Soldier, Hero...Husband?

by Cara Colter

  The man was nearly in front of the stage now, where the children had been sitting moments ago. He was reaching inside his coat pocket.

  Without hesitation, Connor became that huge mountain lion he had been nicknamed for. He went from stalking to pouncing. He launched himself at the man in the coat. They went down in the front of the crowd of people. Everyone was screaming in Italian. The commotion moved like a wave through the crowd until it reached the stage. Isabella, who had been focused on the children, turned, as if in slow motion. Her mouth formed a surprised O. The singing faltered and then ground to a halt.

  Connor rolled back to his feet, taking the other man with him. He lifted him up by the collar of the too-warm coat and reached his hand into the pocket. His hand closed around something cold and square.

  Wrong shape.

  Connor tugged it out and glared at his hand. There was a camera in it.

  Connor stared at it. And then, convinced there was danger, he ripped open the buttons of the too-warm jacket. A wrapped birthday gift was hidden in the folds and fell to the ground.

  “What’s this?” he asked. It looked innocuous, but his training told him it could be anything. The whole point was to make dangerous things appear innocuous.

  The man was staring at him with incomprehension. Connor picked up the package, and held it in front of him. “What is this?” he demanded again.

  He was hit in the knees from behind and staggered forward a step before whirling to face this new opponent.

  Luigi, was there, his face as crumpled as his sunshine headdress. He was screaming in Italian. The man was talking rapidly, both hands raised at his sides, open palmed.

  Connor recognized ma sei pazzo.

  And then Isabella was there, her hands resting gently on Luigi’s shoulders. The little boy turned to her skirt and wept.

  She said something to the man in Italian, and seeing her embracing the boy, he thrust the wrapped parcel into Connor’s arms and turned and pushed his way through the crowd.

  Isabella’s eyes, distressed, went to Connor’s face. “Luigi’s dad,” she said quietly. “He wanted a picture of his son in the fete. He wanted to give him a birthday present.”

  Luigi sobbed something against her skirt, and she stroked his head.

  “His dad wasn’t allowed to go to his birthday party,” she said sadly.

  And then a woman pushed her way through the milling, jabbering crowd and grabbed Luigi away from Isabella. The woman turned and marched through the crowd, her chin tilted proudly, half holding Luigi’s hand, half dragging him.

  “How does this happen?” Isabella whispered. “Presumably they loved each other once. How does it turn to this?”

  And then she brushed at her skirt and smiled weakly at Connor. He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, weathering the dirty looks of the crowd returning to their seats.

  “I will see if the children will go on,” Isabella said. “I think that would be best, don’t you?”

  He nodded and watched her weave her way back through the crowd, get onstage and shepherd those distressed children. In minutes, she had comforted them enough that they were able to resume their song.

  She had not, Connor noted, said one word of recrimination toward him over his overreaction to what had happened.

  But then, she didn’t have to. He had enough recrimination for both of them. He made his way through the crowds, holding the birthday present along with the parcel containing the bathing suit for Isabella, which he had retrieved. No one even seemed to notice him.

  This was Italy. He supposed there were passionate disruptions all the time. But that did not make him feel one bit better.

  What he felt was that he had been living in a fool’s paradise. Was he really tangling their lives together when she had no idea what she was letting herself in for?

  He went to her house, not knowing what to do with the gift for Luigi except drop it off there. He saw his vase of flowers waiting there for her, and in a moment of pure frustration, he swept them off her stoop with his shoe.

  The glass shattered and flowers were strewn everywhere. His note was soaked in water. Annoyed with himself, he set Luigi’s gift inside her door. Her door was unlocked, of course—this was Monte Calanetti, and the only person in the whole town who was out of step was him. He found her broom and dustpan and swept up the mess he had made and put it in the bin under her sink.

  He told himself to leave. He could do what needed to be done over the phone. It would be better that way.

  But he did not leave. He went through her house, stood in the doorway of the bedroom he had used and thought of the journey they had been on since that first morning when he had thought she was an assailant.

  Normal people did not think like that. Normal people did not go into schools and look for escape routes and try to figure out how you would get out of the building if it burned. Normal people did not drag men in overcoats to the ground in town squares.

  From that first day, he should have backed off. What had he done, pressing forward instead?

  He stood for a moment in the doorway leading to the bathroom. The showerhead had been fixed, and a new curtain and rod had been installed. The curtain was no longer transparent, and under different circumstances that might have made him smile. But now, standing here, he could remember her wrapped in her shower curtain, and all he felt was an abject sense of loss.

  He went back downstairs and stood in her kitchen, memorizing it and saying goodbye.

  And then the door squeaked open behind him.

  “Hello, Connor.”

  He turned and looked at her. He had hoped to avoid her. And at the same time, he had hoped for one last chance to look at her.

  Just like looking at her house, he realized he was trying to memorize every single thing about her: the upward tilt of her eyes, the puffiness of her bottom lip, the shine of her hair. He was trying to both burn it into his memory and say—

  “Goodbye, Isabella.”

