Tortured by Her Touch. Dianne Drake

we’re not compatible?” That was an understatement.

      “Because I don’t particularly like you.”

      Rather than being angry, Marc smiled. “Do you realize how many people actually put up with me and my attitude just because I’m in a wheelchair? They find that if they deny me or do something other than what I want, they’re doing something deeply wrong or offensive. The man’s a wounded war veteran and it’s important to appease him.”

      “Appease you? Let me tell you, your wheelchair’s not off-putting, Marc. But your attitude is. So thanks for the invitation but I’d rather curl up with a good medical journal than suffer another meal with you.” With that, she strode away, the sound of angry heels clicking on the floor tile. Rather than frowning, though, a slight smile actually turned up the corners of her lips. This was going to be interesting.

      “Well, then, we’ll stick to the plan. I’ll see you at lunch tomorrow.”

      She turned back to give him a stiff glare, but what came off was more confused than anything, and she hated wearing her emotions on her sleeve, as they always sent out the wrong impression. “Not if your life depended on it, Marc Rousseau,” she said, trying to remain rigid, although her insides were quivering. “Not if your life depended on it!”

      Anne snuggled down on her sofa with a glass of white grape juice and a medical journal and a soft Schubert quintet playing in the background. She wasn’t really so physically tired as she was mentally stressed. Nothing had gone well today. Two of her patients had had emotional breaks—big ones. One had tried to jump out her window until he remembered her office was on the first floor, and then he’d simply smashed furniture. After which he’d apologized and offered to pay for the damages. The other had sat in her office and wept uncontrollably for over an hour, until she’d finally had him sedated and checked in for a night of observation.

      Shutting her eyes, she rotated her ankles for a moment, then sank further back into the sofa pillows, not sure if, when the time came, she’d be able to get up and make it all the way upstairs to the bedroom.

      She really did hate this house. Hated everything in it because it stood for a happier time—a time when love had been fresh and exciting and she’d known it would last forever. And it wasn’t like Bill hadn’t known she’d be serving overseas when he’d asked her to marry him. He’d be good with it, he’d claimed. There was nothing for her to worry about.

      Stupid her, she’d believed him. And on her first leave, she’d come back to a marriage she’d believed was as stable as it had ever been in their three years. But on her second trip stateside he’d seemed more remote. He’d claimed he was tired, too much work, just getting over a cold … there’d been a whole string of excuses, but by the end of her leave, things had been normal again, and she’d returned overseas happy to know that the next time she came home it would be for good.

      But when that day came, she’d found earrings in a drawer on her side of the bed. And a bra. And panties. It had seemed, as the days had gone by, there had been more and more excuses for Bill to invent. None of them plausible. Then her neighbor, an older lady, had commented on the succession of housekeepers who’d come and gone at odd hours of the day and night. “Sometimes two, three times a week!” Mrs. Gentry had exclaimed.

      One check with the cleaning service confirmed her suspicion. The cleaning service cleaned every Friday morning. Once a week. No more, no less. Her accountant had verified that with the checks that had been written. He’d also recommended the best lawyer in Port Duncan, New York.

      “Protect your assets, Anne. Bill’s been doing a lot of spending while you were gone, and if you want to keep anything for yourself, it’s time to lawyer up.” Said by James Callahan, the attorney she’d hired that day.

      Through it all, though, Anne had been numb. She had been unable to function. Betrayal. Fragments of memories left over from Afghanistan. Things she hadn’t been able to forget … or fix. No, it hadn’t made sense, but it had seemed like her world had been closing in around her. She’d been unable to breathe half the time. The other half of the time, she hadn’t been able to quit crying. Vicious circle. Every day. Sucking the life out of her every day. Little pieces of it just falling away, one at a time.

      She’d almost been at the point of complete breakdown when she’d realized she couldn’t control what was happening to her, so she’d sought counseling. Her condition hadn’t been diagnosed as PTSD, but the emotional conflict had given her a deep understanding of those who did suffer through it—the confusion, the anger, the pain. After seeing it on the field and coming up to the edge of it herself, before she’d realized it, she’d been in a PhD program, coupling what she knew as an MD with learning about stress disorders. It had seemed a logical place for her to be. Where she’d wanted to be.

      For that part of her life, she’d put her divorce on hold and concentrated only on herself. Fixing herself first, retraining herself second. Of course, her intention had been to restart divorce proceedings once the rest of it was behind her. One trauma at a time was what she’d learned. Deal with one at a time. And while Bill had been a problem, he hadn’t been a trauma. In fact, getting rid of him would be her easiest fix.

      So then, a whole year after she’d decided to take that fix, he’d come after her, claiming that her being gone had caused him PTSD. Of all the low, miserable things to do …

      “But he learned,” she said as she shut her book and decided she was comfortable right where she was. “When I got through with him, he’d learned to pick his women dumb and dependent. God forbid he should ever get a fighter again or she might do worse to him than I did.”

      Sighing, she shut her eyes, and while she expected to go to sleep with visions of Bill in her choke hold filling her dreams, the person there tonight was … Marc. And he was smiling.

      “Nice smile,” she whispered as she dozed off. Yes, it was a very nice smile to go to sleep with.

      He’d been in bed two hours now, alternately staring at the ceiling, then watching the green numbers on the digital clock. The harder he tried to sleep, the more he couldn’t. Marc’s first thought was a nice cup of hot herbal tea—something soothing. Then in his mind he added brandy to it, just a sip, but the problem with that was he wasn’t a drinker. Never had been. No booze, no pills. Just a bad attitude to get him through.

      So what got Anne through? he wondered. She seemed pretty straightforward. Even functional, considering her divorce.

      “Some people are made to be more functional,” he told his orange-striped tomcat named Sarge, who was stretched out on the bed, snoozing quite contentedly. Sarge was huge, a Maine Coon weighing in at twenty-five pounds. He’d been cowering on Marc’s doorstep one day, all beaten and bloody, and there hadn’t been a muscle or sinew in Marc’s body that could have shut the door on him because he’d known exactly how the cat had felt—defeated. So he’d taken him in, nursed him back to health, yet hadn’t named him, as his intention had been to turn him over to a no-kill rescue shelter for adoption.

      Except the damned cat had these soulful big green eyes that Marc had been unable to resist. So he’d eventually called him Sarge, mostly because his huge size reminded him of an overwhelmingly large and tender-hearted sergeant he’d had working for him in Afghanistan, and he and the cat had become best buddies.

      “She’s something, Sarge,” he told the cat as he pulled a can of cat tuna off the shelf. “And so damn obvious it’s laughable. The lady’s in charge of the PTSD program, and I’m sure I’m supposed to be her secret conquest.” He chuckled as he filled the cat bowl and laid it on the floor at the back door to his apartment—a door never used, due to the six steps down. Management had offered to ramp it for him, but he’d told them, no, that one door was plenty. He lived a Spartan life, didn’t need people fawning all over him. Especially his family. He wondered where Nick was right now. Maybe living it up somewhere and doing every dumb thing in the book just to prove he could. He shuddered, thinking about his brother’s lifestyle. Wild. Carefree. Nothing mattered. Most of all, he wondered if Nick even appreciated the freedom