Seeing Is Believing (6 page)

“What did you do?”

“I went to college for a degree in civil engineering. I could have had my pick of jobs, but I went into the army instead.”

Diana gaped. “You were in the army?” Automatically, she lifted her hand from his arm, memories of her past overriding everything else.

“Yes.” Wes’s mouth quirked. “I wanted to build bridges for the army, but they said they wanted me in Delta Force, as one of the officers.”

“Delta Force?” Her eyes widened. “That’s the antiterrorist team that goes undercover anywhere in the world to help out in military situations.”

“That’s right.” Wes saw the mixture of emotions in her eyes. “Remember the
Aquille Lauro
incident, where terrorists boarded the ship and started killing the passengers?”

“Yes.”

“I was there.” Wes sighed. “I was also on one of those helicopters President Carter sent across the desert. So many good men died on that mission. So many mistakes were made….”

Reeling, Diana sat amid her own conflicting feelings. “You were in the army,” was all she could say. No wonder she had felt the warrior around him. The violence.

“I got out two years ago and went to work for Perseus last year. I spent a decade in the army and I was disillusioned. After losing so many of my friends on that botched mission, I had a bad taste in my mouth for the military.”

Diana sat back, her arms folded tightly across her stomach. “I have a bad taste for the army, too, for different reasons,” she whispered.

Wes saw anger in her eyes—and sadness. “Tell me about it?”

With a shrug, she said, “I’d just as soon forget.”

“Healing comes with talking. Remember?” He smiled slightly for her benefit.

The warmth that came to Wes’s eyes released Diana from her world of anger, grief and confusion. His entire face changed with that smile, and it stunned her. The hardness disappeared, if momentarily. Wes was reaching out to her. She was sure he didn’t do that very often. His gesture touched her more deeply than she could ever have imagined.

“We share a common past,” she said finally. “My ex-husband was in the army.”

Wes nodded. He saw and felt her anxiety. Her fear. It was the first time in his life he’d been aware of anyone’s emotions to this degree or intensity. No longer could he deny that something had truly opened up his scarred heart. Now it was his turn to comfort her. Reaching out, he closed his hand over hers, which lay clenched in her lap.

“Can I read between the lines? He was a real bastard to you?”

Needing Wes’s touch, Diana nodded. She was surprised by his reaching out, but grateful. “Bob Parker was the consummate army officer,” she began bitterly. “He was hard on his troops and he brought that same cruelty to our home.”

“A hard-ass.”

“Was he ever.”

Wes searched her eyes, which were fraught with pain. “What happened?”

“Plenty.” Diana looked up at the ceiling of the aircraft. “I was young, easily impressed, and I didn’t listen to my mother. I should have. Bob was on leave when I met him. I was eighteen and had just graduated from high school. Living on a reservation all my life hadn’t prepared me for the outside world. At least, not then. Now it’s different. I fell head over heels in love with him. He was a warrior, and I was enamored with men like him. But I was idealistic. I didn’t see all of Bob.”

“So you married him?”

“Two weeks after I met him.” Diana shook her head. “I was crazy to do that. But I was starry-eyed. I listened to no one. I knew my mother saw things in my future, but she didn’t say anything. She just begged me to take my time, to think through Bob’s proposal. I didn’t. I thought I knew everything.”

“Yeah, at eighteen I was pretty cocky and sure of myself, too,” Wes said wryly.

“I think it’s a teenage disease.” Diana managed a laugh, but it was filled with the pain of memories.

“So you married him. What happened?”

“Too much to go into, except for the spectacular highlights.” Diana met Wes’s somber gaze. “Bob was a closet alcoholic. He spent more time at the Officers’ Club than home with me. When he did come home, he beat me up.”

Wes’s hand automatically tightened over hers. “He hit you?” Rage filled him.

Diana shrugged. “I’m ashamed to admit it. I’m ashamed to tell anyone that I stayed in that miserable excuse for a marriage for seven years. But I was too ashamed to tell my mother and sister what kind of a hell I was going through. I knew I’d made a terrible mistake, and I didn’t know how to correct it. I was raised to think that marriage was forever. My mother married my dad, who was a white man. They had a wonderful, happy marriage, and I thought that I’d automatically have the same thing. That’s why I was eager to get married—to find that happiness I’d seen at home.”

“It doesn’t work that way. I wish it did, but it doesn’t.”

“No…” Diana cleared her throat and went on. “Bob made major, then lieutenant colonel. We moved more places around the world than I can remember. I was alone. I was like a cowering animal just waiting for him to come home every night, drunk and violent.”

