Warrior's Second Chance

by Nancy Gideon

  He began to pace, building up his argument the way the trial lawyers used to do before his bench. “You were a child, Barbara. He was bringing you down to his level with the lies, with the secrets. Using Robert shamelessly so we would think you were safely dating him instead of someone we didn’t approve of. How do you think it made me feel to learn my daughter was using others to cover for the nights she spent doing God knows what? To find out that she’d gotten a post office box to carry on correspondence behind our back? If you weren’t ashamed of him, why would you go to such lengths?”

  “Who told you about those things?” Barbara gasped.

  “One of your girlfriends who was a true friend. One who didn’t want to see you getting into trouble. I don’t remember her name.”

  Barbara’s question was a whisper. “What did you do, Daddy?”

  He flushed, looking uncomfortable. “I had the mail redirected from the box. You were a minor—”

  “You had no right!” Then, in a breathless voice, she asked, “He sent letters?”

  “At first.”

  “Where are they?” Her heart was beating hard and fast in anticipation. Then he cruelly cut through her hopes.

  “I burned them. He was no good for you, Barbara. It was an infatuation. I don’t apologize for what I did. You weren’t thinking clearly. I knew Robert would take responsibility for you, the way he did for his baby.”

  “Tessa isn’t Robert’s child, Dad.”

  Silence. A thunderous, intense silence as Joseph Calvin absorbed the truth. Then he hissed, “And you let Robert think—”

  “Robert knew. And he knew you would never accept a child of Tag’s. We both knew that you never would have let me keep the baby. So he offered me a way out, the only way you left for me to take that wouldn’t embarrass you and our family name. Robert understood how important that was. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make for Tessa.”

  Calvin huffed and puffed, irate. “And McGee just turned his back and you and the child.”

  “Tessa, Dad. She has a name. And no. He never knew. He still doesn’t know.”

  Calvin might have felt vindicated if she told him that she’d thought just as little of Tag’s inherent decency. She’d also believed Tag had abandoned her and the child they made without a word, without a care. But she wouldn’t let her father off the hook any more than she could excuse her own failings. That would be her guilty secret, and it burned in her breast with a hot, heavy shame.

  “And Tessa? Does she know?”

  “Now. But not until after Robert died.”

  “What a mess you’ve made of everything, Barbara.”

  His resigned sigh of condemnation defined everything about their relationship. She saw that, finally. She would never win his love or approval, just as Tessa had struggled in vain to claim Robert’s. She had made a mess by trying to please the wrong people. But perhaps it wasn’t too late to clean it up.

  Her mother and McGee returned to the room. Their expressions offered no reason for optimism.

  “I’m sorry, Barbara,” Claudia said. “Whatever safeguards that doctor placed, they go much deeper than I thought. He wasn’t able to bring back the things he began to recall while he was under. I made some notes but they don’t seem to mean anything to him now. I know one thing. This isn’t PTSD. It’s hypnosis-induced amnesia covered by a very precise trail of false memories. The truth is there. He just can’t get to it. I couldn’t even scratch the surface.”

  Disappointment on top all else brought frustrated tears to her eyes. She’d hoped… Barbara blinked determinedly. Her attention focused on Tag.

  “You couldn’t remember anything?” she prompted gently.

  “Nothing of any value. This was a waste of time.” He was again all curt, controlled energy. And whatever he was feeling was suppressed behind his immobile expression. He was a stranger again, not the man who’d asked so poignantly for her to help him hold on to the memories they’d made between them. He nodded to her parents. “I’m sorry for the intrusion. I’ll be on my way before you’re linked to my problems.”

  And he started toward the front door, walking right by her without a glance.

  Barbara hesitated only an instant. Then she embraced her mother, pressing a quick kiss on her unlined cheek and murmuring, “Thank you for trying.” Then she exchanged a long unapologetic stare with her father before saying, “Goodbye.”

  As she turned, Calvin called, “You’re making a serious mistake, Barbara.”

  She paused but didn’t turn. “I’ve made them before. But this isn’t one of them.”

