Guardian of the Heart Read online

  “But you belong here.”

  Connie’s nod was just visible. “You won’t believe this, and I’m glad for you. I got that only this morning. I’m going to have a child who will be part of this family. That makes me understand in a way I never could before that I too belong here.”

  “But I love you. John loves you. Mama, Paps…Grumps loved you. How could you not know?”

  “It’s different, Noreen, trust me. I know I’m welcome here, which surprises and humbles me every day. I’m only now starting to understand that I belong here as well. That’s after five years. Xavier didn’t even have twenty-four hours. Do you remember your first flight into a battle?”

  “Remember? Scared the crap out of me. I couldn’t seem to make sense of what was happening. If I’d had to recover someone who was wounded I don’t know if I could have even treated them—they’d probably have bled out from a gut shot I didn’t notice while I was bandaging a cut finger. Everything was happening at…once…oh.”

  “Your family’s home is where everything makes sense to you. Trust me that none of it made sense to Xavier.”

  “None of it?” Connie was right, she couldn’t imagine what that was like.

  “Except maybe you.”

  “And when I imagined having his children and couldn’t make sense of that…”

  “He suddenly lost his sole frame of reference here. You can really imagine that with him?”

  “I can, I could.” Noreen rested a hand on her belly and imagined what that would feel like. It was surprisingly easy. “I can.”

  Connie reached out and clasped her hand hard.

  “I need to talk to him,” Noreen looked around the moonlit yard of her home as if she might spot him. But he wasn’t here.

  “So call him.”

  She had her phone halfway out before the truth sank in. “I don’t know his number.”

  “Where would he go?”

  “He only has one place.” Beamed down into the Army on the first day. Captain Luc had no past.

  Noreen closed her eyes to the cool moonlight that washed over the yard and the fields. The one good thing about her injury was that she would get to recuperate at home. Two weeks here was a pure gift. A gift to her. But to Xavier it would be—

  “I have to get back to Balad.”

  Chapter 10

  Xavier sat in the white rental Camry and waited. The dawn was soft, warming the sky, but not yet raising the muggy heat that he knew would follow.

  It had taken him a while to find the place. Over a dozen years had passed since he’d been here last. Back then his transport was by bicycle, not by car, and the change was confusing.

  The sycamores had grown and the big cottonwood was gone, but he finally found it. Kingsway, Country Club neighborhood, Mobile, Alabama. In the eight years since joining the Army, the closest he’d been to his parents’ home was three hours away while flight training at Fort Rucker. And four years before that had been on the other side of Mobile—both physically and metaphorically—in Prichard.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Xavier?”

  “No fuckin’ idea.”

  Answering himself in an empty car. Real bad sign that he was losing it.

  Coming back to this neighborhood, an even worse one.

  He remembered the fight when he’d announced he was leaving, at age fourteen. All three of them screaming at each other. His father, never a man of action despite his size, clenching his hands impotently. The sharp, slicing pain of his mother’s slap as she declared he was no son of hers. He could still feel the outline of her blow on his cheek.

  Xavier had left behind everything he knew, climbed into his father’s BMW, and raced it away. They’d so wanted him to be what he wasn’t—a white-boy genius willing to kowtow to fit in. In Country Club, their neighborhood, the one-percenters were blacks—two thousand whites in massive homes and twenty blacks. He was the only one his age in school and the other kids made it real damn clear how welcome he wasn’t. Even the teachers didn’t give a shit about him.

  He’d never driven before and ran his dad’s Beemer into a Mercedes coming out of a driveway not a mile later. Airbags blown in both cars, he’d managed to walk away. Hid while the police cruisers circled.

  Nine miles away in Prichard, the whites were the one-percenters. He’d been down with that.

  As the sun came up, he tried to remember the angry kid storming out of the two-story brick colonial complete with Greek revival columns. It was hard, not because he didn’t remember, but rather because he did.

  Like his father, he hadn’t been a fighter. And unlike the white boys in school, his skin was dark enough to hide the bruises. The school principal hadn’t even listened, suspending his ass for—while he was being beaten—managing to deliver a pair of black eyes to the worst bullies in the school, twin sons of the wealthiest bastard in Mobile.

  His mother’s slap had landed hard on top of the mass of pain that was his jaw.

  He could feel her jawbone break beneath his fist when he’d hit her back.

  Could still remember her cry as she fell to the oak parquet of the kitchen floor.

  The house was twice the size of the Wallace’s farmhouse, maybe more. And it was as cold as the marble entryway.

  The front door opened. Mom and Dad came out, looking older than he imagined possible. Dad was going gray, and Mom’s dress was matronly rather than the flashy designer-wear she’d always insisted on. Her hairstyle was severe and did not compliment her bone-thin sharp features.

  And then a little black girl, no more than ten, came out the door and closed it carefully behind her. She wore a pink pinafore that looked right out of some old history book. She didn’t move like a kid—she moved like a ghost. I’m invisible. I’m invisible. He could practically hear her mantra.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d planned to do. Confront them? At least force them to look at him once?

