“An evening stroll.”
She cataloged a wicked-looking knife sheathed at his side and a rifle slung over his back. “Looks to me like you’re on the hunt.”
His gaze made a slow, lingering glide down her body and back up again. “I’m always on the lookout for my next meal.”
Warmth flooded her core, and her breath caught in her chest. Had he just made her lust after him with one glance? Her inner muscles clenched.
“Well.” She cleared her throat. “Point your bullets that way”—her finger indicated the opposite direction of the center—“until I reach the parking lot.”
She set off down the access drive, aware of her every movement, certain that his all-seeing emerald gaze had zeroed in on the slight tremor in her hand.
Gravel crunched behind her, then beside her.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Strolling with you.”
“Are you trying to weird me out?”
“I’m not the one who sat on a cliff for hours to watch someone camp.”
Ears burning, she said, “Please tell me this isn’t your male protective instinct kicking in.”
“And if it is?”
“I’d say knock it off. I’ve got enough testosterone dogging my heels already.”
“Being protected isn’t a bad thing.”
“Protected and smothered are two different things.”
“Ah.”
They lapsed into an easy silence while listening to cicadas ratchet up their evening song.
“When do you sleep?” he asked.
“What?”
“Plant surveys during the day and plant propagation at night. You don’t seem to have an off button.”
Kingston Farms in her spare time.
She shrugged. “I sleep when I’m tired.”
“Did you receive bad news tonight?”
She halted and stared up into his too-handsome face. The onset of a full beard coated his cheeks and chin, and his long eyelashes seemed to go on for miles. He was so damn compelling—until you reached his eyes. Those beautiful gemstones were hard and haunted.
“For someone who prefers to commune with nature, you’re rather chatty tonight.”
“I assumed talking made you feel more comfortable while being alone with me. I’d be happy to stop.”
That he would recognize her wariness and try to assuage it did funny things to her insides.
“The news I received caught me off guard, and I can’t quite figure it out.”
“Maybe I can help, if you care to share.”
“Not tonight. I need to think on it some more.” She changed the subject. “Are you from around here?”
“Bryson City.”
“Beautiful town. My brother, Shep, used to spend a lot of time there. He’s into rock climbing, kayaking, zip-lining, all the adrenaline junky sports.”
“Shep,” he mused. “Shep Kingston?”
“Yes. You know him?”
“He and I used to work for the same outdoor adventure company. Good man, your brother.”
Not everyone got Shep. Only a special few tolerated his quirks, and fewer still accepted his Asperger’s. That Coen did both spoke loads about his character.
“Shep’s a pain in the patoot, like the rest of my brothers. But no one, including me, can resist his genuine frankness.”
“I’ll take frankness over bullshit any day.”
She studied him out of the corner of her eye. “I bet your family was glad to have you back home.”
His eyes shuttered.
“They don’t know you’ve returned to the States.”
“My family is dead.”
Her chest clenched. “I’m so sorry, Coen. I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories.”
“They’ve been gone a while.”
When she opened her mouth to ask what happened, she shoved her water canister against her lips and drank until the compulsion disappeared. He already thought her too curious and would probably tell her to mind her own business if she dared to pry.
She rerouted to a safer topic. “What about hometown friends? Extended family?”
“If I could go home, hug each of them, eat a home-cooked meal, reminisce about the old days, and sleep in a soft bed, I would’ve visited days ago.”
She counted to five. “But?”
“They’ll treat me like I’m a damn hero. Parties, calls for war stories, requests to see my scars, adoring looks.”
“You don’t like to be the center of attention?”
“Once, I would have preened like a peacock.” He rubbed a hand back and forth across his neck. “Now I can’t. I just—can’t.”
Question after question after question churned in her mind like a spin top out of control. If she’d been having this conversation with one of her brothers, she would’ve probed deeper. Probably the same way Coen’s friends would’ve pushed him for information.
But an ill-used and rusty sense of social grace kept her mouth shut. She tried to view the world through his eyes. Eyes that had likely seen far too much pain and fear and hopelessness. All the horrors of war. Were those the images that haunted him? That ripped him from sleep? That would make him lift his fists to Heaven?
When they hit the outer edge of the parking lot, she paused. “Thank you for the stroll.”
“No admonishment for not visiting my hometown?”
She pushed up her glasses. “I think you’ve earned the right to put yourself and your needs first.”
His gaze sharpened on her a moment before his attention drifted down to her mouth, lingering there for a breath-stealing eternity. Then his eyes roamed back up to meet hers, and she saw his intent. Saw his unmasked, raw need.
Swallowing down her answering desire, she forced her body to break away from his visual hold. “Good night, Coen.”
He said nothing, just stood there and watched her walk away.
She peered into her rearview mirror, expecting to see a wall of darkness where he last stood. But the warrior hadn’t moved. Not a single inch.