“What ended it for you?” Wes asked quietly.

A tremble went through Diana, and she opened her hands and tightly grasped his larger, stronger one. “I—it’s so hard to talk about. I’ve only been able to tell my mother, not even my sister, Wes. I’m so ashamed….”

“Your secrets are safe with me,” he whispered roughly, cupping her jaw and forcing her to meet his eyes. Her gaze was tortured, and he managed a poor semblance of a smile for her benefit. “Remember?
I’m
the one with the secrets? If I can trust you to hold mine, will you trust me to hold yours?”

It was so easy to whisper yes, to drown within the vivid blue of his clear, warm eyes that Diana felt tears sting her own. She was wildly aware of his hand gently cupping her face, his fingers calloused and rough. How much pain Wes had endured, and yet he was able—somehow—to reach out and help her heal. His depth amazed her, for she’d never encountered it in a man—though admittedly she’d been afraid to look since her failed and miserable marriage.

“Oh, Wes, it’s so painful to talk about….”

“I know, I know,” he soothed, “but a lady I like one hell of a lot told me that talking and sharing is part of the healing process.”

Her lips parted and she felt the warmth of tears trickling down her cheeks. “I—I became pregnant, Wes. I know I was about three months along when I told Bob.” Her lashes dropped and she took in a convulsive breath. Forcing herself to look at him, to see his reaction to her trauma, she whispered, “When I told him I was pregnant, he started hitting me. He beat me up so badly that I ended up miscarrying and almost dying.”

Wes’s mouth thinned. He turned in his seat and framed her face with his hands. He could see her abject misery, the way the guilt and torture over her lost baby was eating her up. “Listen to me,” he rasped unsteadily, “it wasn’t your fault. Get that? Men like him are sick. I saw guys like that in the military. They’re little men with brittle egos and nothing inside themselves, so they hurt and humiliate women and children to try to feel strong and important.” He stroked her cheek. “I’m sorry, Diana. I’m so damned sorry it happened to you.” His mouth worked, and he couldn’t repress the gamut of emotions he was experiencing. “I wish I could make your pain go away. Make the memory leave, too. But they won’t. Just know that you did the best you could in a hellish circumstance. At least you got out. You have to give yourself credit for that.”

In that moment, Diana felt her heart opening, in a way it hadn’t for years. Wes had said her mother was a healer, but in his way, he was a healer, too. The discovery was poignant, beautiful. She raised her hands and placed them against his. “It’s taken me the past two years to realize that, Wes.” She shrugged. “I came back to the reservation and lived with my mother. I needed to be here, to be home, to heal my grief.”

“I see it all now,” Wes said, taking her hands and holding them across the armrest between their seats. “I understand your reaction to me. I’m the past. I’m ex-army. I bring back everything bad that happened to you.” The corners of his mouth turned in with pain. “No wonder you didn’t want to be around me.”

“No!” Diana lowered her voice. “No…I—I felt the violence around you, Wes. I misinterpreted it. I thought you were the same kind of man that Bob was—an abuser. But you aren’t. Wh—when I pick up feelings, I don’t always filter them correctly.” She touched her brow and gave him a weak smile. “Just because I’m psychic doesn’t mean I’m always right. Just like anyone else, every feeling, thought or sensation is run through the filter of my life experiences. Because of Bob’s abuse, if I sense violence around any person, I automatically and unconsciously react to it.”

Reaching over, Wes took a strand of her hair and tamed it behind her delicately formed ear. The gesture was satisfying to him, and he wanted to touch her more, touch her intimately and with love. Love? Where had that feeling come from? Wes laughed at himself, but it was a laugh filled with pain and longing, not humor.

“I’m glad to know all this.”

“About my past or my psychic gifts?”

“Both,” Wes murmured, caressing her thick, black hair. Like yesterday, she wore her hair in braids, and on Diana they were beautiful—and natural. He met and held her tear-filled gaze. “You’ve had two years of healing. I don’t know how long it takes to get over something like that. Or if you ever do.”

“Mother says I will, with time.” Diana closed her eyes, absorbing his trembling caress. How she ached to kiss Wes, to move into his arms and be held—and to hold him. They both needed to be held, she realized, for different reasons. But she also realized that somehow they fed each other in a positive sense, and were able to give something good and healing to each other.

“If we weren’t here,” he told her in a low, gritty tone, “I’d kiss you. I’d kiss you until you melted into me and I melted into you, Diana.”

