Rocco stood in the narrow shower stall two days later. Hot water sluiced down his back. It did little to ease the tension gripping his neck and shoulders thanks to the night’s virulent dreams. He lifted his face into the sheeting streams of water.
Despite the sun and the work, the meals with Mandy, he lost a little more of himself every day. What pieces remained of his soul jangled against each other like the unglued shards of a broken pot, more apart than together.
A vision of wispy, gold-red hair sifted through his mind. Big, green eyes. Mandy. He couldn’t see her or think of her without heat slashing through his body. The meals they shared in the evenings were a blessing and a curse. He ate because she would sit with him, chatting about lots of things. Nothing. The wind. Kitano. The progress of the construction. It didn’t matter. Her voice flowed through him like a river. His source.
Thank God she wasn’t a mind reader. His thoughts about her were never pure. He listened to her, watched her, all the while wondering what her voice would sound like as she straddled him. He would feel her laughter, her breathing. Her life would be a jumper cable to his, feeding it energy, strength. Life.
He ached to hold her, to draw her into himself. To pretend for a short while that he was whole. That he could feel something. Anything.
He opened his eyes through the streaming water. His dick stood at a right angle to his body, wide and thick, pointing straight toward the wall. He touched himself, felt his balls tighten even more. He slipped his fist over his rigid cock, slowly, imagining her mouth moving over him, those soft, pink lips parting, taking him deeper, deeper into her throat. He hadn’t been blown in almost a decade. He’d lived the chaste existence of an unmarried Muslim while undercover. And once he was married, oral sex wasn’t an acceptable practice.
Ah, God, Mandy. She would look up at him with those enormous green eyes, her mouth full of his cock. Rocco’s nostrils flared. He shut his eyes, seeing her kneel before him. He pumped into his fist. In his mind’s eye, he was easing deeper into her. Pulling back. He soaped his hand, making his grip slicker, moving faster. Harder.
He’d make her go to all fours, lifting her sweet entrance up toward him. He’d slip into her, easing in deep, feeling her sheath grab him. Then he’d take hold of her hips and slam into her, pumping, pumping until he felt her small muscles grab him, milk him, force him to release.
As he thought it, his semen shot out, sluicing in hot jets into the water that now ran cold. He leaned his head against the wall of the shower, feeling a long, long way from sated.
Nothing about him was right.
Wasn’t that what had given him away? He’d been married for four years to the daughter of a powerful Afghan warlord tightly aligned with the Taliban. It had taken three years to infiltrate her people, but once there, it had been so easy to catch her eye, to find himself in her circle, to be accepted by her father. He’d paid the bride price of forty goats, ten cows, and five RPGs. They’d married in a long ceremony. He’d thrown himself into the act, giving her amorous looks and secret smiles. People saw what they wanted to see. He wanted them to see two people in love, a rare enough situation in a country so ravaged by war.
Kadisha had been promised to another before him. Ehsan Asir. Asir was a power-hungry zealot who’d worked hard to earn a spot on the Taliban’s top leadership council, beneath Ghalib Halim. Asir was furious when Halim broke his betrothal to Kadisha in favor of Rocco. Had she shared Asir’s feelings, Rocco would have found a different way to stay close to Halim. She hadn’t though. She was over the moon to be the one to marry Rocco.
On their wedding night, he had been attacked by remorse. He knew he was stealing from Kadisha something he had no right to take-her innocence. He’d taken his time seducing her, hoping to give her a memory to cling to when he was gone. He’d become a whore for God and country, all to slip into the sacred enclave her father inhabited, to join his inner circle and spy on him-and, when ordered, kill him.
His son was conceived on his wedding night. When Kadisha told him a few months later that she was pregnant, he’d been relieved. It meant he didn’t have to bed her so much anymore-and that he could focus on the mission. After Zaviyar was born, Rocco knew his façade had begun slipping. He wasn’t the happy groom, had never been the man he’d pretended to be. Kadisha, ever watchful, caught on. When Zavi was three, she told him she was pregnant again. And in the next breath, she said, “You did this. You killed us.”
Rocco’s fingers dug into the cold, wet tile, finding no purchase. You did this. He couldn’t remember. His mind was a blank.
You killed us.
Perhaps he had killed them.
