Necessary Secrets Page 17

  Lawrence peered over her shoulder. “Nothing stopping you now.”

  She turned to see the staff car disappear down the long, dusty drive. Jon turned, his head down, his steps achingly slow.

  She suppressed the urge to run out and catch him in a hard hug, one meant to comfort. “It’s not what Jon wants to hear.”

  “How so?”

  “I let my emotions get the better of me and neglected my duty.”

  “Jon can handle that.”

  Lawrence didn’t understand. “No, Rick was—” She stopped, and the idea of unburdening herself reared its ugly head again. Beyond, where Jon stood, the dust left by the staff car dissipated. She couldn’t unburden herself with half-truths. Jon didn’t deserve that. But she couldn’t be silent anymore. To hell with a court martial.

  The old man frowned. “Was it Rick’s own fault that he died?”

  She faced Lawrence again, her jaw tight. For a long, strained minute neither said a word. Finally she threw back her shoulders. “No. It was mine, Lawrence, and it’s time I paid for it.”

  Chapter 14

  She’s already started to waddle a bit, Jon noticed as Sylvie approached him. Her hips hadn’t widened overly much, but her walk was as distinctively maternal as the fullness of her breasts and the small outward curve of her belly.

  Whoa. He’d just finished one of the most difficult conversations of his life and still he managed to switch channels to Sylvie with disturbing ease.

  It didn’t seem right.

  Thank the Lord she’d done as he mouthed back there. The major would have taken one look at her and known her condition. And if the man had any kids, he might have easily guessed how far along she was.

  And no way in hell did he want Tirouski to know any damn thing about Sylvie.

  The protective instinct hit him with full, hard force. Even though the situation had never formed, he couldn’t stop the defensive tide growing in him.

  Sylvie’s face pinched into a frown and she stopped just at the parched edge of the grass. One hand settled on her belly, the other crept to her breasts, a gesture that stirred the memory of last night.

  She’d moved her hands to a similar position last night, during their—was it their third time!—lovemaking. What she’d done had been more stimulating, and even the mere memory fanned the embers inside of him, despite the disappointing news the major had grimly delivered.

  He shoved his hat up on his head, feeling the heat radiate upward from the bone-dry driveway. What the hell was he thinking? Here, he’d been told of Rick’s “accidental death,” given a laughably censored report, and the only thing on his mind was what Sylvie could do with her ripening body?

  He should be focused on Rick’s death. He should be doing…something more. Writing letters. Getting the government to recognize the potential dangers facing their soldiers. They should tell the whole truth to military families and taxpayers who held the mistaken belief that stability existed all over Bosnia and that their soldiers were safe. And he should be focusing on the fact that the cowardly bastard who’d killed Rick still walked free, just as the man who’d killed his father walked free.

  But he couldn’t. Sylvie still lingered on his mind. He loved her, yet they seemed as far apart as possible. How could there be any chance for happiness together? She wanted to put Bosnia in the past and she should. He couldn’t even open his brother’s barrack boxes yet. She had secrets, and he wanted to force them out of her.

  He plodded over to where she stood. Her eyes glistened with sympathy, and he ached to pull her into a hard embrace.

  “What did the report say?” she asked.

  He steered her inside, through the dark house to the living room. Not her bedroom. Not anyplace private. When they stopped in the middle of the room, he heard the kitchen door slam shut. Hoping it was Lawrence or the other two, and that they were staying, he held his breath. But off behind the house, a truck started and he knew Sylvie and he were alone.

  He wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or not. To kill the ticking moments, he returned to the porch to collect the papers he’d been given.

  “Major Tirouski should never have wasted his time.” He slammed the front door shut. “The report was so heavily censored, it shouldn’t even have been written.”

  Why the hell couldn’t the major have forgotten them? The last few weeks had been the best Sylvie had ever experienced. And last night she’d realized she could be more than the shell she’d become during those last few days in Bosnia. And here at home.

  And Jon, too, had begun to enjoy the summer. She was sure of that. Yes, the work was long and hard, but in the evenings they’d done up the dishes together, talking about life at the ranch or life in Toronto, filling the quiet evenings with shared stories of the more colorful moments in their lives and careers.

