The Homecoming (31 page)

“Nothing wrong with that.” John put his large arm around her and pulled her close. It made her feel small and vulnerable. But safe. “There were times I drove out to the cliff all alone and bawled like a baby during the two years of Glory’s cancer battle. You’ve been through a rough patch these past few months, Faith. Seems you’re entitled to let go for once in your life.”

And that was exactly what she did as she buried her face in the front of his shirt and let the tears she’d been holding back too long break free.

Sax was waiting on the dock as the blue fishing boat came chugging into the brightly lit harbor. He could see Trey, wearing a bright orange life jacket, standing at the bow of the
Kelli
, Velcro right beside him. Sax’s grandfather stood behind Kara’s son, one hand on the boy’s shoulder, a fond gesture Sax remembered well. Cole manned the wheel while their dad worked the lines.

It was a damn pretty boat. Cole had loved the sea all his life. And now he loved the woman he’d named the boat after. The same woman he was about to pledge to spend the rest of his life with. Strangely, that didn’t seem as weird to Sax as it did just a couple days ago.

The boy’s smile immediately disappeared when he spotted Sax standing alone on the dock.

“Where’s Mom?” he asked as he jumped off the boat onto the floating wooden dock before anyone could catch him. Velcro was on his heels.

“She had herself an accident,” he said, as the dog barked with joy and danced around him. Sax decided obedience training was definitely going to have to be added to his already packed agenda. “Got herself banged up some, but she’s going to be just fine. She’s out at my house waiting for you.”

“Your house?” Those lines that were carbon copies of Kara’s furrowed his freckled brow. “Why not Grandma’s?”

“Because your mom’s got herself some bruised ribs, so walking up and down those stairs by herself while your grandma’s in Portland could be kinda hard.” That part was the absolute truth. “Besides, no place better to recuperate than on the coast, drinking in all that fresh salt air.”

“We’ve got salt air at Grandma’s, too,” Trey pointed out.

“True enough,” Sax said as he waved good-bye to his grandfather, father, and brother, and began walking with the boy and dog to the car. “And if you really want, we can go pick her up and take her back to your grandmother Blanchard’s—”

“No.” The bluff worked, as Sax had hoped it would. Because he hadn’t really had a plan B if Trey had balked. “That’s okay. I like being at your house.” Then came the question he’d been hoping he could avoid. “What kind of accident?”

“She fell down.” True again. Sort of, anyway.

“Mom never falls down.” Sax could feel the suspicion radiating from the kid, who was obviously sensing something more was going on. But he felt he owed it to Kara to let her tell the story in her own way.

“Everyone falls down occasionally. She tripped over a kitchen chair.” He was on a roll. Given the overturned chair he’d seen lying on the hardwood floor when he’d come barreling into the house, that was yet another accurate statement. “So, after checking her out at the hospital—”

“Mom went to the hospital?”

Panic had the young voice going high enough to crack crystal. “Just to be checked out,” he repeated. “To make sure the ribs weren’t cracked. But although your mom likes to think of herself as Wonder Woman, she looked to me like someone who could use a little TLC. So, since your grandmother’s still in Portland, I figured, as her friend, I’d let her stay at my place, pick you up, bring home some pizza and a movie or two.”

“She likes mushy love stories.”

They’d reached the car. Velcro leaped into the backseat; Trey climbed into the passenger seat. “It’s been my experience that most women do.”

“I like comic books about superheroes,” Trey said while buckling up his seat belt. “But Mom says most of the movies about them are just too violent for a boy my age.”

And couldn’t he just hear Kara’s voice laying down that law?

“What does she let you watch?”

“Movies about animals. Which is okay, because I like those a lot.”

“I imagine Surfside Video should have plenty of those. So,” he said as he got behind the wheel and turned the key, causing the oversize engine to start up with a mighty roar. “What are we getting on the pizza?”

“I like ’em loaded. Even with anchovies. Mom says they’re disgusting and always takes them off her pieces.”

