Page 10 of Shadow Target

His heart swelled with so many unexpected emotions. “That’s good to hear, Willow,” and he deliberately walked around her and opened the driver’s side door for her. For a second, she stood, her lips parting, eyes widening. He’d always insisted on being a gentleman. Yes, even in this day and age? He opened doors for women. Standing there, he struggled not to grin fully. “Well? Are you driving? Or maybe, I’ll drive, and you can tell me where we’re going? I have an international driver’s license.”

That challenge startled Willow. “Like hell!” she growled so only he could hear it, scowling and striding up to the door.

Shep stepped back, giving her space. Willow wasn’t a person to be crowded. Ever. That red hair was a warning about her temper, too. He saw a mix of amusement, shock and merriment in her expression. She was allowing him to see her. Maybe not all of her, but more than he’d ever expected at this first meeting. His heart soared with hope.

Once they were both in the SUV, she started it up and drove quickly out of the parking lot, heading through the palm-lined streets and weaving in and out of the early morning traffic with a confidence born from familiarity. She had the windows all down.

“It’s too cold for air conditioning, but the humidity will get you,” she explained.

“That’s fine.” He obliquely studied her out of the corner of his eye. Willow had classic model features in his opinion. Her nose was long and cleanly shaped. Her broad, high cheekbones were the foothills sloping up to her large, damned-intelligent eyes that missed nothing. Her long crimson lashes were the perfect frame for her nearly unearthly green eyes. As his gaze dropped to her lips, he couldn’t stop from feeling his body stirring whether he wanted it to or not. It had a mind of its own, as Willow had often accused him. That was true. That was the only safe port in their marriage that had gone right all the time, every time: sharing sex. They’d never taken their anger or any other luggage to bed with them. Well, “bed” in the figurative sense. He used to have been tied to the idea that the literal bed was where people had sex. But with Willow, any place, so long as it was private, was an opportunity. He almost smiled in memory of that. She was an opportunist of the finest kind, opening him up to other creative possibilities. When she’d first met him, she’d accused him of being ultra-conservative because he was an engineer. Shep had had no defense on that one, because it was true. Most engineers were exactly that: conservative, careful, looked before they leaped, and lived in their heads, ignoring their emotional apparatus, unlike women like her.

“How are you?” he asked, tipping his head in her general direction. Instantly, Shep saw her soft mouth thin. Her hands tightened around the steering wheel as she contemplated his quietly asked question.

“I’m okay. How about you?”

He wasn’t put off by the sudden tension in her voice or by feeling those shields of hers come back up into place. “I’m okay.”

She gave him a look, shaking her head. “You’re lying, Porter.”

“So are you, Chamberlin.”

A sour grin edged one corner of his wide mouth. She sped through a yellow light, going way faster than she should. Taking her foot off the accelerator for a moment, she added, “Just like old times.”

The hurt rolled through him. “Yeah, old times.” Bad times. Painful, agonizing times he never wanted to ever revisit. Now, he knew what his mother had gone through when his father had that affair and had come home one afternoon and told her he wanted a divorce. His mother had crumpled in shock and agony. Shep realized that he had repeated what he thought was probably a similar pattern to the daily, ongoing pain of his parents’ fractured relationship, and that ripped him up inside.

His mother had lost her job as an illustrator for a major publishing house. The sudden absence of her husband had emotionally destroyed her. He’d never been any kind of warm, loving dad to Shep who went on to punch his fair share of walls, raging at what the bastard had done to his innocent mother. She had died shortly after he turned eighteen, right when he was getting ready to go off to college. He’d buried his father six months later. It had been a raw time in his life. These were things he’d never talked to Willow about. In fact, after sex, her favorite time, they talked only about her, her family, her risky adventures as a young girl, but he never spoke about his parents and the first eighteen years of his life. And often, Willow would become pissed because he always shut that particular door in her face, refusing to talk about it. The single biggest reason for why she walked out on him was because he refused to communicate on that kind of personal and emotional level with her.

You’re like a robot, Shep, she had heatedly accused him. All head, no heart. If I’d wanted to marry something with no heart, no feelings and emotions, I would have hooked up with a damned doorknob! You’re flesh and blood. What the hell happened to you to make you so fucking closed up and unavailable even to ME?

He’d heard the argument often from her, feeling backed into a corner where there was no escape from the red-haired harridan who was on a mission to split him wide open so he’d spill his dark, twisted, wounded emotional guts to her. That’s all she’d wanted; to share their lives, their ups and downs, and to be able to hold onto and cry with one another in the bad times, and laugh in the good ones. But he’d frozen up, and Shep had known it’d been driving her away from him. He’d been too fearful of opening up for so many reasons. Not to mention his greatest fear, the one that came true: that Willow would walk out on him. Just like his father had walked out on his mother, Bess. But she hadn’t done it because of some affair like his father had. She’d done it because she felt married to a heartless robot.

