Sometime in the night, he woke to find that the rain had stopped, and it wasn’t fully dark anymore. Not dawn, either. Then it got dark again, he heard somebody coming up the stairs, and he sat up fast.
Weapon.
Downstairs.
He was already out of bed when he heard Lily’s voice. “Power came back on.”
Oh. That was the other reason he’d woken, then. Because she’d been gone, and he’d felt her missing. Also, Tobias was downstairs. As he got back into bed, feeling a little embarrassed, Lily slid in beside him, wearing something long and silky-cool. Pity, he thought, and then she moved closer, curled up beside him with her hand on his chest, and relaxed. Something twisted in his heart, or maybe it untwisted. He held her, kissed her hair, and slept.
When he woke again, it actually was morning, and she was standing beside him. Once again, he’d let himself relax further than he ever let himself. And something smelled good.
“Coffee,” she said, setting it on his bedside table. “Helpful start after a short night, maybe. No milk and no sugar, because you don’t like the sweet stuff.”
“Mm.” He sat up against the padded headboard and smiled at her. “I may have changed my mind about that.” She was wearing leggings and a stretchy top again. No makeup, and she looked so soft and pretty. She was still relaxed herself, then. “How long have you been up?”
“Twenty minutes or so. I let Tobias out and gave him some water.”
“Thanks.” He looked at her more closely. “Leg hurting?”
She sat down on the bed beside him like she wanted to be closer, and that was good news. He put his hand on her thigh and worked the muscles some, and she let him do it. “Hurts a little, yeah,” she said, and didn’t sigh, even though he could tell she wanted to. “I stretched it. It’s getting better. I put your clothes in the laundry with mine,” she went on before he could say anything about that. “But they’ll take a while to dry. I just realized that I’ve got absolutely nothing for you to wear. Even the robes would be ridiculous. Guess you’ll have to stay in bed until your things dry.”
“Nah.” He swung his legs out of bed and stood. He felt good. He felt amazing, actually. “I’ll borrow a towel, drive myself home like a surfer, or maybe just like an Aussie, get changed, and come back and make you breakfast. Have you checked on the animals yet?”
A hesitation. He said, “It’s all right to ask me, you know. It’s all right to think I could help you, and that I would.”
“It’s stupid,” she said. “I’ve put off looking. They’re… it’s not about me, so it’s… I’m nervous.”
It didn’t make sense, except that it obviously did to her.
“Wait, then.” He went into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and slung it around himself. “Twenty minutes, and you’ve got your help. With your animals.”
He did take five minutes at home, once he’d thrown on some clothes, fed Tobias, and grabbed some breakfast things, to do a little research. You could say that he hadn’t been engaged in rational thought last night, but this morning, the inconsistencies were too glaring to ignore. Montana or not, he was having trouble believing that lingerie-shop owners knew how to clear a room or make an operations plan like that, let alone everything else he’d seen. There was a big difference between an amateur and a professional, and Lily Hollander had more than goats in her background.
Except that she didn’t. She’d been divorced not even a couple years back. In New York. From an actor whose name Jace only vaguely recognized, but imagined Rafe would know. There were photos of the two of them together, and there was no mistaking that face and body, although she looked softer in the photos. Sweeter. Less guarded. More like she had this morning, when she’d been sitting on the bed and smiling at him.
Well, the divorce had apparently been nasty. That would change a woman, make it harder for her to trust. And she was older now. He didn’t look all that soft himself anymore. That part added up, but the rest still didn’t.
The problem was—whatever she’d told him or hadn’t, he still wanted her, and it was only getting worse. So he took his dog and his bag of groceries and drove back to her house.
She was already in the barnyard. He left the ute in the driveway, jumped down with Tobias, and asked, when he got inside the gate, “’Wait for me’ not clear enough?”
“It was weak of me to want to,” she said.
“Darling, you couldn’t be weak if you tried.” He took a look at the goats. Mamas complaining about not being milked yet, babies playing games. “How about this? You milk, and I’ll go check out the carnage at the chicken coop and report back, unless you’ve already done it.”
“I’ll take that,” she said, and smiled at him. Cautious still, but she’d said yes.
