All for You

by Jessica Scott

  He’d volunteered to train so that he didn’t have to face the cold emptiness of an impersonal hotel room, since the reality was that he was no longer welcome in his own home. And if he volunteered, someone else wouldn’t have to.

  Now? Now he sat in the middle of the California desert and thought about the new dad who wouldn’t be there for the birth of his child. He looked down at his wedding ring and thought of all the time he’d willingly given up.

  He was a goddamned fool. He wanted her back. Damn it, he wanted his life back. The life with this woman who had once smiled and laughed with him and wrapped herself around him while she slept. Who was as beautiful changing Emma’s diaper as she was dressed up in an evening gown for the Cav ball. This woman who used to ask about his day when he called home at two in the morning, even after she’d been up half the night with one of the kids.

  He sobered, his hands trembling at the thought of his children and the tiny family that had grown while he’d been away. The tiny family that overwhelmed him and terrified him and dropped him to his knees with a need so fierce, it crushed his lungs until he could not breathe. He didn’t know how to feel good again, but he knew he’d never figure it out without them.

  He had no clue where to start. He had no idea how to be a father to his kids. Or a husband to a wife who could barely look at him.

  Trent hopped off the top of the truck. He had a phone call to make.

  Because it looked like he was getting exactly what he wanted.

  And it was time to figure out how to be the man his family needed him to be.

  * * *

  Fort Hood

  “Son of a bi—iscuit!”

  “Bad Mommy!”

  Laura Davila wrapped her scraped and bleeding knuckles in a paper towel and prayed to the patron saint of army wives for patience. Her six-year-old dishwasher was currently spread in carefully laid out pieces across the kitchen floor and counters. And now the cavernous white interior was splattered with her blood. Classy.

  Her son Ethan looked up at her with disapproval in his dark brown eyes, and Laura flinched. “Sorry, honey. Mommy just hurt herself.”

  “You said a bad word.” This from her daughter, Emma. “Agent Chaos said you’re not allowed to say those words.”

  Laura glared at the fat brown hamster that was clutched in her daughter’s hands. Agent Chaos looked up at her with disapproving beady brown eyes. Sitting there, silently judging her.

  She had joked with Trent that he should buy the kids a hamster when he returned from his latest deployment. By the time he came back, things between them had already crumbled but he still remembered the damn hamster. He’d bought not one, but two of the stinking, smelly animals. The hamster cuteness factor did not override the pain in the ass factor of having to clean their cages every other day to keep the smell from overpowering the entire house.

  Maybe if Trent had been around more over the last year, she wouldn’t have minded them so much. But instead of sitting at Fort Hood and working in an office like any other officer who was under investigation, he’d volunteered for several rotations at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin. He’d spent more time there than at Fort Hood over the last year. He might as well have just moved there.

  She took a deep breath and pressed on her throbbing knuckles, focusing on the pain so that she wouldn’t feel the tension that squeezed her heart every time she thought about her husband. She regretted sending him the divorce papers. She could admit that now, but she’d done the only thing she could at the time.

  She could still remember that stupid flare of hope when he’d stood in her office that day. Hope that maybe, finally, he had come home to her.

  But he hadn’t.

  And as time had ticked by and he’d refused to sign the papers and let her go, she’d moved beyond regret. Now, she wanted to move on with her life. Maybe someday she’d be able to think of Trent without the hurt and frustration that kept reminding her of everything she’d lost.

  “You have to pay us each a quarter,” Ethan said, stroking the fat orange hamster in his hands. Laura was seriously thinking about buying a cat—that would solve the hamster problem quickly enough. But it would be just one more thing to clean up after.

  And she wasn’t really up for the childhood trauma of finding a dead hamster under the bed.

  She could only imagine the therapy bills.

  She pursed her lips and counted to ten…thousand. “Okay guys, why don’t you go play in the garage or something? Mommy has too many parts in here, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  Or move anything. But she didn’t say that out loud, because that would only encourage them to run off with some vital component that it would take her three days to identify and two more days to find online and order. A new dishwasher was not in the budget at the moment. Besides, she wanted to see if she could actually fix the thing herself.

  She shoed the kids and their accompanying hamsters out of the kitchen and made her way through the master bedroom to the cache of Band-Aids she hid in her bathroom. The kids were all too eager to use every bandage in the house if she let them, which always meant that she couldn’t find a Band-Aid when she really needed one. She’d resorted to hiding them like they were some kind of precious commodity. In her house, they were.

  Laura pulled down the shoebox that held the first aid kit. She held her breath as she cleaned the cuts on her knuckles with iodine, then wrapped gauze halfway down her fingers, covering the empty space where her wedding rings had once been.

  She paused, staring at her ring finger. Blood pooled on the pale band of skin there, as if her finger refused to forget the rings that had been there since forever.

  Her finger might not forget the rings but that didn’t mean it was a marriage worth waiting for. No amount of waiting or wishful thinking was going to change that. Trent had seen to that. And broken her heart all over again.

  She knew in her heart that they were finished. He had lied to her so many times about his deployments. That alone had destroyed her trust in him. And then there was the rest of it…

  She was ready for the pain to stop. Ready for her heart to stop waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting, so desperately for her heart to stop beating for a man who was never coming home.

