Holding Out For A Hero: SEALs, Soldiers, Spies, Cops, FBI Agents and Rangers (153 page)

“Uh-huh. Why is that?”

“She can be a drama queen. For a while there every time she turned around life threw some new obstacle in her path.”

Ah. She understood that. “Everything is always and never and the worst ever.”

He laughed softly. “Yeah. That’s Diane.”

“I’m sure that’s part of why my father divorced my mother.”

“It wasn’t a mutual thing?” he asked.

“Of course it was. They both have their irritating habits, believe me.”

“Don’t we all? My parents—”

When he stopped and didn’t continue, she glanced over at him. “They had a bad marriage?”

“The worst.”

Curiosity rung a question from her. “Do you believe in marriage?”

“Nah.” He threw a glance her way. “I just believe in sex.”

She snorted a laugh, and he joined her with a hearty laugh of his own. Heat filled her face as her libido went into overdrive. She shook off an image of him kissing her again, only this time with full on passion.

The dirt road came up on their left, and they crossed the road to join it.

They hadn’t gone far before the urge to discover more about her hiking companion made her ask, “What do you do when your sister is a drama queen?”

“Most of the time I hose up. I try to dig her ass out of the mess.” He shifted his backpack. “Always been that way. She married a scumbag when she was twenty. She’s on husband number two, and he’s a sheriff’s deputy. It’s his job now to keep her out of trouble.”

“Does he?”

“Most of the time.”

“Is she your little sister?”

“One year older.”

“Wow. You’d think it would be the other way around. She’d have to dig your ass out of the mess.”

“Nope. We’ve got a major case of co-dependence going on.”

She sighed. “I understand that, too. I did that with my ex husband for too long.”

“Did he drink?”

“No. He was just mean, ruthless and violent.”

Griff stopped in his tracks. She halted along with him.

“Physically abusive?” he asked, worry on his strong features.

She drew in a deep breath, surprised she’d started this discussion with him. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have started this conversation.”

“But you did start it. So let’s finish it.”

“All right. But let’s keep walking.”

They continued, and she bit the bullet. “It’s a long story.”

“We’ve got a lot of long stories between us. Might as well continue.”

Obviously he wasn’t going to let her off the hook now she’d started something. “I married Harold when I was nineteen. I only knew him for two months before he proposed. I thought I loved him. He was controlling. Emotionally at first.” She sighed. “I mean, he was like that before I married him, and my parents objected to the marriage in the first place. My dad blamed himself because Harold worked with my father in real estate and they had business dealings together. Anyway, Harold accumulated wealth before I married him and I knew he was filthy rich just like my parents. But at that time I was all about the lifestyle and wanted to keep it.” When Griff didn’t say anything she continued. “I was a shallow twit.”

“I have a hard time believing you were ever shallow.”

She smiled, liking his compliment. “Thanks, but I really was.”

“Was your husband older than you?”

“Twenty years older,” she said.

“And that twenty year gap didn’t work for you guys, I take it?”

“We had little to nothing in common. Pretty quickly I figured out he’d married me as a trophy wife.”

“You were his second wife?”

“No. He’d just waited until he found someone he could manipulate and put on display. I wore all the right clothes, said the right things, volunteered for the right charities.”

“I get the picture.”

“The picture is so damned big, I’m not sure anyone can get the whole thing.”

“Try me.”

She met his gaze head on and saw the sincerity there. Maybe confessing to him was like unloading on a stranger.

“Did he hit you?” he asked.

“No. Not until…” She swallowed hard as a lump formed where her throat should be. “He was the master of the backhanded compliment. He put me down in about every conceivable way he could. I never did anything right. My friends weren’t the right kind of people, and even if they were I didn’t speak to them the right way. Honestly, I wasn’t even physically attracted to him. So for most of our marriage we didn’t have sex, and I found out he’d been going to high-class call girls and having mistresses along the way. Anyway, I put up with that garbage for about ten years. I told him I wanted a divorce on the same day he lost a wad speculating on the stock market.”