He gave in to temptation, put a hand behind her head, and gave her a soft kiss right there amidst the livestock. She swayed against him the tiniest bit, and he stood back, smiled down at her, and said, “Thanks.”
“For what?” She sounded a little breathless. He liked it.
“For letting me help you.”
It didn’t take him long to find the victims from the night before. One opossum laid out where Tobias had thrown it, a hen still clamped in its stiffening jaws. Nothing else dead in the vicinity, but when Jace let the survivors of the carnage out into their run and figured out how to open the back of the coop to take a good look, he found white and orange feathers scattered in enough profusion to suggest something of a massacre. Most of the eggs in the nesting area were broken, and a few hens looked seriously lacking in the tail-feather department as well.
“Good work,” he told the hens, opening the door to the wide world for them after taking a head count. “Survival of the fittest, ladies.” Then he unhooked their water container, carried it and the feed tray back into the shed, and told Lily, who was just getting Tinkerbelle up onto the milking stand, “You have seven live chickens, all looking like they had a bit of an exciting night.”
Her hands stilled in the act of wiping down the udder. “Three lost,” she said. “Could have been worse.”
“Not a bad survival rate at all.” He unwound the hose, rinsed out the water tub, and refilled it and the grain bin. “Which makes you wonder why whoever it was bothered. Why tell you the animals were in danger? You’d never have checked, and this morning, you’d probably be chicken-free.”
“Because,” she said, starting in on her milking, “They wanted me running around in the rain, in the dark.”
“What I thought at the time,” he said. “Terrorism. It’s about disrupting your life and your peace of mind. It’s not about making you angry, it’s about making you afraid.”
“Spoken from experience.”
“Spoken by somebody who knows what happens to prisoners captured by Afghans, and what that knowledge can do to a soldier’s mind. Fear’s a powerful thing.”
“All right,” she said. “I feel much better about the chickens.”
He smiled. “It’s not a competition. It’s an example. Question for you. Do you mind me burying murderer and murderee in the same grave? That going to offend your sensibilities? You’ve got a dead opossum and a dead hen out there, and if you don’t want to see chicken cannibalism, I need to put them underground.”
“My,” she said, “this is an interesting first date. Burying a woman’s chicken.”
He laughed out loud. “Yeah. And I’ll still take it.”
“Then, no.” She was looking more relaxed than she had since he’d got here. “I’m not sentimental about poultry burial. And thanks.”
You need to tell him. The thought was very nearly shrieking at her.
I have to wait for Lily, to make sure she’s all right with me sharing it.
No, she didn’t, and she knew it. If ever a man’s entire self said Trustworthy, it was Jace’s. The real reason was a whole lot simpler. He clearly had some black and white ideas about right and wrong. Kind of like her. And this wouldn’t look right to him at all. It was one thing to impersonate Lily in order to protect her. It was another to have sex with a man who thought you were a different woman. It was the other night all over again, stomping on his heart and his decency, but so much worse.
Then she came back up to the house, and he was already starting to cook breakfast. Wearing another of those slightly snug T-shirts that showed off his muscles, his beard a dark shadow, his hair black, and a smile at sight of her that was so sweet, it took her breath away.
He took the milk bottle from her and handed her a mug of coffee in exchange, and she said, “What are you making? And can I help?” There was Canadian bacon in a frying pan, and it smelled amazing.
He said, “One-man job. Eggs benedict, Aussie style.”
“Oh, man.” She watched him do it. It was a performance, well practiced and carefully choreographed, and in ten minutes more, he’d set two plates on the counter and was coming around to sit beside her. “I never thought of putting it on bread,” she said, taking her first bite. Sauteed spinach, Canadian bacon, poached eggs, and Hollandaise sauce, layered onto thick slabs of toast. “That’s good. Where did you get bread like this here?”
“Made it. And that’s Aussie style again, on the bread instead of that weird thing you have. So-called English muffins.” When she stared at him, he shrugged. Not an embarrassed shrug, either. You’d have to go to some serious effort to threaten Jace’s masculinity. “I’m a writer. I can’t sit and stare at the computer all day. I need to move around occasionally, I don’t always want company, and I don’t like to eat out all the time. Besides, I spent too many years eating ratpacks. Ration packs. Meals ready to eat. If you’d done that, I reckon you’d learn to cook, too. What the Australian army can do to spaghetti Bolognese in a pouch beggars belief.”
