“I blame that on the Orval. That and she was hot. Not to mention I hadn’t seen a woman show an inch of skin in over six months. I wasn’t paying much attention to what she was saying.”
What Cash wasn’t saying was he was so trashed his alcohol-addled brain couldn’t process words, period, that night.
“Lucky for you Easton stepped in and saved you.”
“Cock blocker,” he muttered.
“Right.”
I let that hang, deciding not to get into all the other times Easton had stopped Cash from making a fool of himself. And not just Cash, all of us. Easton was the voice of reason when it came to Cash’s crazy shenanigans.
There was a brief pause before Cash came back to me.
“Zane’s calling, gotta take this. Call me if you need something.”
“Tell Zane I’ll check in later.”
“Will do. Later.”
I dropped my phone to my lap, double-checking Cash had disconnected before I slid my ass to the edge, dropped my head on the hard vinyl chair back, and stared at the ceiling.
When the fiberboard tiles provided no answers, offered no solutions to my current or past issues, I closed my eyes.
It didn’t take long for exhaustion to pull me under.
“One, do you have a visual?”
“Negative,” I radioed back.
Something wasn’t right.
There was a certain feel, an undercurrent of fear from the locals when a terrorist was hiding out in their community. A terrorist with a hostage…would bring widespread panic.
None of that was present. There were no women clutching their children as they walked down the dirt streets. There were no men hyperalert and watchful. It was business as usual. A woman was hanging laundry on a line, a child at her feet with a wash bucket. A man loading baskets of potatoes into the back of a truck that would be lucky to make the eighty-kilometer trek to the nearest farmer’s market.
“Two, got anything?” I asked Easton.
“Other than a bad feeling?” he returned.
And there it was. He felt it, too.
“Four?” I called out to Smith.
“Watching six kids kicking a ball around.”
Further proof.
If Yaser Said had brought Finn Winters to this small, remote village, children would not be out kicking a ball around.
The villagers would protect their young. They’d take one look at a beaten and battered Finn and lock the women and children away.
And now five men were set to infiltrate their peaceful existence.
“Drifter One, this is Alpha One actual,” crackled through my earpiece. “Abort mission.”
The ball in my gut tightened, forming a knot I was afraid would never loosen.
“Alpha One, please repeat.”
“Mission abort, Drifter One. Do not engage.”
Fuck.
“Copy that, Alpha one,” I radioed back to command, then gave an order that I knew would forever haunt me. “Fall back to exfil one.”
“Garrett?”
I jolted upright and found my mom and aunt across the room staring at me.
Years of practice allowed me to shove the memory back into the box with the rest of the shit I wasn’t ready to deal with and I blanked my face.
“Hey, Ma, how was lunch?”
Seeing as my mom didn’t have the same practice I had, she couldn’t hide her look of concern.
“Yes, it was nice,” she answered and slid her gaze to my father. “We saw the doctor in the hall. He’s coming in to speak to us.”
My gaze went to my Aunt Betty to find her shaking her head.
Lunch was not nice.
Fuck.
“Ma?”
Slowly her eyes came to me. Eyes filled with so much worry my heart clenched.
“You know he’s strong, right?” I asked.
“Yes, of course I do.” She said the words, but her sorrow-filled tone was a clear indication she didn’t believe.
“Ma, look at me.”
“I am, son.”
“I know you’re scared. I know you’re worried. But right now, you need to remember that dad is strong, and if you can’t you need to remember how much he loves you. You need to believe he’s fighting his way back to you—to us.”
From across the room—since that’s what I’d trained my mom to do, to keep her distance, not touch me unless I initiated it, not to come close—she nodded.
Fuck.
I was such an asshole.
“C’mere, Ma.”
On wooden legs she made the short trek. When she was close I pulled her into my arms and tried to remember if in the last two days I’d hugged my mother.
I’d like to have said yes, but I knew the answer was no.
Such. A. Dick.
“Love you, Ma.”
My mom’s body bucked, and her sob tore through the room.
Jesus.
I was a horrible fucking son.
2
“Mr. Davis, you look bright eyed and—”
“Cut the crap, girly, you know that’s bull hockey.”
Dave Davis’s gruff interruption didn’t offend me. Neither did him calling me “girly” seeing as he’d been calling me that since I’d hit double digits. I adored the man and there had been a time in my life I thought he’d be my father-in-law. Even though that hadn’t been a consideration since my early twenties, it didn’t mean I loved the man any less now.
I moved farther into his room, praying today wouldn’t be the day I had to face Dave’s son. Dave’s son was how I’d forced my mind to think of Garrett. Not my ex-fiancé. Not my high school sweetheart. Not the man who I would go to my grave loving.
Dave’s son.
That was safe.
That was what I’d had to do the last two weeks since Dave Davis transferred to the after-surgery rehab center where I worked. And every day for fourteen days I feared I’d run into Garrett. The grocery store, the sidewalk, his father’s room. There would be no good time. For seventeen years I’d successfully avoided Garrett when he came back to Blackhawk to visit. Not that it was especially hard since he rarely came back—especially in the last ten years—but I’d done everything, including not leaving my house if I’d heard he was in town.
And I always heard.
Blackhawk wasn’t a small town, but it wasn’t big. And Garrett was a big deal around these parts. It wasn’t every day the Homecoming King went off and became a Navy SEAL. He was loved, revered actually. Both true stories and tall tales circulated around town. And since like me, everyone thought that Garrett and I would be that couple—you know, the couple who met in junior high, dated all through high school, got engaged, and lived happily ever after—people around town loved to share all things Garrett with me. When he was home, what he did, where he ate dinner, what bar he went to. None of this was done with malice yet it killed. Except Dave and Marion; neither of them uttered a word about their son to me. They knew the devastation he wrought when he broke up with me. They knew how hard it had been for me to get over him and move on, so they never mentioned Garrett when they saw me. And I saw them often. In the beginning I’d done my best to avoid them but being the type of people they were, they wouldn’t hear of it. Especially Marion.