Rocco and Mandy: A Red Team Wedding Novella (Book #6.5) (11 page)

He remembered how things had changed in the village after that. The women looked at him in odd ways, as if they knew his secret. Another memory flashed through his mind, about a conversation he’d overheard. The two women spoke far more freely than they would have had they known he was listening. But he was always listening. He was paid to listen, and sometimes women knew as much as their husbands about battle plans and soldier movements.
 

But this convo had been about Kadisha’s pregnancy. They wondered if she were farther along than she thought. One woman said perhaps she was having twins, but the other shot that down, as twins didn’t run in the Halim family.

Rocco leaned forward and put his face in his hands as he tried to remember everything about that conversation. Energy zinged through him as the implications of that woman’s offhand comment hit home. Rocco had been away with Kadisha’s dad for three months prior to the homecoming reunion when he and Kadisha had had sex. If she were farther along than two months, then he wasn’t the father of their child.
 

He shot to his feet and started walking in a circle around the fountain. He’d asked Kadisha about how far along she was that night after overhearing the women. She laughed it off, telling him again that they’d conceived that night he returned and asking if he didn’t remember how large a baby Zavi was. Still Rocco had been concerned. Their village was a long way from any western medical facility; if she had problems with her pregnancy, they might lose the baby. He’d made arrangements for one of her aunt and uncles to take her to visit the camp of some Doctors Without Borders a day’s drive away.
 

She seemed so happy when she returned, saying the doctors had confirmed her expected due date. He hadn’t thought anything more about it. Until now.
 

Had the doctor actually confirmed her due date?

Or had she let Ehsan seduce her? Had she blown herself up to hide the results of her infidelity to him?

Rocco jogged over to his truck, then drove over to Blade’s and went straight up the access tunnel leading directly to the bunker. He pressed his palm to the security panel, unlocking the big steel doors. Max was already coming into the short hallway from the ops room.

Rocco looked at him, catching his wary gaze. “I need your help.”

“Name it,” Max said without hesitation.

Rocco told him about Kadisha visiting the doctor. “I don’t know where the medical camp was located, but it was a day’s ride from the village. Just about a week before the explosion.”

“Fuck. Me.” Max turned and headed back into ops. “Those camps were mobile, Rocco. Sometimes they had to bug out fast. Doctors came and went. Who knows if they kept a record of her visit? And even if they did, those records might not have survived the war.”

“I need to know, Max.”

“Rocco, the docs saw countless—faceless—villagers…”

“Kadisha wasn’t a faceless villager. She was the daughter of the infamous warlord Ghalib Halim. She would have been treated with deference. Her visit would have been recorded.”

Max set a hand on Rocco’s shoulder. “I’ll do what I can.”

Rocco nodded. “Thank you.”

Rocco was sitting on the patio the next afternoon when Max came to see him.
 

“Hey, bro,” Max said.

Rocco read the tension on his friend’s face. “You have news?” Rocco stood up. Max handed him a printout of a fax. It was the log of Kadisha’s visit. Rocco grinned and looked up at Max. “You got it.”

Max nodded. “What does it mean to you?”

Rocco read the doctor’s notes. It said Kadisha was four months pregnant when she went to see him. Not the two she’d told Rocco. “Everything.” He looked at Max. “Where’s Mandy?”

Max checked the locator on his phone. “At the stables.”

“Thanks.” Rocco hurried across the patio.
 

“Should I call Kit?” Max asked.

Rocco walked backward as he answered. “No need. I’ll explain this later.” He jogged down to the portico leading to the gym building, then along the walkway around the gym and over to the stables.
 

“Mandy!” he shouted. “Mandy!”

She stepped out of one of the stalls and looked at him, then hurried toward him. “Rocco—what is it?”

“I need to talk to you.” He pulled her into a hug, squeezing her as tightly as he did his eyes. He’d almost lost her, lost himself, to Kadisha’s lie.

“You’re scaring me, Rocco.”

“It was all a lie.”

Mandy huffed a sharp breath, her eyes questioning his. “What was?”

“I almost died because of Kadisha’s lie.”

