Trina’s lips still quivered from Rob’s kiss when he stopped short in the parking lot behind the hotel and pulled her to him. The puppy in her arms wiggled between them. She’d put up no argument as they ran together to the hotel room’s door, cleared the hallway and made their way down the cement steps to the back parking lot.
“Act like we’re long-lost lovers.”
His lips were on hers again, but this time it was for show. She could be professional at this. She opened her eyes a slit to see the police cars pulling up to the hotel, sirens blaring and lights flashing in the dimming light. Sometime between the totally unplanned kiss in the bathroom and this strategic gesture, day had faded into dusk.
“Don’t look at them.” He moved his hand over her waist, her hips, to the fullest part of her ass.
“Really?” She spoke against his mouth, her lips acting of their own volition, as well as her tongue. Dang, she’d missed how it felt to have Rob’s mouth on hers, their breath one motion in the midst of their raging desire. And it was theirs, for sure. This was something she’d never experienced with another man, no matter how good the sex was. Rob was special, their tie to each other inexplicable.
He buried his head in her neck and gave her a deliciously moist kiss, his tongue tracing the sensitive skin with exquisite pressure. “Really. They’ll think we’re having a sordid affair. As soon as they’re inside, we’ll take off.”
Her mind was frantically trying to keep hold of what needed to happen to make the mission successful. But her hormones and emotions were at war with reason, and heat rushed into her cheeks when Rob said “inside.”
Trina knew there wouldn’t be another kiss after this; she wouldn’t allow it. So why not go along for a bit longer?
Rob’s lips were on hers again, but after only a second or two he lifted his head, looking past her. “Okay, the coast is clear.” He turned his focus to her. “You all right?”
“Of course.” She wrenched herself away from him and placed the dog on a patch of grass to relieve himself. Part of her hoped Rob would collapse on the asphalt. How could he kiss her like that and maintain any kind of logical thought process?
He’s a trained operative. And he was the same man who’d allowed her to think he’d been killed. She wanted to add the fact that he was the father of her son, a son she was raising as a single mother. But as unfair as the entire situation was, she couldn’t accuse Rob of being a derelict dad. He didn’t even know he was a dad.
* * *
“You’re awfully quiet.” He spoke from the passenger seat as she drove them to a hotel twenty minutes away, in the opposite direction of where the ROC thought they were headed. The darned dog was on his lap, curled up as if he was the one fighting the bad guys and mentally exhausted.
“It’s been a full day. And I’m freezing.” Shivers had started to rack her and she pushed the buttons for the heater. “I’m sorry to need heat in the hottest part of the summer.”
“Hypothermia can set in on the hottest of days. We need to get to the hotel and get your wet clothes off.”
“Not happening.” Even through her chattering teeth, the tone of her statement was sharper than she’d meant. “I mean, something between us. After the kiss. The kisses. I don’t want to lead you on.”
“Trust me, that’s the last thing I’d ever expect from you. The leading me on part. As for kissing you, hell, Trina, it’s been five years. We had amazing chemistry when we were together, and that’s not gone away.”
“We had more than chemistry.” She wasn’t letting him off so easily. “If it was only a physical attraction, you going off the radar by allowing Justin to officially die wouldn’t be such a big deal.”
“I thought you were married, Trina.” His quiet words weighed heavy with what sounded an awful like pain. Regret.
“Not good enough, Rob. Even if I’d remarried, was still married, whatever. What we shared deserved more than you walking away when you saw me again.” She fought to keep her words aboveboard, fair. Her heart screamed at her conscience that if she were really fair she’d tell him about their son, how she’d really felt about Rob. How she hadn’t been able to let go for so long.
“You seem really angry, Trina.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” She spotted the hotel sign and maneuvered to make the left into the parking lot. “You’re correct in that I need to get these clothes off, and into another hot shower. Wait here while I check in.” She mustered as much dignity as one could in soaking-wet clothes and dripping hair and slid out of the SUV. She felt his gaze on her back as she walked into the hotel lobby. Hollywood and sometimes real life allowed for over-the-top, joyous reunions of lovers thought lost or dead. But in her case, seeing that Rob was still alive and as attractive as he’d ever been was pure agony. The sooner she was able to get them both back to Silver Valley, the better.