Her lashes lifted, and she felt his growling words vibrate through her, touching her wounded heart and thirsty soul. The flame in his blue eyes was inviting and made an ache begin low in her body, fanning out until she was consumed with the knowledge that she wanted more than just his kiss. Coming together with Wes felt more right than anything in her entire thirty years of life. And she was old enough, experienced enough, to know the difference now. Her lips parted into a shy smile.

“And I’d return your kiss.”

Her words fell like molten heat across him. He saw the sincerity in her brown-and-gold eyes. He absorbed her honesty, her courage to reach out to him—her woman to his man. Gently, Wes brushed her lower lip with his thumb. “This world isn’t for cowards,” he told her unsteadily. “You have to have a lot of heart, a lot of belief in yourself, in order to survive. And you have, Diana. Maybe you’re not whole, but nobody is.” He stopped caressing her lip and forced himself to place his hands over hers.

“Damaged goods,” Wes muttered. “That’s what we all are. My adopted mother worked hard and long on me, to make me understand that my real mother loved me enough to give me up to a better life, where I’d have a chance.”

“And because I’d had such a loving, secure childhood, it gave me the courage to finally leave Bob, to break free,” Diana quietly admitted, soaking up his small ministrations.

Running his thumb across the back of her hand, Wes murmured, “In a way, we’re both lucky. We got a lot of love when we were young, and it helped us survive.” And right now, he wanted to love Diana. Already he saw obstacles to those possibilities. He was ex-army, a stark reminder of her tortured past and the loss of her baby. Could she look beyond those life-wrenching elements to see him for himself, not in relation to her nightmare? Wes didn’t know how, and he wasn’t going to force his attentions on Diana. The last thing she would respond to would be any sort of aggressive move.

He smiled wryly. “Your mother broke loose a lot of stuff with that healing, didn’t she?”

“Then you believe that it happened?”

He shrugged. “Proof’s in the pudding, isn’t it?”

Internally, Diana sighed. “I’m so glad you accept the gift that was given to you, Wes.”

His laugh was derisive. “I don’t think I had much choice in the matter, do you?”

Her spirits lifted at the sound of his deep, husky laugh. How wonderfully the shape of Wes’s face changed when he laughed. That hardness that usually kept his expression rigid and emotionless had dissolved. In its place was a radiating joy. Oh, how Diana wished they could be anywhere but here right now!

“I wish—I wish we were back on the reservation,” Diana admitted softly, “so I could take you to my old childhood haunts, those favorite places where I was happy, where I dreamed dreams.”

Wes nodded. “Maybe, when this mission is over, we can do that…together?” Did he dare to hope? Dare to dream? How many dreams had been torn away from him in his life? Reality was so harsh, so demanding, that he had learned to stop dreaming. Idealism never went hand in hand with realism. Ever. But as he held Diana’s joyous gaze and saw the hope and desire burning in the depths of her eyes, Wes did dare to hope. To dream.

Diana smiled through her tears. “I’d love you to come home with me, Wes. To see where I come from. Who I am. I’d like nothing better.”

Wes sat very still, enjoying the timbre of her husky voice. Had he heard correctly? His mind wanted to reject it as impossible, but his heart was pounding like a runaway steam engine. Grappling with his strewn emotions, he rasped, “Yeah, I’d like that, too, Diana. I’d like to see where you were raised. What’s made you the wonderful way you are….”

Diana listened, believing but still stunned by his agreement. “You and I,” she began unsteadily, “are a lot alike, I feel.”

“Yes and no.” He picked up her hand and placed a small, warm kiss on top of it. His gaze drifted to hers to see her reaction. He saw surprise, and on its heels, warmth and desire in her eyes. “You come from a world I’ve never known. It’s a world of invisible things. Unproven things. I come from a prove-it-to-me world of reality. If I can’t see it for myself or in some way prove it, I’m lost, Diana.”

Sadness blanketed her joy. “I was raised to believe in the unseen, the invisible, Wes. I saw my mother perform healings all my life, with unseen energy. But I did see the results of those healings. I saw the goodness she gives to others without thought to herself. My sister and I were raised in a home where songs, chanting, rattles and ceremony were a natural part of our life. My mother’s a pipe carrier, and I saw that if she prayed with the pipe, miracles could happen for others.” She gave him a bleak look. “All of these are invisible things, Wes. I can’t show you how it works—or even why it works—I just know that it does.”