“Well, if it will make you feel any better, I killed one of them and wounded the other. Dominguez is going to go away for life in a Costa Rican prison. He’ll never be released to ever hurt Lia again.”
Reaching out, Steve gripped his hand. “Thanks for telling me that. I was worried … well, worried that those two killers were still on the loose, looking for Lia again.”
The only touch he’d ever received from his father was a punch or a slap. When Steve removed his hand, a lot of emotions avalanched in Cav. He was seeing another facet of Steve’s ability to be vulnerable. “I didn’t know what Lia had or had not told you,” he admitted. “It’s her story to tell you, not mine.”
“I agree, son, but sometimes Lia worries about us too much. Sometimes she doesn’t tell us everything, as if to protect us against more bad news. Susan could barely look at Lia after her surgery. She had to leave the room because my daughter’s face was terribly swollen, black and blue, all those stitches …”
“It would be hard on anyone,” Cav agreed.
“Lia saw her mother’s face, saw the horror over her condition in her eyes, and my daughter, who is like a sponge, took on Susan’s reactions.”
Groaning inwardly, Cav sat there, staring blindly out the dusty windshield of the truck as they drove slowly down the dirt road toward the field. “She’s very sensitive,” he agreed hoarsely.
“I tried to tell Susan to act as if she was fine. Not to see her wounds, the swelling, but to treat her as whole.” His voice broke. “She couldn’t do it. It was just too much for her to bear.”
“At least you did,” Cav pointed out quietly, feeling the suffering around Steve.
“I did. I stayed with her day and night. They had her there for three days, which is a long time, from what I understand. The cut on her neck was bad and they wanted to keep her quiet and stabilized until that artery started healing up properly.”
“I’m glad she had you,” Cav said, barely able to keep his feelings out of his voice. “But it had to be hard on you with your wife’s reactions, plus Lia needing you as never before.”
Snorting, Steve rasped, “I didn’t know if I could do it, son. I was hurting so much for both of them for different reasons. This was one situation I couldn’t fix no matter how much I wanted to.”
“Did you visit Lia when she was transferred to the U.S.?”
“Yes.” He frowned. “What hurt the most was that Susan didn’t want to go and visit her daughter. She’d fallen apart over Lia’s attack and wounds. Our doc here in Ontario said she’d had a nervous breakdown over it. I could believe it. Susan has always been strong, but after she had Lia, she changed. When the doctor told her she’d never have another child, that broke her spirit. She’d always dreamed of a big family, lots of sisters and brothers for Lia. Susan came from a family of eight, you know? She was the daughter of a rancher north of here. She grew up fast, was real mature, and when I met her, I instantly fell in love with her.” He smiled wistfully. “She was so full of life, like Lia. And Lia was the spittin’ image of her mother, believe me. She was Miss Sunbeam running around the farm. She made everyone smile. Everyone loved her, Cav. My daughter is just one of those special people that brings sunshine into other people’s lives. It’s effortless on her part because her heart is so big and generous.”
“She sure changed my life for the better,” Cav admitted hoarsely. He could imagine Lia as that bright-eyed little girl, running here and there like the good fairy, sprinkling people with her fairy dust of light and affection. His throat tightened because he loved her so much, and hearing this only made him fiercely want to protect her forever from any more trauma.
“Everyone Lia touches is better off, believe me. She’s just so very special, and I’m not saying that because she’s my child.”
“I wouldn’t disagree with you.” Cav frowned. “Your wife has had a pretty rough road with Lia.”
“Yes.” Steve sighed. “She was just getting on her feet after three years. Lia came home after getting out of the Army. She’d already gotten a job at Delos and was going to be sent to Costa Rica. She stayed with us for almost a month and it did my wife so much good. It did Lia good, too. Those two have always been like two peas comin’ from the same pod.” Steve smiled distantly.
“Did Susan treat Lia as whole by that time?”
“Yes. My wife started therapy about six months after Lia’s assault. She felt pretty guilty, realizing that she’d plunged her own daughter into another hell by not being there for her. To this day, Susan can’t forgive herself for that.”
“But your wife has probably never been around war, terror, or assaults like that.”
