On Lavender Lane (36 page)

“Not really. And we’re supposed to be working.”

“We can work tomorrow. The sky’s clearing up in time for the sunset. We’ll pick up some crab and sail along the coastline, soaking up the sights.”

It sounded heavenly. Also impossible.

“We have work to do.”

“We’ll get an early start tomorrow. Clearing your mind will be good for your creativity.”

“It’s admittedly appealing.”

“Better than appealing. I know this hidden inlet. We could anchor there, eat some crab, drink some wine, swim naked—”

“It’s spring. We’d freeze.”

“Nah.” His hands moved over her shoulders and down her arms. “I’ll keep you plenty warm enough.” His lips skimmed down her neck.

Of that she had not a single doubt. Just his touch was already beginning to make her feel hot. And needy.

“I have responsibilities.”

“Screw them.” The temptation rumbled in her ear. “How long has it been since your life wasn’t centered around work? When was the last time you skimmed across the water on a boat as the sun set into the water?”

“I live in New York. It rises out of the sea on the East Coast.”

“Then you’re long overdue.”

“Are you always this tenacious?”

“When I want something, absolutely.”

“And you want me.”

“We’ve already established that. Yeah. I want you more than I’ve ever wanted any woman in my life. More than I’ll ever want any other woman. What would you say to honeymooning in Hawaii? Cole went there with Kelli and they both say it’s paradise.

“Think of it, Maddy—a land of mai tais and passion fruit
and flowers so bright they almost blind you, lush green valleys, volcanoes—”

“We have volcanoes here in the Pacific Northwest.”

“You’re just trying to get me off topic, but it isn’t going to work. Picture sand that sparkles like black diamonds, and waterfalls where we can get naked and make love in warm blue-green tropical pools—”

“Do all your fantasies include getting wet and naked?”

“Most of them,” he admitted. “Which probably come from all the past years of eating sand and dust. But I do have this other one, where we’re skiing in the Alps and I rescue you from an avalanche, and carry you miles through knee-deep snow until we get to this chalet—”

“Which conveniently happens to be abandoned.”

“See?” That crease that was not quite a dimple winked as he grinned. “Great minds…So, after we stumble in, I light the logs conveniently stacked in a stone fireplace, pour us some brandy—”

“Which just happened to be sitting on the table waiting for survivors of avalanches?”

“No. That would be too much of a coincidence even for a fantasy. Didn’t I mention the Saint Bernard that followed along with us?”

“I don’t believe he came up.”

“Clearly an oversight. But, fortunately, he showed up just in time. However, there do happen to be two snifters sitting on a table, and this big fur rug on the floor in front of the fireplace, so—”

“We get naked.”

“We don’t really have any choice. Because our clothes are soaked and frozen from all that ice and snow.”

“Wet and naked. Admit it, Lucas Chaffee. Your fantasies are in a rut.”

He laughed. “Got me there,” he said agreeably. “But I do have a whole bunch of others.” His grin turned into a friendly leer. “Want to hear some more?”

“Why don’t you save them for some other time and show me around instead? Now that I’m here, I’d like to see what you’ve got planned. Then, I really do want to see your ideas for Gram’s restaurant.”

“I’ve got the sketches on my laptop. But since there’s no place to sit down and spread stuff out here, we can either go back to the farm or my place. Which, to be honest, I’d really prefer.”

“I’ll bet. Because Gram wouldn’t be around to chaperone.”

“I think we’re beyond the age of needing a chaperone.…Kara called and told me that she’d told you about that night the copter had crashed. Up in the Kush.”

“She told me some of it,” Madeline was a bit surprised at how quickly the topic had swung from flirtatious fun to deadly serious. “Though I suspected Sax didn’t share everything.”

“I strongly doubt he did,” he agreed. His expression was as intense as she’d ever seen it. “You might not like the idea, at least right now, but the fact is, like it or not, you can’t deny that we’re involved, Maddy.”

“No.” If she demanded honesty from him, she owed the same in return. “I can’t.”

“Then I have some stuff you need to hear.”

Thinking back to what Kara had told her, Madeline would have to be evil Dalmatian puppy murderer Cruella de Vil to turn down the naked need she heard in Lucas’ rough, flat voice.

