by Cindy Gerard
She could not let herself think about that man. That gorgeous, intriguing, soulful-eyed Latino. She closed her eyes. Let the pain wash through her, a reminder of what was at stake here.
Too much heartbreak. Too much pain. She wasn’t ready—didn’t think she’d ever be ready—to open herself up to either again.
That’s why she put up walls. Fortified herself with emotional barriers. Raphael Mendoza was not going to breach them. She had a life to live and she knew exactly how that life was going to go.
Did it hurt to know Raphael wouldn’t be a part of it? Yeah. It hurt a lot. But not nearly as much as it would hurt if she let him in and then he left her when he’d decided their love affair had run its course. Or when a bullet hit something vital and he ended up dying in some terrorist-infested jungle, or blown up in a bombing, or—
Stop.
She made herself stop because the thought of Mendoza dead ripped through her heart like a knife.
Bottom line, someday, some way, he would leave her. Just like everyone who had ever meant anything to her had left.
A single tear rolled down her cheek. She brushed it away angrily. She wasn’t going to cry over what might have been. And then she ran over in her mind what she was going to tell him when he showed up—and he would show up—at her apartment. An hour later, when he rapped on the door, she was ready for him. More to the point, she was ready to say good-bye.
Rafe was so nervous his hand was shaking when he knocked on B.J.’s apartment door. Cristo. He didn’t get this wired when he prepped for an op. Which told him exactly how important this woman was to him, and how difficult the fight was going to be.
“Just tell her how you feel,” Jenna had said, covering his clasped hands with hers as he’d sat at the dining room table in the Jones’s apartment that morning. “Speak from your heart. There’s nothing more honest than that.”
He couldn’t believe he’d spilled his guts to Jenna. Maybe because he’d witnessed how deeply she and Gabe loved each other, yet in the beginning Gabe had run scared in the other direction.
“And whatever you do, don’t give up. If you love her don’t give up just because she’s scared.”
He’d never given up on anything in his life. He wasn’t about to start now.
The door swung open.
“Hi,” he said, and knew the instant he saw her face that he was in for the battle of his life.
“Come on in.”
She stepped aside. And she wouldn’t look him in the eye.
She wasn’t wearing a speck of makeup; those amazing golden curls cascaded wildly around her face. She was barefoot in a pair of worn jeans and a simple white tank top. Yet she looked more alluring and sexy and real than Brittany Jameson in a hot pink string bikini.
She also looked bruised and distant, all of the shields protecting her emotions locked down tight. Yeah, the battle of his life was about to start.
“How’s the arm?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Little sore, but it’s fine. Yours?”
“Minor scratch. You’re watching for signs of infection, right?”
“I said, it’s fine.”
Okay. She knew how to take care of herself and she didn’t want to talk about it. He got it.
When she walked into the small living area and eased down on the sofa, he followed her. Took a seat on a leather barrel chair facing her.
“So when are you heading back to Argentina?”
Brittle and blunt. That was B.J.
“We had R and R coming even before Colombia. And the Tompkinses still intend to throw that engagement party for Reed. So I’ll be sticking around for a while.”
The look that crossed her face told the tale. She was not happy to hear that bit of news.
“Make sure you tell Reed congratulations for me. I didn’t know what to make of him at first but the pretty boy kind of grew on me.”
He smiled. “Yeah, Reed’s a piece of work but he’s a damn good man.”
“They all are,” she agreed with a nod.
Silence crept in like the sunlight sifting through the partially closed blinds covering her living room windows. Silence and a building sense of good-bye.
He didn’t want good-bye from this woman. And he had to man up and face whatever resistance she was going to lob his way.
“Look. B.J.” He hiked himself forward on the chair, propped his forearms on his thighs, and leaned toward her. “Can I just say something flat out?”
She swallowed hard, still wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I think that maybe good-bye would be the best thing we could say to each other.”
Even though he’d expected resistance, her words still hit him like a bullet. “Just like that? You don’t even want to talk about… us?”
She glanced at him, then quickly averted her gaze. But he saw something in that glance. Longing. Regret. Sorrow. He wanted to fold her into his arms and hold her. Just hold on and tell her everything would be okay if she’d just let him in.
But she appeared so fragile right now, he was afraid that if he touched her she’d shatter into a million pieces. “What happened to you?” he asked gently. “What happened to you that you are so afraid to trust in something good?”
Her eyes grew glassy with moisture but she didn’t break. “I’m not afraid.”
“Right. I know. You’re not afraid of anything. Nothing but me. Nothing but the possibility of us.”
She stared at the hands she’d clasped in her lap. “There is no us.”
“But there could be,” he said, wishing she would look at him. “There could be if you’d just let it happen. And don’t you dare try to tell me that what happened between us in Colombia was nothing.”