Shep wasn’t an idiot. He knew why this brief interaction with Willow had brought all those submerged memories and feelings bubbling up to the surface. He made a fierce internal effort to choke it all back down, and looked out of the car’s window at the unravelling view for cover;

The city of Bahir Dur was busy and he saw some donkeys pulling carts, men hurrying along toward work, the day just beginning in this Ethiopian city by the largest lake in the country. He could smell the lake, the odor of rotting fish and the dank humidity rolling in across the smooth water. There was pain rolling off Willow as well, and he could feel it as sharply as a knife scoring his heart. He had loved… still loved… this woman. And, at all costs, he didn’t want to purposely hurt her again. God knew, he’d already screwed that up royally in the past. “I’m going to try to be better at communication with you this time around,” he told her, glancing over at her, watching for her reaction.

For a moment, Willow gave a slow blink, tilted her head in his direction and met his eyes briefly, then returned to driving the bustling morning streets of the city. She licked her lower lip. Her hands tightened around the wheel for an instant but then she forced herself to relax.

“It’s taken you three years to finally admit that?”

Shep winced inwardly, hearing the raw emotion in her low voice, the hurt, the hours of arguments, the tension and her crying. He couldn’t stand to see her cry because it meant he’d hurt her and dammit, he loved her. Staring at her profile brought a violent need for her, entwined with the love he still held for her. He had no idea how much he’d buried for three years until right now. It felt like he was on an out-of-control roller coaster. One moment a flash of a happy memory would hit him and then, in the next breath, the dark agony of splitting up, the divorce and loss of Willow. When she left, his life became a gray, ongoing, unrelieved daily mission just to survive.

It mirrored his past. His life as a teen had continued to spiral out of control. There had been a court battle shortly after the divorce, and Shep had been given over into the custody of his mother. All he could do was visit his father now and then, but later, he left California with his new family, moving back East. He and his mother were too poor to fly him back and forth, and so Shep deeply lost touch with his father as a result, except for occasional emails. And not only did he lose his mother just before leaving for college, but he also lost his father from a sudden heart attack shortly after that. A heavy weight settled in his chest. As he glanced over at Willow, every cell in his being screamed that he had not wanted this to happen to them as it had to his parents. They’d spent three years apart. Now, Fate had thrown them together again.

Shep wasn’t one to believe in miracles. Or even Fate. That came from his fanciful, imaginative and creative mother. She very much believed in synchronicity. It had always left a bad taste in Shep’s mouth for many reasons. Despite his heart warring with his strong mentality and keen intelligence, he couldn’t separate out his feelings from his brain, right now. Then, after marrying Willow, she had accused him on many occasions of being “all head and no heart.” She was sitting next to him. He could smell her skin, the scent of her red hair, her favorite shampoo, the familiar plumeria fragrance. He was so close to her. And yet, so far away. Desperate, his mind moved into overdrive on how to apologize to Willow. If he did nothing else while he was with her for this construction assignment, he would give her the apology long overdue. A huge one. He was the one who’d put himself in Hell. Worse, he’d wounded this beautiful, willful, life-loving woman to the quick. If nothing else, he silently promised her, I will tell you how sorry I am for chasing you away from me.

CHAPTER 4

Willow didn’t expect Shep to answer her question about it taking him three years to admit about trying to be better at communicating with her this time around. It had been the major reason she’d walked out of the marriage and away from him. She’d loved him when she’d divorced him. He’d never denied her reasons. Over the last three years, the wounds he’d inflicted with his incredible stubbornness had begun to heal. Willow had known it would take time. But, as she’d reorientated her lifestyle away from the military and back into the civilian world, she’d felt the whole process accelerate greatly. But she’d never stopped loving him, as she was discovering right now.

“Have you made peace with the fact you’re a civilian now, and no longer in the military?” he asked her.

Willow swallowed her surprise. Surprise both at the uncanniness of the question’s timing but even more over the simple fact that Shep had asked HER a personal question! Before? No, never; she was the one who’d always had to prod, wheedle, and push a personal feeling out of him and into the open. Maybe he was serious about trying to communicate with her? She licked her lower lip, slowing the car as she turned it into another smaller street lined with palm trees.

“After I decommissioned and left the military, I felt lost.” Of course, she’d just walked out on him, too, demanding a divorce at the same time. Not wanting to quantify ‘lost’, she said, “I did a lot of talking to other pilots who had left the service, Shep. Most of them were going into the airline industry to fly truckloads of people from one random point to another. That’s not the vision I had for myself.”

He chuckled a little. “That’s not your speed or your style, either. You always liked skirting edges, challenging yourself. And sitting in the pilot’s seat of an airliner is about as boring as it gets.”

She managed a faint smile. “You’re right about that. So? I kept looking around. I saw a Shield Security ad in an airline newsletter. They were looking for what we term ‘bush pilots’; people who would fly in supplies to third world countries where there was only a dirt strip, at best.”

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