Embattled Home (10 page)

Chad nodded and reached out to rest a hand on her shoulder. “Flynn’s just kind of grumpy. He won’t hurt you.”

It actually surprised him that Harper wasn’t the one who had scared her.

Mercy clutched her dog, bear, whatever it was, and sighed. “Okay.”

Lora looked resigned to what was going on, and he had the striking thought that maybe he was running her life like the bastard ex was trying to. “If you really don’t want to leave, we can try to tough it out here.”

She shook her head, giving him a tight smile. “No, I know leaving is best. It’s just hard. I’ve fought for everything we have and to walk away from it is harder than I expected.” She swallowed. “You know, I actually had a plan to leave if things got desperate. I don’t understand why I’m dragging my feet now.”

She shook her arms out and stood, heading toward the table. “Give me a minute to write a few things down and I’ll be ready.”

Chad pushed to his feet, anxious to get going. While Lora worked on her list, he walked down the hallway to the employee lounge. There was a group of lockers on the back wall. Inside his, he pulled out one of his alternate legs, the blade prosthetic. He hoped he didn’t need it, but he’d rather take it than not have a backup. He stuffed his spare clothes in the bag as well. They’d probably have to stop on the way to buy a few more things to add to their wardrobes, but this would do for a few days.

When he returned to the boardroom, Lora clutched her list.

“I couldn’t remember everything, but I think I got most of it. Some of the account numbers I couldn’t remember.”

Chad smiled at her. “No biggie. Shannon is a whiz with this kind of thing. She’ll figure it out. You’ll have to leave you cell phone too.”

She didn’t seem too upset as she handed it over.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

Chad walked her out of the room, down the hallway and dropped the list and phone on Shannon’s desk. Then he guided them to the elevator where their bags waited. “We’re bugging out! Are you ready?”

Mercy giggled and nodded, dancing beside them. “Bugging out!”

Lora smiled as she watched her daughter, and Chad thought that maybe everything would be okay.

*     *     *

When Dr. Hartfield
walked into the waiting room where he’d set up his impromptu office and sat down in the chair across from him, folding her legs elegantly, he expected an update on Aiden.

“Would you like to go down and get a cup of coffee in the cafeteria? I’m dragging, and if you’re going to be here as late as you were last night, you probably need food too.”

Duncan sat back in the chair, surprised at her boldness. But he shouldn’t have been. She seemed confident in her skin and her abilities as a doctor. She couldn’t have gotten where she was today if she hadn’t had balls.

As he looked into her dark kelly green eyes, unhidden by her chunky black glasses, he wondered where all the arguments went he’d been giving himself a couple hours ago. “I can take a coffee. And a sandwich.”

Gathering his cane, he pushed to his feet. Pride made him try to minimize his limp, but he gave up on that pretty quickly. If she was interested in him anyway, the quickest way to turn her off was to show her everything.

As she led him from the room and down the hallway, she made sure to walk beside him slow enough that he didn’t struggle. Years ago it would have frustrated Duncan to make people curb their speed for him, but he’d come to the realization that they could walk away from him and he would be fine with it. He would get there eventually.

She pressed the elevator button when they drew close enough, then leaned against the wall. “Looks like you can set up your operation wherever you happen to be. What branch of military were you in?”

“Marines.”

The woman got a funny look on her face and nodded her head. “Should have known.”

The elevator doors hissed open and he made a motion for her to get on first, then he followed. “If I’m not mistaken, you have the look of a brat.”

Laughter pealed out of her, stunning him with its clear beauty. As she looked at him, mouth spread in a smile, eyes creased with laughter, he knew he was in deep shit.

Duncan felt more alive than he had in a long time. Alex Hartfield was an interesting woman. What the hell she wanted with him, he didn’t know. At first he thought she was looking for a father figure to take care of her, but she quickly dispelled that notion. She and her Marine father were on excellent terms, and as they spoke Duncan realized he had known a Hartfield in Iraq. When they connected the dots, he felt like an old man. Yes, that was her father. They’d not been in the same unit, but they’d pounded the same dirt. The difference being her father had never been seriously wounded.

Duncan would still be over there if that helicopter hadn’t come down on him and his guys.

When Dr. Hartfield asked about his injuries, he gave her the list. Clinical, details only. But when she rested her hand on his and he looked into her eyes, he lost his distance. “The biggest injury was to my soul, though. I lost a lot of good men over there.”

She tightened her hand on his, her eyes going moist with tears. “But there’s nothing you could have done,” she whispered.

He shrugged.

Pulling his hand away, he began to gather up his trash. They were in territory he had no interest in rehashing. “When will Aiden be able to be released?”

Her eyes cooled as she watched him but she accepted that he needed distance. “As long as he starts to eat correctly over the next day, I should be able to let him go in a few days. He has to eat first.”

Duncan nodded and waited while she got to her feet. He took her plastic tray from her and dumped the trash, then held out a hand for her to proceed back the way they came. This had been a nice break, he told himself, but it was time to get back to real life.

*     *     *

Lora watched the
miles fly by. They headed east for a while, but she realized they were kind of making a loop. At one point they backtracked completely and took a different exchange on the freeway. Chad talked to the big, black, military-looking vehicle behind them a couple of times, but they didn’t think they were followed.

