AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER
64
HE DROVE HER BACK TOJocelyn Point. They went out to the art studio where Alex had told him she needed to work on a painting for a client that was due to be shipped out soon. He watched her work away as the night fell more deeply around them. Her movements were fluid, her concentration complete. Devine had seen that level of intensity before.
Me, in combat.
“What’s that look for?”
He came out of his musings to find her staring at him as she cleaned off a brush.
“Admiration for your obvious skills,” he said.
“You’re such a sweet talker,” she cracked.
“It’s sincere, Alex.”
She put down the brush and wiped off her hands. “I know, Travis. My bullshit meter is pretty sophisticated and it hasn’t made a peep while you’re around.”
“But, like all women, you have so much more practice at it than men.”
“You really are far more evolved than many of your brethren,” she said, smiling.
“I try to see people for who they really are.”
She drew a step closer. “And who am I, really?”
He could tell, despite the flippant and flirty content and tone of their conversation, Alex was now quite serious. “I see a young woman maybe at a crossroads.”
Her features tensed. “Go on.”
“There’s a military term for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, though it’s now used throughout popular culture:No Man’s Land. But if you dig deeper, it gets more complicated.”
“How so?” she said quickly.
“Typically, to get to No Man’s Land, you had to take action. You had to move from where you were. So now you’re in a bad place, a place where you don’t think you should be and maybe your own survival is at stake.”
Here Devine paused and contemplated stopping. He wasn’t sure why he had chosen to bring up this topic, and now that he was here, he, ironically, felt likehewas in No Man’s Land. Yet the look on Alex’s face told him there was only one path to take with this conversation.
“So, you have three choices: stay where you are, go back, or go forward.”
“And how do you know which is the right one?” she said, a tremble in her voice.
“I wish I could tell you that there’s a foolproof way to figure that out, but there’s not. Sometimes it’s trial and error.”
She slumped and looked beaten.
“But sometimes there is a sign to tell you which way to go.”
“What?” she said eagerly.
He leaned against a table and said, “When I was pulling a tour of combat duty in Iraq I would rotate through this same large village, looking for enemy combatants, informants, people who just needed help or wanted to escape certain situations. I’d go there regularly and felt like I’d gotten to know some of the villagers pretty well. Established a rapport, to the extent you can during a war. One of my jobs was to memorize every detail I could during each visit so that on future trips I could see if anything looked off. It was critical because my life and my colleagues’ lives depended on it.”
“I can understand that,” she said in a tone that was equal parts hollow and anticipatory.
“It was sort of what you helped me do at Bertie’s art studio. I never would have seen that pulley without your help, but you had been there many times before and noticed it right off. Anyway, one morning we reached the village. I did my scope of the village as we were walking through it, looking for anything that looked out of the ordinary.”
“Did you see anything?”
