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He shook his head. ‘Just once?’
Romy balled her fists. He really wasn’t getting her. ‘Can we move past the slack-jawed shock, do you think?’
‘You’re practically a virgin.’
Okay, so maybe he was on the same page. She cleared her throat. ‘I…really don’t count that first time at all. So…yes.’
‘Why doesn’t it count?’
‘I was—’ Half in shock? Violently drunk? Present-absent? ‘—not really involved.’
Clint’s eyes focused on her.
‘Were you forced?’
She shook her head, flushing. ‘I wanted to rebel against my father. The guy was just my weapon of choice. But I also chose not to actively…participate…in the end.’ She couldn’t. It was why she was twenty-six and had never been properly kissed. Let alone loved. ‘Obviously I didn’t plan to…didn’t realise I’d get pregnant.’
A high-pitched creaking sound filled the little Honda. Romy realised it was Clint’s hands squeezing the life out of her leather steering-wheel cover. He muttered an obscenity under his breath.
Her defences shot up instantly. ‘Don’t judge me, Clint.’
Wow. Thinking it and saying it were two very different things. There was a kind of power in actually verbalising the words.
Don’t. Judge. Me.
His eyes zeroed back in on hers. ‘Judging you? You’re practically a virgin, Romy, and I was about to take you up against a wall in an alleyway. How do you think that makes me feel?’
She lifted her voice to match his. ‘Don’t judge yourself either. I just wanted you to understand why I took off like that. It was rude and I’m sorry.’
Words failed him. Then he laughed, strained and thin. ‘You don’t sound sorry—you sound really ticked off.’
‘If you keep pushing me I will get ticked off.’ Lord, it was amazing to speak her mind! ‘I simply wanted you to know why I left.’
‘I assumed it was the military thing.’
She stared at him, breathing heavily. ‘So did I, at first.’
‘But not now?’
Her voice dropped to a bare whisper. ‘It still bothers me, Clint. I would be lying if I said it didn’t. But I recognise that it’s a big part of you.’
Wordless seconds ticked by. Romy studied her hands. Then he finally spoke, steady but low.
‘I go to the city. About four times a year…’
She lifted her eyes to his profile. Was he finally going to share something with her?
‘…to meet with a woman by the name of Adrienne Lucas.’
A vortex opened up deep in Romy’s belly.
‘Dr Adrienne Lucas of the medical corps. It’s a condition of my leave that I check in regularly with her.’
Romy looked up at him, her stomach settling. ‘Check in?’
‘She’s a shrink, Romy. She treats me.’
‘What are you on leave for?’
‘They call it medical leave. I call it leave of last resort. It was that or retire from the corps entirely. The corps wanted me to stay.’
‘But you didn’t want to?’
Silence.
‘What happened?’
Clint made a noise in the back of his throat. His fingers beat a steady rhythm on the steering wheel. ‘They called us the force of choice. One of Australia’s elite squadrons. It meant we were posted deep inside conflicts all over the world. Reconnaissance, retrieval, extractions. We saw things no one should have to look at. Eventually you get used to seeing those things. And to doing them.’
Romy slid her hand over towards him until her little finger barely touched his thigh. She very much needed some part of her to be touching some part of him.
‘One day I saw something I couldn’t get used to. One of my patrol committed something so…’ He shook his head, took a deep breath. ‘A kid, no older than Leighton. It was unacceptable. We were supposed to be helping people. There was only the two of us on reconnaissance, the LT and me. I didn’t want to dog on a senior, a friend, but I didn’t know what else to do.
‘I talked to the LT about it. We were pretty tight. He seemed remorseful, said he appreciated me coming direct to him. Grateful enough that I’d handled it discreetly he granted me a weekend leave.’ He shook his head in the darkness. ‘I spent most of it drunk in the desert, trying to erase what I’d seen from my mind. When I got back to base, I got carpeted by my CO.’
‘What happened?’
‘LT cited me for bailing during the mission. He said I didn’t have what it took in close combat. It became my superior’s word against my own. I was forced to justify myself, forced to tell them what happened with the kid, that he was only defending his family with a rusty old AK with no ammo in it.’ His voice thickened.
