Broken Soldier: A Novel (2 page)

“So how do you know Paul and Christa?” she asked. Her attention was fixed firmly on his face.

Rafa forced himself to relax. It didn’t work very well. “My father and Paul’s father served together a few times over the years. Paul and I lived on the same bases a few times when we were kids.”

“Is that why you joined up, following the family tradition?”

“A double family tradition. My father served in the US Army, but my mother’s family has been in the Spanish military for generations.”

Emily scooted a little closer to the table and took a sip of her wine. “So are you on leave right now? Christa said you were in special forces?”

Rafa looked away. She had eyes as blue as a Cherenkov glow, and they were piercing him in a way he could barely comprehend. “I was in special forces, yes. I’m currently on medical leave.”

“Oh.” She processed that for a few seconds, then changed course, “What kind of places did you live as a child? I’m guessing you didn’t grow up in Alabama, not with an accent like that.”

He smiled, thankful for the reprieve. “Germany, South Korea, even a stint in Madrid when my father served as an attaché to the US Embassy.”

“I’ve never been to Madrid, but I’ve heard it’s gorgeous.”

Its beauty is nothing to compared to yours, he wanted to say, but he held his tongue. “It is very beautiful. I spent a good amount of time with my mother’s extended family. You should visit it one day.”

“That would be lovely, I think.”

The waiter returned, and they ordered food. Emily seemed to be familiar with the restaurant, so he followed her lead for his meal. Thai/Indian fusion was something he hadn’t encountered as a kid, and it was nothing like what he’d become accustomed to in the Army.

“So what do you do?” he asked over a plate of sweet chili naan.

“I’m a psychologist.”

Psychologist. The word hit him like a hammer blow. Paul hadn’t been setting him up with a gorgeous woman. He’d been setting him up with a shrink.
Carajo
, it was an ambush.

Rafa grabbed another piece of bread, trying to hide his growing unease. She wasn’t a wonderful blind date; she was a trained professional, just trying to get inside his head. His nature said to attack into the ambush, to startle and overwhelm the enemy.

I tried to take that feeling and lock it away. He wasn’t at war, not with her. Probably.

It never failed. Just when things started to be going his way, everything fell apart. His mother’s family in Spain had turned out to have more skeletons in the closet than a haunted house. The team in Afghanistan had finally been making progress with the village elders when their convoy had been attacked out of nowhere. And now, he finally met a woman that caught his attention, and she was a plant.

Double
carajo
.

#

It was like someone flipped a switch when she said the word “psychologist.” His posture stiffened, and his face became guarded. Emily didn’t know what kind of horrors he’d seen overseas, but he was shutting down faster than a 5k jogger’s hamstrings on the last leg of a double marathon.

She knew she should have listened to her instincts and stayed home. She watched him across the table, and something inside her snapped.

If he wanted to be intimidated by her, she wasn’t going to pull her punches. “You know, for a big, strong man, you’re as skittish as a kitten.”

Rafa looked up, surprised. His eyes were molten wells of green, like the ocean in the eye of a storm. “What do you mean?”

“I told you I was a psychologist, and you started slamming up walls. What are you afraid of, Rafael Carpenter? I’m a psychologist, yes, but I’m a woman. Until just now, I was having the best evening I’ve had in a long time, and now...”

“Look, you seem like a lovely woman. More than lovely. But I don’t need help, okay?” He reached for his glass, a classic sign of defense, and instead of smoothly grabbing it, he knocked it sideways. He panicked for a split second, his right hand flying up to help steady the glass before he dumped his wine all over the table.

Except he didn’t have a hand. His shirt ended in a maroon cuff, but no flesh protruded from the end.

The pieces began to fall into place. He wasn’t intimidated by her, he was afraid of her. Afraid she was here to fix him somehow.

He steadied the glass and slipped his hand back below the edge of the table. His other hand brushed the hair from his eyes, another defensive gesture.

“I don’t mind,” Emily said. “You don’t have to hide it from me.”

Rafa flushed as red as his wine. “I’m not--“

“You were wounded, Rafa. You don’t need to be ashamed of it.”

