A Scarred Soul: A Small Town Love Story (Safe Haven Book 2) (4 page)

L
ulah watched Vince drive off
—hot, hurt, confused, and probably not going to sleep much. Judging by his current state, that issue appeared to be a regular feature of his nightlife. If nothing else, the guy needed to sleep.

She glanced at her bed and recalled the image of Vince standing beside it, staring. Did he have the same rush of images she’d seen when he stood there? Beating down the attraction to him would take some work. Godzilla, help me remember, Vince is as unreliable as Dad.

Until she’d left home, her life had been controlled by another dependent man, and she wasn’t allowing that to happen to her again. She hadn’t heard from her father since she’d blown him off yesterday, and she still didn’t feel too good about having done that. She hadn’t even asked him the size of the debt. What was the point? The rates from the loan sharks he used meant the debt would be climbing like the gauge on a thermometer in the pocket of a sinner edging closer to hell. This time he would have to take the full fall, and maybe that might force him to seek help for his gambling.

T
he following day
, Lulah arrived home from the Sanctuary to find Vince’s pickup parked in her drive. Although he dropped-off and picked-up Calliope most days, he hadn’t been volunteering at Dog Haven Sanctuary a lot lately, now that his graphic design business was flourishing. She dismounted her bike and walked over to the old barn where he waited.

“Hey, Vince.”

He greeted her with a smile. Although she’d love to see that more often, she also felt relief at its scarcity, because something about that expression and his relaxed stance belted through her, setting up a hum in her chest. His jeans, well-worn, hung loose on his hips, and the old USMC t-shirt he wore had shrunk up and faded through numerous washes so that a little bit of his torso showed. In the gap, she could see the narrow trail of dark hair pointing downwards, and yup, he was one hundred percent UHT, hot. He didn’t need that tattooed anywhere, because it floated around in his aura.

“Lulah, hi, I hope you don’t mind. I was having a look at your barn. I didn’t go inside.”

“Go in, that’s no problem. I haven’t been in there for ages; I don’t use it.” He looked at the door and hesitated. “Here, I’ll come with you,” she offered. “I don’t think it’s even locked.” She tried the handle, and with a bit of a tug, the door swung open.

Vince stepped up to the doorway and made a sight-sweep as if the place might be booby-trapped. He turned, caught her eye, and grinned. “Sorry, old habits and all that…” He held out an arm to usher her in.

Inside, the air was cool and dry. On the far side were a couple of horse stalls while opposite was an old workbench and a tack room with basic bathroom amenities. They climbed the stairs to a loft with two built-in bunks, a set of drawers, and a wardrobe. “This must have been living quarters for a groom. Pretty dusty, the maid hasn’t stopped by in a while.”

Vince laughed.

He stood beside the almost full-length window at the foot of the bunks. After wiping some of the dust from the pane, he looked out at the spread of the narrow valley before him. Lulah watched, noticing his steady breathing as he absorbed the view. “It’s beautiful,” he said quietly. When they came back down the ladder, he went over to the workbench, running his hands along the rifts and dents, brushing away more dust.

Lulah followed behind him. “That’s it. I’m firing the maid.”

“This place is great.” When he faced her, his eyes were bright with enthusiasm. “Can I ask a favor? Please say no if it’s not okay. I won’t be offended.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve taken on some woodwork and restoration commissions. I need a shed or a garage, somewhere quiet. I’ve been working out of a space in a co-op in town, but it’s not big enough, and the dust from the woodwork would be a problem. Could I do the work here? It’s not noisy, and I wouldn’t disturb you. I’d stay out of your way, and I could pay you rent.”

“You’re most welcome to use it, and you don’t have to pay rent. Come up to the house when you’re ready, and we can talk about it.”

Vince arrived on her porch about ten minutes after she’d finished her shower. Calliope immediately settled herself in a corner where she could nap and keep an eye on everyone’s movements.

“Would you like a drink? Beer or something soft?”

“Water, thanks. I’m not drinking until…I’m not drinking right now.”

Lulah fetched a jug of water and a couple of glasses. “Here’s my idea,” she said handing Vince a glass. “You’re welcome to use the barn, but in return, I want you to let me train Calliope, formally, as a PTSD service dog.”

