Harlequin - Jennifer Greene (15 page)

The chicken was going to dry out if she didn’t get the dinner served, so she promised to call her mom later and hung up as quickly as she could, then hustled to sit across from Fox.

“Sorry about the interruption,” she said with a smile. “I talk to my mom a few times a week, but we still never seem to be able to have a short conversation.”

“She said something that bothered you?”

“Oh, no. Everything’s fine.”

“She must have said something or told you something—”

To ward off another direct question, Phoebe served potatoes—no man alive so far had ever resisted those potatoes—and freely offered him some of her family background. “My dad and mom are both from Asheville. Dad’s an anesthesiologist. My mom always claimed it was a good thing he made good money, because she was too lazy to work—but that was a complete fib. She’s a hard-core volunteerer.

Works with sick kids at the hospital. And troubled teenagers at a runaway place. And she’s on the board of directors for an adoption agency. She never stops running.… She also paints.”

“So that’s where all these colors come from?” He motioned around her house.

“Oh, yeah. Mom definitely taught me not to be afraid of color.”

“You sound pretty close.”

“Couldn’t be closer. Same for my dad.”

“So what’d she say that bugged you?”

Her smile dipped, but only for a second. “Fox,” she said firmly, “this is about you. Your time, your dollar. I don’t mind talking about myself, but not when we’re working together.” She glanced at his plate, though, and realized he was on his second helping. “Forget it. Ask me anything you want.”

“Pardon?”

She motioned. “Look at you. Eating like a pig. I’m so proud.” She passed him the plate of warm bread again. “Okay, I forgot, what was it you wanted to know?”

“What your mother said. And I’mnot eating like a pig.”

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“Come on, you,” she crooned. “Try the glazed carrots. The recipe’s so good you won’t even realize it’s a vegetable, I promise. She was just telling me that a man I used to know was getting married.”

“I take it you and this guy were a thing?”

“Yup. Was engaged to him myself, in fact. She was afraid I’d be shook up and hurt when I found out about it.”

“So…are you? All shook up and hurt?”

“Do I look remotely shook up?” But over the flickering candlelight, she saw his expression. “Damn. Quit looking at me like that, Fox. Go back to eating.”

“How long were you with the guy?”

“Three years. Close to four.”

“So he’s the one you broke up with. The reason you moved here.”

“Yes, Mr. Nosy. If you want the down and ugly, he broke my heart. Bad enough that I couldn’t seem to shake it without moving to a new place, totally starting over, physically and emotionally. But that’s water way over the dam now. Eat those carrots.”

He was. But he was still like a hound with a bone. “How did the son of a bitch break your heart?”

She waved the royal finger at him. “Normally I wouldn’t care what language you use. I can do all the four-letter words myself. But not tonight, Fergus. The whole dinner and program tonight is to coax you to feeling calm and relaxed. To help you heal. That’s not going to happen if you get yourself all revved up.”

“I’m not revved up. I just want to know what the bastard did. Cheat on you?”

“No.”

Fox suddenly slammed down his glass of water. “Hell. He didn’t hit you, did he?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Did you forget who you were talking to? No one in this life is going to hit me and live to tell it.”

He nodded. “Yeah, that was a foolish fear, Red. Zipped out of my mouth before I stopped to think. Any guy who’d try that kind of nonsense wouldn’t still be alive. And you sure wouldn’t have mourned him.”

“You’ve got that right.”

Fergus heaped another helping of potatoes on her plate. “You’re tough and strong and can take care of yourself. No question about that. So what exactly did this guy do to hurt you?”

She sighed. “I’ll answer that. I’ll even give you the long, boring, embarrassing answer—but you’ll have to answer something for me first. I want to know what happened. In the Middle East. I know the cover story, how you were hit with a dirty bomb and all. But I want the details. Where were you, what was going on, what was the whole shemola.”

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It was his turn to hesitate. In fact, he apparently wanted to avoid that question so much he scooped up their empty plates and carted them to the sink, then turned around to give her one of those fierce, glowering looks that always successfully made his two big brothers back off pronto.

