The Winter Man (7 page)

“Do you go into combat?” she asked.

“If the job calls for it,” he replied. “You can't teach in a classroom in a combat zone,” he added with a smile. “We teach small forces about incursions and stealth tactics, about IEDs and organizing local militia—stuff like that.”

“What's an—” she felt for the word “—IED?”

“You could answer that now.” He chuckled. “It's an improvised explosive device. You had one sent to you.” The smile faded as he remembered how dangerous her introduction to the world of terror had been. The device, as clumsily built as it was, could have killed her in a heartbeat.

“You said it wasn't well made,” she recalled.

“It wasn't. The good ones would pass for a small manuscript,” he said. “It's a cowardly way to kill somebody.”

She sighed, staring at the carpet. “I can't believe John was this desperate,” she said, shaking her head. “To kill somebody, just because they couldn't love you. It's…” She searched for a word.

“Insane,” he said through his teeth. “John had mental problems. I'm still shocked that Frank and I didn't see it and you did.” It made him uncomfortable for another reason, too, but he wasn't telling her any secrets about his past. Not yet.

She laughed hollowly as she looked up at him. “That's because he wasn't trying to force you to marry him.”

He drew in a long breath and looked at his watch. “I've got to meet a man in the lobby about a job,” he said. “You stay put, okay?”

She nodded. “Thanks for lunch.”

“My pleasure.”

He left her sitting on the sofa and went downstairs to see a government agent from his department. There had been a string of kidnappings of rich persons along the Texas border, and Tony's skills might come in handy, they thought. He put Millie out of his mind before he exited the elevator.

She wandered around the suite while he was gone, straying into his bedroom out of curiosity. His suitcase was open on the bed. She picked up a shirt on the carpet that had been hastily discarded, probably when he changed
early this morning. She held it to her nostrils and drew in the smell. She smiled, with her eyes closed. People had a personal fragrance, she thought, every one different. She'd know Tony's in a dark room. He smelled of the outdoors, of spice and fir. She loved the smell. She recalled the feeling it gave her to be carried, when he'd taken her out of the library protesting. His arms had been warm and strong and she'd never wanted to leave them. But she was going to have to move on.

She put the shirt down. After a minute she realized that he'd know it had been moved, a man as sharp as Tony. She dropped it back onto the carpet, went out of the bedroom and closed the door.

I
t was late when Tony came back. She was watching a movie on television, curled up on the sofa in slacks and a soft yellow knit shirt, with her bare feet under her. He smiled at the picture she made. He thought of a small kitten, cuddly and sweet, and snapped that thought right out of his mind.

“Found something to watch, I gather?” he teased.

She fumbled for the remote control. “Just a movie on regular television,” she said quickly, flushing.

He frowned. “You can watch pay-per-view if you want to,” he said. “Listen, kid, three or four bucks for a movie isn't going to break the bank.”

She flushed even more. “Thanks.”

Her embarrassment made him uncomfortable. He was
used to women who didn't mind ordering the most expensive items on the menu, who asked for trips to the most expensive concerts, who wanted jewelry for presents. This one was nervous because he might think she'd watched a movie on the pay channels. He felt odd.

She sat up and worked her feet back into her loafers.

“You want to take in a show or something?” he asked.

She stared at him. “A show?”

“There's a good theater company here. They have a ballet, an orchestra. Somebody's probably doing something Christmasy, even though it isn't quite the holiday season.”

She would have loved to go. But she recalled that she didn't have a dress that would do to wear to something fancy. Her clothes closet was bare, except for a few mix and match outfits suitable for work. She didn't even have the sort of shoes she'd need for an evening on the town. Tony probably had a dinner jacket or even a tuxedo packed away in that hanging bag she'd seen on the door to his bathroom.

“Mmm…no,” she drawled. “I don't think so. Thank you.”

Unaware of her wardrobe difficulties, he took the refusal in stride, thinking she probably didn't care for highbrow entertainment.

“Do you play cards?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

He shrugged and sighed. “It's going to be a long week,” he murmured. He studied her curiously. “Okay, then. When you're home, what do you do at night?”

She looked uncomfortable. “I read books, mostly, if there's nothing interesting on the military history channel.”

His eyelids flickered. “You like military history?”

“I love it,” she replied, smiling.

“Which period?”

“Any period,” she told him. “I've read everything I could find about Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, cavalry and Native American battles of the nineteenth century, generals of the Second World War,” she rattled off. “I never met a battle I didn't want to read about.”

He sat down across from her. “I took my degree in criminal justice,” he said. “But I minored in history. My favorite period was World War II, European theater.”

She smiled. “I remember. Your foster mother said you were always outlining battle plans to her over dinner.”

He chuckled. “She didn't understand a thing I talked about, but she was always patient and kind.” The smile faded. He looked down at his shoes. “She convinced me that not all foster parents are bad. I went through several after we moved from the reservation in North Carolina down to Georgia.”

This was an experience that had left scars in him. She'd heard his foster mother talk about it. “You said once that your mother died when you were young.”

He looked up. His eyes were flat, lifeless. “That's not quite true. I haven't really talked about her in years. About him, either. My stepfather, I mean.” His broad shoulders
rose and fell. “I tell different stories about them to anybody who asks. I guess I've been running away from the truth all my life.”

She didn't speak. She just listened. Waited. Hoped.

