The Widow of Conard County

by Rachel Lee

  “Nobody can ever be sure tomorrow will come.”

  “No.” Her voice emerged as tight as a violin string, the sound drawn out. He resisted the urge to hug her, once again waiting.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Are you going to build castles in the air again?”

  “It seems important. But first I want a foundation. You and Chet had a foundation.”

  She remained silent for an eternity, then answered quietly, “Yes, we did.”

  Then she headed for the house.

  “I can’t sleep,” she said as they walked in the back door. “I want some hot chocolate. You?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  They hung up their jackets on the pegs in the mudroom and she slipped off her boots. He noted that her hands trembled as she pulled out the pan and ingredients. This was far from over.

  He understood how grief worked. Hell, they’d laid it out for him more than once during his recovery so he’d have some way of gauging his reactions and feelings. She needed the anger as much as she had needed the weeping. Nor was grief, they had warned him, something that just went away. It eased with time, but spurts of anger and pain would return for a long, long time.

  She’d had no help with these feelings. No one to talk to about them. No sounding board. In that respect, he’d been far luckier, having plenty of people at the clinic to listen to him rant about his losses, about what had happened to him. He’d had to grieve for himself as much as for Chet and the others. They’d helped him and encouraged him.

  He wished he could do the same for Sharon.

  “I feel awful for feeling cheated.”

  He looked at her back, thinking how slender and delicate she looked. He had to remind himself that she had survived a lot and was stronger than she looked.

  “You were cheated,” he agreed flatly. There it was again—his damned inability to curb his mouth—but he didn’t try to call the words back because they were true.

  She turned from the stove and looked at him. “It sounds awful.”

  “That doesn’t make it any less true. A lot of military marriages break up because duty comes ahead of everything, even family. Because, like you said, you only had a few months with Chet over a period of years. It’s a strain.”

  “On him, too.”

  “No doubt. But maybe it’s harder at home. More fear and uncertainty because you don’t know what’s going on. Regardless, your marriage got the short end of the stick. Just a simple fact.”

  Her eyes seemed to glisten again as she returned to mixing the hot chocolate. He stared at her back, feeling like a ham-fisted lug.

  “You know,” he said, “I spent most of my adult life dealing with other soldiers, men for the most part. I’m not good with women, so if I step in it, just tell me.”

  “I have before.”

  He couldn’t deny that.

  “I’m not really a different species, you know.”

  To his relief, he heard a spark in that statement that sounded as if she were edging away from her anger. Not that she wasn’t entitled to it. He’d never thought about it before, but she was right. She had been cheated. Not deliberately, not by a con, but by life. “The thing is,” he said, “it’s just life. Life isn’t fair, it cheats us, it wounds us, and then all we can do is pick up the pieces. Easy to say, hard to do.”

  “You’ve got a lot of pieces to pick up yourself.”

  “Yeah. So? It just is. I keep telling myself that. Doesn’t always work, but it’s still true. You’ve seen me get mad and frustrated more than once. I feel ham-handed, I say things I probably shouldn’t, I sometimes can’t hold a thought from one minute to the next...”

  “You seem to be doing pretty well right now.”

  “Thanks. But it’s still there, the grasshopper in the brain. Hell, the only reason I haven’t been more frustrated is that when I butt up against something I should know how to do and can’t remember, you give me just a little push in the right direction. Well, you’re helping me. What help have you had, Sharon?”

  “My friends...”

  “How much have you been seeing them? I bet you’ve stayed away more often than not because you were afraid. Kind of like I’ve been hiding from people myself. I don’t like being reminded that my head is broken. Why would you want to be reminded of what you’ve lost?”

  He saw her stiffen and pressed his lips firmly together. There he went again, saying things he shouldn’t. What did he know, anyway? They’d had a few weeks together, hardly enough to really know anything. He certainly hadn’t been able to see how she handled the months after Chet’s death.

  “Damn you, Liam. You see right through me.”

  He didn’t know how to take that. Frustration rose in a burst and he stood up. Damn it, he couldn’t even talk to another person without saying something wrong.

  “I’m taking a walk,” he said shortly.

  She whipped around from the stove. “No, you don’t. You sit right down there and talk to me.”

  “But...”

  “I don’t care how damn frustrated you’re getting. Express it here. Because, damn you, I need your help right now.”

  “What good will it do if I start yelling about things?”

  “I’m not the only one with a right to anger. Now go ahead, yell all you want, and I’ll yell right back. You have every right to your frustration and you shouldn’t have to go find a corner to hide in when you feel it. The way I did for so long. You’re sitting here suggesting I handled it all wrong, so maybe you are, too.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Not exactly. But you’re right. I went into hiding, for all the good it did me. I don’t give a damn if you punch a hole in a wall, but don’t walk out on me now.”

  The woman had steel in her, more than he’d guessed. He returned to his chair, sitting on the edge of it while frustration and anger of his own tingled along his nerve endings.

