Page 35 of Operation Rescue
“How can you say it like that, so calmly?” Erin burst out.
“I believe he was admiring the tactics,” Rafe said. “As was I.”
She looked at both of them, appearing utterly nonplussed. “Tactics,” she muttered. “Sometimes I just don’t understand you. Either of you. I guess I just don’t understand men.”
“Back at you,” Blaine said, a little sharply.
“A little focus, please?”
Rafe’s words snapped their attention back where it belonged. “Sorry,” they both said, quietly and simultaneously.
“Having recently been there myself, I can say with certainty, it’ll keep,” Rafe said dryly.
Blaine speculated for a moment about what all Rafe and his lady—Charlie, Ty had called her—had had to work through. But only for a moment.
“I wonder what he took,” he said.
“Wondered that myself,” Rafe said, picking up his phone.
Oddly, both he and Erin turned away from the screen at the same moment, as if neither of them wanted to stare at that image a moment longer.
“Let’s go sit down, and work out what’s next,” he suggested.
She didn’t speak, but she did start toward the big, curved couch that faced the fireplace, where, he belatedly realized, a gas fire had come on by itself, obviously tied to a thermostat. She sat in the section nearest the fire, as if she were chilled. He took a seat a safe distance away, thinking vaguely that he didn’t link California with ever being chilly, even in winter.
“At least it wasn’t the poor hamster,” Erin said. “Ethan would take care of it, but those other two looked like they’d just torture it or stomp it and toss it in the trash.”
Blaine stopped himself from asking why, if she was so sure he’d take care of it, she’d never let him get a pet once they were settled, without a re-stationing in the future. It would do no good to open that subject again. And he wondered if he’d ever really understood her at all, this woman he loved.
Or maybe the woman he’d loved had never really existed at all. Maybe he’d made some assumptions, just because of their long history together. Maybe he’d never seen the real her.
But the woman he was seeing now was the same woman who’d been an absolute rock through the worst time of his life.
That wife of yours is something else, Captain Everett. If everybody had someone like her in their corner, we’d clear out this place a lot faster.
The words of the rehab therapist who’d finally signed him off as ready to go echoed in his head. He knew it was true, once he’d felt recovered enough to take in the way she handled things.
He remembered the time they’d tried to wheel him out of his room for some kind of medical test, and he’d watched in more than a little awe as his five-foot-six wife stood down a six-foot-two orderly until he called in the doctor who’d ordered the test. Then she chewed out the doctor, regardless of his rank, with that phrase that had almost become her trademark, that the right hand needed to talk to the left hand around here because he’d just had that test yesterday, ordered by a different doctor.
For the first time it struck him that perhaps that had been her battle. He’d heard guys talking about great heroes who had fought one big, crucial, turning-point battle and then retired from the field forever. They’d only had that one battle in them, but it had been a battle that had to be won and they’d won it.
Maybe he’d simply drained all the fight out of her.
Not the temper, though. She’d still take your head off if you tick her off enough.
“Are you going to say it, or just sit there staring at me like you’ve never seen me before?”
He blinked. She was glaring at him. “Say what?” he asked cautiously.
“Whatever you’re thinking.”
“I was just…remembering.”
“Remembering what?”
“That day you faced down Captain Francis. He ran the whole place, but you were so fierce you scared the guy.”
Her expression changed, the glare vanishing, replaced by a soft, warm look. “You were already going through so much, making you have the same test twice when there was no reason, it wasn’t to monitor anything for changes, was just…stupid.”
