Page 31 of Shielding Aubree

"Hey, can we talk about this?"

She wanted to make him happy, but she didn't trust herself not to make a mess out that, too.

"I think we can both agree that I've been out of line today." She managed a smile and hoped that it didn't make her look manic. "Why don't I go and get out of your hair and maybe if you can find a way to trust me again, we can continue to work together."

Aubree searched his eyes and hoped to find some kind of grace there.

It was almost worse for her guilty conscience that he seemed to be capable of that and more.

The look in his eyes and the set of his expression made it clear that he didn't see her in a bad light.

He looked, at least to her, like he didn't blame her at all.

He was too good for words.

"Why don't you come over here," he gestured toward the side of the pool where he was standing. "You've been working yourself incredibly hard and I'm worried that you might have worked yourself too hard today. I want to make sure that you're safe in case your legs go weak."

Weak.

Well that was one way to say it.

She'd felt that way over and over since she'd arrived at The Refuge. When her dreams weren't filled with fear and darkness,she'd found Ruben in her thoughts. The warmth of his smile and his touch had brought her through some of the darkest times when she found herself shaking and crying.

And maybe that's where she'd gone wrong.

As much as she'd messed up, she was, as Ruben had said, a grown woman.

She knew that she could and should act that way. Be a woman who knew how to focus on the right things.

Her recovery.

Her rehabilitation.

And that meant not to make things difficult for him.

He'd asked her to come to his side of the pool.

So she did.

She walked across the pool to the side, keeping more than an arm's length away from him, but before either of them could say anything she looked at him and saw his back as he reached out to grab the towels from a lounge chair on the deck.

"How did you..."

Ruben turned around and looked at her, his expression open and curious. "How did I..."

She shook her head as she took a towel from him. "I'm sorry. I was going to ask you about your scars, but I haven't given you all that much information about me or mine, so I know that it's kind of rich for me to even ask-"

"I was working a job with some of the men in my unit of the Army." He lifted the towel to his hair and rubbed a little of the water out of it before draping it over his shoulders. "One of the younger guys was tired of listening to the 'old men' in the unit. We operated with a lot of caution. You have to do that if you work with demolitions. And Chuck? He was a little bit of an ass. We didn't want him on our team, but the brass didn't want to hear it.

"Apparently someone owed his father for something so Chuck, which is what we called him because we wanted to Chuck him out of the unit. He thought we called him that because he liked to laugh."

She smiled softly. "Chuckles?"

"That's how we got away with the nickname."

Aubree used her towel to gently blot her exposed skin.

"It was his laughter that I heard right before the explosion." She saw Ruben's whole expression sink. "He'd always talked about the fireworks displays that his father let him set off at home, so from what they could gather later when they went through his things, is that he wanted to show us that we'd been sidelining him unfairly. He'd used his father's money and contacts to bring in incendiaries and put on a show that the base would never forget."

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