Mandy felt the first inklings of worry around 11:00 a.m. Rocco was gone. His truck was still parked next to the garage. His bed was made. His toiletries were still in the bathroom of the bunkhouse. She’d been tied up meeting with George down at the construction site for a while during the morning. She’d expected to find Rocco in the fields, as was his usual routine, but he’d done no new work on the fence line.
Had he gotten hurt during his run that morning? Would anyone have known to call her? She tried his cell phone again. No answer. She’d just retrieved her purse and keys when a sheriff’s patrol car pulled onto the dirt road below. She watched it make the long drive up the hill, her stomach beginning to knot up.
Sheriff Tate put the car in park and rolled down the window. “Sheriff,” she greeted him tensely.
“Mandy.” He nodded at her. “You looking for your hired hand by any chance?”
“You found Rocco? Is he okay?” Why had the sheriff come out to tell her about him? Visions of Rocco having one of his fits in front of the whole town blasted into her mind.
“Hard to know. He’s on First Street in some kind of a daze. He’s just standin’ there. Fred, at the general store, said he’s been there since dawn.”
Mandy gasped. “Is he hurt?”
“Nope. But he won’t talk to anyone and he won’t move along. He’s scaring the natives. Can you get down there and see what you can do before Jerry Tasers him?”
Mandy shut her eyes. How had he gotten to town? Had he run the ten miles? “I’m on my way.” She hurried to her SUV and followed the sheriff to town. Rocco stood on the corner of First Street and Elm, staring east down the two short blocks of Wolf Creek Bend’s main corridor. Intersecting his line of sight was a state highway, railroad tracks, and then an abandoned grain elevator.
There was absolutely nothing of interest to look at, but he watched the far distance with an intense and unblinking stare. Mandy parked, then got out and stood beside her SUV, wondering what was going on with him, what he was thinking. Twice she looked where he watched, but could not see what held his attention.
A couple of pedestrians stopped to talk to him. News had gotten around town that a war hero had come back from Afghanistan and was working at her ranch. As Mandy watched, Rocco ignored the people, one of whom held out a hand as if to shake hands with him. He acted as if he didn’t see them, didn’t hear them. They frowned and walked away. Several people had gathered a little ways down the street and were standing about in small groups, surreptitiously watching him.
Sheriff Tate parked on Elm Street. He, too, got out and leaned against his car, his arms folded. The look he gave her made it clear that if she didn’t resolve the situation in short order, he would.
“Hey, Rocco,” she said in as calm a voice as she could muster when she came even with him. “What are you doing?” He didn’t respond. She looked him over, checking to see if he’d hurt himself. Maybe he’d fallen on his run, hit his head.
“Are you okay?” she asked, touching his arm gently. No response.
She stood in front of him. He was taller than she was, so her position did not break his line of vision. He just kept staring out over her head. “Rocco, you can’t do this.” The sides of his jaw tensed, the only sign he was aware of her presence. “Please. You’re scaring people. You’re scaring me.” His gaze dropped from the distant granary to her eyes.
Mandy couldn’t stop a sigh of relief at the break in his concentration. “Hi.” She smiled at him, uncertain how much of what she’d said he’d heard. “What are you doing?”
“I’m standing here.”
“I see that. But you can’t. You can’t do this.”
“Why the hell not?”
“You’ve been here for hours.”
“So?”
“There are laws about loitering. How did you get to town?”
“Ran.”
“You ran ten miles? While it was still dark?” she asked.
“I had to get here before dawn.”
“Rocco,” she sighed, “we have to go. We can’t stay here.”
“You go. I’m staying.”
Before she could ask him why, another man walked up to them. He clapped Rocco on the back, then offered his hand and a friendly, “Welcome home. Thank you for your service.”
Rocco turned and looked at the man with such animosity that the man dropped his hand and backed a step away before quickly moving along. Mandy sent him an apologetic look, but he never saw it. “You can’t make trouble like this.”
“Like what? I’m minding my own business. They should do the same.”
She could see he was getting irritated, but he was watching her more and the granary less. “You ran down here in the middle of the night. You’ve stood here all morning. What you’re doing makes no sense. You have to be hot and tired and hungry-”
His frown made furrows between his brows. The hard planes of his face became rigid. Something flashed in the back of his dark eyes. Pain. Memories she would never know, could never understand. “You don’t know a goddamned thing about me.”
“Hey, now. There’s no call to talk to a lady like that,” another good Samaritan said as he paused next to them.