Romy stared at him. ‘They didn’t believe you.’
‘There was a reason we all looked up to the LT. He was the best, a talented strategist.’ His laugh turned ugly. ‘He struck pre-emptively to undermine everything I said. He painted me as a coward, made sure the whole platoon heard about it.’
‘And they believed that? About a man who’d earned a commendation for valour?’ He fell to silence. Romy realised. ‘You wore it. You didn’t challenge him.’ As a woman who spent her life feeling judged, she knew exactly how to say that. Factual. Simple. Toneless. He’d find no judgement here.
‘I thought I could tough it out, watch the LT, try and prevent anything like it from happening again. But the other troopers in my unit, men who’d trusted me with their lives, suddenly didn’t want to know me.’ He clenched the steering wheel as if it was a weapon. ‘I was dropped to solo recon. And the LT kept on going out.’
He sounded like a man and a wounded animal all at once. Romy got a real sense of how important that trust relationship was to him. How badly his loyalty had been abused.
‘When did you leave?’ she asked.
‘He finally went too far. Command pulled him out and it all came to the surface. What I saw was just the tip of the iceberg. Even they were shocked, I think. My XO hustled to make good on the damage done, but nothing could undo it for me. I’d grown suspicious of everyone. I had no faith in the men I served with. I had no faith in myself. I started to believe…’
Whatever he’d been about to say, he couldn’t finish. He looked stricken. ‘I spent the best part of a year drunk whenever I wasn’t on mission. It was the only way I could sleep at night.’
‘So you went on leave?’
‘Command considers it some kind of compensation. Either that or they didn’t want a flaming star medallist cut loose and drawing attention. In any case I’m pensioned off on medical leave until my time is up, then they’ll discharge me honourably with no fuss. It’s all over.’
She picked her way through a minefield of possible responses and, as was her peculiar talent, selected the most painful one. ‘But not for you?’
His eyes blazed like emerald coals. ‘That unit was my family, Romy. I would have died for any one of them and I nearly did, several times. So to be turned on by the men who I would have taken a bullet for…To have the corps call my courage into question, my honour…’
Death before dishonour.
Romy shuddered. He’d watched his mother desert his father; then his lieutenant betrayed him, his brothers-in-arms turned on him, his corps abandoned him. The only person he had in the world was Justin. The already strong brotherly bond doubled.
Amazing he could still function, really. That spoke of enormous strength behind those fathomless eyes. She slid her hand onto his where it gripped the steering wheel desperately.
A road train thundered by, its long string of sidelights casting an eerie glow onto his face. He glanced down at her fingers on his and pulled them free. He returned his attention to the dark road and started the car.
She stared at his tortured profile. There was more. Something she was missing. This was about more than just Clint.
‘Is he still inside the system? Your lieutenant?’
Clint snorted. ‘Deep inside it. Brig-deep. He won’t be seeing the outside of a military prison for another decade.’
‘Good. He deserves it.’
‘Maybe we both do.’
She sucked in a quiet breath. ‘You blame yourself for the boy that died.’
The silence stretched for an eternity. ‘But for some geography, that could have been Leighton.’ His voice was thick and low. ‘Just a regular little kid before the conflict started. The only one left to defend his mother and sisters. Terrified.’
The image of Leighton bleeding to death into the desert sands trying to protect her roiled from her brain to her stomach. She cleared her throat. ‘You didn’t kill him.’
‘I didn’t save him.’
‘You can’t be responsible for every child. Every loss.’
Romy’s heart ached for the pain she saw etched there. Then he spoke again, as if he couldn’t seal off the floodgate now he’d opened it.
‘I nearly killed Justin once.’ Her shocked silence was question enough. ‘In the dam down from your cottage. I was supposed to be watching him. I was showing off for some local girls whose parents were visiting mine. Older girls. Pretty girls.’
Her whispered words were measured. ‘He got in trouble in the water?’
‘He was struggling in the water. I didn’t notice for nearly a minute.’
Romy’s hand slid up onto his leg. Entirely inadequate.
Sixty seconds without oxygen…
‘One of the girls was a pool attendant in the city in the summer holidays. She resuscitated him after I pulled him out. He was only five.’
