"After all," she said as I entered, "since this is our last session, I felt like the least I could do was buy you a cup of coffee."
I stopped dead, halfway into the office. "Our last session," I repeated.
"Yes, that's correct." She frowned at my confused expression. "Richard, we've made some great progress, identifying the real issue that's been plaguing you. There is certainly more work that you could do, and I recommend finding a full-time psychiatrist to continue working through some of your PTSD-"
"Why not you?" I asked, interrupting her.
She paused for a second, moving over to sit down in her chair. I followed after her, not letting her walk away from the question as I sat down across from her. She looked up at me, considering, and then set her coffee aside as she prepared to open.
"I'm concerned about my ability to remain objective towards you," she answered softly after another minute, finally meeting my eye. "There have been a few incidents that have... tested the bounds, shall we say, of our professional relationship."
"What incidents?" I had a pretty good guess what she was talking about, of course, but a little part of me really wanted to hear how she'd present it.
Indeed, I got to see Linda look even more uncomfortable. "When I went to visit your house, I overstepped the bounds of a professional relationship," she said, twisting her fingers together.
"That was what helped with my breakthrough, though," I pointed out.
"True – but it was still inappropriate. And some other parts of that visit really illustrated that I shouldn't be acting as your psychiatrist."
Some other parts, she'd said. She was probably referring to how she almost kissed me, how she confessed that she'd been imagining how the two of us would sleep together. Admittedly, I'd had more than a few dreams since then about how that very activity would happen, but that didn't mean that I could let her off the hook.
"And so you're dropping me as a client because of it?" I pressed.
Linda rolled her eyes at me. "Consider this, Mister Military Genius," she snapped. "If we're not in a professional relationship as a doctor and patient, that opens up the possibility of starting a different type of relationship."
"A different type of – oh." It took another second, but the penny finally dropped. My irritation vanished, replaced by a smile spreading across my face. "So," I said as I leaned in, "got any plans for dinner tonight?"
Linda smiled like a Cheshire cat, now that I'd finally arrived on the same page as her. "Let's work through this session first," she suggested mildly. "You still need to tell me about your fourth tour of duty."
My smile disappeared as quickly as it had made its initial appearance. "That's really not what I want to talk about," I said.
"You'll have to talk about it at some point," she tried, but I wasn't having any of it.
"Says who? Why can't that remain in the past? It's not hurting anyone there – let it stay there, buried and dead! That's where it belongs!" It wasn't until I finished that I realized that I'd risen up from my chair, standing over her as I shouted down at her.
Despite my outburst, Linda remained calm and composed, still sitting and looking up at me. "But it is hurting someone," she answered softly.
"Who?"
"You," she pointed out, and my jaw snapped shut on my response.
Slowly, I settled back down in my chair. "Fine," I gave in. "But in exchange for this, I'm taking you out to dinner, and you're not allowed to say no."
A little smile appeared on her face, although it vanished a second later when I looked for it. "Very romantic way of asking me out," she said mildly.
"That's not a no, is it?"
This time, there was no missing her smile. "It is not, no," she acknowledged. "But that can come up later. For now, let's focus on you, and telling the rest of your story. Let's start with the beginning of that fourth tour."
I sighed, running one hand back through my short hair. "Fine. I'll start at the beginning, so sit tight. Just know that this story doesn't have a happy ending."
In short, sparse sentences, I walked her through my fourth tour. Just as I'd mentioned a couple of days previously, most of the tour had been largely uneventful. It had been that lack of activity, more than anything else, that lured me into a false sense of security, making me drop my guard more than I ought to have done. "And it all came back to bite me in the ass," I finished, crumpling up my now-empty coffee cup and hurtling it towards the garbage can in the corner. The crumpled wad of paper hit the rim of the trash can but bounced out, making me let out a hiss of irritation as I hauled my ass up to grab it and drop it into the garbage.
"Tell me about it," Linda said softly, gently.
