The Guardian (A Wounded Warrior Novel)

by Anna del Mar

  “It…um…it all depends on my assignments.”

  “The Serengeti is the perfect background for your work,” I pointed out, completely self-serving. “You could spend a lifetime chronicling wildlife in Tanzania, not to mention Africa. I can’t think of a better stage.”

  “Um…I don’t know.” I’d succeeded in rendering Jade Defiance Romo almost speechless. “I’m thinking on doing a series of segments on the Siberian snow leopard.”

  And as far away from me as she could get.

  I rumbled. “Jade?”

  “Yes?”

  “Stop the bullshit.” I glared at her over the top of my sunglasses. “We both know you like to run. The question is whether you’re gonna run this time around or not.”

  Anger sparkled in her gaze. She lashed out. “Look who’s talking.”

  Talking to this woman was as sketchy as picking one’s way through a minefield. You just never knew when things were gonna blow up in your face.

  “I know I’m gonna regret this question,” I said, “but what the hell are you talking about?”

  Her chin came up. She flashed me her most delicious smirk. “Like you don’t have any secrets of your own.”

  My gut tightened. Yeah, I had secrets and they had to be kept, but I wasn’t backing down from this, from her.

  “Hell, Jade, let’s not get all hung up on the minutia. I don’t have a lot of time for chitchat and I’m no good at it either. So just tell me. What is it that you need to know?”

  “For starters, why are you here?” she said. “What happened to you in Afghanistan and why aren’t you back stateside?”

  “Oh, I see.” She wasn’t gonna put a thing on the line until I was carved out in the open, like trout gutted under the sun. Which was a problem, because my whole truth was out of bounds. Partial then. That I could do.

  “You want me to go first. Okay. I’ll go first. What is it you want to hear, a story about a disillusioned soldier?”

  “No.” She raised her chin haughtily. “I’d like to hear your story.”

  “I’m afraid you’re gonna be disappointed,” I said. “There isn’t a lot I can share, but I’ll tell you what I can, if you tell me why you are so scared of us.”

  Her chest puffed up. “I’m not scared!”

  “So then tonight you’re going to leave the door to your room open so we can get this deal off the ground?”

  She gulped so loudly I heard it. Yep. This was gonna be a hell of challenge.

  “Listen carefully,” I said, “’cause I’m not doing this twice. I love the USA. I fucking love the bitch, what she’s accomplished, what she stands for, the courage of the people who make her, the hope she brings to a fucked-up world.”

  I paused and watched enthralled as she moistened her lips, running the lower over the upper in a totally sexy, mind-wiping way that made me famished for her mouth. Head in the game, Hawking.

  “I can’t say I like what’s happening over there right now much,” I forced myself to go on. “I can’t relate to a government that sends us to war on and off, as if we were built from spare parts instead of flesh and blood.”

  My heart shrunk at the memories, but I drew a deep breath and shoved the images to the back of my mind, where they lurked like ghost skulking in the darkness.

  Jade must have sensed something, because her voice was kinder, softer. “Are you okay?”

  I cleared my throat. “Bottom line: You send me to fight a battle? Let me win it. Don’t fuck around with me. Don’t make me bleed to claim territory only to give it back the next day. Don’t tell people we’re not fighting a war when we are. Don’t swamp me with paperwork. Don’t have us killed for nothing. And there’s a code we all get to live by. If we come back from fighting a war, we get a free plot in the cemetery or decent medical care, whichever comes first.”

  Jade’s eyes glimmered with empathy. “You weren’t happy when you came back.”

  “Is anyone happy when they come back?”

  “No, but we all try to pretend like we are.” She paused then asked. “And your leg?”

  “I don’t talk about that junk.”

  “But something happened when you came back.” It wasn’t a question. It was a fact.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “While I was in the Navy, I did well financially. You don’t spend a lot of dough when you’re stuck with back-to-back deployments. So I got my own prosthetics. They cost me a fortune, but I paid the money so I could be myself and not some useless, dejected son of a bitch.”

