Chapter 25
Row upon row of tents stood around Luc’s shivering form. The odors of manure and rotting garbage hung in the frigid February air. In this particular dream, Luc’s spirit resided in the body of Sergeant Nathan Bledsoe, a twenty-eight-year-old farmer from Albany, New York. His closest friend, Corporal Stephen Ruskin—same age, same occupation, same hometown—stood beside him. Both served in the American Continental Army.
Sergeant Bledsoe fought for a future free from tyranny. And for the lady he
left behind, his beloved Christine. Once the cursed war ended, he planned to return home, marry Christine, and raise a dozen sons to strengthen his country and their place in it. Nathan’s thoughts turned to his betrothed as he rolled a secret missive into oilcloth and stuffed the parchment into an empty spyglass barrel. How often had he told her he loved her? If he’d said the words a thousand times a day every day, it was too little.
They’d grown up together,
their parents close friends and neighbors. From the time he first spotted her cherubic cheeks and those perfect blue eyes, he’d known no other wife would ever suit him. How fortunate she’d felt the same pull toward him! And as they grew, so did their feelings.
S
ince the war began, her beautiful face had carried him through many darkened days. One more excursion, this last trek into Canada, and he’d be free to return home to the promise he’d made to Christine so many battles ago. Her last words echoed in his ears, her promise to wait for him always, her admonishment that he come back to her hale and hearty. And his solemn vow they would marry the day after his return from duty.
“When do you leave?” Stephen whispered, breaking the spell his memories cast.
“Full dark,” Nathan replied in the same soft tone. “After this, I’m bound for home.”
“You always did have the luck,” Stephen grumbled.
Since the words were said with a smile, Nathan never thought to question them.
Within hours of their conversation, Nathan had saddled his horse and ridden off. Working under orders from General Lafayette, he had crept into Canada to deliver the secret message stashed in the spyglass. But someone had alerted the British to his whereabouts and the moment the spyglass changed hands, a unit of redcoats erupted from the woods, rifles at the ready.
Nathan was quickly arrested, charged with espionage. He received no trial, not a legal one at any rate. There was no need. Only two documents were needed to convict him, the message from Lafayette inside the spyglass, and the letter. The letter he’d sent off to Christine, advising her that this would be his last journey and he would return home to her soon. A letter which had somehow found its way into enemy hands. As the tightening noose stole his last gasping breath, Nathan cursed the woman he’d once adored. She’d betrayed him.
May God visit a painful end to Christine Grainger’s days!
Luc bolted upright, awake and instantly alert
.
He
lay beside Jodie, panting, his naked body glistening with sweat. From the nightmare or from their earlier activities? He didn’t know.
Jesus.
Just...Jesus
.
No other thought
permeated the fog enshrouding his brain. He simply couldn’t wrap his head around the confusion muddling his world.
The first time
he and Jodie had melded, the quickie, had been a pleasant surprise. But this last bout was like atomic fusion.
And by damn, he wanted to do it again. Right now.
What better way to forget the hellish memories haunting his dreams than through mind-blowing sex?
Her breath, a little too fast, warmed his ear with each exhale.
Oh, yeah. She was just as hot to repeat their performance as he. Rolling over, he skimmed a hand down her naked hip. With a satisfied moan, she stretched like a Persian cat on a velvet cushion. One arched foot rubbed against his ankle, and he rose on one elbow to look more closely at the scars puckering her flesh. Tentatively, he reached out a finger and when she didn’t turn away, he traced the jagged striations on her left arm.
“I’m not going to erase them,” Jodie said flatly. “So don’t start giving me advice on how to do it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of giving you advice, babe. In fact…” He lowered his voice to a husky murmur meant to get her engine fired up. “…based on what just occurred between us, I’m thinking there are a few talents you’ve been keeping secret. Besides poker.”
Heat traveled between them, warming the cool, scratchy sheet.
“But you’re still curious how I got the scars.” Pain flashed across her features, and he winced that she’d so easily read his mind. This conversation came nowhere near the type of romantic small talk most lovers participated in.
“I’m sorry.” He cupped her hand, pressed the back of it
to his lips. “Forget I drew any attention to them.”
“No,” she murmured. “It’s okay.
Why shouldn’t you wonder about them? Besides, this is supposed to be a ‘new beginning.’ That means clearing the skeletons out of the closet.”
She
snuggled closer, fitting her curves against him, shoulder beneath his arm, hip to hip. Her eyes lost the luster of bliss and dimmed to a serious sapphire. “The thing is, even if I erased the scars from…” She glanced down at herself, and then back into his eyes with an apologetic smile twisting her lips. “…whatever I am now, I can’t erase the memories of what caused them. So what’s the point?”
He skimmed a fingertip over her chin. “You’re procrastinating, sweetheart.”
“Yeah, I am,” she admitted on a sigh heavy enough to anchor the Queen Mary. “Where’d you grow up, Luc? On Earth, I mean.”
The non-sequitur threw him, but only for the briefest moment. Understanding lit up the corners of his brain quickly. She needed to skate
the subject, dance around the topic until she found her footing. No wonder, really. Those scars were pretty hideous to the naked eye. She probably underwent some kind of horrific accident in acquiring them. An accident she hadn’t totally come to grips with yet.