After a few hours she started to see signs for Texas. “Are we going to Texas?”

He nodded, glancing away from the road to see her reaction.

Lora didn’t know how she felt. It was as good of a place to hide as any, she supposed. “Are we going somewhere in particular?”

His eyes shifted away, and for a moment, he looked a little uncomfortable. “We are. A little place about an hour south of Amarillo called Honeywell, Texas.”

She had never heard of it. “What’s in Honeywell, Texas?”

He grinned at her. “Not much of anything really. Couple restaurants, couple gas stations, a grocery, a feed store. There’s a little movie theater that plays matinees on the weekends.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’ve been there before?”

Winking at her, he passed a vehicle. “I might have grown up there.”

Lora didn’t know what to think. Why on Earth would he take her to his home? “Mind explaining that to me?”

Chad sighed. “Well, we’re not connected in any way, so I thought it would be a good place to hide you out. My family has a ranch down here, several thousand acres, and it’s easy to lose yourself on the land. My dad gave me a chunk of the ranch to try to get me to come home a few years ago, but I wasn’t interested in moving back. It’s nice to visit once in a while, but I doubt I’ll ever live there again.”

“And your parents are okay with you bringing a strange woman and child home with you?” She thought his cheeks might have flushed just a bit.

“Well, they’ll probably get the wrong idea, but that may actually work in our favor. I, um,” he coughed into his hand, “well, anytime I come home I have visitors. Of the female persuasion. Maybe if they think I’m off the market they’ll leave us alone.”

Lora shrank back in the seat, cringing. She didn’t want to belong to any man. Did he actually think she would go for that idea? Her gaze furious, she opened her mouth to respond, but he held up a hand.

“I’m sorry, Lora. We’ll come up with another story. No big deal.”

She looked at his clamped jaw and realized he was offended. Why the hell would he…her eyes fell to his left hand, hidden at his side. Ah. He had scars on that side of his neck, too, and she wondered for the first time how far down they reached. It had to have been incredibly painful, what he’d gone through.

Chad had put himself out there to help her, help them both actually, and she’d cut him off at the knees. Shame fought with her instinct to protect herself at all cost. “I can’t…I don’t know that I would be able to fake being with you. Physically, I mean.”

If anything, his jaw hardened even more. “No problem,” he snapped.

She clenched her fists and gave a sharp cry, frustrated that she’d hurt him even more. “I can’t do physical. Me. I can’t do that.”

Some of the tension went out of the fist clutching the steering wheel and he glanced at her. “Okay. I can understand that. We’ll come up with something else then.”

Lora wanted to cry, and scream, and most of all she wanted to punch Derek Malone. The man had ruined her life and Mercy’s life, and she didn’t know if they would ever be the same. She missed being a woman, letting a man touch her without shrinking in fear. Dinner out, dessert in. Sharing every day with someone important. For a few precious months, she’d had that.

Chad turned on the radio and concentrated on the road, letting her off the conversational hook. Mercy slept quietly in the back seat, worn out from all that had happened in the night and morning.

Looking out the window, she tried to imagine the life she had before, but it was so shrouded in all the crap that came after. A tear slipped down her cheek and she was glad she had her head turned away.

They arrived in
Honeywell, Texas a little before noon that day. As Chad idled through town, he looked for changes. There was a new green awning on the restaurant. One of the gas stations had closed down, but there were two new ones on the other end. One of those pharmacies that landed on every corner of the big cities had popped up and he wondered how it had enough business to warrant its existence. Other than that, everything looked the same. The sun shone down harshly, glaring off the hood of the truck and into his eyes. As he drove out the other end of town, he started to accelerate.

“Just a little bit more.”

Mercy was chomping at the bit to be out of the truck. She’d done really well for the most part, but for the past two hours she’d been wide awake and ready to get out. On their last gas break he’d found her a coloring book and crayons. That had kept her occupied for about thirty minutes. I Spy had only lasted ten minutes with the boring landscape. Knock-knock jokes had lasted a few minutes before his repertoire was exhausted. When he started making them up, she knew, and gave him such a disgusted look. Finally he told her to count cows.

When she complained that there were more cows than stars in the sky, Lora had grinned for the first time since they’d started out. Chad hoped that the mess he’d created hours before could be forgotten. How humiliating.

But it only got better when he rolled onto the Blue Star Ranch. His mother came down the porch steps and embraced him the way she always did, then turned to Lora, huddled in her sweater. “Oh, honey, Chad told me you had issues with your ex, but I guarantee you he will treat you so much better.”

“Mama,” he growled. “We’re not together like that. We came down to get away from a situation for a while.”

But she wrapped Lora in her arms and completely ignored his words, treating her like a long-lost daughter.

Dad gave him a look as he stepped forward, pulling him into a hug. “You know how she is, son. You should have known she’d react like this.”

Chad shook his head. “I know, but damn. It’s good to see you, Dad.”

His father looked trim and healthy, buff colored cowboy hat cocked at an angle to shield his face. Garrett Lowell wore a hat like he’d been born in one. Hell, maybe he had.

Car doors slammed behind him and Chad turned to introduce the group. “Dad, this is Harper, Flynn, and Rachel. They’ll be staying with us for a while.”