Page 39 of Silent Threat
“I’ll be back in a minute,” he called back to her. Then he jumped the fence.
He hurried forward on the narrow path that cut through the corn in a fairly straight line. He came out at the side of a country road a couple of minutes later. Could be the deer crossed the road here.
Or this could be where a stalker got into his car after watching Annie. Cole’s muscles tensed. His instincts were sounding the alarm, but he had been trained to see danger everywhere. Dr.Ambrose had been talking to him about tuning down those instincts, adjusting to a civilian environment.
Cole was no longer at war. He was no longer a POW. He no longer had to be vigilant 24-7. He could sleep, and nobody was going to drag him from bed in the middle of the night to pull out his fingernails.
He turned and hurried back to Annie, hating the fact that not only could he no longer trust his body and his hearing, he couldn’t even trust his instincts. In captivity, his instincts had kept him alive. Now, back home, among normal people, those hair-trigger instincts made him paranoid and antisocial—according to his shrink.
By the time he jumped the fence again, the food was all laid out, and Annie waited for him with an expectant smile.
God, what a picture—a painting of domestic bliss.
To live like this—uncomplicated, a picnic in the backyard with a smiling woman, without sounds and images from hell playing in his mind on an endless loop ... That some people had this on a daily basis boggled the mind. Cole had never envied others, but just now, just for a second ...
“How good is your self-defense training?” he asked, to give his thoughts a new direction.
“Spotty.” She handed him a plate. “The police department gives classes for free every couple of months. Officer Flores does it. Gabriella. She teaches good stuff, but I don’t practice enough. The guys at Hope Hill taught me a couple of pretty neat tricks too,” she added. “Sometimes I work out at the gym. It’s an employee benefit. But I’m pretty much a one-trick pony. The move I used on you on the walking trail is the only move I can do well.”
“I think you could be good at it, if you put in the time.”
“It’s not my thing.”
No. She wasn’t a fighter.
“Who owns the cornfield?”
A subtle change washed over her features. Wariness came into her eyes, and some other emotions he didn’t recognize.
“My grandfather. He’s got about forty acres. Gramps can’t work the land anymore, so he rents it to another farmer.”
“Your grandfather lives around here?”
“The farmhouse is on the other side of all the corn.”
“Must be nice to have family close by.”
“You’d think so.” Her smile strained. “How about a drink? I have peach iced tea.”
He had no right prying into her family business, so he didn’t. “Iced tea would be great.”
She brought him a bottle and sat.
He picked up his sandwich. “Do you know there’s a trail through the corn?”
“Sure. Deer. I use it too sometimes to cut through, if I don’t feel like driving around.”
He chewed.There. A reasonable explanation.One of those cases where he saw danger when he shouldn’t have.
“Thanks for all the heavy lifting,” she said.
“Not bad for a broken man?”
She put her sandwich down and put on her serious-therapist look. “We don’t use terminology like that at Hope Hill. It’s not helpful. Nobody is broken. Broken is a machine term.”
He raised an eyebrow.
She winced. “Sorry. Can’t turn it off. I’ll stop lecturing now.”