“Right. That’s what I told her, son. I wasn’t in the military, but for whatever reason, my love for Lia, no matter how she looked, overcame my own personal shock and horror over her assault.”
“It’s not something many people could deal with as well as you did,” Cav said.
“I imagine as a SEAL you saw plenty of blood and horror?”
“Yes, sir, too much if you want to know the truth.” Cav shrugged, his voice low. “You see enough of it and you get anesthetized by it. It doesn’t bother you like it did before. The more you see, the less reactive emotionally you become about it. Except”—he quirked his mouth—“when it’s one of your team that gets shot or wounded. Then you snap right back into the horror and trauma. It can’t be helped.”
“Susan’s therapist, who was at one time an Army psychiatrist, told her that. She’d been a major in the medical field and had been over to Iraq and then Afghanistan, counseling soldiers with PTSD and helping those who had been wounded. It was a good thing Susan picked Dr. Fletcher, because she helped Susan understand that her reaction to Lia’s condition was normal, not abnormal.”
“Definitely, your wife’s reaction is normal.”
“It took her three years to climb out of it,” Steve said, frowning. “And then Lia met this guy named Manuel down in Costa Rica. She said she’d found someone who didn’t make a big deal of all her scars. Of course, my wife and I were worried about that because it had taken Lia three years to get brave enough to go out in public and not keep hiding because of the scars.”
“Manuel,” Cav growled. “Well, that didn’t go well from what Lia told me.”
“God, tell me about it.” Steve shook his head. “My child was just getting a little bit of her confidence back, starting to put out tendrils toward living her life again fully, and this immature bastard might as well have stabbed her with a knife all over again.” His mouth tightened. “Lia came home from that episode broken.”
Groaning, Cav asked, “What did you and Susan do?”
“Susan, thankfully, with the years of therapy, handled Lia a lot better than the first time. She was there for Lia—she never abandoned her as she’d done before—and it was a good thing. You know how women are. They can talk to one another when they can’t talk to a man.”
Cav grinned a little. “Yes, sir, I know that one.”
“Well, Susan was courageous and helped our daughter climb out of that prison. I was so proud of her. But I also saw the toll it took on her. Lia was in a pretty dark place but my wife pulled her out of it.”
Cav said nothing, wondering if that was the reason Susan glared at him. That she really did see him as another Manuel or Jerry in Lia’s life. Now he could begin to appreciate and understand why Susan was being so protective and aggressive toward him. She didn’t want her only daughter to be hurt ever again. On that, they could agree, and maybe, Cav thought, that was the place to begin a gentle conversation with Susan. If he could somehow convince her that he wasn’t going to hurt Lia all over again, she might ease off and relax. But how could he do that?
“Well,” Steve murmured, “enough about our family problems. Let’s go out and meet the crew and see how they’re doing. We don’t want our fresh coffee to go stale on us.”
CHAPTER 3
“Mom? Is everything okay?” Lia asked, drying h
er hands after peeling and cutting up the potatoes for that night’s meal. She sensed the tension in her mother—anxiety, maybe. And now, because she was so sensitive, it was spilling over into her. “Are we causing you stress?” She knew her mother had undergone years of therapy after seeing her nearly die from all those knife wounds, and Lia didn’t want to be a source of strain for her ever again.
Susan gave her daughter a loving look, kissing the top of her head. “Don’t be silly. Everything’s fine! Want to help me set the table?”
“Sure.” Lia removed her apron and hung it on a nearby hook on the wall. “I think Cav is going to love your cooking,” she said with a smile, opening the cabinet door and bringing down four white ceramic plates.
“Why do you say that?” Susan asked, pulling open the silverware drawer.
“Because he really appreciates home cooking.” Her voice lowered softly. “He comes out of an awful family situation, Mom. His dad was addicted to cocaine.”
Susan’s eyes flew open and she stood paralyzed for a moment as she stared at Lia. “What?” It came out like a gasp.
Seeing her mother’s unexpected reaction, Lia stammered, “But—but that was his father. That’s not Cav, Mom.”
“Oh …”
“Mom, Cav was a Navy SEAL. They don’t take men who are drug addicts. They have to a have a clean record. They’re heroes.” She saw her mother look aghast for a moment, swallow hard, and then give her a short nod.
