A Soldier's Redemption Read online

  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.

  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 m
ost. 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.”