Adam’s strong, gentle fingers working the ropes made Karla’s skin tingle and her nipples grow erect. She’d do anything for that man, even talk with his former mistress—God, she hoped Grant was a former one. But first she needed to reassure the woman she wasn’t looking for her to kiss and tell.
Karla zeroed in on Mistress Grant again. “Adam’s been having horrible nightmares.” The raised eyebrow told her the Marine probably didn’t know Adam had been sleeping with Karla. Would she be angry or jealous that Master Adam was interested in a new woman?
Then Mistress Grant smiled briefly before growing serious again and asking, “What kind of nightmares? The war?”
“No, his childhood.”
“He never talked about his childhood with me.”
No doubt. “Me either. But I need your help in tracking down his parents or finding out what happened back then. I don’t want him to hang onto those images that keep haunting him. He needs some closure.”
One of the subs serving drinks tonight laid a tray of empty glasses on the bar and Mistress Grant stowed them in the bins underneath for cleaning later. “What do you want me to do?”
“Master Damián said you…had connections with federal law enforcement.” He’d actually hinted at some connection with the CIA or covert operations or something, but Karla thought that sounded a little too cloak-and-dagger to be real. “I thought maybe you could have someone run a background check.”
“Spy on Master Adam?” Karla thought she heard Mistress Grant growl.
“No! Well, not really on him.” Karla leaned forward, lowering her voice. “His parents were pretty abusive from what I can tell and he’s buried all these feelings so deep that I don’t think he’s ever going to be able to…” love me. No, she wouldn’t bare her soul to this potential rival. “…to get on with his life until he has some answers or confronts the past in some way.”
Mistress Grant sized her up for a long moment, then relaxed as much as Karla had ever seen the woman relax. “I’ll help if I can.”
Karla let the air out of her lungs with a whoosh and nodded. “Thanks.”
“I’m not doing this for you.” Mistress Grant looked across the room toward Master Adam with what looked like longing.
Mine.
Karla felt the green-eyed monster flare up, but tamped it down. She needed Mistress Grant’s help right now.
The bartender laid the towel on the bar and leaned forward, tearing her gaze away from Karla’s man. “I’d go to hell and back for him. He’s the finest master sergeant a Marine could ever ask for.” She returned her gaze to Karla. “If what we find would just cause him more pain, I don’t want him to know. You’ll need to screen whoever we find before we let them anywhere near Adam again.”
Karla smiled. Grant cared about Master Adam, too, and wanted to protect him. As long as they both had his best interests and welfare at heart—and Mistress Grant kept her hands off him—they’d be able to work together just fine.
“Great. Do you want me to see what information I can get on him for you? I don’t expect it will be much.”
“That’s okay. My contacts can check into his military files.”
Damián was right. The woman did have connections. Karla wondered just what she’d done after her stint with the Marines had ended, but that wasn’t any of her business.
“Give me a few days.”
“Absolutely. Now, I’d better start my next set.” She turned to go back toward the stage, then spun around again. “Thanks, Mistress Grant.”
The woman winked at her, which confused Karla. Maybe she wasn’t a threat to her and Adam, after all.
* * *
Adam parked the rental along the winding roadway with two wheels in the grass so as not to impede others visiting loved ones today. With a heavy sigh, he opened the door and got out, not wanting to have this conversation. Most years, he looked forward to his time here with Joni, telling her about what he’d been doing and how much he wished she were with him to share it.
But now he needed to tell her about Karla. What the fuck was he going to say? He felt disloyal.
A crust on the top of the snow crunched under his boots as he walked up the slight hill. At first, he avoided looking at her tombstone while he busied himself with clearing snow from the marble bench he’d had placed there for Joni’s mom to make use of during her visits in better weather. Marge always left him his privacy for his first visit to Joni’s grave, on their wedding anniversary, but he’d bring her out here tomorrow before he headed back to Denver. She probably wouldn’t get out here again for awhile, now that she was moving to assisted living, and winter was setting in with a vengeance.
He sat against the frigid stone and looked down at his hands. Memories of his twenty years with Joni played like a movie in his head. They’d been separated a lot by war, but the times they’d had together had been good ones. For him, at least. He knew he hadn’t ever been able to give Joni the things she wanted most—a child.
Or his love.
The backs of his eyes burned as he looked up at the cold, hard granite stone with the Montague named etched across the surface and a lighthouse carved to the right of her name.
Joni, beloved wife.
“Joni, my beloved li’l subbie.”
She’d given him one-hundred percent of herself. He’d only given about eighty percent back, at best. Would he have been able to surrender the remainder if they’d been together after he’d retired from the Marines? Could he open that part of himself to any woman?
“I’m so sorry, baby.” His raspy words were whipped away on the wind. “You deserved so much better than you got with me.”
The guilt that had been eating at him ever since he’d come home on hardship leave from Afghanistan to find her in the last weeks of her life, hanging on through the pain just to have him beside her, assaulted him once more. Toward the end, he’d begged for God to take her. He couldn’t watch her suffer any more. Her mom had told him she wouldn’t let go as long as she thought he needed her, so he’d released her and promised they’d be together again. Then he’d held her in his arms as the final breath left her ravaged body.