Mandy covered her mouth with the fingers of one hand, but couldn’t stop her tears. “Rocco—”

He led her over to a bench near the opening of the big stable. He was silent for a minute as he gathered his thoughts. “I think Kadisha cared for me the first couple of years of our marriage. But somewhere between the second and third years, she seemed to change. She grew critical of me, of Zavi. I didn’t put two and two together until yesterday.” He looked at Mandy.
 

“Kimble said the chokehold I had on my memories was not only keeping the painful ones at bay, but it was also keeping the answers I sought always out of my reach. Yesterday, I opened up to my memories.”

“Oh, Rocco.” Mandy reached over and held his knee. “I wish you had come to get me before doing that. You shouldn’t have been alone.”
 

“I remembered overhearing a couple of village women doubting her due date or speculating that she might be having twins.”

“Do twins run in your family?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think so. I asked my mom about that one time when I was a kid. I didn’t understand what twins were”—he smiled at her—“but I was hoping there was another of me out there somewhere. She said she didn’t know of any twins in her family. I don’t know if that’s true of my dad’s side. I never knew him.

“Anyway, I was worried that Kadisha might be having twins and might need better care than she was getting in the village. I sent her to a mobile medical camp run by an international group of volunteer doctors.” Rocco handed the paper to Mandy, forgetting that it was in French and she couldn’t read it.

“What am I looking at?”

Rocco pointed to the field where the doctor listed her pregnancy as four months along. “She told me she was only two months pregnant. I had been gone the three months prior to that.”

Mandy’s jaw dropped. Her green eyes were huge as she looked up at Rocco. “She wasn’t carrying your baby.”

Rocco shook his head. “No, she wasn’t. It was only a week later that she blew herself up and leveled the village.”

“Oh. My. God. That poor woman. How terrified she must have been. How desperate.”

Rocco shook his head. He reached for her hand and lifted it to his mouth to kiss. “This is why I love you. Only you would see it from that angle, feel her fear, despite the heinous way she chose to cover her infidelity.”

“Do you think she was raped?”

“No. Her first fiancé had come back into the area. Ehsan Asir.”

“The guy who kidnapped me?”

“Yes. He told me he’d figured out who I was and that he’d come here to take revenge for everything I’d taken from him. I think he worked on Kadisha for a long time. It would have been hard for them to be together very often or for very long. I think he turned her against me and seduced her.”
 

“I think he turned her against Zavi, too. Zavi didn’t seem to have been very attached to her.” She looked up at Rocco. “We talked about it when I put the garden in.”

 
“She had to be terrified of what would happen to her when the truth came out. She could have been stoned to death for her infidelity. Of course, I wouldn’t have let that happen, but she no longer trusted me enough to confide in me.”

Mandy handed him back the paper. He sighed and leaned back in the bench. “I came to tell you that I finally understand what was happening. And I’m sorry. God, I’m so fucking sorry. I put you through hell.”

Mandy reached for his hand. “Yes, you did. And I love you all the more for it.”

Rocco frowned as he looked at her. “How so?”

“It shows me just how deeply you love the people in your life, especially your children. It’s an honor to share my life with a man like you.”

He lifted her over to his lap and set his hand on her small baby bump. “I want to be here for our baby.” He looked up at her. “For you. And Zavi.”

She smiled and leaned in to kiss his forehead. “Do you think we’ve gotten through the worst of it?”

He considered that. Now wasn’t the time for quick answers. Only the truth mattered. “I don’t know. There may well be things that still come up or that send me back to the shadows. I do know that I’m going to continue working with Dr. Kimble. I also know that you’ll see me in the shadows before I even realize I’m back there. And when that happens, I hope you’ll bring me down here to your corral, put me on a fucking horse, and let me follow you around in circles until I learn again that you won’t leave me behind.”

“I’m sorry I left. I thought I was in the way of your healing. I heard you come into our room one night, then I heard you leave and you didn’t come back. I thought I had to go.”

Rocco caught her hand and kissed her knuckles. “I know. I wasn’t rejecting you that night; I was rejecting me. I didn’t feel as if I had the right to be with you. To be happy.”

