by Cindy Dees
Or was she just overreacting? He hadn’t done anything to Tony Sicarrio in her presence. He’d just talked to the guy. Sure, he’d painted some horrifying pictures with words, but it wasn’t as if he’d actually tortured the guy. But then he’d ordered her out of the observation room.
What had happened then? No way would he ever tell her.
Run or stay.
Stay or run.
If she ran, she would be abandoning Gary. She might also be saving her own life.
If she stayed, she might die. Or she might be able to have Bass for herself. Assuming she could find a way to reconcile her feelings for him with what she’d seen of him today.
All of her stuff was at Bass’s place. How was she supposed to get through the gate and past all that fancy security of his to reach her personal belongings and the van? He had her neatly trapped.
Was that his plan all along? Was he that calculating? Lord knew, she’d had no idea he had such a hard streak in him until she witnessed that interrogation.
She had to stick around. For now.
She had to play the game for a few more hours, get back inside his fortress-like compound, and wait for an opportunity to make a break for it.
Plan in place, she sat there until her breathing finally slowed and stabilized, and then she looked around. She had no idea where she was. She headed for the busiest looking street bordering the park and looked for a taxi. It took her a few minutes, but she finally spotted one and waved it down.
She asked the driver to take her back to the police precinct. Sitting in the backseat, she carefully schooled her face to calm. Bass was so perceptive that she dared not give away any hint of her plan to escape him.
The cab pulled up in front of the precinct, and sure enough, Bass was standing out front, looking up and down the street. The look on his face shocked her. He looked...ravaged. She looked more closely, not believing what she was seeing.
His entire body was taut, tense. He looked close to panic. And the expression in his eyes was one of total devastation.
Her plan to run away from him wavered in the face of his distress. Did he really care about her that much? Could she forgive him for what she’d seen earlier?
She climbed out of the taxi, and Bass spotted her instantly. He rushed forward and wrapped her in a bone-crushing hug. He mumbled into her hair, “Thank God you came back to me.”
“I had to get some air,” she wheezed from the iron grip of his arms. “Speaking of which, could I have a little now?”
His arms loosened slightly. Very slightly. “What happened?”
“I started feeling really claustrophobic in there. I went for a quick jog but I got lost, so I grabbed a taxi and had it bring me back here.”
Keeping an arm around her shoulders, he guided her into the precinct. “Let’s get out of here,” he murmured.
Completely thrown by the intensity of his reaction to seeing her return, she followed him to the parking garage and climbed into his pickup truck.
Was she wrong to run away from him? The mental whiplash of seeing him go from violent to solicitous was too much to process.
As he pulled out into traffic, she asked, “Why did you choose to drive this car today?”
“In the first place, this is a truck, not a car, and in the second place, what do you mean?” he asked, never taking his eyes off the road.
“I’ve observed that the vehicle you choose to drive on any given day reflects your mood at the time. So, why the beat-up old truck now?”
He glanced over to her, looking surprised. “Huh. I never thought about it before.”
She stared at him expectantly.
He continued, “For the record, the exterior of this truck may be fifty years old, but the engine under the hood and the chassis is state of the art. She may not look like much on the outside, but Esther is fast and powerful.”
“Esther?”
“My grandmother was named Esther. She had white hair and came to about my chin, but she was a swinging dame. Loved to dance and laugh and shop. I have a lot of good memories of her.”
This was the first time Bass had spoken of his family to her. Carrie studied him thoughtfully. “Have you got a car named after your mother?”
His face closed, and his eyes went hard. “No.”
“Wow. That’s revealing.”
“My mother wasn’t a bad person. She just couldn’t handle it when my father walked out on her. She crawled into a bottle and never made it back out.”
Holy cow. “How old were you when your dad left?”
“Eight.”
Yikes. He’d been old enough to remember it, then. If possible, his face closed even more tightly. Obviously not a subject he liked to talk about. At all. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.
“Why? It’s not your fault my parents’ marriage sucked.”
She sucked in a sharp breath. A bad marriage, huh? She’d lived through the end of Shelly’s parents’ marriage and the disaster of Mrs. B’s second marriage. The toll on Shelly had been rough.
To Bass, she said, “I’m sorry you got caught in the middle of it and got hurt.”
“Granny Esther was great to me. I spent a lot of time with her after the divorce. I’m not totally screwed up.”
“You’re in your thirties and showing no sign of interest in long-term relationships. I’d say you were screwed up at least a little by your parents’ divorce.”
Bass’s spine went rigid at that.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she added hastily. “We’re all screwed up in one way or another by family baggage.”
“How are you screwed up—aside from, of course, having to change your name?”
“I got no support from my family. I learned early on to take care of myself and not trust anyone else.”
“And how’s that working out?” he asked dryly.
“I’m alive.”
“But not much more,” he observed.
