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

He needed to gain her confidence, sufficiently that she would trust him if he told her to do something. That was primary. But how? This was no ordinary operation where being bulked-up in body armor and armed to the teeth would do the job.

Well, he couldn’t let her know how much she had betrayed by her silences. That would scare her into wondering if she’d left a crumb trail for someone to follow.

Yet, he feared someone had found her. That phone call, he was now certain, had been no innocent prank. Someone was sounding out women who fit a certain profile. Waiting to see if something changed after the call. He could explain it no other way. Certainly you wouldn’t warn your intended target if you were certain you had the right one. Instead, and he had done this on an operation or two, you would try to precipitate revealing action.

The person or persons who hunted Cory might still be wondering. That would depend on how many changes the other women who got those calls made. Marsha had adopted a dog, making no secret of the fact that she wanted it for protection.

But what had Cory done?

The rest of the picture slammed into place. She’d taken in a boarder. One who could easily look like a bodyguard.

Cripes. Was he himself the link that had led the hunter to her? That would depend on whether the hunter learned of him before or after the phone call, and for security purposes, he had to assume the worst.

The thought sickened him.

But still, sitting right before him was the woman whose trust he needed, a woman who knew nothing about him, and was likely to know nothing about him unless he started opening up the coffins of his past enough that she felt she knew him.

He swore silently, and poured more coffee into his mug. He needed to go totally against his own nature here. Needed to expose himself in ways he never did.

In that regard, this was a very different type of operation. But where to begin?

He cleared his throat, trying to find words. She looked at him immediately, which didn’t really help at all. But he had to take the plunge, sort of like jumping out of a helicopter into a stormy sea and falling sixty or more feet into water that had turned into bricks.

Her eyes looked more alert now, pretty brown eyes, naturally soft and warm, especially right now when fear hadn’t tightened them.

“I, um, told you I’m not good at making connections.”

She nodded, but didn’t try to say anything.

“Truth is, I feel like an alien.”

Her eyebrows lifted, but her eyes remained warm, and even gentled a bit. “How so?”

Well now, that was hard to explain. But he’d been the one who brought it up. “Because I’ve been places ordinary people don’t go.”

She gave another nod, a slow one. “I take it you don’t mean geographically.”

“No.” And leaving it there wasn’t going to get this part of his mission done. He could almost hear the vault doors creak as he opened the crypt of feelings he didn’t care to share. “I’ve done things, seen things, survived things most people can’t even imagine. I know what I’m capable of in ways most people never will, thank God. And I can’t talk about it. Partly because most of it is classified, but partly because no one will understand anyway.”

“I can see that.”

“The only people who truly understand are the people I served with. And we all have that sense of alienation. Some are proud of it. Maybe even most. But there’s a cost.”

“I would imagine so.”

“So we can’t make connections. We try. Then we watch it all go up in smoke. Our wives leave us because we can’t talk, our kids feel like we’re strangers who just show up from time to time, even parents look at us like they don’t know who we are. And they don’t. We pretend, try to appear ordinary, but nothing inside us is ever ordinary again. And finally we realize the only people we can truly connect with anymore are our fellow team members.”

He watched her eyes glaze with thought as she absorbed what he was saying. “I guess,” she said slowly, “I can identify with that just a little bit.”

He waited to see if she would volunteer anything more, but she didn’t. So he decided to forge ahead. “I’m not saying this out of self-pity.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“I’m just trying to explain why I’m so difficult to talk with. Over the years, between secrets I couldn’t discuss, and realities I shouldn’t discuss, I got so I didn’t talk much at all.”

She nodded once more. “Did you have a wife? Kids?”

“I was lucky. I watched too many marriages fall apart before I ever felt the urge. That’s one closet without skeletons.”

“And now your only support group, the rest of your team, has been taken away from you.”

He hadn’t thought of it that way before, but he realized she was right. “I guess so.”

“So what do you do now?”

“I’m trying to work my way into a life without all that, but I’ll be honest, I’m having trouble envisioning it.”

“I’m...” She hesitated. “I guess I’m having the same kind of problem, generally speaking. I can’t seem to figure out where I want to go, either.”

He waited, hoping she’d offer more, but she said nothing else, merely 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.

Chapter 6

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 wished she knew what had unlocked his silence but she had to admit it was good to know something about him even if it wasn’t a whole lot.

But she wasn’t at all surprised to find out he’d been an abused child. Nor did it surprise her to learn that the navy had given him what he needed. Often abused children needed order in their lives, clear-cut rules to follow, after being subjected to the unpredictable whims of mean adults. The regimented lifestyle took away the fear of never knowing what would bring retribution down on their heads.

