A Soldier's Christmas Read online

  "Exactly," he agreed. "And you know what? Just thinking about it gives me that feeling. Thank you."

  "Me? For what?"

  "For talking with me last night and tonight. For giving me something to think about besides my own misery. I still have a future. And damn it, I'm going to make the best of it!"

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE CHANGE IN HIM WAS SO RADICAL that Maria found herself wondering if it was real, or just some kind of manic episode.

  But he didn't sound edgy or hyper; he just sounded as if he'd made some kind of peace with himself. God knows he needed to. He'd been beating himself up something awful last night.

  He rolled his head and looked at her again. "You're wondering if I've lost my marbles."

  "Yes. No. Well, not exactly. It's just such a change."

  "Yeah, I know. Thing is, I've been sick of myself for some time now. But it was like I was caught in some kind of whirlpool that just kept sucking me down no matter how hard I fought it.

  "But I've been thinking about a lot of things today. About Nate—Dad—and Yuma. And about why I do the things I do. And I realized I've been making it far harder on myself than I need to. And after talking with you last night I realized…if I'd ever talked to Darlene the way I talked to you, she might not have left."

  "Which means?"

  "Which means I've crossed the Rubicon, and someday I might actually be good at building a relationship. Like you said, not everything is classified."

  * * *

  HE CLOSED HIS EYES, SAVORING THIS moment of peace. He knew that he still had stuff to deal with, but it was as if he'd at last been released from the hell he'd been steadily sinking into because of his sense of failure after Darlene left him.

  He'd finally worked his way to the core of the problem, and with a small nudge from Maria had figured out exactly where he'd gone wrong.

  There were still problems he needed to address, of course, and he knew it wasn't going to be easy to stay on this side of the Rubicon. Old habits died hard. But Maria was right. There was another kind of intimacy.

  And he needed to explore the twists and turns that had led him to this point. He needed to talk about them to get them perfectly clear in his own head.

  He opened his eyes and found that Maria still appeared to be wide awake and attentive. "Can I bend your ear?"

  "Be my guest."

  And she smiled, that smile that did crazy things inside him. That made his heart skip a beat. There was something else here that was going to have to be dealt with one way or another, but he wasn't anywhere near ready to get to that.

  "I think," he said slowly, "that I got into this mess because I was alone for so long."

  She nodded encouragingly.

  "I don't know if you're aware of it, but I was adopted."

  "Marge told me. She said she and Nate weren't yet married, and he was in Vietnam when she learned she was pregnant with you. Apparently her father disapproved of Nate and was stealing her letters to him, and his letters to her."

  Seth nodded. "And when she learned she was having me, she was sent away. She thought Nate had abandoned her, thanks to her father, and gave me up for adoption."

  Maria nodded. "It's such a sad story, Seth."

  "Sadder for them, I think. I had a good family. It wasn't a demonstrative family like the Tates, though. And I was an only child. So I kind of developed a tendency to keep things inside."

  "I can see that. You must have needed to depend on your own resources a lot."

  He nodded. "For almost everything except food and shelter. Don't misunderstand me. My adoptive parents were good to me, and they loved me. But we never did find a really good way to relate."

  "I'm sorry."

  He shrugged. "A lot of kids have it a lot worse. I was lucky. But, anyway, at eighteen I joined the navy to see the world. Sound familiar?"

  She gave a little laugh. "Yes, it does."

  "And being eighteen, as soon as I could, I volunteered for the SEALs. Looking back, I'm not sure if I needed to prove myself in some way. I do know that I wanted to be the biggest, baddest dude on the block." He gave a small snort of laughter. "Not unusual at that age."

  "No, it's not."

  "Anyway, I actually made it through BUD/S, the training program. And I discovered something I'd never really experienced before. The kind of companionship that men can have when they undergo hardship together. When they depend on one another for their lives. We grew up together, Maria, in those six months. And we were cemented in ways I can't really put into words."

