Page 25 of Shadow Target

He saw the sponge bread on the counter. “Let me help? Do you trust me to bring over the basket of bread?” and he slid her a teasing look. She looked damned delicious, her hair up, wild and unruly wherever the combs could not tame it. Willow always looked so young when she wore her hair like that.

“Sure. Bring it over.” She put on two oven mittens and lifted the steel pot off the Wolf stove. “You’re favorite wat meal: lamb.”

He set the basket of bread between their plates and stepped aside, giving her enough room to place the pot on the metal trivet in the center of the small table. “There’s nothing I won’t eat. Being in the military, you know we’re garbage cans. If it don’t move first? We’ll eat it.”

Setting the potholders aside, Willow grinned and nodded. She thanked him for pulling out her chair for her. After she sat down, he joined her at her left elbow. “You’re right about that.” she replied.

“We’ve been out at sites in Peru, in the jungle, and someone would kill a snake and bring it in for the meat,” he said. He handed her some of the folded, warm bread. Anything to touch this woman even briefly.

“Ugh, no snake meat for me.”

“Well,” he said blandly, holding up his bowl as Willow filled it with the wat, “it was better than starving. There’s not much protein in Peru, except for eating guinea pigs.”

“But they are such cute little things,” she said, distressed, filling her bowl. “What did the snake taste like, Shep?”

“Actually, like chicken. The jungle has plenty of snakes, and the village where we were working made it part of their normal weekly meat source.”

Wrinkling her nose, she said, “I’ll stick to the known meats in the USA, thank you very much.”

“Hey,” he said, holding up his glass, “let’s make a toast?”

She raised her eyebrows, picking her own glass up. “Oh? What’s the occasion, Porter?”

He held her amused green gaze. “Us.”

“How so?”

“Because we’ve been working around one another for three weeks without ONE argument. Isn’t that a new personal best for us?”

Laughing, she toasted him and took a sip. Setting her glass aside, she said, “I guess it is.”

“When we were married, we fought nearly every day.”

“Sadly, we did,” she said, spooning in the delicious-tasting stew.

They ate in silence, the iPod’s classical music playing in the background. She knew Shep liked coming to her condo because it felt alive. In part, it was the green plants throughout it, but mostly because he’d always seen her as a bright spot in his life. There wasn’t a day that went by when she hadn’t looked forward to seeing him. She and Dev stayed at their homes in Bahir Dar. Shep and everyone else had been over at that old barracks turned into a hotel at the construction site.

“I’ve missed seeing you around,” Shep admitted.

She slanted him a glance. “Why? Because we aren’t fighting like dogs and cats?” and she added a teasing smile, not wanting him to take it as a personal hit. He became thoughtful.

“You have always been the sunlight to my darkness. I know I never admitted that to you… until now…”

Her heart twinged. She heard the sadness blanketed in his tone, saw that familiar heat in his eyes, and knew Shep still desired her. She said, “I’ve always thought of you as the moonlight to my sunlight. Nothing wrong with that.” She saw his face grow more relaxed. It was true: they both were intelligent people and, whenever they’d chosen to mix it up verbally and spar with one another, it had always turned into a take-no-prisoners, blade-cutting duel. And they’d both been guilty of it. And now, they could admit it to one another, their egos far more mature and tamed than back then.

“I don’t mind being seen as your moonlight. It feels like a compliment?”

“It is,” she murmured between bites.

“Maybe, one of these days… if things keep up the way they are? I can be real moonlight, instead of the darkness I became in your life, Willow.”

She pushed her emptied bowl aside, pouring them coffee from a dispenser. “We didn’t always have darkness in our marriage, Shep, and you know that. We had good times, too. Laughter. Sunlight and moonlight.” She handed him his mug.

“Toward the end of it, mostly dark and stormy, though.”

Willow couldn’t disagree. “What do you attribute to us not fighting with one another here?”

He laughed a little. “Absence in the other person’s life? You’re flying nonstop from dawn to dusk. I’ve got my head down on getting this project online and keeping it on a daily schedule. We rarely see one another.”

---