So…okay. He’d give her all the time she needed. What the hell else did they have here anyway? Nothing but eons of time. Although, she’d come up with a helluva way to pass
the endless hours. In fact, he hoped her “new beginning” scenario included a lot more melding. It wasn’t just your average ordinary human sexual relations; it was more powerful, more consuming, more—for lack of a better term—earth-shattering. Nuclear sex.
His finger skittered over her hip again, but she slapped
his illicit digit away.
“Later,” she said with the smart tone of a parochial school nun wielding a ruler on an unruly child’s hand. “Answer my question first.”
He yanked his finger away and offered her a disappointed shrug. “Okay, fine. I was born in Manhattan. Well, at Manhattan Hospital. I grew up in the New York suburbs. Not the most exciting life, but average as far as childhoods go. Mom, Dad, a little sister, three-bedroom house with picket fence, and a dog. The perfect picture of suburbia.”
“I was born in a mud hut in a rain forest in Costa Rica.”
He snorted. “Get outta here.”
“No, really.
” As if to lend credence to her words, she nodded. “My parents worked for UNESCO. You know what that is, right? The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization?”
“Yeah. I’ve heard of it.”
After moistening his fingertip, he traced lazy curlicues over Jodie’s skin and hid a smile when her normally burnished gold aura turned to a copper shimmer. She glowed beneath his touch. What man wouldn’t feel a surge of pride to have such power over a beautiful woman?
“By the time I was si
x, I’d lived all over Central America.”
His fingers stopped and amusement fled. “Jeez, that must have been tough on you.”
“It was,” she admitted with a grimace. “Sometimes.” In halting tones, she told him about growing up as the only child of UNESCO workers.
Through
her vivid descriptions, he envisioned the poverty, the harsh jungles. “That was a helluva way to grow up. Weren’t you ever lonely? Or angry that you didn’t have all the stuff other kids your age had?”
“I had friends, Luc,” she replied with a smile. “All the children in all the villages we lived in and all the children of other UNESCO parents. And honestly? I didn’t know I was missing anything. It probably sounds crazy to you, but when you grow up without cable television, Friday night movies, and shopping malls, you don’t realize those things are normal. For me, normal was one-room schoolhouses, watching out for snakes when I went to the outhouse at night, and learning to share everything I had no matter how meager because someone else always had even less.”
“Sounds pretty harsh.”
“No, actually it was wonderful. It was different, and maybe compared to your upbringing, fairly bizarre. But I had a lot of benefits—I learned to appreciate the simple joys in life, I got to spend a lot more time with my parents than most ‘normal’ kids, and I can speak three languages fluently. It also gave me all that compassion you hate about me.”
“Right now, sweetheart, I don’t hate a blessed thing about you.” Once again, he skimmed his hand down her hip, watched her skin sparkle beneath his touch.
She slapped him playfully. “Pay attention, Luc. I’m only going to tell this story once.”
He sobered immediately. “That bad?”
“That bad,” she said, her eyes hooded under heavy lids. As if to ward off the memories, she tensed in his arms.
On instinct, he gathered her closer. “I’ve got you. Go on. Tell me.”
“Our last home was in a tiny village a few miles from San Salvador. I still don’t know how it happened or why, but guerillas overran Castelan, our village in a pre-dawn raid.”
He stiffened. No. It couldn’t be.
Apparently unaware of his reaction, Jodie plowed on, no doubt to get through the horror as quickly as possible.
“I remember my mother waking me and hustling me to the Jeep.”
In contrast, Luc’s mind slowed to a crawl. Dread took hold, along with a desire to stop her from confirming his thoughts. If she didn’t speak about it, maybe he could pretend he didn’t know.
She sat up, back braced against the headboard, staring at the blank wall across the room.
“
At first I thought I’d slept until noon because when we raced from the hut it was so bright and hot outside. Then I realized the village was on fire.” She shuddered.
“The screams,” she said. “God, I still hear them. Women wailing, children shrieking. And over all of them, my mother shouting to my father, ‘Hurry, Jack. Hurry.’ I saw one of the aide workers, Carlos, running toward us through the underbrush. The guns cut him down the minute he reached the clear
ing.” On a shaky sigh, she squeezed her eyes shut.
“Maybe you should stop,” Luc suggested. Even as the words left his lips, he silently cursed his cowardice.
But she pressed on, her tone growing hypnotic in its cadence. “Daddy got the Jeep started, and we jerked forward.”
She ope
ned her eyes then, raw pain muddying their normally pacific blue color to lifeless gray. “They never cried out, neither of them. I heard the bullets, of course. They pinged the doors, ripped into the cushion around me. I saw Mom and Daddy’s bodies jerking in the front seats, felt the blood splash over me, and the strangest sensation of somersaulting over and over. The last thing I remember was smelling gasoline…”
Oh, Jesus.
She didn’t have to finish the sentence for him to understand what happened. “H-how?” He coughed to clear his heart from the middle of his throat. “How old were you?”
“
It was November 14, 1996. I’d just turned fourteen the month before. I woke up a few weeks later in a hospital, everyone I knew dead and gone. As soon as I was healed enough for travel, I was shipped back to the States. Daddy had a doctor friend who took me in while I underwent a series of skin grafts. After that, it was foster care until I turned eighteen.” She gave him a sad smile. “Believe me when I say as boring as you think your childhood was, it really
was
perfect.”