Page 36 of Sanctuary

“Another latte?” Gabe headed to the counter after Lori nodded slowly, though she looked lost in her thoughts. There was only a small line, but it gave Gabe time to digest the story so far, and it explained a lot. Lori presented as a logical, thoughtful woman who liked to take her time to process every opportunity and decision, but she was also someone who seemed spontaneous and open, given her decision to take on the Sanctuary the way she had. Or at least that’s who she’d been before this lawyer person. Whatever happened had caused Lori to shut down and withdraw—and made it hard for her to trust again.

When she returned to the table with the latte, Lori was dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

“Hey,” Gabe said softly. “You don’t have to keep talking about this.” She tapped Lori’s tablet. “I could tell you all about what I’m going to need to get the restoration project moving.” Of course, that wasn’t what Gabe really wanted. Now that Lori had cracked the door slightly, Gabe wanted to wedge her foot in and ease it open wider. She had the patience to do it slowly, sure, but she wanted the rest of this story too.

“It’s okay.” Lori tucked the tissue into her purse. “I suppose I’m not as far along in the process as I should be.”

Gabe shook her head. “I don’t think anyone can put a timeline on these things. It’s different for everyone, isn’t it?”

Lori smiled. Well, she looked like she tried to smile, but her grief was clearly having none of it.

“Have you had your heart broken too?” she asked.

Gabe rubbed the back of her neck and glanced away briefly. “Not in the way you might think.”

Lori frowned. “What do you mean?”

Gabe squeezed her neck harder. This definitely wasn’t the path she’d wanted this conversation to go down. Her own vulnerabilities weren’t up for discussion here. “Family,” she said. “It’s complicated. A long story for another time.” With any luck, that time would never come.

Lori arched her eyebrow. “You know I’m going to remember that. If this friendship is going to work, the trust has to go both ways.”

“I get it.”

“So is it fair to say you’re the one who breaks other people’s hearts then?”

“Nope, that would not be fair,” Gabe said. “I’ve never had any serious relationships where hearts have gotten involved on either side. When I was on base, I was too caught up in the seriousness of my job to even think about love. And…” she paused, trying to decide how to put it in a way that wouldn’t make her sound bad or that Lori would find distasteful, “the little time I had between postings, I spent traveling and didn’t stay in one place for long.” It was the nicest way she could think of describing multiple one-night stands in over thirty states.

“You didn’t go home?”

“I didn’t have one.” She shrugged. “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

Lori glanced at her watch. “Time-swallowing?—”

“Black hole, yep. We should talk about the car then,” Gabe said.

“No, not yet. First, I’ll quickly finish my sorry tale. We spent a huge amount of time together, fell in love, and got married as soon as I moved into the house here. Things were good for a while. She discovered the rust bucket in one of the old barns, moved it into the building you saw it in, and blew a huge amount of money on tools and such. But there it stayed for five years waiting for her to restore it.”

“But she never did.” Surely that couldn’t be the root of the problem. People made plans then life got in the way all the time.

“Not exactly. Two years ago, she suddenly found her passion for it and began spending a lot of her nights and weekends in the ‘cave,’ as she called it. One night, I decided to check in on her and see how it was going. But it seems that she was working on a different kind of project, one on two legs instead of four wheels. All the time she’d said she was working on the car, she was actually working on another woman.” Lori took a deep breath then blew it out slowly, as if preparing herself to say the words. “I walked in to find her chin deep between her paralegal’s legs on the hood of that rust bucket.”

Lori’s body sagged, like telling the story had used up all her strength and she had none left to sit upright. Gabe experienced a similar effect but for a very different reason. That bombshell left her wishing she hadn’t encouraged Lori to open her heart and share her vulnerabilities at all. Because that nugget of information slammed the door shut on the potential to them ever becoming anything other than friends. And even a friendship could be on wobbly ground if Lori found out about Gabe’s indiscretion with the sergeant major’s wife.

God damn it. She sighed deeply and knocked back the dregs of her first coffee, planning to wash it down with something harder as soon as she was alone again.

“Gabe?”

Lori’s soft voice pulled her from her self-pity. “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” Gabe said, the platitude falling from her lips easily. If Lori knew what she was holding back, she’d think Gabe was being insincere. And even though she wasn’t, Gabe knew she represented everything Lori was running from, everything she’d suffered with the ex-wife. Even if Lori did learn to trust again, Gabe was certain that trust wouldn’t extend to her.

“I’ve got a feeling that she cheated on me multiple times, probably with different people, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. Once a cheater, always a cheater; isn’t that what they say? And worse yet, the paralegal knew me. She’d even been to some of our fund-raising events for the Sanctuary. It takes a certain kind of person to smile and play nice with the person you’re cuckolding.”

Could a woman cuckhold another woman? “That’s terrible. I can’t imagine how painful that must’ve been.” But Gabe had been the other woman too. She’d shaken hands with the husband. Saluted him. Played nice. Then she’d still bedded his wife. It hadn’t been her finest moment, and she certainly wasn’t proud of it. Even though the sergeant major was a gold-star misogynistic, homophobic asshole. Which was why Cynthia had chosen Gabe, of course: maximum damage. It wasn’t a story that she could ever share with Lori. She was way too damaged to hear Gabe’s excuses and justifications. Even though she did have a damn good reason for her actions, it wasn’t one she expected anyone else to understand.

That realization sank into her consciousness with the weight of a thirty-ton truck. She couldn’t outrun her past, and she couldn’t keep it from affecting her future. If only she’d had the strength to resist the temptation, though it had been more than that.

She looked up at Lori, even more beautiful and now even more out of reach, and remembered a passage from the Bible: He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, He will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.

Gabe didn’t want a way out, but how the hell was she supposed to endure this temptation?

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