A shiver skittered down her neck, and she wondered what kind of sleeping bear her curiosity had awoken.
20
Smack!
Kendra’s head snapped to the side from the force of her interrogator’s blow.
“What are you doing in Ecuador?”
The corporal spat a mouthful of blood on the dusty floor before leveling one half-swollen eye on her captor. The other eye was already swollen shut.
“Birdwatching,” she said in a scratchy, defiant voice.
Another blow.
Sergeant First Class Coen Monroe fought against his bindings. A fist hammered him in the ribs, doubling him over.
Their captors thought forcing them to observe each other’s torture would break them. But they had no way of knowing he and his team had been trained for this exact scenario. Kendra knew he would not save her by providing information to their country’s enemy, as he knew she would not.
Now three days into their torture, he prayed for strength.
“What is your mission?”
Her lip curled. “Counting snakes.”
The interrogator’s eyes sharpened, and he seemed to be mulling over her words. Not all cultures grasped the fine art of American snark, especially not Kendra’s.
At six feet, Kendra stood level with most of the men on their team. Add in graduating cum laude from the University of Illinois and street smarts gained from growing up on the south side of Chicago and the Army had one lethal Delta Force operator.
He tested his restraints once again. But the plastic ties at his wrists and ankles held tight. He locked eyes with Kendra, sending his strength down their visual line.
For all his tactical abilities, he couldn’t find a way out of this hellhole. He couldn’t even get out of this motherfucking chair. Three days without food, water, or sleep. They sat in their own filth.
Soon the interrogator would tire of Kendra and he would come for him. So
on she would get a break.
But not yet.
The bastard put his knife against her cheek and sliced.
“No!”
* * *
Coen’s face hit the corner of something hard, and his outstretched fingers slid against a cool, silken surface. He tried blinking open his sleep-drugged eyes, but the nightmare’s scarlet fingers wouldn’t release him.
Slick with sweat, his contorted body lay heaving, gasping, aching to end it all, when a hushed feminine voice filled the night air.
* * *
“Charlotte’s brisk pace slowed. A man was slumped on the pavement between her shop and the boarded-up bakery next door. He sat with one leg stretched out across the walkway, the other bent at an angle. The brim of his hat protected his face from identification. So, too, did the long black woolen coat and matching muffler around his neck.”
* * *
Steadying his breathing, he concentrated on the familiar, soothing voice and dragged himself closer to its comforting net.
* * *
“The tension in Charlotte’s shoulders returned in full force. Even though she could not identify him, she knew what he wasn’t—a beggar. Everything about him was too refined for him to be living in the streets. She glanced around, checking the evening shadows as best she could with only lamplight to aid her. Anderson’s lending library, Patterson’s coffee shop, Gertrude’s lace boutique, Tilly’s former bakery—they all stood silent and free of loitering troublemakers and customers. If she cried out for help, would the shopkeepers hear her from their snug, upstairs apartments?”
* * *
Images of Kendra and the guards faded back into a shallow pocket of his mind. But the guilt of Coen’s failure sat like a vise across his chest. His eyelids fluttered open once before shutting again. Tired. He was so damn tired.
He reached out, resting his fingers against the tent, close to the voice, and listened.
21
“Good morning.”
Riley peeled her eyes away from the box she was stuffing with this month’s selection of fresh vegetables to find her brother, Way, entering the farm’s cold storage building.
“Morning.”
“What’s wrong with your voice?”
“Too much talking yesterday.”
“Too much talking or too many questions?” he asked in an annoying tone that only a brother could master.
“Is there a difference?”
“For you, yes. You’re not a conversationalist. More of a listener and asker-er.”
“I don’t think that’s a word.”
“It is now.” He pulled folded cardboard from a shelf and moved to a workbench behind her to assemble it into a shipping box. “Don’t you normally come here in the afternoons?”
“Not today.” She took a sip of water, having no intention of sharing her late-night activities with Way. Although she had always felt a greater kinship with him than her other brothers, she would keep this story to herself.
After spending several hours reading to Coen, her throat hurt, her eyes were gritty, and her butt was sore. Thank goodness she’d had the presence of mind to bring a mosquito net, or she’d have to add itching to her list of morning-after complaints.
Even so, she would do it all over again. Who was Kendra? What had happened to her? What had Coen witnessed?
“What can you tell me about PTSD?” she asked.
The air stopped moving behind her, and she waited for him to redirect the conversation like he always did when confronted with questions about his military experience.
“It exists.”
Keeping her back to him, she said, “I know it does. I’ve read enough about it online to fill a book. But I wanted to know what you thought about it.”
“Why the curiosity?”
She sent him an incredulous look over her shoulder. “Are you serious?”
“Good point. Stupid question.” He picked peppers and cucumbers from slanted, square bins and set them in his box. “Why so curious now?”