Rocco flashed an angry look at him and snapped, “Fuck off.”
Mandy sent the man a look and gave him a slight nod. He moved away to stand with Officer Jerry. “I don’t understand why you’re here like this,” she replied to Rocco.
He spun her around, gripping her with an arm across her body, using his other hand to hold her jaw and point her face toward the old steel walls of the grain silo. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Officer Jerry straighten and Sheriff Tate wave him back.
“What do you see?” Rocco asked her.
Mandy tried to draw a breath, but his grip was too tight to allow much air. She could feel the tension in his body. “I see buildings. People. A road. A highway. A railroad. The old elevator.”
As close as he was holding her, she felt the long draw of air he pulled into his lungs, felt him press his face to the crown of her head. She wondered if he was aware that he was touching her. Maybe he only had issues when someone else was doing the touching.
“What are those things?” he asked.
“What things?”
“What you see. The buildings. The road. The people? What do they make?”
Mandy felt close to tears. In some elemental way, she knew her answer was pivotal, but she didn’t know what the right answer was. “I don’t know, Rocco.”
“What do they make?” He shook her. “Look, Mandy. What are they?”
“It is my town.”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
A small sob broke from her. He was more lost than she ever knew. “What is it that you see?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
“I’m not looking at the things.”
She shut her eyes, praying for strength. Did he even know he was standing here with her, on the corner, in the heat of the midday sun? “Then what are you looking at?”
“The light.”
The light? The sun was nearly directly overhead. The sky was a brilliant blue. Cloudless. The air was clear, no haze marred the view. “Why the light, Rocco?”
He let her go. For a minute, he said nothing as he stood silent and still, seeing something she couldn’t. “There was an explosion in the village where I was working undercover. Taliban fighters captured me. They put me in a pit with wooden planks overhead. I had blood on me, debris from the explosion, all kinds of grisly shit. They didn’t let me clean up. They didn’t feed me. I got a cup of water a day. Five days I was in that hellhole.
“The last day, I stood as tall as possible. I was dying. I knew it. Facing east, I watched the light move over what was left of the village. I told myself I wasn’t in that pit, hidden from anyone who might be looking for me, starving to death. I imagined being home, standing on Main Street in my town.” He stopped speaking for a moment, his jaw pressed tightly shut as emotion threatened to overwhelm him.
“I promised myself that I would do this very thing. I would stand one entire day and watch the light move over my hometown, which looks so very much like this one.”
Mandy dashed tears from her face. She straightened her shoulders and faced east as he did. “Then we will stand here, Rocco. You will watch the light, and I will keep people from bothering you.” She said nothing else and looked neither to the right nor to the left.
A minute passed. Another. The silence thickened about them like foggy air. “Am I losing my mind, Em?” Rocco rasped.
She looked at him. Tears fell from her cheeks, but she ignored them. “No. You are keeping a promise you made to yourself. You’ve earned the right to stand on this corner as long as you wish. And if I have to fight off every citizen of Wolf Creek Bend so that you can be here like this, then so be it.”
A ghost of a grin tilted a corner of his mouth as he looked at her. “You should have been in Afghanistan. You would have been beautifully effective there, straightening up the bullshit nonsense from the elders in every village our guys cleared.” He stared down toward the end of street. A minute passed. Another minute.
He sighed, still facing forward. “This isn’t what normal people do, is it?”
“Normal is overrated.” Mandy shrugged.
He bowed his head, rubbing his hands over his eyes. “I have to get back to normal.”
“Why?” she asked, venturing a look at him.
He didn’t answer her. “I’ve seen enough. I’m ready to go.” He shoved his hands through his hair, then held his head. “Sorry-about this. About everything. You don’t need a fucking headcase for a hired hand. What the hell was Kit thinking sending me to your ranch?”
“Forget it.” Mandy smiled up at him. “How about lunch? My friend runs the diner in town.”
He looked down at his T-shirt and running pants. “I’m not dressed for lunch.”
She shrugged. “This is Wolf Creek Bend. No one dresses for lunch. Come on. They have the best milkshakes ever there.”
He looked at her for a long minute. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“How badly do you want to be normal again? It would be a step in that direction.”