  But how could he do that in front of his little sister?

  He had a little sister!

  Did she even know he existed? Or was she as oblivious as he’d been?

  Dad climbed in his late-model Beemer and Mom loaded her daughter into a Cadillac SUV so new he could smell if from across the road despite having his windows up.

  Xavier could only watch them all go.

  Mom went the other way, but Dad drove in his direction.

  His eyes tracked to Xavier as he came even with where Xavier was parked in the rental-white Camry.

  Then he flinched with recognition, but kept going.

  Xavier didn’t know why he was surprised when the cops showed up less than two minutes later.

  Chapter 11

  Noreen sat atop the T-wall above the closed USO club on Balad Air Base. Atop the wall and her stupid doughnut pillow. Her ass still hurt and the long flight back from Oklahoma hadn’t helped it any.

  Where the hell had Sergeant Xavier Jones gotten to? He hadn’t reported back in. She’d ponied up the money to call Washington State, but the 5th Battalion liaison had said that Xavier hadn’t come through security on the battalion’s Fort Lewis base.

  She couldn’t call every recruiter in Mobile asking if they knew Xavier. Besides, the two guys he knew had probably rotated back to their units. Or retired. Or, with the way her luck was running, beamed back up to the mothership along with Xavier.

  For the entire flight back and the long day she’d spent cooling her heels, she’d tried to figure out what to say to him. She knew it had to be… No. She didn’t know what it had to be.

  The commander wouldn’t even put her back to work.

  “This is a medical leave. Unless a doc signs off, I can’t use you.”

  The doc had poked and prodded her, enough to elicit a yelp of pain despite her commitment to not reacting. The verdict of “not yet” had cut out any chance of finding distraction here. Not even light duty.

  With the crew running at full tilt, they weren’t helping her much either. They were somewhere out there in the
darkness on a mission and she was roosting here with a sore butt.

  Balad had become one of the dullest places on Earth.

  She was even too sore to practice Parkour… Noreen had needed an old Hummer that had been parked close to the barrier wall to even climb atop the T-wall in the first place.

  One of these days she’d…

  “Heard that I’d find you here.”

  And there he was. Xavier was leaning against the wall looking up at her. His arm was still in a sling.

  “Heard from who?”

  “Connie.”

  “Connie? How did you hear from Connie? Did she have your number and not tell me? I’m gonna—”

  Xavier shook his head. “She told me when I showed back up at the house.”

  “You went back to— But I’m here in—” Noreen’s head was going to implode. Her brain had clearly shriveled to the size of a walnut and her skull would collapse into the resulting vacuum at any moment.

  Xavier was just nodding.

  “Why did you go back? Where did you go?”

  “How about we talk on the level?”

  Even though she’d hunted him halfway around the globe, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to do that. But she didn’t see any other option.

  She waved him to go around the front, then she carefully lowered herself down to the USO’s rear deck and found her way through the darkness to open the locked front door for him.

  He followed her back out to the deck in silence.

  “Where did you go?” It wasn’t the first question on her mind, but it felt far safer than asking why he’d gone.

  Having told Noreen his real past, something not even his Army recruiter pals fully knew, he found it possible to tell her the rest of it.

  It was maybe the hardest thing he’d ever done, telling Noreen all of the dirty truth. He couldn’t read her face as he described that final night in his home. Punching out his own mother. It made him sound like a sadistic bastard. He couldn’t even claim to not have hit someone since. Fighting wasn’t a way of life in Prichard, but it was certainly a major pastime and he’d learned to give out better than he got, so that others left him alone.

  “Didn’t take me long to shed that in the Army though. Not many guys bigger than me, but plenty who were nastier. My last real fight was in the third week of Basic Training. I took offense at who knows what. Other guy was a street kid from Detroit—even if he looked like a blond Iowa farm boy—and was just as nasty as I was. For punishment, the drill sergeant had us paired on two-man drills for the rest of Basic. Learned he was a good guy. A really good one. Chad went Delta Force about a year before I went Night Stalkers.”

  Then he told her about discovering he had a little sister.

  “Makes me want to go stage a rescue,” Noreen whispered softly.

  “Thought about it some, even as the cops were harassing me. Though one of them knew about the Night Stalkers and he backed off his partner pretty quick once he saw that’s where I served.”

  “But…” she coaxed him back to the story.

  “But,” Xavier agreed. “How do I know she was trying to walk like she was invisible? Maybe she was trying to walk like a ninja or something. Maybe she likes pink and wanted to match her best friend in school. Maybe it was school picture day and she’s normally dressed in punk-goth. That’s when I got to thinking about you and me.”

  For the first time, Noreen really looked at him. Up to that point she’d been mostly looking down at the picnic table on the USO’s old deck, brushing the sand gathered on the surface into shapes with little strokes of her fingertips.

  “I saw what you were thinking of me. Hurt like goddamn hell, I’ll have you know.”

