“Oh, God,” he muttered, watching Stacy disappear out the rear door. Giving Dara a sorrowful look as he rose, he said gruffly, “This is a special hell. I don’t see how anyone works here. It’s too much for me to take, emotionally. All I wanted to do was go find that deadbeat father of hers and her uncles and beat the shit out of them and tell them if they ever lifted a hand against Stacy or her family again, it would be the last thing they’d ever do.” Matt pushed to his feet, offering his hand down to Dara.
Smoothing out her tan linen trousers after standing, Dara nodded, giving him a sad look. “Men just have a different way of dealing with bastards like her father and uncles.”
Snorting, he took her warm hand, walking her down the hall toward the reception area. “Yeah, my reaction isn’t PC, is it?”
“No,” Dara said, giving him a wry look, “but I don’t disagree with you. Men like that are monsters. And most likely, their own fathers sexually abused them and they’re just carrying on the bad seed down the family line. Each generation is stained by it until somebody stops it and says no. Stands up to the perpetrator.”
“Her mother sure as hell didn’t.”
“That’s because she was so beaten down that she couldn’t,” Dara said gently. “It’s a disease in a family, Matt. Safe House can’t fix everything and everyone, but now that Stacy and her mom and her baby brother are here, they have a chance to not only survive this, but heal from it over time. Delos is doing so much good for people across the world.” She waited as he unlocked the front door, stepping out to look around before allowing her to walk outside. “I just think your family rocks, Matt. I have so much hope for the Stacys of the world who are lucky enough to connect with one of the Delos charities.”
CHAPTER 9
“I don’t want this vacation to end,” Dara admitted, lying on top of Matt, luxuriating in him after they’d made love. She threaded her fingers through his damp hair, drowning in his hooded, lion-like eyes.
“Why? Because we won’t be drinking Hawaiian water and we’ll lose that great sex we’ve enjoyed here?” He chuckled, skating his fingertips down her long, sleek back. His heart swelled as she laughed with him.
“That’s crossed my mind,” Dara giggled, pressing a kiss on his dark-haired chest. She lifted her head, resting her chin on the top of her folded hands, holding his amused gaze. “What if it’s true? What if we go back to Virginia and our sex life is dull in comparison? Will we have to visit Hawaii a lot more often, then?” Her lips drew away from her teeth.
Caressing the crown of her head, Matt growled, “If this vacation had done nothing else but give us this incredible new breakthrough with one another, it would be worth every second over here. I don’t think we’ll go back to the old ways. We like what we discovered way too much. It suits us for where we’re at right now.” He shrugged. “Nothing stands still, sweetheart. Everything is organic in our life, and it’s always going to be changing.” He saw a shadow briefly come to her eyes, and she quickly tried to hide it from him, to no avail. “Come here,” Matt said gruffly, easing her off him. He fluffed some pillows behind his back, sitting up and leaning against the heavy bamboo headboard. Reaching out, he drew Dara easily across his thighs. Matt was bothered by that fleeting look in her eyes. Settling her comfortably across him, guiding her head to his right shoulder, he slanted a look down at her, imprisoning her with his arms and body. She made that humming sound of pleasure, closing her eyes, surrendering to him in every way.
“I love cuddling with you,” she whispered. “I feel so safe, as if I’m suddenly wrapped in a huge cocoon of your care.”
A sound of pleasure moved through his chest and Matt kissed her smiling lips, tasting her unique sweetness. “I always want to make you feel safe, my lovely woman.” He moved his roughened palm down from the side of her hip, appreciating her long, curved thigh, hearing her sigh of satisfaction as he caressed and continued to please her.
“You are definitely my big, bad guard dog,” Dara admitted. “I’ve always been so independent, a wild cowgirl from the rough country of Montana. But since I met you?” She absorbed the gleam and arousal in his gold eyes, for her alone. “I realize now that sometimes, I want to be held. To feel protected. And it doesn’t make me a wimp or whiner or anything.”
Matt became serious with her. “When you were little, was there ever an incident in your life that triggered the worry you have nowadays?”