  "I can imagine it, though, Seth. It must have been really intense."

  "'Intense' doesn't begin to cover it. They force you to realize that you are not going to make it without your buddies. No way. They force you to realize that each of us holds the lives of our teammates in our hands. I don't know of much else like it.

  "Anyway, by the time you go through that, you've changed. Significantly changed. I certainly wasn't a kid anymore. I was acutely aware of my limits, my abilities, and more important, my dependencies on the rest of the team. And what I didn't know by the end of BUD/S, I sure as hell knew after a couple of missions."

  He fell silent, still sorting through his thoughts. She waited patiently. He liked that about her. Darlene, frankly, had never been one to sit quietly and wait for anything. She'd had a vitality that had kept her talking and prying, and seldom quiet. Until the end.

  "Well," he said after a moment, "I think I'm getting a little sidetracked here. The point I'm trying to get to is that I was used to being solitary, and suddenly I had a sort of family with truly intense connections. But it was another undemonstrative family, another family where things weren't talked about. I mean, we did our missions, got debriefed, and basically forgot about them because they were secret and we couldn't discuss them. So while we were closer than brothers, it was an…unspoken closeness. And the more we did, the more was left unsaid. We got quieter, steadier, tougher, more cynical about some things. And we felt increasingly separated from the world around us, because of our experiences."

  "That's…unfortunate."

  "In a way, yes. It's necessary, but it has its down side. Maybe more so for me than others. I don't know. Plenty of SEALs actually are married, although I have to admit there are a lot of divorces, too. It's hard on wives. Very hard. We have a closeness they can't be a part of. You know, I just realized that."

  "How so?"

  "That our wives are shut out. It must be really hard for them. We have this bond, and they're always outsiders to it. They can never, ever be part of it. Damn, I wouldn't be surprised if they get jealous of it."

  "Maybe some do."

  "Maybe." He sighed and rubbed his eyes. "So, bottom line is, I'm probably more closed than most. And maybe because of that, I didn't make enough room in my life for anything except the team bond. It was the most intimacy I'd ever known in my life."

  "Oh, Seth." Her voice didn't sound sad, exactly, but it did sound very sympathetic.

  "I think," he said finally, "that I kept Darlene on the other side of a glass wall. I put a huge barrier between us, instead of bringing her to the other side with me. You know, I think I need to call her and apologize."

  "That might be a very good idea, if you don't think it'll just upset her."

  He looked at her. "It might do her some good to know none of it was her fault. I know when she left she was blaming herself, saying she wasn't the right person, that she'd failed me and she couldn't live with it anymore. God, I messed her up."

  * * *

  MARIA WENT TO THE KITCHEN TO make them both some hot chocolate, leaving Seth to think in solitude for a few minutes. She had to admit she was pretty impressed with him. Few people could sort their way through their own psyches as well as he seemed to be doing.

  She put the kettle on and turned on the flame beneath it. The brief whiff of the gas suddenly transported her back to her grandmother's as a small child.

  Sitting in her grandmother's kitche
n at the big round oak table perpetually covered with oilcloth, was one of her happiest childhood memories. Grandma would give her a brown sugar lump as she puttered around making tea for herself, or dinner for the two of them.

  On warm summer evenings, they would sit in rockers on the front porch and drink homemade lemonade while the breeze ruffled the vines on the trellis. Trips to the pond to feed the ducks stale bread. "Picnics" of graham crackers and strawberry jam mixed with powdered sugar to frost them, taken on long walks along the train tracks until they found a place where Grandma felt they could settle and have their delightful snack.

  As the kettle whistled, Maria started back to the present, and wondered why she had traveled down that particular memory lane. It had been a long time since Grandma had passed on, a long time since Maria had felt utterly safe and happy.

  Maybe it was because she didn't feel safe now. Not simply because she was contemplating a major life change, a change so drastic she could barely begin to imagine what it would really be like. But, perhaps, because of the man in the living room, who was waking yearnings she thought she'd put aside a long, long time ago.

