by Rachel Lee
Ed lingered at the truck, though. “You need help, holler,” he said. This time he addressed his words to Liam. “It’s a lot for one man.”
“Thanks,” Liam managed. He hoped he sounded pleasant.
At last, they climbed into the truck, and Ed headed back to his business.
“He’s such a nice man,” Sharon remarked.
“Yes.”
“Something wrong?”
“Not a thing.” He felt her eyes on him but refused to return her gaze. The things going on inside him weren’t for sharing. Then he wondered if they were rational. But why should they be? They were feelings.
“Hell,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Just getting tangled in my own head again. Yes, Ed seemed nice.”
“I was going to offer you lunch at Maude’s diner. But it’s small and usually crowded.”
He bridled a bit, even as he realized it might be a difficult time for him. But going to a diner? He took the bit between his teeth. “Sure, that sounds great. My treat.”
The only way he was going to emerge from this tunnel he’d been staggering his way through for so long now was to punch a hole in the side and fight his way out of it. The image pleased him enough to put a smile on his face. He could do this.
* * *
Sharon acutely sensed the ebb and flow of whatever was going on inside Liam. She couldn’t ascribe it to particular things, but she felt it, anyway—the moments of tension, the instants of irritation, the seconds of uncertainty. He was on quite a roller coaster during this trip to town, and she wondered if it was good for him to do all this or if it might give him problems.
But he was the one who said he wanted to go to the diner, and with only the merest hesitation on the doorstep, he plunged in.
She couldn’t help but wonder what it must feel like to be a man who could remember facing the most god-awful thing in the world, namely war, and then find yourself unwilling to face a crowded diner.
Why should that be? What exactly had happened to him? Or perhaps the self-doubt had crept in while he was recovering his physical skills and learning to control his temper.
Given that he had warned her he often said things he shouldn’t, she thought he’d done remarkably well at the paint store, especially with Ed acting like there was no way Liam could do this job alone. Maybe he couldn’t but that should be his decision, not Ed’s.
As it was a weekday, and still a bit early for lunch, the diner wasn’t overly crowded. It was only as they slid into a booth that Sharon realized she might have made a huge mistake. Maude had a tendency to slam things around, seem angry at her customers most of the time and speak sharply. Sharon didn’t know if Liam was ready for the full treatment.
“Maybe we shouldn’t eat here,” she said.
“Why?”
“Maude.”
“Who’s Maude?”
“She owns the place. Chet used to say she was like a drill instructor. Liam, she’s going to slam things down in front of you and be very sharp in her manner.”
“Really?” To her amazement, Liam smiled. “Forewarned is forearmed.”
Now came Sharon’s turn to tense up. She’d seen enough to know that Liam could control his temper decently, but he had never been exposed to Maude, who seemed to be anger personified. “She might not even let you order for yourself.”
“You don’t know how rarely I’ve ever been able to choose what I eat.”
She hadn’t thought about that. She guessed living off rations a lot of the time might make a person indifferent and willing to eat pretty much anything that wasn’t freeze-dried and rehydrated.
And there was Maude, bearing down on them. Stocky, getting up in years, but as vital as ever, she stomped their way with a gleam in her dark eyes. It almost reminded Sharon of a cat that had spied a bird: predatory.
But Maude had a good heart. She just had the world’s most unfortunate manner.
She reached their table and stared down at Liam. “Who’s this?”
That was Maude, straight to the point. Before Liam could answer, Sharon said, “This is Liam. He was Chet’s best buddy in the army.”
“Took you long enough to get here.”
Sharon nearly cringed. She wouldn’t have blamed Liam for giving an equally sharp response. Instead, he surprised her.
“Some roads,” he said, looking right at Maude, “are long and twisted.”
Maude peered at him. “Maybe from Afghanistan they are.” The response was monumentally unexpected from Maude, and evinced none of her usual antagonism. However, she still slapped the menus and the empty coffee mugs on the table in front of them. “Coffee?”
“Love some,” Liam answered. Sharon managed a nod.
As soon as Maude had moved away out of earshot, Sharon leaned over and said quietly, “That was something. Maude’s never that mellow.”
Liam shrugged. “All you have to do is glare back.”
How had she missed that? Had he really glared at Maude? Maybe so. Wow.
The notion made her want to giggle, and she quickly covered her mouth with her hand. She wouldn’t want Maude to think she was being laughed at. Steaks had been burned for less.
“What do you recommend?” Liam asked.
Sharon remembered then that he might have trouble reading the menu. He had said he had could only read some, and menus could be daunting if they were packed, as Maude’s was. Dang. He hadn’t even reached for it. She wondered how she could broach the subject of teaching him.
“Well, Maude is famous for her steak sandwiches and pie.”
“Then I’ll have a steak sandwich.”
By the time they were eating their sandwiches, Sharon was wondering what had gotten into Maude. Nothing got slammed in front of them at all. It was an amazing personality change, right down to a nicer tone of voice.
“You tamed the dragon,” she told Liam as they climbed back into her truck.