Mandy sighed, then took his face in her hands. “Do you suppose, maybe, that you could do a whole lot less thinking and whole lot more just…being?”

He nodded. “I think I can try. Now. But at that point, I still thought my baby’s soul was alone, that Kadisha would reject the baby as she’d come to reject Zavi. I couldn’t tolerate that, Mandy.”

“That’s why I love you. Zavi and I and our new baby need you—the beautiful, emotional, loving man that you are.”

“I’m ready to start healing.”

“We need to put Zavi back together again. We frightened the hell out of him.”

Rocco nodded. “You know the best way to do that?”

She shook her head.
 

“Let’s get married. Let’s make this real. We’ll have adoption papers drawn up so that you are in every way his mom.”

“Are you ready for that?”

“I am. I’m sorry it took me so long to figure this shit out.”

“Kadisha did a number on you. What would you have done if you’d figured out she’d been unfaithful before she blew up the village?”

Rocco was silent as he thought about that. “I don’t know. I might have divorced her and let her go to Ehsan, but I suspect he would have rejected her and had the village shame her. I think he was just using her to get to me. Neither of us did right by her. I regret I didn’t have the chance to make that right—if that would even have been possible. She gave me my son before destroying herself and the village. I will forever be grateful for that.”
 

He looked at her, studying her face as he asked, “Would you mind if we rebranded your garden as a memory garden or a meditation garden? I accept the burden I placed on Kadisha’s life. It’s something I’ll be working through for a long while. But I would rather not tie Zavi to a past he’s already beginning to forget, or bind him to a woman who didn’t want to be his mother. Not when he has someone who does want to be his mom.”

“I don’t want to lie to him about his origins.”

“Nor do I. I just think it’s healthier to focus on what is, not what was.”

Mandy smiled. “I’m happy to call the garden anything you wish.”

“And do you think we can get rid of that old barn? It’s a hazard and I don’t want the kids playing in it.”

“Are you ready to let it go?”

“I am.”

“Then I think we should. Maybe I could put up something different for you. Space all your own. A man cave.”

“Thank you, but I don’t need that. I’m done being separate. If I need alone time, I’ll go for a ride. But the truth is, right now, I don’t want to be away from you.”

Mandy smiled. “Do you think the three of us could go for a ride and have a picnic one day soon?”

“How about tomorrow?”

“I’d love that.”

“Thank you for loving my son.”

Mandy tilted her head. “Our son.”

He reached up to touch her hair. He pulled her in for a kiss. “Our son,” he said, smiling against her lips. She wrapped her arms around his neck. He felt as if he were kissing her for the first time all over again. Her mouth was warm and soft against his, her tongue sweet. After a long moment, he broke the kiss. “I hate to stop this, but I need to go talk to Kit.”
 

They both stood up, but she wrapped her arms around him in a tight hug that he was in no hurry to end. He smiled, loving the fact that she didn’t want to let him go. That, after everything he’d put her through. He rubbed her back. Zavi wasn’t the only one he needed to put back together. “Em—did you mean it when you said you’d marry me?”

She looked up at him and smiled. “Yes.”

He shut his eyes. “Thank God. Losing you would end me.”

She shook her head and touched his face. “You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for.”

“But not strong enough for that.”

* * *

Rocco grinned the whole way back to the big house. He walked outside as long as he could, heading straight for the den. He’d called ahead to make sure Kit came up. There would be time enough to tell the rest of the team his news—he wanted Kit to be the first to hear it. After all, it was his sister he was going to marry.

Rocco lifted his face to the sky, feeling the heat of the sun on his face as if for the first time in a long, long while. It was the same sun now as it had been the past few months. Why did it now have heat that he could feel? It was as if he’d been trapped in a bubble that had kept him cold and had dulled his senses. Fiona had said that she chose the sunshine when she was working through the shock of her trauma. He’d told her that he believed in sunshine, but he hadn’t at that point.
 

He did now. And it felt fucking fabulous. He was still grinning when he walked into the den.