Sax laughed for the first time since getting the call from John O’Roarke. “Definitely a case of the apple not falling far from the tree. Your dad was the exact same way.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. Everyone always bitched whenever he’d win the coin toss to choose the ingredients. Cole always said it was like chowing down on bait.”

The small face, which had been wrinkled with worry, lit up from within as if Trey had swallowed the Shelter Bay lighthouse. “It’s cool Dad and I both like them,” he said.

“Cool indeed,” Sax agreed.

The air inside the car suddenly chilled.
Damn
. Wasn’t this just what he needed to top off a suckfest day?

Sax looked up at the rearview mirror. Sure enough, the guys were sitting back there with Velcro. He couldn’t shoot them the finger, or even a glare, just in case the kid would choose that moment to glance over at him.

But as it turned out, he needn’t have worried. Because Cowboy merely grinned and gave him two thumbs-up; then they all faded away, as they always did, into the mist.

It was the sound of the wind, moaning like the spirits of all those sailors lost at sea, and the rain pelting against the window that woke Kara.

She forced open her eyes, which felt as if they’d been weighed down with stones. The unfamiliar room was dark. Disoriented, she struggled to sit up, then wished she hadn’t done so when the gingerly executed movement caused rocks to tumble around in her head.

So she lay back against the pillow, trying to get her bearings.

A flashback of the attack hit like a jolt from a Taser. She instinctively flailed out, hitting at nothing but air.

Her heart pounding against ribs that felt as if they’d been hit by a baseball bat, she closed her eyes and concentrated.

It was okay. She was at Sax’s house on the cliff. In his room. And his bed. Thanks to that pill he’d forced on her back at the hospital, and the crash that was inevitable after such a wild adrenaline rush, she’d dropped like a stone into sleep.

He’d brought her here after helping her escape the hospital, had given her his T-shirt, made her tea in a heavy mug with the eagle-trident-and-anchor SEAL symbol printed on it, then helped her into bed.

Which had felt really strange. And not just because her head had begun spinning from the painkiller. But because she could not, in her memory, recall ever being taken care of.

Oh, her parents had certainly clothed and fed her. And her father had always been her biggest booster. But while he’d fed her confidence, he’d never been one to believe in pampering. Nor had her mother, perhaps because when she spent her days with patients with serious problems, a skinned knee or head cold just didn’t seem all that life-threatening. Which they weren’t. But still . . .

Jared had loved her. She’d never had a moment’s doubt about that, even during those last difficult days. But he’d been a Marine at heart. He’d always said that if cut, he’d bleed the Marine battle colors of scarlet and gold. While it was a valiant thought, the only color staining the front of the blue police uniform on the day of his death had been red.

Even so, just as he wasn’t given to grand gestures, neither had he been one to coddle anyone. Not Trey. Nor her. It wasn’t because he hadn’t cared; it just wasn’t in his nature. Perhaps, she thought now, if he had understood that sometimes it was okay not to always be tough, he might have gotten help earlier.

Sometime during childhood, she’d taken on the role of the family caretaker: making sandwiches and heating up soup for her father’s and her dinner when her mother couldn’t get home from the hospital, struggling to ease her husband’s stress, which oddly always seemed worse when he was back home than when he was deployed. She’d learned, in counseling, that for military personnel, often “real life” was more difficult because it was more untidy. Less regulated.

So she’d tried to create a home schedule that didn’t allow for surprises, even going so far as to make a chart she kept on the refrigerator door. Her efforts had seemed to work. Until . . .

No
. She wouldn’t think about that. Not now. Her eyes stung. Kara blinked furiously. Her son was just on the other side of that wooden door. She had to be strong for him.

She reached out to turn on the bedside light, but nothing happened. Groped around and felt the flashlight lying on the table. Turned it on, saw the broken gold ring glinting in the narrow yellow beam, and felt a pang of loss.

Sax was right: She could have a jeweler repair her wedding band. But another part of her wondered if maybe Sherry might actually have a point about it being time to move on with her life.