  “I walked that path with Hannah,” she said, giving me a glimmer of what her life had been like after the service. “I filed the millions of forms, put up with the bureaucratic bullshit, navigated through the heartless, brainless VA autocracy and pleaded, argued, and screamed.”

  “So then you know,” I said. “I don’t mind serving. I don’t mind dying. We die every day. What makes me mad is living with the knowledge that no one at the helm gives a fuck. But the USA? I’d die for her.”

  “Yeah,” she said, so quietly I barely heard her. “Me too.”

  And as if I needed it, I found yet another reason to go after her with everything I had.

  16

  Jade

  My eyes grew misty and my throat tightened. Jesus, he was gonna think I was a human seesaw. In truth, my emotions were all over the place. My heart boomed really hard in my ears and part of me was delirious that he wanted to have…what? Something with me? The other part of me was terrified, because I didn’t think I could have a fling with Matthias and then carry on as if he was just another hook up.

  I hid my emotional reaction by lifting the camera to my face. I put my eye to the viewfinder, zoomed in on a dark dot racing on the golden savanna, and found a pair of ostriches going through the motions of a mating dance. Click, click, click. I loved the soothing sound.

  “Jade?” he said, after a little while. “Your turn now.”

  I groaned inwardly. He hadn’t told me everything I wanted to know, but wasn’t going to let me off the hook either.

  “Come on.” He nudged me softly with his elbow. “I’ve never given that self-righteous little speech to anyone else before. You’ve got to make an effort too.”

  I sighed and lowered the camera. “The thing is…” How could I even begin? “I’m not very good at this. In fact, I’m a disaster. So I swore off men. No offense, but I want to keep it that way.”

  There. I’d said my piece, even if the better part of me wanted to violently choke me for it.

  “You swore off all men?” He lifted his hat and scratched his head, before he donned his hat again. “Damn. That’s harsh, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe, but it worked.” I raised the camera to my eye and began shooting again. “In the last year, I’ve had a measure of peace. Peace is not something that comes very easy to me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, you know.” I kept shooting. “Old shit and stuff like that.”

  His hand landed softly on my arm. “Can you please put the camera down?”

  Reluctantly, I lowered the camera and let it hang from the strap.

  “Thank you,” he said. “So what’s this old shit and stuff?”

  “Junk,” I said, “stuff I don’t want to talk about. Kind of like you and your leg.”

  He seemed to absorb that for a moment. “Fair enough. So we’ll skip that part and talk about why you gave men up in the first place.”

  Right. Just kill me now.

  “Come on,” he urged me on. “Give it a try.”

  “I have a really bad eye.” I stuffed my idle hands in my pockets and stared at my feet. “I’m attracted to dangerous situations. I can’t tell the good apples from the bad. I like bad boys, men who cheat, lie and treat women like shit. And then of course, as soon as I figure it out, which is usually, like, pretty quick, I hate those sons of bitches. It’s that sort of mumbo-jumbo twisted crap you hear all the time.”

  “Hmm.” He considered what I’d said. “So a
m I a bad boy in your eyes?”

  “Hell, I wouldn’t know the difference if it smacked me in the face.”

  “Then why not try to find out?”

  “It’s too freaking confusing.”

  “Then let me ask this,” he said. “Why are you always attracted to bad boys?”

  “It’s got to do with the way I grew up.” I put a lid on the bad memories that threatened to spring out of the can and trounced on. “My biological mother supported her heroin habit by bringing men to the house. My true mother thinks her taste in men fashioned mine. Revolting, I know, but she might be right. Maybe I just have bad genes.”

  His shades aimed at me. “Sounds like you had a tough time growing up.”

  “It sucked, but I stuck it out and survived. You lost your foot. I got to grow up with an addict and a psycho. So what. People like us, we go on. I’m here and honestly? I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Can you at least tell me how you ended up with the Romos?”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “I get you don’t want to talk about your childhood,” he said, “but your adoptive parents are not out of bounds, are they?”

