The Defiant Hero (57 page)
“He told me that he was convinced that by talking about me that way, he’d forced the German to see him not as a nameless, soulless enemy soldier, but as a human being. As a man—who loved and was loved.”
“It worked,” Amy said. “Because they let him live.”
“That’s right.” Eve smiled, remembering how through the years Ralph had told her time and again of the way his stories of her light and life had served to entertain his captors—and to make him an individual in their eyes.
“He asked me to marry him,” she told Amy. “Right there on the dock. I told him that I already had married him, that I’d never signed or sent back those annulment papers. But I told him, if he wanted me to, I’d marry him all over again.”
“And he wanted to, right?” Amy said. “Because you got married again.”
“We did.”
The back door of the camper opened, and the strikingly beautiful FBI agent named Alyssa Locke stuck her head in. “Your mom just pulled up,” she said to Amy with a smile.
Amy was up and out of the door in a flash.
Eve sat for a moment, letting the little girl have some time alone with her mother, content to rest.
And remember.
“I’ll marry you again,” Eve told Ralph as she stood on the dock in his arms. “But what I won’t do is delay our wedding night another day longer.”
He’d laughed at that, his laughter rich and warm. It wrapped around her, and she knew her words were a lie. She’d wait for him forever if she had to.
Still. He was English, after all, and it was possible he’d need a bit of a push. “What are your plans?” she asked him. “Are you going to teach?”
He shook his head. “I haven’t thought much about it. I haven’t thought much beyond fresh eggs and a rare steak for years. And you, of course,” he added with a smile. “And not at all in that order.”
She kissed him, long and sweet. “You always were a fabulous teacher.” She kissed him again, longer and a little less sweetly. “As a matter of fact, there’s something very specific I was hoping you could teach me tonight.”
He shouted with laughter at that. But as he looked at her, the warmth in his eyes shifted to something potent. Something hot. “Oh, yes,” he murmured. “Count on it.”
His kiss held a promise of something achingly wonderful.
He pulled back to look into her eyes. “Promise me,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
He laughed. “Now how do you know I’m not going to ask you to promise me something ridiculous?”
“I don’t care. I’d promise you anything.”
His smile softened as he touched her face. “I am the luckiest man on this planet. The war didn’t break your spirit, did it?”
She shook her head.
“I’m not sure whether to be grateful or terrified about that,” he told her with a laugh. “Just . . . promise me that you’ll never withhold the truth from me again. Promise you’ll never again pretend to be something you’re not. Because you’re perfect, Eve, just the way you are. No more lies, all right?”
“I promise,” she told him. She kissed him again, and he took possession of her mouth, slowly, deeply. It was exquisite.
And so were the words he spoke when he pulled back to look into her eyes. “I’ll never leave you again,” Ralph told her. “From this moment, Eve, until the day that I die, I’ll be with you, right by your side.”
Fifty-five years later, Eve sat in the camper all alone, remembering those promises they’d made.
The door was still open a crack, and she could see outside, see the other vehicle that had pulled up, see Amy, held tightly in Meg’s arms.
She’d delivered the child safely into her mother’s arms. She’d done it. Or rather, they’d done it. She and Ralph.
Although he’d been gone from this world for these past two years, he’d been with her in spirit throughout this entire ordeal.
Eve smiled and sent him a silent apology for pretending to have that limp that fooled her captors so successfully. Yes, she’d promised him all those years ago that she would no longer pretend to be something she wasn’t, but he would have to admit that there were times when pretending did have its usefulness.
She could almost hear Ralph’s rich, warm laughter wrapping around her.
Still filling her heart.
Meg held Amy on her lap. Since she’d turned ten, she’d claimed to be too old for that. But not today. Today, she was parked there pretty darn permanently.
Meg held her daughter close. Amy’s hair smelled like a bad mix of wet paper bags and soggy dog, but she didn’t care.
She had a lifetime to get Amy clean.
Eve sat next to her, holding her hand. “Thank you,” Meg kept telling her grandmother.
She still couldn’t believe they’d gone out a second-story window.
She still couldn’t believe that in a single heartbeat, her life had turned from tragic to perfect.
She knew what Lazarus’s mother must’ve felt like.
The door opened, and John came inside the van.
Meg felt Amy shrink slightly. John was big, she realized. Tall and broad and . . . He smiled at her and her insides melted.
“Amy, this is Lt. John Nilsson. Do you remember him from Kazbekistan?” Meg said. “He saved my life about twenty different times these past few days.”
Eve was looking from her to John, and Meg knew she hadn’t missed the message he was sending her with his eyes. His love for her was written all over his face. He didn’t even try to hide it. Eve squeezed her hand and when Meg turned to look at her, she made big eyes and a completely approving face.
Meg laughed. “John, this is Amy, and my grandmother, Eve Grayson.”
John sat down, shining the warmth of his smile on them both. “I’m honored to meet you, Mrs. Grayson. You should be proud of what you did out there tonight.”
“I am,” Eve said.
John’s smile widened. “Well, good. The FBI’s going to be taking both you and Amy to a safe house where you can get cleaned up and where a doctor will come in and check you both out.” He turned to Amy. “This must’ve been pretty scary, huh?”
“I do remember you,” she said. “Your hair was shorter. You’re a language specialist, right? Like Mom?”
“Yeah,” John said. “Like your mom. I have a lot in common with her.”