* * *
Rob stared at the muted television from one of two double beds in the much older, run-down hotel. Trina was talking in low murmurs to someone he thought might be her brother. She’d made it clear she wasn’t married, but hadn’t said she’d never gotten married or hooked up with anyone since him. And he hated the part of himself that burned to know if she’d fallen in love with another man.
“Hey, buddy!” Trina’s voice lifted into pure happiness, and he couldn’t help taking a surreptitious look at her. She was wrapped up under her blankets, her hair dry thanks to the yellowed but still functional wall hair dryer unit in the bathroom. He’d found an extra comforter in the closet and placed it over her. She’d uttered a quick “thanks” and busied herself with calling whomever she was still on the line with.
“Mommy has to work on something for the next few days. Uncle Nolan and Grandma and Grandpa are going to take care of you. Are you okay with that?”
Rob though it odd that she asked the kid if he was okay with something that he had no control over. Who did that? A mother who loved her kid is who. Nothing he’d know about, as his years in foster care hadn’t given him a good model of a healthy parent-child bond. His gut soured over the realization that another man had fathered a baby with her. Their relationship when they were both Navy hadn’t progressed to the point of discussing a future that entailed family, but he’d hoped it would. Hell, he’d expected it would. When he and Trina had started seeing each other, during the war, it had changed him. He’d begun to think about life in a totally different way. It was a certainty that he’d have wanted a family with her.
“Sorry about that. You can turn the volume up if you want.” She stared at the ceiling as she spoke. He clicked the television off.
“Nothing to apologize for. I take it that was your kid?”
Silence. He’d wait as long as it took.
“Yes. Childcare is always tricky, but I’ve been so lucky. My brother got out of the Navy a year or so before me, and my parents are still in Williamsport. Not far from here, actually. Maybe an hour or two west, only two hours from Silver Valley. When I landed the job with the Marshals I was lucky to get one tour in Philadelphia and then moved to this one in Harrisburg. It’s allowed both me and—and my child to settle down. My hours are usually pretty conventional, as I don’t do as much in the field as I used to.”
“When we worked together I never thought you’d leave flying.”
“Yeah, well, priorities change once you have a kid to think about. And I can’t blame motherhood for it—I would be bored flying commercial airlines. I need something that’s a little more different on a day-to-day basis. I’m applying for an administrative position with the Marshals, as soon as one opens up in our local office. I don’t want to move again. Not while my son is in school.”
“Settling down has its benefits, I’m sure.” He wanted to say anything to keep her talking. He loved her voice but even more, any little glimpse into the woman she was today. Regret hammered at his insides more than the pain in his bruised ribs. He’d been so damned inconsolable after he’d seen her in Norfolk.
“What about you, Rob? Why haven’t you settled down?” She was on her side, facing him. Still hunkered down under layers of blankets, incongruous with the air-conditioning that blasted over his bare chest and barely kept him cool in the hot night. The puppy curled next to her, fast asleep. She’d fed him more of the kibble. They were going to have to do something about that dog. It couldn’t stay with them—it was too risky. It could bark at the wrong moment and give their position away.
“That’s a good question. I hate to admit it, but I think my head was messed up for a while after the explosion.” He wasn’t going to tell her that memories of her got him through. “I was still in the mode of doing whatever I could to serve my country.”
“It looks to me like you still are.”
“Yeah.” He let out a laugh that sounded like a grunt. “But it’s more on my terms. Part-time, if you will.”
“What do you do when you’re not working?”
“That’s a good question.” One he wasn’t going to answer, for now. Part of being a Trail Hiker was finding a civilian identity in the community of Silver Valley, so that no suspicion would arise on how an agent earned a living, or where they went when they disappeared on global missions. Rob had pursued a career that would help foster kids and other at-risk youth find their way at a community center for kids with no parental support. He’d earned his master’s degree in social work part-time over the last several years. He wasn’t ready to tell Trina this, though.