Making Clint only thirteen. Still a child himself. Too young to take on that guilt. Too young not to. ‘You mentioned that you owed him.’
‘His development was slowed after that. For years it looked like he’d never be able to learn like everyone else.’ His bitter smile twisted. ‘The man Mum ran off to the States with was Justin’s developmental specialist.’
Charming.
‘He seems pretty normal now.’ Romy suppressed the memory of the nasty glint in Justin’s eyes at the dance. No wonder Clint was protective of his brother. He’d probably spent a lifetime being subtly reminded of what had nearly happened. Empathy welled up for the guilt-ridden young man Clint must have been. The damaged man he’d grown into. She cleared her throat. ‘If he got a front-of-house role in a major hotel, Justin can’t have had much lasting damage.’
He nodded, slow and thoughtful. ‘Pure luck. And skill on the part of Richard Long, my stepfather. It could have been very different.’
Romy took the opportunity. She lightened her words. Carefully, carefully…‘He doesn’t really talk about it much. His US job.’
Clint slid his glance sideways. ‘Leave it, Romy. Stop fishing for mystery you won’t find.’
‘I’m just curious.’ Because the Joliet Grovesnor had no record of a concierge called Justin Long. Or Justin McLeish. And that’s where Simone said he’d earned his management stripes. ‘I’d like to know more about how they run the big US hotels.’
‘Then ask him.’
The idea of having a reasonable conversation with Justin Long was laughable. Even before she’d half crippled him with her Vulcan death grip. But if he was lying to Clint, she wanted to know about it. It was her job. ‘I might just do that.’
The past fifteen minutes explained so much. Why wouldn’t you shut yourself away after an incident like he’d experienced in the military? Who would you trust?
She thought about her father and what sorts of things he must have seen in his time in active service, what that might do to a man. How it must take extra strength even to do the day-to-day things, never mind the horrendous things they were tasked with. Had her father done any of that? She thought about how there was no weapon on this earth strong enough to fight the infection which took her mother, and how a control freak like the Colonel must have felt about being powerless. About the baby whose birth caused the deadly, aggressive infection.
She frowned.
Clint had been ripped out of his unit, away from the men he was closest to, and look how it had affected him. The Colonel was recalled unexpectedly from active duty to come home and raise a motherless infant single-handed and assigned forever after to passive training and admin roles. It didn’t change one moment of the misery that was her childhood, but it did make her appreciate, a tiny bit, how it must have been for the Colonel twenty-six years ago.
And why he might have viewed her as the enemy her whole life.
Chapter Nine (#ulink_37a2e8bb-b6ce-5e09-95ab-98aef9ddc27e)
LEAVING Romy alone, injured and patently conflicted, on her front verandah last night had been one of the hardest things Clint had done since coming to WildSprings. Every part of him wanted to scoop her up and carry her inside. Tuck her into bed. Bind her ankle. Spoil her. Instead, he’d locked her car up and footed the mile home in the dark, walking off some of his tension.
It had helped. A little.
The morning coffee was helping more. He sipped the battery-acid-strength brew.
Romy had a way of bringing out the caveman in him and then making him feel ridiculous for it. And he didn’t feel like overtures of kindness would be welcomed from him. Not after he’d near mauled her back at the fundraiser. Thanks to her father, she was highly sensitised to being dominated. She saw it at every turn. He didn’t want her connecting him with those feelings. Ever.
He didn’t want to be responsible for shadows in her eyes. Or her son’s.
A sudden knock at the door had him leaping for the Browning nine-millmetre sidearm he didn’t carry any more. The fact someone got all the way to his door without being detected…He was losing his touch. He pulled it open.
‘Hi, Clint. Can I come in?’
Justin seemed distracted, and this was the first time in months his brother had visited the tree house. Something was up. Clint stood aside and waved him in.
Justin shuffled nervously in the doorway. ‘I need to talk to you. About last night.’
Clint’s heart kicked into gear. Had someone seen him and Romy? Probably. Not exactly his most covert operation. He steeled himself for the inevitable attack.
He crossed to the kitchen and held up his mug. ‘Coffee?’