Amy smiled. “You colored with me. And you taught me to say shit in Kazbekistani.”
Meg laughed. She had to feign outrage. “You did what?”
“Oops.”
“You also taught me to say—”
“Thank you very much,” John said to Amy. “I clearly made a lasting impression. Wow.”
“You did,” she told him, laughing at the face he made. “You always made me laugh, even when I didn’t feel much like laughing.”
John looked up at Meg and the expression in his eyes was priceless. He’d been scared, she realized. This big, strong, capable man who didn’t know the meaning of the word quit, this man who’d gone fearlessly into battle for her today and had taken two lives to protect her, had been scared to death of meeting a ten-year-old girl.
“We’re going to be seeing a lot of John from now on,” Meg told her daughter.
“You and me, Amy,” John added, “we’re going to be really good friends. We have a lot in common, too, you know. Starting with the fact that we both love your mother.”
Amy looked from John to Meg to Eve. And she smiled at her great-grandmother. “This is so cool.”
“So of course I get down here after the action is over,” Jules complained.
“You didn’t miss all that much,” Locke countered. As she watched, Sam and Lopez came out of the house with the forensics team, who were carrying one of the body bags out of the house.
Jules watched, too, as the FBI team went back into the house. “How many are in there?”
“Just two. Two others are in custody—they were picked up on the road. Mrs. Grayson says there were five that she knew about. One’s still at large.”
The second body bag came out. Sam and Lopez were still standing next to the truck. As Locke watched, Sam turned away. He leaned down, alongside the wheel, and threw up.
Holy cow.
“I heard there’s some kind of bogus death threat,” Jules said, “that Meg Moore’s going to be under protection for a while.”
“Just until the word gets out,” Locke told her partner.
Lopez touched Sam briefly on the shoulder. Sam shook his head rather vehemently as he straightened up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
Locke turned away before he looked over and caught her watching. “We think the threat was just a mind game. Just more psychological warfare. But the Extremists—and all of the other fringe groups in K-stan—are going to get a very explicit message,” she said. “They go near Meg Moore or her family, and they will be crushed. They stay away, and we use our embassy to open up lines of communication between them and their government.”
“Ah,” Jules said. “The old threat combined with dangling a little of what they want most in front of them. That should do the trick.”
Locke glanced back at the trucks. Sam was gone.
“I heard from Max Bhagat that we’ve announced to the media that the so-called hostage situation at the K-stani embassy was just a training operation.” Jules laughed. “Everyone saves face—except CNN and all the other networks who’re made to look like fools for having reporters standing outside a training op for all these days.”
Locke spotted him. Sam had moved over to the house, where he sat on the front steps, head in his hands.
Who would’ve thought . . . ?
“Excuse me for a sec,” she said to Jules.
“Sure.”
Locke approached Sam cautiously. Slowly. Carefully.
He heard her coming, though, and he looked up. And laughed derisively. “Great, you saw that, huh? Perfect. Have at me, Alyssa. My night hasn’t been painful enough.”
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Fucking perfect,” he said. “I’m not sure which it was that did it to me—the thought of how close that little girl and her grandmother came to getting a bullet in their heads or catching a glimpse of the forensics guys shoveling pieces of a human being’s brain into one of those body bags. Either way, it still makes my stomach churn.”
“I wanted to apologize,” she said. “For some of the things I said to you before, you know, back at the hotel.”
He was surprised and working hard to hide it. He reached down onto the step beside him and picked up a dead twig that was lying there. “Some of the things,” he repeated, snapping the twig into two. “Only some?”
She gave him the smallest of smiles. “That’s right. You know you were there dogging me.”
He looked her dead in the eye and the world tilted slightly. “Can you really blame me?”
She couldn’t respond to that. “I really appreciate your not giving in to your anger and, you know, your not talking to anyone about what we, um, did that night.”
“Okay,” Starrett said. “We’re a slow learner, huh? Let me see if I can say it so you’ll understand. I’m not going to talk about it to anyone. It’s not their business. What we did is between you and me. No matter how mad you make me—and, shit, you can make me mad!—that’s not going to change. You want me to say it again, more slowly this time?”
Locke shook her head. “No, I’m . . . I got it. I’m . . . Thank you.”
He tossed the pieces of twig into the dust, one at a time. “Forget about it.”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s not a bad idea. In fact, I was thinking . . .”
He looked up at her in silence, waiting for her to go on. How was it that he could have been so good, so gentle and kind with Amy and Eve out there in the woods just a few hours ago? She’d been impressed with the way he’d taken charge of the situation. He was good at what he did. She couldn’t deny that.
So why did he always treat her so badly?
Locke cleared her throat. “You know, Starrett, since you’re in the most elite SEAL team in the country, and I’m in the FBI’s top counterterrorist unit, well, there’s a really good chance we’re going to run into each other with a certain frequency.”
He nodded. “There is.”
“I’m assuming you’re not going anywhere in the near future—”
“No, I’m not.”
“And I would rather not have to transfer and . . .” She took a deep breath. “In an attempt to make things as least awkward as possible, I think we should both simply pretend that night never happened. You know, forget it ever took place.”
Sam nodded, still just watching her. “Is that really what you want?” he asked quietly.
As she looked into his eyes, she felt a flash of uncertainty. “Yes,” she said, trying to feel as sure as she sounded. “From this point on, we don’t talk about it again, all right?”
Sam still watched her steadily. Finally he nodded. “All right.”
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