by Geri Krotow
“No.” All of their conversation since they’d left the hotel had been clipped on his part. Trina got why Rob didn’t want an extra body tagging along on his op, but she knew that his ribs were still hurting and at risk of complete fracture. She’d be his backup if he collapsed a lung. “The dog, Trina. We need to do something about the dog.”
“He’s a good little puppy. He can stay in the car—we’ll leave the windows open. My guess is he’ll be happy to smell us, and stay put. It’ll be cooler than being outside, especially if you park this under a tree.”
“I’ve got a better idea.” Without fanfare, he turned off the highway and onto a winding country road. After about a mile he pulled off onto a farmhouse drive, and she saw the Paradise Creatures sign. “We’re taking him to a kennel?”
“Until you are able to come back for him, yes. I’ve already reached out to the owner and they’ve agreed to open for us.”
She smiled inwardly, inexplicably buoyed by his concern for the tiny dog. “Thank you.”
Rob grunted his acknowledgment as he put the SUV in Park. “If you don’t mind, could you take the dog in?”
“Of course.”
Trina signed the papers for the puppy, and when the attendant asked her his name, she thought a minute. “Renegade. His name is Renegade.”
She returned to the car, where the motor was still running and the air-conditioning divine.
“How is your arm feeling?”
He shrugged. “Fine. Sore, like I pounded out too many reps in the gym. If it had been broken, we’d both be on a bus right now.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do, Trina. You’ve single-handedly decided that you’re going to get in on this mission when you’ve never worked something like this before. You usually apprehend one person at a time, right?”
“Not always. It depends. And no, I have no clue whom you’re working for or what you’re doing, except that Corey mentioned young girls being trafficked and I had to help. They’re being sent to my neck of the woods. Have you spent a lot of time in Silver Valley in between your missions? It’s peaceful, a rolling green-and-blue horizon atop woods and farm fields. Not usual for a place so close to three major cities.” She referred to Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, DC.
“I’ve recently become acquainted with Silver Valley, yes.” He’d lived right in her backyard for three months. And she was furious with herself for caring, for wanting to know where he lived and how long he planned to stay.
“Then you know it’s worth fighting for, to keep these evil bastards out.”
“I don’t think that ROC is interested in settling in there anytime soon. They only want their cut for the girls.”
“Maybe.” She didn’t know what he did, and wasn’t trying to pretend to.
“What I want to know, Trina, is why aren’t you more concerned about your kid?”
“I’m very concerned about my child.” She bit her lower lip. It was so very difficult to not just spill it all, tell Rob that Jake was his. But not like this, not in the midst of an op that could go south at any point. “I’m also lucky to have supportive family.”
“Yes, you are.” His judgment couldn’t be clearer. It stung that he thought her career was a threat to her child. She’d asked herself the same question, and it always came back to accepting that law enforcement was a calling for her. And so was being Jake’s mother.
“What should I know about what we’re walking into?” She had training, but knowledge was the best weapon in any op. And an open mind.
“Have you ever worked any kind of SWAT?”
“Only training. I’ve been pretty lucky as far as ops go—most of my apprehensions have been textbook. If there’s any chance something is going to get risky, we go in pairs and ask for backup when needed.”
“Great. So you forced yourself on this without the skills to be of any help.”
“Excuse me. I have plenty of skills. And it won’t be just the two of us, will it?” She’d assumed they’d be going in on the tip of a large spear of LEAs. “We’re wasting time talking. Let’s go.”
He shook his head. “We can’t do one thing, make a single move, until we get the go-ahead from my boss. I’ll drive to our waiting point and we could be there five minutes or five days until the call comes. It’s how these things go. We won’t have backup at the start. We’re going in clandestine. The ROC group won’t hesitate to kill these girls in order to keep how they got them this far into the States from being revealed. Until the girls are placed where they’re being sold, and the money is in ROC hands, they’re a liability. I have no desire to have the deaths of these young women on my conscience.”
Cold dread made her blood feel as though it was thickening, pumping too slowly through her body.
“You okay?” She heard Rob’s voice, but her vision blurred as she remembered the cold stone basement, the hours that she’d been certain would turn into days. “Trina.”
His forceful tone shook her from the hell that had been the first major turning point in her life. “I’m fine.”
“You’re thinking about the time in high school, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” She placed the empty coffee cup into the holder on her door. “I’m in this for whatever it takes.”
“I forgot about it until you got so quiet. Look, Trina, this is not the mission for you to prove yourself on. It’s not a hill worth your blood.” His twist on the military adage about whether a hill was worth dying on wasn’t missed. He was trying to get her back to herself.
“I’m good. That was a long time ago. I’ve been through wartime ops since then.” And had birthed a baby, his baby.
“You’ve got a kid, Trina. I get that you’ve changed, you’re not the same woman I knew, but you’re still you. You’ll never forgive yourself if you get hurt, or worse.” He shifted onto a new road and started the long twisting way into the deepest part of the Poconos.
“J—he’s fine.”
“You have a son.”
“Yes.”
“His father—are you with him?”
