Unexpected Hero

by Barbara Ankrum

  “Oh, no!” Megan cried, sitting up, the Zen of the perfect yoga class dissipating with the news. “That’s so…so… Are you sure you have to sell? Maddie will be so sad.”

  By now, Jase was paying attention too. Gemma caught him studying anew the seen-better-days farmhouse across the way with its peeling paint.

  Laurie continued. “My mother has a long road ahead and I can’t just abandon this place or hope to find renters who will care for it and these babies as I would. Besides, I’ll need the money to resettle down there. No, I’m afraid the farm must go on the market this week.” The woman scrubbed a knuckle under her eye and smiled brightly with a bow to the class. “So I bid you namaste, my friends. That divine spark, dwelling in the heart chakra, acknowledges our souls’ recognition of one another. No matter how far apart we reside on this physical plane.”

  They bowed back to her, hands clasped prayerfully before them.

  It occurred to Gemma how far apart she’d grown from any spiritual exercise in the dog-eat-dog world of journalism. Even though she had only taken this one class here, she could feel its loss almost as acutely as the others seemed to. There weren’t many perfect moments in the world, but watching a baby goat leap for joy off someone’s downward facing dog might just be one of them.

  As they gathered their things, several women went up to Laurie to hug her and offer their support as Gemma imagined a life in a place like this so far from the big city and all the dreams she’d spent the last ten years trying to make come true.

  Not worth dwelling on, though. Real life was not found on a goat farm or in a town like Marietta whose statistics somehow belied reality. No doubt with a little digging, she’d find the dark underbelly of this place and the verifiable reality of the coupling phenomenon here. True love was a myth, and happily ever after its greatest lie. She’d come to believe that after Ash’s betrayal, but that didn’t mean she didn’t harbor a secret hope for people like Trey and Holly that they’d succeed where she had failed.

  She hoped. She just didn’t believe.

  Chapter Five

  The men had supplied an abundance of fish for the late afternoon meal and Holly had catered the rest. There were hushpuppies, coleslaw, salads and veggies—all laid out on a portable picnic table by the shore—and Paul was manning the cookfire as the others played an impromptu game of volleyball.

  Everyone except Noah and Gemma, who had taken a stroll downstream from the goings-on, holding red SOLO cups of local craft beer. He picked up a flat rock and skipped the thing four times across the surface of the water and gave a little fist-pump of victory. Damn, he felt good being outdoors again. “I haven’t done something like this for a long time,” he mused, searching the bank for another rock. “I like it.”

  “Skipping stones?”

  “Something like doing whatever I wanted. Walking with you.”

  She blushed. “I hardly think I could be on your bucket list since we only just met yesterday.”

  “Believe it or not—” he hurled another stone in a perfect skip “—this is pretty damn close.”

  Their eyes met for a long moment before she leaned down and found a flat rock of her own to send flying. The stone plunked into the water without so much as a skip. There was something adorable in the way her eyebrows furled when she got frustrated. He’d become a reader of people. That was why his negotiations never felt left to chance. He nearly always had a clear read on his opponents. In the case of Gemma, however, his intuition was only slightly muddled by other factors that he had, anatomically, less control over.

  “So,” she asked, “back home, in New York, you’re…too busy for fun or what?”

  “Or what. There are a lot of constraints on my time. But I guess I’m not unique that way.”

  “Says anyone who’s ever worked for someone.” She flicked a look up at him from her rock search. “I know my life is the same. Work, work, work.”

  “Do you support yourself with your writing then?” he asked.

  She turned over a particularly smooth rock in her hand a few times. “Um. Oh. No. Not exactly. I…I do various things. Like…coffee delivery.”

  He frowned. “You drive a truck?”

  She laughed and tossed her rock without looking at him. “No. But I can pour a mean cappuccino.”

  “You’re a barista?”

  “Yes. You could say that.” She had done that. On the way up in the office. Her rock skipped once and disappeared with a loud ka-plunk. “Darn! You know how most kids are soccer stars or they can do the high jump or win doubles matches? Me? I never mastered any of that. I run. That’s all I really do well. Do you run?”

  “I do, actually. I know Central Park backward and forward.”

  “Oh!” she said, clasping her hands together. “I’d love to run there. Those paths are in so many movies, you know? I think I’d almost recognize them if I saw them in person.”

  “Someday, you’ll have to take a run with me there.”

  A quick flick of a smile was all that offer earned him and she started moving downstream again. “I think I just need to find a flatter stone.”

  He lifted one from the bank. “Try this one. Here,” he said, moving behind her and sliding the rock into her hand. “Let me show you.” Such an obvious move, that for a moment she froze in his arms. But he closed his fingers around the rock and with her backside against him, one arm touching her waist, he flattened out her trajectory and together they sent the rock flying. Four perfect skips across the flat skim of water before the stone disappeared.

  “Ooh! Look at that!” She spun around, literally jumping up and down. He took a deliberate step back.

  “Ahhh. I’m such a dork,” she said, tucking her hair behind one ear, suddenly embarrassed. “Small things, you know?”