  Busying her hands, she dumped packets of cocoa mix into mugs, then poured boiling water into them. When she picked up the spoon and began to stir, however, her thoughts drifted again.

  Drifted to her grandmother, drifted to Seth. Somewhere inside her there was a connection, but she couldn't find it. Two more disparate people she couldn't imagine.

  Yet perhaps that wasn't true. Grandma had been tough, tougher than Maria hoped she'd ever have to be. The woman had survived homesteading in the wilderness of Wyoming, had survived droughts and blizzards, the deaths of some of her children, the loss of her husband…so many sorrows and hard times. Yet Grandma had persevered, moving forward into each new day with a peace that seemed to bless those around her, as if hardship had taught her she could survive whatever life brought. Maria admired her strength—and maybe envied it a little.

  Seth, too, had survived unimaginable difficulties. He took them on willingly. Maybe that was the connection. Didn't that make him pretty damn special, too?

  By comparison, Maria felt untested and untried. Maybe that was why she was thinking of joining the navy. Maybe she sought tests and trials of her own. Maybe the journey she really needed was not so much one of seeing exotic places as it was of finding herself.

  Or maybe it wasn't even that. Maybe it was just that there was a huge void in her life she needed to fill, and she was casting about for a way to do it. But was joining the navy the right way? Or just running away?

  Sighing, she gathered up the mugs and went back to the living room. It seemed Seth wasn't the only one who needed to do some soul-searching.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE WIND KICKED UP WITH RENEWED FORCE. Mug in hand, Seth wandered to one of the tall windows and drew the drape back so he could look out.

  "The whiteout's even worse now," he remarked.

  "This is certainly the longest storm I've seen since moving here," Maria replied.

  "It's rugged, all right. I'm not sure it isn't mostly just the wind, though. When I was outside earlier it was so dry the snow was blowing over itself."

  "That happens sometimes," she agreed.

  "I didn't see much of it when I was growing up in Denver."

  "Well, heck, haven't you heard? That's a tropical climate."

  He laughed and let the curtain fall so he could turn and look at her. "So it seemed. People were forever driving as if they couldn't believe that snow had fallen overnight. It got pretty bad sometimes."

  "Once a bunch of us from college, over semester break, decided to pile into a friend's car and take a trip. We hit Denver first, soaked up a little nightlife, then headed up into the mountains after a snowfall." She laughed and shook her head.

  "And?"

  "Well, it wasn't too bad in Denver. The roads were starting to clear by about nine in the morning, so we packed up and headed west, figuring we might spend a few hours in Vail, maybe do some skiing there or at Copper Mountain. Anyway, the higher we got into the mountains, the worse the roads got, so we were moving at a pretty steady thirty to thirty-five. And all these cars were zipping past us at sixty, skis on the roof racks, wanting to get to the slopes as early as possible."

  She shook her head and laughed again. "We cracked up laughing later, though, because as we approached the Eisenhower Tunnel, most of these cars had skidded off the road. I mean, the shoulder and the median looked like a parking lot. And we just kept chugging along at thirty."

  He chuckled. "I've seen that a few times myself."

  "Of course, anywhere you live, every winter you have to learn to drive again at the first snowfall."

  "But in Denver it's like every snowfall is the first one."

  "For some people, anyway," she laughed. "I'm sure it's only a handful. But an amusing handful."

  "A dangerous handful." He smiled over his mug at her. "I like your laugh."

  She froze, feeling embarrassed again. "It's just a laugh."

  "No, it's a nice laugh. Infectious. Makes me grin just hearing it."

  "Well, thank you."

  "You're welcome," he said with mock gravity.

  But as he lifted his mug to his lips, his gaze held hers, and even in the dim, ruddy light she could tell that something had changed.

  His stare made her feel self-conscious, and she looked down at herself, wondering if she was still decently covered. Satin wrapped her like a cocoon. So she looked into the fire and cast about for some way to change the mood. Because if he came on to her again and then pulled away, she'd probably be scarred for life.