And apparently he’d needed to take charge at the same time, or he never would have gone into the SEALs. Maybe there’d even been an element of nobody’s ever going to get away with treating me that way again.

She didn’t consider herself an expert, but in eight years of teaching she’d certainly seen enough kids fighting these same battles, and few enough who were willing to talk about it. It was sad how they became coconspirators with their abusers, protecting their tormentors with silence and even outright lies.

And often, even when she thought she had enough to report it to the authorities, nothing came from it. Without physical evidence, as long as the child denied it, there was little enough anyone could do.

The thing that had always struck her, though, was the incalculable emotional damage that must come from being so mistreated by the very people a child by rights ought to be able to trust.

Well, she’d always wondered about that, and now she was looking at it. He seemed to blame his job for his inability to make connections, and perhaps it was responsible in large measure, but she suspected the seeds of the problem lay in his childhood. If you couldn’t trust your own parents, who could you trust?

She closed her eyes, chin still in her hand. As always, when confronted with something like this, she wanted to help, but in this case she didn’t see how she possibly could. This was a man who must be what? Thirty-eight? Thirty-nine? She couldn’t just step in like some delivering angel. He wouldn’t want it, and honestly, she didn’t know enough to be much help. The best she could do was listen when he was willing to talk.

He had turned out to be a good case for not judging a book by its cover, though. If her ears hadn’t become properly tuned through teaching, she probably would have thought all along that he was a hard, harsh man, sufficient unto himself, needing no one and nothing. That’s certainly what he had tried to become, and the image he tried to perpetuate.

And she had to admit she felt a lot more comfortable now knowing that he wasn’t the stone monolith he had first seemed.

Listening to him had also made her think about her own situation, and doing so made her squirm a bit. Yes, terrible things had happened to her, and her entire life had changed as a result, but how could she truly excuse her waste of the past year? Terror and trauma could explain only so much. The woman she had once believed herself to be had turned out to be a weakling and a coward.

She gave herself no quarter on that one. Some of it could be excused, but not all of it. After all, look what Wade had managed to achieve out of his own trauma as a child. He may have drifted for nearly a year, but then he’d taken a stand to make something of himself.

She hadn’t even tried.

But even as she sat there trying to beat herself up in the hopes that she might regain some sense of purpose or direction, she found herself remembering that episode in the kitchen yesterday, when he had lifted her onto the counter and kissed her.

Oh, man, that had started some kind of internal snowball rolling. Just the memory of those all-too-brief moments was enough to make her clamp her thighs together as the throbbing ache reawakened. She had thought that part of her dead and buried for good, only to discover it could come back to life at the merest touch.

Like a daffodil determined to bloom even though snow still lay on the ground in an icy blanket, her body responded to the memory as surely as the touch. She could only imagine what it might feel like to be claimed by such a man, one so powerful and strong, one so confident in his own desire. Sex with Jim had been good: loving and tender. She couldn’t help but feel that the entire experience would be different with Wade: hot and hard.

And maybe that’s what she needed now, someone to push her past all the invisible lines she had drawn around herself, someone to knock her off center enough to emerge from her cocoon.

Because she sure as hell needed some kind of kick.

Wade returned downstairs eventually, waking her from a half doze where dreams of hot kisses had collided with inchoate fears, the kind of feeling that something was chasing her, but she couldn’t escape it, and the kisses felt like both protection and trap.

Freshly shaven, smelling of soap even from several feet away, he sat facing her. “Sorry, woke you again.”

“I didn’t want to doze off. If you want some, the coffee should still be hot.” The memory of her odd half dream made her cheeks equally hot. She hoped he couldn’t see and thought he probably couldn’t since she kept the curtains closed, and the early daylight out.

It was time to start opening those curtains. Time to allow the sunlight into her house, something she hadn’t yet done in all this time.

She rose at once and went to the pull cord. The instant her hand touched it, Wade barked, “Don’t.”

With that single command, he drove all her resolutions out of her head and brought the crippling fear back in a rush.

She froze, feeling her knees soften beneath her. She wanted some anger, even just one little flare of it, but it failed to come. Instead she reached for the wall beside the curtain, propping herself against it and closing her eyes.

When her voice emerged, it was weak. “Why?”

