Читать книгу Military Heroes Bundle: A Soldier's Homecoming / A Soldier's Redemption / Danger in the Desert / Strangers When We Meet / Grayson's Surrender / Taking Cover - Catherine Mann, Merline Lovelace - Страница 39

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.

“What if I’m the one hunting you?” he asked. “Good question. Call the sheriff right now. Tell him to come get me. Tell him whatever you want.”

“And then what?”

“And then I’ll leave. I’ll be gone from this county as fast as I can pack my duffel.”

Did she want that? No...no... Not if he was who he was really supposed to be. “You know too much about me.”

“Lady, I know nothing about you. I’ve guessed some things, but you sure as hell haven’t told me anything.”

“What did you guess?”

He passed a hand over his face. “Will it scare you if I get up and pace? I’m not really good at holding still unless I have to.”

She waved a hand, indicating permission. God, when he stood he seemed to fill the entire room.

He started pacing, but slowly, taking care not to come too close to her. “You know I noticed how afraid you are.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I noticed some other things, too, and last night it just all kind of came together for me. The way when you talk about things from your past you hesitate and then skip anything that might actually give away where you lived before. I also noticed that when you got scared by the phone call you turned to the sheriff.”

“What does that tell you?”

He looked at her. “That you’re scared and on the run from some threat that still haunts you. But you’re not running from the law, or your first response wouldn’t have been to call Gage Dalton.”

She nodded stiffly. “Okay.”

“I noticed the security system. You can’t afford it.”

“No,” she admitted.

“I’ve been involved in WITSEC ops overseas.”

“WITSEC?”

“Witness security. Witness protection.”

“Oh...my...God...” She sank onto the rocking chair, arms still tightly wrapped around her.

“All the signs are there for someone who can read them. Which most people can’t. It took me more than a day to figure it out, so don’t worry that you’ve tipped off everyone in the county. I’m sure you haven’t. But it’s the only picture that fits. Am I wrong?”

She shook her head stiffly. “It was that easy?”

“Actually, you made it very hard. Like I said, I didn’t glom on to it immediately. But when I put a few things together, it was the only explanation I could think of. The alternative was to think you’re just crazy, and you’re not crazy, Cory.”

She felt numb, almost out of her own body, with shock. This man had figured her out so fast, and yet he said it had taken him too long. How did that add up?

But if he’d figured it out, how many others had? No one, he said. But could she safely believe it?

“Trust me,” he said, “it wouldn’t occur to anyone not familiar with the protocols. You don’t give anything away.”

“I...find that hard to believe, now.”

“Well, believe it. WITSEC is not the first thing that would occur to anyone about you. It would probably be the last.”

“Why?”

“Because no one would suspect you of being a criminal, even if they suspect you have some secrets.”

“I’m not a criminal!”

“I know that. It’s obvious. And since everyone thinks that only criminals get witness protection, you’re even more covered. Very well covered.”

Her eyes burned and she felt hollow as she looked at him. “What now?” she asked, a bare whisper.

“Well, all I have is a suspicion. But you can choose how to act on it. Call the sheriff, I’ll tell him everything I noticed about the guy. Call the Marshals and they’ll move you again. Or...I can try to protect you until we get something solid.”

She’d already made up her mind she didn’t want to move again. Once was enough. What few tenuous connections she had managed to make here were more than she wanted to sacrifice. She couldn’t face another blank slate in a blank town, couldn’t face having to start all over again, small though her start here had really been. After all, there was Emma, Marsha, Gage, Nate and Marge Tate. While she hadn’t exactly gotten close, she had come to know them a bit. And she discovered she wanted to know them even better.

She raised her eyes to his, resolve steadying her. “I’m not running again.”

He nodded. “I kind of decided the same thing this morning.”

She nodded slowly. “I guess you did.” Her decision made, her muscles began to uncoil slowly, one by one. “I guess I need to tell you the story.”

“Cory, you don’t have to tell me a damned thing. I can work this without knowing. Your secrets can remain your secrets. But I gather, since you didn’t recognize the guy at the store, that he’s not someone you’re afraid of.”

“No. Actually...I saw only one man. The man who killed my husband and shot me.”

“Shot you?” He stopped short.

She nodded, and for some reason she didn’t understand, she opened her robe and tugged her pajama top up enough to reveal the scar across her midriff. “He killed my baby, too.”

He swore, a word she wasn’t used to hearing, and the next thing she knew he’d gathered her up off the chair and was carrying her through the house toward her bedroom. There he laid her down on the queen-size bed, and stretched out beside her. Without another word, he drew her into a close embrace, as if he wanted to surround her with the shield of his body. As if he wanted to shelter her from it all.

But nothing could. She stared blindly at his chin as her head rested on his upper arm, feeling as if a wind had blown through her and left her empty in every way, empty of her past, empty of her hopes and dreams, empty of feeling.

Something in her had died all over again.

In the hollowness that seemed to engulf her, she heard her own voice. It sounded dreamy, disconnected, as if it belonged to someone else and she wasn’t in control. And maybe she wasn’t.

