The Unsung Hero (20 page)
Self-consciously, he glanced down to make sure his fly was zipped—to make sure he’d remembered to put pants on in the first place. But he was still wearing the bathing trunks he’d thrown on after this evening’s sweatfest—when he’d cleaned and vacuumed his apartment in the oppressive heat. He hadn’t turned on the air conditioner until about a half hour ago—it cost way too much to run and he was saving every penny. He’d showered after cleaning, but putting on anything more than his bathing suit had seemed insane.
He’d finally pulled on a T-shirt when he’d gone out to get a pizza for dinner. He now double-checked the logo on the front to make sure he wasn’t wearing something offensive or too strange. No, it was his “Spock for President” shirt, faded and loose, with a small but growing hole in the shoulder, along the seam.
“Why don’t you get new glasses?” Mallory asked. “You know, there’s one of those one-hour places down on Route 1.”
David wasn’t sure what to say. Was she trying to feel more in control of this situation by pointing out his obvious flaws? Except why stop with his broken glasses?
“I don’t have the money.” He answered her as if her question was sincere. “Right now everything I’ve got is going toward getting Nightshade drawn and printed.”
“What about your parents?” she asked. “Couldn’t you call them and tell them your glasses broke? I bet if you went to visit them, the first thing they’d do would be to take you to get new glasses.”
She was right, except . . . “It’s one thing when they offer to help, but to call and ask for money . . .” He shook his head.
Mallory nodded solemnly. “I know what you mean.”
“I’ll be going home about a week before school starts,” he told her. “I’ll probably get new glasses then.”
Her question had been sincere, not a thinly veiled put-down. She was talking to him, having this conversation as if she cared what he said, as if his thoughts and opinions were valid, as if she actually liked him. David’s pulse kicked into a higher speed as he stood there, gazing into her luminescent eyes, unable to look away, barely able to breathe.
He and Mallory and Brandon were in a room together, and Mal was talking to him, looking at him, liking him.
“What’s the big deal?” Bran said loudly. “They’re your parents. They expect you to call and ask for money.” He yanked his shirt over his head and began unfastening his pants.
His gleaming golden abs and pecs seemed to fill the room, and Mallory turned away from David to stare. The look of awe on her face would have been funny, except for the fact that it completely killed the little seed of hope that had unfurled just seconds ago in David’s stomach.
And as Brandon kicked off his sneakers and stepped out of his jeans, as Mallory turned, wide-eyed, to watch him walk across the room in his boxers, David felt himself return to his normal invisible, unnoticed state.
Which was just as well, since he had work to do.
________________________________________
Nine
TOM COULDN’T CONCENTRATE on the baseball game. And there was no point in reading his printed file on the Merchant again. He’d read all the information five or six times, and he could recite parts of it from memory.
What he wanted to do was to get back on-line and see if WildCard had emailed him a download of additional information. But the computer was in Kelly’s bedroom, and her door was tightly shut.
He stood outside her room for several long seconds, just listening. There was nothing but silence. If she was in there, and he knew she was, she was probably asleep.
What he really wanted was to be in Kelly’s bedroom with her.
It had killed him earlier tonight when she’d started to cry. Not pulling her into his arms had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. But he knew himself too well, knew he couldn’t be the kind of friend who offered casual physical comfort.
He wanted this woman too much. Holding her would have pushed him over the edge. He wouldn’t have been able to resist the temptation, and he would have kissed her. And she would have either kissed him back or pushed him away.
Tom wasn’t sure which response would have been worse.
If he had kissed her and she hadn’t pushed him away, he didn’t doubt for one second that he’d be in Kelly’s room, behind that closed and locked door, right this very moment. He was good with women—it was a fact. He could say that with very little ego involved.
He knew just what to do, what to say to make a woman set aside her doubts and embrace the moment. So to speak.
The problem was, when it came to Kelly Ashton, he couldn’t get past his own multitude of doubts.
What if the man he’d seen at Logan and the Home Depot wasn’t the Merchant?
He’d always hated the fact that the terrorist had escaped capture. That had chafed long after the other members of the counterterrorist team had accepted the fact that the man was gone. The CIA had tried to pick up the Merchant’s trail, but they’d come up empty-handed again and again.
With WildCard’s help getting reports and records that normally wouldn’t have crossed his desk, Tom had followed their progress over the past few years—if you could call it progress when absolutely nothing happened.
WildCard had jokingly referred to Tom’s interest in the Merchant as TLO—Tommy’s Little Obsession. They’d both laughed about it, but Tom wasn’t laughing now. Now the word obsession made him a little too uncomfortable.
He gets a serious head injury and starts seeing the Merchant every time he turns around.
As the leader of a SEAL team, he needed to know without a doubt that everything he saw was real. There was no room for trying to figure out what was real and what was a hallucination.
No room for him, not in this condition.
Tom went outside, but the night air was neither cool nor fresh. The beautiful summer day had become more and more humid until this heavy mass of heat now sat solidly on top of them.
Needless to say, the change in weather didn’t help his persistent headaches at all.
He was restless and dizzy and far too keyed up to try to go to bed.
From out in the yard, he could see that the light in Kelly’s room was off. She was asleep.
He went farther into the yard, all the way to the fence. That was the shortest route into town—provided you could make it over the fence. Dizzy or not, it took Tom about a half second to climb, and another half second to drop down into the neighbor’s yard.