  She had to tell him the truth. Oh God, he deserved so much more than the ridiculous report he’d just thrown down on the coffee table. The papers had spilled apart, all three pages, neatly formatted, and, she caught the words apologize, regrets, understanding mocking them.

  She drew in a deep breath. “Jon, there is more to Rick’s death than what they’ve given you. Things you deserve to know.”

  He couldn’t believe his ears. Anger filled him as he collected the report, only to throw the damnably thin thing down. That was all he’d have of Rick’s last day? Sympathy? And silence blamed on national security? And now Sylvie wanted to talk?

  Hell.

  A short, anxious-sounding sigh burst from Sylvie’s mouth, and he shot up his head to glare at her. He didn’t bother to hide his irritation. “What about the nondisclosure form you signed?”

  “To hell with it.” She kept on talking. “I know that the brass want this incident to be kept quiet. But I hated that it was all subdued. Rick deserved better. And I hated Bosnia.” She rolled her eyes. “I still do. There’s no good guys or bad guys over there. It’s just a bunch of ethnic groups fighting. And they’ve been fighting for hundreds of years long before we got there. And they will long after we leave. It’ll never end. They all signed this Dayton Accord, and we were over there to keep the peace, but the fighting hasn’t really stopped.”

  Spoken like a war-weary soldier, he thought. And she was right in many ways. Sometimes he even got tired of gangs battling it out in Toronto. Sometimes he wished all of them would just kill themselves off, the lot of them, and save so many innocent lives.

  But her conflict had been much worse.

  She pulled air into her lungs and her tongue flicked nervously over her lips. That task done, she walked to the picture window where the lace bowed into the room, blown by the breeze. Holding his breath, Jon felt the warm wind seep into the living room.

  “It was supposed to be a routine supply run. The only thing different was that this outpost had been temporarily manned by the German contingent and we were to support them for about a month. They needed rations and some paper products and some sandbags. They’d asked for more, but the captain ordered us to take just the essentials. The only thing of value that I’d taken was the office cell phone.”

  She sighed. “We didn’t even have any ammo with us. Just a couple of full mags each. There was nothing worth an ambush. Nothing worth dying over. Not in the truck, and not on us.”

  His hands shook and he forced them into his jeans pockets. His arms ached to hold her. She shouldn’t have to relive all of this torture. Hadn’t she suffered enough?

  And yet…he’d waited so long for this moment. His jaw tight, he ground out, “What happened that night?”

  She toyed with the lace curtain in front of her. “The weather was really bad. It had already delayed us once, and when we figured it was letting up, we left the base camp. We were expecting to drive all evening and spend the night at the outpost, then return the next day. But the weather just got worse.”

  She took another breath. Talk to me, Sylvie. Talk to me.

  Finally she continued. “After we’d gone about twe
nty kilometers into the mountains, and made the turn we were supposed to make, the weather worsened. Rainy, slick, and the higher we climbed, the worse it got. Before long the rain had turned to sleet and then snow, and I knew something was wrong. I guess it was intuition, because there was no other reason for me to be suspicious.”

  She turned and glanced at him, as if gauging his reaction so far to her words. He kept his face as neutral as possible.

  “Then we drove around one hairpin turn, a really bad one, and there it was. Rocks and trees and mud all strewn over the road. A landslide, we figured. Rick barely stopped the truck in time. But as soon as we got out—” her voice hitched up “—a-after we got out of the truck, we realized it had been deliberately set.”

  His heart punched a nasty tattoo in his throat. He tried to breathe, but the hot air in the living room turned leaden when he inhaled.

  This was it.

  Sylvie’s hands twisted the lace into a tight knot. She was no longer looking at him but at the intricate pattern of the curtain.

  He should stop this torture. Right now. But he couldn’t speak.

  “We’d only been standing in front of the truck for half a minute, and I’d just suggested we winch the big stuff to the side. We had a good winch on the front of the truck. We could do it. But we never had a chance.”

