kept making excuses to seek him out was attractive. He’d
been bothered then by the fact that he’d felt not even a
slight stirring of sexual desire. He hadn’t had had a woman
since the night before he’d shipped out for Iraq. He’d
missed sex the first months there. At some point, he’d quit
thinking about it. That part of him had gone numb.
It wasn’t that he felt nothing. Grief was his constant
companion, anger looking over its shoulder. He had
unpredictable bursts of fear. Once in a while, he allowed
himself to be grateful that he was alive and that he’d
found sanctuary.
Fiona MacPherson’s pretty gray eyes and cloud of
curly dark hair wouldn’t have been enough to draw him
from his preferred solitude. Not if something else about
her hadn’t sliced open the layer of insulation that had
kept him distant from the rest of humanity.
So what was different about her? What had he
sensed, from the moment their eyes first met?
He kept following her around in search of answers,
not out of lust.
John gave a grunt that might have been a rusty laugh.
Well, not entirely out of lust, he amended.
The sound he’d made brought her head around,
although neither of the girls seemed to hear. When
Fiona saw him leaning against the wall, she smiled. As
if glad he was still here.
There, he thought in shock, might be his answer.
She saw him. Really saw him. Not as a Heathcliff she
was bent on seducing as part of a weekend’s adventure,
but as if she were interested in him as a person. As if
she might even like him.
In fact, she was the only person outside family and
old friends who’d ever bothered to wonder if he suffered
from PTSD—and he could tell she had been curious,
even if she hadn’t meant to ask. He’d only admitted to
having served in Iraq to a couple of other veterans who’d
stayed at the lodge over the past year. They had recognized each other. If others had speculated after seeing his scar, they’d kept the speculation to themselves.
What he didn’t know was whether Fiona MacPherson looked at everyone the way she did at him. Why that mattered, he didn’t know. In a few days, she’d be gone.
But he still wanted to know.
CHAPTER FOUR
FIONA COULDN’T BELIEVE John Fallon had thought she
would come right out and ask if he suffered from
post-traumatic stress disorder. She didn’t know him
anywhere near well enough to be that personal. The embarrassing part was that she had wondered, and he could probably tell.
In the privacy of the laundry room—where she was
shifting loads again perhaps an hour later—she groaned
aloud. He must think she had no better manners than
Amy! She couldn’t even blame him.
Should she apologize once more? Or would it make
things worse if she brought the subject up again?
Definitely worse, she decided.
Folding towels in the same style he did, lengthwise in
thirds, she couldn’t help thinking about what he’d said. He
needed to decompress, which must mean he was having
trouble with… She didn’t know. People, noise, nightmares? Of course, there was his limp, too. She’d seen how much his leg hurt him on occasion. He’d go utterly still,
his jaw muscles locking, and a sheen of sweat would
break out on his face. Was he continuing to do physical
therapy, or had he recovered as much as he was going to?
“Gee, why don’t I just ask him?” she said aloud,
rolling her eyes.
His voice came from behind her, mild but impossible
to ignore. “Ask him what?”
Fiona froze. Her fingers tightened on the towel in her
hands and she said the first thing that came to her. “Oh,
um, whether you have more laundry soap.”
“Why? Are we running low?” He came closer to her
and peered into the tall plastic bucket. Which was half
full.
Even more flustered by his nearness and the woodsy
scent that clung to him, she babbled, “No, no, I’m just
afraid we’ll use it up. I thought maybe we should start
hanging the towels after baths instead of washing them
incessantly.”
“We have plenty of soap.” He nodded past her, where
half a dozen plastic buckets were stacked against the