A Hero to Come Home To (16 page)

Though the tiny can of burnt orange paint had been beautiful, buying two gallons of it had raised her doubts.

Did he think he was intruding? That maybe she and Therese had things to discuss? Or that three were company and four were a crowd? It was too awkward to say
Don’t mind them, they’re leaving soon.

Instead, she swallowed and said, “Oh. Well…”

Therese, bless her heart, didn’t feel any such hesitance. She looped her arm through Dane’s and pulled him along with her. “You’ve never had anything from CaraCakes, have you? Because no one with a taste bud on their tongue would ever pass up CaraCakes, especially when it’s free.”

Dane didn’t seem overly convinced, but he wasn’t rude enough to forcibly free himself from her grip. With a silent sigh of relief that did nothing to ease her confusion, Carly followed them.

The bakery was a full-service place filling a small space downtown just off Main Street. On Sundays when she and Jeff had eaten dinner at home, they’d stopped there for a loaf of fresh-baked bread to go along with the meal and whatever sweets caught their attention for dessert. This afternoon, she’d gotten fruit tarts, tiny pecan pies and, her favorite and the bakery’s specialty, carrot mini-cupcakes.

By the time she reached the kitchen, Jacob had already claimed the dining chair closest to the window, and Therese was settling Dane in the chair opposite. Carly opened the pastry box on the counter and transferred the sweets to a serving tray while Therese took drink requests.

“He’s kind of like a skittish horse today,” she murmured when she reached to get glasses from the cabinet next to the one that stored the plates. “Spooks easily. You just have to show him who’s boss.”

Carly winced. To Therese, who had grown up with horses, showing an animal who was boss was probably a simple thing. Carly, on the other hand, had never met a horse that didn’t try to take a bite out of her.

Once everything was on the table, she and Therese sat across from each other. With the enthusiasm of a growing boy, Jacob didn’t require any nudging to move one pecan pie and two mini-cakes to his plate and start eating. Dane was a little slower, but no mortal could resist two heavenly bites of carrot cake topped with a dollop of cream cheese frosting.

“Cream cheese is the best food ever invented,” Therese said with a sigh. “Appetizer, entrée, dessert, and it’s pretty darn good all by itself for a snack. I bow at the feet of whoever discovered it.”

“I’m sure multiple members of my family can tell you,” Carly said before biting into her own mini-cake.

Therese finished hers with a grin, reached for another, then said, “So, Dane, Carly says you think we’d be a lot of fun at a strip club. You tell us your experiences, and we’ll tell you ours.”

The only person at the table who wasn’t surprised by Therese’s offer was Therese herself. Jake’s mouth had dropped, Carly’s eyes were popped wide open, and Dane was pretty sure his own expression fell somewhere in between.

“Um, yeah, I just meant—”

Therese’s grin widened. “We know what you meant. The margarita club members can be a rowdy group.”

Especially with a few margaritas in them.
He kept that observation to himself, though. No need to add to the stunned look her son already wore.

“You go to strip clubs?” Jake demanded, his cheeks red, his voice cracking on the final words.

“No,” Therese replied.

“But you said you’d tell your experiences—”

“My experience is that I’ve never been to one. But he didn’t know that.”

Jake swallowed hard, peeled the paper from another cupcake, and shoved it in his mouth.

“I would’ve figured Jessy as the one to say things for the shock value,” Dane said.

“It got you talking, didn’t it?” She finished a fruit tart, delicately wiped her fingers on a napkin, then slid her chair back. “Finish up, Jacob. We need to get home so you can do your homework.”

The boy stood, took a swallow of pop, grabbed a pecan pie, and headed toward the hall. There he turned back and grudgingly said, “Thanks, Ms. Lowry.”

“Thanks so much for your help, Jacob,” Carly said. “We couldn’t have done it without you.”

“You mean, Dane couldn’t have done it without him.” Therese touched his shoulder briefly as she passed, stooping to give Carly a hug. “Invite us over to see the paint job when it’s finished, and we’ll help you put it all back.”

When they were gone, the room seemed half its size and twice as quiet. Dane ate another cupcake, then shifted in his chair, making it squeak faintly. He couldn’t think of much else to say, so he focused on Therese and her son. “Jake doesn’t look anything like his mother.”