It didn’t work on her. She just had a feeling this was it—it with a capitalI. Either they had some kind of breakthrough together or he was going to back off from seeing her—not because she hadn’t helped him with the pain, but because something in Fox wasn’t sure he wanted to heal.

Surprisingly he ambled into an answer, as if the subject bored him but he was willing to go along with her. At least for a while. “I enlisted in the service because of the kids. Because teachers need to be role models for kids, and history teachers get stuck being role models of a unique kind. Every day, see, I was talking about heroes in American history. What made a hero. Why we studied certain men and women over others. How we defined leadership and courage and all that big hairy stuff.”

“Okay.” Since he was clearing away the dishes, she stood up, too. The dogs trailed her like hopeful shadows. She slid them scraps, washed her hands, then brought out her ruby-glass bowls and the double-chocolate ice cream. Then waited.

“Okay,” he echoed her. “So a part of teaching history is teaching heroes—teaching kids that all of them had the potential to be heroic in the right circumstance. That being a hero wasn’t about having courage. It was about finding courage. That everybody was vulnerable and scared sometimes, but that the right thing to do is to stand up for people more vulnerable than you are.”

God. He was going to turn her into mush. She heaped five big globs of ice cream without even thinking.

Her heart just squished for what he said, how he said it, what he so clearly believed from his heart. But she said just “okay” again as if leading him to continue.

“So…” He fed plates into the dishwasher as if he were dealing cards, whisk, whisk, whisk. “So there came a point when we came to a unit about the Middle East, talking about history there, what had been happening over the last several decades specifically. The problem, as I could see it, was that the grown-ups in their families tend to wring their hands about anything to do with the Middle East, you know? Everybody’s tired of trying to fix something that nobody thinks we can fix. Of trying to do something we don’t have the power to do. We’re tired of getting involved, wanting to feel like we’re good guys, and then getting kicked in the teeth for it. And because that’s what the kids were hearing at home, that’s what they brought to me at school.”

“And you did what about this?” She sat down with the two ruby bowls of ice cream, then poured on the warmed marshmallow on top.

“God,” he said, watching her.

“Now, don’t get diverted. Keep talking.”

He did, but with a spoon in motion. “So…I didn’t see I had any choice but to volunteer for the military—because that’s what I’d taught them. That you couldn’t just talk. You had to show up. That even weak-kneed, gun-hating, sissy teacher types…such as myself…had the power to change things—”

“Fox. You haven’t got a sissy bone in your body.”

“Maybe not. But it still tends to be the stereotype for male teachers, that we’re lightweight fighters, so to speak. And it bugged me, what the kids were hearing at home. Anyway, I’m just trying to explain. I felt
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I’d lost the right to talk to them about heroes and leaders, if I wasn’t willing to stand up myself.”

Phoebe put her spoon down. She was the worst sucker for sweets ever born, especially for this kind of sundae, but she suddenly knew something bad was coming. Sheknew. And she didn’t prompt him when he hesitated this time because right there, right there, she changed her mind about whether he should tell her this. She wasn’t a psychologist. What was shethinking, to be so arrogant to believe she could help?

“So…I got over there,” he continued slowly. “And they put me to work, pretty much on the kinds of projects you’d expect them to assign someone like me—rebuilding schools, trying to organize the old teachers, spending time as a sort of liaison with the townspeople. I carried a gun, but I never had a reason to aim it. There were incidents. Plenty. But I wasn’t really personally affected. I just did my thing, what I was getting the stripes for, what I really went there to do.…”

“Here,” she said firmly. “You need cherries on that sundae. And more marshmallow—”

But when she tried to grab his bowl, he hooked her wrist instead. They weren’t exactly done eating.

They weren’t done with dishes, either. But for some unknown reason they went outside, sat on her back steps and sipped in the crisp spring night. The dogs were chasing around the bushes, happy to be out and free. Clouds whispered a promise of rain. He dropped his jacket on her shoulders and picked up his story, his tone still as even as a tailor’s hem.