  A spike of melancholy pressed on her lungs. Damn it, what was wrong with her today? She was past mourning the death of her marriage. At least she kept telling herself that. So when was it going to stop hurting?

  She briefly considered a shot of vodka to numb the pain, but that wasn’t really a good idea since she was alone with the kids. She barely ever had a drink these days. She sighed and glanced wistfully at the discreet box on the top shelf in the bathroom closet. Droughts were not limited to alcohol.

  She had gotten used to it, this new normal. While the kids were vibrant chaos, full of life and joy, the married part of her life was…well, it simply was. There was nothing there anymore. No joy. No hatred. Just silence and cold detachment overlying a dull aching sadness.

  She simply wanted it to be over. And damn Trent to hell for dragging it out when he wasn’t even willing to fight for them. And the silence between them? Between her and the man she’d thought she’d love for the rest of her life?

  She sat on the edge of their bed, one finger rubbing absently over the bruised knuckles and her empty ring finger. She could hear the kids shrieking in the garage. One of the hamsters had gotten away. She smiled. She really didn’t mind them, not when the kids loved the judgmental little beasts so much. It was a gesture of kindness from a man who couldn’t be a father. She knew that.

  It didn’t make it hurt any less. She’d married him knowing what she was getting into, thinking her love for him was strong enough to withstand whatever the army could throw at them. Knowing that the army was a demanding job, that he’d be gone a lot. But that first deployment had done something to him, something deeper than just the visible scars on his body.

  Once she never would have thought th
e silence would grow too loud or that his empty side of the bed would become too heavy to bear. Once she would have waited forever for him to come home to her.

  But forever was a long time.

  And her faith in their love had died long ago on some distant battlefield.

  Turn the page for a preview of the third book in the Coming Home series

  It’s Always Been You

  Prologue

  Northern Baghdad,

  FOB War Eagle 2005

  Is this hell? Because it feels like hell.” Lieutenant Ben Teague swiped his sleeve across his forehead and accomplished absolutely nothing. Sweat still dripped steadily down his forehead as he walked the perimeter of their tiny combat outpost with his platoon sergeant.

  “Don’t start complaining about the air conditioner again.” Next to him, SFC Escoberra scowled at him.

  Ben smirked and patted Sarn’t Escoberra on his shoulder. It was so easy to get his platoon sergeant irritated. “I was not going to mention the AC. What makes you think I’d do such a thing?”

  “Fuck off, LT.” Escoberra looked down the alley toward the city that hated them. It was a shit position, as shit positions went. Nothing quite like being alone and unafraid on the battlefield.

  “Easy there, big fella. Didn’t meant to get your PTSD all riled up.”

  Escoberra snarled and Ben grinned. “You’re in a lovely mood. Don’t tell me you’re cranky about this lovely little mission, too?”

  “Don’t start, LT.”

  “What? We can barely defend our position, we don’t have enough ammo, and we’re not serving any purpose other than to hold some piece of rock down. The commander can’t even give me a good reason for us to be out here.”

  Beside him, Escoberra sighed heavily and lifted his weapon, checking the field of fire. “LT, you need to quit pissing and moaning about this. The men are going to hear you.”

  Ben sobered and snapped his mouth closed. His platoon sergeant was right. It wasn’t good to let the boys hear the leadership arguing about the mission. “Let’s change the subject to something less depressing. How’s the family?”

  Escoberra eyes crackled at the edges. “My wife seems to think our thirteen-year-old daughter needs a personal trainer.”

  Ben coughed, trying to hide a laugh. “Yeah, ’cause that’s all you need is to think about your thirteen-year-old daughter getting smoking hot while you’re deployed.”

  “Not funny. I’m not ready for her to grow up yet and she’d not even mine,” Escoberra said quietly. “I love that little kid. I swear to God, if some raging hard-on hurts her…”

  “No boy is going to dare come around with you there.”

  “That’s the problem. I’m not there,” Escoberra said.

  Ben adjusted the strap on his weapon. Inspecting the concertina wire. “Does her dad ever come into the picture?”

  “Nah. He’s out of the picture. I’m not complaining, though. She might not be mine by blood but she’s family by every other way that matters.” Escoberra glanced down the road. “And speaking of the commander, guess who’s coming to the family dinner for a site visit later tonight?”

  Ben dropped his head onto the sandbag in front of him. “I don’t want to deal with the fucking commander. I’d rather deal with my mother.”

  Escoberra snorted. “What’s wrong with your mother now?”

  “She called the battalion commander and tried to get me moved to go take an executive officer job. Fuck that, man. I don’t want to count pens and toilet paper.” Ben wiped his gloved hand over his forehead, looking out over the edge of the barrier on the roof. Their single building stronghold wasn’t exactly an impenetrable fortress, but at least it provided a nice view of the city. When things were getting blown all to hell around them.

  “She’s just trying to look out for your career.”