“He looks like his father, she says. Anyway, she’s his stepmother. Jacob and Abby came to live with them when Paul got transferred here.”

“Where’s their mother?”

“In California.” Carly’s nose wrinkled. “She needed time to find herself.”

He frowned. “If you don’t do that before you have kids, you don’t
get
to do it until they’re grown.”

A faint smile eased some of the tension from her face. “I agree. Even after Paul died, their mother wouldn’t take them back. She claimed she was grieving too much.”

“And they weren’t?” Dane shook his head. “My mother drives me crazy, but lately I keep getting reminders that she could have been a lot worse.” Anna Mae was overly critical and too quick to show her disappointment, but at least she hadn’t abandoned him until he was well past his teenage years. One visit to the hospital for his first surgery, then she’d never come again.

But it had been for the best. He’d had enough of a negative attitude himself. He couldn’t have handled hers, too.

She hadn’t wanted a son with only one leg. Just as Carly likely wouldn’t want a man with only one leg.
“
Jeff was perfect, you know. I do love perfect.”

Hearing the words again, even if only in his head, tightened his gut and made uneasiness shiver down his spine. It would be kinder to her if he just stopped coming around. He could avoid her until he transitioned. The only places he had to go were the WTU and, occasionally, to the commissary, PX or dry cleaner’s. It wouldn’t take any real effort to be elsewhere every Tuesday until he left Fort Murphy.

If he had the courage.

If he didn’t mind being alone and lonely again.

If he didn’t care about giving up the only relatively normal part of his life.

Feeling the weight of her gaze, he glanced up and found her watching him, a question in her eyes. Had she said something he’d missed, or was she wondering why he’d been so quick to try to say good-bye this afternoon?

He figured it was the second, since she didn’t repeat a question but instead stood and carried the dishes to the sink.

“I guess I should get started with the painting since I have no place to sit in my living room for the near future.”

Go ahead. Say, “Yeah, good luck with that” and walk out the door.

But his conscious mind all too willingly ignored his subconscious mind. “I’ll start the taping while you change clothes.”

The smile that flashed across her face was relieved, and most of her awkwardness vanished. “You think I’m too messy to wear pants and a silk shirt?”

“I think you’re too smart.”

She tilted her head to one side. “What about you? Your clothes look new.”

“Everything I have here is new. I haven’t gotten my household goods yet.” It wasn’t unusual for a shipment to be slow to arrive, especially coming from overseas. Personal belongings came by boat, and more often than not, it was a slow one.

Though the only reason his stuff hadn’t reached Fort Murphy was because he’d had it all put in storage in Bethesda and hadn’t made any effort to retrieve it yet. Furniture, the Ducati, electronics—everything he’d left in Vicenza when he went to Afghanistan and everything he’d taken to the desert—waited for him to land somewhere.

Carly accepted his statement at face value. “We had friends who got orders to Schofield Barracks. Their stuff had to be trucked from Fort Carson, in Colorado, to the coast, where it was loaded onto a ship, and halfway to Hawaii, the ship sank. They lost everything except the couple of suitcases’ worth of stuff they’d taken on the flight over.”

“Tough. I’ve got a lot of buddies who sell everything when they get orders and just keep whatever will fit into the suitcases they can take. That’s what I had planned to do.”

“What changed your mind?” she asked as she emptied two plastic bags onto the table: rolls of painter’s tape, drop cloths, trays, rollers, and brushes.

He’d had more important things on his mind, like the infections and the three successive amputations that had taken more and more of his leg.

If someone had told him two years ago that so much of who he was was tied up in his leg, he would have thought they were crazy. Turned out, he was the one who was a bit crazy.

“I got sentimental, I guess,” he said at last. “I didn’t want to leave any more behind than I had to.”

Her forehead wrinkled, but she didn’t pursue the comment. “I’ll be back in five.”

Once the sound of her steps had faded down the hall, he grabbed three rolls of wide blue tape and went into the living room. He started with the door frame, precise in his placement of the tape. He’d never needed to tape anything; he was good at putting the paint only where he wanted. But Carly didn’t have his experience with a brush, and as she’d said several times, she liked perfect.