“No. He—he’s never been in the picture.” Crap. The flashback to when two male high school classmates had grabbed her off the abandoned path between the girls’ locker room and the track, locked her in the football storage garage, promising to come back later for the “real” action, had left her raw. It felt like Rob was ambushing her with everything she’d worked so hard to leave in her past. Including him.
“Did you do in-vitro or adopt?” His curiosity was sincere, his expression open. Fury flashed hot and potent, making her turn in her seat and look at him as he drove.
“Damn it, Rob, you can’t come back to life and interrogate me about what I’ve been doing for the past five years that I thought you were dead. It’s not your business anymore!”
He matched her previous litany of profanity as he slowed the SUV and drove off the road into the space between two copses of trees. They’d be invisible to any passersby, but she wasn’t concerned. In this remote part of the mountains they’d be lucky to see one other vehicle per hour if at all.
The SUV was shielded from the bright sun by the evergreen forest, which provided a better canopy than any stretch of canvas. Rob rolled down the windows to allow for airflow, and to Trina’s surprise, goose bumps appeared on her forearms. It had to be ten, maybe fifteen degrees cooler out of the blazing sun. The early-morning dew still glinted from the tiny green plants that grew at the base of the tree trunks.
“Trina. Look at me.”
Damn it, she was trembling again.
“Please.”
She wanted to ignore his demands, his arrogance, his sheer ignorance of the hell she’d been through, believing he’d been killed. Rob’s gentle persuasion, however, had always been her Achilles’ heel. She sucked in the pine-scented air and faced him.
* * *
Rob’s initial fury that Trina refused to take orders and go back to her office in Harrisburg had been pierced by the stricken expression that he could only attribute to what he remembered as the scariest time of her life. She’d told him the story of the two teens who’d terrorized her in high school, and he’d wanted to go back in time and kill them. As her story unfolded under the desert stars, he’d put his arm around her and listened, giving her all the comfort a SEAL on deployment could. And he’d thanked God that her school had a security system that prevented her captors from doing any physical harm to her. The security guards had caught them and freed Trina.
Her life’s purpose had changed, though. Once on track to become a doctor, she’d decided to do something more physical to help others. And, Rob suspected, to make her feel more empowered. The US Navy beckoned. He understood, because his desire to become a SEAL had been born out of wanting to get out of the chaos that had been his childhood.
Now as he looked into her eyes, eyes that had haunted him since he’d said his private goodbye to her five years ago, he saw the woman he’d made love to in the midst of the highest operational tempo both of them had ever experienced before now.
“I’m sorry if I’m coming across like a tank. But I want to make it perfectly clear, Trina. I moved to Silver Valley, took the job with my current employer, to be closer to you. Even if we only met for coffee once, had one conversation where I’d told you I was still alive and wished you well in your current life, it would be worth it to me. We shared something when we were deployed that few ever do. Forgive me if it’s been too long, and you’ve buried the memories too deeply.”
“I didn’t bury the memories, Rob. I relived them every damned day. For a long time. And I’m still not understanding why you didn’t reach out sooner.” Tears were forming and leaking out of the corners of her eyes, trailing down her cheeks. He couldn’t stop his hand, and his fingers brushed away the sign that he’d hurt Trina far more than he’d imagined. They’d both needed closure.
“I wanted to, babe, but it wasn’t possible.” He hadn’t thought enough of himself to do it for him, but he should have done it for her. Walked across the street and—
His gut clenched in the certainty that a person had less than a handful of times in life. When he was a kid and saw his first SEAL movie and knew that was his path. When a bombing raid had gone terribly wrong and he’d ended up severely injured, only to be captured, tortured as a POW, and once back in friendly hands had endured the most excruciating pain yet—rehabilitation. Knowing his SEAL days were over, and that he’d be able to keep up the good fight in the CIA, but only if he had no shot with Trina.
He’d thought he’d had no chance, but this moment of clarity pierced through everything. His thoughts and planning for what they were going to accomplish once at the ROC Poconos compound took a back seat, and Rob had never allowed a mission to take a back seat.
He didn’t care that she had a child, either. Usually he’d dated only single women without kids, not wanting to involve another potential casualty in his very fluid lifestyle. An adult woman understood “no permanent ties,” but a juvenile didn’t. He paused. If the toddler he saw Trina with had been around two, then he’d be what, five by now?
A bolt of truth pierced him.
“Trina. How old did you say your child is?”
Her eyes widened, and she moved her upper body back, away from him. But she didn’t break eye contact. In that moment, he knew.
“I didn’t. He—he’s five.”
“Five. Years. Old.” Rob let the words hang there as he struggled with the denial exploding inside him, the pure angst that he might have missed the most important thing that ever happened to him.
Trina knew he knew. He saw the regret, the sorrow, the truth in her eyes.
“Yes. He’s five, and his name is Jake. Justin ‘Jake’ Berger Lopez. I call him Jake because, because it’s easier.”
Her proclamation was a hand grenade to his gut. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but stare at Trina. She was his only anchor to the present.
“Rob, I know this is a shock, and trust me, I understand.” She let a nervous laugh bubble out, filling the front seat. “How do you think I felt when I saw you walking out of that storage building? And I had my weapon trained on you. God, I could have blown you away, if I’d thought you were Vasin.”