“I’m sorry.” As if he sensed the storm that had just torn through her, leaving her once again gutted by fear, he came to her, slipping his arm around her waist, and guiding her back to the couch. “I’m sorry,” he said again as he helped her sit, and sat beside her. He kept her hand, holding it between both of his, rubbing it with surprising gentleness.

This had to stop, Cory thought. This had to stop. One way or another, she had to find a way to get rid of this fear. Else how was she ever going to do anything again? “I can’t keep doing this,” she said to Wade, her voice thin. “I can’t.”

“Keep doing what?”

“Being afraid all the time. And I was just starting to do things to fight it back. Like letting you move in here. Like helping Marsha yesterday. Like opening the damn curtains for the first time in a year! And you told me to stop. Why? Why?”

At least she didn’t dissolve into tears, but she felt on the brink of it. Ever since that phone call, she’d been teetering as she hadn’t teetered in a long time. Before that she’d lived in a steady state at least, even if it was one of grief and fear.

Wade surprised her by drawing her into his arms and holding her. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, and stroked her hair gently. “I’m sorry.”

“After...after...” The thought fled before a renewed rush of terror as something struck her. “What do you know?” she asked on a whisper. “What do you know that I don’t?”

His hand hesitated, then resumed stroking her hair. “I’m not sure I know anything.”

“Tell me!” Her hands balled into fists, and she pounded one of them against his chest, not hard, but enough to make a point. That chest yielded to her fist about as much as cement.

He sighed, tightening his arms around her.

“Wade, don’t do this to me. You either know something or you don’t.”

When his answer seemed slow in coming, she stiffened, ready to pull away. “You can’t do this,” she said, anger beginning to replace fear, and weakness with strength. “You can’t! You can’t just waltz into my life and then do things to make me afraid all over again. Not without a reason. I won’t stand for it.”

“All right. Just keep in mind this may be meaningless.”

“Just tell me.”

“That man we met at the store yesterday morning? The one we ran into later in the aisle?”

“Yes? What about him?”

“Early this morning I realized he was driving the car behind the woman who waved to us as we were walking back to the house.”

She hardly remembered the incident and had to make herself think back. Yes, a man had driven past them, right after that woman. She tipped her head back, trying to look at him. “But it was a different car.”

“Yes, it was. But it was the same man. Maybe he just owns two cars.”

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t remember the face of the man in the car during their walk. “How can you be sure? I can’t even remember what he looked like.”

“Training. If I hadn’t gotten so lazy over the last six months, I’d have picked up on it right away. And he might just have two cars. A lot of folks do.”

He looked down at her at last, his obsidian eyes like chips of stone. “I can’t ignore it. Coincidence or not, I cannot ignore it.”

She bit her lip, then said, “That’s what made you come down so early this morning. Why you went out to jog. You were looking for him.”

He nodded. “I didn’t find him.”

“So it could be coincidence.”

“Maybe.”

She shook her head a little, trying to sort through a bunch of conflicting thoughts. Finally she came up with one question. “That phone call couldn’t be part of it, could it? I mean...” She wanted to believe it was all random chance, but the phone call kept rearing up in her mind, some part of her insisting it was no prank. “It doesn’t make sense. Why call me if you know where I am?”

“Because maybe you don’t know exactly which of a handful of women is your target.”

“And how would that prove a damn thing?”

He loosened his hold on her, giving her space, but she didn’t move away. She didn’t want to. Odd considering that he was busy ripping her newfound courage to shreds. Not that it had been much to begin with.

He spoke finally. “Sometimes the only way to identify a target is to do something that makes them take a revealing action.”

She searched his face, but it remained unreadable. “You’ve done that?”

“A couple of times.”

“It works?”

“It did for me.”

“But I haven’t done anything since the call! So that can’t be what’s going on.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Stop being so elliptical. Just tell me what you’re thinking. Please!”

“I moved in here right before you got the call. What if the person trying to locate you saw me only after the call?”

Her stomach sank, and right along with it her heart. “Bodyguard,” she whispered. Then she had another horrifying thought. “Marsha got a dog.”

“If I were them, I doubt I’d pay much attention to a dog.”

She was feeling sicker by the second. “No. Especially not when they could trace her back if they want to. If they can.”

“Can they?”

In that question she heard the million unanswered questions her own life had become. She had as good as admitted what was going on here. And he had apparently figured out plenty on his own. Now what? Tell the truth, or leave the lies hanging out there. The omissions. The secrets.

Then she had another thought. “What if...” This one really sickened her. So much so she wrenched away from him and jumped up from the couch. She backed away, wrapping her arms around herself, staring at him, feeling horror start to grow.