Harmonia's Kiss by Deborah Cooke Read Free Book Online

other women. She’d try to carry on for Timmy’s sake. She had to be strong. Mark would expect that of her.
    Plus she had to figure out what she was going to do. She’d have to get a job, find a home, settle them into a new life someplace. It felt wrong to be planning a future without Mark. It felt as if she was betraying his memory, or the power of their love, just by thinking about it. She remembered his insistence before departing on this tour of duty, his demand that she would live life without him. She knew that she had made the promise he had asked of her without ever believing that she would have to keep it.
    Could there be a future without Mark? Ronnie doubted it.
    But she’d promised. It might have been the last promise she’d ever have a chance to make to Mark and she was going to keep it.
    Somehow.
    There was a decisive knock on the door of the hotel room, and Timmy ran to open it before she could stop him. She heard him greet someone and knew she’d missed another opportunity to teach him to be cautious.
    Mark would have known how to get his attention.
    Ronnie felt suddenly overwhelmed. How was she going to raise their son alone?
    Why did she have to?
    â€œYou are foolish,” Drake said, his low voice carrying through the living room of the hotel suite. Ronnie’s heart stopped cold and she stared at the man she’d not really expected to see again.
    He looked exactly the same, and she was relieved that she hadn’t imagined him. His hair was salt and pepper, cut short, and his eyes dark. It was impossible to guess his age. He was tanned and fit, and moved with the economy of an experienced warrior. He was dressed as earlier in khaki but carried no weapons. She had assumed he was in the service, as well, maybe that of another country, but realized this time that his outfit was devoid of insignia.
    Maybe he, like Mark, worked in covert operations.
    Ronnie dared to hope. She’d understood what he meant earlier, that Mark might have been captured and imprisoned, tortured even, that he might not still be the man she remembered, but Ronnie believed in the power of love.
    She’d take Mark any way she could have him. It had to be better than him being gone forever.
    Drake crouched down in the doorway to address Timmy, his gaze so steely that the boy took a step back.
    â€œIt is your duty to defend your mother,” Drake said, his voice stern but not harsh. “A child opens the door to anyone who knocks, but you must be the man of the household. You must think. You must be sure. You must defend your mother and your home. You must not allow peril to cross the threshold unchallenged.”
    He had a strange way of expressing himself, a formal use of language as if English wasn’t his first language. Ronnie wondered where Drake was from.
    Then she swallowed, fearing his meaning. If Timmy had to be the man of the house, did he mean that Mark wasn’t coming home the way he had been when he’d left?
    Or at all?
    Ronnie had said that she wanted the truth.
    But the idea of what he might have come to tell her dropped the bottom out of her world.
    She crossed the room, pasting a smile on her lips and managing by some miracle to speak lightly. “Hello, Drake. I didn’t think I’d see you again so soon.”
    He inclined his head slightly as he straightened to consider her. She had the feeling that he was assessing her, deciding how much information she could take. She held his gaze, letting him see her determination to know it all, and saw his minute nod.
    His gaze flicked to Timmy, then back to her, as if they were in league together. Did Drake have children himself? He seemed to have an intuitive understanding of how to deal with Timmy.
    Did he have a wife, one who worried about him?
    Ronnie bet he did.
    â€œA matter of jurisdiction was resolved today,” he said quietly.
    She didn’t understand him immediately, but caught her breath at the