He noticed and smiled. “My real father was my mother's second cousin. He lived on the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina where she grew up. But he was married. She got pregnant and she didn't have any money for a termination. So there was this big, loud Italian construction worker doing a project near the res. She started going out with him and by the time she told him she was pregnant, he thought it was his. Then she gave birth to a full-term baby in what he thought was her sixth month, and the jig was up. He hated her. But they stayed together for three more years, until my sister was born. He took a powder and left her with the kids.”

“That must have been rough. Was she young?”

“She was nineteen when she had me,” he said. “Not terribly young. But my sister was half Cherokee and half white, and my mother couldn't take the constant criticism from her family. When I was seven, she left the reservation and took us on a bus to Atlanta. We didn't know it, but her husband was working there. He found out from her kin where she was. He moved back in with us. She might have tried to run, but he told her that he had legal rights to take the kids if she ran away. So she stayed. And I ended up with an Italian name that has nothing to do with my ancestry.”
He laughed. “The only good thing about it is that it saved a few soldiers' lives when I got teased. They didn't make Indian jokes around me, because they thought I was Italian.” His eyes glimmered. “I'm proud of my ancestry. Cherokees are still a proud people, even after all the hell the government put us through when they marched us out to Oklahoma in the dead of winter, walking, in 1838.”

“I know about that,” she said. “It was a tragic episode.”

“One of many,” he agreed.

She saw the pain on his face. He was talking around his childhood, trying not to remember. She wanted him to deal with it. She might be the only person alive that he'd ever really talked to about it. It would help him. “Your parents didn't have a happy marriage,” she prompted.

He shook his head. He traced the back of a big fingernail absently. “My so-called father drank. A lot. And when he drank, he remembered that I wasn't his kid and made me pay for it. I was in the emergency room every few months with bruises and cuts. Once, with a broken bone.”

She winced, thinking how hard it must have been for him, at that age, to be so badly treated by a man he considered to be his father. “Didn't your mother do anything to protect you?” she asked, aghast.

“She couldn't. She was a little woman. He knocked her around all the time. He was a big man. She was scared to death of him. She had no place to go. He knew it. He liked that.” His face tautened. “But then he started doing
things to my little sister, when she was about eight.” His whole body seemed to contract. “My mother caught him at it, late one night. She was very calm. She went into the kitchen, got the biggest butcher knife she could find and hid it behind her. She went back into the living room, smiling. She said it was all right, she wouldn't make a fuss. He smirked. He knew she wouldn't do anything. He said so. I can still see her, smiling at him. She went to him like somebody sleepwalking. She stabbed that knife up to the hilt in his stomach, all the way to the heart. He never saw it coming. She was still smiling when he fell down on the floor.” His eyes closed. “I never saw so much blood. She didn't move. She stood there, holding the knife, while the life drained out of him. She never stopped smiling, not even when they took her away in the police car.”

Millie was horrified. No wonder he wasn't eager to get married and settle down. “What happened to her?” she asked gently.

He drew in a long breath. “They committed her. They said she was insane.”

Her heart jumped. “Was she?”

He met her eyes. “I've never been sure, Millie,” he said gently. His expression was tormented. “She died long before they had tests that could have backed up their theories.” He shifted a little. “Our first set of foster parents told us very little, but they did mention that the
psychiatrist said it was schizophrenia. There's a hereditary tendency toward it, I've read.”

No wonder he wouldn't reveal his background. He was ashamed. Perhaps he was afraid, too. Maybe he thought he'd go mad himself.

She got up from the sofa and knelt down in front of him, balancing herself with a hand on one big knee. “I've read about mental illness. Some disease processes have a genetic tendency. That doesn't guarantee that anybody else in the family will ever develop the same illness,” she said firmly. “You're as sane as I am,” she added. “If you'd had mental deficiencies, believe me, they'd have shown up early. Very early.”

He looked down at her, scowling. “You think so?” he asked.

“I know so. Did you ever torture an animal for fun? Set fires in your house? Wet the bed when you were in your teens?”

He laughed. “None of those.”

“I'm no psychologist,” she told him. “But I'm a great reader. Children show signs of mental illness in childhood. Since you were in the child welfare system, I'm sure the caseworkers paid close attention to you, considering your mother's illness. They would have put you in therapy immediately if they'd even suspected you had problems.”

He cocked his head and laughed hollowly. “I can tell that you've had no contact with the system,” he said
with a sigh. “There are people who do their best for foster kids. The woman you knew, who brought me to San Antonio and got me through high school was certainly one of the best foster parents. But I lived with one family in Atlanta who had seven foster kids. They used the money the state gave them to gamble. They went up to Cherokee every month and blew it on the slot machines, hoping to get rich. Meanwhile, the kids went without school clothes, food, attention, you name it. No caseworker ever set foot in the house. Nobody investigated when we went to school dirty. The state did finally get wise, when one of our teachers started asking questions. We were removed from that house. But, you see, there wasn't another family willing to take me and my sister together. That's when we got separated, just before I was fostered to the woman who adopted me and eventually brought me to Texas.”

“I'm sorry,” she said.

He drew her hands up to his mouth and kissed them. “You always did have the softest heart,” he said gently, surprising her. “I remember how you loved kids. You'd tell stories in the library during summer vacation, and they'd gather around you like flies around honey.” He laughed softly. “I loved watching your face when you told those stories. You lit up like a Christmas tree.”