“Not much of a dragon,” he remarked. “I’ve met tougher ones.”
“I’m serious. I’ve never seen her like that. Attitude comes with every meal at Maude’s.”
He laughed. “Maybe I’ll see it next time.”
She put the key in the ignition, then hesitated. “Liam?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you want to learn to read better? Because if you do, I can help. I am a teacher.”
He was silent a few heartbeats. “They told me I might never be able to read much again. Not a book or anything like that. They weren’t sure, but said in most cases like mine improvement might be limited. Something about where some of the damage is located.”
“Oh.” Her heart sank.
“On the other hand,” he said, “I guess there’s only one way to find out. Sure, let’s give it a shot.”
“I can go to the library and find early-reader books if you won’t feel insulted. Or we can work out a method at home.”
“Skip the library,” he said after a moment. “I can read some things. Short things. It’s not all gone.”
“Then maybe you just need to brush up.” Which was a hopeful statement indeed, she admitted to herself. Some things could never come back, depending on the degree and type of injury. She guessed they were going to explore some more of his limitations. She just hoped they didn’t bring him to despair.
* * *
And that was how he came to be high on a ladder three days later, starting the second side of the barn, turning everything white with primer.
It was an easy, soothing job, one he had remembered well enough. It stole some of the constant tension he lived with, wondering when he was going to butt up hard against all that he’d lost. He could paint. That actually opened up possibilities for work in the future.
And the constant physical exertion relieved the anxiety that never quite left him. In fact, it banished it.
Up on that ladder, he actually felt as if everything was right in the world. As he was brushing and rolling his way over the weathered wo
od, he wondered if he should have taken Sharon’s offer to rent the paint sprayer. He’d looked at it, decided he wasn’t ready to test himself through that, and opted instead for brushes and rollers.
Truthfully, he didn’t want this job to be easy. He needed the hard work, something sadly missing from his life for a while now, unless you counted rehab. Learning to walk and take care of himself had been labor all right. Hell, at one point getting a spoon from a bowl to his mouth had seemed overwhelming.
But things were looking up. Definitely. Now he had another tool in his pack to add to those he’d remastered.
Then there was reading. He wondered if he’d made it harder on Sharon by refusing the books, but he hadn’t known how to tell her that the prospect of facing a book, even a children’s book, had been rife with the potential for failure. The doctors had told him often enough that his reading skills might remain forever minimal, that he’d be fortunate if he could read even two pages in a book.
Sometimes he wondered if the doctors hadn’t given him too many warnings. All for the best of reasons, of course. They’d prepared him for disappointments. Unfortunately, they’d also made him reluctant to try.
Well, that was going to change. He reached for the paint can hanging from a lower rung by a wire hook, and lifted it, refilling the roller pan. Yep, he was going to try some new things, just like he was working on reading.
He still knew the alphabet, which was good, and wasn’t overwhelmed by single, common words. He recognized most of them on the flash cards Sharon had tested him with. Next was getting to sentences. Complexity. Putting words together correctly.
“Paint.” He heard himself muttering the word and was recalled to the task at hand. Twenty feet high on a ladder didn’t seem like a smart place to let his mind wander, and the muttering habit he’d developed brought him back once more.
That guy Ed had been right: this wood was soaking up paint like a desert would soak up water. He almost imagined he could hear it slurp.
He kind of liked the way some of the wood had silvered where the paint had been gone awhile, but he also remembered that wasn’t good for the long run, so he remorselessly slapped primer over it.
He realized he had begun to spend a lot of time not thinking about Sharon. Deliberately avoiding thinking about her. He knew why, too. He’d come here carrying a letter to her from Chet, his best buddy ever, and the kinds of thoughts he kept having felt like a betrayal.
He’d reacted to his first view of her, of course. A very pretty woman, she undoubtedly drew many men’s thoughts in sexual directions. But after this amount of time, he’d gotten used to how pretty she was. What he couldn’t get used to was how strongly she attracted him. Damn, that just seemed to keep growing.
Anytime he came within a few feet of her, he smelled her, and she smelled good, especially the shampoo she used. He detected no other perfume, but she didn’t need it. Her natural scents enticed him.
It had been a long time since he was attracted to a woman, and if he came right down to it, it would be even longer till he acted on that attraction, because he was afraid of his own bumbling. There were times in life when you really couldn’t blurt out the wrong thing, or blurt something out the wrong way, and he seemed to possess an absolute genius for that these days. Keeping quiet and staying away from situations fraught with emotion seemed like the best course.
Glancing down, he saw he needed more paint. The pan was empty, the paint can hardly holding enough to fill a brush. Lifting the brush from where it dangled from another wire holder, he ran it around the inside of the paint can and swiped it against the wall repeatedly until it was nearly dry.
They were going to have to get Ed to deliver more soon. He didn’t like that, and he knew exactly why.
“Selfish,” he muttered to himself as he grabbed the can, pan, roller and brush and climbed down the ladder. “Damn fool,” he added for good measure.
He didn’t have a thing to offer a woman like Sharon, so why was some broken connection in his brain trying to put a fence around her? Sharon needed a whole man, not the dregs of one.