  She looked as if he had struck her. “Goodbye? But—”

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “Go?”

  “I’m leaving Monte Calanetti.”

  “Leaving Monte Calanetti?” she asked, distressed. “But why?”

  She had to ask that? After the mistake he had just made at the fete? After he had overreacted so hugely to Luigi’s father? After he had destroyed the performance she had worked so hard on? After he had embarrassed himself and her in front of the whole town?

  “I’ve finished the reconnaissance for the wedding.” He could hear the chill in his voice. He put up the shield in his eyes. “I’ll be back a week before to put everything in place, and then the day it’s over, I’ll be gone again.”

  “But isn’t this a bit sudden? I thought...” Her voice drifted away. He hated himself for what he had led her to believe.

  But wasn’t the truth that he hated himself anyway?

  “I’m not who you think I am,” he said gruffly.

  “I have never met anyone less capable of subterfuge than you!” she snapped. “I know exactly who you are, Connor Benson.”

  For a moment, everything in him went weak. To have this, to have someone know everything about you, and care anyway? Wasn’t that what every man really desired?

  Beyond anything else, beyond wealth, beyond accomplishment, beyond success, did not the most humble of dreams live in every man? To be cared about for exactly who he was?

  But Connor knew, in his case, that was not possible. When Isabella knew the truth, she would not feel the same about him anymore. How could she? He had never felt the same about himself again.

  “Isabella, I need to tell you something.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  I NEED TO tell you something. Isabella felt as
if her world was going dark and swinging crazily around her. Hadn’t every horrible event of her life begun with those words?

  Her father, looking up in that café and seeing her standing there, tears rolling down her face, running across the street to her.

  I need to tell you something. This is how it is for a man. It doesn’t mean I don’t love your mother. And you.

  Giorgio, just turned sixteen, I need to tell you something. I have an illness. I have always known I was not well. I might have ten years. And I might not.

  And now this. Isabella pulled one of her chairs out from the table and sank into it. She was so filled with dread she felt as if she could not breathe.

  “What? What do you need to tell me?”

  He pulled out the chair across from her. Was she ever going to be able to come into this kitchen, this house, again without seeing him here, remembering him? Because he was saying goodbye.

  Connor had a dark secret, just as all the men in her life had had dark secrets. She should have known, should never have left herself open to it. Never.

  “It’s another woman, isn’t it?” she asked, her voice shaking. “Of course! How could I have been so naive to think a man like you could love only me?”

  He swore under his breath. “It’s not another woman.”

  “You’re dying, then,” she decided.

  “No. I need to tell you why I left the SEALs,” he said.

  She perked up. Why he’d left his previous job? That didn’t sound as if it could be too bad.

  “You need to know what kind of man I really am.”

  “I already know what kind of man you are,” she said.

  “No, you don’t,” he said harshly.

  The harshness in Connor’s voice made her want to cover up her ears so she didn’t have to listen to him. It didn’t really matter how bad she thought it was. It mattered how bad he thought it was.

  “My team had a tough assignment on the Pakistan-Afghan border.” He wouldn’t look at her. He was looking at his hands. His fingers kept threading and then unthreading. “It was a hotbed of all kinds of activity. We’d gotten some intel about an event that was supposed to go down. But our intel was wrong, or delayed.

  “We got there too late. We arrived just as a bomb went off in a school. Within seconds, the whole place was in flames. There were terrified kids everywhere, running. We helped get as many kids out as we could. I thought maybe everyone had gotten out. And then I saw all these little faces pressed against a second-story window.”

  She remembered his uneasiness in her classroom. She remembered him telling her to try and get on the first floor. She remembered him saying, “I’m sure you do. Unless there’s a fire.”

  Her heart broke for the look on his face as he remembered this, the helpless agony there. He still wouldn’t meet her eyes, as if he carried some unspeakable shame within him, as if somehow this was all his fault. She put her hand across the table and laid it on his wrist.

  He looked at it for a moment, as if he understood perfectly what she was offering. Her strength and her compassion.

  He shook her hand away.

  “We had been ordered to stand down.” He was looking at her now. His gaze was aloof. She had liked it better when he was not looking at her, not with this look in his eyes.

  “The building was deemed too dangerous for us to go into. Do you understand what an order means when you are in the military?”

  She nodded mutely.

  “It’s not open for discussion. At all. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand there and look at those kids and hear their terrified voices coming out the window they had smashed. My mom had just had Henry. I had a little brother and a little sister the same age as those kids.”

  Isabella had never felt the heartbreak she felt looking into his face. She understood that he was trying to close himself off from her. Connor was a man held in the hell of his own memories. And he was not going to allow anyone to shoulder that burden with him.

  “In retrospect, there were other things I could have done. We could have organized something for them to jump into. We could have stood under the windows and tried to catch them.