So, again talking in short details to try and lessen the pain of those dreadful memories rising back up in my head, I talked about how we headed out for a convoy patrol, running through several small villages that were suspected to be hotbeds of terrorist activity. "And it's a dumb as hell strategy," I added, almost spitting out my words. "When we get tips about a hot area, we send soldiers into that area. They can lure us to pretty much anywhere that they want, just by sharing a bit of intel. We just threw bodies at the problems until we killed them -but at a cost to us that no one ever seemed to consider!"
"The patrol," Linda prompted.
"Right." I picked up the story where I'd left off. "We headed out to follow up on this tip, and there was a supply run heading in that direction at the same time. We fell in with them – two Humvees in the front, one in the back, a couple trucks in the middle. Pretty standard formation; the armored Humvees at the front handle any spare bullets headed in that direction, while the single Humvee in the back can handle any unexpected assaults from the rear."
"Got it. But they were prepared for this?"
I nodded. "The militants were smart about it. They set up multiple explosive points along a road, but they put the triggers later on, making sure that the bombs wouldn't go until all of the convoy vehicles were in between the paired IEDs on each side. Those explosives took out the first Humvee almost completely, and ruined the engines on both trucks."
"And then what happened?" Linda asked, after I fell silent for a minute.
"Then they moved in," I answered. My gaze was down at my hands, knotted together in my lap, but I wasn't seeing my tightly intertwined fingers. Instead, I found myself back in Iraq, back in the shouting and the chaos in the aftermath of the series of explosions.
One of the IEDs on the driver's side, near the second Humvee, failed to detonate. I never found out whether the issue was due to bad explosives, faulty wiring, or some other problem, but that defect most likely saved my life.
I'd been in that second Humvee, relaxing as I just followed after the first Humvee, driving essentially on autopilot. We were only a dozen miles or so outside of our target, and I was looking forward to ditching the trucks rumbling along behind us. I had my eyes half closed, leaning back against the headrest, when the first explosions went off, directly in front of us, engulfing the forward Humvee in flame.
Acting purely on instinct, I yanked the wheel over to the side, pulling our Humvee off the road. Bullets stitched impact marks across the right side of our windshield, thankfully not penetrating all the way through the bullet-resistant glass. I shouted out at Joey, my mate riding shotgun, but I still can't remember what I was yelling. Regardless, I doubted that he could hear a single word that I said, as both of our ears rang from the nearby, thunderous explosions.
As I spun the Humvee's wheels to turn in a circle, I saw that we'd been the luckiest of the vehicles in the convoy, if such a term could be applied to the aftermath of the explosions. One of the trucks had been almost completely demolished by a particularly strong blast, and the remains of the vehicle lay overturned, burning merrily. The other truck was still on its wheels, but even as I watched, sustained fire from an assault rifle shattered its windshield and extinguished any life left in its operators.
"The other Humvees!" Joey shouted ou
t, the words curiously distant sounding as my ears continued to ring.
The front Humvee was a lost cause, mechanically speaking, but the soldiers inside might still be alive. I pulled our vehicle around, gunning the engine and sending us roaring towards our comrades. "You check the rear one!" I shouted to Joey, pointing at where the third Humvee had come to a screeching stop, twenty yards behind us. "I'll check the front one for survivors!"
He nodded, his face pale but determined. I grabbed my M16, silently thanking fate that it hadn't been trapped somewhere out of reach by the force of the explosion, and wrenched the driver's side door open. The metal screeched in protest, but the hinges still reluctantly gave way as I put my shoulder into forcing it open.
Gun in hand, I ran for the front Humvee. The front engine had been breached by the explosion, and I saw at a glance that the vehicle wouldn't be running again. The passenger compartment still appeared largely intact, however. I raised the butt of my rifle and smashed the already-cracked window, shattering it and knocking it out of its frame.
From inside, I saw the near-panicked faces of two other squad members, Davies and Edgar, peering out at me. "Captain!" Davies called out, his face breaking into a grin of absurd hope. "Goddamn, it's good to see you, sir!"
