The Unsung Hero (22 page)
For a dork, anyway.
“Well, thanks,” Mallory said. “I think you’re completely full of shit, but thanks.”
David laughed. “Now, how did I know you were going to say that?”
She laughed, too. It was funny, his smile was nearly as nice as Brandon’s. And when he looked at her like that, gazing into her eyes . . .
“Ditto all that from me, too, babe.” Brandon grabbed her hand and spun her in a circle, away from David. “I’m definitely the copresident of your fan club.”
David cleared his throat. “Maybe we should get started.”
“Absolutely. Once we start, it’ll really warm up,” Brandon told her, waggling his eyebrows, his smile promising heat of a completely different kind.
She tried to pull her hand free, but Brandon held on to her tightly, despite the slippery oil.
“Have you done any acting?” David asked her.
“A little.” Mallory thought of all those times she’d walked through the halls of the high school, pretending that she didn’t give a damn what the other kids said behind her back. Sure, a little—provided ninety-nine percent of her life could be defined as “a little.”
“Nightshade—the character you’re helping me with—is seventeen years old,” David told her. “She’s still in high school, and when she’s her alter ego, Nicki, she’s . . . well, a loner, I guess. With the exception of another character, named Hubert, she doesn’t have any friends.”
Well, hey, that shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for her.
“How old are you, anyway?” Brandon asked.
“Eighteen.”
“So doesn’t that mean . . . You just graduated, right? Congratulations.” Brandon looked over at David and grinned. “She’s eighteen and she just graduated. Great news, huh?”
“I thought you were in a hurry to get out of here tonight,” David said evenly.
“Me? No way. I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be than right here, wearing my lovely little Speedo, flexing my abs, playing superheroes with my new friend Mallory.” Brandon rubbed Mallory’s arm, as if trying to warm her up. His thumb accidentally brushed against her breast. “Let’s do this before the woman freezes to death.”
Mallory stepped slightly away from him. “What’s Nightshade’s deal?”
“She’s got super X-ray night vision,” Brandon told her. “And she can fly or something, right?”
“She can completely dematerialize,” David corrected him. “What she does is kind of like what the transporter does on Star Trek, except she can change the state of her molecules at will. She doesn’t need a machine to do it. When she’s dematerialized, she can move more quickly from place to place, which, yeah, is kind of like flying. But when she gets to her destination, it takes about an hour for her to rematerialize. And while she’s rematerializing, she can’t fight. She’s got none of her powers—except her ability to see in the dark. She’s completely vulnerable.”
Mallory knew all about being vulnerable.
“When she’s materialized, she’s a kick-ass fighter,” Brandon volunteered. “Martial arts, you name it—she’s down with it. She’s pretty much invincible. No fear, you know.”
No fear. Now, that would require some acting.
“Okay,” David said, retreating back behind his camera, “let’s do it.”
“Doing it with pleasure,” Brandon murmured, waggling his perfect eyebrows at her again.
The pain pills Charles was taking didn’t blot out things the way a good, stiff drink used to.
With gin, a man could just keep pouring himself drink after drink until the memories faded into nothingness. But his pain medication was rationed, and he couldn’t keep taking pill upon pill.
Well, he supposed he could, but Kelly, for one, would frown upon it.
Kelly.
She’d always tried to please him. Until tonight. Tonight she’d let him have it—everything he deserved. Well, not quite everything. She’d gone easy with the scorn and derision.
With his eyes closed, he could see her at three, at seven, at thirteen, with her bright eyes and her brilliant mind and that impossibly sweet face. But even Kelly, as much as he’d loved her, hadn’t been able to take away the emptiness that rotted him from the inside out. Only gin could numb that, and far too often even the gin wasn’t enough.
Charles kept his eyes shut, breathing as deeply as he could without coughing, pretending he was asleep. After three failed marriages, if there was one thing he was good at, it was pretending he was asleep.
Kelly kissed him on the cheek. “Good night, Daddy. I love you.”
She loved him. After over thirty years of behaving like a son of a bitch, his daughter still somehow managed to love him.
But it still wasn’t enough.
God, what was wrong with him?
He heard the bedroom door close gently, and he opened his eyes, stared up at the ceiling. His room was dimly lit from the night-light Kelly’d left on in the bathroom.
The pill he’d taken an hour ago made him feel as if he were floating—just a little—above the bed. It took the edge off the constant pain, but it didn’t stop the memories.
France.
1944.
The summer after Normandy.
He blinked and suddenly it was bright as midday in his room. He blinked again, and it wasn’t his room any longer. It was Cybele’s kitchen.
He wasn’t eighty and dying, he was twenty-four and healing.
He was doing well. He could shuffle around with a cane. Cybele had taken out the stitches in his side and his shoulder, and he’d taken off his sling just the day before.
Cybele—who thought he was some kind of hero because he went back into that church for some child who’d been left behind. He didn’t know why he’d done it. He couldn’t even remember it clearly. The entire battle was a blur. When he’d felt the bullets hit him, he’d been sure he was dead.
Yet here he was. Still taking up space, although thankfully not space in a Kraut POW camp. Instead, he was the great American hero in this small-town French Resistance headquarters.
Joe Paoletti—Charles was supposed to call him Giuseppe—was one hundred times the man Charles was. He was OSS, for crying out loud, yet no one gave him an extra egg for dinner. And even if they did, he wouldn’t have eaten it. He was too much of a hero not to give it to someone else who needed the nourishment more.
Despite the fact that Joe was an overachiever in the hero department, despite his intensity and too-serious nature, Charles liked the man. How could he not? It would’ve been like disliking Jesus.
