“Pardon?”
She motioned. “Look at you. Eating like a pig. I’m so proud.” She passed him the plate of warm bread again. “Okay, I forgot, what was it you wanted to know?”
“What your mother said. And I’mnot eating like a pig.”
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“Come on, you,” she crooned. “Try the glazed carrots. The recipe’s so good you won’t even realize it’s a vegetable, I promise. She was just telling me that a man I used to know was getting married.”
“I take it you and this guy were a thing?”
“Yup. Was engaged to him myself, in fact. She was afraid I’d be shook up and hurt when I found out about it.”
“So…are you? All shook up and hurt?”
“Do I look remotely shook up?” But over the flickering candlelight, she saw his expression. “Damn. Quit looking at me like that, Fox. Go back to eating.”
“How long were you with the guy?”
“Three years. Close to four.”
“So he’s the one you broke up with. The reason you moved here.”
“Yes, Mr. Nosy. If you want the down and ugly, he broke my heart. Bad enough that I couldn’t seem to shake it without moving to a new place, totally starting over, physically and emotionally. But that’s water way over the dam now. Eat those carrots.”
He was. But he was still like a hound with a bone. “How did the son of a bitch break your heart?”
She waved the royal finger at him. “Normally I wouldn’t care what language you use. I can do all the four-letter words myself. But not tonight, Fergus. The whole dinner and program tonight is to coax you to feeling calm and relaxed. To help you heal. That’s not going to happen if you get yourself all revved up.”
“I’m not revved up. I just want to know what the bastard did. Cheat on you?”
“No.”
Fox suddenly slammed down his glass of water. “Hell. He didn’t hit you, did he?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Did you forget who you were talking to? No one in this life is going to hit me and live to tell it.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that was a foolish fear, Red. Zipped out of my mouth before I stopped to think. Any guy who’d try that kind of nonsense wouldn’t still be alive. And you sure wouldn’t have mourned him.”
“You’ve got that right.”
Fergus heaped another helping of potatoes on her plate. “You’re tough and strong and can take care of yourself. No question about that. So what exactly did this guy do to hurt you?”
She sighed. “I’ll answer that. I’ll even give you the long, boring, embarrassing answer—but you’ll have to answer something for me first. I want to know what happened. In the Middle East. I know the cover story, how you were hit with a dirty bomb and all. But I want the details. Where were you, what was going on, what was the whole shemola.”
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It was his turn to hesitate. In fact, he apparently wanted to avoid that question so much he scooped up their empty plates and carted them to the sink, then turned around to give her one of those fierce, glowering looks that always successfully made his two big brothers back off pronto.
It didn’t work on her. She just had a feeling this was it—it with a capitalI. Either they had some kind of breakthrough together or he was going to back off from seeing her—not because she hadn’t helped him with the pain, but because something in Fox wasn’t sure he wanted to heal.
Surprisingly he ambled into an answer, as if the subject bored him but he was willing to go along with her. At least for a while. “I enlisted in the service because of the kids. Because teachers need to be role models for kids, and history teachers get stuck being role models of a unique kind. Every day, see, I was talking about heroes in American history. What made a hero. Why we studied certain men and women over others. How we defined leadership and courage and all that big hairy stuff.”
“Okay.” Since he was clearing away the dishes, she stood up, too. The dogs trailed her like hopeful shadows. She slid them scraps, washed her hands, then brought out her ruby-glass bowls and the double-chocolate ice cream. Then waited.
“Okay,” he echoed her. “So a part of teaching history is teaching heroes—teaching kids that all of them had the potential to be heroic in the right circumstance. That being a hero wasn’t about having courage. It was about finding courage. That everybody was vulnerable and scared sometimes, but that the right thing to do is to stand up for people more vulnerable than you are.”
God. He was going to turn her into mush. She heaped five big globs of ice cream without even thinking.
Her heart just squished for what he said, how he said it, what he so clearly believed from his heart. But she said just “okay” again as if leading him to continue.
“So…” He fed plates into the dishwasher as if he were dealing cards, whisk, whisk, whisk. “So there came a point when we came to a unit about the Middle East, talking about history there, what had been happening over the last several decades specifically. The problem, as I could see it, was that the grown-ups in their families tend to wring their hands about anything to do with the Middle East, you know? Everybody’s tired of trying to fix something that nobody thinks we can fix. Of trying to do something we don’t have the power to do. We’re tired of getting involved, wanting to feel like we’re good guys, and then getting kicked in the teeth for it. And because that’s what the kids were hearing at home, that’s what they brought to me at school.”
“And you did what about this?” She sat down with the two ruby bowls of ice cream, then poured on the
