"Four years overseas. Three of them in the camp."
Lori stroked his fingers one at a time. "You must have been young when he left."
Tendons and veins bulged and rippled along the top of his hand. "I was five. Davis was three. Mom was pregnant with Mary Ann."
"Your poor mother." Poor young Gray, she thought but didn't dare say. Instead she linked their fingers without giving him a chance to say no.
His jaw worked double time. "Damn straight."
"But your father came home."
Gray's grip tightened, painfully. "Yeah, he came home."
"What happened?" she asked, then wished she hadn't His hold slackened, and he slid his hand free.
"He finished out his time in the service, retiring at thirty years."
"End of story?"
"For him maybe. It didn't matter to him what it cost my mom to see him put on that uniform every day. It didn't matter that it almost killed her to send him off to fight in other conflicts around the world." Gray pinned her with eyes that glittered in the dark like the fluorescent lighting of his aircraft. "It didn't matter because the military is in his blood. It's a calling, something he couldn't turn his back on no matter what it cost. Even if it cost him his family."
"But your parents are still together. They're still a family." She tried to take his hand again, offer something to smooth away the harsh lines she'd never seen on his playful face before.
He gripped her wrist and held it between them. "Lori, your training should have taught you better than that. Just because two people live together and exchange a few vows doesn't make them a family. We haven't been a family since he walked out the door to Vietnam."
The bitterness in Gray's voice stopped her cold. She'd asked for this, thinking there had to be something more beneath the songs and smiles. But she hadn't expected an intensity that almost scared her. For herself or him, she wasn't sure.
The vaporizer chugged in the silence. He carefully released her arm with exaggerated control.
Gray looked out the French doors as if searching for something in the night sky. "I'm just like him, Lori. Whether I'm a flyer, doctor, or a ditch digger, I'm going to do it in the military. It's in my blood. Some men can juggle it all, family and service. I'm not one of them. I'm too much like my father, too driven, too selfish. And I won't do to any woman what he has done to my mother."
"How do you know if you haven't tried?"
"Who says I haven't tried?"
Steamy air weighted her lungs until she couldn't find the breath to talk.
"I tried twice. Desert Storm wrecked one relationship."
She inhaled that thick air, but it did little to ease the band constricting her sides. "And the other?"
Silently he stared back at her with the answer they both already knew. Did she want him to say it? What would it gain either of them?
He looked away, and the moment passed. Lori deflated against the bed.
Gray was damn right she'd picked up a trick or two about human nature in all those counseling courses. Her every professional instinct shouted there was more about his father and his family than Gray was sharing. Even so, his set jaw as he stared out at the twinkling sky told her it wouldn't do any good to push him. He'd spilled as much as he planned to. End of discussion.
Lori rested her head against the mattress and closed her eyes as if that would somehow block out visions of the man beside her. Regardless of the rest of his story, he'd made it clear. He had his reasons for staying single. He had plenty of commitment in his life. He'd just committed himself to the Air Force.
Knowing that should have freed her.
It didn't. Instead of hearing his words, she saw his eyes, the flash of pain that had likely not been as well hidden in the young boy.
More than anything, she wanted to cradle that child to her and make his world right. She wanted to comfort the man and thank him for finally sharing a part of himself with her, even if it scared her more than a little and pushed them farther apart.
How sad something that should have sent her hot-footing it away only made her want to hold him even more.
* * *