Amy left him in her tiny living room while she hung up her coat and headed for the kitchen, hiking up the thermostat on her way.
“It’ll warm up in a few minutes,” she said over her shoulder, then rattled around in her cupboards for the coffee and filters.
Her hands were shaking as she filled the glass pot with tap water. Shaking hard.
She set the pot on the counter. Lowered her head. Drew a deep breath. Tried to settle herself down.
But she was so rattled. So…overcome with the joy of seeing him. Over the idea that he’d come all this way. To see her. Surely…please God, let it mean something.
Tears leaked from her eyes. Damnable, hot heavy tears of hope and dread and…God. She blinked them back. She had to get ahold of herself.
“Amy.”
She actually flinched. Stiffened when she felt his hands cup her shoulders. Felt the warmth of his body behind her seeping into her back. Couldn’t stop the tears this time as he turned her around to face him.
She couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t let him see what he did to her. Couldn’t let him…
Kiss her.
But she did. Her lips trembled as he tipped her face up to his with a curled finger under her chin and lowered his mouth to hers. All gentleness. Apology. Regret.
“I never should have let you go,” he whispered and kissed the corner of her mouth. Nuzzled his nose along her cheek, wiping her tears with his thumbs. “I’m sorry.”
A sob wracked her body as she threw her arms around his neck and clung. Just clung and cried while he wrapped her tight and held her.
“You’re shivering,” he whispered against her hair.
She choked out a laugh. “Look who’s talking.”
She felt his smile against her hair. “How about we skip the coffee and go warm each other up?”
“Yeah,” she said, finally meeting his eyes and seeing everything she needed to see there. “How about we do that?”
She was a wonder of fluid grace, of greedy taking, delicious giving. The first time, she damn near burned him alive, a frenzied and furious need to feed a fire that demanded quenching.
The next time, they took each other slowly. With reverence. With lush, lazy strokes, with long languid kisses. The kind that said we have tonight. And we have many, many tomorrows.
Dallas eased up on an elbow beside her. Watched her beautiful face as she rested. Her pale skin glowed almost iridescent in the tiny room in the double bed. Her silver gold hair fanned around her face on the pillow. A smile of utter contentment lit her face.
Mine, he thought. She had to be his. Had been his from the first time he’d seen her, wild with terror and needing him on Jolo.
And finally, finally he understood. Now he had to make her understand. He owed her that. He owed her the opportunity to know exactly what she was getting into. Then she could decide if she still wanted to take him on.
He could count the times on one hand when he’d been this scared. His first parachute jump. The first time he’d come face-to-face with a man whose only focus was to kill him. When Amy had run out into a hail of gunfire to retrieve the M-60. He’d thought he’d lost her then.
Could still lose her now.
He brushed a fall of hair back from her temple. “You awake?”
She yawned, then stretched like a cat and squirmed deeper into the mattress. “Do I have to be?”
He grinned in spite of the way his heart was beating against his ribs. “Yeah. I think you do.”
She opened her eyes. Blinked. Gazed up at him. “Am I going to want to hear this?”
There was that uncertainty again. There was the doubt. He hated that he was the cause of it. But there wasn’t any other way.
“I love you,” he said to assuage her concerns and because he simply needed to say it…just say it. Finally.
Her eyes glittered in the dim light. “I know,” she said. “I’ve always known.”
He smiled tightly. “That would be why women are the superior sex. They’re a lot smarter then us mere men. Took me a long time to figure it out.”
“So why do I get the feeling that this is a problem?”
He ran his hand down the length of her arm. Laced her fingers with his. Brought them to his mouth. Kissed her fingertips.
“Once upon a time,” he began, smiling with her when he launched into an impromptu fairy tale, “there was a little boy who wanted to grow up and save the world. If you were to ask his family, they would all say the same thing about him.”
“That he was wonderful?”
He grunted. “That he was focused, rigid, controlling in everything he did. That all of his life he required perfection. That meant he needed to be perfect too. And that any woman who wanted to spend her life with him needed to be perfect.”
“Oh.” The delight left her eyes and the worry returned.
“But when the boy became a man,” he went on, finally getting to the tough part, “something happened to make his perfect life not so perfect anymore.
“He went to war,” he said, stopped and shook his head. “He went to war. It’s what he’d trained to do. What he wanted to do in the name of his country, for the sake of his family, for all the reasons that make a man with a purpose a patriot.”
He stopped. Looked into the darkness toward the other side of the room. Looked back down at her; a concerned frown pinched her brows.
“Good men died in that war. Men he was responsible for. Men who left mothers and sisters and babies and wives. Men who didn’t come home. Men who died in pieces on a cold mountain pass in a godforsaken country that’s still at war.”
“And they haunt you,” she whispered.
Only then did he realize he’d fallen silent.
He swallowed. Nodded. “They haunt me.”
“We all have ghosts, Dallas.”
“Yeah. It seems we do. Only—I wasn’t supposed to, see? None of that was supposed to affect me. Me and my perfectly planned out life.