He shifted uncomfortably. Even then, he looked amazing. That hint of vulnerability did something to her, made her pulse flutter, her engine rev. Her heart nearly stopped from the surprise of her own reaction.

“I’m not ashamed,” he said, but she barely heard him.

Emily blinked, processing his words, and tried to remember her anger from a moment before. “I’m not here as a psychologist. I’m here as a woman. This was a blind date for me. All I knew was your name.”

He cocked his head, maybe, just maybe, believing her. Then his head started to shake. “I know you’re trying analyze me, but you don’t know me. You don’t know what this means.” He raised his right arm. “The military has been my whole life. And that’s over.”

“I know that’s how you feel right now, but give yourself time. Maybe the Army has other uses for you.”

He looked away again. His shoulders rose a fraction and fell. “I doubt it.” He met her eyes, and a smile cracked his grim expression, lighting up his whole face. “We’re both here, no? How about we talk about something else?”

“Sure.” God, anything else had to be better than digging into that pity party. No matter what he was thinking, she really didn’t want to analyze him.

“So in the Army we do a lot of sitting around and waiting. It gives a man plenty of time to read.”

It was Emily’s turn to smile. She could talk about books for days. “What do you read?”

The conversation trailed off into mysteries and thrillers and back around to speculative fiction. Dinner breezed past, and when the waiter came with their dessert, Emily realized that she’d had a better time than she could remember, at least in the last year.

“The check,
senor
,” Rafa told the waiter as he took the final plates.

“We can split it,” Emily said.

Rafa looked aghast. “No, no, I will handle this.”

“It’s okay, Rafa. It’s the 21
^st
century.”

He shook his head. “I am a man of duty. Tonight, dinner is my treat. If there is a next time, perhaps we can discuss splitting it.”

A next time. “How about we get a drink somewhere then?”

He smiled again, and the icicle she called a heart melted even further. “That would be great.”

He left cash and pushed himself back from the table. Emily led the way to the front of the restaurant, digging for her valet ticket as she walked.

“Do you have anywhere in particular in mind?” Rafa asked.

“There’s a place by my office.” And not too far from her apartment, in case things got weird. Or awesome.

Emily stopped at the hostess stand and held up her ticket. The hostess eyed her with a frosty glare. “Can I help you?”

“I need to get my car.”

The hostess’s eyebrows rose. “We don’t have a valet service.”

Is this girl trying to piss me off, Emily thought. Of course you do. “Your valet took my car right out front and told me to check with you when I was ready for it.”

“Ma’am, we don’t have a valet service. Excuse me.” She turned her back on Emily to take care of a woman that had just come through the front door.

“I don’t understand,” Rafa said. “You have a valet ticket, no?”

“I don’t understand, either.” Emily looked closer at her ticket. It was a plain cream slip with a neat “13” printed on one side. She let the hostess finish with the other woman. “Miss, excuse me.”

“Ma’am, are you sure the valet wasn’t at the Hilton down the block? We don’t have a valet service.”

Emily could see that she wasn’t going to get anywhere with the hostess. Fine. “Thanks, anyway.” She jammed the ticket back into her purse and looked at Rafa. “I think my car was stolen.”

His expression darkened. “Then we should call the police. Perhaps outside, though.”

The hostess was giving them dirty looks, so Emily led the way outdoors. A chill breeze blew down from the mountains, giving the night air an edge that made her wish she’d brought a coat. She dug her phone from her purse.

“You don’t have to stay,” she told Rafa. “I don’t want to ruin your whole night.” Truth was, she didn’t really want him to stay. Drinks had sounded like fun, but she had managed to screw up the entire evening.

He looked at her a moment, then nodded. “Perhaps you are right.”

Emily watched him head across the parking lot. He only made it a dozen strides before she began to regret her decision. 

S
WEAT
 dripped down Rafa’s face, splashing on the treadmill. He looked over at Paul, jogging beside him. “Stolen. I don’t know how.”

“Bro, you stayed around to comfort her, right?”

“Uh, no.”

Paul wiped his face with the hem of his t-shirt. “What? What’s wrong with you?”

Rafa held up his right arm.

“She cares about that?”

“I don’t know if she does or not, but I do.”

“I’m telling you, you don’t need to worry about it. This isn’t some college floozy. She’s been friends with Christa for years. She’s like a hotshot shrink or something.”

