Page 13 of Shadow Target

The faint feeling of her longing for her older brother was nothing new to Shep. She loved Ben fiercely. As he followed her across the beautiful rug that looked hand-woven, he wondered once again if the death of her younger sister, Ella, at age twelve from childhood leukemia, was part of the reason. She had come from a loving home, unlike his own. There was no way for him to know how the loss of a child affected a family, but he knew it would never be good. The hall opened into a large kitchen and dining room. It looked to Shep like a chef’s dream come true, with a gleaming steel Wolf stove sitting centerpiece. The windows were large, allowing a flood of morning light to pour in.

Willow went to the counter. “You still like strong, black coffee?” she asked, looking toward him as he stood unsurely in the middle of the cream-tiled room.

“Some things don’t change, yes, strong and black. Please.”

A sweetness riffled through her as she pulled out some K-cups from the drawer. “You’re right, some things don’t. I discovered this delicious, strong Ethiopian coffee and it’s to die for. I think you’ll like it.”

Shep wandered to a maple buffet at one end of the dining room, watching her work with that grace of hers. “Sounds good.” He halted momentarily as he saw a group of family photos in frames along it. One of them was of him. His brows rose and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. It was a photo of him in a red hardhat and his blue chambray shirt and Navy dungarees, looking off to the right, something catching his attention. He remembered that day. He’d taken Willow out to a nearby Afghan village where he and his digging crew were putting in a new well in for the people there. Willow had never been without her Canon camera, and he remembered her snapping that shot.

Shep wanted to say something about his own photo mixed in with her family ones but didn’t dare. If Willow had really moved on, and he’d assumed she had, why was his photo there? Why wasn’t there a photo of the latest man in her life, instead? He found it impossible to believe she didn’t have a man in her life. She was young, intelligent and incredibly confident. Turning, he saw her fiddling with her iPod and then soft classical music claimed the background of the huge roomy space. He recognized the piano music as Luovico Einaudi, one of her favorites. He listened to the opening bars as he took in the lovely plants hanging from the ceiling; lush leaves shining and bursting with life. Some had small, lavender flowers showing among their greenness.

“Take a seat at the kitchen table,” she said, bustling to and fro, gathering everything she would need to make breakfast for them.

“Thanks. Nice place. It’s alive,” he said, sitting down at the small, round, white wrought-iron table with its glass top. Everywhere he looked, the place was neat and clean. It was part of Willow’s discipline, he supposed. But he was a neatnik, too. Another place where they agreed to agree and not disagree. It was burning him up inside to not ask her about why she still had a photo of him. He watched her work; that quick efficiency of hers.

“I like living plants in my home,” she said. “I hate sterile environments.”

“Did your parents have a lot of plants in their house where you grew up?” Shep realized he’d never talked about such things with Willow, and he’d made it his mission to correct that flaw this time around; to show her he did care about her and her family, and not just himself. She seemed rather stunned for a split second, giving him a quick look as she arranged the eggs on the counter.

“My mother, you know: ‘Ruth’, is a nutritionist. She was always growing her own herbs in small pots along the windowsills of our house in whatever Air Force base we were currently at.”

“Your Dad is probably retired from being a pilot in the Air Force by now though, right?”

“Yes. They’re living outside of Pacific Beach, California, near where I was born. They have a small ranch. Mom has a huge organic garden, plus my dad ordered a Sun Glo greenhouse package for her. He built it from the great kit they got, and now she’s got vegetables and herbs year ’round.”

“Sounds nice,” he said, leaning back, one leg hooked over the other at the ankles.

Willow brought over his coffee, sitting it before him. “Drink up.”

He looked up into her eyes, seeing a mix of emotions. She felt vulnerable to him and it automatically made Shep protective of Willow. Scoffing to himself internally as he lifted the dark, fragrant coffee to his lips, he knew she hated it whenever he became protective of her. She’d always called it ‘smothering’ and ‘suffocating’ and said that she was fully able to take care of herself. That had always been an area of contention between them, brutally heightened to the nth degree as they’d played out the farce that had been their marriage in the Afghan war zone. He thought ‘farce’ often when it came to their marriage but didn’t completely believe the word. Shep had often wondered if they’d been stateside, or in some other safer environment, if maybe the stress would have been less and if their marriage could have survived. He would never know the answer, but his mind asked the question over and over regardless.

Willow cracked six eggs into a bright-pink ceramic bowl, whisked them, and added salt, pepper, a few herbs and some milk. “Tell me more of your adventures over the last three years?” she asked him.

“Just like what you already know: kicking around the world, drilling wells, constructing buildings and stuff like that. Mostly in South America. Peru, to be exact.”

She smiled a little, pouring the eggy mixture into a black skillet on the stove. “I imagine you got to brush up on your Spanish?”

Shep had four foreign languages under his belt, Spanish one of them. “Yeah, it came in real handy.”

“So, the Marine Corps has continued using you and your team undercover via Delos I see.”

“They try to put me where no one’s going to notice I’m a Marine in disguise,” he said. “We were up in the Highlands of Peru, near Cusco. There’s a lot of activity with Russian drug teams coming in and trying to take over the cocaine trade up there. We were able to help locate them, and then the Army Special Forces killer teams went in and took them out. We were digging wells for those villages, so the Q’ero people always told us the truth of what was going on. They’d send messages discreetly to us. Messages we could pass on to one of those hunter-killer teams to take the bastards out. The Q’ero people hate the Russians. And that’s why I’ve spent the last three years down there.”

“Commendable work,” she murmured. “But dangerous.”

Shrugging, he said, “Someone has to do it. I like being undercover.” and he rubbed his beard. “I don’t have to shave every day,” and he grinned a little.

“Yeah, shaving every day wouldn’t be much to look forward to,” Willow agreed. “You look the same from when we were together at Bagram. All the black ops members there went unshaven, right? It helped them fit in with the Afghan guys with their shaggy beards.”

“It was a good disguise,” he agreed. Shep had been through the Naval Monterey Language School to acquire Pashto, one of the languages of Afghanistan. He’d already learned Spanish, French and Italian.

“Ever been in Ethiopia before?” Willow asked.

“Nope, and I don’t know the language either.”

“You have a linguistic mind, so you’ll pick up some of it, I’m sure.”

He smiled, appreciating the coffee. “I dunno. If you say so.” He saw Willow shake her head and groan as she worked efficiently at the stove. “I know,” he drawled, “I wander the world clueless sometimes as far as you’re concerned.”

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