Then Brooke came face-to-face with Rafe . . . and everything else faded away.
He stood unmoving, his back to the wall. He wore jeans and a short-sleeved blue T-shirt that hung on his spare frame. He was so still, only his eyes moving, flickering as he observed everyone in the room. Scrutinized them as if trying to decide which of them would be the first to try to kill him. The room was full, but around him a small space had formed, as if he gave off a force field to hold them away . . . or as if whatever had happened to him was contagious and everyone was afraid to get close for fear they’d catch it.
Brooke looked from him to Nonna.
Nonna met her gaze and her eyes filled with tears.
Brooke looked back at Rafe, only to discover he was staring at her with such a world of pain and longing....
Brooke’s mother stepped between them. “Honey, try this. It’s Sarah’s fruitcake and you know how much you love it.”
Brooke stared at her, uncomprehending. Then her brain snapped back to normal; she smiled into her mother’s worried face and said, “Thank you, Mom. It smells great!” Taking the cake, she ate a few bites, and tried the cookies and the prosciutto and the marinated artichokes. She drank wine and sang Christmas carols by the piano. She showed off her engagement ring to her cadre of envious school friends, and only once looked toward Rafe, when she saw Eli approach his brother and speak to him, and the two left the room together. Nothing about Brooke’s behavior indicated she had a thought other than enjoying her last Christmas in Bella Valley without the man she would marry in the spring.
But when she got home, she lay on the bed, feeling alone as she had never been in her whole life.
She hurt. She waited.
And she listened.
Two hours later, when the spray of gravel hit her window, she was up and leaning out, offering her hand to Rafe. “Come in,” she said.
“I can’t.”
She didn’t know why he couldn’t, but his voice was so flat and dead, she believed him. So she wiggled through the window in her flannel Christmas pajamas and fell into his waiting arms.
Chapter 38
Rafe held Brooke tightly as he carried her to the alley and into the shadows where he’d parked Nonna’s Mustang. She stretched down, opened the passenger door, and he put her in. She watched him walk around to the driver’s side, a shadow stealing through the dark night. The car door opened softly, the lock almost muted by his care. He slid in and started the engine. And he drove. He drove for an hour, up into the foothills, then higher into the mountains, foot on the accelerator as if he were trying to escape something. To escape himself.
Finally, at three o’clock in the morning, she put her hand on his arm. “Stop and tell me about it.”
He pulled off the paved highway onto a small, rutted dirt road that went nowhere. When they broke out of the trees and into a mountain meadow, and the Mustang’s front wheels sank into the mud, he stopped the car.
They sat looking at the stars—so many stars, a hundred million stars in a clear black sky—and he began to talk.
“Eight of us. We were supposed to blow up the rebels’ munitions storage, the biggest in the Afghan mountains. It took us weeks to get into position. We went in at precisely the right time. Everything went perfectly. . . . There’s a saying in the military: If your attack is going too well, you’re walking into an ambush. We were. They caught us. Put us in cages where we could see the ammunition we were supposed to destroy. Held us for ransom. I knew that wouldn’t work—the U.S. military doesn’t ransom their people.” His voice was flat and hard and very quiet, as if even in this isolated spot, he feared being overheard. “They knew it wouldn’t work, either, but they also knew they could make us give video confessions, and those confessions would play on the Internet and the media would give them attention.”
“I didn’t see any videos online.” During the fall semester, she had been studying hard, but she had glanced at the headlines occasionally. She would have noticed Rafe’s face.
“Because we beat one another up.”
“What?” She had meant to keep her voice gentle and without inflection, but that surprised her.
“They wanted to show us freely confessing we were spies, so we punched one another enough to cause some ugly bruises. Pissed them off, so they stopped feeding us or giving us water, which pretty much worked to make us willing to do anything they wanted.” Rafe seemed to think that would surprise her, so he added, “Yeah, really. Without water, I’d do almost anything. But bodies don’t heal without hydration, so it was a stupid move on their parts. We lost one guy then and there, Walter Davis from North Bend, Indiana. He got an infection and died. I think he died because he hated being underground all the time.”
“They kept you underground?”
“In the caves, yeah. We lost Harou Yoshida from Honolulu, Hawaii, and Madison Dominguez from San Diego, California, because those two motherfuckers, you know, wouldn’t shut up.” Rafe’s voice almost smiled. “They were always ragging on the guards about their hygiene and whether they . . . Well, those two guys were gross. Funny gross. Fuck, man. Those guys. There was nothing they wouldn’t say.”
Rafe had never sworn like that. Not in front of Brooke. But she didn’t think he’d even noticed. “How did you lose them?”
Abruptly grim, Rafe said, “The guards got mad and shot them. Left them there. That’s when the rest of us got sick. You know, you can’t leave two bodies rotting in the cages with living human beings without some horrible disease popping up. When the guards finally came to haul the bodies away, we were all so sick, dysentery, I think. We were dead men. None of us were going to last another hour. So they walked in, put down their rifles, threw a tarp over the bodies, and started to drag them away. If I’d, um . . .” He stopped and rolled down the window, thrust his head and shoulders out, and breathed deeply, trembling.