She sat back, startled. Was he right? Had she sacrificed a normal life, normal relationships—heck, even friendships—in the name of protecting herself? Was she as messed up as him?
Truth be told, she’d never slowed down long enough to really think about it.
They arrived at his place, and she watched closely as he punched the left-hand garage-door opener and the iron security gates swung open. The right-hand garage-door opener raised the big steel door at the end of his parking garage. She memorized the numeric code that let them into his workshop, and despaired of how she was going to get past the palm print pad that let him into his house. Maybe, if she was lucky, she could get out of the house without the palm print thing.
Bass went immediately to the kitchen and started cooking. An act she now knew to be another coping mechanism of his. Cooking was how he de-stressed. In a little while, the smells of frying sausage, seafood and the pungent spices of jambalaya emanated from the stove.
She went into the bedroom and quickly organized her clothes and personal items so she could pop them into her bags and be ready to go in a matter of minutes. She returned to the main room, her heart heavy.
She set the table for dinner, and sat down with Bass to unquestionably the best jambalaya she would ever taste.
Bass let her eat in peace, but then at the end of the meal, he laid down his napkin and said seriously, “We need to talk.”
Uh-oh. “About what?”
“About today.”
She knew he was mad that she’d bolted from the police station! “What about today?” she asked cautiously.
“About my interrogation of Tony Sicarrio.”
Oh. Whew. Not something she particularly wanted to revisit, but at least she wasn’t the target of this conversation. “Umm. Okay. It was pretty graphic.”
“Yeah. It was. He was a tough nut to crack.”
She
took a deep breath and forced herself to ask the question she’d been dying to ask ever since she bolted from the precinct. “Did you hurt him?”
“No.”
Did she believe him? He’d never lied to her before. But he also wasn’t elaborating. Doubt ate at her gut, and she chewed her lip, unsure of what she believed.
Silence fell between them. Bass seemed to expect her to say something, to react to his horrific descriptions of torture. But she had no idea what to say. His utter determination to get at the truth—at any cost—had appalled her. Made her distrust him. Sealed her decision to get away from here, away from him, as soon as possible.
She had to say something. The silence was getting downright uncomfortable. “Where did you learn about all those torture tactics? Is it something you were taught in the military?”
“Good Lord, no! The US uses enhanced questioning techniques, and some of them can be fairly...challenging...but we don’t torture anyone.”
“Not officially.”
He shook his head. “The stuff I talked about isn’t stuff I’ve ever done to anyone. It’s all stuff that’s been done to me or my fellow SEALs.”
Oh. My. God. “That’s horrible!”
“Yes. It is.”
“How does somebody walk away from something like that and not be a complete head case?”
“Some guys don’t. Some guys never recover physically or emotionally from what’s done to them.”
She stared at him in horror. “What was done to you?”
He shook his head, his eyes hard and cold. “It’s in the past. I survived. I walked away from it. I got some counseling, and I let it go. I don’t need or want to talk about it ever again.”
Fair enough. She wasn’t sure she could stand to hear the details anyway. If only he would offer her the same understanding. But it wasn’t in his nature to let something important go. If she had a secret, he would insist on knowing it.
Aloud, she asked, “Is it common for SEALs to get tortured?”
“Not at all. We have to get caught to get tortured, and that’s rare indeed.”
“Can you talk about how you got captured?”
“Bad intel. Politicians back home interfering with important decisions. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. It was just one of those things. The stars aligned to blow a mission to hell. At least everyone on my team lived. Most of the time when a mission goes sideways, guys die.”
“Still. That’s terrible,” she responded.
“Life is a roll of the dice. We were lucky.”
“Lucky that you were captured and tortured?”
“Lucky that we lived. SEALs are trained to put up with a lot of terrible stuff and not take it personally. The funny bit is we actually accomplished the mission. The bad guys revealed themselves by capturing us, and the team sent in to rescue us was able to take them out.”
She had a hard time wrapping her brain around that kind of thinking. “So your team was bait? You sacrificed yourselves and got tortured to lure out a bad guy?”
“More or less.”
“That’s insane!”
“That’s the job.”
“You SEALs really are crazy.”
He shrugged. “Someone’s got to do the job. Why not me? I’m stronger, tougher, and better trained than anyone else to pull off the tough missions.”
She couldn’t resist asking the question that bubbled to her lips. “Does that include being able to dish out the same kind of punishment that was done to you?”
He frowned. “That’s not a simple question. Do I know how to do bad things to people? Of course. Do I think it’s right to torture someone? No. Is there a circumstance under which I might actually torture someone? I know better than to say never.”
That rocked her to her core. He was admitting that he could do terrible things to other people? He really was the monster she’d thought he was earlier!
“Don’t look at me like that, Carrie. Everyone’s capable of doing things they thought they could or would never do, given the right motivations. I’m trying to be honest with you, here. I wouldn’t just randomly grab someone and do awful things to them.”