He still had a vivid image of her in his mind, her head thrown back, her eyes closed as she climaxed and trembled and fell apart for him.
She picked up a throw pillow, hugged it to her breast. “What happened was a casualty of the circumstances.”
“Oh, right. Heat of the moment,” he concluded for her, not able to hide his anger. “Tensions ran high. Lives were on the line, and all that bullshit.”
“Yes, damn it,” she said, reacting to his tone. “All of that. And it’s not bullshit. Sometimes … sometimes the moment feels like the only reality. Sometimes you need that moment to get you through.”
“So you’re saying that any time you get in a dicey situation you sleep with your partner.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Then don’t lie to me. It meant something. I mean something. We mean something.”
She closed her eyes, shook her head. “I … I can’t do this.”
“Why? Just tell me why.”
She tossed the pillow aside and shot to her feet. He stood and stopped her with a hand on her good arm when she would have walked away from him.
She lowered her head, spoke to the floor. “I want you to go now.”
His head fell back in frustration. “How can I fight something I can’t see? And how can you not want to fight for this?”
“Because I’ll lose!” Her eyes swam with tears when she finally looked at him. “And I don’t fight battles that I can’t win. Not anymore.”
“Not any more? Are you listening to yourself? Damn it, B.J., you’re still fighting those battles. Battles you lost a long time ago. Battles that have nothing to do with me. Yet I’m taking the heat for the beating someone else gave you.”
She jerked out of his hold and walked to the door. “You don’t get it.”
He breathed deep. Cupped his fingers around his nape. “Damn right I don’t. I’m offering you something good. Something you can count on. And you’re letting past pain dictate your future.”
For an instant, just an instant, he thought he saw a flicker of hope. And then it was gone. She swung open the door. “Just go. Just, please, go.”
Defiant, prideful, she fought back the tears.
She wasn’t going to break.
Instead, she’d broken him.
“Good-bye, B.J. Ha
ve a good, lonely life.”
B.J. stayed in her apartment with the blinds shut tight and the phone unplugged for two days. She slept. Dry-eyed, she stared at the walls. Occasionally, she remembered to eat. On the morning of day three, she declared herself cured of Raphael Mendoza.
Well, if not cured, at least capable of functioning. She rode her bike, jogged, tried out a new recipe. And she did it all by rote. But at least the sharp pain she felt in her chest every time she thought of him had mellowed to a dull, tolerable ache. The hollow and futile echo of longing had been muffled by a numbing fog. And she’d wallowed in self-pity long enough.
She was due to return to work tomorrow after her short medical leave. Today was about fulfilling another duty. She arranged for a rental car and headed out of the city.
“Mom? You home?” She let herself into her mother’s apartment with her own key when her mother didn’t answer her knock. Of course she was home. Her mother never left the house. Thanks to the corner market that delivered her groceries, cigarettes, and wine, she never had to.
She stepped further inside and was hit by the stale odor of cigarette smoke and booze. The TV blared in the corner.
“Mom?”
She finally found her in the bedroom. For a heart-stopping instant, B.J. thought she was dead. Her mother lay flat on her back, fully dressed, an empty bottle of wine lying on the floor by the bed.
Then her chest rose.
B.J. honestly didn’t know if she was disappointed or relieved.
The first time she’d found her mother this way, she’d been eight years old. She’d been so scared she’d hidden in her bedroom closet. That’s where a neighbor found her the next day, her panties wet, her eyes matted shut from crying.
Her mom had gone away for a while then and B.J. had stayed with some nice people until her daddy had come home. When Janine came back from the hospital, things changed for a while and B.J. had thought she was safe again.
She was twelve the next time she’d found her mother that way. And she’d grown up a lot. She called for help. Over the next several years, she’d made many such calls.
She wanted to feel indifference as she watched her mother. She wanted to just walk away. But she couldn’t because in spite of it all, she still loved her mother.
So she stood there and stared as she thought of all the loneliness, the bitterness, the pain that was her mother’s life. The anger and isolation her mother had chosen.
And in a horrible moment of clarity she saw her own future. A future filled with loneliness and bitterness and pain—all because she was too afraid to take a chance on something good.
“My God. Oh, my God,” she whispered, and dropped to her knees beside the bed. Then she lowered her head and finally let the tears come in earnest. They spilled out like a flood then, hot and wet and heavy.
She cried for herself, for the father she’d lost, the man she’d just driven away.
She cried for her mother, for her wasted life, for the choices she’d made.
She cried until her chest hurt, until her throat was raw, until her eyes burned and ached and there weren’t any tears left to shed.