  A few minutes later, she brought mugs of cocoa to the table and sat facing him. “So we just have to start putting the pieces back together.”

  For a few seconds he had trouble figuring out what she meant, then he remembered what he had said earlier. “I guess so.”

  “Where do we start, Liam? Where are you going to start?”

  “Right here, I guess. If you don’t mind. Because I’m feeling better here than I have since I was wounded. I’m remembering things I can do. I’m learning other things.”

  “Good. I’m still amazed that you made your way out here all alone and facing all that ugliness from idiots. I’m touched. And I’m not sure I could have done it.”

  “You could have,” he said with certainty. “You’re tough. And you could have avoided some of the problems I had.”

  “Because I can remember how to read?”

  “And other things. I took a few wrong turns.”

  “You got lost?”

  “Yeah.” He clenched his hands and forced them to relax. “I never got lost in the mountains of Afghanistan, but I got lost on the roads at home.”

  “But you had GPS back there.”

  “Not always. Equipment breaks. Even the hardened stuff they gave us. But yeah, I got lost and when I got lost, I got mad.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Asked people. I told you about a couple of troublemakers, but most people were nice and even helpful.”

  “I should hope so. And you have no family?”

  He didn’t want to go there. He might have accepted it, but that didn’t mean it didn’t still sting. “My sister. She washed her hands of me as soon as she heard about the extent of my injuries. Can’t say I blame her, considering at the time I couldn’t remember anything and couldn’t even feed myself. Who’d w
ant to take that on?”

  Her faced saddened. “Have you tried to get in touch with her?”

  “Why? She doesn’t need a problem like me. She’s got three little kids and a job. Can you imagine her having to explain weird Uncle Liam to young kids? I don’t think so. And what if I went ballistic? There’s always that chance when I get frustrated.”

  “You’re taking that awfully well.”

  “I didn’t at first.” Nor did he want to remember the fury he’d felt that his only living kin didn’t want him. It had taken him a while to get to acceptance. “She didn’t see any more of me than you saw of Chet, and with me it was since I was eighteen. I’d go to visit her for a week when I was on leave, but I spent the rest of the time kicking around. She didn’t really want me around for long, even back then.”

  “And your parents?”

  “Long gone thanks to a drunk driver. What about you?”

  “Only child. I avoid my parents these days. They retired to Arizona, Mom’s a nasty alcoholic and my dad is one angry man. I can take them for a couple of hours, max.”

  It was a pretty dismal picture for both of them, he thought. He missed his buddies, and he suspected she’d been missing her friends. They both lacked families, although from what he’d seen, that wasn’t always a bad thing.

  Regardless, they were two souls cast adrift by loss and they needed a way back to shore.

  “Any ideas,” she asked, “how we move forward?”

  He shook his head, the frustration surging in him again. “How the hell would I know? You’re asking the wrong guy, lady. I’m still trying to put myself back together. I can’t think much further than the next step right now. What about you?”

  “I feel like I’m coming out of a long, dark tunnel. It hurts sometimes. But you’re helping.”

  “Are you talking about the sex we had earlier? Because if you were, don’t. It was just sex.”

  “Just sex?” She hopped up from the table, fury blazing in her eyes. “If that’s all you think it was, Liam O’Connor, you can leave right now.”

  He listened to her run up the stairs and slam her bedroom door. Well, that had really cut it. Count him seven kinds of idiot.

  He looked toward the door where she had vanished, fighting an urge to smash something.

  Never had he hated the man he had become as much as he did right then.

  * * *

  Just sex? Sharon paced her bedroom in fury. Just sex. No way. It had been something more, and it had torn the shell around her heart wide-open, exposing raw nerves she hadn’t even been aware of. And no matter what Liam said, after the way he’d held her afterward and comforted her later out in the field, she figured it wasn’t just sex to him, either.

  Or maybe she was building another castle in the air, she thought bitterly. She seemed to be good at that. Did that one act imply permanence? No, she wasn’t that foolish, but two hearts had touched, however briefly, and to hear it dismissed as just sex was maddening.

  After the glow had worn off and the night had brought solitude, she’d come face-to-face with some very painful, possibly ugly feelings in herself. Liam was right, she had known what she was getting into when she married Chet. She had married a soldier, after all.

  The problem was, knowing in advance and actually experiencing it had turned out to be two different things. She supposed that was a basic truism of life, but at the beginning, while she had known it would hurt when he was away, she hadn’t guessed how much she’d eventually come to resent it. There was nothing like actual experience to wipe away rosy imaginings.

  But just sex? Fury seethed in her. She’d been ripped wide-open by the experience, laid naked to all her games and delusions and pretenses by the simple, straightforward reawakening to her own vitality, and he could dismiss it like that.

  God! Had that been all it had meant to him? A quickie in the late afternoon? No earth-shattering, gut-wrenching realization that life could be good again? That maybe it could be even better?

  She heard the knock on her door and wanted to ignore it, but she knew this house well enough to know that he had been able to hear her pacing. No chance he would think she was asleep.