Her body had begun to grow cold before her mom had forced him to let go physically. Joni had been his anchor for twenty years. She’d taught him a lot about love, honor, and commitment, lessons he hadn’t learned growing up. That she’d stuck by him all those years, half of them on her own while he was deployed somewhere else in the world, was a testament to what a strong woman she was. To how strongly she’d loved him.
He hadn’t been prepared to be set adrift then. He’d lied to her on her death bed. He had still needed her. She was the only person who had ever loved him unconditionally. He had no fucking clue what he was going to do in a world without his precious Joni. But he’d closed off that hurt and gone back to war, this time in Iraq. He’d never opened himself up to thinking much about Joni and their time together.
“Oh, baby. If you were here, I’d…”
You’d what? Had he changed any over the years? Fuck no. He knew he’d still be unable to say the words, because he’d learned early on they didn’t mean anything. He didn’t believe he’d ever be able to love anyone. That would require making himself too vulnerable to another person, and he wouldn’t do that. No, never again.
But even though he’d never been able to tell Joni the words, surely she’d known he’d have gone to hell and back for her. Hadn’t she? God, he didn’t know anymore. Joni had never complained about his inability to say the words. She’d never begged him.
She’d just made him feel like the most perfect husband and Master in the world.
“L’il subbie, please forgive me. I never meant to hurt you.”
How could he even think of replacing Joni with Karla? He’d just wind up hurting her, too, because he could never say what every woman needs to hear from the man she loves. Besides, Joni could never be replaced in his heart.
The wind picked up and something slappe
d against his cheek. He looked down at the ground to find a neon-pink flower petal lying in sharp contrast against the snow. Who would have a neon-pink flower arrangement on a grave in November? He reached down to pick it up and his thoughts immediately went to Karla and the first time he’d seen her and her garish hair color in the bus station in Chicago.
She’d looked so scared. Lost. He’d been drawn to her like a moth to a flame. There had been no sexual attraction on his part. No, she’d just brought out every protective instinct in him and forced him to play hero; to do the right thing, when all he’d wanted to do was crawl in a hole somewhere and die. Karla had pulled him back from the dead that night.
So, when had his thoughts for her turned carnal?
At the club, during her audition this summer, before he recognized her. Seemed like a lifetime ago, so much had happened since then. He’d been drawn to her voice then, wresting him from his office and into the great room. Dressed in that awful Maid Marian dress, he’d still been captivated by her long black curls. Even then, he’d imagined grabbing her hair in his fists as he…
Jesus.
He looked up at the stone in front of him.
Joni, beloved wife.
How could he desecrate Joni’s memory by sitting at her grave thinking about having sex with another woman? He looked back down at the flower petal in his hands, then glanced around at the nearby tombstones. All he saw were decorations with autumn colors. He had no clue where the neon-pink flower petal could have come from. The wind must have carried it quite a ways.
He stood up, tucked the petal in his pocket, and breathed a heavy sigh.
“I’ll be back to say goodbye before I head home, baby. I…”
Fuck. He couldn’t even say the words to her now, knowing she could never hurt him. What a sorry excuse for a husband he’d been.
He wouldn’t entertain any more ridiculous notions of being any better for Karla. She deserved better. Anyone but him.
* * *
The next morning, Adam sat at the kitchen table in his mother-in-law’s kitchen. The cheerful room with it yellow walls and white curtains covered with strawberry didn’t do anything to lift his somber mood. Visiting Joni’s grave always played hell with his mood and he knew that it wouldn’t lift again until after the New Year. God, he hated the holidays from Thanksgiving to New Year’s. Too many memories of Joni.
“Quarter for your thoughts.”
He looked across the table at the silver-haired woman who had been like a mother to him for thirty years. More of a mother than his own had been. She’d shown him acceptance and love, once she’d realized Joni was happy and the wandering Marine wasn’t out to hurt her little girl. Not intentionally, anyway.
Adam forced a grin. “Inflation?”
“Yeah, it’s popping up everywhere these days. A penny doesn’t buy much of a thought anymore.” She took a sip of her herbal tea and Adam stared into his coffee mug for a moment.
“I still miss her, Mom.”
“So do I, hon.” She called everyone hon, something Adam had picked up himself, well, when talking with women, at least.
Marge reached out and squeezed the hand he had wrapped around his mug and he looked up to see a tear slide down her wrinkled cheek. “I’ve rattled around in this house of sad memories too long. That’s one of the reasons I decided to move to an apartment. Some friends from high school are in the same complex, and we’ve decided it’s time to raise a little more hell while we still can. Our last hurrah.”
Adam grinned at her. “What out, Twin Cities.”
Marge grew series again. “But Adam, you have so many years ahead of you. No one’s earned another chance at happiness more than you. Don’t you think it’s time for you to find someone else?”
Adam stalled, taking a sip of the lukewarm coffee. He wasn’t going to talk to her about Karla. That relationship couldn’t go anywhere. But he realized he had no interest in looking for anyone else.
“Who is she?”
Stunned, Adam looked up at Joni’s mom and quirked an eyebrow. “She?”
