by J. M. Madden
She was as careful as she promised to be and he could tell there were people walking wide of them. It made his skin creep that he couldn’t see what they were doing, but he trusted Cat to watch his six. She paused at the end of the hallway. “Are you doing okay? Want to stop for a minute?”
He did but he wouldn’t admit that to her. “I’m fine. Keep going.”
When they got on the elevator he didn’t expect the vertigo that hit when it started down. He swayed and clutched at the slick walls but almost immediately Cat was there, wedging herself beneath his good shoulder and bracing her feet. Harper tried not to rest on her too much but the weakness in his knees about took him down. When they landed at the bottom she stayed propped against him, not moving. “We’ll go when you’re ready.”
Harper dragged in oxygen and waited for his head to stop spinning. “I’m ready.”
The elevator doors had already closed so she pressed the button to open them and came back. When she tried to position his hand he reached a few inches farther and settled his hand at the nape of her neck, on the right side. It placed them in a closer proximity, but her hips brushing against his as they walked was really very nice. The awareness from earlier surged back. It had been more than a year since they’d been together. Seventeen months and three weeks, actually.
And I can only blame myself.
As soon as she led him through a set of automatic doors he could smell and feel the cool, fresh air. He dragged it in, filling his lungs, until a sharp pain ripped through his chest from the movement. She led him to a table and put his hand on one armrest of a wrought iron chair. Ever so carefully he lowered himself down in. Cat moved to his right. “You’re on a paved patio with four sets of tables and chairs. A concrete path winds through some little trees to the left and it looks like it leads to a longer walking path. There are seven people out here right now, mostly nurses. And, of course, your back is to the wall.”
If he hadn’t had the bandages on his eyes he would have gotten a little choked up again. She knew exactly what he would have looked at when he entered the area. “Thank you,” he murmured.
They sat for a while just enjoying the sun and fresh air but Harper knew they had things to talk about. He just hated to drag them up. He took as deep of a breath as his chest would allow.
“How’s Dillon?”
Silence stretched between them and he wondered if she’d even respond.
“She’s fine. Growing like a weed. Becoming a young woman.”
Harper swallowed hard, devastation rolling through him. He thought he wanted to know but maybe he didn’t. Fuck. The thought of the time that he had lost with his almost teenage daughter was the greatest regret of his life.
“I told her you were on a long assignment. She told me the other day though, that she thinks you’re dead and I’m just scared to tell her. She hasn’t heard from you for a long time. Neither one of us has.”
Whether she meant them to or not her words destroyed him, more even than the physical pain he was fighting.
“Tate,” she continued, her voice matter of fact, “has stopped asking where you are because I give him the same answer over and over and over again.”
“And what is that?” he growled.
“That Daddy will come home as soon as he is able to.”
Though he had no sight he turned his head away from her to try to recover his breath. His teeth were clenched so hard something popped in his jaw. Being away from his kids devastated him, but they were safer with him not in the house.
After that last time getting shot up in Afghanistan he’d handed in his walking papers. Though he was only in his mid-thirties at that time he was a little old by SEAL standards. His kill record had been impeccable but the deployments were getting harder. Not just physically but mentally as well. Being shot that last time had been a hard recovery and he’d been tired. Not just body tired but spirit tired as well.
So once he’d recovered from being plugged he’d taken a training job on base. It hadn’t been as exciting as hopping on a ’copter and taking off for parts unknown, but he’d still been immersed in the Teams lifestyle.
He’d had issues with paranoia though. When the guys left on deployment he worried the base would be attacked because it was less protected. When they were in-house he worried the base would be attacked. The terrorists had taken out bounties on all snipers’ heads and he worried that he, himself, would draw danger to the States. To his family. When he’d been in the Teams the target on his back had felt so real. Distance hadn’t helped. So he’d carried a weapon everywhere—grocery store, auto mechanics, kids’ school until they’d posted no weapons, even for the servicemen. That paranoia, and an incident with Tate in the fall had led to his breaking point.
Cat had fought him when he’d threatened to leave. It had been the most bitter fight they’d ever had because they’d repeated it so many times. But the nightmare of waking up and seeing his four-year old son holding his loaded side arm out to his sleeping wife, barrel first, had literally terrified him. He’d kept the M11 Sig Sauer 9mm on the bedside table beside him at night because he had dreams of being caught unaware by terrorists. Cat hadn’t liked it, but she’d understood his need to feel safe when he was home. In the desert or wherever he was sent, he had the weapon on or mere inches away twenty-four seven. It was difficult to try to give it up when he came home after so many years of his life depending upon keeping it close.
That night had cemented in his head how wrong it was for him to subject his kids to his neuroses. If the kids needed Cat in the night they’d go straight to the master bedroom where they slept. First he’d gotten an apartment a few blocks away, coming home for dinner and seeing the kids off to school in the mornings then going to training, but that had seemed to confuse them. For a couple of weeks they carried on that jagged schedule until Cat had put her foot down. He needed to move back into the house. They would deal with his issues together as a family, get counseling. But he hadn’t done it. Their safety was paramount and he just couldn’t be near them.