  “Anita and Joseph Romo are awesome,” I said. “Anita was a judge in family court. I ended up in front of her on a charge of assault and robbery.”

  His eyebrows spiked. “Assault and robbery?”

  “Yep.” I felt obligated to elaborate so he wouldn’t think I was a serial killer. “My biological mother taught me to shoplift if I wanted to eat. That’s how the robbery part began. First gig with the police? Age five. I had a few more encounters with the law before it got serious.”

  “As in how serious?”

  “There was this pimp and drug dealer that used to hang out at our place, a real piece of crap. The woman who birthed me was his number one girl. He tried to rape me when I was twelve. So I hit him over the head with a shovel and took all his junk, including his merchandise, and flushed it down the toilet. My own mother called the cops on me. So there you have it.”

  I bit down on my lips and stole a mortified glance in Matthias direction. His forehead was furrowed in thought and his gaze was fast on me as if his mind was trying to infiltrate mine. I never talked about that stuff. Why the hell had I just told him that story?

  I snapped. “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like how?” he said.

  “I know what people think when they hear a story like that.” I fiddled with my camera. “They think I come from trash and to trash I should return.”

  “Jesus, Jade, I sure hope that sassy mouth of yours is getting ahead of you, ’cause that’s not what I’m thinking at all.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I cocked my eyebrows. “Then what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking you’ve always been brave,” he said. “I’m thinking I’m glad you took care of that asshole, otherwise I might’ve had to go looking for him myself.”

  I don’t know why, but my eyes welled up. Me. Tears. Twice in one day. No way. I dug my nails in my palms and got myself under control. Part of me was touched by Matthias’s words. He wanted to protect me. The other part was mildly offended. I could take care of myself, had done so for as far back as I remembered. I was about to say so when a plume of dust appeared in the distance, announcing the approach of a vehicle. Matthias got on the radio to figure out if it was one of his.

  I aimed my camera at the truck and zoomed in my lens. “Tourists?”

  “Lost ones.” He tracked the vehicle with his binoculars. “They’re a while out yet. So what happened after you met Anita Romo?”

  His mind was like a laser-guided Hellfire.

  “She and her husband came to see me at juvi jail,” I said. “They told me about their daughter, Amber. Funny story. She was Amber and I was Jade. I guess they were into semi-precious stones?”

  Matthias’s lips curved up. “And?”

  “Amber overdosed on heroin at fifteen.”

  His mouth thinned. “Tough.”

  “It was real tough going for the Romos for a while,” I said. “They’d lost their only daughter to drugs. I’d lost my biological mother to drugs. I mean, she wasn’t dead, but for all practical purposes she might as well have been, because I was yanked out of her place and she didn’t even care. My mother chose drugs and her crappy pimp instead of me.”

  His lips compressed even tighter.

  “The Romos suggested we were a natural fit.” I shrugged. “I had my doubts, but they insisted. It was hard for me. I couldn’t believe they wanted me.”

  “Why not?” Matthias asked.

  “My own mother didn’t want me,” I said. “Why should they?” At thirteen, I was an epic mess, a teenage nightmare, bad news all around. “We went through some really rough spots and yet Anita and Joseph stuck with me. They offered me something I didn’t think I could have.”

  “And that was?”

  “In their words?”

  “Sure.”

  I hesitated for a moment, throat tight with the memory, then forced myself to say the magical words. “They offered me a forever home.”

  Matthias’s Adam’s apple bounced on his throat. “And that put you over the hump?”

  “I didn’t believe in the concept at all. I thought of it as a huge cliché. I mean, everyone is always talking about forever this, forever that, blah, blah, blah. But I didn’t believe in forever.” I wasn’t sure I believed in it now either. Sometimes my life felt like a ticking clock waiting for the next blast. “But hey, I believed in for now. Plus they were sweet, and I needed a place to stay.”