  She swallowed. Jon stepped forward to grab her, but she stopped him with her hands, now released from their lace prison. “They opened fire on us.”

  He dropped his hands. “Did you have your sidearm with you?”

  She nodded. “Rick had his rifle, with a round up the spout and the safety on. That’s standard. I had my pistol. As soon as the first round hit the truck, I shoved Rick to the ground and covered him. Then we scrambled under the front of the truck. Rick looked at me, and I gave the order to fire back.”

  “You? He had to wait for you?”

  “The senior rank gives the order. It’s part of the rules of engagement. I didn’t even challenge first. You know, yell out who we were and to stop or we’ll open fire. All that crap.”

  “Why not?”

  “We didn’t have time. They were still firing at us. And if you’re attacked so unexpectedly that challenging the enemy would endanger your life, you don’t have to. We didn’t know where they were. The snow was pretty heavy by that time. We couldn’t see anything. But we fired off a few rounds, anyway. They kept on firing. It seemed like they were all around us.”

  “What happened then?”

  She began to rub her arms. He couldn’t imagine her cold. To him, the whole room was stifling, an inferno. She stopped rubbing after a minute. “We crawled under the truck to the back.”

  “Were you planning on climbing into the back of the truck?”

  “Ultimately, yes. We couldn’t go back into the cab. There was nowhere to drive. We couldn’t see a thing. So the only safe thing to do was crawl into the back. Rick had shut off the engine and taken the keys with him. The truck would have been useless to whoever was firing on us.” She stopped talking.

  “What did you do next?” Come on, Sylvie. Don’t stop now. Tell me, baby. Tell me everything.

  The lace pattern had been studied enough. She looked away from both it and him. “Once we’d crawled to the back of the truck, the firing stopped.” She paused. “I guess they couldn’t see us anymore. I had the company cell phone with me, and while I was crouching under the driveshaft, I tried to call the captain.”

  “Back at camp?”

  “Yes. But with the weather and the mountains, I couldn’t get a decent signal. I looked at Rick and asked him if he was okay. He looked pale. I was afraid then that he’d been seriously injured.”

  He stared, each word she spoke piercing him like a hot poker. They hurt more than the day he’d been shot at. The day his Kevlar vest saved his life. The impact of the bullet had left one hell of a bruise on his chest, but he’d survived. “Had you or Rick been hit, yet?”

  Her hand splayed out across her belly. “I looked over at Rick and asked him again. But he shook his head.” She seemed to want to add more.

  “I tried to call again, and I got someone. I don’t remember who it was. I called for the QRF.”

  “The QRF?”

  “Quick Reaction Force. A platoon of infantry trained to respond immediately to any situation. Whoever I was talking to asked where I was. I didn’t know exactly where we were.”

  “You don’t have GPS on your truck?”

  She shook her head. “No. It was just a cargo truck. Only the armored vehicles have GPS. I gave him a ballpark grid reference and he asked what the hell was I doing way out there.”

  “Grid reference?”

  She nodded. “It’s a method of locating points on a map.”

  The air hung heavy around them. The way she’d paused, the wary look that had seeped into her eyes, all his intuition grabbed him hard. “Go on.”

  Her voice dropped. “I told him, and he said that, according to a memo he’d just got, the outpost had been abandoned the week before. The Germans had moved to another location. I had the wrong grid reference.

  “I’ve had a lot of time to think about this and I know what happened. The outpost had been abandoned, yes, but someone in the German contingent wanted us to go up there to be ambushed. That was why they asked for a whole pile of stuff, like ammo, radios and batteries. And fuel.” She stared at him, her eyes wide and yet, angry. “Basically, there had been a major security breach.”

  He was stunned. “And that’s why you were made to sign that nondisclosure agreement?”

  “We all sign it when we retire. But yes, that’s why Major Tirouski insisted I keep quiet. They had a big problem on their hands and if the media got hold of security breach, you-know-what would hit the fan.”

  He frowned at her, the hairs on his arms rising. “Did Tirouski ever talk to you?”

