Rachel Lee – An Unlikely Daddy (страница 7)
And the lie. The big lie. That they would travel together? Johnny would likely have never been assigned to any station where he could take his family. Not with his skills.
And another lie, his own. He and Johnny didn’t work for the State Department. They worked for the CIA. State was their cover. He hated having to perpetuate that with Marisa. At this point she deserved something better than lies. She certainly deserved to know about a black star on a marble wall at Langley that would never bear Johnny’s name.
But the simple fact was, the agency would put up the star, but it might never acknowledge that John had been one of them. It had happened before and would happen again, and setting Marisa on a quest to break through that huge barrier to truth seemed fruitless. Some names were never inscribed in the book, which was guarded as well as the crown jewels. Some families were never invited to the annual memorial ceremony. Some were never told what their loved ones had done. Some were left forever with stories such as those Marisa had been told because even one slip might cause an irreparable harm.
He didn’t even know himself exactly what had happened to John. He’d never know. But he didn’t like giving her the cover story when she deserved the truth.
But maybe the truth would upset her more. Maybe knowing that all that talk about exotic travel had been most likely lies would only compound sins that never seemed to stop compounding.
He’d been at this business longer than John had; he was more used to deceptions that went with it. But he found himself getting sick to the gills of it. That woman up there reminded him that secrecy had repercussions. Horrible repercussions. At least if John had been killed in a combat mission with the Rangers, she’d have been given some information about where, when and how that was truthful. Instead, she’d been given a lie. A street mugging?
Not much closure, especially when she was right that John could have taken care of himself.
He brought the springs up to the bedroom she had indicated. Her room, he guessed, at the back of the house. She wanted the child near. She was already working over the wood with a damp rag. He looked at the springs, though, and wondered if they should be replaced. A few rusty spots marred them.
“Can we get new springs for the crib?” We, as if he belonged.
She let it pass, though, and stepped over to look. “Maybe I should.”
“Can you get them in town?”
“I can order them. I know I need to order a mattress.”
But not a whole new crib. He didn’t need brilliant insight to understand that. “Let me measure them, then. Can you just call to order them?”
“Freitag’s?” She smiled faintly. “They’ll order anything anyone around here wants. We used to have a catalog store, but that closed. Miracle of the internet.”
“Where do I find a tape measure?”
He found it in the kitchen drawer she had directed him to and returned with it and the memo pad and pen from the fridge. He measured the frame, made notes about how it bolted to the bed, then joined her in wiping down the wood. At last she sat on the edge of her bed, holding her stomach and laughed. “That felt good!”
“Yeah? Somehow I think you need to tell that to your back.”
“How did you guess?”
“Because mine would have been aching after being bent over all that time.” He stepped back and looked at the crib. “It’s a very nice piece of furniture.”
“Johnny’s grandfather built it for him. Carpentry was his hobby.”
“A great heirloom then.” He looked again at the springs. “You know, I should probably take this back downstairs and work on it with some oil and rust remover. Maybe it doesn’t need to be replaced.”
She shook her head. “I want new springs if I can get them. Babies bounce when they get old enough to stand. I wouldn’t trust it.”
“Fair enough,” he agreed, and carted it back down to the basement. He could also put some wood slats in place to replace the springs, he thought. Peg them in so they couldn’t slip out.
But why was he even thinking of such things? He had no place here, and no sense of how long Marisa would tolerate him. Worse, with every passing hour he was building the wall of lies higher.
Sometimes he just hated himself.
When he got back upstairs, he found Marisa in the kitchen. She was nibbling on some carrots, and a plate of them sat at the center of the table as if in invitation to him.
“Mind if I get some coffee?” he asked.
“Help yourself. Make fresh if you want. And thanks for your help with the crib.”
“No big deal.” He filled a mug and sat across from her. She appeared pensive, so he waited for her to speak.
