by Jillian Hart
Frankly, he couldn’t blame her.
Failure was something he hated, and there was so much of it in his past. Add that pain to the way his leg was killing him and the heat blast from the fire that made his back sting like crazy. It was time to go.
That’s just what he did.
“Hey, wonder man, what about your burns?”
The question that came from behind him was spoken in a serene voice, as peaceful as a lazy summer’s day.
Cadence’s voice. The back of his neck prickled, as it did whenever he felt God at work in his life. The tingle shivered through his spine and into his soul.
She moved after him. “You’re on fire. Hold still, cowboy.”
She still hadn’t recognized him? He waited while she covered him with the charred remains of her stadium blanket. A few pats and the embers were out, and once again he was in Cadence’s debt. Maybe this time he was man enough to know what that meant.
“Are you hurt?” she asked without looking at his face. “Your shirt has a hole in it. You’ve got to be burned.”
“I’m okay.” He turned around and braced himself for the worst.
He watched her go from polite to wide-eyed surprise. So now she recognized him. He hadn’t been sure if she would. Not a lot of folks would these days.
Gone was the long hair of his rebellious youth, replaced by a military cut and discipline that had helped to give him an entirely new purpose to his life. When he’d known Cadence, he’d needed a purpose more than any teenaged boy wanted to admit.
Looking back wasn’t easy.
Nor was it easy to watch the surprise on Cadence’s lovely face turn to disdain. “Ben?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“I should have known where there was trouble, you would be nearby.”
“Hey, I didn’t start the fire. Blame it on static electricity.”
“So it’s still that way, is it? Always the other guy’s fault?”
He fidgeted, definitely uncomfortable. She hadn’t forgotten, that was for plumb sure, and there was no friendliness in her shimmering eyes or welcoming smile on her soft lips as she folded up the blanket.
“Your shirt’s no longer smoking, so I guess you’ll make it. You’ll still be here to torment decent folks for some time to come.”
“The good Lord willing.” He cracked her his best grin, the one that seemed to have an effect on women, but she seemed impervious to it.
She didn’t blink. Her stiff demeanor didn’t relax. Her mouth didn’t so much as twitch into an answering smile.
“What are you, a doctor?” she asked, watching him with a jaded eye.
So she wasn’t glad to see him. Well, he’d known that’s how she would feel, and he wasn’t so glad to see her either. A doctor? No. He didn’t answer, because the last thing he wanted to talk about was his life.
What about her life? What fancy city boy had she married? What was she doing here, of all places? Guilt and regret weighed on him as he kept walking.
Some good soul had pulled his truck away from the reach of the fire—he’d left the keys in the ignition—but the driver’s side was looking a little singed. Great.
Well, he didn’t have the energy to get upset about it. Long ago he’d learned that disasters happened, and so he’d taken out full coverage on his insurance. Good thing, because it was a brand-new truck and had four thousand, nine hundred and, oh, about thirty miles on it the last time he’d looked.
“Are you going to have someone look at that back?” Cadence asked.
“It’s nothing to worry about.” He took another step and gritted his teeth. Wow, his leg was hurting worse. As if the heavyweight champion of the world had decided to take a whole lot of warm-up punches on his calf.
“Did you forget something, wonder man?”
Then it hit him. “My crutches.”
“I thought you might need them. That would explain the cast on your leg.” Cadence had known Ben McKaslin most of her growing-up years. This didn’t surprise her. “Don’t tell me it’s broken and you’re walking on it?”
“Walk on it? I hiked ten miles to an LZ, a landing zone, and didn’t bat an eye.”
Good try, but you’re not impressing me, cowboy. Cadence folded her arms across her chest and did her best to glare at him. He was using that charming grin of his, the one he figured could make even the angels forget his every transgression.
She, however, was immune. Immunity gained long ago.
He reached one big hand for the crutches she held. “Contrary to popular opinion, if a fracture isn’t too severe, you know, like a compound with the bone sticking through your skin, you can walk on it. Some of us are tough enough to fight bad guys, secure a perimeter and treat wounded with all sorts of ailments in spite of an injury or two.”
Some things never changed, and that was Ben McKaslin. The grown man in his thirties standing before her was essentially no different from the eighteen-year-old she remembered. The one with an attitude and an overly high opinion of himself. Was she surprised? Well, she shouldn’t be.
She thrust his crutches at him to keep him as far away from her as possible. “You need to have the paramedics look at your back.”