He frowned down at her. “Fine. Let’s go.” They crossed the street. Rocco opened the door, sending a look around the street as she walked through it. What he was looking for, he didn’t know. Habit, he guessed. Seeing who might be watching them, what the lay of the land was before he went inside so he’d have something to compare it to when he came out. It was an average day in a little American town. Nothing to worry about. He followed Mandy into the diner and immediately came to a stop.
The room was a riot of color-yellow and teal Formica, black-and-white tiling, chrome-edged fixtures, pop-culture memorabilia from the middle of the last century cluttering the walls. An ancient woodstove jutted into the room from one of the walls, home to a couple of potted ferns. A counter ran the length of one wall complete with metal stools covered in red padded vinyl. Glass stands of cakes and other treats stood at various intervals on the counter. The room smelled overwhelmingly of coffee and meatloaf and fresh bread, heavy and cloying.
The hairs lifted on Rocco’s neck. Fuck average-something wasn’t right, something that had nothing to do with the kaleidoscope of color used in the diner’s décor. His instinct had never failed him in all his years in Afghanistan, not when it hit like this.
He grabbed Mandy, pulling her behind him as he glanced around the room. Someone had triggered his internal warning system. There was an enemy here. Someone who wanted him dead. He looked at every face of every man, seeing only ranchers, laborers, tradesmen, truckers. Good salt-of-the-earth types. The cops who’d been watching him outside were now seated at a table against the far wall.
“Rocco, what is it?” Mandy asked in a whisper at his side.
He took a step back, moving her with him. “There is an enemy here.” He heard her loud sigh, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t wrong.
“There are no enemies here. These are just regular people.”
“There is. I’m never wrong about this feeling, Em. Never.”
Mandy moved in front of him, shielding him from the curious glances coming their way. “I know these people. They’re friendly.”
“One of them is not a friendly. We need to leave.”
“No. We’re staying. We’re going to sit down and have a nice lunch like normal people.”
“It is too dangerous. I don’t know which one it is.”
“It is none of them. I know them.”
He looked at her, watching her expression. “You know all of them?”
She looked at the people seated at tables and booths. There was Sheriff Tate with Deputy Jerry, a couple of tables of farmers and ranchers, several local businessmen, two families she didn’t know. The plumber and the family physician sat on stools up at the counter. Jerry and the sheriff, as well as a few others, were watching the small drama unfolding by the diner’s entrance.
“I know most of them. The others I’ve seen around town. We’re plenty safe. You’re probably picking up on the vibe from the sheriff, who’s about to head over this way. Just stop. Trust me. Please.”
Rocco’s heart was beating rapidly. He could feel a cold sweat break out over his body. He wasn’t safe. He had no weapons with him, and his psych eval from Walter Reed had made it impossible for him to buy new. No matter. He could kill with his bare hands as easily. He would keep Mandy safe.
“We need to leave. We are surrounded,” he told her. The smoke from the griddle took on a metallic scent. Blood.
The room shifted, flickered, became a courtyard filled with men in shalwar kameez wearing turbans and khapol caps, sitting about in small clusters, smoking, laughing, drinking tea. Hiding semiautomatics. A fucking viper pit filled with Afghan and Pakistani insurgents and village men who would as soon shoot an American as help one. And he stood among them in fatigues. Unarmed. It was his nightmare come true.
Ah, Jesus Christ. He was dead. Dead.
“Rocco, look at me. Look at me now.” The voice of an angel whispered to him urgently. She touched cool fingers to his cheeks, cupping his face. His gaze shot to his arm. The blackened flesh was there, shrinking, drying. He tried to breathe. He wanted to vomit.
“There are no enemies here. You are safe. I am safe,” the angel spoke, her voice so like Mandy’s. Hot tears tracked down the clammy skin of his face. “Rocco, do you hear me?”
Please, God, kill me. Kill me, if you must, but don’t touch the angel.
Mandy watched the sanity leach from Rocco’s eyes as his body became rigid. She turned him and dragged him by his sleeve through the door, outside into the fresh air and sunshine, making a beeline for her SUV. She had no idea what just happened, but it was clear that Rocco was in over his head. She shouldn’t have forced the diner on him. What had she been thinking?
He didn’t resist as she settled him in her SUV. He said nothing as she reached across him and fastened the seat belt. She worried he might try to get out while she drove if he weren’t buckled, or that the warning beep from the unfastened seat belt sensor would deepen his anxiety attack. She put the air-conditioning on full blast and rolled all the windows down, letting the movement of the air calm him as she drove back to the ranch. Halfway home, she heard him sigh as he leaned his head back against the headrest, finally coming back to himself.