"Hold tight, soldier," I commanded, stepping back and turning my attention to the door. Unlike the door of my own Humvee, which had managed to take most of the force of the nearest IED explosion without warping too badly, this door seemed almost fused into place. I yanked at the handle as Davies pushed from the inside, but it was to no avail.
"We'll get you out!" I shouted to Davies, seeing him and Edgar both nod. I turned away from the front Humvee, searching for some other way to get my soldiers out from the armored vehicle that had become a prison.
But as I turned back towards the Humvee, I caught a streak of light glinting off something up on a nearby hill. Expecting a sniper, I threw myself away from the front Humvee, back towards my own vehicle, desperately seeking to get behind some form of cover.
I made it nearly halfway across the distance between the two vehicles before the rocket-propelled grenade struck the windshield of the front Humvee, detonating on impact.
"And that was the end of my fourth tour," I told Linda, blinking as the fog of memory fell from my eyes. "The blast of the grenade killed both Davies and Edgar on impact, and shrapnel from the explosion tore into my side and leg. Joey managed to haul me back to the one working Humvee and get me out of there, back to a field hospital. One of the guys in the back Humvee also made it, but the attack was pretty devastating. I had surgery to remove the shrapnel, but some of the bits lodged into my leg, too close to the femoral artery, and the surgeons didn't dare to take those pieces out."
I stood up, not letting Linda say anything. "And that, doc, is the story of my fourth and final tour of duty," I finished. "And I'm not sharing it again."
Linda also rose up to her feet – and before I could storm out of her office, she reached out and laid her fingers gently on my arm. "Thank you for sharing," she said softly, her eyes soft as they met my own.
Somehow, her touch did help calm me somewhat. "I'll send you a message with the address for tonight," I answered before leaving, my head still swimming with the fog of memories.
Chapter Fourteen
LINDA
*
That evening, I stepped through the front door of the restaurant and had to stop for a minute, just looking around at the interior in amazement.
"Wow," I breathed out, gazing up at the high, sloping ceiling. The interior of the ceiling had been painted dark blue, nearly black, and glittered with hundreds of tiny, embedded LED lights like stars. Combined with faux-antique columns in the Greek style and the red Spanish tile accents, the place made me felt like I'd stepped from the Midwestern United States across the Atlantic Ocean and landed directly in Italy.
"Oh good, you made it."
I turned at the deep tones, saw Richard move out from a side passage to greet me. From the smile on his face, I guessed that he'd recovered his self-control since storming out of my office that morning. "I was a little worried that you might not show up."
"I almost didn't," I admitted, although looking up at him, I couldn't even remember why I had thought that this might be a bad idea. Richard wasn't my client any longer, after all, as of just before the end of this morning. While it might not have been totally acceptable to some of the more tightly wound doctors that I knew, they didn't have to hear about this. And thoughts of a naked, aroused, smoldery-eyed Richard helped me overcome any other lingering doubts about coming out tonight.
After he'd stormed out of her office after finishing his story this morning, Richard apparently managed to successfully cool off. A bit later that afternoon, as I was starting to worry about whether we still, in fact, had a dinner engagement, I heard my phone buzz.
When I picked up my phone, the message contained very little useful information; all it contained was an address and a time. The address, a quick internet search revealed, matched up with Ciao Bella, a very classy looking Italian restaurant. Heading home after work, I found myself staring into my closet, wondering why I didn't own any elegant outfits (even though I hated the idea of wasting hundreds of dollars on something as ridiculous as a little black dress, something I'd almost never wear!).
But still, even as I drove over to the restaurant, I kept feeling strangely nervous. I'd been on dates before, but something about tonight made my knees shake and knock together, almost like I was seventeen again and headed out to the movies with a cute boy for the very first time. I kept trying to calm myself down, tell myself that this was nothing, but the fluttering of butterfly wings in my stomach refused to go away.