He saw Dara become solemn, her lashes dropping for a moment. “Yes … there was an incident …”
“Can you share it with me?”
“Sure. I was five years old and I was out with my family in the woods. We gathered firewood in the fall before the snows came. My grandfather Graham would drive the tractor with the flatbed on it, and my father, mother, and grandmother would cut up the trees that had fallen during the year and fill up the flatbed. It was a weeklong event, and we’d go out after breakfast and return just before nightfall. My father and grandfather would then stack the wood in a nearby woodshed near our ranch home.
“I had wandered off into the woods and no one saw me. I was following my nose and pretty soon, I realized I was alone. It scared me, Matt.”
“At five? Sure it would,” he said. “What did you do?”
“I started crying and calling for them. And no one came. Then I started to run, but I wasn’t sure where they were. The trees were thick, the brush heavy, and I got disoriented and lost. I was so scared. I worried about the grizzly bears, because we had a lot of them in the area. I knew they ate little children like me because I had a high, squeaky voice like a baby elk or fawn who was trying to hide and not be discovered by a hungry bear.”
“That had to scare the hell out of you, then,” Matt said, caressing her cheek, seeing that time branded into her eyes.
“Oh,” she said wryly, “it did. I was never so scared. I was so lost. I couldn’t hear my parents, and I kept crying out for them.”
“They must have found you.”
“Yes, near dusk, half a day later.” Dara grimaced. “I was dirty, my face, arms, and hands scratched, freezing and shivering from the cold temperature. It was my grandfather who located me. He tracked me through some pretty awful backcountry. Luckily, it had snowed a week before but then melted. He followed my footprints in the mud. It was only many years later that he told me he’d been a sniper in the Marine Corps. I didn’t know what that meant, but I do now. Those men and women know how to track, and he’d used that skill to find me.” She smiled a little, her voice growing fond. “I had half a day of worry about being eaten alive by a grizzly bear. I was terrified.” She gave him a dark look. “Until, that is, that ambush we survived in Afghanistan. It’s number one in my book now.”
He grunted, considering her story, moving his fingers lightly across her shoulder. “Still, you probably felt abandoned by your parents.”
“Oh, I sure did. But I was only five, and I wasn’t mature enough to think about doing anything but running and trying to hide. That’s when my worry was triggered.” She shrugged. “My mom’s a worrier, too. And so is my grandmother. The worry gene runs in the women on that side of my family, I guess.”
“Yes, and that incident triggered yours, big-time,” Matt guessed.
“It did. After that, I couldn’t stop worrying about anything that stressed me. My mom and grandmother saw it, recognized it for what it was, and began to work with me on it, to get me to understand worry didn’t resolve anything. After I graduated from high school, I had it pretty much in hand. It would only surface in very serious situations.”
“But going through medical school? Residency?” he asked, because that was highly stressful.
Shrugging, she said, “I never worried about that. It never triggered it, Matt. The trigger is when I feel like I’m threatened, or feel my life is going to end.”
Mouth thinning, Matt began to understand the depth of her anxiety and its originating point. “I didn’t see your worry surface the day we got hit by that
ambush,” Matt said, using his index finger to coax a few gold strands away from the corner of her soft mouth. “You were strong. And you never whined. Even when you sliced your knee open, I didn’t even know it had happened until we managed to find a cave to hide in that night. You’ll never be a whiner, Dr. McKinley.” He tapped the end of her nose gently. “Which brings me to the next topic of conversation that I want to discuss with you tonight.”
Her lips curved ruefully and she gave a breathy laugh. “Now you sound like Dr. Phil.”
Matt laughed with her and shook his head. “No, I don’t have his psychological expertise, I’m afraid.”
She curved her palm against his jaw. “What did you want to talk about?”
