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“Lady, nothing about this day has been lucky.”
At that moment, the nurse called out, “Mr. Benedict. The doctor can see you now.”
Anna watched “Mr. Benedict” close his book and rise to leave without another word. He was churlish. And unfriendly. And morose. Almost rude. She was glad he was gone.
And regretted bitterly that he hadn’t been more interested in getting to know her.
6
Anna stepped out of the warmth and bright light of the urgent care facility into the cold night air and gasped as a hulking figure emerged from the darkness. “Good Lord!” she said, putting a hand to her heart as the stranger with the dog bite stepped into the light. “You scared me to death!”
“I stayed to walk you home.”
She wasn’t far from home, but there was enough crime in Georgetown that it was a thoughtful gesture—if a bit suspect, considering the stranger’s off-putting behavior toward her inside.
“Why would you want to do that?” she asked, drawing her sweater tighter around her.
He shrugged. “It’s late. It’s dark. You’re alone.”
“All true.” But she was pretty sure none of that had anything to do with the reason he’d stayed. She thought it was more likely he was alone. And wanted female company. Was she willing to provide it?
“You walked here, too?” she asked.
He nodded.
“All right,” she said at last.
Anna shivered with excitement and anticipation as the stranger set a large hand at the small of her back. She was surprised at the visceral reaction she had to his touch.
During the short, silent walk, she debated whether to invite him inside. For coffee. To get to know him better. If she did, he would probably think she was inviting him inside for something else. For sex.
Anna didn’t believe in one-night stands. Safe sex was tough enough to manage if you knew your partner. This man was a literal stranger. She knew his last name was Benedict, but that was all.
On the other hand, if she didn’t invite him in, she was afraid she’d never see him again. And in that case, she knew she would always regret not knowing how his lips would feel on hers.
“How’s your arm?” she said to break the silence that had descended between them.
“I can’t feel anything right now. How’s your hand?”
She raised her hand to observe the small bandage that covered two neat black stitches. “I’ll survive.”
That was the extent of their conversation.
She knew nothing more about him when they arrived at the bottom step of the stately brownstone where she lived, which had been broken into four condominium units, than she’d known when he offered to walk her home. Except that he smelled good, a mixture of musk and man. And that she didn’t want him to walk out of her life.
“Would you like to come up for some coffee?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Why not?”
Anna used her key to get into the entryway, then took the stranger’s large, callused hand and led him to the polished wooden stairs covered by an oriental runner. “I’m one flight up.”
She had left a few lamps on, so they were greeted by soft golden light as she unlocked her front door and ushered the stranger into her small living room.
As soon as the door closed, he took her into his arms. His ice-blue eyes looked warm as Caribbean waters when he lowered his head to bring their mouths close.
Anna felt a little off balance because of the speed at which he’d moved, but she realized this was exactly where she wanted to be, that she desperately wanted to taste his lips.
She felt her pulse thrum as he set an arm around her hips and drew her close. Close enough to feel that he was aroused.
And to feel him begin to tremble.
With desire, she thought at first. But when she raised a hand to his nape, it felt slick with sweat. Strange, when they’d been walking in the cold night air.
She leaned back to look into the stranger’s face and saw he had his eyes closed. And his jaw clenched.
Oh, God. Oh, no. Not him.
He was exhibiting classic symptoms of PTSD. Anna hoped she was wrong, but she didn’t think she was. Her heart swelled with compassion. She put her arms around his shoulders protectively, leaned close to his ear and said, “You’re all right. I’m here.”
She felt him shudder and knew that whatever he was experiencing had nothing to do with desire.
She lifted a hand to brush a dark lock of hair from his forehead. “We’re in my apartment in Georgetown,” she murmured. “My Maine Coon cat Penelope has a litter of adorable kittens in a basket in the next room. Your arm might be aching because you just had stitches where a dog bit you earlier today.”
She talked to him calmly, as she would have to one of her patients, and gradually felt his trembling stop. When he opened his eyes, he seemed surprised to see her still standing within his embrace.
He abruptly let go of her and took a step back.
Reluctantly, she took another step back herself. “Are you all right?”
He looked away and down. Ashamed, she knew. Upset. Angry with himself.
“Soldier?” she asked. “Cop? Fireman?”
He grimaced, then met her gaze and said gruffly, “Soldier.”
“You should get some—”
“I don’t need any help.” He turned and reached for the doorknob.
She took two quick steps and put her hand over his. She met his startled gaze and said, “I’d like to see you again.”
He frowned and said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
Then he was gone.
7
Ben recognized his body’s heightened awareness, the thudding heart, the fetid sweat in his armpits, his rapid eye movement scouting the terrain, rigid muscles tightened to the point of pain, ready to explode into action: it was the knowledge of death waiting around the corner.
He had to remind himself he wasn’t scouting some war-torn foreign city. He was merely driving his black SUV through the Columbia Heights neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
Nevertheless, he could smell danger in the wind.
“How’s your arm?” Waverly asked from the passenger’s seat of Ben’s SUV.
Ben flinched as he flexed his injured left arm, which was stuck out the window. “Fine.”
“Dog bites can get infected easily.”