They lay in silence for several minutes, each lost in their own thoughts. Although Rob’s dick seemed to have a mind of its own, with Trina so close. The separate beds and small space between them may as well be a concrete prison wall, though. He sensed she’d created a safe space for her thoughts to inhabit, just as he had. Military training on compartmentalization had its benefits.
* * *
Rob’s phone woke him from a deep slumber in which he’d dreamed he had a chance to either work with Trina on a mission or go work with a scary, deadly dude who wouldn’t say what his missions were. The insistent vibration of the device broke through the dream’s cobwebs and he strained to see who was calling at 0415. Claudia Michele, director of Trail Hikers.
“Claudia.” He lay on his back, prepared to listen.
“Rob, glad you’re okay. From your GPS and phone I see you’re safely ensconced with Trina Lopez.” There was nothing invisible or unreachable for Trail Hikers. The super secret shadow agency had every technological capability available to any nation on the planet.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“We’ve had a development. I hate to ask you to participate with your injuries, but I need you to go in and get one of our agents. She’s stuck up there, with the ROC group you’ve evaded.”
Rob sat up and swung his legs over the bed. “Do I know her?”
“No. She’s newer than you, and her background is human trafficking. There’s a corridor of trafficking between New Jersey and Silver Valley, straight through the Poconos. That’s why Vasin was holed up there. We have reason to believe Ivanov is in the vicinity, ensuring this latest effort goes off without a hitch.”
“I could have told you that.” He didn’t want to say too much within earshot of Trina. He trusted her implicitly but this was about mission integrity—operational security. Other agents’ lives were at stake.
“Our agent has been posing as the solicitor for underage girls who will be sent to work in strip clubs. They have jobs during the day as domestic help, mostly housekeepers. What ROC hasn’t figured out is that we’ve kept these girls out of the bars. A onetime payment is made to ROC for them, and they don’t follow up.”
“That’s unusual for them, isn’t it?”
“In the past, yes. But with the weight of law enforcement coming at them from all angles, they can’t afford to maintain ties to any shipment—be it drugs, weapons, underage girls. They take their cut and take off.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“Take Trina Lopez to the nearest bus stop—she’ll get back to Harrisburg on her own. Use the SUV you’ve rented and go back to Vasin’s hideout. There’s a trailer park on the premises.”
“I saw it.” But it had looked abandoned even to his trained eyes.
“They moved the girls there three hours ago. Our agent was supposed to pick them up last night but with the recent events Ivanov pulled up all his feelers and ordered the young women and our agent into the park. We’ve overheard conversations that indicated he’s going to issue an order to kill them all.”
“How many captured and how much time do I have?”
“Twelve, and you’re already behind by an hour. But don’t go in there until I send the word. Situate yourself within fifteen minutes of the location I’m going to text to you and sit tight.” Claudia ended the connection. She wasn’t one for small talk during an op.
“What’s the plan?” Trina’s sleepy voice made him pause before he replied.
“We’re splitting up. I’ve got to report somewhere ASAP. You’re on the next bus to Harrisburg.”
Trina let out a string of obscenities that made him smile in the early-morning darkness. You could take the woman out of the Navy, apparently, but her Navy vocabulary remained intact.
“What, you don’t like buses?” He was already putting on his cargo pants, his adrenaline surge masking the pain he knew was still there.
“There is no bus, Rob. I’m going with you.”
“Like hell you are.” As he spoke her phone rang.
“Corey, what’s going on?” He watched her silhouette by the fuzzy light of the bathroom night-light. She nodded, gave one-word responses. Relief mingled with dismay in his gut. Relief that she’d have to listen to her boss, who was obviously telling her what Claudia had just told him. Dismay that he might not see her again. If he was smart, he’d let go of his plan for any more closure, his hours with the counselor be damned. This was about all the closure he could handle.
“What you don’t get, Corey, is that I’m here, on the ground, and with a man who was with the fugitive I was supposed to pick up. And this man, Rob Bristol, is in no condition to go into an ROC vipers’ nest on his own. We’ve helped with ROC cases before, why not this time?”