  “But no,” he said softly. “I had to be the cowboy, even though I’m from Corpus Christi. You know, I was a wild kid in my youth. The military managed to tame most of that out of me, but not all of it.

  “So, they told us to stand down, and I said those words to my superior that Luigi said to me that day in the hallway, and I think I said them with as much pleasure.

  “And I went into that building. If you’ve never been in a burning building, you have no idea. It’s darker than night in there, even though it’s the middle of the day. The noise is something that you awake in the night thinking you hear—like the wail of a banshee. It’s so hot you can feel your clothes melting.

  “But none of that mattered. I was in those doors and up those stairs before I could think it through. What I didn’t think through? Once I broke the ranks, they all did. My whole squad, eight men, followed me into that fire.”

  He was silent for a long, long time.

  “Only seven came out,” he said. “My best friend was unaccounted for. I went back in one more time. He was trapped under a beam that had fallen. His back was broken. He’s in a wheelchair to this day. Because of me. He has burn scars over fifty percent of his body because of me.”

  “What about the children?” she whispered.

  “They made it. Every single one them. To this day, Justin will tell you it was worth it.”

  “Then maybe you should believe him,” she said.

  The look Connor gave her was furious. “No. Maybe you should believe me. I made a decision based totally on emotion. It was unacceptable. When I start coming from that place of emotion, my judgment is clouded.”

  She saw, instantly, where he was going with this.

  “You’re saying your judgment is clouded about me,” she said.

  “Look what happened today. I read that situation all wrong. It’s an embarrassment.”

  “I wasn’t embarrassed,” she said. “I don’t think anything you did could ever embarrass me.”

  For a moment, it looked as if something in him softened, as if he might lean toward her. But no, he leaned away. He heaved himself up from the table.

  She got up and stood in front of him. “Please don’t go. Please don’t carry this one second longer by yourself.”

  He stared at her. For a second, once again, he hesitated. She saw so much pain and so much longing in his face. She thought she had him.

  But then his face hardened, and he put her out of his way. “Like I need a little chit like you to help me carry my burdens,” he snapped. “You’d be squished like a bug underneath them. Like a bug.”

  And then, casting her one more proud look, he was out the door. She followed him. She could not believe the impotent frustration she felt.

  “Connor Benson!”

  He swung around and looked at her.

  “You are the worst kind of coward,” she yelled. “You act as if you are the bravest man alive, but when it comes to matters of your heart? You are a complete coward.”

  His mouth fell open. Then he folded his arms over his chest and spread his legs apart. A warrior’s stance if she had ever seen one. It just made her madder. There was a pot of flowers by her door and, propelled by anger, she picked it up. She hurled it at him. He had to step to one side to avoid being hit. The pot smashed harmlessly beside him. He glared at her, and she glared back, and then he turned and walked away, not once glancing back at her.

  She watched him walk down the street, his stride long and confident and powerful, the walk of a warrior, until she could see him no more. And then she closed her kitchen door and leaned against it and wept.

  What on eart
h had gotten into her? She was a demure schoolteacher! She did not scream at people in the streets. Or throw pots at them.

  Or slap people. Or wear red dresses. Or green bikinis.

  Let’s face it. Connor Benson had brought out the worst in her.

  Or maybe what he had done was make her lose her hold on control, to find at her center she was not demure at all, but passionate and fiery and alive.

  Because despite vibrating with anger at him right now, Isabella had to admit she felt as alive as she had ever felt. Despite the fact he had left her, and she knew he was going to use all his considerable strength never to look back, she still felt on fire with life.

  She gathered herself and gathered her broom and dustpan and went out into the street and cleaned up the mess she had made. And then she brought it into her kitchen and opened the dustbin. But before she dumped the broken pot and flowers and dirt in, she noticed there was something in there that had not been in there before.

  She set her filled dustpan on the floor and hauled the trash out from under the sink. She found the pieces of a smashed vase, and the broken stems of wildflowers, and a water-stained note. She carefully pressed open its folds with her fist. She would know that bold handwriting anywhere. She read the note.

  Dear Isabella,

  Life is a river, with calm places and turbulent places. I wonder if you would like to join me on this wild and unpredictable ride? If you are willing, I will pick you up tomorrow evening, after the fete, and we will explore the river.

  Instead of signing it with “love,” he had drawn a quite adorable heart and then signed his name.

  But between the time he had written this note and now, everything had changed. Because of Luigi’s father, but not really. That incident had just triggered all of Connor’s deepest insecurities.

  What a terrible burden to carry through life: to think you were in charge of everything, to want to protect everyone, to not allow yourself any mistakes.

  It was a hopeless task, of course, protecting everyone. It was impossible. Connor Benson had set for himself an impossible task, and then he was hard on himself when he failed. What he needed most was not, as she had said, someone to help him carry the burden, though he needed that, too. But what he needed most was someone who could gently tell him when he was being unreasonable, when the goal he had set for himself was too much for one man alone.