Looking into her slumberous blue eyes, which were saturated with pleasure, he said, “You worrying yourself to death while I’m back over in Afghanistan for a month and a half. I think you’re afraid I’ll die over there and you’ll lose me.” He felt her tense, her eyes suddenly reflecting that concern he’d seen in them before. She tried to hide it from him, but he growled, “Don’t dodge me on this, Dara. We have to talk about it. We have to get it out so that you don’t kill yourself with anxiety while I’m in country.” Dara sobered instantly. He felt bad about bringing her down like that, but avoiding the issue wasn’t going to help anyone. Especially her.
“I’m not worrying.”
“Right. Even your voice tells me you’re fibbing, Dara.”
Her mouth flexed, brows dipping, and she looked away from him momentarily.
“It’s less than two months,” he said, making light of it. “I’ve told you, in the winter, things wind down. We don’t do missions. We’re all snowed in. And so is the enemy.”
“Sure, just like Callie was telling me that Afghan village we were going to was safe, Matt.” Dara stared up at him, seeing the calm and strength in his shadowed features. She loved him so much, so deeply, that she couldn’t imagine her life without his being a part of it.
“Sweetheart,” he sighed, sliding his hand soothingly across her naked shoulder, “we need to figure out how best for you to avoid the worry that keeps you on tenterhooks. I can email you nearly every day. We each get a turn on Skype about every five days so we can talk to our loved ones back home. You’ll actually see that I’m alive and kicking.” He added a slight, half-cocked smile to go with it, hoping she’d buy his version of life in Afghanistan. Matt knew he had a chance. Callie, her sister, had spent half the year there for five straight years and knew the country’s inherent dangers, but Dara did not. Callie knew the rhythm of the black-ops teams and she wouldn’t have been fooled at all by what he was saying. He watched Dara’s expression, felt her emotions, and it pained him because he knew she’d suffer no matter how logically he reasoned with her.
“What does your family do when you’re gone?” she asked.
“My mother worries,” he admitted. “Her way of dealing with it is to keep busy. Plus, since my dad is an Air Force general, he can get updates on me and where I’m at when no one else can. There are days when Mom becomes really edgy. She’s very psychic, and that doesn’t help, either. Some days she senses I’m in a lot of danger. And she’s usually right, but I’m not dead. I’m just on an op, that’s all. On those days, my dad makes a few discreet requests through certain unnamed back channels, and he finds out more or less what I’m doing and how I am.”
“Can I use that back channel?”
He laughed. “I knew you were going to go for that.”
She gave him a dark look. “Well, wouldn’t you if it was available?”
“Yes,” he cautioned her heavily, “but my CO doesn’t like an Air Force general butting his nose into his business, so you can’t just use it whenever you feel like it, Dara.”
“I hate the nights alone, without you next to me. I get horrible dreams. I wake up screaming sometimes. In fact, I wake myself up because I’m screaming. Not something I like admitting to you, Matt.” Dara gave him a pained, apologetic look.
Bringing her against him, holding her solidly, feeling her arm wind around his neck, her brow pressed against his jaw, Matt whispered, “I’m coming home to you, Dara. That’s all there is to it. I have so much to look forward to with you. No enemy bullet is taking me out. I promise you.” Wincing inwardly, Matt knew he had no way to back up that promise. But if he didn’t alleviate her worry, it would eat her up inside while he was gone.
“Look at it this way: you finish your residency on March first. On that very day, I’m leaving Afghanistan and the Army. I’ll be home in two or three days after that, depending on the flight schedule out of Bagram. You’ll not only be a fully-accredited pediatrician, you’ll be putting plans into place for your clinic. I would think that between the two, you are going to be very, very busy. Don’t you?” He gave her a wry look, challenging her.
“All that’s true,” Dara admitted. Tracing an invisible heart on his chest with her fingertip, she said, “I’ve also been thinking about something else, Matt.”
“What?” He picked up her index finger, kissing the tip of it, watching the tension shed from her face.
“I found out from Alani that all the Safe House branches, wherever they are located, have an agreement for a medical practitioner to come in for a visit once a month to see those who need medical attention. It’s funded by a stipend. And after it’s used up, there’s no more money available to pay a doctor. There’s got to be a better system put into play to deal with this kind of situation. I’ve got some ideas, and I want to bend Dilara’s ear about them when we get home.” Her lips puckered and then she added, “And if she likes my idea, then I want her to hire me as a part-time consultant to be the director of this new medical initiative and get it put into action for all the Safe House charities.”