Which he wasn’t. Which her husband had been. Like it wasn’t hard enough to compete with a dead man’s memory, Jeff Lowry just had to be a perfect memory.

Maybe she wouldn’t care, once she got to know Dane better. It was one thing to know a person’s flaws right from the start and accept him anyway. But when she knew him for the man he was inside, maybe the outside wouldn’t matter so much.

Or maybe it would. It came down to a matter of how much he was willing to risk. Stop seeing her now and be alone again, or wait until he cared a whole lot more than he already did and find out that she couldn’t bear the reality. By that time, it wouldn’t be just loneliness he had to deal with. There would be pain, too, and whatever self-confidence he’d managed to recover would bleed out again.

It wasn’t so hard a decision, though, he realized when she came into the room. She’d put on denim shorts that showed an awful lot of long, sexy legs and a sleeveless T-shirt that couldn’t have fit tighter if it’d been painted on. With her feet bare, her toenails polished pale pink and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked young and happy and beautiful enough to make his mouth dry and his hands unsteady. A strip of blue tape went wild of its mark, a downward slash across the plain white wall.

She didn’t seem to notice as she picked up her own roll of tape. “Should I start with the window frame?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.” He wished he’d brought his pop in with him. He could use a drink before his tongue stuck permanently to the roof of his mouth.

She was very careful with the tape, too, aligning the edges so the wood was completely covered but not blocking the Sheetrock, either. She started about three feet off the floor on the near side of the double window and worked her way to the bottom, then straightened again to finish the top part. When she stretched to reach the very top, her shirt pulled up with the movement, revealing soft golden skin and something he hadn’t expected: a pale blue stone nestled in her belly button.

He didn’t even bother to tear loose the tape he’d just applied, but left the roll hanging there and covered the distance to the kitchen in record time—at least, for him. Grabbing his glass from the table, he downed the contents in one gulp, emptied the rest of the can into it and drained it just as fast.

He’d known women with piercings almost everywhere. It wasn’t anything new or shocking. He was used to it.

He just hadn’t expected it of Carly.

He’d seen a lot more skin than that, too. In fact, he’d seen more women naked than he wanted to remember. Truthfully, more than he did remember. Those months after the divorce, he’d dulled his pain with booze, sometimes without complete recall of what he’d done under its influence.

But he hadn’t seen Carly’s skin. Hadn’t seen Carly naked.

And as long as there was a chance that might happen, he wouldn’t be walking away.

“All right. Are we ready for paint?” Carly stood back from the wall, hands on her hips, and scanned the room. Lines of blue tape circled the doorway, windows and baseboards, and white tarps were draped across the furniture. She’d guessed two would do it and had bought four; it had taken three. The other would come in handy to protect the floor.

“Let’s say the
room
is prepped. Are
you
ready?”

She took a deep breath. “Yeah. Let’s start.”

While he set the first can of paint on a stack of newspapers, then pried it open, she spread the last tarp along the wall where she intended to start. It was the long one, nothing but Sheetrock, no openings to paint around except the electrical outlet at each end, also taped in blue.

“You want to use the cutting brush to cut in along the ceiling,” Dane said, pouring thick rich paint into a disposable tray. “That’s the two-and-a-half-inch brush you bought. Do you have a ladder?”

Carly brushed her hair back. “Oh, yeah. Been used once. One day Jeff decided to replace the ceiling fan in the dining room. He climbed up, overstretched, and crashed onto the dining table and sprained both wrists. I never let him try it again.”

She headed to the utility room, where the ladder had occupied the narrow space between the dryer and the wall since Jeff’s fall. She hefted the bright yellow metal and half carried, half dragged it back to the living room. “Where do you want it?”

Dane looked up, his gaze traveling the length of the ladder. His expression was measuring, his mouth in a taut line. “Sorry, Carly, you’ll have to do the climbing.”

She was thinking she liked the way he said her name when their conversation the night before crept into her mind.
“
I tore up my leg.”
No more jumping from airplanes, or riding motorcycles, she guessed, and the injury probably restricted him from other activities as well, like climbing ladders.