They’d reached the area where the desolate ranch house stood. She drew her pack off her shoulders and rummaged inside for water. She took a long cool drink, half stalling and not wanting to finish this story. Griff slipped his pack of his shoulders and retrieved his own water bottle.

“What happened next?” he asked after taking a swig of water.

Now that she’d reached this magical point in the story, she didn’t know if she could finish. “The last person who had to listen to this was my therapist.”

“I’m listening now.”

Damn Griff for knowing what to say and when.

Cassie adjusted her hat so the brim did a better job of covering her eyes. She rummaged in her backpack and came up with her sunglasses and plopped them on her nose. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten to wear them in the first place.

“He came home that night with a gun and started shooting up the house. I tried to leave but he grabbed me by the hair and tied me to a chair. We stayed that way for a couple hours before he decided to call the police himself. After three hours of negotiating with a SWAT team, he put a bullet through his skull. I was tied to that damned kitchen chair and couldn’t get loose. The SWAT team broke in and that was the end of it.”

She’d kept the words matter of fact and unemotional, knowing if she didn’t tears would come.

“I’m sorry you had to go through that.” His voice held warmth, as if he had first hand understanding of the type of damage that could do to a person. “How long ago did all that happen?”

“Ten years.” She dared look at him, happy the sunglasses hid her moist eyes. His gaze was hard, filled with a pent up anger. She drew off her gloves and stuffed them in her coat pockets. “There was a benefit to the experience.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I’m a better person for it. It changed me forever.”

His silence on the subject comforted her in a strange way. He didn’t pontificate or judge or give her advice, and she found that refreshing. Sometimes letting what happened just be made the memory less painful.

“What the hell?” he suddenly said, looking toward the house.

She turned her attention to the house, and her stomach lurched. “The roses are blooming again.”

He threw a sharp glance at her. “What?”

“When I came up her the other day, the roses were blooming. When I came down the hill before you the roses were dead. I thought maybe I was just crazy. I didn’t even think much about it until now.”

A chill ran over Cassie, and she rubbed her arms.

“There’s got to be a logical explanation for it,” he said.

“You noticed it too the other day?”

“Yeah, but my experience was that the roses were dead both times I paid attention.”

“You’re kidding me?”

“No. I wouldn’t kid about something like that.”

She gave a nervous laugh. “Well at least we see the same thing this time.”

He took a step forward.

She grabbed his arm. “Don’t.”

“Why?”

“Someone must be living there now. There was a lock box on the front door and there isn’t now.”

“You’re right.” He gently pulled out of her hold, but he didn’t take another step toward the house.

Apprehension she didn’t understand gripped her. Instinct told her to leave and leave now, but she couldn’t force the words up her throat.

“Weird as hell,” he said quietly.

“Let’s go. Maybe we just imagined it all.”

“Yeah.”

They started back up the hill, and as they left Cassie felt the strange fear abate. She couldn’t form the words to describe why she’d felt such intimidation from the place. A niggling disquiet lingered. It made no sense that they’d both seen something different. They reached the Point not long after. She took her pack off and laid it down near the flat rock where she’d sat the last time she was here. He did the same just as she settled on the rock and started digging her pencils out of the pack.

“So now it’s your turn to tell me more about you,” she said.

He stood walked to the fence line. As he had the last time they’d been here, he considered the beautiful view.

“You don’t want to hear about it,” he said.

Surprised, she said, “What?”

“It’s too bloody. Too ugly.”

“More bloody than watching a man shoot himself in the head? I know war is hell.”

“There’s that.” He didn’t look at her—he kept his gaze on the beyond. “And then there was my life before the military. When I was a kid.”

God, what secret is he hiding?

“I’ve been told I’m an excellent listener. It’s a skill I learned after my husband shot himself.”

“I’m sure you are. You might be ready to divulge your past, but I’m not ready to tell mine.”

More than disappointment came over her. She felt, even in the smallest way, as if she’d been screwed over. She’d revealed more of herself than she had with any other man in ten years. She drew in a deep breath.