“He’s mine, your kid.”
“No, he was fathered by one of the next half dozen men I slept with after you died. I only named him after you for the hell of it.” She pulled a face of pure disgust. “Of course he’s yours. He looks just like you. Except he has my gray eyes.” Her face reflected a mother’s satisfaction. “You saw us, saw him, when you found me in Norfolk. And as I said, my brother was there, helping me out. He’d come over for dinner a lot of nights when he wasn’t studying for law school. I was on shore duty, biding my time until I served out my time and could resign. All I wanted was for Jake to be safe and for me to have a normal nine-to-five job so that he’d grow up protected and in a happy environment. It made sense to come back to central Pennsylvania. You had no family, as far as I knew, and since we’d never been officially married, there was no way I could seek financial support from the Navy for your son.” She stopped, and he felt her hand on his arm, her slight squeeze.
He looked at her hand, then up at her. A man could dive into her eyes and never come out. “I’m so, so sorry, Rob. If I’d known...”
“If you’d known what? You’d have taken me back, started up where we left off? I was a broken man, Trina. It took me almost two years to come back from my injuries.” Physically. His mental and emotional healing had yet to be finished, if it ever would. “And you knew that not one, but two fathers had failed me, miserably so. The second one was my foster dad, so that was pure circumstance. But my biological father was a drug addict who never was able to get sober. What kind of example is that? Worse, what if it’s in my DNA to be a lousy parent?”
Trina remained silent, but her eyes shone with compassion and regret. She had regrets?
Elation, joy, anger, anguish. The emotional cocktail hit him without warning, making speech impossible. He wanted to run around shouting that he had a son! He was a father! But he’d missed the boy’s first five years. Five. Years. Did his son wonder about him? Did he know he existed? Pain worse than any broken rib squeezed the air out of his lungs. If his son had suffered at all due to his absence, he wouldn’t be able to live with his decision to not walk across that street three and a half years ago.
He and Trina had just reunited, started to tiptoe around their emotions. And now he had to accept that he’d missed the first five years of his child’s life. He hated being at the mercy of fate, but to realize his own actions may have caused more harm than good was devastating. But he couldn’t change the past, no matter how much it hurt. Today was what mattered.
* * *
Trina hated that Rob hurt so much. If she could play the last five years back and have him know Jake from the time he’d been in her womb, she would. Even as she thought about it, though, she knew that wasn’t entirely true. Rob was right. They’d been very different people back then.
“Rob, this isn’t how I imagined telling you that you have a son. ” And she had imagined it countless times. Hoped for this exact situation, that he’d somehow come back to her, the KIA report a mistake.
“You never pictured it. You thought I was dead.”
“Stop blaming yourself for this. It is what it is. You said yourself that you weren’t over what you’d been through. That you’re still faced with the hell you survived.”
He shook his head, the rest of his body still as he looked out the windshield. She shifted to face forward, giving him at least the illusion of space from her, from her desire for him to let it all go. Nothing in this was simple or black-and-white, and it had all started w
ith the first day they’d worked together in the Navy, on the preparation meeting that led up to the fateful mission that had torn them apart.
“I have a son.” He was saying aloud what his heart wanted to believe but his mind couldn’t yet wrap around. This, Trina understood. She’d had the opposite problem in that her heart had refused to believe Rob, then Justin, was dead, that he’d miraculously appear and be thrilled they’d made a baby during their brief but intense affair. Her mind told her otherwise, as had the headstone in Arlington National Cemetery.
“I still can’t believe that I laid flowers at your grave.”
“You never sought any kind of compensation for our son, you said?”
“How could I? You and I were only—” she waved her hand “—what, lovers? Boyfriend and girlfriend? You know how the military works. If you’re not a dependent, if you’re not marked down on page two of the member’s service record, you don’t exist.”
“You could have searched for my family. My brother.” He’d told her about him, where he lived.
“I’ve already told you why I didn’t.” She watched as a herd of deer appeared to the right of the vehicle. A huge stag with a full rack of antlers stood amid several does, and she spotted a fawn.
“It’s not fair of me to ask you about any of it, Trina. I wasn’t there for you. And not for our son, either.”
“You didn’t know you had a son. And who knows? If you’d shown up as soon as you could have, it might have been a disaster. I was so protective of Jake, and you say you were really messed up. I’m not sure I would have been the partner you needed at that point.”
“You’d have been perfect.”
“Um, no. I swear I called my mom twenty times a day when I didn’t demand she be right there with me.”
“What’s he like?” Rob spoke as if in a trance.
“He’s the most enthusiastic person I’ve ever met. I mean, that boy gets excited about going for a walk in the woods as much as he does about Santa Claus. He’s also very bright, scarily so.” She laughed at a memory. “When he was in preschool, his teacher asked the kids to draw a picture of a triangle. Jake drew what looked like a scribble. I could see a tiny triangle in the middle of it, but the teachers were looking for just a triangle on the page. It was so him. He probably drew the triangle and then improvised until they had to turn it in.”