Close To Danger (Westen #4)(51)
“No. Someone else you need to talk to.” He held her gaze as the phone dialed in his hand. A deep voice that sounded a little familiar answered.
“What’s wrong, Bulldog?”
*
The timer on the oven broke the lovely silence surrounding Chloe as she snuggled against Wes. It took several beeps before he moved to leave the bed.
“Don’t go,” she murmured.
“Time to put the steaks on,” he said as she tried to pull him back in the bed.
“We don’t need to eat. We can just stay buried in here ’til all the snow melts.” Given how good sex with him was, the idea sounded better and better to her.
He chuckled as he pulled on his jeans. “Sorry, counselor. Despite what you might’ve heard, man cannot live by sex alone. We need meat.” Reaching down, he kissed her for a few more beeps of the timer then drew the covers up around her. “You stay here. About fifteen more minutes and then dinner will be ready.”
Drawing his pillow up against her, she watched him move about the kitchen through the open doorway. The man had a smooth, efficient and confident manner about him. From the first time she’d seen him late last spring, she’d been unable to truly put him out of her mind.
Suddenly a grey and white furry body appeared on the side of the bed. Rolling over, she scratched the wolf-dog’s head and looked into his blue eyes, so reminiscent of Wes’s.
“Hello, W?den. Is it starting to smell good out there? Do you think I should get dressed and go help?”
As if understanding what she asked, W?den walked around the bed wagging his bushy tail, looking much more like an overgrown puppy than a fierce wolf.
“Okay,” she said, grabbing her clothes from the floor where they’d landed earlier. “I get the message.”
A few minutes later, dressed but still chilly from the loss of body heat from Wes and the covers, she stood in front of the roaring fire. On the fireplace mantle sat some framed pictures. One of an elderly couple and a teenage boy, taken about twenty years ago.
“That’s Nana and Poppy,” Wes said behind her as he set plates on the island counter. “They raised me after my mom, Carla, left to go live with her last deadbeat boyfriend.”
“By the smiles on all your faces, they love you very much.”
“They did. Nana died my junior year of college. Poppy not long after I made into the Army Rangers.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Do you keep in contact with your mother?”
Wes shook his head as he laid the butter and sour cream onto the counter between the plates. “Last time I heard anything about her was from Nana about a year before she died. Carla was living in some sort of back-to-nature commune in the southwest. After Nana died, neither Poppy nor I made an effort to find out anything about her.”
The tenor of his voice told Chloe that conversation thread was done. He’d answer no more questions about his mother. Picking up the other framed picture of a group of men in combat fatigues, all armed and gathered around a sand-colored Humvee-looking vehicle, she carried it over to the counter. “And this is you in where? Iraq or Afghanistan?”
He cut up one steak and put the pieces into a dog bowl on the floor for W?den, then finished loading their plates with the baked potatoes and steak. Sitting beside her on one of the barstools, he took the picture from her. The lines around his eyes and mouth tightened a bit as he stared at it. His body went still and a faraway look filled his eyes. Where ever he’d just gone, it was painful for him. Chloe waited.
Finally, he set the picture on the counter above the food. “My first tour of duty in Afghanistan.” Without further comment, he began loading up his potato with butter, sour cream and cheese.
Chloe followed suit, enjoying the companionable silence as they ate their meal, complete with a nice Merlot. So many questions about Wes’s time in the military, his dark-ops career, what had happened on that last mission, and if he was still active rolled around in her head, but she’d learned years ago with some of her clients, patience on her part sometimes got her better results than grilling them with questions.
“That’s Steve Janowski,” Wes finally said when his steak was gone, pointing to the bald, shorter, stockier man with a medic symbol on his uniform, standing beside the younger version of Wes. “You know him as Bulldog.”
“The man you have looking after Dylan?” Chloe took a drink of her wine, studying the man in the photo. “He’s a medic?”
“Best there is. Also a surgical PA.”
Understanding hit her. “So he could work with my sister and keep an eye out for danger without tipping her off?”
Wes nodded. “Or anyone else. He’s good at putting people back together, but just as skilled at taking them apart.”
“Who are the other guys?” she asked, leaning back in her chair, sipping on her wine, her hunger pleasantly satisfied.
“On the far left is Justin Renner. We called him Cannon,” he said pointing at a medium-sized, medium-height African American with a saucy grin, holding what looked like a combination rifle and machine gun.
“Cannon because of the big gun in his hands?”
Wes coughed on a strangled laugh. “Not exactly. He got the name for two reasons. First, because he could throw a football like an NFL quarterback, accurate and made your hands hurt when you caught it.”