But she wasn’t at all surprised to find out he’d been an abused child. Nor did it surprise her to learn that the navy had given him what he needed. Often abused children needed order in their lives, clear-cut rules to follow, after being subjected to the unpredictable whims of mean adults. The regimented lifestyle took away the fear of never knowing what would bring retribution down on their heads.
And apparently he’d needed to take charge at the same time, or he never would have gone into the SEALs. Maybe there’d even been an element of nobody’s ever going to get away with treating me that way again.
She didn’t consider herself an expert, but in eight years of teaching she’d certainly seen enough kids fighting these same battles, and few enough who were willing to talk about it. It was sad how they became coconspirators with their abusers, protecting their tormentors with silence and even outright lies.
And often, even when she thought she had enough to report it to the authorities, nothing came from it. Without physical evidence, as long as the child denied it, there was little enough anyone could do.
The thing that had always struck her, though, was the incalculable emotional damage that must come from being so mistreated by the very people a child by rights ought to be able to trust.
Well, she’d always wondered about that, and now she was looking at it. He seemed to blame his job for his inability to make connections, and perhaps it was responsible in large measure, but she suspected the seeds of the problem lay in his childhood. If you couldn’t trust your own parents, who could you trust?
She closed her eyes, chin still in her hand. As always, when confronted with something like this, she wanted to help, but in this case she didn’t see how she possibly could. This was a man who must be what? Thirty-eight? Thirty-nine? She couldn’t just step in like some delivering angel. He wouldn’t want it, and honestly, she didn’t know enough to be much help. The best she could do was listen when he was willing to talk.
He had turned out to be a good case for not judging a book by its cover, though. If her ears hadn’t become properly tuned through teaching, she probably would have thought all along that he was a hard, harsh man, sufficient unto himself, needing no one and nothing. That’s certainly what he had tried to become, and the image he tried to perpetuate.
And she had to admit she felt a lot more comfortable now knowing that he wasn’t the stone monolith he had first seemed.
Listening to him had also made her think about her own situation, and doing so made her squirm a bit. Yes, terrible things had happened to her, and her entire life had changed as a result, but how could she truly excuse her waste of the past year? Terror and trauma could explain only so much. The woman she had once believed herself to be had turned out to be a weakling and a coward.
She gave herself no quarter on that one. Some of it could be excused, but not all of it. After all, look what Wade had managed to achieve out of his own trauma as a child. He may have drifted for nearly a year, but then he’d taken a stand to make something of himself.
She hadn’t even tried.
But even as she sat there trying to beat herself up in the hopes that she might regain some sense of purpose or direction, she found herself remembering that episode in the kitchen yesterday, when he had lifted her onto the counter and kissed her.
Oh, man, that had started some kind of internal snowball rolling. Just the memory of those all-too-brief moments was enough to make her clamp her thighs together as the throbbing ache reawakened. She had thought that part of her dead and buried for good, only to discover it could come back to life at the merest touch.
Like a daffodil determined to bloom even though snow still lay on the ground in an icy blanket, her body responded to the memory as surely as the touch. She could only imagine what it might feel like to be claimed by such a man, one so powerful and strong, one so confident in his own desire. Sex with Jim had been good: loving and tender. She couldn’t help but feel that the entire experience would be different with Wade: hot and hard.
And maybe that’s what she needed now, someone to push her past all the invisible lines she had drawn around herself, someone to knock her off center enough to emerge from her cocoon.
Because she sure as hell needed some kind of kick.
Wade returned downstairs eventually, waking her from a half doze where dreams of hot kisses had collided with inchoate fears, the kind of feeling that something was chasing her, but she couldn’t escape it, and the kisses felt like both protection and trap.
Freshly shaven, smelling of soap even from several feet away, he sat facing her. “Sorry, woke you again.”
“I didn’t want to doze off. If you want some, the coffee should still be hot.” The memory of her odd half dream made her cheeks equally hot. She hoped he couldn’t see and thought he probably couldn’t since she kept the curtains closed, and the early daylight out.
It was time to start opening those curtains. Time to allow the sunlight into her house, something she hadn’t yet done in all this time.
She rose at once and went to the pull cord. The instant her hand touched it, Wade barked, “Don’t.”
With that single command, he drove all her resolutions out of her head and brought the crippling fear back in a rush.
She froze, feeling her knees soften beneath her. She wanted some anger, even just one little flare of it, but it failed to come. Instead she reached for the wall beside the curtain, propping herself against it and closing her eyes.
When her voice emerged, it was weak. “Why?”
“I’m sorry.” As if he sensed the storm that had just torn through her, leaving her once again gutted by fear, he came to her, slipping his arm around her waist, and guiding her back to the couch. “I’m sorry,” he said again as he helped her sit, and sat beside her. He kept her hand, holding it between both of his, rubbing it with surprising gentleness.
This had to stop, Cory thought. This had to stop. One way or another, she had to find a way to get rid of this fear. Else how was she ever going to do anything again? “I can’t keep doing this,” she said to Wade, her voice thin. “I can’t.”
“Keep doing what?”
“Being afraid all the time. And I was just starting to do things to fight it back. Like letting you move in here. Like helping Marsha yesterday. Like opening the damn curtains for the first time in a year! And you told me to stop. Why? Why?”
At least she didn’t dissolve into tears, but she felt on the brink of it. Ever since that phone call, she’d been teetering as she hadn’t teetered in a long time. Before that she’d lived in a steady state at least, even if it was one of grief and fear.
Wade surprised her by drawing her into his arms and holding her. “I’m sorry,” he murmured, and stroked her hair gently. “I’m sorry.”
“After...after...” The thought fled before a renewed rush of terror as something struck her. “What do you know?” she asked on a whisper. “What do you know that I don’t?”
His hand hesitated, then resumed stroking her hair. “I’m not sure I know anything.”
“Tell me!” Her hands balled into fists, and she pounded one of them against his chest, not hard, but enough to make a point. That chest yielded to her fist about as much as cement.
He sighed, tightening his arms around her.
“Wade, don’t do this to me. You either know something or you don’t.”
When his answer seemed slow in coming, she stiffened, ready to pull away. “You can’t do this,” she said, anger beginning to replace fear, and weakness with strength. “You can’t! You can’t just waltz into my life and then do things to make me afraid all over again. Not without a reason. I won’t stand for it.”
“All right. Just keep in mind this may be meaningless.”
“Just