“Hawthorn and the others still come over to check on us sometimes. His little boy is on the T-ball team with Tate. And Katey and Lucas have us over for dinner occasionally.”
Gratitude tightened Harper’s throat, making it hard to swallow. He couldn’t be there in Virginia but his Team had stepped in like they’d promised they would. They’d carried his Swiss-cheesed, two hundred and seventy pound ass out of Kandahar and they were still carrying him three years later. Every once in a while his phone would ping with a message from one of the guys but he very rarely responded. Then the longer the stretch of time went the harder it was to respond.
Like the stretch of time now. He knew Cat was waiting on some kind of acknowledgement of what she’d told him but his brain was shorting out. He wasn’t ready to deal with their issues.
“Katey’s still putting up with Lucas’s foul mouth, huh?”
She didn’t respond for several long seconds and he knew he’d disappointed her again.
“Yes, she is. They got married several months ago. And Katey is pregnant.”
He forced his lips to smile, though his gut churned. “They’ll be great parents.”
“Hm, maybe,” she murmured. “I thought we were going to be great parents, too.”
If she’d leveled a shotgun on him and fired, she couldn’t have hurt him more than she did right then.
Cat had a right to be pissed. When he’d married her years ago she’d known being with the Teams took most of his focus. Missions had taken him away for months at a time. He’d been deployed to Iraq four times and Afghanistan twice, each time for six months or more. Then there were too many individual ops to even count. Though the deployments were hard Cat took care of everything like she’d been doing it all along. And she had, actually. She was literally a single parent. He hadn’t been at Dillon’s birth or Tate’s. Christmases had passed with barely a glance. If she hadn’t have sent him a box of treats every holiday he wo
uldn’t even have noticed them.
But even when he’d been physically home, mentally he hadn’t. In his mind he’d always been preparing for the next op. He was on the range with his rifle every day, rain or shine. Training in the gym every day. Keeping that fine combat ready edge took a lot of grueling work.
The only thing he’d been able to do well for his family was leave. And provide for them monetarily.
“You are a great parent,” he told her firmly.
She snorted in that derisive way she had. “Doesn’t feel like it sometimes.”
Harper couldn’t help her with this because he felt like a failure all the time.
“Anyway,” she sighed. “We’re going to sit out here for a while and enjoy the day. Then we’re going to go back up to the room to talk to the doctor and he’s going to change our lives with his incredible news. Sound okay to you?”
He nodded slightly, willing to go along with her fairy tale for a little while.
Chapter Three
When they arrived back at his room Harper was more whipped than he wanted to let on, but he forced one foot in front of the other. The grumpy nurse came in and told them that the doctor had just been in looking for them. She hurried out of the room to try to find him.
Harper hiked himself onto the bed but didn’t recline. Even though it caused some pain through his chest, he sat up straight at the edge of the mattress. The clock on the wall ticked and he counted off the seconds as they waited. Cat paced the room, moving from one side of the cramped space to the other. He almost snapped at her to stop but he realized she needed the release as well. If he didn’t think he’d bang into things he would be pacing as well.
The door hissed open and his heart raced before he could settle it back.
“Mrs. Preston, Harper. I’m Dr. Coughlin. How are you feeling today?”
Harper almost cursed at the ridiculous question. How did he think he felt? “Like I’m going to peel my skin off if I don’t get some answers.”
The doctor laughed a little and Harper felt him move in front of him. “Well then, let’s see what’s going on behind these bandages.”
Harper held himself as still as he could as the doctor started to fiddle with the bandages over his eyes. He curled his fists into the mattress, attacked by a wave of trepidation. Before the feeling could completely register Cat had curled one of her hands over his own.
If he could have given her a look he would have. Instead he flipped his hand over and crushed hers within it.
The doctor took his sweet time removing all the wraps around his head. Harper couldn’t tell if he was doing it deliberately or not. The man murmured to the returning nurse and he felt the weight of the heaviest bandages leave his head.
“Now Harper, I’m going to remove the last layers slowly. Be patient, because we’re going to dim the room. We don’t want your eyes to hurt you more than they already will.”
He nodded slightly, jaw clamped, and fought off the choking impatience.
As the air of the room hit his skin for the first time in days Harper took a huge breath, in spite of the pain to his chest, and opened his eyes.
Pain immediately brought the tears. Tissues were pressed into his hands and he blotted at his streaming eyes, but they wouldn’t stop leaking.
“This is very normal after a trauma like you’ve had. Just give them a minute to acclimatize.”
Harper mopped his face but the tears kept coming. After a couple of long minutes they began to ease and he blinked his eyes open again. Everything was super blurry, but even through the blurriness he knew one thing.
The fairy tale was over.
He turned his head to the left, hoping that the first thing he would see would be Cat. And it was. She’d cut her hair since the last time he’d seen her and the dark strands curled around the back of her ears. Her face was red as if she were fighting tears silently.
But that information was drawn in from his left eye. His right, dominant eye was completely black.