“You can show me around the cannery some other time,” she said. “It’s been sitting here empty for years. It won’t be going anywhere in the next few days. Meanwhile, I’ll follow you out to your place.”

“Thanks.” He did not look relieved. More, she thought,
resigned.

46

“I bought some wine,” Lucas said, as they walked into the cottage. “Would you like a glass?”

“Am I going to need one?”

“It might not hurt.”

“Well, then, I guess I’d like a glass.”

“Red or white?” He held up two bottles, both labels she knew to be outrageously expensive at wholesale price. She couldn’t imagine what he’d paid for these.

“I didn’t realize you were a wine buff.”

“I’m not. I told Sax I wanted the good stuff and he suggested these.”

He’d bought them for her, knowing she’d come back to the cottage. Then again, she suspected anyone watching them the past few days would have been able to figure out where they were headed.

“That’s very thoughtful of you. And I’ll take the sauvignon blanc,” she decided.

She loved that he actually had to look at the label to see which was which. Again, showing that, knowing nothing about wine, he’d gone to that extra effort just for her. Working his way to redemption, which, especially after that story Kara had shared, he’d already achieved.

He opened the bottle with more skill than she might have expected, poured it into a glass his father must have originally bought, since there was a row of them on a
kitchen shelf, and snagged a bottle of dark beer from the fridge for himself. Then, as if he wanted to maintain some distance between them—yet another warning that this wasn’t going to be the easiest story to listen to—he put her glass and the bottle on the farm table.

“Do you want anything to eat?” he asked. He seemed uncharacteristically distracted. “I didn’t think about it when I was buying the wine, but I might have some crackers.”

“The wine’s fine.” She sat down on one of the rush-seat, ladder-back chairs at the table.

“Okay.” He sat across from her. “So,” he began without preamble, “you know how I said that I’d told the guys you were my one regret?”

“That would be a bit difficult to forget.”

“There was this Marine. He was really young. Nineteen. He was skinny with a bunch of freckles and carrot red hair. Sax called him Opie.”

“After Ron Howard. From Mayberry.” She took a sip of the wine, which definitely lived up to both its price and reputation.

“Yeah. That’s him. Sax pretty much nailed it when it came to how he looked. But he was one helluva shot.”

“Was?” She knew where this was going.

He swiped a hand through his hair. Took a deep breath. “We fought a lot of battles that day, but one of the worst was the first one, when we were trying to evac the copter before it blew. The kid was a Marine sniper and his shooting could well be the reason Sax and I lived to tell the story.

“So, I don’t know how long we were fighting. Time has a way of both speeding up and slowing down during moments like that. It doesn’t matter how well you can plan a mission—and this one was a clusterfuck from the get-go—the one thing you can always count on is that the plan falls apart with the first contact with the enemy.”

“I’ve heard about that. The fog of war.”

“That’s it. But
fog
’s too benign a word for it.” He took a
pull on the brown bottle. “Anyway, we’d taken all the bad guys out, and were starting to breathe again when the kid started screaming bloody murder.

“Turns out he’d stood up during the last volley and gotten shot below his chest plate. In the pelvis. Which is one of the worst places you can get shot, because the aorta splits low in the abdomen, forming left and right arteries.”

“I didn’t know that.”

But
he
did. Madeline thought about how even as horrific as the situation must have been for all the men on that downed helicopter, it had fallen on Lucas’ shoulders to keep the wounded—and it sounded as if there was a lot of them, along with that pilot Kara had mentioned—alive. She took a longer drink of wine.

“Not many people do,” he said. “Because it’s not their job. The arteries branch into the exterior and deep femoral vessels, which serve as the primary arteries for the lower part of the body.”

“And that’s where he was shot?”

“Yeah.” He dragged his hand down his face. It was not as steady as she was used to seeing it, revealing how painful this memory must be.

“You don’t have to tell me about this,” she said.

