Over the Edge (34 page)
There was quite a bit of pressure on that young man. Helga could imagine that she’d have little appetite—or patience for people having a party—if she were responsible for a team of men who were planning to force their way onto a locked aircraft to try to kill five hostile terrorists without injuring any of the innocent passengers on board.
Either that or he was miffed because what’s-her-name Locke was drinking without him.
Helga smiled at her tendency to find a budding romance under every rock. Avi used to tease her about it all the time.
She took the cowboy’s still warm seat as a busboy quickly cleared the table, stopping him from taking a linen napkin that had been placed in the middle of the table. “Reserved for Lt. Sam Starrett,” it said in messy blue ink.
That was right—the cowboy’s name was Starrett. Just like the character from the book Shane, about the gunslinger and the farmer’s family in the old American West. How fitting.
And how ridiculously odd that Helga should be able to remember that—the name of a fictional character from a book she’d read at least four decades ago—when there were times she couldn’t remember the name of the person she was talking to.
Or—worse yet—when there were times she didn’t recognize the person she was with. Such as the man sitting down across from her at her table, giving her a bottle of water and a smile.
It was frightening beyond belief when her world gave a sideways slip and she found herself here. Completely at a loss.
“You okay?” he asked, whoever he was who had sat down across from her, concern in his eyes. Eyes that she’d seen before. Eyes . . .
Annebet, her eyes filled with concern as she pulled Marte off of Helga. “Why are you fighting? What’s this about? Helga, are you okay?”
“Just . . . just a little warm,” Helga managed to say.
The man with the blue eyes so like Annebet’s reached across the table and took back the bottle of water. He opened the top, put it into her hand.
“Tak.”
He smiled. “My mother used to say that. You sound so much like her, it’s a little unnerving sometimes.”
His mother. Marte. This was Marte’s son, Stanley. The world slipped back into place. Thank God. “It’s a little unnerving for me, too,” she told him. “You have Marte’s smile and Annebet’s beautiful eyes. Did she become a doctor, Annebet?”
“Yes, she did,” Stanley told her. “She was a pediatrician—ran a children’s clinic in Chicago.”
Helga put her hand to her mouth, suddenly afraid she was going to cry. “Did she ever . . . marry?” She had to know.
“No. She always said she was married to her career. She passed on just two years ago. The winter after she retired.”
“That must’ve been hard for Marte.”
Stan looked at her. “My mother passed twenty years ago.”
Merde. “Forgive me,” Helga said. “Of course. I’m . . . tired, and . . .”
“It’s all right. Really.”
“She was my best friend during a time when I couldn’t have survived without a best friend. Quite literally,” she told him. “In my heart, she’ll always be twelve years old. In my heart, she’ll never be gone.”
“In mine, too,” he told her quietly, a completely unexpected admission of deep love from this big, rough warrior.
“The first time I defied my father,” Helga told him, “the first time I stood up to him and told him he was wrong, I pretended I was Marte. She was so brave, so ferocious.”
He smiled. Damn, she’d lost his name again. The more she tried to force herself to remember, the more it eluded her.
“That’s a good word for her,” he said.
“She beat me up once,” Helga told him.
He laughed. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“She thought I’d told my parents . . . about something we’d been hiding from them. She was furious with me. Annebet had to pull her off. She felt just awful when she found out she was wrong. Marte,” she qualified. “It turned out another girl, Ebba Gersfelt, was the one who told.”
Ebba Gersfelt had been jealous. She’d seen Hershel and Annebet meeting in the park, and she’d told her parents, who had called the Rosens.
Marte’s son glanced across the room, trying not to be obvious about the fact that he was more interested in watching the pretty dark-haired helo pilot than in what Helga was saying. The pretty pilot was finishing up her dinner with an outrageously handsome young officer. What was that about? Why didn’t Marte’s son go and talk to her, join them?
Maybe it was because he was sitting here with her.
Helga might not be able to remember a name, but after being a diplomatic envoy for over forty years, she knew how to end a conversation.
“I’ve kept you here for long enough,” she told the man with a smile. “I know you have things to take care of. But perhaps we can find another time to talk.”
He was enough of a professional soldier to recognize a dismissal when he heard one. He stood up, pushed in his chair. “Your assistant mentioned something about sharing a flight back to London. I’d like that.”
She had no idea what he was talking about. Was she going to London? Still, she kept her smile intact. “Wonderful. It was nice talking to you.”
“Likewise, ma’am.”
As he walked away, Helga dug through her purse for her notepad. Stanley. His name was Stanley. And the helo pilot was Lt. Teri Howe.
But as she watched, Stanley gave Lieutenant Howe a wide berth, passing the young woman without even giving her a glance.
It didn’t make sense. But too often these days, nothing made sense.
Of course, that was really nothing new. Nothing had made sense back when she was ten years old, either.
“You’ve continued to see this girl, despite our objections,” her father had roared at Hershel on that awful day that had started with Marte’s fists and her angry accusations that Helga had betrayed them. The accusations had hurt far more than the fists.
Hershel had looked at their father, his anger evident only by the tightening of his jaw. “I’ve asked her to marry me.”
Poppi exploded. “Over my dead body! I forbid it! I forbid you to see her ever again!” He caught sight of Helga cowering in the doorway. “And you—I forbid you to play with the other Gunvald girl! From now on you will come straight home from school! You will not talk to either of them, am I understood? If you live in my house, under my roof—”
Forbid her to see Marte . . . ? Helga couldn’t breathe.
But Hershel just laughed. “I’ll pack my things.”
Mother was aghast. “And go where?”