A short pause as Trina listened, then her shocking reply.
“Fine, Corey. Put me on an official leave status starting now.” She put her phone down and clicked on her nightstand light. Rob was struck by her stunning beauty, but kept it to himself out of self-preservation. He didn’t want her phone slamming against his skull.
“I’m going with you, Rob. Either we both go rescue the girls, or they get hurt or worse. Your choice.”
“Your boss told you the whole story, then?”
“Enough to know that this is time-sensitive and we’re the closest, most capably trained law enforcement—” she snorted “—or whatever the hell you are, nearby.”
He stared at her, knowing that if he agreed to allow her to accompany him, he was putting her life on the line, too. To let her go put his heart on the line, but it might not be life-saving for Trina. Because he knew ROC, and they didn’t give up easily. At the first sign of Trina they’d be all over her like rain in April. Ivanov had to know by now who she was, what she’d been doing on his compound. The security system on the storage building was directly connected to the ROC’s systems headquarters, which meant Trina’s face was plastered probably in a text message to every ROC bad guy within a thousand miles.
Trina’s life was at stake no matter what Rob did.
“It’s my mission, my orders.” He’d never forgive himself if anything happened to her. She had a kid now, for heaven’s sake.
“I can help you with the girls, Rob. Corey said there’s a dozen or more, smuggled from Ukraine, being prepped to go to Harrisburg. We’re going to need another SUV or two.”
“My orders, Trina.” She’d fought him when he was a SEAL, too. She’d been the pilot in charge of a support mission and wanted to give him suggestions that he didn’t have time for—his team had already considered all options. Not something he’d expect a non-SEAL to completely comprehend. It’d turned out her concerns had saved the lives of his men during that deadly raid.
“But—”
“My orders. Or the bus stop.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
She’d relented. Now Rob had fourteen women to save—twelve young girls, a Trail Hikers agent, and Trina.
* * *
“You never thought I was going to get on a bus, did you?” Trina sipped hot coffee with cream from a foam cup as Rob drove back through winding roads and heavily treed countryside. She’d agreed that since it was his mission, he should drive. She understood—it was a way of letting your brain and body know that you were in charge and in need of top performance.
“No.” All of their conversation since they’d left the hotel had been clipped on his part. Trina got why Rob didn’t want an extra body tagging along on his op, but she knew that his ribs were still hurting and at risk of complete fracture. She’d be his backup if he collapsed a lung. “The dog, Trina. We need to do something about the dog.”
“He’s a good little puppy. He can stay in the car—we’ll leave the windows open. My guess is he’ll be happy to smell us, and stay put. It’ll be cooler than being outside, especially if you park this under a tree.”
“I’ve got a better idea.” Without fanfare, he turned off the highway and onto a winding country road. After about a mile he pulled off onto a farmhouse drive, and she saw the Paradise Creatures sign. “We’re taking him to a kennel?”
“Until you are able to come back for him, yes. I’ve already reached out to the owner and they’ve agreed to open for us.”
She smiled inwardly, inexplicably buoyed by his concern for the tiny dog. “Thank you.”
Rob grunted his acknowledgment as he put the SUV in Park. “If you don’t mind, could you take the dog in?”
“Of course.”
Trina signed the papers for the puppy, and when the attendant asked her his name, she thought a minute. “Renegade. His name is Renegade.”
She returned to the car, where the motor was still running and the air-conditioning divine.
“How is your arm feeling?”
He shrugged. “Fine. Sore, like I pounded out too many reps in the gym. If it had been broken, we’d both be on a bus right now.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do, Trina. You’ve single-handedly decided that you’re going to get in on this mission when you’ve never worked something like this before. You usually apprehend one person at a time, right?”
“Not always. It depends. And no, I have no clue whom you’re working for or what you’re doing, except that Corey mentioned young girls being trafficked and I had to help. They’re being sent to my neck of the woods. Have you spent a lot of time in Silver Valley in between your missions? It’s peaceful, a rolling green-and-blue horizon atop woods and farm fields. Not usual for a place so close to three major cities.” She referred to Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, DC.