“Yeah. I do.” He took another deep breath. “Because it’s always going to be with me. I’m not saying that it always hovers over me like some dark cloud, but it’s part of who I am. Who I’ve become since that summer we spent together. And it’s not that I’m trying to impress you, but you said we needed to get to know each other better. And so, if you figure you can take it—”

“I can.” She realized it was important that she hear the entire story, as horrific as she feared it would be. Because he was right. It was part of him. Part of the man he’d become. The man she was falling in love with all over again.

“I got an IV going and kept squeezing the bag with both hands to get replacement fluids in him and try to keep him
from bleeding out. I’d gone through six bags, but the wound just kept spurting like a fucking geyser.

“By now the kid had figured out what had happened. He might’ve been young, but this damn well wasn’t his first rodeo, and he’d seen other guys die the same way. Especially since chest plates don’t provide any lower-body protection against IEDs. Almost anyone else would’ve been crying for their mother, which happens more than you might think—”

“Whenever I get a cold, I still want my mother. Or Gram.”

He nodded. Managed a half smile. “There you go. Anyway, the kid sucked it up and stayed amazingly calm. But meanwhile, I’m about to lose it because he’s still spraying blood like damn fire hose, which means that the only way I’ve got even a prayer of a chance of saving him is clamping off the artery.”

“But…” The thought, as she imagined the scene, was so frightening Madeline felt her blood go cold. “Wouldn’t that mean—”

“I’ve got to go into the wound.”

“With your hands?”

“Well, it wasn’t as if we had a fully equipped operating room on the battlefield. The worst part was that because of the altitude and the fact that he’d lost all that blood, I didn’t dare give him any morphine, because his blood pressure was so low, it would’ve killed him for sure.

“So, like in those old Westerns, when a guy’s gotta bite a bullet while the doc works on him, some of the team held him down and kept taking turns pressing on his abdomen to keep pressure over the artery while I went spelunking through his skin, muscle, and fat. Not that he had much fat, because like most Marines, he was in great shape.”

“Except for the fact he was dying.”

“Well, yeah. There was that. I was still optimistic, because, hell, that’s part of a medic’s job description. If you allow yourself to think the worst, it just might happen, so
you just keep focusing on the task at hand and figure out how to make things work.”

It made her realize how different their lives had been these past years. Until Maxime’s sex video had gone viral, the worst thing Madeline had had to suffer since she and Lucas had broken up had been a collapsed soufflé or curdled hollandaise.

Meanwhile, in all those years in all those war zones, this couldn’t have been the first patient he’d lost. And worse than a patient, she considered. A teammate.

She took a deep gulp of the wine, then reached across the table and put her hand on his. “I want to hear the rest.” Okay, that wasn’t exactly true. She didn’t necessarily
want
to. But knew she
needed
to. And, from the despair she heard in his voice, Madeline understood he needed to tell her. “But first I want to say one thing.”

He looked down at her hand, then turned his so they were palm to palm. “What’s that?”

“I need to apologize.”

He looked honestly confused. “For what?”

“For thinking the worst of you all these years. I was so wrong.”

“Hey.” He linked their fingers together and lifted their joined hands to his lips, brushing a kiss over her knuckles. A kiss as soft as snowflakes, but as warm as the embers that she could no longer deny had continued to smolder all these years. “At least you were thinking of me.” His quick grin lightened the mood.

“You really
are
an optimist.”

“Roger that. At least, let’s just say I’m hopeful where you’re concerned.…So, getting back to this story of how your name came up, as bad as things were, they were about to get a lot worse. I couldn’t find the artery because it had retracted back into his abdomen.”

Madeline’s stomach clenched. Sickness welled up and burned her throat.

“What did you do?”

“We called for an evac copter, but were told we’d have to wait.”

“That’s what Kara said. Which is beyond horrible.”

“It wasn’t what we wanted to hear, all right, but the military lives by rules of combat engagement, and the rules for this mission were clear from the start. No planes flew within thirty minutes of sunrise. So putting another bird down before nightfall was not going to happen, because as far as command was concerned the LZ—that’s military speak for
landing zone
—was still hot—”

“Military speak for
dangerous
.”

“Yeah. Like the entire damn mountains weren’t,” he muttered, pushing the heels of his hands into his eyes. As if he could block off the visions, which she suspected were permanently etched on his mind.