“Hush little baby … don’t … you cry. Momma’s gonna… love you by and by…”
Her eyes were blurry as she lifted her head, saw her mother’s sad, tired gaze fixed on her as she sang a long-forgotten lullaby. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry, baby. Momma loves you. It’ll be okay.”
32
It was clear from the look on Jenna’s face that she was beyond surprised when she opened the apartment door and saw B.J. standing there at nearly half past ten at night. “B.J. Hi. Come on in.”
“I’m … I’m sorry to intrude. I know it’s late.” By the time she’d gotten her mother sobered up, fed, and bathed, it was already after eight. She’d pushed the speed limit all the way back to D.C. and driven directly to the Jones’s apartment. “I… I was hoping Rafe might be here,” she said hopefully.
Jenna hesitated, then finally nodded. “Yeah, yeah, he’s here. He and Gabe are out on the terrace having a beer.”
B.J.’s pulse picked up. Part relief. Part dread. What if she was too late? What if Rafe had decided she wasn’t worth the effort? She breathed deep. It didn’t matter. She needed to do this.
“Um … I’d really like to talk to him,” she told Jenna, who was clearly hovering somewhere between curiosity and concern about what this was going to mean for Rafe.
In the end, Jenna took a chance. “I’ll just tell him you’re here.”
“Wait.” B.J. stopped Jenna when she turned to go. And then she did one of the hardest things she’d ever done in her life. She asked for help. “I need a favor. I … would it be possible for me to see him alone? On the terrace, maybe?”
Jenna hesitated again, then leveled a look at her. “You’re not going to hurt him again, are you?”
Her heart sank. “No. I’m not going to hurt him. I’m just hoping he’ll listen to me.”
Jenna’s expression softened. “You can do this,” she said gently.
B.J. pushed out a nervous laugh. “God, I hope so.”
“Hold on. I’ll go get rid of the king of the castle and clear the way for you. Then Rafe’s all yours.”
All hers. The idea still scared her to death. But so, now, did the prospect of a future without him.
In that desperate, defeated moment when she’d wept beside her mother’s bed, the loneliest, most hopeless moment of her life, her mother had responded to her pain. She’d reached out. Offered comfort. Offered love.
Love … from a woman who had been lost to B.J. for as long as she could remember. Her mother had somehow found it in herself to be a mother to her. To care and protect and comfort.
Love … from a woman who had been lost even to herself. In B.J.’s darkest moment, her mother’s humanity had emerged from the ashes of a desolate life and she’d taken a chance that her daughter wouldn’t reject her.
And in that precious moment, B.J. had understood: If a soul that lost could find the courage to love again, then how could she continue to deny love’s existence? How could she not take a chance to find love for herself?
“All clear,” Jenna said as she stepped back into the apartment with Gabe in tow.
Gabe’s stern scowl let her know that the jury was still out where she was concerned. It reinforced something Rafe had said to her. “They’re my brothers.” And brothers looked out for each other—just as Gabe was looking out for Rafe.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Jenna said as they headed for their bedroom. “My money’s on you.”
B.J. smiled her thanks, drew a fortifying breath, and stepped out onto the terrace.
Rafe reclined on the chaise longue, nursing his beer, looking at the night sky as if he really gave a crap about the stars. Stars were for lovers. Without someone to watch them with, they were just a bunch of stupid, overrated balls of fiery gas.
“Thought Jenna had dragged you off to bed,” he said when he heard the terrace door open, then close. He cranked his head to the right, expecting to see Gabe.
His heart stopped when he saw B.J. instead.
Slowly, he sat forward, swung his feet onto the slate tile. And said nothing. He just stared, wanting to draw a dozen good conclusions about why she was there, afraid to let himself explore even one.
“Hi.” She walked hesitantly toward him.
“Um… yeah. Hi,” he said cautiously.
“Nice night.”
Okay. The unknowns were killing him and small talk was not a game he wanted to play. “You came here to talk about the weather?”
She stepped closer, stopped when she was standing directly in front of him. “I came here to talk about stupidity. Specifically mine.”
Relief. Hope. Love. They rose up in his chest, filled the emptiness there as her eyes filled with tears … tears that glittered like the brilliant, beautiful stars scattered across the heavens.
He held out his hand—and she gripped it like a
lifeline. Without a word, he pulled her close, wrapped his arms around her hips, and buried his face against the warmth of her belly.
“Thank you, God,” he murmured, and breathed in the scent and the heat and the wonder of this woman.
“I didn’t realize I had so much anger inside me.” Night shadows played along her bedroom walls as B.J. splayed her fingers across the solid breadth of Rafe’s bare chest. She turned her head to kiss his shoulder. “Didn’t know how heavy it was, how crippling, until I let it go.”