  “No. You’re refreshing.”

  “Refreshing? You make me sound like a Pepsi,” she teased, but the touch they’d just shared lingered between them like something intangible. He wanted to touch her again.

  Instead, he laughed.

  “I’m pretty sure my dorkiness comes from being an only child,” she explained, taking a few steps down the beach. He followed her. “Overt adult participation where none should tread. Hence my literary obsession. I’d read cereal boxes if they had copy on them. But kid stuff? The sports? I think I missed out on some of that. You, on the other hand—” she gave him the up and down “—look like you must have starred in every sport there was. And then, of course, the military. That’s like one big sports team. Of…” she added, “amazingly heroic athletes.”

  “Right. The military must look like that from the outside.”

  “And from the inside?” she asked.

  He picked up another rock and sent it flying. “From the inside, that’s the only place I ever felt like I fit in.”

  “Really.” She turned to look at him then. “How so?”

  He wasn’t sure how to answer that question. Or whether to answer at all. “No one signs up for what war really is. We sign up for what we think war will be. Or who we believe we’ll be in it. But war is like…like a steel forge. What battle doesn’t completely annihilate, it changes. Like alchemy. You enter as one element and come out an entirely different one.”

  “And yet, you feel like you fit in there?”

  “I found myself there. But that had as much to do with those guys back there as anything.” He glanced back at the campfire. “We, all of us, changed together and for the most part, that bond should never be broken.”

  “I don’t really know them,” she said, “but they seem like a loyal bunch. True friends, friends who know each other inside and out, they’re hard to come by. Almost impossible really.”

  “She says, speaking from experience?” She was standing close to him. Close enough that he could smell the hint of shampoo in her silky dark hair and whatever scent she’d put on today—something clean and warm and lemony. At his question, an expression crossed her face that he read as pain, but she erased that quic
kly, smiling up at him.

  “Nobody gets out unscathed, right? But what I meant to say was, I like your friends. All of them.”

  “They like you, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh. That’s the word going around.”

  “They’re talking about me?” She fanned her face with her hand and an embarrassed smile. “Oof!”

  “Actually, they just mentioned how much you seemed to like the goats.”

  That made her laugh. “Oh, the goats. Have you ever—?”

  He brushed the sand off his hands. “Nah. I’m not a yoga guy.”

  “Me neither, but they may have just made a convert of me. And you know, if I’m not mistaken, Jase seemed kind of interested when the instructor mentioned she was selling her farm.”

  “Really? Jase was interested in something there, but I’m not sure he was interested in the goats.”

  “Hmm, Megan?” she murmured, walking along beside him as they headed back to the group. “She’s divorced, I take it?”

  “Yeah.” So he’d heard from Holly, who’d grown closer to Megan after Tommy’s death.

  “So,” Gemma said, “maybe Marietta is not all so happily ever after?”

  He turned a curious look at her. “Sorry to burst your black cloud, but she moved back here after her divorce. From San Francisco.”

  “Oh. Sorry. That did sound cynical, didn’t it?”

  “Statistics don’t lie. Marriages fail. Everywhere, I guess.”

  “Have you ever been married?” she asked, staring out over the water as they walked.

  Her question caught him off guard. “No. You?”

  She shook her head. “Almost. But no.”

  “Almost? Engaged then?” He regretted his question almost as soon as he asked it. “Sorry, you don’t have to answer that. That’s none of my business.”

  She moaned with a little chuckle and stopped walking. “No, it’s all right. It’s an embarrassing story, but I’ve already fallen on my face in front of you, so…what’s a little getting-left-at-the-altar story?”

  He stopped dead and turned. “No. You’re kidding me.”

  She sighed. “This is not normally a second date confession, but since we only have the weekend…yes. Right in the middle of our vows. Turned out, he was secretly seeing someone else who he later ended up actually marrying. But truthfully, that was the best thing. Really the best thing. He wasn’t such a good guy after all. And she’s welcome to him.”

  Noah tightened his fist, imagining decking the bastard—whoever he was—for putting pain like that in her eyes. Feeling protective of this woman he’d only just met blindsided him. She didn’t really strike him as the kind of woman who needed a man to protect her.

  Except for that fragility he glimpsed now and then. That fear he’d see, a heartbeat before she hid that emotion from the world. She might be afraid, but she’d be damned if she’d show him. Which only made her telling him this story all the more extraordinary.

  He glanced back at the volleyball game, and Paul tending the fire, feeling ashamed that in all the years he’d known them, he’d never been even a fraction as forthcoming as Gemma had just been to him. Whatever stories he’d told them about himself, in the rare moments he had, had been made up of whole cloth and bore little resemblance to his real life. Not that he didn’t want them to know. The lie he’d told had taken on a life of its own and by the time he trusted all of them with his actual life in Afghanistan, telling the truth about himself could only have been construed as a bona fide knife in the back.

  This dilemma haunted him still. In fact, even before coming this weekend, he had already decided that this would be his last reunion with them. Eventually, the truth would catch up with him and he couldn’t face any of them when it did. And maybe that’s why having Gemma alongside him had seemed, at first, so appealing. She’d be a smokescreen. A filter, even. A way to dodge the intimate questions.