  And she ran after the man she loved.

  Chapter 9

  When she opened the passenger side door, Barbara was greeted by a brief flicker of surprise and then the continued cool Tag had carried from inside the house.

  “Get out, Barbara.”

  “No.” She buckled the seat belt about her in a defiant gesture. He didn’t start the car. Nor did he look at her again as he spoke in that same flat tone.

  “Stay here,” he insisted. “They’ll make sure you’re safe. You belong here, not on the run with me.”

  “I’m where I belong right now. Let’s go.”

  Still no turn of the key. Instead, he tugged on a ball cap, pulling it down low, and used dark glasses to shield his identity from the last of the day’s sun.

  “Your folks are probably on the phone to the police. How long before they catch up to us? I don’t want you with me when that happens.”

  “They won’t catch you.”

  “They will if I have to drag you along. You’ll slow me down. I don’t have time to babysit a pampered society girl who can’t be trusted to be strong when the going gets tough.”

  That took her right to the heart. For a moment, she couldn’t get over the pain of it, but she did. She’d put aside his hurtful words for when she had time to let her spirit bleed over them.

  “Look who’s talking about trust. Who’s failed whom, McGee? I’m just protecting my interests. So start the damned car.”

  Her gritty demand had the desired effect. He pulled away from the curb with a jolt as harsh as the one that wrung her emotions. She gripped the door handle and pursed her lips together even tighter.

  The truth was, she had failed him under pressure. She hadn’t believed in their love, a love that still tormented her with those tantalizing what-ifs.

  So she stayed silent and let him drive, not asking questions, not trying to find a chink in the impenetrable wall that had slammed back down around him.

  She stopped watching the road signs through eyes too tired and tear-drenched to focus and simply leaned back and eased them shut. It didn’t matter where they were going when the road wasn’t carrying them to the answers they needed to find.

  She wondered what her daughter was doing. Was Tessa still blissfully ignorant of the danger she was in? Or had Allen decided to step up his intimidation? How far could she trust him to keep his word, to follow the time schedule he’d given them?

  A heavy, desperate ache built around her heart, pressing, crushing, as she mourned the loss of family.

  She was on run with an intimate stranger, placing herself in deeper peril by the mile. To what purpose?

  She should have gone to the authorities in the first place. She should have stepped back and accepted the fact that she was what Tag accused her of being, what Robert and her parents had always groomed her to be. A pretty piece of useless fluff. A decoration without real utility. Tag was right. She was just getting in his way.

  She must have made some unwitting sound of despair for him to reach out to her. His fingertips grazed her damp cheek before tunneling back into her hair. With a touch both gentle and firm in its support, he palmed the back of her head and drew it to his shoulder. She burrowed there, gratefully, emotions too shattered to sustain her in her exhausted state. Silent tears fell. He didn’t speak, didn’t offer any words of comfort, but none were needed. Just the weight of his hand, the solid curl
of his arm, the steady rock of his breathing was enough as he continued to drive into fast-approaching darkness.

  “Barb, wake up. We’re here.”

  Groggily, she leaned away from him, unaware of exactly when she’d fallen asleep. She glanced around. “Where’s here?”

  “The best I could afford with the cash on hand. Sorry.”

  The term Roach Motel came to mind as she exited the car where they’d parked next to a particularly odorous Dumpster. One dim, flickering light illuminated the broken walk leading along the back of the single-story building. She was glad for what the shadows concealed. Between the battered pickup trucks and abandoned trash bags, the surroundings didn’t warrant a closer look. She picked her way over a pool of broken glass and wad of fast-food wrappers to join Tag at the door to their overnight accommodations. He’d set his jaw against the need for further apology as he turned the key and switched on the single light.

  It was spartan, only a double bed covered by a faded green spread flanked by a rickety nightstand and a two-drawer pressed wood dresser. No television, no chair, no amenities of any kind. It was old but clean. There was a thin door leading the way to a bathroom and tiny shower; for the moment, those were the only luxuries she required.