At the house, Rocco jumped out of the car almost before she had fully stopped the SUV. He marched to the bunkhouse. She called to him, but he ignored her. He went directly to his bedroom and pulled his duffel out from under his bed. Jerking open the top dresser drawer, he pulled out his things and started shoving them into his duffel.
“What are you doing?” Mandy asked from the doorway. He should have known she’d follow him. He didn’t waste a look on her. He had to leave. Had to run like hell.
“What does it look like?” he snapped.
“Stop this, Rocco.” She took a handful of his clothes and brought them back to the drawer.
He glared at her hands on his clothes. “Why can’t you leave me the hell alone? I’m not fit to be around people,” he growled a warning as he grabbed his clothes and tossed them back into the duffel, most of them missing the yawning opening. “I’m dangerous, Mandy. I could hurt someone and not know it until afterward. I could hurt you.”
His chest rose and fell, rage visibly building inside him. His face hardened. His nostrils flared. His lips pulled back from his teeth as a roar broke from him, shaking the walls of the little room. He backhanded the lamp from the dresser, swiping it against the far wall. The shattering sound fell short of the satisfaction he was looking for-it was far too little noise and destruction. He looked around the room for something else to destroy. Mandy had no doubt the dresser would have followed the lamp, along with several other pieces of furniture, had she not been standing in the room.
She didn’t back away, didn’t fold her arms. She held herself as absolutely still as possible. “You can’t run from yourself,” she said quietly, not as an indictment but as a simple statement of truth. “Where ever you go, you’ll just end up there with yourself. You’ve got to stand and fight somewhere. Do it here.”
He shook his head, glaring at the dresser. “What the hell was Kit thinking sending me here, a wolf into a lamb’s home?”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
His head lifted, his hard gaze leveling her. “You should be. I’m afraid of me.”
“What is it that you fear?”
“Stay the hell out of my head, sweetheart. The shadows there have teeth. They will shred you as they have me.”
She wasn’t backing down. “Where did you go today, at the diner? In your mind, you saw something.”
A muscle worked in corners of his jaw. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Leave it, Em.”
“No.”
Rocco sighed, his shoulders slumping. He looked at the wall in front of him. Tears pooled in his eyes, spilled down his rigid face. He thought, with some relief, of his shotgun and the cold metal of its barrel. He could put a shell in the chamber, put the muzzle against the roof of his mouth, and end the fucking hell festering in his head.
“Where did you go at the diner, Rocco?” Mandy asked again.
He shut his eyes. “There was a courtyard full of insurgents, resting from the midday heat. I saw them. They saw me. An angel was there. With your voice. I knew I was dead, knew there was no way I’d get out of there alive, but I begged God to spare the Angel.”
He realized, in that moment, if he killed himself here, God would not spare her.
Mandy pulled a ragged breath. She forced her eyes away from Rocco, offering him the only kindness she could. Privacy.
“Put your things away. I’ll go make you a sandwich, then you can get back to the work waiting for you in the pastures.”
“I don’t need a fu-”
“I know you don’t, but I need to do this,” she interrupted him.
He looked at her. “Why?”
“Because helping you is the only thing my brother ever asked of me. Ever,” she answered, with more vehemence than she wished. The last thing Rocco needed now was more emotion. “Everyone here failed him,” she said in a calmer voice. “I did. My grandparents did. His mother did. My parents did. His girlfriend did. The whole town turned its back on him when he needed them. This is the only thing I have ever been able to do for him. And I won’t let you take it from me. You are important to him, and that makes you important to me.”
She headed for the door but stopped at the threshold and glanced back at him. “Look, Rocco. Not all wounds are physical, but they all take time to heal. Cut yourself some slack. You had a setback today. Big deal.” She shrugged. “It’s not your first and it won’t be your last. I don’t care what the town thinks of you or us or me. I never have. So don’t start arguing that you should leave.” He said nothing, which seemed the best of all mercies.
She’d taken two steps before he stopped her. “Em?” His face was pale. Lines of fatigue showed around his eyes, his mouth. “Make it two sandwiches. And a milkshake?”
She smiled at him and nodded. “Coming up!”