Undercover Hunter(54)
“So it got swept under the rug?”
“So deep you’re only the fourth person to hear about it.”
He stood up abruptly and walked out of the kitchen. She heard him taking long heavy strides into the living room, back into the bedroom and around again. Pacing. She hated sitting there feeling so emotionally naked and wondering what he was thinking.
She should have kept her secret. Should never have admitted her deepest secret. Hell, she was a soldier, a former MP. She knew all about keeping necessary secrets.
She wished she could walk out of this house into the storm and get her equilibrium back. She had buried the whole thing so deep herself that eventually she had decided it was a good thing she’d been talked out of pursuing the matter. It had propelled her instead to help out other victims. That was a good thing, right?
She kept men at a safe distance and hunted those who transgressed, and never again had she let any man, no matter his rank, talk her out of pursuing an investigation. Overall, she really didn’t like men. At least not many of the ones she had served with. Too many of them seemed to think women owed them something, and she wasn’t dishing out for any of them.
But Cade seemed different, so she couldn’t dismiss his reaction, whatever it was. She guessed she’d know shortly if he was like others of his gender. God, she hoped not.
Because in some crazy way she needed him to be different.
* * *
Pacing like a caged lion wasn’t helping a damn thing, Cade thought as he strode furiously in tight circles. He kept seeing DeeJay’s face as she told him she’d been raped, had seen a naked vulnerability she probably shared with no one. She had trusted him with that, and instead of being in the kitchen with her, doing and saying whatever supportive things a person should be doing at such a time, he’d strode away to try to walk off his fury.
There was no walking it off. At this late date, there was nothing to do about it, either, but right then he’d have loved to get his hands on whoever had hurt her that way. All of them, including the officer or NCO who had told her she’d kill her career if she accused her rapist.
They were like bookends, he and she, he accused of misconduct he hadn’t committed, she unable to get justice for real misconduct. For a crime. No wonder she’d been willing to risk her career on that sensitive case. She’d not only become a crusader, but she’d become a voice for those who might otherwise be silenced.
God, it was ugly.
He had to get a grip and go back to her. He couldn’t leave her sitting there wondering what he thought, whether she repulsed him now, or if he was seeing her in a class with his old partner who had falsely accused him.
Get a grip, he told himself again and stepped down firmly on his fury before returning to DeeJay.
* * *
DeeJay heard Cade’s return. She looked up almost fearfully and noted how he filled the doorway. He was tall, and his shoulders were broad, tapering to narrow hips and long legs. A perfect specimen of manhood. Despite feeling as if she’d exposed herself to huge danger by telling him the truth, she couldn’t help but notice. Despite years of building calcified layers of self-protection, beneath them a woman still lived.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“I never asked you to leave.” She waved vaguely at the chair and refocused her attention on the coffee she still clutched as if it were a lifeline. What had possessed her to blurt the truth?