If she told Way about her encounters with Coen, he would forbid her from seeing him again, which she would ignore, which would force him to confront Coen. Way might even compel him off the property, without consulting the Steeles, if he thought it was the only way to protect her.
No, she wouldn’t tell him about her time with Coen.
Way sighed. “Post-traumatic stress affects every combat service member to a certain degree. Sometimes bad things happen to them, and other times they’re the ones seeing and doing bad things. A blessed few can compartmentalize their experiences and move on with their lives. The rest—” He cut off for several aching seconds. “The rest cope with their memories in destructive ways.”
Riley half turned to stare at her brother’s back, wondering which category he fit in.
“I’m not a doctor, but the way I see it is that post-traumatic stress only becomes a disorder when you allow it to rule your life.”
“How do you mean?”
“Drinking and fighting too much. Losing your family, friends, and job to unchecked anger.”
“What if the memories attack when you’re at your most vulnerable?”
Way slowly turned to face her. His penetrating gaze studied her as if she were a topographical map and he was charting out the best route to take.
“Vulnerable how?”
She assessed the answer and deemed it safe to share. “While sleeping.”
His attention sharpened, creating a deep V in his forehead. “What happened in Costa Rica?”
The question hit her like a shovel to the head. “What?”
“You never explained why you returned sooner than anticipated.”
“That’s not true. The experiment failed— I came home.”
His expression turned skeptical. “You spent years in a mountainous jungle and have yet to share a single fond memory about the experience.” He leaned against the table and braced his palms on the ledge behind him. “I find that odd.”
“What I find odd is your selective memory. I’ve shared plenty of stories of my time in Central America.”
“When you came home for visits, yes. But not one story since you’ve returned for good.”
She opened her mouth to contradict his statement, but she couldn’t come up with a single example.
Her brother wasn’t done.
“For years, you work your ass off, day and night, studying hard and saving money so that you could one day run off and study a group of prehistoric people and their plants.”
“Indigenous people.”
He waved off her correction. “You achieved your goal and appeared happier than I’d ever seen you. So why did you clam up?”
Unable to withstand his too-perceptive regard, she resumed filling her box. “What’s left to tell? I don’t have anything to show for my time in Central America, except my ability to speak fluent Spanish.”
“Did you witness something distressing?”
“No. My time in Costa Rica was near perfect.”
A small hole was burned into the back of her head by his considerable, focused attention. She’d made a mistake in asking him about PTSD. But she’d needed to better understand Coen’s haunting cries of torment.
The thought of him alone while warring with his memories each night had propelled her into those woods. She’d only intended to check on him, but after she’d arrived, she couldn’t bring herself to leave.
So she’d pulled out her mosquito net and latest reading material, a historical mystery about a mismatched pair of sleuths, from her bag and began reading by book light.
An hour later, his first whimper carried through the nylon tent. A muffled thrashing followed, and then his first heart-wrenching plea.
Kendra.
Riley had read enough articles about combat veterans nearly killing their significant others when they attempted to shake their loved ones out of the throes of a nightmare. So she’d remained frozen and unsure, hating that she didn’t know h
ow to help him.
When his screams intensified, her helplessness became a physical pain. Staring down at her book, she’d alternated between prayer and tears until the pages blurred and wobbled.
On the verge of storming into his tent, consequences be damned, she heard her dad’s words with eerie clarity.
“Sometimes your mother’s work would leave her so stressed out by the end of the day that the only way she could silence her mind was by listening to me read. Something about the cadence of my voice lulled her to sleep in a way no sleeping pill could.”
Drying her cheeks, she had begun to read aloud. Tentatively at first, and then her voice had grown in volume as her spine straightened with determination.
When the tent’s side had bulged outward near her head, she’d swallowed back a shriek. Her breaths had scraped against her throat as she stared at the imprint of his fingertips against the thin nylon barrier.
Readjusting her book light, she had resumed reading, keeping her voice low and calm and measured. Silence had extended over the tent, so she’d slowed her words until they faded into nothing.
A guttural growl had preceded metal crashing against metal. Picking up where she’d left off, she read to him. Read to him until her words had been nothing more than a rusty whisper. Read to him until she heard him stir just before dawn broke over the ridge.
Way interrupted her thoughts. “If not something in Costa Rica, who has you curious about PTSD?”
Way’s question pulled her back to her box of vegetables.
Glancing over her shoulder, she wondered how he’d coped with the “bad things” he’d seen, done, and experienced while in the service. Even before he’d gone off to war, he’d always been her larger-than-life brother.
People followed him. Their age, experience, or socioeconomic status made no difference. From his preschool friends in the classroom to his high school football teammates on the field to his mowing crew on his first job to his military unit inside the battle zone, he had led and inspired countless individuals. Individuals who loved him for his decisive but fair nature.
Searing Need Page 8