“Anywhere but here,” Hershel told her. “If my friends in the resistance don’t have room for me, I’ll stay in the Gunvalds’barn. They’ve never been anything but welcoming to me.”
“Because they’re fortune hunters—all of them,” Poppi stormed. “If you walk out of this house, I’ll cut you from my will. Go and tell this Annebet that—that you have no more money. See if she’ll marry you then.”
“You’re wrong!” Helga stepped into the room, and her father turned to look at her, incredulousness and anger on his big face. She’d never dared to speak back to him before.
She nearly faltered, nearly backed away and scrambled up the stairs to the safety of her bedroom. But Marte wouldn’t have run, and she closed her eyes for a second, trying to imagine what Marte would say next.
She’d call him a fat pig and tell him to eat horse droppings.
Helga tempered Marte’s fight with her own gentle reasoning. “Poppi, you don’t really know the Gunvalds. You don’t know Annebet. If you took the time to meet her, you’d see that she doesn’t want Hershel’s money. She cares nothing for that, and everything for him. She loves him more than she loves herself, more than she loves her own comfort and happiness. The only reason she won’t marry him is because she can’t bear to be the cause of a rift between you.”
“She told you that?” Hershel’s face was filled with emotion. For an instant, Helga wasn’t sure if he was going to laugh or cry. “Mouse, my God, she said that to you? That she loves me that much?”
Helga nodded.
Hershel laughed as he kissed her. “She loves me that much! Thank you, God! I’ve got to go find her.” He started for the front door.
Poppi was still furious. “If you leave this house, you’ll get no money from me!”
Mother was crying. “Hershel, don’t do this!”
Hershel stopped, looked back. “I don’t want your money—take it, please.”
“If you walk out that door, you will be my son no more!”
Helga gasped, but Hershel just shook his head. “How does that work, Poppi? You proclaim it and make it so? You can shut me out of your heart, but you can’t shut yourself out of mine. I may not be your son, but you’ll always be my father, in my eyes and in the eyes of God. Unless you think He listens to your pronouncements, too?”
For once her father was speechless.
“Won’t you wish me luck and long life?” Hershel asked quietly. “Because tonight will be my wedding night.”
Poppi pointedly turned away.
“Luck, Hershel,” Helga said. “Luck, and prosperity and—”
“To your room, miss,” her father raged, as Hershel quietly shut the door. “To bed without supper!”
And Helga escaped, only too glad to take the stairs to the second floor two at a time. She closed her bedroom door behind her. Locked it. And went out the window and into the softness of the late summer twilight, down the drainpipe, just the way Marte had shown her.
Hershel had seemed so convinced that Annebet would marry him—tonight.
And Helga wouldn’t have missed their wedding for the world.
“The best we could figure, it was some kind of equipment error,” Mike Muldoon told her as they sat over coffee in the hotel restaurant.
Teri was exhausted. She was having what had to be very close to what people described as an out-of-body experience. She was still partly numb from the afternoon’s emotional roller-coaster ride. She still couldn’t quite believe that, after over twenty years of silence, she’d finally told someone about those awful months when she was eight.
She’d told Stan.
And he hadn’t blamed her and he hadn’t hated her. And, probably most important, he hadn’t pitied her. He’d listened and held her. He’d cried, but it hadn’t been from pity. It had been because he cared.
Yeah, he cared—enough to bully her into coming downstairs for dinner and then virtually delivering her to Mike Muldoon.
Teri had been stunned. Again. Stan wasn’t going to join them. Again. She’d thought . . .
Obviously she’d thought wrong. Her whole world had gone through some major gyrations, yet nothing had changed for Stan. He was still working overtime to set her up with his friend.
And she’d sat down at Muldoon’s table, even more exhausted than ever, figuring, Why not? Why fight this? Stan wanted it so much—one of them deserved to get exactly what they wanted.
It had been awkward again at first, sitting there alone with Muldoon. The ensign was remarkably bad at small talk. Still, she’d managed to get him going by asking him questions about Stan.
Muldoon admired the senior chief possibly even more than she did. And he was full of some pretty wild stories—wild enough to keep her from begging exhaustion and crawling back to her room the minute she’d finished her dinner.
She glanced at her watch. It was only 1700. It felt closer to midnight.
“But there was no doubt about it,” Muldoon was telling her now. “We were dropped so far from the LZ—the landing zone—we were in a completely different country.”
“I know what an LZ is,” Teri told him.
“Right. Sorry.” He made a face. “I keep forgetting you’re a pilot. You’re . . .” He cleared his throat, fiddled with his glass of water. Glanced at her. “Too pretty to be a pilot.”
“You’re too pretty to be a SEAL,” she countered, and he laughed.
“I had a good time tonight,” he told her. “Stan was right. You’re great.”
It took every ounce of willpower she had not to pounce on that statement, to ask if Stan really said that about her in those exact words. But she knew she really didn’t need to ask. Of course Stan had said that. He said it while trying to talk Muldoon into going out with her. It meant nothing.
“So you missed the LZ by a few dozen miles,” she said, wanting to hear the rest of Muldoon’s story before she went up to bed. She had fewer than nine hours before she had to report for duty, and she was determined to spend every one of them sleeping.
“Try a few hundred,” he told her. “Like, three hundred.”
What? “How could that have happened?”
“We didn’t spend a lot of time speculating,” he said with an adorable smile. There was no doubt about it, Muldoon was gorgeous with that chiseled face—a nose that was the closest thing to perfection she’d ever seen, those cheekbones, that sensitive mouth and strong jawline and chin. It was not a hardship to sit here and watch him tell his story, watch his eyes light with amusement, watch emotion and candlelight play across his face.
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