  “What do you need from the car?”

  “Just my overnight case. Do you need the bathroom before I hit the shower?”

  “No. Go ahead.”

  Such personal talk for two distant traveling companions.

  She shut herself in where the cracked tiles were held together in a sort of low-rent mosaic by age-stained grout and waited for the much anticipated hot water. At least the pressure was good, she thought with a sigh as she stepped beneath the spray. The plastic curtain fluttered as the bathroom door opened. She froze, pushing her hair out of her eyes, wondering wildly, with a sudden surprising rush of nervous excitement, if Tag meant to join her.

  “I thought you might like these.”

  Her bag of bath necessities nudged beyond the edge of the curtain, her scented shampoo, bath gels and milled soap looking glaringly out of place in the seedy surroundings.

  “Thanks.”

  The soft sound of the door closed on her fantasies.

  What had she expected?

  Just because the idea of sex with Tag McGee had percolated beneath the surface of her more rational emotions from the moment she’d lost herself looking up into his clear blue eyes didn’t mean the same had occurred to him. He hadn’t said specifically that there wasn’t a Mrs. McGee or a soon-to-be Mrs. McGee in the picture somewhere. She’d assumed that just because the memory of what they’d shared still created an enticing friction at every sensory nerve ending, he’d be similarly chafing to find out if it would be just as good—no, just as spectacular—as it had been that first time around.

  She wanted to know. She wanted to know so bad, her knees had been shaking when he’d opened the bathroom door. If he’d chosen to look behind Curtain Number One, he would have found her lathered and ready before even wetting the soap.

  Maybe it was the adrenaline rush, the forced proximity, the threat of danger that had all her senses tingling. Or maybe it was the simple fact that no man but him had ever stirred her to such a frenzy of need. Not as a teen. Not as a grown woman. She’d longed for him, for the chance to return to his arms, to suck up his kisses, to glory in his lovemaking until the reality of him in the next room, available and sexy as hell, was enough to have her breathing heavily. Even if it was just for one night, one time, one more memory, it would be enough to sustain her. Even a spiny cactus required the occasional watering. And she’d never felt so parched in her entire life.

  She lathered and scrubbed and massaged a citrus scent into her skin before toweling dry and turbaning the thin terry about her damp hair. Putting on the stale clothes she’d worn for two days was out of the question. Planning to ask Tag to retrieve her other bag, she swaddled herself in the other good-sized bath sheet and stepped out into the dark room. McGee stood silhouetted at the window, peering through the inch-wide gap he’d left in the limp curtains. He was in jeans and a T-shirt. The dark fabric stretched taut across his shoulders. Hard muscled arms pushed from the short sleeves. He was coiled and ready for anything. And so was she. He didn’t turn.

  “Feel better?”

  “Than what?”

  He did look her way then, a slight smile etched upon ragged features. A smile that froze and thinned with strain as his no-longer-cool gaze took in the sight of her bared shoulders and shapely legs.

  Then it hit him, hard, the fact of the two of them alone in a no-tell motel room with one bed and thirty years of pent-up wanting. He tried to speak, but his tongue seemed to stick to the roof of his mouth, probably seared by the same sudden blaze of heat that pooled liquid lava low below his belt.

  She appeared to have something to say, but apparently the same abrupt loss of oral command struck her, too. She stared back, mesmerized by the intensity of desire she read in every stark line of his face, in the unmistakable ridge building behind the zipper of his snug jeans.

  It wasn’t alarm or anything like it reflected back in the soft wetting of her lips. So he took a chance, forcing words through the Sahara-dry passage of his throat.

  “How is it that you can still believe in me enough to be here when I can’t even trust myself?”

  A determined swallow worked her creamy neck, but her gaze never wavered. “It’s in your eyes.”

  “What is?”

  “What I’ve always seen there. The promise of everything I could ever need or want.”

  He processed that claim slowly, denying his mind’s quick rejection, as well as his heart’s all-too-eager acceptance. There was too much history to take that answer at face value.