“When might you torture someone?” she demanded, outrage growing in her chest. “Give me an example.”
“All right.” He thought for a second. “If someone kidnapped you, and I had one of the kidnappers in custody and they wouldn’t tell me where you were—I wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever I had to in order to get them to tell me where to find you.”
She was only slightly mollified by that answer.
He must sense her reluctance to buy his explanation, for he continued, “Everyone’s got a hot button. Everyone’s got someone or something they’ll break all their personal rules and taboos for. If you were a mother and someone was harming your child, are you telling me you wouldn’t hurt them, given the chance?”
“I suppose I see your point.”
“Trust me. It’s what becoming a SEAL is all about. We will die to defend our country and protect our brothers. Period. Someone’s got to be willing to go that far, and we’re those guys. We’ll die to defend the people we love, as well.”
“That’s really intense.”
“I suspect most people will get violent to protect the people they love. Thankfully, most people aren’t ever put in that situation.”
But SEALs were put in that situation. Routinely. How did that change a man? Did it unleash something terrible inside him, or did it refine his priorities into something heroic? She studied Bass intently. Maybe it did both to a man.
She just wasn’t sure she was brave enough to love a man who could be both.
Bass stood up and picked up the dinner dishes. “SEALs are extremely carefully trained to control the violence. We’re not psychopaths waiting to tear the head off anyone who crosses us.”
This afternoon’s interrogation notwithstanding, apparently. “Then why did you go after Tony Sicarrio like that?”
“I didn’t lay a finger on him.”
Truly? Then why did Bass order her out of that observation room? She declared, “You scared the hell out of him.”
“Do you want your uncle back?” he shot back at her.
“Yes, of course!”
“At what cost? Is it worth me scaring some two-bit criminal into telling us where your uncle is and who has him? I threw some ugly words at a bad guy. Not a hair on his head was touched. He got off damned easy if you ask me.”
Carrie had no response for that. Bass was right. Her reaction wasn’t on Tony Sicarrio’s behalf. This was about her fear of violence in men. She’d been the victim of it once, and she had no intention of being a victim of it again.
Silently, she carried the rest of the dishes into the kitchen.
Bass commented, “I need to run over to the Navy base and check in with my guys. Do you want to come with me or would you rather stay here? This place is buttoned up tight, and our bad guys have been striking strictly late at night. You should be okay here for an hour or two.”
Hah! A chance to get out of Dodge! She answered, “I’d rather stay here if you don’t mind. It has been a long day.”
“Cool. Feel free to go for a swim in my bathtub. It’s fully jetted.”
“That sounds amazing.”
She waited until the rumble of Bass’s Charger faded into silence before racing to the bedroom and throwing her clothes into her duffel bag. She was just heading to the pegboard in the kitchen to get the keys to one of Bass’s cars when her cell phone rang in her pocket. She jumped about a foot in the air. Ten to one it was Bass checking up on her. Lord, that man had great internal radar. He must sense that she was about to pull a runner.
She schooled her voice to cheerful unconcern. “Hello?”
“At long last, Kathy. You’re a hard girl to find.”
&nbs
p; She staggered and dropped onto the sofa. She hadn’t heard that voice since the night long ago that changed her life forever. That changed her forever.
“What do you want, Lonnie?” she snarled. She would be damned if she showed fear to this man, even if her legs were too weak to hold her weight right now and her entire body was shaking like a leaf.
“You know perfectly well what I want. Except this time I want you wide awake.”
She mentally swore, calling him every name she could think of in her head. The only reason she’d been able to recover and move on at all from his attack was that she’d been drugged and had no memory of the actual rape.
God. She hated to even think the word.
“You’re a pig, Lonnie.”
“You’re an uppity little bitch who needs the starch knocked out of her.”
Her breath whooshed out of her. But then a strength she didn’t know she had flowed through her. She answered scornfully, “Whatever. You need to leave me alone, Lonnie, unless you want to end up like your men.”
“What men?”
“Tony and Stevie. They’re in police custody and singing like little birdies.”
That caused a long silence at the other end of the line. She was on the verge of hanging up when Lonnie burst out, “You want your uncle back alive or not?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You come to me and I’ll let him go. You refuse to come to me, and I’ll kill him. Your choice.”
Her brief moment of bravado crumpled, leaving her bent and broken and so scared she could hardly breathe. “Where is he?” she asked hoarsely.
“With me.”
She closed her eyes in agony. Every instinct she had was screaming at her to run, run, run! But she had to keep him talking. Get him to reveal everything she could before he hung up.
“Where are you?” she asked in resignation.
“Outside New Orleans.”
“Give me an address.”
“Head southwest out of New Orleans on Highway 90 and call me when you get to Morgan City. Be there in two hours, or your uncle’s a dead man.”
