by Dana Marton
Recovery had stages. Right now, Trevor needed that support, that shelter. And maybe he needed it from a friend, from someone who was kind of like him. Words weren’t always the same when they came from a therapist.
When he looked at Annie next, some of his darkness was fading around the edges. “You think I could take one of these orchids back to my room with me?”
She smiled at him. “Sure, Trev.”
More of his darkness melted away.
Trevor was definitely making progress. And Annie couldn’t have been happier about that. With everything she was, she sensed a breakthrough just around the corner for him. She couldn’t wait.
Soon they were both grinning.
She’d messed up with Cole, but she was definitely doing something right with Trevor. She needed to keep her mind focused on that.
Don’t think about the kiss. Don’t think about the kiss. Don’t think about the kiss.
Chapter Thirteen
NOON FOUND COLE once again leaning against his truck in the parking lot outside Hope Hill. He watched the facilities and the people hurrying between buildings, coming and going from lunch. None of them looked like a traitor. He needed progress. One damn clue. Anything. Those burner phones the traitor used had to be somewhere.
He had only three more offices to search, and seven patient rooms.
He’d gotten an eyeful when spying on the acupuncturist, but what he’d seen hadn’t exactly moved him forward.
Milo had had a young woman with him—maybe the girl was twenty, if that. They’d both been naked. Milo had been on the treatment table, acting out some fantasy, the woman’s lips moving up and down an impressive erection. But the sex act wasn’t what left Cole mentally scarred. What had him jerking his head back was the fact that Milo had about two dozen stainless-steel needles sticking out of his ball sack.
Like a freaking porcupine down there.
Who did that?
First thing this morning, Cole had canceled all his scheduled acupuncture treatments.
Since that left a hole in his schedule today, he’d gone swimming earlier than usual, and . . . Annie.
Her mad dive into the pool, the way his heart stopped, her see-through shirt, the way his heart stopped again—he didn’t know what to do with any of that. He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to kiss her again.
He didn’t go to her morning feeding with her. He’d tracked her down and offered, but she’d said Detective Finnegan would be stopping by. The man had more questions and wanted to look at the house and yard again in the light of day.
Maybe he’d find footprints.
Instead of going with Annie, Cole had texted his mother, checking in—she was fine, other than some big drama at the knitting club. After she finally let him go—once he agreed that Letty was definitely copying her colors—he went for a run and bumped into Trevor on his way back. Trevor had been sitting in the courtyard with a sketch pad.
“Didn’t know you were an artist,” Cole said.
“Planning a new barn for my mother. She loves her horses.” He showed Cole his drawings. “I work on it every day. Takes my mind off other things. Kind of relaxing.”
Cole was glad to see the guy relaxed. He left Trev with a few encouraging words and went back to his room to text his CO with an update. They’d agreed on regular check-ins.
His CO texted back.
Msgs are still going to Yemen
2 in the past 3 days
And Cole thought, Shit.
Then noon rolled around, and Cole found himself in the parking lot once again.
“Need some company?” he asked when Annie showed up.
Her gaze hovered in the vicinity of his neck, and she wouldn’t look any higher. “Thanks, but I’m good. I have some errands to run. I won’t be back for a while.”
He shouldn’t have said anything about her nipples back at the pool. The sight of her clothes stuck to her body had poleaxed him. His body stirred at the memory.
“I’m going crazy in this place,” he said. “I need to get out for a while. You said we could be friends.”
After a moment, she gave a reluctant nod.
Relief loosened the tension in his shoulders. “Truck?”
“Car. I have to get groceries.”
He went around to the Prius’s passenger side.
“Finnegan have anything new?” he asked as he got in.
“Not yet.”
“I don’t like the idea of you going to the house alone.”
She didn’t tell him to mind his own business, but she looked as if the words were on the tip of her tongue.
Don’t think about her tongue.
They took care of the animals and bought groceries. They also stopped by the small PD so she could be fingerprinted, which took less than ten minutes.
When she drove by her house, he said, “You missed the driveway.”
“The food is for my grandfather.” The skin tightened around her eyes. “Sylvia, his housekeeper, has a bad back. She can’t carry heavy grocery bags anymore.”
Annie’s stiff posture said there was a story there somewhere about the grandfather. For one, Cole wondered for the first time, why wasn’t she staying with the grandfather instead of at Hope Hill?
Annie drove to the end of the block, turned right, drove past the cornfield, turned right again at the next stop sign. She pulled over in front of a hundred-year-old brick farmhouse. “You don’t have to come in.”
Cole was already reaching for the handle. “I don’t mind. I’ll help you carry the groceries.”
She was so clearly dreading the visit, he almost told her to stay in the car and he’d carry the bags in, but he had no right to interfere in her family business.
They found the eighty-something man alone, sitting in his striped blue pajamas in the kitchen, reading the paper. He didn’t smile at Annie, didn’t hug her, didn’t thank her for the food.