  She swallowed. “He came here one day shortly after you arrived. He wanted to make sure I was keeping my mouth shut.”

  “A long trip for just that.”

  She looked away and shrugged. “This was a big problem, and he was on government time.”

  Something wasn’t right, and again the old suspicions reared. Somehow he forced himself to bide his time. “Did you make it into the back of the truck? Did Rick get shot then?”

  Sylvie looked up at him, almost as if she’d been lost in her thoughts. “We did manage to get into the truck, but no, Rick had already been shot. I think he’d been hit right when they opened fire on us. But it was too dark for me to notice any blood.”

  Her words were all jumbling about in his mind. He shook his head. “Did Rick know he’d been shot?”

  She nodded.

  It wasn’t making sense. “Why did he lie?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Denial, not wanting to be a burden to me. Scared.” She met his gaze with caution. “Rick was really scared. We both were, yes, who wouldn’t be, but Rick was terrified.”

  Jon didn’t know what to say. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was dry.

  “Rick was a good soldier,” she rushed out. “It was okay to be scared. Don’t compare him to yourself when you’re in the line of fire, or even me. Rick was young, and didn’t have the experience I had. He hadn’t been hardened like the older, more seasoned soldiers. He couldn’t put his emotions aside and focus on what had to be done.”

  He gaped at her. What was she saying?

  She continued. “When we got into the back of the truck, I saw that he was injured. I tried the cell phone again, to let them know we had an injury. But it didn’t work inside the box. Too much steel plating, I guess. If only Rick had told me earlier that he was injured.”

  Jon blinked. That explained the anger at the two-way radio. She hadn’t been able to report that Rick was hurt. “It’s all right. I understand. Rick wouldn’t have wanted anyone to think he couldn’t do his job. He’d been shot in the leg, and must have thought that it wasn’t as bad as it was. After all, the injury ki
lled him.”

  Sylvie paled. “Yes, he was conscientious,” she murmured.

  Jon pulled her close. “I don’t need to know any more.”

  She pushed out of his embrace. Still ashen, she took another step back. “Yes, you do. That’s only what happened outside of the truck.”

  He shook his head. “What did you do inside of the truck?”

  She straightened her shoulders, her expression now tight and distraught. “I killed Rick.”

  Chapter 15

  What? Did he hear her right?

  Frowning, he tried to ask her to repeat herself, but he couldn’t. Somehow the air in his lungs refused to move through his vocal cords.

  What had she just said?

  She backed away. He searched her face, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  Finally he blurted out, “What did you say?”

  She bit her lip, her hands wringing over and over until he wanted to grab them and force them down to her sides.

  “Answer me!”

  She jumped. “I killed him! Or as good as. Please, Jon, don’t say anything until I tell you the whole story. Please?”

  He did nothing, and the long seconds ticked into minutes. Finally he nodded, a slow, wooden movement.

  Her voice quavered. “After we got into the truck, I put the combat lock on. That’s the lock on the inside. It was pitch-black, but I managed to find the dome light. That’s when I saw he was injured.” She seemed to steel herself for a proper explanation. “You see, Rick tried to stand, but he slumped down and I grabbed him. Only then did I see he’d been injured. I asked him where, and he said his leg.

  “We didn’t have a first-aid kit back there, so I tore off Rick’s field-dressing kit. He had taped it to his webbing here.” She touched her right shoulder. “I gave him first aid. He hadn’t been bleeding a lot, but I managed to bandage it. He said his leg was going numb. That’s when I tried to call again, but I had lost the signal.

  “I wanted to go back outside, to call the camp. I can remember that now, but…” With her fingers she pressed her eyebrows together and shook her head. “It was unsafe. Rick couldn’t cover me properly. Then…then the dome light went out. At the time we didn’t know if those who shot at us had cut the battery cable or the battery had just died. It went out quickly, I remember, and Rick swore. By then, he was pretty scared. The wind picked up and we could feel the truck wobble. Those trucks have a very high center of gravity, and they get buffeted about in a strong breeze. I decided it was too dangerous for me to go outside alone.”