“What about the clinic you want to open for the poor in Washington, D.C.?”
“Oh, I’d do that, too. I’d spend four days a week at the clinic and a day at Delos advising, consulting, and directing the people out in the field once the idea is approved. I’ll handle the in-house paperwork.”
“Okay,” he murmured, “then you’re going to be a lot busier than I realized. Don’t you feel that all this will keep you so occupied that you’ll worry less?”
“No.”
Matt bit back a chuckle. Dara was honest, if nothing else. “What can I do to ease your anxiety?”
“Can’t you leave the Army early?”
“No, sweetheart. An officer can get away with doing that by turning in his or her commission, but I can’t do that without facing a court martial, and I’m not going there.”
“But I was talking to your father one day, and he mentioned a hardship discharge.”
Matt stopped himself from rolling his eyes. Dara had been creative in uncovering possible routes to get him out of Afghanistan sooner, not later. “Sweet,” he murmured, cupping her chin, forcing her to hold his gaze, “a hardship discharge really does mean exactly that. For example, if I were the only son and my father died, leaving my mother destitute, I could request such a discharge and receive it so I could leave the military to go home, get a civilian job, and take care of my mother.”
“But I’m not destitute.”
“Not by any stretch of anyone’s imagination. I’m sorry.” Matt meant it, because she was going to be on the razor’s edge while he was back in that damned dangerous country. He saw the banked terror in her eyes, and he spread his large, golden tanned hand across her belly. “What about,” he rasped, watching her carefully, “the possibility that I’ve gotten you pregnant while over here? How would that change you, Dara? What would you be focusing on instead?”
Matt knew the answer to all those questions, because in some respects he understood Dara better than she did herself at times. He’d gone through a life-and-death experience with her in Afghanistan.
“I-I’ve thought about that, too.”
All that worry in her eyes dissolved. He intuitively sensed that if she was pregnant, it would s
hort-circuit a lot of her anxiety. She would focus on the baby she carried in her body. “Is there any way you can tell that you might be pregnant?” Because he felt she was, but that was his intuition, his gut call. And he wasn’t about to say anything about it. Dara was a doctor. She’d need medical tests to prove it one way or another.
“Yes,” she whispered. “When we fly home, I can go to the hospital and have one of my friends at the lab draw blood. She’ll be able to tell immediately if the pregnancy hormone is in my blood or not.”
“Then why don’t we do that? I don’t leave for Afghanistan until the day after that. It would be nice to know before I left.” He saw her eyes flood with unshed tears, her lower lip quiver, her hand tightening around his neck, holding his gaze. Matt knew how much being a mother would mean to Dara. He knew her secret dream of having as many children as they wanted. She planned to continue her career as a pediatrician and be a mother, too. It would serve her well, and he slid his hand across her belly. “Let’s take this one step at a time. I think that if you’re pregnant, a lot of your worry will go away. Your focus would be on our child. And I’m going to survive over in Afghanistan just fine and come home to both of you.”
*
Matt was outside the hospital lab Dara had disappeared into. They still had jet lag from landing yesterday evening at Reagan National Airport in Arlington. The whole Culver family had come out to meet them in baggage claim. It was a feast of happiness, and Matt liked that his mother hugged Dara. They were close and kindred spirits of a kind. As he and his father walked with their luggage in hand to the covered parking lot and their awaiting Suburban, Matt knew his mother would be a strong, caring rudder to Dara while he was overseas.
He slowly paced the hallway outside of the lab on the second floor of the massive, busy hospital. He’d made them breakfast, and by nine a.m., he and Dara had driven over to the Alexandria hospital. Dara had practically dragged him into the elevator, flustered, worried, and excited. Matt hid his smile because she was anxious and wanted so badly to be pregnant. He wanted it for her, too.
Never Enough: Delos Series, 3B1 Page 12