“Who’s that?” were the first words out of his mouth, his eyes slanting toward Cole.
Annie turned toward Cole as she responded. She hadn’t once forgotten, from their first session, that he needed to see her lips. “A friend from Hope Hill. His name is Cole.”
“One of the looneys?”
“He has trouble with hearing, so if you talk to him, you have to turn toward him. He needs to read your lips.”
Instead, the old man turned away, but not enough so Cole couldn’t read his next question. “You sleeping with him?”
He read the words almost as clearly as he read the disgust and censure on the old man’s face.
Annie’s expression tightened. She began putting food in the refrigerator while Cole hesitated, unsure how to defend her.
The guy was old and frail, his disapproval the strongest thing about him. A two-hundred-pound Navy SEAL mowing his ass down wouldn’t be right. And he was Annie’s grandfather. She clearly cared about him enough to help him.
She shot Cole a let-me-handle-it look.
So Cole stood there, fuming silently. He prayed the old geezer didn’t lay into Annie again, because Cole wasn’t sure he’d be able to keep from saying something he might regret later.
“Sorry about that,” Annie said when they were back in the car, her slim hand hesitating on the key in the ignition.
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
“We don’t get along.”
“Why?”
“When my mom was twenty, going to college at WCU, she got pregnant by an older guy in town. Turned out, he also got another woman pregnant at the same time. He chose the other woman and the other kid.”
Annie’s face was so studiously impassive, Cole knew the rejection still hurt her.
“So then my mom quit college to raise me. She went to work as a cashier at the grocery store. We spent the first eleven years of my life living with my grandfather. He called my mother a slut and a whore at least fifty times a day, until she couldn’t take it anymore. She got a new job in Delaware, and we moved there.”
Her expression had been closed and her muscles tight since they’d pulled into the driveway, but now the look in her eyes turned dark and bleak.
“What happened in Delaware, Annie?” Cole asked as softly as possible, and held his breath for the answer.
She stared past him, out the passenger side window as her lips formed a single word. “Randy.”
“Who is Randy?” Other than a man Cole needed to kill.
Her gaze snapped to him, as if she’d only now realized she’d spoken out loud.
“He was my mother’s boyfriend.” She drove away from the farmhouse. “Need to go anywhere before we go back to Hope Hill?”
She straightened her spine, filled her lungs, and turned her tight expression into a neutral one. From the way she was desperately avoiding looking at him, he was pretty sure no further questions on the subject would be answered.
He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “I have PT in half an hour. I’d better get back.”
Even if what he really wanted to do was go wherever this Randy lived and ask the asshole what he’d done to put that look into Annie’s eyes.
She drove in silence.
“I’m going to your feedings with you from now on,” he said. “Until they catch the intruder, you shouldn’t go alone.”
He was aware that he wasn’t giving her a choice. He couldn’t. Her safety wasn’t up for negotiation.
He expected her to push back.
“Harper said the same thing. That I shouldn’t go alone,” she said instead. “OK. Thanks. I appreciate it.” And then she added, “Sorry about my grandfather.”
“You don’t have to be sorry on my account. But he should treat you better.”
He wondered if the old man put her down regularly like he’d done with that are-you-sleeping-with-him comment.
Yet Annie still took care of the man. She was not only courageous, but she was loyal too, another attribute Cole valued highly.
He wanted to protect her. He was going to go with her again at six and at midnight.
After that, he was going to search the three remaining offices. Hopefully without running into someone else with needles in his ball sack.
Chapter Fourteen
ANNIE RESCHEDULED SOME of the sessions she’d originally canceled for the week, including an informal activity at three o’clock. She sent out a round of text messages. Five guys showed, which wasn’t bad on last-minute notice.
“Grab some shovels and buckets,” she told them.
Would have been nice if Cole had come.
As soon as the thought surfaced, she shook it off. She needed to be glad that he wasn’t here. She’d been serious when she’d told him she couldn’t help him anymore as his therapist. She had to be circumspect at work.
And outside of work?
He wouldn’t let her go to the feedings alone. Probably only because his default setting was protector.
Don’t read anything into it.
Maybe she should have sent him away when she found him waiting for her in the parking lot, but she couldn’t.
Because he needed the normalcy of the chores?
Because she liked his company?
Both? Neither?
Her thoughts and feelings were a swirling mess when it came to Cole.
She was smart enough to know when she was in trouble.
Yet when he lumbered up as the group headed to the back of the buildings, her heart leapt. She acknowledged it, but remained firm in her decision not to encourage the attraction.
She nodded a greeting, then turned to lead the group, not stopping until they reached the designated spot.
“So we’ll mark out the spots for the trees, then start digging the holes. We need holes about two inches deeper and two inches larger all around than the root balls. Everybody who didn’t get a shovel needs to start carrying water.”
None of them ever complained about having to do something physical. Getting them to talk or consider taking some of the alternative-treatment methods seriously was like pulling teeth. But if hard work and muscle were needed, they were there.