It was a cold night. The heat generated by the car was gone. Steam had crept up the windows, enclosing them in the small interior of the Mustang.
And he was hanging out, gasping for breath.
Now she understood why he couldn’t come inside her bedroom. He didn’t want to be inside anywhere.
She didn’t blame him.
She pulled her legs up on the seat, tucked the hems of her pajama pants over her bare toes, hugged herself to create warmth, and watched him until he shook like a dog and pulled his head in.
“Sorry.” He sounded more like Rafe than he had all night. “Just had a moment. I shouldn’t be filling you in on all the details, anyway. They’re disgusting and uncivilized. Nobody wants to know. They just want me to get better.”
So many things she could say. So many approaches she could take.
She settled on breaking the tension. “Let’s have some respect. I’m not that civilized.”
“Really? You’re not?” He sounded wryly polite.
“When there’s a thunderstorm, I go out and walk in the rain without an umbrella. I could be dead in an instant, but I defy the lightning!”
“Whoa.”
“Exactly. Politically correct I am not. One time when I was eight, I threw the cat into the sprinkler.”
“You’re out of control.” He gave her a proper amount of awe.
“Yes, I am. Best of all, in my freshman year at college, we had a hard freeze and my whole dormitory went out and jumped in the fountain.”
“Did you have your clothes on?” He sounded stiff and perturbed.
“My sweat suit!”
He cackled. There was no other word for it. He definitely cackled. “I am now fully respectful of your feral side.”
“That’s right, ba-bee.” She was cold enough to shiver in little shudders.
He noticed at last, and rolled up the window. “Wait a minute.” He got out, went around and opened the trunk, and came back with the ragged quilt Nonna kept in the back. For picnics, she always said, but long ago, in high school, Brooke and Rafe had more than once made love under its protection.
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He got back in and held it close to his chest. “Give me a minute; I’ll warm it for you.”
Brooke knew she would give him as many minutes as he needed. She’d stay here all night if he wanted her to, and with the front wheels stuck in the mud, they might be here part of the day, too.
She spared a thought for her mother’s frustration; then he wrapped her in the blanket and she forgot her mother. Offering him a corner, she asked, “Don’t you want to share?”
“I don’t feel the cold,” he said. “In the caves . . . it was hot down there.”
“All right.” Her shivering was easing. “So anyway, tell me the rest of the story. The guards were dragging out the bodies and you—”
“If I’d been somewhere where I wasn’t lying on the ground in my own feces, I don’t think I would have been able to get up. All I can recall is this upswell of vomit and anger. I leaped up and grabbed the rifle. I remember the looks on their faces when they heard the round go into the chamber and turned and saw me on my feet—it was pure I’m-going-to-hell terror. Don’t kid yourself, Brooke. I’m not a good person. I was glad they were shitting themselves.”
“Did you shoot them?”
“I shot them both.”
She looked down into the dim reaches of the car, thinking that someone like her—a female college student with no experience with violence—shouldn’t be so ferociously joyful about his brutality.
But she couldn’t lie. “I’m glad, too. What did you do next?”
“First, I grabbed their canteens and drank their water. Wrong! Because the shot echoed all over that cave and every damned insurgent heard it. But I was crazed. The second thing I did was what we’d been sent to do. I set a charge under the munitions.”
Her eyes opened wide. She stared through the dark at his faint silhouette. “But . . . you were in there. Weren’t you likely to blow yourself up?”
“Like I said. Crazed. Then I went back into the cages, grabbed our commander, and dragged him out. He was dead.”
“What was his name?” She asked because saying the names seemed to mean something to him.
He hesitated, then said, “He was Colonel Federico Martínez from San Antonio, Texas.”
“A good commander?”
“The best.” Rafe’s voice grew thick with emotion. He controlled it and continued. “Next I dragged out Alex White from Boston, Massachusetts, and Isaac Berkowitz from New York, New York.”
“Wasn’t anybody shooting at you or anything?”
“They kept running at us, shooting like crazy. Then when I screamed like a madman and pointed at the charge under the ammunition, they would run. And scream like little girls. I liked that part.”
Screaming seemed like a good idea to Brooke. “How did you get out?”
“I wasn’t thinking right—you had that figured out, didn’t you?”
She nodded. Her sense of dread was growing.
“The good part of that is that I didn’t set the charge right, so when it blew, it blew part of the munitions out the front of the cave. Took out every one of their men, all their computers, all their weapons, all their tactical plans. I don’t know all it took, but it left the way free for me to carry out Berkowitz and White.” Rafe rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “Too bad we’d been in there a couple of months, so it was winter outside. I dumped them in the snow and went back to finish the job. I’ll bet ninety percent of the munitions were left, and when they blew, the whole hillside lifted and settled, and the caves, miles of them, collapsed.”
“But you were outside in the snow with nothing.” She was telling him something he knew, but still, she couldn’t comprehend the magnitude of his insanity.
“Took our troops about two hours to come in with helicopters to clean out any remaining nests of insurgents.” Rafe’s voice strengthened. “I managed to get their attention. White died. Berkowitz and I survived.”