He studied his glass. One finger ran up and down the side, and Lulah waited, knowing he wouldn’t speak again until that finger stilled.

“What will happen to Calliope when the training is finished?”

“She’s your dog, Vince. She’ll be your service dog.”

“There are other vets who need her more than I do. Once she’s trained.”

“You need her. And if you have some sort of male ego issue about getting around with a service dog, well, leave her jacket off. You’ll have to tackle things like stores and restaurants alone.”

“You’re going to turn my little buddy into some sort of crutch.”

“I’m going to help her help you. Damn, you’re stubborn.”

“I don’t know…”

“There’s a quiet, empty barn in my yard, Vince.”

“Not fair.” He grinned. “Empty barn? That’s ‘guy porn,’ and you’re talking dirty.”

“So you’ll do it?”

“Okay, so long as she doesn’t have to wear that jacket. Dogs shouldn’t wear clothes. It’s demeaning.”

Laughing, Lulah stood. “I’m going to put some dinner on, and we can work out where we go from here. Come inside and talk while I work. Oh, and my essay is ready for you to check.”

When he followed her into the house, he brought with him his own special scent so that she slowed herself and took one cautious breath to pull him inside of her.
Damn, that was good, and that’s as close as we go, hot dude.

Washing the salad vegetables, she took the questioning of her motives to a deeper level. Really, there were a number of people she could cajole into reading over her assignments, but training a PTSD dog was something she wanted to do so badly. She wanted to prove to CRAR—the organization that funded the Sanctuary—that although she might be crap with the paperwork, when it came to working with dogs and people, there would be no doubt about her ability.

The fact that the dog was Calliope and the vet was Vince set off her inner klaxon, loudly warning of the danger of stepping beyond the minimum safe distance perimeter of casual friendship.

Across the room, he sat at the table reading her assignment, jotting quick notes and editing hieroglyphs in the paper’s margins. His concentration and neat hand seemed completely at odds with his bad-ass physical portrait, and moving closer to him, she finally snuck a peek at the tattoo on the inside of his left wrist. G A B L E—that was one for his daughter. For some reason, it caught her breath, and she found within her a bit more resolve. It gave her enough strength to believe she could work with Vince, help him take control of his life, and even enable him some dad-and-daughter time with Gable, without becoming involved herself. Friendship. Nothing wrong with that.

He caught her looking at his wrist, and as he held her gaze, he rolled his arm to hide the tattoo.

“Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“Why do you hide that tattoo?”

“I don’t know; it’s so personal.”

“If it’s personal, why did you have it inked in such a public place?”

“Geez, Lulah, straight to the point.”

She beamed at him, “I don’t beat around the bush. I’m sorry; I talk my way until I hit the boundary. Do you want me to back off?”

He hesitated as though figuring out a polite way to tell her to shut-the-whatever up. He dropped the pen he used on her homework. “No, don’t back off; just be you. People are on edge around me as if I’m about to detonate. I like the way you come at me. It’s refreshing.”

“Good.” She pulled up a chair at the table beside him, and staying with his eyes, willing him to be still, she took hold of his hand and flipped it, revealing a tattoo. His glance fell to her hand, and she followed his gaze, so that the pair of them had their entire focus on where she held him. She traced a finger over the letters, each one illustrated in a child’s old-fashioned alphabet block, and felt him shiver, his hand making a solitary twitch in her grasp. “Okay here?”

He nodded. “That’s what Gable does when she sees it, runs her fingers over the letters.”

“It’s tactile, this tattoo.” She knew he continued to watch her fingers as she traced the letters. His skin was remarkably smooth, and this close she could smell him better—moss after rain, male—and that scent went straight to the part of her brain she had so little control over. Well, to be honest, there was that struggle with the part of the brain that censored her speech, too, but if she concentrated, she could wrangle some order there.

Un-touch the hot guy.
She slid her hand back to the table and managed a couple of slow blinks to pull herself into a more sensible state. Phew, nice
.
“So back to the reason you hide the tattoo that you had drawn in an exposed place. Want to share?”