It was only a matter of days before Cybele and Joe and the others were to smuggle Charles back to the Allied side of the line.
He couldn’t wait to leave.
Compared to the alternatives—death and its second cousin, life in a Nazi concentration camp—Charles’s life here in Ste.-Hélène was pleasant enough. He didn’t dare set foot outdoors in daylight since Cybele’s house was five doors down from one of the highest-ranking Nazis in town, but that was just as well. For him, as for most of the men, days were mostly lazy. Henri, the two men he’d dubbed Luc Un and Luc Deux, and the others rarely went out in the daytime. They did most of their movement at night, venturing forth only in the shadows, like ghouls or vampires. They’d return to Cybele’s house before dawn and sleep on the kitchen floor until noon or later, hiding out from the Germans.
Cybele and the other women, however, lived two lives. They lived in the nighttime world of the men, often participating in their missions despite the dangers. But they lived in the regular world as well. Cooking for the small army of resistance fighters who dozed on the kitchen floor. Cleaning, doing the laundry. Fishing in the river.
Cybele took in mending to earn money to buy flour for bread. She and the other women didn’t sit still without a sock and a darning needle in their hands.
It seemed ironic—her best customers were the Nazi soldiers who patrolled the streets of the town. Their worn socks appeared in Cybele’s basket again and again.
And Saint Joe was as tireless as Cybele. He spent much of his days—even those when he was up until dawn—out in the small plot of land behind Cybele’s house. He’d turned every workable inch of dirt into a vegetable garden, and he tended it more carefully than a miser would tend to a chestful of gold, coaxing precious food from the soil. For a kid from New York City, he had one hell of a green thumb.
Charles’s French was improving. Or rather, his understanding of what the others were saying was improving. He still couldn’t speak the language, despite Cybele’s gentle tutoring.
She would laugh at his attempts, though. Frankly, it was worth it to fail, just to hear her laughter.
He told her all about Baldwin’s Bridge in English, about lazy summers by the ocean, about his years at Harvard, and she would tell him, in French, about life in Ste.-Hélène before the Nazi invasion.
Her husband and son had been killed by the Germans, and Cybele’s heart was still broken. She’d never said as much, but Charles knew it was so. She’d asked him in turn about Jenny.
It had been one of those hot afternoons a week or so after his arrival when Charles had reached into Cybele’s basket and pulled out a sock and a needle.
Cybele had laughed at him. “Don’t tell me they taught mending at your Harvard University,” she’d teased.
“No such luck. I’m going to have to ask you to teach me to do this,” he’d said, and she’d laughed some more, as if he’d made the biggest joke of the whole war.
“I’m sitting here doing nothing,” he’d insisted, woman’s work be damned. “I’m going out of my mind. Show me how to do this. God knows I eat the bread you make from the money you earn darning these socks.”
Her eyes had grown wide as she realized he wasn’t joking. “Henri and the Lucs refused to learn. It was all I could do to get them to help with the cooking.”
“Henri and the Lucs are asses.” Charles put his finger through the hole in the toe of the sock and waggled it at her. “Get over here and teach me. I want to help.”
Laughing again, she had. She’d had to sit close to show him what to do. Her work-roughened fingers were cool against his, her thigh soft against his uninjured leg. She’d pulled her long hair up into a haphazard pile on her head, and several dark wisps lay against the long, graceful paleness of her neck. Her dress was old and loose and made of patched and faded cotton, and she smelled of cheap soap. She was too skinny from years of giving most of her dinner away to the people using her attic as a temporary stop on their dangerous road to freedom, and her collarbones stood out starkly on her chest.
And when she turned and looked into his eyes from just those few inches away, it had been the closest Charles had ever come, at that point in his life, to a religious experience.
Yet he knew that if she’d walked past him on the streets of Baldwin’s Bridge, he never would have given her a second glance. He never would have taken the time to look into her eyes and see who she really was.
She was everything he wasn’t. Everything Jenny wasn’t.
They’d sat on that bench for quite some time, heads close together, hands occasionally touching as she corrected him, as he tried to make his too-large fingers move like Cybele’s. It was hard as hell to do—women’s work, indeed.
But finally, he’d finished. One clumsily darned sock to six of Cybele’s. And yet she applauded him, her brown eyes sparkling with admiration and warmth.
He took another sock from the basket and doggedly set to work.
He could tell from the way she watched him that she’d expected him to stop after one.
But there were sixty more socks in that basket that needed mending. At his current pace, he’d be done by next Wednesday. But it wasn’t as if he had a whole hell of a lot else to do.
He could feel Cybele watching him, but he didn’t dare let himself look up again. He knew he’d see hero worship in her eyes. And, sure, while he wanted her to like him, he wanted her to like him for the man he really was, not because of some twisted misconception. Maybe he’d been a hero by accident, but those days were behind him now.
“First thing I’m going to do when I get back to Baldwin’s Bridge,” he told her, “is absolutely nothing. I’m going to sit on the front porch of my father’s summerhouse, and for about two months I’m going to do nothing but eat steak at every meal and watch the tides turn.” He glanced up. Big mistake. He tried to bluster on, tried to make a joke. “I’m going to talk Joe into coming with me, and I’m going to pay him thousands of dollars to plant a flower garden in my backyard. No turnips, no cabbage. Just flowers.”
He saw it coming, saw her lean toward him, saw her gaze drop briefly to his mouth, and his heart nearly stopped beating.
He didn’t close his eyes until her lips brushed his in the gentlest of kisses. It was achingly sweet, and over far too soon.
He didn’t reach for her, he didn’t move. He couldn’t. He was married. He had no business kissing anyone but Jenny.
But, God, he wanted Cybele.
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