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"Are you all right talking about it?"
He rubbed her earlobe between his fingers. It was incredibly soft. "Afghanistan. We'd been ordered to police, render aid where needed, not to engage the enemy. The Taliban didn't get the memo, I guess. My unit went into the house of a guy who'd been acting as our interpreter. We went there to discuss security at the local school.
"It was a trap. He was Taliban, and those guys are fighting to win. Or fighting for us to lose. Either way, it was a bloodbath. We killed all of them. Two women. One kid who looked about thirteen. I and one other guy were the only two of our unit to survive. Last I heard of him, he's still messed up psychologically." His eyes slid from his study of her earlobe to her soft gaze. "I got lucky."
"Does it hurt?"
"Sometimes it reminds me it's there. Not too often." He smiled crookedly. "Rubbing it helps."
"How about kissing it?"
And without waiting for a reply, she moved down. She ran her fingertip delicately along the scar that ran from knee to groin, then followed that same course with her lips, touching it with feather-light kisses. He placed his hand on the back of her head, not in the least bit forcefully. Lightly. Just to acknowledge how damn good it felt, how sweet it was of her not to be repelled.
Then she kissed his penis, took the tip of it into her mouth, and every cell in his body jangled. "Christ." He took a handful of hair and pulled her up. "Stop, Berry." He kept tugging on her hair until they were once more face-to-face. Hers wore an uncertain expression. She looked a bit wounded.
He ran his thumb across her lips. "I want you to, God knows. It felt amazing, and five minutes from now I'll probably be weeping because I stopped you. But you've gotta know some things."
"What things?"
"I'm not going anywhere from here."
She shook her head in confusion. "What?"
"From Merritt. I'm here to stay. People wonder why I settled here. It's rumored that I lack ambition, that I'm wasting myself in a backwater place. Maybe all that's true to some degree. But the fundamental truth is that, when I left the Army, I was sick to death of seeing blood and watching people die, and die in ugly ways. I wanted to be a cop, I've wanted that all my life, but I didn't want the job in a big city, where violence is an everyday event."
"Violence can occur anywhere. Case in point," she said of Starks.
"Yeah, but not on a daily basis. The last few days excluded, my main job here is keeping law and order. I do some good. Sure, I haul the lawbreakers to jail. I've busted up meth houses, and sometimes bloody wounds come out of those raids. But I haven't had to kill a woman before she could kill me. I haven't had to blow away a boy who was too young to shave."
"But that was--"
"War. On the other side of the world. I get it. But read the papers, Berry. Listen to the news. I want to be where there's less chance of me having to kill somebody. I might--might--consider running for sheriff when Drummond retires, but that's as high as I'll go. I don't want you to get in too deep, only to find out that I'm not who you thought I was, or who you'd wish me to be."
She smiled, but not particularly with humor. "It's funny."
"Somehow I don't think so."
"No, it is. Dodge said practically the same thing to me last night."
"Jesus, I'm starting to sound like Dodge?"
She turned toward him and nestled closer. Speaking in a near whisper, she said, "He and Mother slept together last night."
"Not for the first time, I think."
"He's my father."
"How long have you known?"
She looked at him with surprise. "You knew?"
"Guessed."
"How?"
"The way he looked at her, at you, didn't match the rest of him. Everyone else on the planet he barely abides. He cares for the two of you, and it shows. Wasn't too hard to figure out why."
She related the story that Dodge had told her the night before.