Pain darted in his eyes like the sting of a hypodermic prick. “Share? Okay, ah, I had the tattoo placed there when I was a whole person. You know, the full-function guy: the dad, the Marine, the fixer and the protector. Hell, I’d have had her name tattooed across my forehead. Now I’m a broken, fucked-up loser with PTSD who can’t be trusted alone with my own daughter because I might flip out and harm her. So I hide the tattoo because I don’t like explaining to people that I don’t have access to Gable these days since, you know, I’m this asshole who can’t keep his shit together.”

“Well, so long as you’re not too tough on yourself.”

“Hell, Lulah!”

“Boundary, sorry, went too far.”
Boundary, boundary, shit; give the guy a break.

“Can’t you pull back a little earlier?”

“I wish. I have this sort of imaginary electric fence in my head that I rig up depending on who I’m talking to. It stops me from crossing the boundary. Well, sometimes it does, but sometimes it fails.”

“How does it work…when it’s working?”

“I give myself a sort of mental zap when I’m close.”

“And when it fails?”

“All my thoughts keep pouring out, unchecked. It’s like the gate’s left open, and the cattle are running free.”

“More like a fucking stampede,” he muttered.

She could see his tension ramping up to rapid, sharp, high-alert breaths. Not good for the PTSD hot guy to have his agitation escalate. Time to ease up. “Sorry, buddy. I like to tease. Add that I’m still working out my boundary with you, so even though I’ll try not to, there might be a few more barrier crossings.”

The way he looked at her ignited that jet that turned her inner warmth into an inferno. She looked down to her assignment on the table in front of him.

Vince picked up the pen and cleared his throat. “We should probably get back to this.”

“Sure.” Her brief disappointment bothered her. Relief they were returning to the assignment was the right response. That was the reason Vince was here. But she had this urge to delve further into the person he was. Bad idea. Worst idea since the day she’d handed over the few hundred dollars she had in savings to her father, believing him when he told her the card game he was going to was a sure thing.

Vince doodled on a scrap of paper. “Lulah, of all the things I might do, I’ll never lie to you. Sometimes the truth may not be pleasant; sometimes I’m silent. Silent for days. But I won’t lie.”

Heck, whatever that’s about.
“Thanks, I appreciate that.”

They spent the next half hour working through Lulah’s essay. Vince told her she was making progress and that this one didn’t need nearly as much work as the early ones. When they finished, Lulah cooked some pasta and oven-roasted vegetables, urging Vince to stay and talk about Calliope and what they could do with her.

“I’m teaching her to ground you when you start to freak. There are all sorts of ways she can do this. For instance, she automatically went over to you yesterday and placed her head in your lap. How did that feel?”

“It brought me back some awareness. Did you see she added her paw a short time later when it became worse for me? That was great.”

“Cool. Now, how are you in crowds? Let’s say shopping malls, at the park, places like that.”

He rubbed one hand up and down the left side of his jaw. “Yeah, that can be difficult. I don’t like being crowded in.”

Lulah made notes. She had no business digging into his issues, but she did want to identify some basic situations that troubled him. “Okay, we can work with that. Nightmares…we know you suffer from those?” She continued jotting down ideas, but when there was no response, she looked up at him. He clenched and released his fists, and that amazing tanned face was pale and pained. Where was Calliope? Outside the dog sniffed around the garden with Joker, too far away to notice.

“Where are you, buddy?”

He stared right through her.

“Vince, it’s not happening.” She stood to reach for him. The move was instinctive until she recalled what Adam taught her, and she sat again. His police training and working through this sort of stuff with Marlo gave him plenty of practice at calming agitated people.

Don’t touch the hot guy when he’s having an episode. Ground him. Ask him to identify something in the near vicinity. “Vince, please, look around you; tell me what you see.”

Finally, he drew a deep breath. “Lulah, hell.” His gaze ricocheted around the room, “Ah, table, chairs, fridge, books; it’s your cabin, Lulah.” His words rattled out like gunfire.

“Good, good. You gonna keep breathing now?”

“Sure, sorry about that.”

“Can I make you some tea or a glass of water? I have no idea why you would need a drink, but you know, it’s that old television thing…offer a drink, boil some water, and provide clean towels.”