"Lee, Rachel - Lost Warriors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lee Rachel)

But was anything ever that easy? Of course not. She drew his gaze as if she
were some bright, shiny object in an otherwise dull world. Inevitably, he
remembered how she had felt in his arms. . because naturally, she had
managed to get herself there more than once that long-ago summer. Once he'd
nearly had to bite his tongue to keep from asking her, if she had a balance
problem of some kind, the way she was always tripping, stumbling, falling.

He felt the corners of his thin mouth lift at the memory. In retrospect it
was funny. Cute, even. How many times had he caught her and found her
breasts pressed to his chest? Her hip pushed into his groin. With all the
innate instinct of any female animal, she had known how to flaunt her assets
and arouse a man. At times that summer, he could have sworn he'd walked
around in a perpetual state of arousal.

But Wendy deserved better than that, and he didn't have anything better than
that to offer.

He didn't even have to close his eyes to remember how his wife, Carla, had
wept when she left, her heart sundered, her grief as real as a stabbing
wound, begging him to understand that she just couldn't handle it anymore.
She just couldn't handle it.

At the time he had felt distant from Carla, from her leaving , from all the
grief he'd caused her. A normal reaction of post-traumatic stress disorder,
he had been told. To feel removed from things and people that had once been
vitally important. Normal or not, he suspected that the coldness inside him
had been at least as responsible for Carla's departure as anything he had
done. As responsible as the whiskey, as responsible as the rages and the
nightmares.

A good thing in the end, he told himself. She'd gotten out. For whatever
reason, she had managed to save herself from him. She was happily married
now, with two kids and a normal husband, and he told himself he was happy for
her, that she deserved every good thing that came her way.

But inside. . inside he resented it. He hated her for abandoning him. He
hated that he had driven her away and cost himself the only happiness he'd
ever known. Childish normal, selfish feelings. Poison. Just some more of
the many things that made him poison. " " Yuma? " ,

He glanced up and found Wendy looking at him from across the room. "Yeah?"
" " What happens when you take time off? Can somebody else fly? "

He nodded. "Derek Locke fills in: Locke was a local insurance agent. " He
flew Hueys when he was in the army, and he volunteers so I can have time off.
He'll be on call tomorrow , as a matter of fact. I've got some business to
take care of. " In the hills. With men who hadn't been quite certain of him
since he had left their ranks and begun his return to the world.

"You're going up into the mountains?"