Chapter 19
Honey. He’d called her honey.
The word opened up a flood of memories, all tangled up with that word. For a moment she could barely breathe.
“—whole bag of it.”
She was startled back into the present. “Mouse and rat food?” Erin asked. “That’s what he took?”
Rafe nodded.
“Maybe he got that pet he always wanted,” Blaine muttered.
She winced inwardly, although he didn’t seem to be aiming that at her.
That didn’t stop her from feeling guilty.
She’d worked so hard, tried so hard, to provide a stable home life for Ethan, one where he didn’t have to pack up and move all the time.
But what he’d really wanted was…a pet? A creature to be responsible for, that he’d have to feed and take care of and who might not like the constant moving any more than she did?
An animal who would always need attention, care and feeding—
She felt a nudge, realized Rafe’s dog had moved, and was now right next to her.
He’d done it so quietly she hadn’t even realized it.
The moment their eyes made contact the dark head came to rest on her knee.
The animal kept looking up at her with those gold-flecked eyes.
Because it seemed like the thing to do, she reached out to touch the dark fur.
And there it was again, that soothing warmth, as if somehow the dog had the knack of infusing calm, comfort.
A thought struck her suddenly and she went very still.
“What?” Blaine asked, observant as always.
“I just…had a thought.”
“About what?”
“That…maybe I was looking at the whole pet thing all wrong. I was looking at it as another responsibility, another weight to carry.”
“Like an adult, not a kid.” Blaine’s voice was quiet, almost understanding.
She stared down at her fingers, still stroking that soft, black fur. It was as if the dog had brought the idea with him, and had somehow given it to her. That was silly, but she couldn’t deny the notion made sense.
“I never really thought about it from Ethan’s point of view. That maybe…maybe he just wanted a companion he wouldn’t lose every time we had to move.”
“Like he lost whatever friends he made on base or at school?”
She nodded, and finally met his gaze. “God, I feel so awful. Why didn’t I realize—”
“Because it was as hard on you as it was on him,” Blaine said. “Don’t think I don’t know that.”
For a moment she just stared at him, looking into those deep blue eyes, so much darker than her own. A silly memory struck her, of the day they’d joked that Ethan’s medium blue was what happened when you mixed their two colors together.
She nearly jumped when Rafe stood up suddenly. He held out a hand toward her. “Give me your car keys,” he said.
For a moment she just stared at him, wondering how one man could look so intimidating and yet be as kind as he’d been to her. Somehow she trusted him, and pulled the keys out of her pocket and held them out to him.
“Here’s the deal,” he said briskly as he took the keys, with a slight snap in his voice now. “We’ve done all we can until I get some answers on those last calls I made.”
“I should go home, then,” she said. “Be there just in case, like you said.”
“Yes. But not this instant. I’m going to do a little work on your car, and the tools are here.”
Erin blinked. “What?” She hadn’t realized he’d meant he would personally deal with her overdue vehicle service.
“I’ll see what we’ve got in the garage here, but I’ll probably have to pick up some parts. While I do that, you two are going to sit here, on neutral ground, and talk.”
She stared at the man, because there was no doubt that that had been an order. “I don’t think—”
“This isn’t the time to overthink it.” Rafe shifted his gaze to Blaine. “Either of you. Just talk it out until you can work together. For Ethan’s sake.”
He turned as if to go. As if assuming they would of course follow orders. She wondered if anyone had ever dared not to, when given by this man. And she was suddenly very curious about the woman who had the backbone to stand up to him.
But then he turned back slightly. “Cutter?” The dog’s head came up. “Peacekeeper,” he said, in that same tone, that of command.
The dog let out a little yip of acknowledgement.
And then Rafe was gone, and she and Blaine just sat staring at each other.
“He can really order him to…do that,” she said.
Blaine nodded. “Rafe told me he—” he reached out to scratch behind the dog’s ear “—has done this job before.”
“I’m sorry he has to do it for us.” She looked down into the gold-flecked dark eyes, remembered the feeling of soothing warmth that seemed to emanate from the animal whenever she touched him.
Silence spun out between them for a long moment. Then Blaine grimaced and stood up. “It just feels wrong.”
“Sitting here doing nothing while Ethan’s out here, somewhere?”