“You know, I don’t want to use springs in that crib at all. I shouldn’t need them. They look dangerous to me, and my friends all have mattresses that just sit on brackets around the outside of the crib.”
He summoned a mental picture. “That would work. I could add some more brackets for you easily enough. The way it looks now, you only have four of them.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I’d need them all the way around so the mattress is higher. You know, so fingers or hands couldn’t poke out.”
“Easy enough.”
Then she smiled faintly. “And that’s part of the reason for crib bumpers, I guess.” A little shake of her head. “I need to get on the stick about this, don’t I?”
“You’ve got a little time.”
“Not a whole lot.” She held out her hand. “Pad? Pen?”
He’d forgotten he’d tucked them into his breast pocket and turned them over immediately.
“So, hardware for angle brackets and screws, right? Say eight of them?”
“Maybe twelve. And they should be wide, not too narrow.”
She wrote. “Then mattress, bumpers, sheets, blankets...” Her voice trailed off. “I let this go too long.”
“You’ve still got time, right?”
“Another ten weeks.”
“That’s plenty,” he said bracingly. “Your friends and I will help if you let us.” Then he took a leap into a potential briar patch. “I don’t like those basement stairs of yours.”
She looked up from her writing. “Why?”
“Too narrow, and the railing isn’t sturdy enough. “You shouldn’t be climbing them right now, but with a baby in your arms or on your hip...” He let it hang, and braced for her justifiable anger. Just who the hell did he think he was? She’d have every right to demand that of him.
She frowned, then sighed. “You’re right. I hate those stairs.”
“I can fix them.”
At that her head jerked back. “Ryker, you just dropped by to do your duty to Johnny. You checked on me. Are you planning to move in?”
A justified question. But he was feeling a need, a strong need to atone and make up for things, including the lies he kept telling by omission as much as anything. His answer, though, surprised even him. “For a change I’d like to actually build something.”
Something passed over her face—whether sorrow or something else, he wasn’t sure. “Why should I trust you?” she asked finally. “You think I can’t tell you’re keeping secrets?”
“John kept secrets, too,” he said. “And by the way, John trusted me, or I wouldn’t be here now.”
She debated. He could see it. He wondered how much faith she’d lost in her husband just by the few things he’d told her. He’d certainly tried to avoid telling her that she’d been fed some outright lies. He didn’t feel good about it, but that was the job. Besides, he owed it to John to protect her from the ugly truths.
“What would you do to the stairs?” she asked.
“For one thing, the steps need to be wider. So it’ll stretch farther into the basement, but there’s room. And I’d give you a rail on both sides strong enough that if you grab or fall against them, they won’t collapse.”
She nodded slowly, giving him his first sense that he might actually be getting somewhere with her. “I’d like that,” she admitted.
He rose and reached for the jacket he’d slung over the back of the chair earlier. “I’ve imposed too much. See you tomorrow.”
Before she could answer, he headed for the door. Coming here hadn’t eased his sense of guilt in the least. He’d better watch his step before he carried that woman into another thicket of lies, a thicket worse than the one left to her by John.
He was, after all, still CIA. And while he might have a few months off, that didn’t mean he should spend them weaving another trap for an innocent woman. She’d paid a high enough price already for loving the wrong man.
Ryker’s departure left Marisa feeling adrift again. Maybe she’d been too quick to take such a long sabbatical. No, she couldn’t have handled teaching in the fall, but now that months had passed, she itched at times to have a schedule, to have things that needed doing. A point, a purpose, beyond wallowing in grief and taking care of her health and the child in her womb.
Johnny’s death had inalterably changed her life, but she had managed his absences before by keeping a busy, full life. These days she’d all but cut off her friends.
And Ryker. He intrigued her. She felt the hardness in him at times, but she felt more there. As if he were reaching out for something, too. He’d helped her with the crib, and he said he wanted to fix her basement stairs. God, she hated those stairs. For years now she’d stood at the top of them and thrown her laundry down because she couldn’t safely carry it.