  “What?” she demanded querulously.

  The door opened and the man himself stood there. “That came out wrong.”

  “Oh, really?” She folded her arms and glared at him. “I get that you can’t promise a future, but don’t you dare dismiss something so wonderful and intense as just sex.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Sharon. Honest to God.”

  “Then how did you mean it? Explain it to me, Liam. I’m listening.”

  “Help me here,” he said after a moment. “I’m not saying it wasn’t wonderful, but it sure as hell wasn’t helping you.”

  “I never said it was.”

  “No,” he agreed. “That’s where I blew it. It was top on my mind and out it came.”

  Her anger eased just a bit. “Top on your mind?”

  “Damn, it was good, Sharon. Dangerous, but good. I don’t want you getting hurt because I can’t control my lust for you. Looks like we got to the hurting part, anyway.”

  His lust for her? A shiver of pure sensuality rippled through her, dampening her anger even more. No! She fought it down. No more of that. Lust was just lust. About that much he was right.

  “What happened?” he asked. “I get the feeling that us having such a good time together opened wounds. I never want to do that to you.”

  Her lips felt stiff as she answered, forcing herself to be uncomfortably truthful. “Sometimes wounds are festering under the scar tissue. Lancing them is good. That’s what happened.”

  “Because we...?” He didn’t finish the question.

  “Yes, in part. I felt alive again. I realized I wanted to live again, and enjoy everything again, and then I got to thinking about all I’d missed. It all just backed up like a sewer.”

  Several heartbeats later, he spoke. “I guess that’s good?”

  “I don’t know. It sure hurt. But I need to face it and sort it out.”

  “I get that,” he said after a moment. “Facing things can be tough. I guess I should leave you alone. I just wanted you to know I didn’t mean to be insulting. It was special to me. I just didn’t think it was helpful.”

  “Maybe it was, for me.”

  “Okay.” He paused, then started to turn away, but she stopped him.

  “Did it help you at all, Liam?”

  He hesitated. “Not really. Not if by help you mean something good, but I guess you don’t since it managed to rip you wide-open. I guess that’s something we should avoid.”

  He was going off on his own tangent again. Part of her said to let him go, but part of her refused to let it drop here. Maybe she was naive enough to need to believe it hadn’t simply been mechanics and biology for either of them.

  “Something bad happened to you after we were together?” she asked quietly.

  “Not exactly.” He sighed. “It’s hard to say. I guess I felt lonely later. I never had what you and Chet had. I always figured it would come someday, but...well, I just never had it. And now it looks like it’ll probably never happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “Look at me, Sharon. Look at the million little things you do for me to keep me going through a day. I’m broken, damn it. Yeah, I keep finding out I can deal with some things. I can paint a barn. I can follow decent directions if I can sort through them. You’re helping me to read. But there’s no telling how many more ways I’m broken that I don’t even know yet. I guess I’m going to find out. Who’s gonna want to put up with that and my moods? What if I lose it and go ballistic? I can’t even promise not to do that. Push me hard enough, and I probably will.”

  “Go ballistic how?”

  “Rant
, throw things, smash things. You think any woman wants to live with that kind of time bomb? Or even consider having kids in that situation? I’m not sure that I’ve got a tight tether on myself.”

  “Well,” she said slowly, “you didn’t kill those guys in the parking lot.”

  “Because that guy stepped in.”

  “Have you considered that even though he stepped in, you could have still acted out?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You didn’t have to stop just because one guy spoke up for you.”

  He just shook his head. “You don’t know how many times a day I just want to smash something. It’s not as often here. I don’t feel pushed by much, but I still feel it. And I get so damn mad at myself.”

  Then he shook his head again. “I came up here to talk about you, not about me.”

  “Right now it seems to be the same subject. I wonder if that hot chocolate is cold.”

  “Probably.”

  “Then I’ll heat it up. Let’s go downstairs.” She drew him out of her room, away from the bed she had shared with Chet that suddenly seemed too damn inviting. Look at the two of them, she thought to herself. They were likely to use each other as a bandage if they weren’t careful.

  The kitchen seemed ever so much safer, although considering what had happened on the counter only a few hours ago, that was open to question.

  She poured the cocoa back into the pan and put it on simmer, stirring gently so a skin didn’t form. She listened to him pace behind her, but eventually he settled on a chair.

  She refilled the mugs and returned with them to the table. “We’re a mess,” she announced.

  “You’re not that much of a mess,” he argued.

  “That’s debatable. When you walked up that driveway I was just trying to shake myself out of the paralysis I’ve been dealing with since Chet passed. Everything around here was going to hell, and I knew I needed to do something about it, but I couldn’t make myself. Then you came, and things around here are getting fixed.”

  “What little I can do.”

  “Stop knocking yourself. And for God’s sake, don’t hate yourself because you were wounded. I can understand being frustrated and angry, but there’s no reason on earth to hate yourself for it. It’s beyond your control.”