The doctor must have sensed his discouragement because he launched into several tests that made him focus on the man. Harper did what he could but when the doctor requested he cover his left eye with his hand and to tell him what he was holding up, Harper couldn’t keep his mouth shut any longer.
“I don’t see a fucking thing. No color, no variations of gray, no blurriness, nothing. It’s a black screen.”
Cat’s hand tightened on his own as his voice got whisper quiet. She knew he was beyond pissed.
The doctor threw out platitudes about giving his eye time to recover and they could look at transplants but Harper shut down. He heard Cat’s calm voice asking about second opinions then the doctor’s affronted reply, and he almost smiled. His wife would do everything in her power to make things right, no matter who she offended. It was one of the many million things he loved about her, that mama-bear attitude. “I need you to step outside for a minute, please,” she told the doctor quietly.
Harper didn’t hear them leave. Thoughts of going through life lopsided, perpetually off balance crowded into his mind. Diego, a Marine at LNF, had lost his eye in an IED attack years ago and he still had balance issues.
How the fuck was he supposed to do his job?
Cat stepped in close, wedging herself between his knees. She cupped his face in her strong hands and forced him to look at her. “You need to breathe. This is not the end of the world. In spite of what you think, your fucking right eye is not your life.”
Harper dragged in a huge gulp of air, only then realizing he’d stilled as if readying for a shot, though his heart raced in panic. Nodding at her words, he forced his heartbeat to slow down. “What the hell am I going to do?”
In spite of the world falling around them, she smiled that beautiful, soul-shattering smile she had. “You’re going to move to a different position in your company with different tasks. Or you’re going to learn to shoot with your other eye. It’s that easy.”
Was it really though?
Cat tightened her hands on his face and leaned forward to press kisses to his cheeks. She paused at the corner of his right eye and pressed a lingering kiss there, then moved to wrap her arms around his neck in a fierce hug. “You’re still gorgeous and you’re still a bad-ass mother fucker,” she whispered into his ear. “That eye is such a small part of you.”
Harper wrapped his arms around her, so grateful that she’d managed to find him and be here. The news he had just received would have devastated him and he wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t been here to calm him as she always had. He would have punched someone or broken something. Hell, maybe both. His iron control only held so far. Cat was the only thing that kept him sane.
And when he thought about it rationally he knew she was right. Since he’d been out of the service his sniping skills had fallen to the wayside for the most part. Duncan used him more for personal protection and investigation than anything else. He used his size to be intimidating when he needed to, and his mind when it was more appropriate. It was just hard because he identified himself as a SEAL, as being a sniper. He had for years.
No, losing his vision wasn’t the end of the world. It just felt like it right now.
Cat pulled away and looked up at him. Even in the dim light he could see the determination flashing in her whiskey golden eyes. “We’ll get a second opinion.”
Harper nodded but he was distracted. Lifting his hand, he fingered her dark hair. It was so short in the back and cut at an edgy angle. “When did you cut it?”
She looked a little unsure but lifted her chin. “Several months ago.”
He blinked and turned his head a little to look her up and down. Still tall and willowy, just tall enough to reach his own chin, but she looked a little leaner. As if the time apart from him had been hard on her. Her big, eloquent eyes still dominated her angular face, and if they were any less beautiful she would have looked harsh.
The makeup she had worn today had smudged beneath her e
yes, as if she’d been crying. He hadn’t heard her make a sound. Reaching up, he wiped the evidence away with his thumbs, then as naturally as breathing, he leaned down to press a kiss to her lips.
“You look stunning today.”
Cat froze and her breath stilled. Harper cupped her jaw and leaned into her, desperate to find that connection they’d had before. And it was there. When she leaned into him and moved her mouth they fell into the rhythm naturally. He realized that he felt nervous. If she pushed him away he wouldn’t blame her. Honestly, he didn’t know how she’d put up with him all these years, in and out of her life all the time. In his heart he knew he had always taken more than he gave and it made him feel ashamed.
Like he was doing now.
On that sobering thought he pulled back.
“You’re thinking too hard,” she admonished. “I can see it in your face. And you need to stop. It was just a kiss.”
But her kisses turned him on like nothing else in the world. Once she got a glimpse of the scrubs she would know too. It had been a long time since he’d held her, kissed her, loved her. His body knew that release was inches away. They just had a lot of issues.
Cat narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re still thinking too hard.”
He barked out a laugh. “Probably,” he admitted. “But it’s the way I am.”
She nodded and smiled. “But you don’t have to be.”
Harper wished he could rid himself of the anxiety that plagued him. Working out helped take the edge off, but he hadn’t been able to do that for a solid week now. Damn, had he really been in the hospital that long? He glanced around the room. There was a whiteboard across the way that gave the date and his nurses’ names. Yep. A week. His gaze fell to the rolling table beside his bed and the tattered brown teddy bear resting there.
“Your boss said the little girl you saved wanted you to have it while you were sick, but she expects to get it back.”
Emotion constricted his throat and he had to look away from Cat to clear it. Reaching out a finger, he stroked down the stuffed animal’s head. “She didn’t have to do that.”