“Well, that’s nice to know.”
Hesitating, Lia whispered, “Mom, I love Cav. He’s a good man. He’s been incredible to me, helping me to realize that my scars don’t define me. Before him? The Jerry and Manuel incidents?”
Groaning, Susan muttered, “Oh, God, them … They hurt you so much, Lia. They set you back in your healing.”
“Sure did,” she said wryly, walking over to the long, rectangular oak table, which sat on wooden claw feet gripping spheres. “But Cav is nothing like them. His mother was abused by his father. He was a mean person, Mom.”
“That’s terrible,” Susan agreed, laying down the flatware as she placed the plates on the table. Lia had already set out a quilted place mat for each one.
“Cav was abused, too, Mom.” Lia glanced over at her. “He’s told me about it and all I can do is cry for him and for his poor mother. It was a terrible situation. It made me realize how lucky I am to have you and Dad. You never laid a hand on me.” She gave her mother a grateful look. “The more he’s told me, the more I’m grateful you’re my parents.”
Susan came over, hugging her daughter. “There’s never a need to strike a child, Lia. You were raised with love, not a heavy hand.”
She smiled, returning her mother’s hug and then releasing her. “Cav is so gentle with me. He’s taught me a man can be like Dad.”
“That’s good to know,” Susan said, her hands light on the last of the flatware. “But he seems very hard to me, Lia.”
“Oh,” she laughed, “that’s his SEAL game face he’s wearing.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, there are a lot of situations, dangerous ones, that Cav found himself in when he was in the SEALs and that he gets into now as a security contractor. He can’t let his emotions rule him. He has to be very focused and alert, and think through the action that’s taking place around him. And he’s been taught by the SEALs that if you show how you’re really feeling, an enemy could take advantage of you and maybe kill you. Or kill your teammates.”
Susan shivered and walked to the kitchen. “Ugh. I can’t even imagine the world he lives in, Lia. How can you?”
Lia sauntered back to the counter, pulling down the salt, pepper, and sugar bowl. “Because he’s a gentle man, Mom. He’s so much like Dad that I can’t even begin to believe it.”
Susan gave her a quizzical look. “I certainly don’t see that in him.”
“Well,” she murmured, giving her a mother a pleading look, “give Cav a chance to be himself around you. He’s nervous about meeting the two of you. He doesn’t know you except through me.”
“Well, if he’s a SEAL, he certainly shouldn’t feel any anxiety about meeting us. We’re not his enemy.”
Setting the crystal salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table, Lia said, “He cares, Mom. He’s worried that you won’t like him. I mean, not that he’s told me that. But I can tell … I can tell he’s concerned about what you two will think of him.”
“You do love him, Lia?” She leaned her hips against the counter, her arms folded across her chest, staring at her critically.
Setting the sugar bowl on the table, Lia turned. “Yes, I do. I wanted to tell you and Dad in person, too. I wanted you to see how good a person Cav is so that you’d understand why I love him so much.”
“But how long have you known him, Lia? Has he told you that he loves you, too?”
She heard the strain in her mother’s lowered voice, saw the censure in her green eyes. “Yes, he tells me every day how much he loves me, Mom. Since January of this year, we’ve spent a lot of time in close contact with one another because he was my bodyguard and Dante Medina had a hit out on me in Costa Rica.”
“What do you mean ‘close contact’?”
She walked to the counter, holding her mother’s stare, feeling as if she’d done something wrong. Why was she behaving like this? Lia didn’t understand it. “Maybe I gave you the wrong impression in my calls to you and Dad,” she said, opening her hands. “Cav is a bodyguard. He had to live with me, shadow me when I went out of my house, drive me everywhere I went. We saw each other twenty-four hours a day.”
“He was sleeping with you?” Susan demanded, shocked.
“No … no, he slept out on the couch. I slept in my bedroom.” Lia frowned. “He was always there for me, Mom. I think I started falling in love with him from the time I met him in San José. He was always kind to me. Patient. And he never stared at me like I was the Hunchback of Notre Dame because of my scars.”
Susan rolled her eyes. “You promised to stop using that to describe yourself, Lia.”
