Merline Lovelace – Military Heroes Bundle: A Soldier's Homecoming / A Soldier's Redemption / Danger in the Desert / Strangers When We Meet / Grayson's Surrender / Taking Cover (страница 33)
“Very true.”
“Have a seat. I’m making toast. Would you like some?”
“Just some coffee when it’s ready, thanks. I haven’t been up long enough to feel hungry. You look exhausted.”
She shrugged and pulled her slice of toast from the toaster. “I had a restless night. One of those where you feel like you keep waking up, but you almost never wake up enough to actually do anything about it. You know, like turn on a light and read or something. In and out like a swinging door all night.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It happens. In a strange way, it almost felt like when I was in the hospital.” She sat at the table and began spreading jam on her toast. “When they had me drugged. I wasn’t really sleeping, I had the oddest dreams, and I kept waking up but couldn’t really wake up. Weird.”
“Yeah. Been there.”
She laughed quietly. “Can’t blame the drugs this time. Maybe too much coffee, but not drugs.”
He grinned. “Leading the clean life, eh?”
“Oh, yeah. I donate blood as often as I can, and when I go in, they have these forms. Same questions every time. I tease them that I’ve led a very dull life. Last time the nurse asked me if I’d ever received money for sex, I said, ‘I wish.’ I thought she was never going to stop laughing.”
His smile broadened.
“But you know,” she added more thoughtfully, “I find there are lots of questions I answer negatively that I ought to be able to answer affirmatively.”
“Such as?”
“‘Have you been out of the country in the last three years?’ Heck, I haven’t even taken a real vacation locally. So I go in and answer the questions and start thinking about taking a cruise, or visiting another country, or...”
“You’ll do it someday.”
She let go of her wistfulness and smiled. “Yeah, I will. Someday.”
“I can’t donate blood at all anymore. Been overseas too often and too much.”
“That’s okay. I think you’ve given enough, anyway.”
He shook his head. “Wrong way to look at it.”
“You think so?”
“You can never give enough.”
As she considered his words, she nodded. “You’re right. There’s always a need to be met somewhere.”
“Maybe I will have that toast,” he said. When she started to rise, he waved her back. “I can make it for myself. You just rest.”
“Bread’s in the bread box. If you want butter...”
“I know.” He smiled. “The refrigerator.”
She laughed then. “Something about being a mother changes you forever. You start assuming that people need explanations for the simplest stuff.”
“Looking after others is never a bad habit.”
His words warmed her, and she sipped her coffee, savoring its richness, trying not to stare at the scars on his back. There were probably more she had missed, and somehow she felt embarrassed not to have noticed them. Even in the throes of their incredible lovemaking.
He popped a couple of slices of bread in the toaster, said, “Be right back,” and disappeared from the kitchen. He returned before the toast was ready, wearing a sweatshirt of his own.
“Are the mornings always so chilly here?” he asked.
“Most of the year,” she admitted. “At the height of summer it can get really hot in the daytime, but the nights cool down fast. I’ve never yet had a night when I didn’t need a blanket.”
“That’s the best way to sleep.”
They sat together for a while, sipping coffee, eating toast, no conversation necessary. They had reached that exquisite point where neither of them felt pressed to fill a silence. Connie savored that comfort. To her, that had always been a mark of a truly good relationship, when there could be companionable silence.
Eventually she glanced at the clock. “I guess we may as well go to the early service, if I can get Sophie and my mother up.”
He nodded.
“Do you want to come?”
“Sure. Dress up?”
She shook her head, smiling. “Times have changed. Jeans will do.”
“Nobody complains?”
“Why should they?” She shrugged. “I’ve often felt that God couldn’t care less what we’re wearing when we pray. Clothes are for other people, not for him.”
“I like the way you think, Connie.” Standing, he astonished her with a kiss. “I’ll go wash up real quick while you wake the others.”
Julia awoke quickly, with a smile, and agreed she would like to go to the early service. “Much more peaceful,” she said. “Not so many folks stirring around and coughing.”
Connie laughed. “Then up and at ’em. I’m going to get Sophie.”
She climbed the stairs feeling better than she had in a week. Somehow Ethan’s presence this morning had managed to batter back the night’s vague fears, and the sunlight pouring in every window seemed to fill the world with a crisp, clean glow. The sky, she thought, would be almost unbearably clear and blue this morning.
She knocked on Sophie’s door, then opened it. For an instant she didn’t register what she was seeing. For an endless, eternal instant, she couldn’t put the pieces together.
“Sophie?”
No answer.
“Sophie?” She turned from the bedroom and ran to the hall bathroom, finding it empty.
Then she screamed. “Sophie!”
Only silence answered her.
Five sheriff’s cars filled the tree-lined street. Gage and Micah were there, along with her other friends. Other cars were already out on the streets and ranging the countryside, searching. Every one of them had Leo’s arrest photo.
Connie had pulled on her own uniform and gun, ready to get going. But Gage wouldn’t let her, not just yet.
“The doors were locked,” she kept saying.
Gage looked at Ethan. “You’d have heard her.”
“If she’d come downstairs, yes,” he said. “I know myself well enough that even when I sleep, I’m still alert if I need to be. And those stairs creak.”
“So that leaves...” Gage’s scarred face frowned at the dormer of Sophie’s room.
“Exactly,” Ethan said. “It wouldn’t have been hard for her to get down.”
“Or someone to get in,” Connie said.
Ethan shook his head. “A normal-size man would have made too much noise. This room’s right over the living room.”
She turned on him. “Are you saying Sophie left on her own?”
He didn’t answer, but his dark eyes said everything.
“Why would she do that, Ethan? Why?”
“She said she saw him on Friday. Maybe she talked to him. If it’s Leo...”
Connie bit her lip. “You think he could have talked her into meeting him?”