Secret Dream: Delos Series, 1B1 (7 page)

She groaned. “Oh, not another Mount Everest to climb, Cav!”

He chuckled. “I’ll help you climb it just like I helped you with your worry about your scars. You scaled that mountain, Lia. There are always mountains to climb. They never end. What has changed, though?” He leaned over, catching her glistening eyes filled with such love for him. “You have a partner now, baby. You never have to do this alone again. You’ve more than earned a climbing partner.” He grinned, watching her respond so positively to his ministrations. “You have me. Warts and all.”

Nuzzling into his neck and jaw, she whispered, “Thank you for being who you are, Cav. I love you, warts and all.”

He smiled, bussing her cheek where the scar lay. “The only difference is we have different warts. No one’s perfect. No one’s whole, Lia. None of us ever will be. But when you have a love like ours, it’s the glue that can make all the difference in the world. Look how much you’ve changed since meeting me. Look how much I’ve changed since you walked into my life. We’ve done a lot of healing on one another, whether it was conscious or not.”

“Love,” she said, her voice wobbly with emotion, “makes such a difference.”

“Yeah,” he rasped, rubbing his jaw against her hair, “I see that in my life and how you’ve helped me so much over the months we’ve been together. It’s a miracle from where I stand.”

“No,” Lia whispered fiercely, kissing his neck and jaw, “
you
are
my
miracle, Cav Jordan.” She poked his chest with her index finger. “And don’t you
ever
forget that!”

“It’s such a turn-on when you get fierce like a lioness protecting her pride,” he teased, smiling, watching her lips curve upward. Just her mouth sent him around the bend, and he found himself desperate to make love to her because he knew that would settle her back into her core self. All this distracting drama being thrown out by her mother would dissolve. Love, he was discovering, was truly a miracle antidote for both of them.

The sweet smell of the hay mingled with her scent. As much as Cav wanted to drag Lia up to that second floor and find a nice, soft place in the haymow to make slow, delicious love to her, it wasn’t going to happen tonight. When he looked out the open barn door, the sky was growing old, the sun having set. The clouds above, all reminding him of sheep’s fleece dotting the vault of the sky, had turned from orange to pink and then to a deep fuchsia color the farther the sun sank below the horizon. He slid his fingers through her hair, caressing her nape, hearing Lia purr like that lioness he silently envisioned her as. She snuggled deeply against him, rubbing her breasts against his chest, and he felt the points of her nipples hardening. Never mind that with his exquisite sense of smell, he could inhale that sweet aphrodisiac fragrance of her sex.

As he pressed small kisses here and there on her hair and nibbled on her ear, hearing her swift intake of breath, feeling her fingers curve more deeply into his shoulder, he wanted to take away all the worry Lia was carrying for her mother. Cav knew he had his work cut out for him with Susan. If he couldn’t reach inside her head, get her to trust him just a little, it would continue to be a rough, emotional week for Lia. And he just didn’t think it was necessary for it to go that route.

The woman he loved had been fractured by the first assault. And then Jerry, followed three years later by Manuel. And lastly, the attempt on her life down in Costa Rica. After five years, Lia was behaving like the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. They were broken by war and all that it meant. Their souls were shattered and bleeding and they had no help in repairing themselves. They’d all seen too much. They’d survived when others had not. And Cav knew from his own experience that when one trauma got piled upon another, it would make the strongest man or woman snap and break. Lia’s strength had taken her a lot farther than most, but even she had her breaking point. And Cav silently promised her that he would do everything in his power to stop her from reaching it.

Susan Cassidy was on his radar. He had enough information now on how to deal with her—he hoped. It would take all his years as a SEAL, all that supersensitive intuition of his, to try to get Lia’s mother to come around and give her daughter safety, not make her daughter’s love for him a source of strain. And Cav knew it could cut either way. He prayed like hell that he had what it took to pull this off for both women, to give each of them the reprieve they both deserved and needed. Wryly, he looked at himself. He’d come out of a war zone in his own family. He’d joined the SEALs and entered another war zone. And now? Now he was trying to become a peacemaker between Susan and her daughter. Did he have the tools to do it? The experience? All he knew was how to survive in combat. But it didn’t matter. Cav loved Lia with his life, and he was willing to try to be that peacemaker whether he had experience at it or not. He had to.

