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

On a teacher’s salary, many of those items had truly been an indulgence. She had scrimped to buy them, until she had had a kitchen that would have pleased a world-class chef.

And now she was using a five-dollar aluminum stockpot and a chef’s knife she’d bought on sale at the grocery store.

How odd, she thought, looking at the pot. How very odd what had once seemed important to her. And how little she usually missed those things now that they were gone. In fact, even had she been able to afford them, she doubted she would have replaced them.

They didn’t matter any longer. Who had that woman been, anyway? Had she ever known? She certainly didn’t know who she was now.

A faint sigh escaped her, and she put the pot in the sink to fill it with water. Indulgences. Her past life had been full of them, her new life was empty of them. In the midst of the storm, all she could say about it was that she had never known who she was? Had no idea who she had become?

When she started to lift the heavy pot full of water, Wade stepped in and lifted it for her. “Don’t call me a pig,” he said. “I’ve just been trained to act a certain way.”

She arched a brow at him. “So a woman can’t lift anything heavy?”

“Why should she when I’m standing right here?”

Once again she was left wondering how to take him. But this time she asked, emboldened, perhaps, by the fact that he had called her enchanting. “What exactly do you mean? That I’m too weak to do it?”

He shook his head. “No.”

That awful answer again, the one that told her nothing. “Then what?” she insisted, refusing to let him get away with it.

He put the pot on the stove. “Would it make you feel better if we had an argument?”

That yanked her up short and hard. Was that what she was doing? Trying to get angry so she could forget the other things he made her feel? Or was this some kind of insistence on independence that actually made no sense? She bit her lip.

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.