than suspicion.

But he was fairly decent on his own. And he was intimately acquainted with his own abilities and weaknesses. After all, he’d spent twenty years honing those abilities and weeding out those weaknesses.

So the question now was how much he should share with Cory. Should he let her know what had coalesced everything for him? Or should he let it ride to avoid making her any more frightened? That was always a difficult question in WITSEC ops. You needed your protectee to be as cooperative as possible, as helpful as possible, but you didn’t want to scare him or her needlessly because that could result in actions born of fear that could endanger the entire operation.

Cory still had her head down, her face concealed. He studied her, trying to see her as a mission, not as a woman who had stirred some long-buried feelings in him.