Free A Soldier's Redemption by Rachel Lee Page B

store.
    How odd, she thought, looking at the pot. How very odd what had once seemed important to her. And how little she usually missed those things now that they were gone. In fact, even had she been able to afford them, she doubted she would have replaced them.
    They didn’t matter any longer. Who had that woman been, anyway? Had she ever known? She certainly didn’t know who she was now.
    A faint sigh escaped her, and she put the pot in the sink to fill it with water. Indulgences. Her past life had been full of them, her new life was empty of them. In the midst of the storm, all she could say about it was that she had never known who she was? Had no idea who she had become?
    When she started to lift the heavy pot full of water, Wade stepped in and lifted it for her. “Don’t call me a pig,” he said. “I’ve just been trained to act a certain way.”
    She arched a brow at him. “So a woman can’t lift anything heavy?”
    â€œWhy should she when I’m standing right here?”
    Once again she was left wondering how to take him. But this time she asked, emboldened, perhaps, by the fact that he had called her enchanting. “What exactly do you mean? That I’m too weak to do it?”
    He shook his head. “No.”
    That awful answer again, the one that told her nothing. “Then what?” she insisted, refusing to let him get away with it.
    He put the pot on the stove. “Would it make you feel better if we had an argument?”
    That yanked her up short and hard. Was that what she was doing? Trying to get angry so she could forget the other things he made her feel? Or was this some kind of insistence on independence that actually made no sense? She bit her lip.
    He faced her again. “It’s my training. It’s my background. Call it a simple courtesy.”
    And he’d done it even though he’d expected her to object. In fact, he’d tried to deflect the objection before it occurred. Would she have even thought he was being chauvinistic if he had not shot that defense out there to begin with?
    â€œYou’re a very difficult man to understand,” she said finally. “Not that you try to make it any easier.”
    â€œNo. I don’t.”
    â€œThank you for lifting the pot.”
    â€œYou’re welcome.”
    Feeling a bit stiff and awkward now, she returned to cooking. Maybe she should never have agreed to this whole cooking thing. Maybe she should have kept him at a distance, as a roomer she hardly saw.
    Because right now she felt too much confusion for comfort.
    Confusion and fear. Great companions.

Chapter 5
    W ade went to ground for the night. He had no problem staying out of the way upstairs until sometime in the morning. He had a finely honed instinct that warned him when it was time to become part of the background. Wallpaper. Just another tree in a forest. Now was such a time.
    The hours ticked by as he read a novel he’d bought during his bus trip but had never really started. He had plenty to think about anyway as the hours slipped toward dawn. The past he still needed to deal with, the future he needed to create out of whole cloth and finally because he could avoid it no longer, a woman who slept downstairs.
    Not quite two days ago, he’d met Cory Farland for the first time. There had been no mistaking that she lived in a constant state of fear, though he didn’t know why. Now, in an extremely short space of time, she had made several attempts to break out of that fear, to become proactive,to take charge of even little things. And she had come perilously close to having sex with a total stranger.
    He recognized the signs of someone emerging from a terrible emotional trauma. Her actions were a little off center, her reactions misaligned. He didn’t even have to try to imagine the kind of confusion she must be experiencing within herself because he’d lived through it.
    He wanted to kick