“I’ve recently become acquainted with Silver Valley, yes.” He’d lived right in her backyard for three months. And she was furious with herself for caring, for wanting to know where he lived and how long he planned to stay.
“Then you know it’s worth fighting for, to keep these evil bastards out.”
“I don’t think that ROC is interested in settling in there anytime soon. They only want their cut for the girls.”
“Maybe.” She didn’t know what he did, and wasn’t trying to pretend to.
“What I want to know, Trina, is why aren’t you more concerned about your kid?”
“I’m very concerned about my child.” She bit her lower lip. It was so very difficult to not just spill it all, tell Rob that Jake was his. But not like this, not in the midst of an op that could go south at any point. “I’m also lucky to have supportive family.”
“Yes, you are.” His judgment couldn’t be clearer. It stung that he thought her career was a threat to her child. She’d asked herself the same question, and it always came back to accepting that law enforcement was a calling for her. And so was being Jake’s mother.
“What should I know about what we’re walking into?” She had training, but knowledge was the best weapon in any op. And an open mind.
“Have you ever worked any kind of SWAT?”
“Only training. I’ve been pretty lucky as far as ops go—most of my apprehensions have been textbook. If there’s any chance something is going to get risky, we go in pairs and ask for backup when needed.”
“Great. So you forced yourself on this without the skills to be of any help.”
“Excuse me. I have plenty of skills. And it won’t be just the two of us, will it?” She’d assumed they’d be going in on the tip of a large spear of LEAs. “We’re wasting time talking. Let’s go.”
He shook his head. “We can’t do one thing, make a single move, until we get the go-ahead from my boss. I’ll drive to our waiting point and we could be there five minutes or five days until the call comes. It’s how these things go. We won’t have backup at the start. We’re going in clandestine. The ROC group won’t hesitate to kill these girls in order to keep how they got them this far into the States from being revealed. Until the girls are placed where they’re being sold, and the money is in ROC hands, they’re a liability. I have no desire to have the deaths of these young women on my conscience.”
Cold dread made her blood feel as though it was thickening, pumping too slowly through her body.
“You okay?” She heard Rob’s voice, but her vision blurred as she remembered the cold stone basement, the hours that she’d been certain would turn into days. “Trina.”
His forceful tone shook her from the hell that had been the first major turning point in her life. “I’m fine.”
“You’re thinking about the time in high school, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” She placed the empty coffee cup into the holder on her door. “I’m in this for whatever it takes.”
“I forgot about it until you got so quiet. Look, Trina, this is not the mission for you to prove yourself on. It’s not a hill worth your blood.” His twist on the military adage about whether a hill was worth dying on wasn’t missed. He was trying to get her back to herself.
“I’m good. That was a long time ago. I’ve been through wartime ops since then.” And had birthed a baby, his baby.
“You’ve got a kid, Trina. I get that you’ve changed, you’re not the same woman I knew, but you’re still you. You’ll never forgive yourself if you get hurt, or worse.” He shifted onto a new road and started the long twisting way into the deepest part of the Poconos.
“J—he’s fine.”
“You have a son.”
“Yes.”
“His father—are you with him?”
“No. He—he’s never been in the picture.” Crap. The flashback to when two male high school classmates had grabbed her off the abandoned path between the girls’ locker room and the track, locked her in the football storage garage, promising to come back later for the “real” action, had left her raw. It felt like Rob was ambushing her with everything she’d worked so hard to leave in her past. Including him.
“Did you do in-vitro or adopt?” His curiosity was sincere, his expression open. Fury flashed hot and potent, making her turn in her seat and look at him as he drove.
“Damn it, Rob, you can’t come back to life and interrogate me about what I’ve been doing for the past five years that I thought you were dead. It’s not your business anymore!”
He matched her previous litany of profanity as he slowed the SUV and drove off the road into the space between two copses of trees. They’d be invisible to any passersby, but she wasn’t concerned. In this remote part of the mountains they’d be lucky to see one other vehicle per hour if at all.