She took a sip of coffee and considered that. “Last night, I thought that your ex-wife—what’s her name?”
“Caroline.” He didn’t say it like it bothered him.
“Well, I thought Caroline was nuts. Now, I think she must be certifiable.”
He smiled. “Ah. You have to be a match, though. But for the sake of research—what specifically did you think she shouldn’t have left behind? If you tell me, I’ll do it again.”
She put a hand on her chest, then laughed at herself. “Whoa. You don’t get any worse, do you? It was all good. You know it was. But when you stopped.” She sobered, looked into those blue eyes, and told him, because she wanted him to know. “When I hurt, and you felt it, and you stopped. You made me feel…” She had to stop, swallow.
“Cared for,” he said quietly. “I hope. Precious.”
She leaned over and put her head against his chest like a completely different woman, a woman with no barriers, and his arm came around her like it had to be there. He didn’t try to kiss her. He just held her.
“Yes,” she said. It was easier to say from down here. “That was it.”
He stroked a hand over her hair. “Yeah. And you made me feel just that good, too. Just that lucky. But if my ex was crazy, what was yours? I can’t imagine a man letting you go. You know my whole story. I don’t know much of yours.”
She sat up again. “I don’t know your whole story. Not even close. I don’t know why you know how to milk goats, for one thing.”
It was a diversion, and he saw it. He didn’t pursue it, but his eyes were guarded again. Because she’d let the tender moment pass by instead of hanging onto it like any rational woman would have. Instead of hanging onto him. “I’m going to tell you,” he said. “Call it setting an example. I learnt how from a boy. An Afghani named Samir. Eleven, twelve years old, and missing a leg from a land mine. His goats’ milk wasn’t as good as yours, but we weren’t too choosy. Cheekiest little fella you ever saw, and he could milk a goat in five minutes flat. Taught me to do it for the fun of it, I reckon. Some people can find fun wherever they are, and others can’t find it anywhere at all. He was one of the lucky ones.”
“I guess the camp isn’t there anymore,” she said after a moment. “Wherever that was.”
“No. And neither is he. He’s dead.”
“Oh.” It wasn’t like she hadn’t had an idea of all the things he must have been through, and still, it shook her. “How?”
A long pause. “He had an uncle in another village who was Taliban. Or so they said. Reckon they made an example of him.”
“What happened to the uncle?”
He just looked at her.
She said, “You killed him.”
“Yes. At least I like to think it was me. All within the rules of engagement, so don’t get excited. That’s the job. Was the job.”
“Are you sorry you left?” That was the question, wasn’t it? “That you… had to leave?”
He took another bite of his breakfast, but it didn’t look like a delaying tactic. It just looked like he was thinking. Like he was calm. “No. That part of my life is over. I wanted to remember what the rest of life looked like, maybe. Better to quit before all your softer feelings are burnt out of you, I’ve decided. See if they’re just lying dormant after the drought, or if they’re actually gone.”
“I’d say yours are there.”
“I hope so.” He had a hand on one of her curls. Not tugging, just like he wanted to feel the softness for himself. “How about yours? I have a feeling they might’ve been through some dry times as well.”
“Oh.” She tried to be casual. She couldn’t manage it. “Could be. You know. What time is it?”
He looked startled again, but he also looked at his watch. “Eight.”
“I need to clean up here and get ready for the shop.” She got up, grateful in the most cowardly of ways for the chance. “Got a broken window and an insurance report to take care of down there. Your clothes should be dry by now. Thank you for breakfast. And… everything.”
He got the message. He got up himself, helped her carry things into the kitchen, and said, “You’re welcome. For everything. You’ll need me to give you a lift to the shop, as your car’s still there. I can wait for you, or I can come back for you.”
He’d backed straight off, and it disconcerted her. “Uh…” She said. “Wait for me? If you’re all right with that. Half an hour.”
“No worries,” he said. “I’ll do the washing up.”