  “My mom needs to worry about her part of the war and let me worry about mine.” Grit scraped over his skin. “Fuck, man, moms are supposed to bake cookies and kiss your boo-boo when it hurts. Mine eats napalm and pisses razor wire.”

  “You never struck me as the kind of guy who had mommy issues,” Escoberra said.

  “Screw you, man. I don’t. I was just saying I’d rather deal with her than the commander. The commander is a pain in my ass.” Ben spat into the dirt, not actually wanting to delve into talking about his mother. “We need to get ready to head out on patrol. Maybe I can avoid the commander if I’m too busy getting shot at.”

  “Play nice, LT. I’m tired of the first sergeant running a wire brush over my ass because of you constantly fighting with the commander. You’re a lieutenant, he’s your boss. You don’t get to tell him how you really feel about things,” Escoberra said. His words were mild but beneath the calm was a temper. Ben knew firsthand and, as much as he liked screwing with Escoberra, he also knew his limits.

  He wasn’t entirely sure that Escoberra wouldn’t take his head off if given the right provocation. “Think of it as an exfoliation treatment,” Ben said after a while.

  After an impossible silence, Escoberra finally glanced at him, then looked back out over the endless, dusty city. It was too quiet out there. “The sun is getting to you. You should drink water.”

  Ben bit his bottom lip where it had split sometime in their last firefight. It split open again with the movement and he tasted warm, coppery blood. “It’s a hundred and twenty-six degrees. Of course the sun is getting to me.” He adjusted his body armor, itching to go out on patrol and do something. “Tell me again why we’re hanging out here?”

  “Waiting for the bad guys to drive right by.” Escoberra pointed at a white pickup that zipped by the end of the road, then stopped. Two faces peered out at them.

  Ben’s stomach flipped beneath his ribs. His heart started racing in his chest. “You’re really fucking scary sometimes with that warrior intuition shit you’ve got going on.”

  Escoberra palmed the buttstock of his weapon. “Call it in. Get air support en route. This could get ugly.”

  But Ben didn’t get the chance. A brilliant flash of heat seared across his skin a split second before the boom knocked him on his ass.

  And then all hell broke loose.

  Chapter One

  Fort Hood, 2009

  Four years later

  Captain Ben Teague prayed to the caffeine gods and waited for the espresso machine to dispense the morning sacrifice. He’d never really considered why an infantry battalion had an espresso machine in the middle of the battalion operations office, but right then he wanted to kiss the man who’d had the foresight to buy it and keep it well stocked with beans.

  Somehow, he didn’t think that Sergeant Major Cox would appreciate the gesture.

  It was four thirty in the morning on a Monday and someone had the good idea to call an alert. Which meant that instead of getting to sleep like a normal person, Ben and everyone else in this clusterfuck of a battalion had dragged their carcasses on post at the ass crack of dawn.

  Ben was liable to stab someone if he didn’t get coffee stat.

  Funny, he’d actually thought he was going to finally get some sleep. He’d slept like shit last night—as usual—and damn it, he was getting caffeine before the morning briefing.

  He kicked his New Kids on the Block trucker hat higher up on his head and counted to ten while the espresso machine ground the beans, then dispensed the precious liquid.

  The warning light flashed red and the steady stream of espresso dripped to a halt. Ben wanted to cry.

  “It needs water, sir.”

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious.” Ben shot Sergeant Dean Foster a baleful look, then jerked his thumb toward the espresso machine, saying nothing further. He wasn’t in the mood to deal with Foster’s smart-ass comments this morning. Not when Ben’s sense of irony was still hungover from the night before.

  “Did someone wake up on the wrong side of the bed?” Foster asked, taking the lid off the reservoir. “Do you need a hug?”


  “No jokes before caffeine. Off with you, minion.” Ben narrowed his eyes then waved his hands. “Now to figure out why the hell we’re here at this ungodly hour,” he muttered.

  Not that it mattered. Ben had long ago given up trying to change things. And to think, once upon a time, he’d thought he could make a difference.

  What a miserable joke.

  “Teague, I don’t give a flying fuck how much you were abused as a child, if you don’t get that goddamned hat off in my building…”

  “Good morning to you, too, sunshine,” Ben said to the battalion sergeant major. Any day he could get the sergeant major’s goat was a good day. It was one of life’s few pleasures.

  Someday, that would backfire on him. Until then, though…Sarn’t Major Cox was five and a half feet tall and about as wide, and none of it was fat.

  “Teague, one of these days…”

  “We’ll go take a long hot shower together and you can tell me your childhood traumas?”

  Sarn’t Major swung at him but Teague ducked. His hat wasn’t so lucky. Cox grabbed it and tore the thin white mesh in half.

  “Oh come on!” Ben threw his arms up in disgust. “It took me at least four hours of surfing the Internet to find that hat.”

  Cox held up a single finger then balled it into a fist around Ben’s hat. “Get your sorry ass in the conference room. You’ve got a meeting with the boss in twenty minutes.” Cox threw the hat at Ben’s chest. “We’ve got brothers and sisters who died in this uniform. How about you start treating it with some fucking honor,” he growled as he stormed by.

  Ben ground his teeth looking down at the rank on his gray uniform. Honor?