The SUV was shielded from the bright sun by the evergreen forest, which provided a better canopy than any stretch of canvas. Rob rolled down the windows to allow for airflow, and to Trina’s surprise, goose bumps appeared on her forearms. It had to be ten, maybe fifteen degrees cooler out of the blazing sun. The early-morning dew still glinted from the tiny green plants that grew at the base of the tree trunks.
“Trina. Look at me.”
Damn it, she was trembling again.
“Please.”
She wanted to ignore his demands, his arrogance, his sheer ignorance of the hell she’d been through, believing he’d been killed. Rob’s gentle persuasion, however, had always been her Achilles’ heel. She sucked in the pine-scented air and faced him.
* * *
Rob’s initial fury that Trina refused to take orders and go back to her office in Harrisburg had been pierced by the stricken expression that he could only attribute to what he remembered as the scariest time of her life. She’d told him the story of the two teens who’d terrorized her in high school, and he’d wanted to go back in time and kill them. As her story unfolded under the desert stars, he’d put his arm around her and listened, giving her all the comfort a SEAL on deployment could. And he’d thanked God that her school had a security system that prevented her captors from doing any physical harm to her. The security guards had caught them and freed Trina.
Her life’s purpose had changed, though. Once on track to become a doctor, she’d decided to do something more physical to help others. And, Rob suspected, to make her feel more empowered. The US Navy beckoned. He understood, because his desire to become a SEAL had been born out of wanting to get out of the chaos that had been his childhood.
Now as he looked into her eyes, eyes that had haunted him since he’d said his private goodbye to her five years ago, he saw the woman he’d made love to in the midst of the highest operational tempo both of them had ever experienced before now.
“I’m sorry if I’m coming across like a tank. But I want to make it perfectly clear, Trina. I moved to Silver Valley, took the job with my current employer, to be closer to you. Even if we only met for coffee once, had one conversation where I’d told you I was still alive and wished you well in your current life, it would be worth it to me. We shared something when we were deployed that few ever do. Forgive me if it’s been too long, and you’ve buried the memories too deeply.”
“I didn’t bury the memories, Rob. I relived them every damned day. For a long time. And I’m still not understanding why you didn’t reach out sooner.” Tears were forming and leaking out of the corners of her eyes, trailing down her cheeks. He couldn’t stop his hand, and his fingers brushed away the sign that he’d hurt Trina far more than he’d imagined. They’d both needed closure.
“I wanted to, babe, but it wasn’t possible.” He hadn’t thought enough of himself to do it for him, but he should have done it for her. Walked across the street and—
His gut clenched in the certainty that a person had less than a handful of times in life. When he was a kid and saw his first SEAL movie and knew that was his path. When a bombing raid had gone terribly wrong and he’d ended up severely injured, only to be captured, tortured as a POW, and once back in friendly hands had endured the most excruciating pain yet—rehabilitation. Knowing his SEAL days were over, and that he’d be able to keep up the good fight in the CIA, but only if he had no shot with Trina.
He’d thought he’d had no chance, but this moment of clarity pierced through everything. His thoughts and planning for what they were going to accomplish once at the ROC Poconos compound took a back seat, and Rob had never allowed a mission to take a back seat.
He didn’t care that she had a child, either. Usually he’d dated only single women without kids, not wanting to involve another potential casualty in his very fluid lifestyle. An adult woman understood “no permanent ties,” but a juvenile didn’t. He paused. If the toddler he saw Trina with had been around two, then he’d be what, five by now?
A bolt of truth pierced him.
“Trina. How old did you say your child is?”
Her eyes widened, and she moved her upper body back, away from him. But she didn’t break eye contact. In that moment, he knew.
“I didn’t. He—he’s five.”
“Five. Years. Old.” Rob let the words hang there as he struggled with the denial exploding inside him, the pure angst that he might have missed the most important thing that ever happened to him.
Trina knew he knew. He saw the regret, the sorrow, the truth in her eyes.
“Yes. He’s five, and his name is Jake. Justin ‘Jake’ Berger Lopez. I call him Jake because, because it’s easier.”