He had just reached the lowest rung of the ladder when he felt a prickle between his shoulder blades, the kind of prickle that had always warned him there were eyes on him.
The response was instinctive, so deeply ingrained that not even memory loss had killed it. In an instant, he crouched and began to scan the area.
Finally, he spied the intruder: little more than a dot in the distance, he saw a horse and rider coming this way. Admittedly, it was just a man on a horse, but in Afghanistan that hadn’t always been innocent.
“Liam?”
At the sound of Sharon’s voice, he spun around. She was carrying a pitcher of lemonade and a glass toward him.
“There’s someone coming,” he said tautly.
“Where?” Her brow furrowed and she looked around.
“Rider on the hill.”
She looked where he pointed. “Relax,” she said softly. “It’s my neighbor, the guy who owns the sheep.”
He looked at her, saw concern on her face, and realized he was being an idiot. The anger surged then, in response to feeling like a fool, but more probably in response to an adrenaline rush that had no outlet. He dropped the painting supplies on a tarp.
“I’m going for a walk.” He strode away, ignoring her as she called his name. At one point in his life he’d seen enemies on every hill. Now he felt threatened by every approaching car.
Damn it. How was he supposed to live this way?
Chapter Five
Sharon watched Liam storm off across the field. She understood he needed to do it, but it broke her heart, anyway. That might have been Chet, and the thought was almost too much to bear.
At least when she’d glimpsed these reactions in Chet when he was home on leave, they hadn’t been as strong, probably because when he came home he was in familiar surroundings and with familiar people. Liam didn’t have that comfort. None of it.
He was a stranger in a strange land, a place so unfamiliar he couldn’t adequately judge the threats. She hated to think of the overload he must sometimes feel on top of his cognitive deficits. Hell, people who came home with post-traumatic stress lived in a hell beyond imagining. How much worse must it be when you added all the TBI effects?
She was sure she hadn’t begun to plumb the depths of all that Liam dealt with.
He’d seemed better the past few days but she didn’t delude herself into thinking he was necessarily healing. He’d merely been occupied with an exhausting task. He’d said himself he needed to keep busy, and that part she understood. But there was no way she could truly grasp the rest of it. No way at all. She felt so inadequate.
She held the pitcher of lemonade in one hand, tucking the glass in her elbow so that she could wave to her neighbor. Then she turned and went back to the house, her mind spinning in a hundred different directions. There had to be more she could do. Something. Anything.
But she couldn’t think of what it might be. The work wasn’t enough, and that would run out, anyway. Then what? Clearly he needed some kind of anchor, some kind of secure point from which he could start taking his life back. The faster he painted, the more she feared for him. Was he going to finish and then take to the road again?
What then? Where would he go? What would he do?
She felt sick to her stomach just thinking about it.
She also knew in her heart that she didn’t want him to move on. She liked him. Never mind that every time she saw him her heart skipped a beat and her thoughts wanted to turn to sex. Sex was no solution, not for either of them.
Although it might be quite a nice experience, she thought with a faint little smile as she mounted the porch steps. She certainly experienced a strong itch to run her hands all over that powerful body of Liam’s. He might have built it to fight demons, but wherever it had come from, it was a beaut.
She’d spent three days watching his muscles ripple in the sun and admiring t
hem. They’d begun to invade her thoughts on waking and when she fell asleep. Heat pooled between her legs all too often, and she wondered if she was just lonely or in danger of developing a dangerous obsession with a man she hardly knew.
Oddly, the thoughts no longer made her feel guilty as they had at first. Good, because lately she’d become as determined to move on as Liam seemed to be determined to come to grips with himself and what he could still do.
Chet would have hated for her to keep moping. He had hated moping. How often had he said, “Life deals, and then you deal.”
The memory brought another smile to her face. He’d been right. His other favorite saying was, “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” She’d heard that quote attributed to John Lennon as well as an early-twentieth-century writer. She supposed the source didn’t matter as much as the sentiment. Besides, it was seldom that only one person had a particular idea.
All of which was a distraction. She set the lemonade on the small porch table and sat in one of the lawn chairs they’d always meant to replace with something sturdier. Well, maybe she’d get out the plans for those Adirondack chairs and see if she and Liam could work their way through them. Maybe it was time for her to get handy, too.
Ransom Laird was coming closer, she realized. She didn’t see him out this way often. She had a lot of neighbors she often didn’t see for weeks at a time or longer because running a ranch of any kind tended to be time-consuming. She’d have gotten to that point, too, once Chet had come home for good.
Except he wasn’t going to do that now. And now she had Liam to concern her. Maybe she needed to look into getting some animals.
“Howdy,” Ransom said as he rode up. He dismounted and tied his horse to the porch rail.
“Lemonade?” Sharon asked.
“I’d love some.” He took a seat as she poured. Even in his early sixties, Ransom was the kind of man who could make a woman’s heart flutter. Something about all that hard work outdoors, Sharon supposed.
“How’s Mandy?” she asked.