She’d told Sax she’d been through all the stages of grieving. Which was true. But the ring had been one thing, along with the box of medals and memories that were fading every day, that had kept her connected with Jared. It had also left her in a sort of limbo, which had been okay, since, as she’d also told Sax, she was dealing with a lot of things right now. Deciding to think about it later, when her body wasn’t feeling as if it had been run over by a bulldozer and her head wasn’t pounding, she managed, with no small effort, to climb out of bed. Wincing at the pain in her bruised ribs, she hobbled across the plank wooden floor to the window.

The fog surrounded the house like a thick gray blanket. Every so often the eerily wailing wind would part the fog, allowing her to catch a glimpse of turbulent surf and the steady flash of the Shelter Bay lighthouse, warning any ships that might be caught at sea during the storm away from the rocky shoals.

She moved the flashlight around the room until its beam found her overnight bag lying on a chair. Sax had chosen well, though she couldn’t help but be a little embarrassed at the idea of him going through her underwear drawer. And not because of its being underwear, but because except for two steel gray cotton sports bras she wore while running, it was all unrelentingly white. Unrelentingly boring.

She’d once owned enough lace and satin lingerie to outfit a harem. Jared had bought her the first scarlet-as-sin nightgown at the San Diego Nordstrom right before they’d taken the trolley across the border into Tijuana to get married. At the time she’d been relieved that he still considered her sexy even though she was pregnant.

Later, she’d spent weeks before he arrived home from deployment shopping for the sexiest outfits she could find. Which had occasionally been embarrassing, since his taste had tended more toward the more outrageous Frederick’s of Hollywood than Victoria’s Secret, but she’d loved making him look at her as if she were the hottest woman on the planet.

Toward the end, she’d gone even further, dressing up in a sexy, skintight nurse’s uniform, a see-through harem costume, even a too-short-to-be-legal French maid’s outfit. But nothing had worked. Their lovemaking, which had once been so joyful, had become as arid as that Iraqi desert he’d spent too much time in.

So, after his death, she’d gathered up all the seductive lingerie, stuffed it into a black plastic bag, and late one night tossed it into a Dumpster two blocks from their town house.

Bygones, she told herself now, as she took out a pair of panties and the thick terry-cloth robe that would hopefully hide the fact that she’d decided the one thing she didn’t need was a bra digging into her bruised ribs.

Going back in the bathroom, she flicked on the light switch, only to find it didn’t work either. Deciding the storm had knocked out the power, she tentatively ran the flashlight beam over her body, which was scraped raw in places and badly bruised. Afraid of what she’d see, she then studied her face in the mirror. Although thanks to the earlier shower she was clean, she still looked like a shipwreck victim who’d been dragged in from the sea.

Her eye was turning out to have a hell of a shiner; her bruises, like the ones covering her body, were already starting to turn purple; and beneath the bruises, her complexion was still nearly as white as the butterfly bandages on her cheek and temple.

One look at her and Trey would probably freak.

Hoping that the rest of the house was as dark as this, she drew in a breath that, despite the medication, hurt like hell, squared her shoulders, then left the bathroom to face her son.

Sax’s back was to the doorway, but he knew the moment Kara entered the room. And not just because her kid’s eyes widened to saucers, but from the way the air stirred, the way it always did whenever she came near.

He turned around. Although her body was engulfed in folds of black terry cloth, her feet were bare, the polish on her toenails gleaming like pink seashells on the beach. Desire hit. Hard.

“Mom!” Trey practically tipped the chair over as he jumped up and ran across to her, flinging his arms around her waist. Sax watched her flinch, but wasn’t the least bit surprised when she didn’t so much as whimper at what had to have been major pain. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She hugged him back, then put her hands on his upper arms and moved him a bit away. “Just banged up a little.”

“Sax said you fell down in the kitchen. That you tripped over a chair.”

“He’s right. As stupid as it sounds, I did.”

“Wow.” He was studying her with not a little skepticism. “You must’ve fallen on your face.”

“That’s pretty much it.”

Sax could tell Kara hated being dishonest with her son, but understood the reason. Though the kid was smart as a whip, which meant they wouldn’t get away with keeping the truth from him for long.