“You were just thinking of someone. The half-smile on your face tells me it’s a woman and she might be important to you.”
Adam waved her off the scent. “She’s important, but it’s not like that. She’s a young singer at the club. I first met her nine years ago when she needed rescuing.” Only she rescued me instead.
“How young is young?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Pshaw. Joni’s dad was twenty-eight years older than me.”
“And you’ve been alone how long?”
“He wasn’t in as good physical shape as you are; lots of health problems and he drank too much. Even so, we had twenty-three years together. I wouldn’t change that for anything. Except for the drinking. Joni was so happy you weren’t a drinker.”
Marge had no idea that it had been Joni who’d gotten him to give up drinking, before she’d brought him home to meet her folks. He’d have followed in his old man’s footsteps, if not for Joni. The backs of his eyes burned.
“But you and Joni had twenty years with each other. Lots of couples aren’t blessed with that. Would you still have married her if you knew it would only be for twenty years?”
He cleared the frog from his throat. “Hell, yeah.”
“Well, you’ll only be seventy in twenty more years. Spring chicken.” She smiled.
“Yes, ma’am, but I’m still old enough to be her father.”
“But you aren’t her father. And from the way your eyes light up when you think about her, I’d say you don’t picture yourself as her daddy, either.”
Hell, no. But thoughts of what Karla’s daddy would think when he found out Adam had slept with his daughter made his gut twist. When he’d talked with Carl and Jenny a few months back, after Karla had shown up at the club, he’d promised to take good care of her. Instead…
Marge leaned toward him, her eyes bright with unshed tears. She touched his hand again and said in a raspy whisper, “Adam, Joni would want you to have someone to love, and for you to have someone to love you as much as she did. Trust me on this. But if you don’t believe me, look in that box she left for you.”
The box. Every year for the past five years, she’d tried to get him to open it, or at least take it home with him. Every year, he’d left it untouched in the back of the closet in the room where Joni had died. Adam had avoided the room and that box every year he’d come up here since his retirement from the Corps. He knew Joni had wanted him to have whatever was in there, but he’d been reluctant to take possession of it, afraid of what might lie inside.
“I think it’s time, Adam. You need to take it home with you this time.”
Adam looked into Marge’s eyes, the eyes that reminded him so much of Joni’s. But he didn’t feel his heart squeeze tight or his lungs constrict the way they usually did. He just saw Marge, Joni’s mom.
He nodded.
“Yeah. It’s time.”
Chapter Fifteen
Adam walked into the room and avoided looking at the queen-sized bed where he’d spent Joni’s last agonizing weeks. But the images bombarded him just the same. Skin on bones. She’d lost so much weight between the spring, when he’d been home on medical leave after the ambush in Afghanistan, to when he’d been called home by Marge finally, at Joni’s request. Joni hadn’t wanted to take him away from something as important as Enduring Freedom and the men and women who needed him to just sit helplessly by her side and watch her die. She was both a hero and a casualty of the war that no one would ever recognize or honor except Adam and Marge.
When he’d come into the room that first day back, Joni hadn’t been able to speak, but had patted the mattress beside her. He’d come into the room and wrapped her in his arms, holding her while she sobbed. Clearly, she’d needed him. He’d have been here sooner, if only he’d known. So fucking helpless.
Shit, helpless didn’t begin to describe what he felt. He’d wished he could battle every
cancer cell that had invaded her body and crush it between his fingers. Would he have been able to make a difference if he’d been here? Probably not, if the Mayo doctors couldn’t find a cure for her. Where else could he have taken her? She’d held on longer than the doctors had predicted. Marge was probably right—she was waiting to hear the words from him that would release her to the next life. But saying them had been the hardest thing he’d ever done. As if he were saying he didn’t want her beside him any longer.
Then, on the 6th of November, he just couldn’t stand to watch her suffer any longer. He’d have liked to have held her close and kissed her one last time on their twentieth anniversary, only two days later, but her breathing had become so labored and the look of terror in her eyes scared him to death. At his request, the hospice nurse had increased the amount of morphine to the full dosage allowed. A few hours later, she’d surrendered to him one last time, dying in his arms.
Adam felt a hand brushing his back and jumped. “I know it’s hard, hon,” Marge said. “I just want to thank you for making Joni so happy, right to the end.”
He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t clear the lump in his throat. Then he fought to get the words out anyway. “She deserved better than me.”
“Bullshit.”
Adam had never heard Marge cuss before. He turned toward her and she pierced him with her big brown Joni eyes.
“Adam Montague, I don’t know who messed with your head when you were young. I know, I know,” she said, waving her hand as if to brush away his familiar rote protests. “You don’t want to talk about that time in your life. But you had better hear this. You were a good husband, a good provider, and, from what Joni hinted at, everything she ever wanted in a man between the sheets.”
If Adam could blush, he would have. Talking about kinky sex with Joni in front of her mother was just wrong on too many levels.
“You need to accept that you’re a good man, Adam, and move on.” She reached up and stroked his face, her thumb brushing across his cheekbone. “Everyone else can see that. Why can’t you?”
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