That should have been his first clue. When he’d first met Lucy eighteen months ago, she had kept herself closed off from others, icy and distant. It had been a defense mechanism to manage the pain and rage from her past. Constantly training, running for miles, working long hours. She didn’t let herself feel anything, and that meant the only time her emotions were free to escape was in sleep. And those emotions became nightmares, violent memories that Sean had helped Lucy overcome.
And for months, he’d thought they were over. After they’d moved to San Antonio in January, she rarely woke before dawn, her insomnia under control. But the nightmares had returned when they came home after her leave. He wanted to pull the truth from her, because he didn’t think she was being honest with him. She wasn’t lying to him … just omitting details. She never wanted to worry him. But what she didn’t understand, what Sean hadn’t made clear enough, was that holding back made him worry more.
He thought time would fix the problem, as long as he was here for her, and some nights she did sleep soundly. But not tonight. The urge to hit something propelled him out of bed. He’d put in an aggressive workout later. Instead, he followed Lucy downstairs.
He thought she’d be in the kitchen brewing coffee—he smelled the rich coffee beans Lucy liked—but the pool lights were on. He walked outside and saw Lucy swimming laps, her long, curvy body as graceful as a mermaid’s as she swam the breaststroke one way, flipped, and did the backstroke going back. He could watch her for hours. She’d swum in high school and college, but now she did it for fun. Or a workout. Or trying to out-swim her personal demons.
The late spring nights were cool, but not cold, and the early morning air was refreshing. It would be another humid scorcher today, but right now the weather was perfect. Maybe there was a benefit to getting up at three thirty in the morning.
Sean liked everything about the Olmos Park house he’d picked out for them, but the pool had sold him. It wasn’t as fancy as some of the others—no rock walls or elegant waterfalls or curving design. It was a large, black-bottomed rectangle and the only added touches were custom tiles along the edges and a raised infinity hot tub that dropped water into the pool below. When Lucy first saw the pool she grinned like a kid, then jumped in fully clothed. Such behavior was out of character, but also a testament to her complete and total joy, justifying Sean’s decision to purchase the house and surprise her.
Sean wanted that Lucy back. The Lucy he knew was still in there, waiting for the nightmares to run their course.
After twenty laps, Lucy slowed down for a few more, then got out and spotted him. “I woke you up,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He handed her a towel and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She shrugged and dried off. “I feel better.” She drank from a water bottle. She was out of breath, but there was color in her cheeks.
He wrapped a hand around her neck and kissed her warmly. “I’m here.”
“It helps.”
“I want to do more.”
“You do far more for me than you should. I need to stand on my own two feet. But having you here gives me peace. Know that. I’ll get over this funk.”
“It’s more than a funk, Lucy. We’ve been back for two months and you’ve only slept through the night twice.”
She frowned. “Are you keeping track?”
“No, not like that, but I love you and I know when you’re not sleeping.”
“The nightmares aren’t so bad,” she said. “They just seem real. They startle me, because I wake up at first not knowing that it was a dream. I think that’s what’s bothering me so much. There’s like a minute or two when I don’t know where I am, I don’t know who I’m with, I think I’m still there.”
“Where are you?”
She didn’t answer the question, not directly. “It changes.” But she didn’t look him in the eye, and he feared she was retreating further into the past, beyond the imprisoned boys in Mexico, back to the darkest time of her life, when she’d been held captive by a psychopath and repeatedly raped.
Sean hugged her tightly, because he had to. For him as much as for her. She grabbed him just as tight. She whispered, “Let’s go back to bed.”
He kissed her. He would have made love to her in the pool, on the lounge chair, anywhere, but Lucy would be nervous having sex outside. And he wanted—needed—her to relax and feel how much he loved her. He picked her up and carried her inside.
As soon as he stepped through the door, the house phone rang. Lucy jumped out of his arms. “It’s never good news before dawn,” she said and answered the closest phone. “Hello?”
Sean watched her face. In two blinks she’d gone from romantic to panicked to professional.
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” she said a few minutes later then hung up. “That was Juan. A VIP is dead. Doesn’t appear to be murder, but the circumstances are suspicious, and the dead guy is a government contractor with high-level security clearance. The powers that be want the FBI to take the lead.”
The way she spoke surprised Sean. “Do you know him?”
“No, why?”