in his unlit back room and stared out an uncurtained window. Agitation crawled across his nerve endings, and he faced that fact that not even six months had been enough to ease the constant pressure and stress he lived with. It was as if his mind and body had simply forgotten how to relax.
He’d moved here for the wide-open spaces and the clear sight lines. A strange way to pick a town. Well, that and the fact that he knew Seth Hardin a bit and Hardin had always spoken well of this place. But he hadn’t even let Hardin know he was here, although he heard the guy was currently on station with his fiancée somewhere out there. No point in introducing himself to Hardin’s family hereabouts. He might not stay long.
He might not be able to stay long. Questions about his past simply couldn’t be answered. His whole adult life was stamped “classified,” and it was hard to talk around those things without inadvertently giving something away.
He had his cover story, but it didn’t fit him somehow. He’d rather say nothing than lie needlessly, anyway. It was beginning to strike him that all he’d done was exchange one covert life for another. How did you build on that? He had six months of public history and a childhood. The rest was best forgotten.
Hell, maybe they should have filed him in the warehouse with all his mission debriefings.
The thought amused him, but not for long. Something about that encounter with his neighbor earlier had seemed to cast his current existence in high relief. Was he always going to live in the shadows?
It hadn’t been so bad when he’d shared those shadows with the other guys in his unit, but now he shared them with no one, cut off from friends who could no longer talk to him about what they were doing, and cut off from everyone else because he couldn’t say where he’d been or what he’d done.
He wasn’t feeling sorry for himself. He’d made his choices. But it sure got irritating at times. Even the most casual of conversations felt like a minefield. He’d probably get used to it, though. He’d gotten used to a lot worse.
So he had some decisions to make and some learning to do. First off, he could have handled that encounter with the woman—Allison—with a minimum of common courtesy. Damn, it wasn’t as if his name was classified. Would it have been so hard to say, “Nice to meet you. I’m Jerrod”?
Except that it might have been taken as an invitation to get to know him better. So he’d been rude. Not even helping her up after she’d slipped could make up for his cold response to her friendly greeting.
Time to learn to get through those simple courtesies without keeping his guard so high that he failed at the smallest aspects of daily life.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t know how. During his service, there had been plenty of opportunities to practice the social graces, at least to a minimal extent. Certainly the academy had drilled them into him. But then covert operations had kind of drilled them out.
Still, it was no excuse. What was going on inside him? No longer in uniform, he was feeling like some kind of sham. Because at heart he was still a long way from being a civilian.
He sighed and pressed his forehead to the icy window glass. When his career came to a close, thanks to shrapnel lodged near his spine, he hadn’t dreamed that he’d feel so much like a stranger in a strange land. Or that he’d be so ill prepared for a so-called normal life.
His old normal was no longer normal, and he needed to get his act together. Traipsing around the countryside all day, every day, might ease the need for action, at least a little, but it wasn’t moving him forward in any useful way.
He had a lot of years ahead of him, and he needed to do something worthwhile with them. If worse came to worse, he supposed he could return the call from the CIA, but did he really want a covert future where his ability to act would be hemmed in by pretending to be a diplomat? Was he even certain that he would do any good? At least what he’d been doing for the military—well, damn near all of it—had sure as hell seemed necessary.
The CIA was a whole different can of worms, one he wasn’t sure he wanted to open. At least in his former capacity, he hadn’t usually needed to lie and gain the trust of people who shouldn’t trust him at all.
There it was again, that whole lie-and-trust issue. Kind of late, he thought almost bitterly, to be developing moral qualms.
Or maybe not too late. Not too late to want to do something productive rather than destructive. The only question was what would satisfy him. What did he feel equipped to do that didn’t involve sniper rifles and C-4?
Maybe he just needed to take it in small steps. One little thing at a time.
He glanced at his watch and saw it was only eight o’clock, still early, although the winter had made it dark as pitch out there.
Maybe he could rectify one small rudeness. Just a small step, but a right step.
One foot in front of the other. That had gotten him through more than he cared to remember. One step at a time.
* * *
The ringing of her rather sickly sounding doorbell startled Allison. Her friends seldom dropped by unannounced and solicitors were rare on cold winter nights.
She dropped her red pen, tossed her reading glasses on the stack of papers and walked to the front door, rubbing her neck as she went. It hadn’t taken long for the first seeds of eyestrain to start making themselves felt from her forehead to the back of her neck. She wondered at the tension, then decided she was probably more worried about tomorrow than she wanted to admit, even to herself. Tracking down a poison so dangerous that many countries had declared it a chemical-warfare weapon would be no picnic, no matter how carefully she collected her samples. One slip might be her last. Unfortunately, she was the only one available with sufficient expertise to do this. Her fault for taking training with a decontamination team while she had been in graduate school. Curiosity had led her to this point.
She opened her door and felt her heart skip a nervous beat, even as her jaw dropped. She didn’t know what she had expected, but certainly not the enigmatic guy from next door who had barely answered her earlier greeting. Up close like this, she saw that while he was lean, he was also larger than she had thought, and both the porch and hall lights cast his harshly angled face in high relief.
For the first time, she realized he looked dangerous. But as the wind whipped snow into her door, stinging her face, she knew she couldn’t stand at the door like this for long. He might be wearing a parka, but she sure wasn’t. Should she let him in?
“I wanted to apologize,” he said gruffly.
She blinked as snow crystals melted on her face and made a quick decision, possibly a stupid one, but time would tell.
“Come in,” she said. “I’ll freeze standing here.”
He hesitated, as if he considered his purpose here completed, but then gave a slight nod. She stepped back, letting him in and closing the door against the frigid night and blowing snow.
She wiped her sleeve across her face to get rid of the wet, then caught sight of herself in the hall mirror. Her grungies. A great first impression. But as she raised her gaze again, she met eyes that looked about as black as a starless night, and just about as cold. A little shiver passed through her.
“Coffee?” she asked.
Again he hesitated.