“How’s Berkowitz?”
“Better than me.” Rafe’s voice grew hushed again. “But that’s not saying much. I just . . . I can’t sleep. If I sleep, I see them. The guards. My friends. The bodies. I can’t stay inside long. If I do, I start clawing at the walls. Sometimes I jump up in a panic because I need to blow up those munitions. And I remember those guards I shot, and I’m so glad. So glad.”
Brooke had taken a psychology class her freshman year of college. She was so not qualified to deal with this. On the other hand, she knew without a doubt that no one understood him more. “Rafe. You did survive. You completed your mission. And you brought back a man alive who counted himself as dead. More important”—she got up on her knees, and although he was nothing more than a dim outline, she faced him—“you saved yourself. Right now, that might not feel like anything important to you, but to your grandmother and your brothers, and maybe even your father and mother . . . they want you here to talk to, to eat with, to laugh with—”
“What about you?”
Leaning forward, she cupped his chin. “I couldn’t live in a world without you.”
Chapter 39
The blanket slithered to the floor.
Rafe plunged his fingers into Brooke’s hair, pulled her mouth to his, and kissed her, and she tasted his despair, his anguish, his need. She wanted to cry for him. She wanted to live for him, and make him live for her.
She got up on her knees and leaned into him, across the emergency brake that dug into her thigh, her chest against his.
He slid his hands down her back, under her elastic waistband, and pushed her flannel pajamas off her butt. She struggled to kick them off her legs and suck his tongue into her mouth at the same time.
His palms rode up and down her thighs. He made groaning sounds deep in his throat.
She pushed his T-shirt up, unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants.
Now he was fighting his way out from under the steering wheel. He tore his mouth from hers, pushed his seat all the way back, leaned across her and down, and pushed her seat back—and when he came up, she’d managed to unbutton her top and he got a faceful of her breasts.
She didn’t know how he did it, got from his side of the car to her, but suddenly his pants were down around his knees and he was on top of her. Then he was inside her, desperate for her, filling her while she cried with the joy of knowing he was here and alive.
Placing her feet on the dash, she lifted herself into his thrusts, over and over, dragging him back to life, forcing him to be with her in this moment.
He kissed her, over and over, her cheeks, her lips, the top of her head. His tears dripped on her as he began to thrust faster and faster, as his climax neared, as the reality of breath and love and freedom burgeoned in him, in them, overwhelming them both.
Then he came. She came.
And for a few precious minutes, he was her love once more.
The next night, Brooke went out the window.
The night after, Rafe came in the bedroom.
The night after that, Kathy Petersson caught them doing the wild thing.
The next day, Rafe left Bella Valley without a word, returning to the psychiatry hospital for treatment, breaking Brooke’s heart again.
She ended her engagement anyway.
She waited for Rafe to come and get her.
That never happened.
She considered going to get him.
But this time, he was the one who had left her. He had gone back to the military. That was a message, wasn’t it? A message she should heed?
Rafe’s ghost face faded off Nonna’s dining room wall. Brooke came back to the present; the memories still made her feel weepy and foolish.
How many times would he get it wrong?
How many times would she?
At the sound of footsteps behind her, she jumped.
“Hey, have you found anything?” Rafe put his hands on her arms, rubbed them up and down. “I didn’t. Nothing in the cellar.”
“I was playing with these bottles, trying to think where your g
randfather would put Massimo’s wine.” Brooke looked around the dining room. “This house is so simple, yet it’s been added onto how many times? Over how many years? Plus, Nonno was a builder and an electrician. Massimo’s wine could be anywhere in here.”
“Nonno ran the resort until the dementia took him and Noah got the job. The bottle could be in the wine cellar down at the resort, too.”
“Oh, God.” She turned to face him. “This is the biggest mess I could possibly imagine.”
Rafe pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked, then shook it as if trying to jiggle out a message. “No, there are bigger messes.”
She would start feeling sentimental about him; then he would annoy her like this. “You check that phone every fifteen minutes. What are you waiting to hear?”
“Nothing you need to be anxious about.”
Secretive. No communication skills. What was she thinking, feeling maudlin about Rafe? “I don’t need to be anxious because I wouldn’t understand your concerns? Or because I wouldn’t give a shit? Or because—”
“This isn’t a concern. This is a problem. Okay, listen.” He lowered his voice. “I left my team in Kyrgyzstan dealing with a kidnapping, and I haven’t heard from them since shortly after I got here. I’m worried.”
He seemed suddenly to get that he should talk to her, and she wondered what had turned on the light in his head. “You think something has gone wrong?”
“It’s mountainous. It’s still winter there. The territory is hostile. We were rescuing an American pilot, a female. I wish I were there. I have to be here. I’m not doing that well handling this situation.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize . . . All this time, you’ve been worried about your team? And the mission?”
“I work the case I’m on, and in this instance, my case is finding Nonna’s attacker—and the mystery keeps growing. But yes, I am concerned. They’re good people. They’ve been with me a long time. And the pilot—I promised to do everything I could to get her out. I simply wish I could be there personally.” He took a breath. “Now, tell me, how are you doing?”