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “I’m still a work in progress, Mom. Cav has been helping me change how I see myself, how I feel about myself. He doesn’t see my scars. He sees me, Mom.” She pressed her hand against her heart, her voice cracking with emotion.
“But what does he want from you?” Susan demanded, her mouth tightening.
Lia stared blankly at her. “What do you mean?”
“Jerry and Manuel. Remember them? They wanted sex from you. They never saw you. They didn’t care about you at all. They both tried to use you.”
Wincing, she whispered, “Yes, I was desperate, Mom. I wanted … well … I was lonely. I wanted a relationship, so I reached out.” She swallowed, her voice dropping in pain. “I made mistakes.”
“Horrible ones,” Susan rattled, her voice rising. “Jerry, in particular, destroyed you all over again, Lia. What makes you think Cav isn’t just like that?”
Lia’s lips parted. She stared blankly at her mother, shock racing through her. Finally, she found her voice. “No … Cav is nothing like Jerry or Manuel, Mom. Truly, he isn’t! Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think,” she said irritably, frowning. “I worry for you, Lia. This man you brought home is a killer. That’s what he does for a living. What am I to think?”
Blinking, Lia felt as if the ground had dropped away from beneath her feet. Shock bolted through her as she stared at her worried mother, whose lips were pressed tightly together, her eyes filled with anxiety.
Susan made an unhappy sound. “I’m sorry, Lia. My menopause symptoms are driving me crazy. I don’t sleep well at night. And the less sleep I get, the more grumpy, irritable, and oversensitive I become.” She gave her a daughter an apologetic look.
“Have you seen a doctor about this?” Lia asked, concerned. Her mother wasn’t the type to admit when she wasn’t feeling well.
“Yes. And I refuse to take
sleeping pills. You know how much I hate drugs.”
“You and I are on the same page on that one,” Lia agreed, going over and hugging her mother.
Susan pressed a kiss to Lia’s hair. “I don’t mean to sound so judgmental, Lia. I’m just concerned for you. I want you happy. I’m glad Cav said he loved you.”
Releasing her mother, she smiled a little, gripping Susan’s hand for a moment. “He does love me, Mom. Neither Jerry or Manuel ever said anything close to that for me, so that should tell you a lot.”
Just then, Lia heard the screen door open and then close. Her dad’s voice drifted down the hall; he was conversing with Cav. Gulping, she whispered, “Mom, let’s table this discussion until later. I want to know more about your menopause problems. Please?”
“Yes,” Susan said tightly, looking toward the entryway to the foyer.
Lia saw Cav saunter in, his hands loose and at his sides. He was smiling at something her father had said. And then her dad appeared and laughed, clapping Cav on the back. She saw the look in her father’s squinting blue eyes. There was genuine warmth between the two of them. Her heart was pounding and she was confused by her mother’s way of seeing Cav. What was going on? Unsure, she saw Cav’s gaze move from Susan, who busied herself at the sink, to Lia.
More than anything, Lia wanted to speak privately to Cav, but it was going to be impossible under the circumstances. The scent of the big pot roast, the potatoes baking, apples slathered with brown sugar in the oven alongside them. She forced a smile over to Cav. Instantly, she saw his brow dip for a second and recognized that he was picking up on her real feelings. Lia knew she was never any good at hiding how she felt around Cav. What she didn’t want was for Cav to accidentally say something that might set her tense mother off.
Dinner was miserable for Lia. She helped her mother bring over the roast. Her father expertly cut thin slices, laying them out on a nearby platter. Lia made the gravy. Cav tried to help in the kitchen, but Susan asked him to just sit down and have a cup of coffee. The brittleness in her mother’s voice didn’t go unnoticed by her father or Cav. Yet neither said anything; they pretended that everything was all right, despite the silent strain hanging invisibly over them. Lia made sure that Cav sat next to her, and her father was at that end of the table. Susan was to her right. She wanted Cav as far away from her as she could get him. Because she was so sensitive, she felt the subtle tension running through Cav. More than once he glanced over at her, giving her that laserlike look that told her he was picking up a lot around her and that he knew she was upset. And then she felt him going into protective mode, as if sensing she was at odds with her mother.
Secret Dream: Delos Series, 1B1 Page 4