And now, standing in the front entrance area of Ciao Bella and looking up at Richard's craggy but oh-so-handsome smiling face, it all suddenly felt worth it.
"Well, I'm glad that you did come," he told me, gesturing to the restaurant around us with one hand. "This is one of my favorite places to eat - and since you're such a big fan of Italian, it seemed perfect."
I looked around again at the incredibly well-decorated interior, the waiters in full tuxedos that seemed to glide almost magically in between the tables, the expensively dressed patrons. "You realize that when I talked about Italian food, I meant noodles boiled in a pot over my ancient little apartment stove, right?" I pointed out to Richard. "Not anything this fancy! I could never afford to eat at a place like this!" I still would have a hard time justifying any of the prices here to my wallet, I suspected privately.
Richard's grin, however, just grew wider. "My treat, doc. Remember that I'm worth over a billion dollars? I almost invited you to fly to Italy for a meal there, but my brother's currently using the private jet."
I struggled to even comprehend this sentence. "You have a private jet?" I blurted out.
"Well, our family holds a long-term lease on one, yes."
"And what, Sebastian decided to hop on it and head to Ibiza or something?"
"Teddy, actually," he corrected. "And no, he's off consulting with a client for some sort of work in Europe. Didn't give me too many details."
Teddy – that was Richard's middle brother. I started to ask what Teddy did, not even touching the idea that Richard could so casually invite me on an international flight to another country just for a dinner date, but a man in a tuxedo bustled up to us and cut off my thoughts before I could speak.
"Sir, madam, your table is ready," he informed us, speaking with a smooth, buttery Italian accent as he gave us a little bow.
Richard smiled at me, and I felt the warmth of his hand pressed against the small of my back as he guided me after the waiter. The butterflies in my stomach redoubled the fluttering of their wings, and I tried to focus just on breathing as I followed.
I didn't know whether Richard paid extra to get the best table in the house, or if the maître d' just recognized what had to be one of the wealthiest people in the entire city and re
warded him accordingly. In any case, however, we ended up at a small table, just big enough for the two of us, in the middle of the restaurant but separated from most of the other diners by gauzy curtains.
I picked up the menu that the maître d' had left behind - and promptly gasped at the prices. "You're sure that you're paying for this?" I asked Richard, peeping at him over the top of my menu. "Because if I have to cover my own meal, I'm not going to even be able to afford the free bread on the table."
He laughed, tossing his head back. I really liked the sound of that laugh, I decided. He hadn't done it much during our sessions, but it seemed to smooth out the wrinkles on his face, made him seem thrilled just to be alive. "Trust me, I'm covering everything. This is a thank you for helping me, and you can order whatever you want."
Still feeling slightly tentative, I picked out a couple dishes that struck me. Everything on the menu, described in restrained but artful terms, sounded absolutely delicious. After several minutes of dithering, I finally settled on the slow-baked chicken alla Scarpariello, accompanied by charred broccoli rapini and giardiniera. I wasn't even sure of a couple of the words, but even still, just reading that description made my mouth water.
"Any preference for wine?" Richard asked, holding out the large, multiple page black folder that contained the restaurant's wine list.
Oh god. I already had enough trouble picking out food. I'd be completely lost if he wanted me to also choose a wine. "You can go ahead and pick," I told him, smiling to mask the twinge of anxiety. What if he realized that I didn't have his same sophisticated tastes, decided that I wasn't worth the effort of wining and dining after all?
Somehow, Richard sensed my concern. "Can I confess a secret to you, doc?" he asked, sliding his chair a little closer to me.
"Of course."
He flipped open the menu and showed it to me. I tried to keep from fainting at the astronomical prices of the wine options. "I don't recognize almost any of these," he confided. "Honestly, I usually don't make a point of showing off my wealth. I earned my own money in the military, and I've never wanted to end up as one of those spoiled trust fund kids. If I could, I'd just ask the waiter to bring me a cold beer."
For Love of Valor: A Bad Boy Military Romance Page 9