  “Why wasn’t it enough, Barb?” he needed to know.

  “It wasn’t for an insecure seventeen-year-old. I never heard from you, Tag. My father intercepted your letters. I never saw them. I never knew until now that you wrote me. And it broke my heart. But I’m not that little girl anymore. I don’t need those same guarantees now. And what I want, at the moment, is a lot less complex.”

  He started to shake his head in deference to the complications she so conveniently overlooked. But then she ended their disagreement with a conclusive, if unfair, action.

  The towel dropped.

  Before him stood the youthful perfection that had driven his postadolescent hormones crazy, softened yet strengthened by the years and three children. He hadn’t been a monk for the last thirty years, but at the moment he couldn’t remember the details of any other female form.

  “Pretty sneaky way to defuse an argument,” he managed to say.

  Without a hint of girlish shyness, Barbara Calvin D’Angelo merely smiled. “Old age and treachery overcoming youth and skill.”

  He couldn’t get beyond the sudden sensual stupor to cross the room. His delay brought a beguiling blush of uncertainty up Barbara’s gloriously naked chest and neck to warm her cheeks. Her next suggestion was no less direct but slightly more imploring.

  “Since you passed on what was behind Curtain Number One, you can have what’s under Sheet Number Two. If you want to.”

  “Deal of the century,” he concluded.

  She’d stripped back the bedspread by the time he reached her. He stilled further movement by cupping her chin in one hand. As she looked up at him through eyes luminescent with yearning, he tugged the towel from her tousled hair so he could lean into her, nudging those fragrant strands until his senses filled with the fresh scent of her. How he had dreamed of this moment only to have those imaginings fall so far short of the actual paradise of having her offered so sweetly, so completely.

  “I have thought of little else for longer than I can remember,” he murmured into her ear.

  Her lips grazed his throat. “Don’t think. Do.”

  He scooped her up, holding her tight, savoring the feel of her all sleek and curvy against him. Turning, he arranged her malleable
form upon the starched white sheet. She gleamed there, a pearl of unequaled value. When he paused to remove his own clothes, she pulled him down to her, so that he fell across her, scuffing her tender breasts with the rough fabric of his shirt. Then he forgot about everything beyond the warm pleasures of her kiss.

  Hot, hungry, urgently seeking, her mouth worked against his, demanding, pleading, pleasing in ways that short-circuited rational thought. He didn’t think. He just reacted to this unexpected second chance at his heart’s every desire.

  She tasted like a young man’s hopes and a grown man’s fantasies. Warm, sweet, willing. He learned her contours all over again, finding them fuller and more satisfying, a finely aged wine appreciated by a true connoisseur. He sipped from the bouquet of her lips, teased his palate with the smoothness of her arched throat, rolled his tongue about the full-bodied bud of her nipples until he was intoxicated. Barbara D’Angelo at any age was a good year. A great year.

  He slowed the need to gulp her down with a greedy desperation because the gradual sampling was far more filling. And rewarding. He returned to dip into the silky cavern of her mouth. She moaned in welcome. He traced her shape with the flat of his hand, smoothing her like a virgin canvas with that claiming pass. Over the swell of her breast, along the curve of her ribs, over the slight mound of her belly while she quivered inch by awakening inch. Her excited breaths brushed in hurried little gusts against his face as he lifted slightly away to watch the evolving pleasure in her expression. Her lashes fluttered wildly as his fingertips stroked up one sleek inner thigh, moving with unerring purpose toward the center of all her passions. Finding her hot, wet, ready for the entry of one finger, two. The walls of her body clutched tight about him, grabbing at the wonderful friction he incited the same way her hands fisted in the sheets.

  “McGee, I’m on fire,” she cried with a husky urgency that got his own blood hammering hard and fast and furious.

  “Burn, baby,” he whispered against her panting mouth, “burn.”

  A sudden tension pulled her every muscle taut and trembling. She quivered there at that seeking pinnacle for a long, expectant second before shuddering, crying out, dissolving into a series of delightful tremors that amazed and inspired him.