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

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 (#ulink_82015107-cf7f-5657-8712-9be37e0937d6)

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.