T
he next morning
at five a.m., Cav heard someone stirring out in the kitchen. He’d purposely kept his door open to the long hall. Down at the end of it was Steve and Susan’s bedroom. Like the SEAL he was, he’d awakened at the least sound that was out of place in the sleeping household. Three times last night, Susan Cassidy had walked quietly down the hall, past his room, and into the kitchen. Lia had been right about her mother’s having sleep issues. Sleep deprivation was a special hell of its own. She would stay up for twenty or so minutes, having a cup of tea, and then go back to bed.

As he propped himself up on his elbow, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, he felt a lot of sympathy for the woman. It was still dark outside. He quietly got out of bed, climbed into a pair of comfortable Levi’s, pulled on a black T-shirt, shoved his feet into his black Nikes, and left for the bathroom. The least he could do was brush his teeth, comb his hair, and look halfway presentable. He decided not to shave because he wanted some uninterrupted time with Susan before the rest of the household woke up.

When he emerged into the kitchen later, he saw that Susan was already dressed in a pair of jeans, a white short-sleeved blouse, and leather shoes. She was at the kitchen stove, making up some eggs.

“Morning,” Cav murmured, halting at the doorway, allowing her time to realize he was there. When Susan turned, he saw how pale her face was, the tension in her cheeks, and the shadows beneath her eyes. He had his thumbs hanging in the edges of his pockets, wanting to appear casual and relaxed so she wouldn’t go on immediate guard.

“Morning,” she whispered, keeping her voice low so it wouldn’t carry down the hall to the bedrooms. “Are you hungry, Cav?”

Surprised that she wasn’t being surly toward him, he smiled a little. “I can always eat, ma’am. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

“You can set the table. Steve will probably be up in about an hour. With the beets being dug out of the ground right now, he starts out early into the fields and comes home late.”

“Farming is a lot of work,” he agreed, purposely keeping his voice low also. He pulled four plates from the cupboard. “Did you sleep all right?” He knew it was a personal question; he tried to prepare for her to get prickly.

Susan groused, “The dark circles under my eyes. A dead giveaway. Right?”

He smiled a little. “I imagine having me underfoot is an extra burden you don’t need right now,” he said, setting the plates on the bright pink quilted place mats.

“Oh,” Susan said, cracking six more eggs into the skillet, “this has nothing to do with you and Lia visiting us. I just haven’t been myself in so long that I’m at my wit’s end. Did I wake you up last night? I must have gone up and down that hall at least three times.”

“No,” Cav lied. He walked to the silverware drawer, opening it. “What’s keeping you up?”

She shrugged. “Damned if I know. My doctor says its menopause. Whatever the hell
that
means. He said some women have trouble sleeping. I can tell you that I sure do. I get night sweats that wake me up and then I can’t go back to sleep. This has been going on since I was forty-five and I’m sick of it.” She turned, looking at him. “Does your mother have menopause symptoms?”

His heart contracted and he held the flatware in his hands, feeling gut shot for a second. Cav hadn’t expected her to ask those kinds of questions. But why wouldn’t she? Susan assumed he still had his mother. “My mother died when I was eighteen of a heart attack,” he said, forcing himself to move to the table.

“Oh,” Susan murmured, startled, “I’m so sorry . . . how horrible . . .”

In that moment, Cav could see Lia in Susan’s face. And her demeanor mirrored Lia’s exactly. They were so alike, and that gave Cav some information that would help him work with Susan. “Yeah, I didn’t see that one coming, either.”

“I’ll bet you miss her.”

“Very much. She’s never far from my thoughts.” And that wasn’t a lie. He saw the sympathy in Susan’s exhausted features. Just like Lia, she was putting herself out to others instead of putting up boundaries to protect herself. It ran in the family. The “no boundary” gene was shared by the two women.

“Were you in school when she died?” Susan asked, stirring up the eggs and adding salt and pepper to them.

“Actually,” Cav murmured, coming and resting his hips against the counter about four feet away from where Susan was cooking, “I had just joined the Navy. I had passed all the SEAL qualifications and was getting ready to go to BUD/s, their six-month boot camp.”

“That’s so sad,” she said, frowning.