Her proclamation was a hand grenade to his gut. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but stare at Trina. She was his only anchor to the present.
“Rob, I know this is a shock, and trust me, I understand.” She let a nervous laugh bubble out, filling the front seat. “How do you think I felt when I saw you walking out of that storage building? And I had my weapon trained on you. God, I could have blown you away, if I’d thought you were Vasin.”
“He’s mine, your kid.”
“No, he was fathered by one of the next half dozen men I slept with after you died. I only named him after you for the hell of it.” She pulled a face of pure disgust. “Of course he’s yours. He looks just like you. Except he has my gray eyes.” Her face reflected a mother’s satisfaction. “You saw us, saw him, when you found me in Norfolk. And as I said, my brother was there, helping me out. He’d come over for dinner a lot of nights when he wasn’t studying for law school. I was on shore duty, biding my time until I served out my time and could resign. All I wanted was for Jake to be safe and for me to have a normal nine-to-five job so that he’d grow up protected and in a happy environment. It made sense to come back to central Pennsylvania. You had no family, as far as I knew, and since we’d never been officially married, there was no way I could seek financial support from the Navy for your son.” She stopped, and he felt her hand on his arm, her slight squeeze.
He looked at her hand, then up at her. A man could dive into her eyes and never come out. “I’m so, so sorry, Rob. If I’d known…”
“If you’d known what? You’d have taken me back, started up where we left off? I was a broken man, Trina. It took me almost two years to come back from my injuries.” Physically. His mental and emotional healing had yet to be finished, if it ever would. “And you knew that not one, but two fathers had failed me, miserably so. The second one was my foster dad, so that was pure circumstance. But my biological father was a drug addict who never was able to get sober. What kind of example is that? Worse, what if it’s in my DNA to be a lousy parent?”
Trina remained silent, but her eyes shone with compassion and regret. She had regrets?
Elation, joy, anger, anguish. The emotional cocktail hit him without warning, making speech impossible. He wanted to run around shouting that he had a son! He was a father! But he’d missed the boy’s first five years. Five. Years. Did his son wonder about him? Did he know he existed? Pain worse than any broken rib squeezed the air out of his lungs. If his son had suffered at all due to his absence, he wouldn’t be able to live with his decision to not walk across that street three and a half years ago.
He and Trina had just reunited, started to tiptoe around their emotions. And now he had to accept that he’d missed the first five years of his child’s life. He hated being at the mercy of fate, but to realize his own actions may have caused more harm than good was devastating. But he couldn’t change the past, no matter how much it hurt. Today was what mattered.
* * *
Trina hated that Rob hurt so much. If she could play the last five years back and have him know Jake from the time he’d been in her womb, she would. Even as she thought about it, though, she knew that wasn’t entirely true. Rob was right. They’d been very different people back then.
“Rob, this isn’t how I imagined telling you that you have a son. ” And she had imagined it countless times. Hoped for this exact situation, that he’d somehow come back to her, the KIA report a mistake.
“You never pictured it. You thought I was dead.”
“Stop blaming yourself for this. It is what it is. You said yourself that you weren’t over what you’d been through. That you’re still faced with the hell you survived.”
He shook his head, the rest of his body still as he looked out the windshield. She shifted to face forward, giving him at least the illusion of space from her, from her desire for him to let it all go. Nothing in this was simple or black-and-white, and it had all started with the first day they’d worked together in the Navy, on the preparation meeting that led up to the fateful mission that had torn them apart.
“I have a son.” He was saying aloud what his heart wanted to believe but his mind couldn’t yet wrap around. This, Trina understood. She’d had the opposite problem in that her heart had refused to believe Rob, then Justin, was dead, that he’d miraculously appear and be thrilled they’d made a baby during their brief but intense affair. Her mind told her otherwise, as had the headstone in Arlington National Cemetery.
“I still can’t believe that I laid flowers at your grave.”
“You never sought any kind of compensation for our son, you said?”