  As if she wasn't already.

  "I should put another log on," she said finally.

  "I'll do it."

  He crossed the room, set his mug on the mantel and squatted before the fireplace to open the screen. The view, she thought, was a nice one. Narrow hips, tight rump…

  Oh, heavens, she had to stop thinking this way!

  She wasn't built for flings, and a fling was all this could ever be. In a week or two, whenever his leave was up, he'd return to Virginia Beach and they'd probably never meet again. Not after she joined the navy. There was no reason to believe she'd ever be stationed anywhere near his SEAL team. And even if she was, who was to say that he'd ever want to see her again?

  But she couldn't drag her gaze away from him as he poked at the fire, stirring up the embers, then placing another two logs on it. He waited, squatting, until they caught, then put the poker back and closed the screen.

  She pulled her gaze away just in time as he straightened and turned toward her. "There," he said. "You'll keep warm now."

  Warmth wasn't her problem. His mere presence was keeping her warm enough to have withstood the cold outside. "Thank you."

  "Maybe," he suggested, "after this blows over, if it warms up some, we can go cross-country skiing together."

  She wished her heart would stop doing little flops in her breast. "I'd like that."

  Skiing, at least, was safe. They'd be busy having fun, and it would be too cold out there to get into any trouble. Safer then sitting alone together in this dimly lit living room while the wind howled outside.

  She really ought to go back up to her room. But she couldn't make herself move. It was as if her body didn't want to be any farther from Seth than it was now. In fact, it wanted to be even closer.

  Floundering for some self-control before she hurled herself into this man's arms in a blind need to satisfy the growing ache within her, she said, "I imagine it's been difficult to get used to a new family."

  He had returned to his post by the window, holding the curtain back and watching the snow whirl like dervishes. "Difficult? I don't know that I'd say that. They've all made it as easy on me as they possibly could. Although I felt like hell when Marge and Nate separated after I showed up."

  "What made you come looking for them?"

  He dropped the curtain and turned toward her. "My a
doptive parents had died. While I was going through their papers, I learned about Marge. And…well…I didn't have any family at all. I don't know whether I just needed to satisfy my curiosity or if I needed something deeper. I know it never entered my head that she was married to my real father, or that her husband didn't know about me. God, did I feel like hell."

  "You weren't responsible."

  He shook his head. "I was responsible, all right. I should have thought it through better before I just popped up on the doorstep."

  "I think the outcome would have been the same. Marge told me that after all those years, not telling Nate about you was in large part because she didn't want to disrupt your life. And she knew Nate would want to find you. She felt she was sparing you both. But once you contacted her in any way…Well, I honestly think the same thing would have happened. And from what I see, I think the breakup actually strengthened them."

  He nodded slowly. "Nate told me it made him a better husband."

  "So it all worked out for the best. Still…"

  "Still," he agreed, "it's not the same as a family you grow up with. Especially since I'm away so much. But I love them all, don't misunderstand me."

  "I could see that." She smiled. "They're pretty fond of you, too."

  He chuckled. "They were even good about my IOUs. Maybe you can help me do some shopping for them. I'm not as in touch as I ought to be."

  "I'd be glad to." Maybe this was getting just a little too cozy? Yet not even her emotional survival instinct could pull her away.

  "What about your family?" he asked. "Where are they?"

  "My two brothers are in computers, and they travel all the time. Right now, Sam is on a job in Germany, and Frank is in Japan. And my parents are still in the little town I grew up in. Except this year they went to Hawaii for Christmas. They've been saving for years. Mom says she's wanted to spend a Christmas there ever since the first time she heard Bing Crosby sing 'Meli Kalikimaka.'"

  "I bet they're sitting on the beach right now."

  "Probably. Soaking up sun. It'll be good for both of them. They hardly ever get away because they own their own business. It's practically a twenty-four/seven job."