Guess I should have known better
. She swallowed sharp words. “That’s your right.”

He turned, and his eyes told her he didn’t like what she’d said. “You’re pissed,” he said.

“Okay, I’m pissed. At myself, actually. I shouldn’t have revealed that much about myself to a man I don’t know all that well.”

He wiped one hand over his jaw line, and for the first time she noticed he’d shaved. Yesterday his bristly beard growth had given him a harder-looking edge.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said. “You can trust me. I’m just not ready to regurgitate all my past right here and right now.”

She couldn’t think of a thing to say in response. Anger simmered inside her, twisting like a flag in the breeze and threatening to fly away.

“I guess we’re even,” she said. “Because you haven’t heard all of my past either.”

A real breeze tried to snatch her hat, so she tightened the chin strap. Griff did the same with his boony cap.

“Hey, I’m going to walk back down the hill a short way. I’ll be back,” he said.

His feet crunched over the dirt road and before she knew it, he was gone.

So he didn’t want to tell her his dirtiest secrets. She’d made a mistake telling him too much, expecting a little of the same. She wouldn’t do it again.

She poured her feelings into sketching. Perhaps her confessional loosened her creativity. Her pencil flew over the page. Today she didn’t draw Griff in a military uniform. She sketched the landscape before her and imbedded it with a strange, monstrous quality. Vines grew where none truly did, mountain ridges stabbed sharply into the air, jagged and higher. Snow covered more of the peaks, and iron-rich soil was closer to blood red than rust. Green grass took on a shade it couldn’t reach this time of year. She was glad she’d brought her colored pencils. Time had no meaning. She blinked as she looked down at the sketch. Her pencils had flown over the page in such quick succession. When she looked at her watch, it had taken her less than six minutes to slam together the violent, ugly images. Compelled beyond anything she’d done in a long time, she began to draw rose bushes. She didn’t understand why and didn’t care. Once more she worked swiftly, first with black, then gray than blood red. When she quit drawing a very few minutes later, the rosebush she’d drawn resembled one of those she’d seen in front of the ranch house down the hill. White roses with red lines running through them, and razor sharp thorns. Disturbed, she stopped and stared at the picture. More than once in her life she’d drawn pictures that moved her, had created a vision of her imagination without stifling herself. This time she wished she had stopped herself.

She put her pencils away and shook her hand out.

A shadow fell on her page. Surprised Griff had made it back without her hearing him, she wondered if his ability to sneak up on people was a military skill.

She smiled. “You’re blockin’ my sun.”

“Well, I’d hate to do that now, wouldn’t I?” Dougray’s Scottish accent asked.

Blackout: Chapter Four

“Son of a bitch.”

Griff couldn’t believe his eyes. He took one step and then another down the driveway of the ranch house with the weird-as-hell rose bushes. Now the roses looked trampled and shredded, as if they’d been run over by a mower or a car. A cold tingle darted over his skin and caused goose bumps. He tried to look at things rationally. How could he? Unless a car had come through her or a mower since they’d gone up to the Point, there was no way these roses would be in such bad shape. A niggling sense of unreality made him want to ignore the evidence in front of him. He could rush back up the hill and tell her what he’d found. On the other hand, she’d think he’d lost every marble he had.

He took his sunglasses off and hooked them into the neckline of his t-shirt, as if the dark shades obscured what really had happened to the rosebushes. No. They still lay mangled on the driveway.

When he’d refused to tell Cassie anything else about his past after she’d spilled her guts…well, cowardice had talked for him. He’d walked down the hill to cover two things. His conflicted thoughts about telling her what he’d experienced years ago, and to satisfy his curiosity about the house.

“Fucking nuts,” he said under his breath.

This house was strange, and no doubt about it. Not any stranger than him standing here in someone’s driveway eyeballing the house. He’d be lucky if someone didn’t call the cops, although he didn’t see any sign that people were out and about anywhere nearby. The neighbors on either side of the dirt road had up to five acres or more each. Driveways on the left side of the road, across from this property, were so long he couldn’t see homes from here.