  He may have told himself that, but here he was, wanting to punch out her ex-fiancé for breaking her heart. Damn. What the hell was wrong with him? This week would be over before he could blink and she’d be in his rearview mirror.

  “Anyway,” she went on, brightly, “things are looking up for Trey and Holly, since Marietta seems to be defying the odds.”

  “If anyone can,” he conceded, “it will be them. They went a long way to find each other.”

  *

  Gemma felt his gaze on her and deliberately looked away. She pulled her phone out of her back pocket and aimed the camera at the sun just beginning to sink behind the peaks of Copper Mountain, the flat stretch of prairie that collided with the banks of the river and the mountains at the other side. “Have you ever seen such beauty all in one place?” she asked, staring at the purplish light spreading across the sage-dotted expanse.

  “Not really,” he admitted. “This place is beautiful in a way the city could never be.”

  “My first photo on my new phone. Thanks again for this. That really was very kind of you.”

  He smiled down at her. “The least I could do for your being my plus-one.”

  “This light really flecks your eyes with gold.” She lifted the phone and snapped a photo of him, eliciting a small frown between his brows, and he turned away.

  “C’mon. You must have women tell you all the time you have beautiful eyes.”

  “You’d be the first,” he said. “But I’m not fond of photos.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I’ll…I’ll delete it…”

  “No, it’s okay. Old habits.”

  “No, but seriously,” she said, “In another life, I could imagine you on the pages of a magazine wearing trendy, fabulous clothes and looking all…ex-Navy-SEAL-ish.” She sent him an impish, apologetic grin.

  “Very funny.”

  “In another life, I would have been a photographer,” she claimed, sliding the phone back in her pocket. The rocks clacked together beneath their feet as they made their way down the riverbank toward the fire Jase was tending.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s kind of an obsession of mine.” Not a lie. “I wander around Seattle a lot taking pictures. It’s my therapy when things go wrong.”

  He got a faraway look on his face she couldn’t read.

  “If you could do anything,” she prodded, “anything besides whatever you do, what would it be?”

  For a long moment, he thought about that. “I’d be…myself,” he said cryptically.

  She chewed on a fingernail. “You mean…do whatever you want without anyone judging you for it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I meant.”

  But she could tell that wasn’t what he meant at all. “This is your vacation. Your ‘reprieve,’ in your own words. What do you want to do? Let’s do that.”

  A laugh crinkled his beautiful eyes. “Is that a challenge?”

  “Consider the gauntlet thrown.” From the campsite, the smell of the fish fry drifted their way. The volleyballers had finished their game and were heading back. She could feel the night closing in on them.

  “What if I say I want to drive in a race at Daytona?”

  “I’d say you’d better hurry up and get in line. I think there’s one scheduled for tomorrow.”

  “Or ride a horse?”

  “Well, we’re in Montana!”

  He laughed. “I only have the weekend and most of that is tied up with the wedding. But there is one thing that caught my eye on the way into town. It’s not easy. You up for trying?”

  She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of this. “What is it?”

  “You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”

  Madly. But she was not about to turn down an opportunity to get to know the real Noah better. “Pfffttt,” she scoffed. “Do I look like a girl who’d be afraid of heights?”

  A slow smile spread across his face.

  *

  The next morning, the Fourth of July dawned bright and clear. They had left the Graff Hotel and found thems
elves in the midst of a sparkly parade, complete with homemade floats and veterans, young and old, marching down Main Street. Kids who had decorated their bikes with flags, ribbons and playing cards attached with clothes pins, at an even earlier event, wound down the street too, being cheered on by their parents in the crowd.

  It was essential small-town Americana. So red, white and blue the whole street literally smelled like apple pie—thanks to the actual apple pie vendor on the corner nearby. Kids on curbs waved sparklers in the morning air and every shop and lamppost was decorated with bunting and banners.

  She’d watched Noah take in the moment, thinking he and his friends belonged in that parade as well. He’d stood for a long moment, watching those old soldiers pass by with a kind of reverent respect. Or maybe a wistful remembering. Did he miss soldiering? They hadn’t talked about the war or exactly how he and his friends had bonded so tightly. But what had happened to them was something no one messed with. That much she knew for sure.

  He’d rented a car to drive them to his mystery location—his surprise—halfway up Copper Mountain and far from the noise and celebration in town. Now, Gemma stood at the bottom of a ropes course, buckled into a Machiavellian harness that cut off nearly all circulation to her legs, and she stared up at the postage-stamp-sized platform where Noah stood balanced.

  “When I mentioned the gauntlet,” she called up to him, “I was actually speaking more in…metaphorical nonsense.”

  He on the other hand, looked alive. Despite the long string of moments he’d spent staring up at the course before attacking it. Almost bracing himself for it. But then, he had climbed that pole like he’d been doing that his whole life.

  “C’mon,” he shouted from above her. “You can do it.”

  “Says you,” she grumbled. Then, louder, she called, “Maybe I should just watch you go through first. Get the idea.”