  “I never—” She stopped when he held up a hand.

  “That’s what I figured out. You were looking at me in a damn weird way, but I never asked why because I already knew. Or thought I did. I can’t ask my sister—at least not yet. Maybe when she’s older. But I can ask you. So what the hell were you thinking that morning that made you look at me the way you did?”

  Noreen went back to studying the sand, hard. Like it was the only thing in the world.

  “Noreen. I just laid all my shit on the table. You can walk away from me if you want, but you better answer me first or I’m gonna get some kind of pissed.”

  “I was thinking of what it would be like to have your baby!” Noreen slapped a hand over her mouth. “I can’t believe I just said that,” she mumbled without removing her hand.

  Apparently neither could Xavier as he just sat there with his jaw down.

  When it got too ridiculous, she reached over with the hand that wasn’t still covering her mouth and raised his jaw.

  “I thought… Shit!” Xavier ran his good hand over his bare scalp.

  “What?”

  “I thought you were doing some kind of morning-after I-so-don’t-know-your-ugly-ass kinda thing.”

  “After the amazing, life-altering sex we had, you think I’d feel that?”

  Xavier had to admit that it hadn’t made much sense at the time. It made even less now. He shrugged in self-defense, “It was one hell of a strange look.”

  “It was one hell of a strange feeling.”

  “So what did you decide?”

  “Are you asking if I want to have your baby?”

  Xavier blanched, which was good. At least she wasn’t the only one here totally out of her depth. He shrugged uncertainly.

  “Do you want to have kids at all?” she asked quickly because no way was she answering that question first.

  “Never thought about it before, other than being careful during sex.”

  “Well think about it.”

  Xavier twisted his head to the side as if he had a sudden crick in his neck. “If you asked me forty-eight hours ago, it would have been an easy no.”

  She couldn’t even manage the “But?” prompt.

  “But then I saw my little sister, the one I didn’t know I had, and I knew I’d missed some serious shit. It would have been cool to have a kid sister. She’d probably have been a total pain in the ass, just like John said you were.”

  “You talked to John about me?”

  “Yeah, the whole family—when I went back to find you after driving ten hours each way to Mobile and back. Maybe the strangest meal I ever ate in my life—all that family gathered ’round like they really cared for each other.”

  “Nothing like about it. They really do,” and again Noreen was proving his point. They really did, no matter how strange it was to witness.

  “Anyway, he told a lot of Noreen stories. Then Mama Bee got in on it. They also told me about you going ROTC and turning officer in front of the whole family. You never saw people so damn proud. Only people at my Basic Training graduation were those two recruiters. Back then I thought they were just pleased with themselves for dragging another kid off the streets. Didn’t know they’d keep being friends.”

  He fussed with his sling for a bit. Finally got up to walk around, but it didn’t feel like he was trying to walk away, so Noreen sat and waited…and wished to hell she’d been at that meal. Partly to see and feel it, but also partly to stop the stories because she knew just which ones had been told.

  “I talked to Connie and John afterward some, before I drove to the airport and headed here. Never seen two people so happy, swear to god I haven’t. Made me wonder if my parents ever felt that way about me. Hard to imagine.”

  Then he came around the table and straddled the other end of the bench she was on. She could feel it flexing under her despite the doughnut pillow.

  “At first I thought I’d never want a kid because I’d never want to have the disaster that was my family. Looking at John and Connie and your family? It’ll take me a while to get used to the idea, but I can see it happening. I can see the kind of dad John will be. I’d never be that good, but I can see myself trying someday. Trying hard.”

  Like before, like that crazy morning, Noreen didn’t know wha
t was going on inside her. But she finally had some idea.

  Xavier—big, powerful, beautiful Xavier—sat and waited patiently for her to figure out what she wanted. Even asking the question gave her the answer.

  She scooted her doughnut pillow forward until they were knee-to-knee.

  “I’ve always known I wanted kids someday. Right now I have too many things to do, but I’ve always known it. And now I know one other thing I really want.”

  “What’s that?” Xavier took her two hands in his one big one when she reached out.

  “I want them to be yours.”

  “Mine, huh?” Xavier rubbed his thumb over the back of her hands while he looked at her like no man ever had. His smile was brilliant in the dim light of the Balad USO’s back deck—a place she’d never, ever forget.

  All she could manage was a nod.

  “Well, Miss Guardian, the thought of your kids being anyone else’s makes me feel major crazy, so I guess they’re going to have to be mine.”

  “You guess?”

  “Your family makes me think that doing things in a traditional way has its points. So you’re going to have to marry me first before we do any kid-making.”

  “Are you asking?” Noreen barely felt it as Xavier lifted her onto his lap with his good arm.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that a requirement or an answer to the question?”

  “Yes,” was all she could manage.

  “Seems to me that knowing the answer takes some of the point out of my asking, but I’ll do it for you. I’d do anything for you. Will you marry me and spend the rest of your days as the Guardian of my heart?”