“The local kids started coming around. Nothing odd about that. Kids always know when an adult honestly likes them, you know? And the kids wanted their schools back. So they started hanging with me. And I could speak some of the language, so I’d get them going. I’d teach them some English, they’d teach me some of their language. We talked about rock and roll, and games, and ideas, whatever they wanted.”

His jacket was cuddled around her shoulders, when all he had to warm him was a shirt, yet she was the one whose fingertips were chilled.

“So…there was a certain morning. It was hot. Over a hundred. Sun blazing, just like every other day.

I’d started work early, gotten up before anyone else—God knows why, probably because I was nuts.

Anyway, I’d turned around this corner, was picking up a box of supplies, when a kid came in the alley. A boy. Not even half-grown. Big, dark eyes. Beautiful eyes. I see the way he looks, and think he must have been sleeping in that alley, so my mind’s running ahead. I figure he’s orphaned, and then that he might be hurt, because he’s got that kind of deep, old hurt in his eyes.”

Mop and Duster came flying back to flop on his feet. His feet, not hers. Damn it, they knew.

“So I start talking to him, like I always do with kids, same tone, same smile. Bring an energy bar out of my pocket, offer it to him. I’m thinking what I’m going to do if he’s in as bad shape as I think he is, because I’m sure as hell not leaving him alone in that alley. I’m thinking, this is exactly what it’s all about.

Not the guns. Not the bull. But this. Finding a way, a real way, to give a wounded kid a life.”

“Fox.” There was gravel in her throat now. Gravel in her heart. It came from looking at his face, the naked sadness in his eyes.

“He had the dirty bomb under his clothes. Did something to detonate it.”

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

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“I can’t explain the rest. Why I came home so messed up, so angry. I mean, obviously it was tragic and horrible. But it’s not as if I could have stopped it. I never actually saw him die, so it’s not like that specific memory could be part of the nightmares. I didn’t. I didn’t see much of anything—I have a real vague memory of being blown against the far wall and knocked out, but that’s it. I didn’t know anything else for hours. But when I did wake up…I woke up angry. Beside-myself angry. Mad enough to punch walls and cuss out anyone who tried to help me—”

“Fox.”

Finally he looked at her. “I haven’t told my family most of that. Didn’t want to. Hell, I don’t honestly know where all the rage came from. But that story better be a good enough explanation for you, red, because that’s all I’ve got. That’s what happened. There’s nothing else—oomph!”

Maybe he’d intended to say more, but she swooped on that man with the fury of an avenging angel. She knew he still had half-healed wounds and a half-dozen seriously sore spots. She knew it was stone chilly on the back porch steps. Most of all she knew that she’d never again intended for Fox to see her sensual side…but the damn man.

What was she supposed to do? Listen to that terrible hurt of his and do nothing? Listen to how badly he’d hurt for that child, so badly he couldn’t stop hurting himself, and pretend it was just a story she was hearing that didn’t affect her?

She kissed him and kept on kissing him, thinking he deserved every damn thing she could give him and then some. If he lost respect for her, then that was how the cookie crumbled. Sex was a way to show love, to give love. To pour on love. It was only one way, but at that very second, she needed to pour five tons of love on the damn man, and she didn’t have a zillion other options at her disposal. Sex was too darn handy not to use it for all it was worth.

Still kissing him, still teasing his tongue with hers, she pushed the jacket off her shoulders and then started to pull up her sweater. Both of them needed a second to suck in air, and it was that second when she yanked the sweater off her head and tossed it.

Not a great idea. Mop and Duster promptly took off with it and tore across the yard, but that was an oh-well. Fox’s eyes were open at that moment. Dark and deep and confused. He opened his mouth—so she shut it again.

Headlights suddenly glowed from the neighbor’s driveway—far enough away that they couldn’t really see much. Or maybe they could. She didn’t care. She didn’t unbutton his shirt because she’d have to kill him if he caught cold because of her. She went directly for the snap on his jeans.

He needed gentle treatment, she thought. He needed tenderness.