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

head above water as it was.

He closed his eyes, leaned back in the creaky old chair with a sigh and gave
up fighting the memories. Wendy Tate had turned his summer crazy six years
ago, until he had finally flat-out called her a baby and told her to grow up.
Nate Tate had tried to discourage his daughter from pursuing Yuma, but there
was just no stopping a woman who thought she could save a man's soul, and the
younger the woman was, the more apt she was to be a zealot. Wendy had
definitely been a zealot.

In spite of himself, Yuma smiled, just a faint lift of the corners of his
thin mouth. She had been something else. Yessiree. Only, instead of coming
after him with talk of fire and brimstone, cries of temperance and demon rum,
she had talked of love-and just about succeeded in seducing him.

As he'd remarked to Nate at the time, when Wendy had been doing her level
best to drive him crazy by wearing short shorts and halter tops, "My mind may
be a mess, but my body parts are in perfect working order. All of them."

That was still the problem, Yuma thought. It was always the problem. If his
body had just given up and died years ago in that hellhole, his mind wouldn't
be a mess right now, would it? Of course not.

From graduation day until she left for college late in August , it had seemed
that wherever Yuma looked, Wendy Tate had been waiting. Nor had the girl
made any secret of what she was doing. She was stalking Yuma and she didn't
care who knew it. She even told her own father, when he had ordered her to
leave Yuma alone, "But, Daddy, don't you see? Yuma needs me."

Yeah, the way he had needed another hole in his head, or , a frontal
lobotomy, or a case of the crabs. i.

Nate had finally shrugged and told Yuma, "I can't get , through to her, son.
You try. Be rough if you have to. It's for her own good: '

So he'd been rough, telling her she was a baby, that she i might as well be
in diapers for all he cared, and that she'd better go away and grow up before
she called herself a woman. God, how he had hated to do it! Every time he
remembered the look in her innocent brown eyes when he cut her to ribbons, he
felt sick to his stomach. Even all these years later. And that night, Jim
Beam had looked awful ' good. That was the closest he'd ever come to opening
that bottle.

And Wendy Tate wasn't the first woman who'd thought ' her love could heal
him. Others had tried over the years, but

Yuma never gave them the chance. The one woman whose love should have healed
him, the woman who had waited throughout his long years in t Vietnam and in
the POW camp, ; the one woman he honestly believed really had loved him, had
walked out finally, unable to take any more. ' That was another one of the