  “So at thirteen, you were already the queen of skeptics,” Matthias put in.

  “I learned skepticism right on the delivery table, when my mother demanded a fix.” When a little girl didn’t have a today, how was she supposed to believe in forever?

  “And yet, here you are, all these years later, tight as you can be with the Romos.” Matthias mouth turned up at the corners. “They sound like amazing people.”

  “They are.” I said. “My parents changed my life.”

  “And you changed theirs,” Matthias said.

  The cynic in me rebelled against this conversation. “How would you even know that?”

  “Your mom told me,” he said. “Last night, when I talked to her on the satellite phone.”

  Holy shit. “You called my mom?” My mind couldn’t stop spinning. “But…why?”

  “I called them to introduce myself.” Matthias flashed a wolfish grin. “I figured they’d feel better if they knew some basic things about the guy you’re gonna be dating.”

  My heart came to a screeching stop. “Excuse me?”

  “Babe…” He stared at me, his mischievous grin expanding on his face. “Your parents have a right to know.”

  Babe?

  “Have you lost your freaking marbles?” The man standing next to me was certifiably insane. “There’s nothing to know!”

  “Wrong. You and I? We’re getting together. No way around it.” He exhaled a frustrated breath. “Stand down, Jade. I don’t like the look on your face.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it. “What look?”

  “That one, the one you’re wearing right now, where you roll your eyes like a zebra about to kick off a stampede.” He shot me a long suffering look. “We both tried. Right? We each tried to eject from this trajectory since day one. But it didn’t work. We’re locked in the cockpit. We either get this jet to fly straight or we’re gonna crash in a hail of flames.”

  Sarcasm was my last ditch defense. “That has to be the most romantic declaration I’ve heard since that shepherd at the Kabul market offered me two goats for a whiff of my panties.”

  “No guy in his right mind is gonna sniff any part of you while I’m around.” The smile was gone from his face, replaced instead by that really intense expression that made his nostrils flare and his eyes spark with golden light. “Can’t you see? It’s like we were genetically engineere
d for each other. I mean, honestly. Who else is gonna put up with your hot head? And who the hell is gonna put up with me? It’s only a matter of when, babe. Your call.”

  There wasn’t enough air in the Serengeti to inflate my lungs. “You seem pretty sure of something I’m not counting on.”

  “My gut is telling me I’m right,” he said, “and I always trust my gut. You got a problem with that?”

  I stared at Matthias. How the hell did I punt on something like that? My heart was jammed in my throat. Where could I start to unravel this mess?

  “I called your parents because I wanted to know more about you,” he explained patiently, probably in response to the now overt panic he saw on my face. “I might look dangerous to you, but that stuff you do to my brain? That’s seriously terrifying to me.”

  I was in shock, and yet I could understand that last part, because he felt equally terrifying to me. “So you decided to check me out?”

  “As thoroughly as possible,” he admitted. “If I’m going to have a girl, and she doesn’t talk a lot about herself, I want to know who the hell she is.”

  Talk about being blown away. He’d called my parents. He was sure we were getting together. He’d called me babe. God have mercy. I shivered inside, from shock, from delight I could never admit out loud, from terror all over again.

  “Um…” I curled my fingers and stared at my nails. “Just curious. What did Mom say?”

  “She told me you were a tough nut to crack.” He smirked. “She warned me that your skull is thicker than a Kevlar helmet and you kick as hard as a mule.”

  Sounded like Mom.

  “She told me a story,” he said. “When you first moved in, she told you to decorate your room however you wanted. She said you painted your room black as night and hung a poster of skulls and crossbones on the door, just to piss her off.”

  Yep, he’d talked to Mom for sure. I’d hated the dark bedroom with all my heart. For the first three months, I’d snuck out after she and Dad went to bed and slept in one of six cheerfully decorated guestrooms with the lights on.