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 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 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?”