“I didn’t really grieve about the baby,” she heard herself say. “I’d just found out that morning. Not enough time for it to become real.”

“Mmm.” A sound to let her know he was listening, indicating no reaction whatever. She didn’t want a reaction. She couldn’t have handled one just then.

“What was real was that when I woke up from surgery they told me that the only part of Jim I had left was gone, too. I miscarried because of the trauma.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I was...I was at the best and brightest point of my life that night. The happiest. I had Jim, we were going to have a baby. Maybe no one is entitled to that much happiness.”

“Everyone is entitled to that kind of happiness.”

“Really? Even you?”

He didn’t answer, his silence speaking volumes.

“We went out for dinner to celebrate the news, came home and...made love. I was so happy I couldn’t even sleep. And then some son of a bitch came through our door and took it all away with a gun.”

He murmured something, but she didn’t try to make it out. She didn’t care. Numbness still wrapped her like cotton wool.

“I saw the man. They couldn’t find him, though, couldn’t identify him. We think...they think...he was working for a drug gang that Jim was about to bring in indictments against. A hired gun, probably. They put me in protection from the instant I got to the hospital. They wouldn’t even let me go to Jim’s funeral.”

His arms tightened a bit, but he said nothing.

“Then, after three months in a safe house, they told me I had to relocate because the word on the street was there was a contract on me because I could identify Jim’s murderer.”

“Not penny-ante criminals then.”

“No. Sometimes I think they were bigger fish than even Jim realized.”

“Maybe so.”

“There wasn’t even a threat beforehand. No warning of any kind. The grand-jury testimony was sealed, the indictments were going to be sealed until they’d rounded everyone up. Maybe there was a leak from somewhere. No one seemed to know. I’ll probably never know.”

“So three months in a safe house, and then the beginning of the journey to nowhere.”

“First, first they did a little plastic surgery. I had a nose job. Just enough to make me look different if anyone had a photo of me. My hair...I have to color it. I wear it differently now. Not big changes.”

“Big enough changes. The nose especially. Minimal change, maximum impact.”

“That’s what they said. Change a nose and you change the whole face.”

“That must have been hard for you.”

“Even now I sometimes jump when I look in a mirror. Anyway, they moved me through three towns before the nose job. After that, it was another six towns. We’d stay for a while, then they’d pack me up and move me again. They said they were making sure nobody could follow me.”

“That’s right.”

“So you’ve done that part, too?”

“I’ve done it all, from the moving to the safe-house protection. Of course, I had the disadvantage of having to protect a couple of really bad guys. Sometimes it seems hardly worth the trouble.”

“But it is, right?”

“If they have enough information, yes. In your case, it would have been an honor.”

She reached up with one hand and touched his chin. At once he tipped his head to look at her. “I hated it.”

“I imagine so.”

“But they were really doing everything they possibly could for me. Even while I hated it, I understood it. They went out of their way for me.”

“Because you were innocent.”

“Because my husband was an assistant U.S. attorney. Because he was one of theirs. I don’t kid myself that I would have gotten the same kind of care except for Jim. The only man I could put behind bars is the man who killed a federal prosecutor.”

Something in his dark eyes seemed to soften just a hair, but he didn’t argue with her, probably because he knew she was right.

“Those kinds of resources,” she said, “don’t get spent on just anybody. I could have witnessed almost any other murder, been the only one able to identify the killer, and I’d have been on my own before long.”

“Seems like you’re kind of on your own now.”

“That’s the way it works.”

He nodded. “Most of the time. Are you angry about that?”

“That I got first class instead of coach? How could I be angry about that? What I’m angry about is that every single thing I cared about was stripped away from me. My family, my friends, my career. Sometimes I get angry at myself for letting them take me away.”

“Be sensible. What good would it possibly have done to get yourself killed?”

“It might have spared me the limbo I’ve been living in.”

He sighed and cupped her cheek with his warm hand. “Now that’s crazy talk. Somehow we’ll get this guy and then you can get on with your life.”

“Can I? I’m not so sure of that. I was supposed to be safe ever since I got here, but I haven’t spent one hour of one day without looking over my shoulder.”

“All I can tell you is that things may be coming to a head finally. And that I’m trained for this kind of stuff. And that the last year...Cory, think about all you went through. Of course you couldn’t get your bearings, especially when you had good reason to be terrified.”

“Apparently so, since I seem to have been found.”

He fell silent for a half minute, then said, “You’re going to hate me for this.”

“For what?”

“Maybe it’s a good thing you’ve been found. Maybe we can deal with this mess for once and for all. Maybe we can get your life back.”

“I don’t exactly have a life to get back anymore.”

“Maybe you could even go home and resume your career.”

“I don’t know about that. I’m not sure I want to.” She was sorry then, sorry because the numbness wore off suddenly and she started feeling again.

And what she felt was a pain deeper and wider than the Grand Canyon. When she started to cry, he just gathered her closer.

As if that would help. As if anything could help.