He turned to look at her. “Yes.”
“Yes, it does,” she agreed. “That’s why I had to leave, even if it was just to walk around. But I did do a little research, when I was going crazy just sitting at home. Foxworth is quite an operation.”
“Seems like it.”
“They don’t promote themselves much, but if you check out the places online where they’re mentioned, when you read the statements and comments and posts from people they’ve helped, they’re so heartfelt and the people are so grateful for whatever they did.
I saw it over and over and over. It’s staggering.
They all said that if you’re in the right and can’t get help anywhere else, they’ll help.
And that no case is too small, if Foxworth believes in it. ”
“Rafe told me one of Quinn’s—Quinn Foxworth, who started the foundation with his sister—first cases was finding and returning a stolen locket. It was a little girl’s only memento of her dead mother.”
Erin stared at him, amazed at what he’d said. “That’s…wow.”
“Better yet, the guy who stole it got his head straight and now works for Foxworth, helping other ex-cons who want to go straight.”
“Wow,” she said again, and now she could feel her eyes stinging, and a tightness in her chest. “It’s…wonderful to know that there are still people out there who care that much.”
“Yeah.” Blaine flicked a glance toward the outside.
Her car had fired up again, making what sounded like even more noise than before, but it shut down after a moment and he went on.
“And now they’re on our side, Erin. The people who have done that small thing to taking down a sitting governor are on our side. ”
“Thanks to you,” she said softly.
He half shrugged. “Thanks to me being in the right place at the right time and having a bird to fly.”
She studied him for a moment. “You never were comfortable with the hero hat, even when you’d earned it.”
The look he gave her then was so startled it startled her. What, did he think she’d forgotten what he’d done, how he’d served, the lives he’d protected and saved? She sighed.
“Just because I’m not hero material doesn’t mean I don’t recognize it when I see it,” she said. “Like in you two,” she added with a nod toward the door, which had opened again, just enough for Rafe to lean in.
“I’m going to pick up some parts. If Ty pops up again—” he gestured at the computer screen where they’d watched the video “—go ahead and answer him. I should be back in fifteen or less.”
Before she could even ask about how much this was going to cost, the man was gone.
“I can’t afford a big repair bill,” she said, hating how anxious she sounded.
“We’ll work it out,” Blaine said.
So, what, he was going to pay for this, too? He already gave so much that she wondered what he lived on himself. She couldn’t even look at him, her emotions were so tangled up. She buried her face in her hands.
She didn’t know how much time had passed before she heard Blaine say, very quietly, “You were wrong, you know.”
She nearly laughed out loud. She’d been wrong about so much. “You’re going to have to narrow that down a bit.”
“You were as much a hero as I ever was.”
She jerked her head up sharply. “What?”
“Don’t belittle what you went through. I don’t, because I know that if you hadn’t been there, fighting for me, I would probably have given up.”
“I doubt that,” she said, but she couldn’t deny the words pleased her. She’d wanted to be there for him, the way he’d always been for her, and Ethan.
It was the nights between the long days of pushing and trying that nearly did her in.
Because every night she dreamed of them getting past this, of him getting back on his feet, and then…
it happened again. And again. Endlessly, in her nightmares, he would heal, then get broken. Heal, get broken. Every night.
He hesitated, then added, “I know what you told everyone. That nobody was supposed to tell me how bad it was, just how many bones I’d broken, or that my left arm might never work right again. Dr. Hadley told me, right before he released me from rehab.”
“I just didn’t want you to think any damage or limitation was permanent, before you had to.”
“And because of that, because of the way you never let me hear what the staff, what the medics were saying, never let anyone tell me, I had no idea that I couldn’t be doing what I was doing.”
“I didn’t want to hear it, either,” she said honestly.
He smiled. “Because you did that, because I never knew how bad the prognostications were, I never lost hope. I just thought it was taking so long and hurting so much because I’d been so busted up, not because I was never going to get on my feet again.”
“And so you did,” she said softly.
If she was proud of anything she’d done in that long, hard battle they’d fought it was that. She believed in the power of the mind to convince the body to heal itself, and it had worked.
Too bad she hadn’t been able to power her mind into preparing to go through it all again someday.