“Yeah, speaking of that. I wish you had told me
before
the date.”

“What? She get all professional on you?”

“A little bit. And you’re a dick for ambushing me with it.” The treadmill ground to a halt. Rafa leaned over it, panting.

“Ambush? It wasn’t like that, Rafa. C’mon. You’ve known me too long for that.”

“I’ve known you long enough to know that you’ll ignore me when I tell you I’m okay.”

Paul laughed. “So that’s true. But you don’t always know best, big bad warrior. She’s a nice girl. Had a rough patch last year, but...” He held up his arm in imitation of Rafa. “Who didn’t?”

“I hope you trip and that treadmill eats you.”

Paul mashed the button to stop it, and hopped off. “So anyway, did you like her?”

“She was gorgeous. And smart. And has wonderful taste in books.”

“Then why the hell did you run off?”

“Because I’m a cripple and she’s a shrink.” They made their way through the gym and toward the locker room.

“Setting aside the invasion of Iraq, that’s the most piss poor reasoning I’ve ever heard.”

Rafa shrugged.

“So call her,” Paul said.

“I don’t have her number.”

“If I get her number, will you call her?”

Rafa shrugged again.

“God damn it, Rafael, you are not a broken man. You can walk, you can talk, and I imagine, if you put your mind to it, you can fuck. So call this girl and go have a good time.”

They passed into the locker room. The smell of feet assaulted Rafa’s nose as he went toward the locker he shared with his buddy. Some people would think it was gross, but for someone that had been in and around the military for a lifetime, it smelled like home.

“I’ll think about it.”

Paul slapped him on the back. “That’s my boy.”

#

“So how was it?” Christa had her ankle up on the wooden fence that separated the trail from the parking lot. There was enough leg on display to turn every male head that jogged past them.

Emily stood beside her, one arm pulled tight across chest, stretching her tricep. “It was okay. He was gracious and smart and absolutely gorgeous.”

“Yeah? I
told
you that you’d have a good time.”

“It was great right up until I told him I was a psychologist. Then he got all weird on me.”

“What’s that mean? He didn’t like try to come onto you or anything, right? Paul said he wasn’t that sort.”

“Nothing like that.” I should be so lucky, she thought, remembering that rugged face and his sexy hair. “He just shut down. I think he thought Paul sent me to evaluate him.”

“What, professionally? You explained that you work with kids, right?”

“Sort of.”

“What’s that mean? Sort of?”

“I just told him I was a psychologist and he shut down on me. I didn’t feel comfortable going into details after that.”

Christa winced. “He’s had it rough. I talked to Paul about it some more. He was a captain in the Army. Paul says he could have been even higher up, but he was dedicated to his men and didn’t take desk jobs. He was leading a team at some outpost and they were escorting the Afghan leaders to a big meeting.”

Christa waited for a pair of women to pass them, then continued. “They were on their way to this meeting and they got attacked. It was bad. Really bad. And then they lost more men when they tried to get the wounded out.”

“That’s terrible,” Emily said. “Worse than I imagined. I didn’t really talk about what happened to him. He didn’t seem willing.”

They headed out onto the trail, their legs pumping as they built up to a comfortable jog. Emily sucked in a breath of the fresh, piney air.

“Yeah, it’s pretty bad. Paul said a big investigation was done after the fact, and the higher ups needed a fall guy. Rafael was the highest ranking officer directly involved.”

“They didn’t just blame him, did they?” She couldn’t believe that. No one ever said that life had to be fair, but Rafa didn’t strike her as the sort to be derelict about anything, never mind the lives of his men.

“I don’t really know. I just know that he’s on medical leave, and Paul said he’s unlikely to return to active duty.”

They jogged in silence for a few minutes. “That’s pretty heavy,” Emily said. “I can see why he’s touchy about it.”

“Yeah. So did the rest of the evening flop after you told him about your job?”

“It was okay right up until I found out my car got stolen.”

Christa stumbled. Nearly fell. “What!”

“I gave the keys to the thief and didn’t even realize it.” Emily explained about the valet and the police report. “The officer said it will either show up in the next week or so or not at all.”