Cav remembered clearly that she had referred to him as a killer. And maybe her frown meant Susan had been reminded of that. If she was like Lia, then Cav knew the only way to draw her out was to become vulnerable himself. It wasn’t something he was comfortable with, but his love for Lia had pushed him to do it for her. Now he had to do it for Susan, hoping she wouldn’t turn on him and savage him. “I came from a pretty busted-up home. My old man was a drug addict. My mother tried to protect me from him,” he offered, seeing the sudden sympathy come to Susan’s darkening green eyes. “He was abusive toward both of us. I remember as a young kid begging my mom to run away with me and leave him. But”—he shrugged—“she never could. At that time, I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t leave him.”

“Lia told me a little about your family,” Susan offered, stirring the eggs “I can’t imagine living in that kind of daily, ongoing hell.”

“It
was
hell,” he agreed grimly. Cav wanted to cross his arms across his chest, but he knew that body language was a powerful communicator. And even if Susan didn’t pick up on his defensive posture consciously, she’d react nonetheless to it. And then she might close up, and he’d miss an opportunity to try to reach her for Lia’s sake.

“Your mother?”

“Yes?”

“What was her name?”

“Elizabeth.”

“Pretty name. Tell me about her?”

Anguish scored him, and Cav felt like he was standing naked in front of Susan. He’d discussed his mother with only two people in his life: Chief Jacoby, his sea daddy, who had been a role model and father to him when he was a SEAL, and then, of late, Lia. Sucking it up, Cav knew he had to push through his need to hide his pain from others. If Susan was really like her kindhearted daughter, this information might create a bridge of trust with her. It was one helluva risk. Taking a deep breath, he said, “My mother got pregnant with me when she was fifteen. She married my father. I was born when she just turned sixteen. She never finished school, stayed home and took care of me.”

Susan frowned and whispered, “You had a rough start to life, Cav.”

“Not as rough as my mother did. She’s the one who suffered the most in all of this.”

Susan carried the skillet over to the table and put two-thirds of the eggs on his plate and the rest on her plate. “You seem to have a bit of a Southern accent, Cav. Did Elizabeth come from the South?”

He smiled a little. Yep, like mother, like daughter. He pulled out her chair for her, then went over to the coffeemaker and poured them each a cup, bringing them over to the table. Susan sat down, thanking him for the coffee. Cav ensured there was plenty of space between them. He didn’t want to crowd Susan, so he sat opposite her at the wide, long rectangular oak table. “My mother came from Dunmore, West Virginia.”

“You have a nice, soft drawl. I noticed it when you’d speak to Lia.”

He pushed his fork through the steaming, fluffy eggs piled high on his plate. “Lia has that effect on me.”

“How so?”

“Being around Lia allows me to relax. She accepts who I am, warts and all. I don’t have to be on guard or put on my game face. I can just be me.” He saw Susan giving him a thoughtful look. At least this time it wasn’t a glare. Or defensive. And he’d been right: he’d have to be vulnerable in order to reach her. That was a helluva gene they had in their family, and he was glad not many other people he’d ever met had it. Cav was not the type to be open or outgoing or blither on about himself or his family.

“That’s nice,” Susan murmured, chewing her eggs. “My daughter has that effect on everything and everyone. Did she tell you about Goldy, her palomino gelding?”

Cav smiled fondly. “Yes, she did.”

“She’s horse-crazy, you know?”

“A month ago I took her to a wild mustang and burro sanctuary and farm near Alexandria, Virginia. They had mustangs you could trail-ride there for an hourly rate. I knew she loved riding, that she felt free when she did it. I got lucky. The owners of the place, a husband and wife, had a palomino gelding there named Sunny, a ten-year-old mustang, and they had him waiting for Lia.”

“Oh,” Susan murmured, deeply touched. “That’s so wonderful of you to do that for her.”

“We had a great time. And it really made her day.” Cav felt hope. The difference between Susan today and yesterday was jarring. Right now, he had an opening with Susan and he was going to take advantage of the opportunity if he could. For Lia’s sake. For her sake. He didn’t want Susan seeing him as the villain here. Or a killer who was stealing her much-loved daughter from them.

Susan stirred the eggs with her fork, frowning. The silence hung in the kitchen for a few moments. “Cav? Why did you join something like the Navy SEALs?”