“I have holes, Amy,” he admitted as she waited in silence. “Big black holes that I fall into…for days sometimes. Holes I can’t dig my way out of. Sometimes, I don’t even want to. I just want to stay there, curled up, cocooned, separated from what’s real and what’s keeping me from facing the memories that hit me like…like—”
“Like a shot from a cannon,” she finished for him.
“Yeah. Like that. You have them too, don’t you?”
She nodded. “I haven’t been diagnosed. But I’ve done a lot of reading since—well, since what happened to me on Jolo. PSTD. The medical condition of the decade.”
He lay back down beside her, gathered her close. “So, you have before you an imperfect man. A man who doesn’t know if he can keep himself together, let alone help another wounded soul through her own kind of hell.
“Christ,” he muttered, frustrated and unsure, “you need someone you can count on to be there for you. Not someone who will bring you down when you need to be shored up.”
She was quiet for a long time. Then she placed her hand over his heart. It was small and warm and so very, very welcome there. “You know what I think about perfect people, Dallas? I think they don’t exist. I think they’re a trick of light and mirrors and shadows. And I don’t think I could live with or love a man who had a misguided goal of perfection.”
She turned in his arms, pressed her forehead to his and met his eyes. “I like a man with scars. I like a man who looks in the mirror and sees himself for who he is. For what he is. An imperfect person in an imperfect world.
“In fact,” she touched her lips to his, achingly tender, incredibly sweet. “I love a man like that.”
Easy. She made what he’d been making so hard, so easy. Relief was huge and sweet and humbling.
He smiled against her mouth, nipped her lower lip. “Well, it just so happens that I know where you can pick up a slightly used, fairly imperfect man who fits that description.”
“Really? He doesn’t have any warts, now d
oes he? Because I draw the line at warts.”
He laughed, rolled her under him and pinned her to the mattress. “No warts. Lotta scars, though.”
“Ah,” she said, threading her hands through his hair. “Bonus points. I think maybe we can make a deal here.”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling into the face he wanted to see on his pillow every morning for the rest of his life. “Here’s the deal. I get to marry you. You get to become a Garrett—although, considering what you’re marrying into, I’m not certain that’s much of an incentive.”
“They love you.”
“They made me come here,” he admitted, “so I guess they aren’t so bad.”
“No,” she agreed. “They aren’t so bad. And neither are you. We’ll be fine, Dallas. We’ll be good.”
“We’ll be great,” he promised, for the first time believing it as he slipped easily inside of her.
EPILOGUE
Three months later, West Palm Beach
She loves it here.” Amy stood in the shade of the covered pavilion watching her mother. Karen Walker’s wheelchair had been rolled to the edge of the grass where she sat staring out over a small lake where sandhill cranes and snowy white egrets waded along the bank. The sun was warm on her face and she actually had a little color on her cheeks.
“I know it’s hard for you to see it,” she said, glancing up at Dallas, who stood with his arm slung possessively over her shoulder, “but I can tell.”
She wound her arm around his waist as he hugged her. “I’m glad. I was afraid the move might be hard on her.”
That was another thing she loved about this man who would soon be her husband. He looked at all sides of every situation. And more than likely, he had a solution to every problem.
Amy never could have afforded this beautiful facility for her mother’s care. Winter Haven had been a state-run institution, her mother’s expenses covered by federal and state funding. Mary’s House was a brand-new, state-of-the-art mental health facility built and funded by Darin Kincaid. Darin, Amy had learned, was Nolan’s father-in-law.
“The story behind Mary’s House is long and sad,” Dallas had told her when he’d shown her the brochures with its beautiful color photos of the building, the private rooms and the extravagantly appointed grounds.
“Dallas, I can’t afford this.”
“You can. Because it’s not going to cost you a penny.”
She’d been speechless.
“Someday I’ll tell you the details, but the bottom line is Kincaid wanted to right an old wrong and the best way he knew how to do it was to provide for people like your mother who need safe haven, need special care, and don’t have the means of paying.”
Even now, two months after they’d moved her mother from Winter Haven in New York to Mary’s Place in West Palm, Amy still had difficulty grasping the opulence—both materially and emotionally.
Today, it was the emotional abundance that touched her the deepest.
“Here you go, Karen,” she heard Susan Garrett say as she joined Amy’s mother by her chair and handed her a cool glass of ice tea.
It was her mother’s birthday today. That, according to Dallas’ mother, made it a special family celebration.
All day long, Amy had been fighting back tears. Joyful tears. Grateful tears. I-can’t-believe-my-good-fortune tears as one by one the Garrett clan had shown up at Mary’s House for a birthday party slash potluck slash picnic.
Susan Garrett had made all the arrangements. She’d reserved the outside pavilion for the gathering and made all the phone calls. Wes, their dad, was busy bouncing Nolan’s little guy on his knee and, as usual, the Garrett “children” were giving each other ten kinds of grief.
Amy watched it all in a daze. A little in awe of Jillian, Nolan’s wife. She was a big-time news personality in West Palm—and she made, according to Nolan, “a killer bowl of potato chips.”
Jillian, evidently didn’t cook. Nolan didn’t seem to care.
