Ryker knewFrancesca wasn’t taking his words as an idle question, and he liked her more for it. As if it would be possible for him to like her any more than he already did. Her gentle manner, her soothing touch, her beautiful expressive eyes were already weaving a spell around him that he didn’t want to break.
Before she could speak, however, he posed the same question to her. “What about you?” he asked. “Here I know nothing of the life you currently lead, but that’s only fair as we don’t know anything about mine. What life do you wish to live, Francesca Simmons?”
As he spoke, he tracked the progression of Francesca’s emotions from tense to immediate relief. This was a woman who didn’t want to talk about her past—not to him. He suspected not to anyone. But there would be time for that. There were so many other things he wanted to learn about her. A person’s path was important, but their heart—that is what mattered, he thought. Your feet might get youtoa place, but your heart is what got you through it.
Francesca didn’t respond right away and he leaned back in his chair, completely at his ease. She watched him, and eventually a smile played at the edges of her lips. “Are you interrogating me, Mr. Goba?”
“In the most insistent and demanding of ways,” he nodded. “You must tell me everything or I will subject you to hours of intrusive questions.”
“I see.” She reached for the carafe, then halted as he smoothly lifted it and poured more water into her glass. “You don’t have to serve me, you know,” she protested.
“I don’t, no. But if it does not bother you?” He looked the question at her and she shook her head, which made him grin in genuine pleasure. “Then you must know I enjoy doing it. Everyone works hard in this world, but not everyone is taken care of. I get the impression you focus more on caring for others than others do for you.”
She blinked at him. “I don’t need anyone to care for me.”
“Oh, but there you are wrong.” Ryker spread his hands. “We each need someone to care for us, whether or not we can manage quite well on our own. We are strong because we need to be strong. I am, you are. Our sweet nana inside is, cooking her wonderful meals. But our hearts are never so full as when they beat in time to another’s. It’s what hearts were made for, yes? It’s what makes them complete.”
She was fully staring at him. “You can’t seriously talk like this all the time.”
He laughed, but he couldn’t deny his rush of excitement at the expression on Francesca’s face. He’d surprised her, and in surprising her he’d peeled away another layer of her wariness, revealing another facet of the woman underneath. He got the feeling there was more—so much more to Francesca than he could imagine, and even now he felt the press of time.
He leaned forward. “So answer my original question. How would you live your life, if you could choose any path? What would you do?”
She tilted her head. “I’ve chosen a path I love,” she confessed, and he found himself believing her. “I help people become more whole, more their true selves. That’s really the goal of my work, I think.”
“The work you did with the soldiers?”
“Well—that was more to help them give a voice to what they’d experienced,” she said, and her gaze shifted away from him as she went to a place in her own memories. Not all of them happy memories, he suspected. “I couldn’t heal them. I’m not a doctor. I couldn’t tell them it would be okay, that they’d get better. Some of them will, some of them won’t. The things they saw…” she shook her head. “I never realized how sheltered I was in my own happy, safe world, until I saw a glimpse of their truths, their experiences.”
“And you gave them words to express that truth?”
“Words, sometimes,” she said with a soft smile. “Or I simply gave them a safe place to share it. To let the ugly or hurtful or terrible thing into the sunlight, where they could see it outside of themselves, and realize it was part of their experience, yes, but not who they were, not really. That they had endured it, but they no longer needed to carry it if they didn’t want to.”
Ryker found his throat tighten at the naked emotion on Francesca’s face. It was emotion she probably didn’t reveal to those she was helping, but her grief was almost transparent, her empathy for these strangers so strong that he could feel their remembered pain as if it was shimmering between them now. “That is a gift,” he murmured.
She blinked at him, and her wariness was back. “It’s a blessing, really. Except I’m the one being blessed. I researched all the different careers out there, what I could do, what I wanted to do. That I was able to go to school to learn how to help people in this way—that was unbelievable to me when I first realized it.” She smiled, only it was a smile she would give a stranger, one intended to deflect, not to invite in. “I was very lucky.”
“You were,” Ryker said easily, taking no offense at her caution. There was nothing in Francesca’s revelations that merited such concern as far as he could see—but he hadn’t walked in her shoes, hadn’t carried her burdens. Eventually, he would understand her, but he could pursue that end as cautiously as she pursued everything. “And you will be finishing your studies soon?”
“Yes,” she said, her relief on being on more solid conversational ground obvious. “I have to present my final thesis, defend it as they say, but the preliminary work I’ve already submitted has been well received. I should have my masters and could start work counseling as early as next year.”
“Ah!” he said, sitting back. “So you would like to become a counselor, then. For soldiers?”
“No—not exclusively.” Francesca shook her head quickly. “I don’t pretend to know everything it takes to understand the needs of military personnel. They give so much more than people believe they do…I’ve seen the barest amount. I’d have to do far more intense work in that field before I would consider myself an expert. But for the general public, yes. I think that would be very rewarding. To help them get connected with who they really are, live their best life. That sort of thing.”
He nodded. “You’d be very good at it.”
“Maybe,” she said, then she flashed him an uncharacteristically confiding glance. “But first I’d travel.”
“Travel! But you are traveling now, you and your friends.”
“Well…not as much as we expected,” she laughed. “We have stayed in Garronia longer than expected, with Nicki’s, ah, recovery.”
“Fair enough.” He poured more water into her glass, pleased that she let him do so. “And where would you travel, once you leave our shores?”
“Paris,” she said definitively. Then she quirked a look at him. “Have you ever been?” She blinked at what he knew must be the clouding of his expression, and hastened to take back the question. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—”
“You worry too much,” he said, shaking his head. “In truth, I don’t know. But the not knowing gives me no pain.” It didn’t, either. He probably had been to Paris, he thought. He would remember that when the time came, if so. But there was nothing related to the City of Lights that gave him pause. And he knew it was called the City of Lights. So that, at least, was progress.