In the distance, he could hear strains of music from the carnival that was in town, set up in the Catholic church parking lot. He headed toward it, hoping that a brisk walk there and back would at least make him tired enough to sleep.
Despite her exhaustion, Kelly couldn’t sleep.
She heard the water running downstairs after the baseball game ended and her father got ready for bed.
Slipping on her robe, she went out into the dark hallway and down the stairs. He’d left his bedroom door ajar, and she knocked on it as she pushed it open even farther.
Charles had managed to get himself into bed, but it wouldn’t be long before he could no longer do that. Every day he seemed a little bit skinnier, a little more frail. He was disappearing before her very eyes.
“Can I get you anything?” Kelly asked through the lump in her throat.
He shook his head, and she knew he was uncomfortable.
“It’s okay if you take one of the pills Dr. Grant prescribed.”
He looked at her, only briefly meeting her eyes before he looked away again. “I took one an hour ago.”
It was too soon to take another. “I can call the doctor,” she told him, “see if—”
“It’s not that bad.” He nodded at her, dismissing her. “Good night.”
Frustration bloomed, choking her from inside out, and she couldn’t stand it anymore. She couldn’t pretend to be the perfect Ashton daughter another minute longer—quiet and polite and careful not to be emotionally untidy for fear she’d upset her father. The man was dying. How bad could a little upset be compared to that?
“Aren’t you at all curious about what I did today?” she asked him, her voice a little too loud, a little too angry. She didn’t give him time to answer before she continued, pulling up a chair to the side of his bed and sitting down. “Today I had a meeting with the parents of a little girl who’s probably going to die of leukemia. Even though these days the odds of survival are high, this little girl is pretty frail. If the cancer doesn’t kill her, the chemotherapy might be too much for her—she could die of an infection. She could catch a cold and her suppressed immune system might not be able to fight it off. I had to sit there and explain this to her parents, trying to give them hope while cautioning them about the potential outcome.” Her voice shook. “I’ve done this before, but this time it was different. I know there’s always a fighting chance, but this time . . . I honestly don’t think this little girl is going to make it, and I knew her parents could tell. Daddy, it was one of the worst days of my life.”
Her father didn’t say a word. He just sat there, leaning back against his pillows, staring down at the lump his feet made underneath the sheet and blanket as if he wished he were anywhere but there.
“I probably should never have become a doctor,” Kelly told him. She’d never admitted anything like this to him before. She’d never dared. “I’m not cut out for this. On the surface, I look fine. But inside, I feel like I’m going to die.”
Kelly knew he wanted her to leave. He wanted her to take her whining and get the hell out of his room, leave him in peace. But she couldn’t do that. She was running out of time. And if she wanted him to talk to her, then dammit, she was going to have to start by talking to him. Tough shit if he thought it was wrong. Tough shit if he found it offensive. He was the one who was wrong all these years—all those too-stoic Ashtons were. Hold it inside, don’t let it show, try not to feel.
But you couldn’t not feel. And keeping it trapped didn’t make it go away. It would build and build, a terrible ball of pain and anger and joy—yes, even joy, because God forbid an Ashton should laugh too loudly in public. And nothing, not even the alcohol her father had soused himself with for years, could make those feelings disappear.
She just had to do it. She had to open her mouth and talk to him. It was exactly like asking Tom to dinner, the way she’d done this afternoon. She just had to grit her teeth and make an attempt. Because she knew for damn sure she’d never get what she wanted—a chance to truly know her father—if she simply and meekly continued to act the way she had in the past.
“I came home today completely wrung out,” she told him. “All I wanted to do was curl up somewhere and cry. You know, I cry a lot.”
His gaze flicked up to hers, but then he quickly looked away again. Cry. It was one of the most obscene words in the Ashton dictionary.
“Don’t worry—I usually don’t let anyone see,” she added. “But I completely lost it tonight, when I was talking to Tom.”
Nothing. No response. She didn’t even know if he was listening, or if he was running mathematical equations in his head, trying to shut her out. She felt a deeper flare of anger and hurt.
“You know, I still have a crush on him. Ever since he’s been back, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to get him into bed.”
Her father started to cough. Yes, he was listening.
Kelly helped him with his oxygen, and when he was finally breathing more easily again, he glared up at her. Eye contact. Jackpot. “Why on earth would you say something like that to me?”
Honesty. Brutal honesty. She could do this. If she could ask Tom to dinner, if she could look Brenda and Bob McKenna in the eye and tell them little Betsy was probably going to die, she could do this. “I want you to know who I am.”
“I know who you are!”
“You don’t know even a tiny fraction of—”
“I know all that I want to know, thanks.”
“Really?” Kelly asked quietly, her heart tearing in half. How could he say that? “You honestly don’t want to know any of my secrets? You don’t want to know things like . . . like . . .” She searched for something important, something she’d never told him or anybody. “Like up until today I’ve had two absolute best, golden days with memories that I’ll cherish until the day I die? You don’t want to know that one of those was a day I spent with you? You took me out in your sailboat—I think I was twelve—and we got caught in a squall. Do you remember that?”
“No.” He did. She knew he did. She could see the memory of the wind and waves in his eyes.
“Instead of sending me below, you trusted me to help you get us safely back to shore,” she continued. “And after the storm was over, that night when we finally got home, you gave me the Purple Heart you won in the war. I know you remember that.”
He didn’t do more than stubbornly shake his head no.
“I still have it, you know. You told me I was a good sailor,” she said to him. “I was so proud that you thought so. But then Mom never let you take me out on the boat again.”
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