Ethan and Darcy were there. So were Eve and her husband, Mac, whose dark good looks and quick smile could compete with the Garrett men, any day.
Even Manny and his new wife Lily and their son Adam joined the party, with Jason Wilson and his wife in tow.
“Is that…that can’t be…” Amy stuttered when she saw the woman at Jason’s side. “She looks like…like that famous rock star.”
“Sweet Baby Jane?” Dallas asked with a grin.
“It’s not, is it?”
He popped an olive into his mouth. “’Fraid so.”
“Dallas. You didn’t tell me.”
He grinned down on her. “Tell you what?”
“Well…that there was going to be a celebrity here.”
He grunted. “Don’t let Janey hear you say that. Far be it from me to dispute her, but she considers us the closest thing to normal in her life—and she loves just being a person when she’s with us.”
Amy relaxed a little. Grinned. “Normal is a bit of a stretch,” she agreed.
“I warned you.”
He had. He’d warned her that his family was loud and boisterous and irreverent when they all got together during their down time.
They were all that and more. And Amy loved it. Loved the idea of belonging to a family almost as much as she loved Dallas.
She glanced back at her mother, touched a hand to her heart when she saw Nolan’s little boy on her lap and Wes kneeling beside them, supporting the little guy’s weight.
“She’s smiling,” Amy said, swallowing back tears.
“Like you said,” Dallas turned her in his arms and kissed her forehead. “She’s happy here.”
“She’s happy,” Amy said, not caring that there were tears running down her face, “because of you. You and your wonderful not-so-normal family. I love them. I love them all.”
“See, now that’s what I call a very nice coincidence. Because they all love you too,” he added gently.
“Thank you.” She snuggled up against him. “Just thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet, sweetheart. The ugly family secret is about to come out.”
She leaned back. He’d linked his hands together at the small of her back and held her hips close to his. “You have an ugly secret?”
His eyes danced. “Should have told you before, huh?”
“Depends. What’s the secret?”
He hooked a thumb over his shoulder.
She peeked around him.
Eve was dragging something that looked like a…“Is that a croquet set?”
“Game on!” Eve shouted. “And I pity the fool who thinks they can beat me on this fine, fine day.”
“Jenna says hi.” Amy dropped down on the sofa beside Dallas the next evening.
He looked up from the newspaper. “How is she?”
“Good. I think. Kind of subdued. She asked if we’d heard anything from Gabe.”
“That’s not likely to ever happen.”
“I wonder about him, sometimes, too. If he’s okay. If Reed and Lang made out okay.”
Dallas folded the paper, set it on the coffee table and turned to her. “You don’t have to worry about those three. They know how to handle themselves.”
She leaned back into him when he lifted his arm in invitation. “I wonder how Juliana fits into that puzzle.”
“Amazing woman.”
Amy nodded against his shoulder. “Sad, though. Beneath her gracious welcome, I thought she seemed a little sad.”
“Everyone has secrets,” he agreed and kissed her temple.
“And ghosts,” she added.
They’d been addressing their ghosts. They were down to monthly visits now, but both Dallas and Amy had been seeing someone to help them deal with the PSTD.
It was slow. But it was coming along. She didn’t figure they’d ever be fully free of their past. In truth, she didn’t want to be. She never would have met Dallas if it hadn’t been for what had happened to her on Jolo. And what had happened to her…it was p
art of who she was now.
But the man beside her—he was the biggest part.
She turned in his arms. Kissed him with feeling.
When she pulled away, they were both smiling.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked in a deep, sexy bedroom voice.
“Yeah.” She ran a finger suggestively down his chest. “Let’s do it. Let’s go get the croquet set. I need to practice.”
He groaned, wounded to the bone. “Eve has turned you into a monster.”
“But, I’m your monster, right? And you wouldn’t have me any other way.”
“Scars and all,” he said, running his thumb tenderly along the crescent-shaped scar on her temple. “Scars and all.”
Dear Reader,
It has been a joy introducing you to the amazing men and women of E.D.E.N., Inc. during the course of the Bodyguards series. And judging from the many responses I’ve received, you have enjoyed reading about Nolan and Jillian, Eve and Mac, Ethan and Darcy, Jase and Janey, Manny and Lily, and Dallas and Amy as much as I’ve enjoyed telling their stories.
It’s always hard to say good-bye to old friends—and truly, the Garretts and their extended family have become my friends—as I hope they’ve become yours. So let’s not say good-bye, okay? Let’s just say so long for now, wish them well and hope that we may someday see them again.
If you like the E.D.E.N. series, I promise I have several more similar stories in mind. Gabe and Jenna, for instance. They’re both calling to me. Both have a story to be told—Gabe’s dark and deep and Jenna’s feisty and fun. And as obnoxious as he was, there was something about Johnny Duane Reed that made me smile and wonder about the heart and true nature of the man who lived behind that sexy grin. Not to mention Sam Lang. The quiet man. How many secrets must he harbor? I wonder what it’s going to take to pry them out of him….
I love hearing from you and make all efforts to answer all my mail, so don’t hesitate to contact to me via my website: www.cindygerard.com.
All my best until next time,
Cindy
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