The Final Mission. Rachel LeeЧитать онлайн книгу.
something was seriously wrong with the way the investigation had been quashed? For a moment, she almost smiled, and the taste of the pancakes became wonderful.
Yeah. They’d confirmed her suspicions. Now she would get to the bottom of this or die trying.
She tried to imagine Mary sitting at this table. All her memories of Mary involved the base, the hospital and a couple places where it was safe for an American to stop for coffee. Even in a pacified zone that wasn’t always a sure thing.
She ran her fingertips over the aging oilcloth, and figured from the pattern that it must have been Mary’s choice. She had loved cheerful things.
And she probably wouldn’t be very happy to see Courtney sitting here feeling as if lead weighted her down. That just wasn’t Mary. She probably wouldn’t be happy, either, that Courtney had gotten Dom all stirred up again.
Crap! She put her head in her hands as powerful, painful feelings grabbed her. Maybe she should have just let this lie and lived with her sense of outraged justice.
But as soon as she had the thought, she knew she couldn’t rest until she was absolutely certain that she had done everything possible. Everything.
She heard Dom come into the mud room, and didn’t even bother to look up. She didn’t want to know, in a moment of reaction he couldn’t conceal fast enough, how little he wanted her here.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” she admitted frankly. “But it doesn’t matter.” And it didn’t, compared to his problems.
“Of course it matters.”
She listened to him pour coffee for himself, then heard a chair scrape as he sat at the table. “What’s going on?”
She shook her head, still resting in her hands. “It’s hard reading those emails and letters.”
“I know.”
Yeah, she was sure he did. And it seemed petty of her to even mention it. “How are you managing?”
He shrugged a shoulder, seeming to indicate he wasn’t going to talk about it. But then he said, “With time I feel it less often. I still feel it, it still hurts like hell, but it happens less often. I guess you can get used to anything, given time.”
“I guess so.” She gave herself an inward shake and looked up at last, finding his strong face looking calm, even resigned. And then she caught a flicker of something else in his gaze, something hot. It was gone almost instantly, but she knew that look, had seen it often enough to know what it meant: he found her sexually attractive.
But as quickly as the heat showed, it was followed by a flash of puzzlement, as if he didn’t understand what he’d just felt.
Guilt. It was thick on the air, she realized. They both felt guilty, though perhaps for different reasons. She felt it because it was partly her fault Mary had died. He probably felt that an instant of attraction somehow betrayed her. And frankly, Courtney wondered the same thing, because as she had caught that flicker of sexual yearning in his gaze, she had felt herself respond all the way to her center.
Desire, evidently, had its own calendar and its own causes, and simple thoughts of propriety, ugly things like guilt, couldn’t entirely squash it.
Life went on whether you wanted it to or not. That was the hardest part. Just when you felt everything should freeze in time and space, that the whole world should halt because you had lost someone you loved, life intruded, reminding you that you had to go on.
“Have you decided whether you’ll go camping with us tomorrow?” he asked.
“I …” The hesitation, so strong earlier, the decision she thought she had made … all of a sudden they were gone. “Yes. Yes, I will.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Good. You’ll enjoy it. There’s a cabin up there, not much, but I’ve kept it up because the boys love to go up there in the summers when we look after the horses. You won’t exactly be roughing it.”
“It would be fun either way. I think—” she hesitated, then blurted it “—I think I need some fun.”
“I think you do, too. I think we all do.” His smile widened slightly. “How devoted are you to spending another day in my office?”
She thought about all those photos she still needed to review, all the tapes and CDs. “There’s a lot I need to look at still.”
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