“How could I? You and I were only—” she waved her hand “—what, lovers? Boyfriend and girlfriend? You know how the military works. If you’re not a dependent, if you’re not marked down on page two of the member’s service record, you don’t exist.”
“You could have searched for my family. My brother.” He’d told her about him, where he lived.
“I’ve already told you why I didn’t.” She watched as a herd of deer appeared to the right of the vehicle. A huge stag with a full rack of antlers stood amid several does, and she spotted a fawn.
“It’s not fair of me to ask you about any of it, Trina. I wasn’t there for you. And not for our son, either.”
“You didn’t know you had a son. And who knows? If you’d shown up as soon as you could have, it might have been a disaster. I was so protective of Jake, and you say you were really messed up. I’m not sure I would have been the partner you needed at that point.”
“You’d have been perfect.”
“Um, no. I swear I called my mom twenty times a day when I didn’t demand she be right there with me.”
“What’s he like?” Rob spoke as if in a trance.
“He’s the most enthusiastic person I’ve ever met. I mean, that boy gets excited about going for a walk in the woods as much as he does about Santa Claus. He’s also very bright, scarily so.” She laughed at a memory. “When he was in preschool, his teacher asked the kids to draw a picture of a triangle. Jake drew what looked like a scribble. I could see a tiny triangle in the middle of it, but the teachers were looking for just a triangle on the page. It was so him. He probably drew the triangle and then improvised until they had to turn it in.”
“I don’t think I knew what a circle was, much less a triangle, when I was in preschool.”
“I know, same here. And I told the teacher as much.” At least Rob was perking up, coming back from the dark place his thoughts must have taken him. That she understood, too. The years of wondering how he’d died, if he’d suffered in the blast or slowly died before help could reach him, if the enemy had captured him. Finally she knew most of it, and all she cared about was that he was alive.
“Rob, this is too soon, too much, for both of us. But you have to know that I’m glad you’re here. And I know Jake is going to be happy to meet you.”
“He can never meet me, Trina. He’ll think it’s his fault I didn’t show up until now. That’s how kids’ minds work. I know he’s not in the same situation I was in as a foster kid, but he’s been without a father. And you said he’s smart—he’ll put two and two together. What have you told him about me?”
“I told him his dad was a brave man who gave the ultimate sacrifice for his country.”
“More like a coward who couldn’t walk across the damn street. Let’s face it—I didn’t have a father, so how can I be one?”
She let his words lie. She couldn’t take him through the mental and emotional processes he needed to travel to fully absorb what he’d discovered today. That he was a father.
“That was then, Rob. This is now. We’re both different people. As odd as it felt to call you by a different name, other than your core self, I don’t see you as Justin any longer. You’re still you, I feel that, but…”
“This is the crux of it, Trina. Can you live with who I’ve become? More importantly, will Jake accept me as his father? Hell, I don’t even know if it’s safe to tell him about me. I don’t want to screw him up for life. And my work, it could bring some really bad guys to our doorstep.”
Trina had gone over the same thoughts, the same mental path. She had so much she wanted to say, so much she wanted to share with him about Jake, his son.
Had she fully accepted that he was here, alive?
“When I saw you yesterday, standing there with your pistol on me, I couldn’t have defended myself if I’d wanted to. It was like you’d dropped out of the sky.”
She offered a smile. “Maybe we’re overanalyzing this. It’s the twenty-first century and we’re used to instant communications, knowing everything in real time. During past wars, take the Civil War or World War II, family members went for years not knowing anything about what was going on with one another. Lots of cases of sailors or soldiers gone missing occurred, and those folks picked up and kept going. It was a mere blip in their life. They focused on the positive.”
“I get where you’re going with this, Trina, and forgive me but I just can’t handle your positive affirmation baloney right now.”
Like a physical slap, his words stopped her cold. This side of Rob was what she’d written off as the warrior part of his SEAL personality. It was what all military folks understood—the mission had to be the top priority. And it had never reared its head between them like this before. Of course, they’d never gone on an op together as parents to the same child.
Trina retreated inside herself, forcing all the acidic comebacks aside. They’d only spent two days together. After five years apart, what did any of this really mean?