“The doctor shot me up with antibiotics last night.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Like a sonofabitch.”
“You should be at home taking it easy.”
“Not an option. Not after Epifanio called and asked me to meet him. The kid’s found out something about whatever’s going down on the streets, Waverly. I can feel it in my bones.”
“We’ll know soon enough.” Waverly’s eyes, cop’s eyes, stayed on the street. Alert. Probing.
Epifanio had borrowed a friend’s cell phone and called Ben from the bathroom at school earlier in the afternoon. He’d refused to tell Ben why he had to see him, just ordered, “Get your ass over here, man.”
“After school, right?” Ben had asked, to confirm that Epifanio wasn’t truant.
“Yeah. On the corner. Like always.”
Ben knew which corner Epifanio meant. It was the site of a convenience store near Lincoln Middle School where the 18th Street gang hung out. The kid had sounded anxious and afraid.
“Are you okay?” Ben asked. “Are you safe?”
“Sure,” the kid said.
“I can call the police and have them—”
“No cops!”
He’d sounded frightened at the possibility the cops might come for him, panicked almost, so Ben had backed off.
He’d called Waverly as soon as he’d hung up the phone and shared his concern about the boy.
“You want me to have a black-and-white pick him up?” Waverly had asked.
“I think that’ll just scare him,” Ben said. “Maybe make him run, and get him into another kind of trouble.”
“What’s your plan?”
“I’m meeting him after school.”
“How about if I come along?”
Since Waverly didn’t wear a uniform, Ben figured he could easily pass him off as a friend. But if things went south, he might very well need his friend’s help.
“You can come, but you’re a friend, not a cop, got it?”
Ben eyed the vacant faces of the truants and dropouts walking the streets of the broken-down neighborhood. “Never thought I’d see so many thousand-yard stares in faces so young. Hard to believe they’re just kids.”
“Kids with guns and knives,” Waverly said. “Don’t ever underestimate them.”
Ben had too recently fought in Iraq and Afghanistan against boy soldiers to discount the danger of a child with a gun. He was very much aware of the savagery bubbling beneath the surface whenever roaming gangs prowled the streets. And he had a gut feeling, an awful premonition he couldn’t shake, that Epifanio was in real peril.
As opposed to the phantoms that had plagued Ben last night. He didn’t know what had triggered the flashback in the woman’s apartment. He just wished it had happened later. After he’d sated himself with her.
She was different somehow from the other women he’d picked up over the past six months. He’d felt poleaxed the instant he’d laid eyes on her in the vet’s office yesterday morning. It could have been the oddity of the circumstances. It wasn’t every day you met a woman with a dog attached to your arm. But the flare of sexual desire he’d felt was so strong it had spooked him.
Which was why he’d avoided her at the urgent care clinic. The last thing he wanted to do was get emotionally involved. That led to loving. And loving led to pain.
He’d wanted—needed—to put himself inside her. What alarmed him was the equal need he’d felt to hold her in his arms and keep her safe.
Safe from what? What horror had she witnessed that had put that shadowed look in her eyes? He didn’t want to know.
In the end, she was the one who’d ended up holding him, keeping him safe. He’d been lucky to beat a hasty retreat without indulging the need he’d felt. Somehow he knew that having her once would not have been enough. Letting her into his life was simply asking for trouble.
Ben turned the corner onto 16th Street NW, just as Lincoln Middle School let out. The Latino, Black and Asian kids had formed into knots that Ben recognized by the gang colors they substituted for their maroon and khaki school uniforms and by their gang hand sign greetings to each other.
He saw a cluster of the brown pants and white T-shirts worn by the 18th Street gang and felt a chill run down his spine.
“I wish he’d given me some clue what he’s found out,” Ben muttered, his eyes still shifting right, then left, then up to the rearview mirror to check behind him.
“I don’t like the feel of this any more than you do,” Waverly said.
Ben adjusted the Glock 19 he was wearing in a slide belt holster concealed under his leather jacket, then shifted it back where it had been before he’d adjusted it.
“Why are you so jumpy?” Waverly asked.
Ben glanced at the man who would be his brother-in-law by tomorrow noon, noting his friend’s clean-shaven, thirty-year-old face, his calm brown eyes, his not-quite-regulation police haircut. Ben was the same age but felt decades older. He put his eyes back on the street. “Seen too much bad stuff, I guess.”
It hadn’t taken him more than one war, and a couple of military interventions, to realize he didn’t want a career in the army. Yet here he was, a soldier in a different kind of army fighting a different kind of war. His job, once again, was to protect the innocent, who were as difficult to identify in this American landscape as they had been in a foreign setting.
Waverly pointed to an alley on the right, a block down from the neighborhood convenience store where Ben was supposed to meet Epifanio and said, “What’s going on over there?”
Ben slowed his SUV to a crawl as he watched the altercation at the entrance to the alley. What Ben saw were two different gangs on the same turf. And neither of them happy about it.
“Looks like the One-Eight pitted against MS guys,” Waverly said.
“Not good,” Ben muttered.
“You hear about the kid who lost his fingers to a machete in a mall in Virginia? That was MS,” Waverly said.