Cole carried water. Digging one-handed would have been awkward for him. Annie made sure not to pay any more attention to him than to the others. He was preoccupied, doing the work, but his attention was clearly not on his task. He almost planted one of the trees without taking the burlap off the root ball.
“Why are we planting two of everything?” Dale, a recovering burn victim and former marine, shouted over. “OCD?”
At the moment, the brand-new orchard consisted of two cherry trees, two apples, two pears, two plums, two sour cherries, and two peaches.
“I’m experimenting with what’ll grow well in this soil,” Annie said. “We’ll plant more of whatever produces well.”
The property had plenty of space, and if they grew more fruit than the cafeteria needed, they could always donate the rest to the Broslin food pantry.
“Why not plant one of each, then?” Dale wiped his hands on his jeans. “If you’re not sure they’ll all make it.”
“Most fruit trees need two of a kind for cross-pollination,” Kyle, a farm boy from Iowa, told him.
“They don’t look too good.” Dale had doubt written all over his city-boy face.
“They’re going dormant for the winter.” Kyle rolled his eyes.
And Annie added, “Best time to plant them.”
The trees wouldn’t bear fruit for years. None of the men who planted today would be here for the harvest. They wouldn’t benefit. They were planting for others.
They talked about that as they worked on the orchard. Annie considered the concept of continuity important. She wanted them to viscerally understand that there was a future—a future that could be bettered by simply working on things today.
She hoped the message reached Dale, specifically.
Most of her patients lived in the past—had trouble letting go of the past, of things that had happened to them, things they had done. She had to coax most of them to live more in the present. Not Dale. Dale lived too much in the present. If something didn’t work right now, it was never going to work. If he had trouble sleeping right now, he was never going to sleep again. She’d done several visualization exercises with him in the past couple of weeks about what his ideal future would look like. He had a lot of trouble with that.
In his mind, the way things were—especially bad things—was the way they were always going to be.
Annie wished Trevor had been able to attend the tree planting, but Trev had PT. The planting would have probably been too strenuous for him anyway. Titanium screws held his neck together.
The guys did a great job with the task, the trees popping into the ground one after the other. Annie was pleased.
She was also far too aware of Cole in a way she wasn’t aware of the others. She wanted to think the reason was because he was bigger than everyone else. And, also, she had to be aware of him to make sure she turned toward him when she spoke, so he could read her lips. Except, if she was honest with herself, her awareness of him went beyond that.
She had to admit that she was aware of him as a man. When he passed by with a bucket of water and brushed her arm, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
She was aware of his shifting muscles as she watched him lift a hundred-pound root ball with one hand. Every time he came within ten feet, her entire body focused on him.
She had to get over her stupid and extremely inappropriate attraction before he noticed. And before others noticed. None of the men were fools. If anyone figured out how stupid she was being, her credibility with her patients would be ruined. Not to mention her continued job prospects at Hope Hill.
“I’ll take that.” Cole popped up at her elbow as she reached for the cooler the cafeteria had packed for them.
She’d wanted to eat at least a snack outside with the group under the sky, in the orchard they were planting—another connection.
Cole reached around her and took t
he cooler, his arm brushing her shoulder. Once again, lightning sliced through her. Before she could step back, he was gone, taking the cooler to the picnic table in the center of the future orchard and dropping it in the middle.
Dale opened the top. “Egg-salad sandwiches.” He picked one along with a bottle of water, then looked back in. “Got some tuna too.”
The guys gathered around and sat. Annie rubbed her arm where her skin tingled, then went to join them.
She had no plans to sneak in any therapy. A shared meal, community, nature, and good work all contributed healing power.
The picnic table could easily sit eight average people, but some of the guys were pretty big, especially Cole and Dale. Their warrior bodies took up a lot of space. Only when she stood next to them did Annie notice that there wasn’t enough room for her at the table.
Cole sat on one end. As Annie prepared to sit on an overturned bucket, Cole leaned into the row of massive soldiers next to him and pushed them over. He barely exerted himself, but the row moved, until Dale fell off on the other end.
“Make room for the lady,” Cole mumbled under his breath as the others laughed, Dale taking his dethronement in stride and claiming the bucket.
Nothing for Annie to do then but sit next to Cole. She made sure to keep an inch or two between them as she dropped her hands onto her lap. She didn’t want to reach over Cole for a sandwich and accidentally press a breast against his arm. She wasn’t that hungry anyway.
“Can I grab you something?”
They were so close to each other, she could see the golden flecks that ringed his dark irises. His gaze dropped to her mouth as he waited for her answer.
He looked at her mouth a lot. She knew he had a perfectly good reason. Awareness zinged through her anyway.
Knock it off.
“An egg-salad sandwich and a bottle of green tea would be great.”
He turned to grab what she’d asked for and handed it over, keeping his gaze on her mouth in case she asked for something more.