“I’m good to go.” He took the crutches from her, and his nearness snapped between them like static electricity.
Like the tiny spark that had ignited the gasoline fumes from the van’s gas tank, the result shocked her. And had her stepping away from what had to be danger. “Your shirt’s started to smolder again.”
“I’ve had worse.” He said it as if he walked through flames every day.
Ben McKaslin was everything dangerous in a man. He was too handsome, too charming, too everything. She’d made sure their fingers didn’t touch as she handed off the crutches. The sticks of aluminum clanked as he took them in one hand, leaning now on his good leg as if the injured one was only starting to pain him just a bit.
Just like old times. Only Ben could turn a stop for gas into a three-alarm blaze, and it was never his fault. Where there was smoke, there was Ben.
Although something had changed about him, but she couldn’t place what. Everyone knew he’d joined the military—and not a moment too soon, lots of folks had said. Maybe it had done him good. One could only hope. “They’ve got the flames out.”
“So I see.” He reached into his shorts pocket, leaning awkwardly on one crutch as he did it. Then he shook his head, scattering short shocks of thick dark hair. “The keys are in the truck, not my pocket. Habit.”
She took one look at his dimples as he smiled more broadly, deepening them on purpose.
Right, as if he could actually charm her. She wasn’t even affected. Not in the slightest. She’d learned to be strong long ago. Ben McKaslin was no man to trust. Besides, he wasn’t here to stay. It was as plain as day he was injured on duty and so he’d probably be home for a visit for, what, a couple of weeks? Eight at the most, to heal that injured leg of his, and then he’d be racing back to wherever it was he was stationed.
Sure, Ben had always possessed great and admirable qualities, despite his flaws, but he wasn’t a stick-around kind of man.
She was beginning to think they’d stopped making men like that sometime before she was born, because she had yet to meet one man she thought would stick. One who would be responsible and honorable enough to depend on for the long haul.
Not that she had trust issues, of course, although on many occasions, her coworkers had pointed out that she did.
Okay, so maybe she did, but her trust issues had never been the only reason he’d left the day after graduation for boot camp. And never looked back.
Forgiveness, Cadence. It was sometimes the hardest part of her faith. She’d had to do so much of it throughout her life. Maybe the angels were giving her as many opportunities as she needed to get it right.
So she tried to let her resentment go. She wasn’t the head-in-the-clouds teenager she used to be. No matter how it seemed, Ben had to have matured, to
o. So it was with as clear a heart as she could manage that she tried one more time. “Let me take a look at your back. You can’t go home like that.”
“Sure I can. My family wouldn’t recognize me if I didn’t have something wrong.”
Where he could have said those words flippantly, he was steadier. Lines had dug their way into the corners of his eyes, and gave his face character. It was his eyes that had changed. They didn’t light up. They didn’t sparkle.
She couldn’t stop the cloying sadness that overtook her. A sense of loss overwhelmed her, and suddenly wrestling to forgive him didn’t seem like such a big problem.
By the looks of it, he’d had a tough road over the years, too.
He didn’t look at her as he made his explanations and his attempt at an escape and emotional distance. “I’ve gotta get home. Looks like they’re taking the mother to the hospital. She’s lucky. Goes to show a lot of folks don’t realize the danger when they’re filling up their tanks.”
“I guess no one really thinks about it. I don’t.” She got the clue. He didn’t want to remember old times. Neither did she. It was sad, the years that stretched empty and lost between them. As much trouble as the teenage Ben had brought into her life, he had brought laughter, too. Where once they had been close, now they couldn’t be more distant. Just two people who stopped to get gas during one summer’s night. They’d keep it polite, the type of conversation two strangers might have.
She didn’t know what more to say to him. She didn’t know how to broach the past. To ask if he’d gotten married, if he had kids, or if he’d stayed as carefree and independent as he’d always intended to be. What did he do in the military? How had he become injured?
She was so far removed from the local news. She didn’t live in the same small town any longer. She lived here in Bozeman and went home a few Sunday evenings a month to have supper at her mom’s, but her old life—including an innocent teenage romance with Ben—was so past history, it wasn’t even a shadowed blip on her radar.
“Goodbye,” she said to Ben casually, as if he’d never been special to her.
As if he’d never been the man she’d once intended to marry.
As if her heart were whole and her life as it should be, she walked to her car, climbed in and drove off without looking back.
Chapter Two
Cadence Chapman. Wow, that was someone he hadn’t thought about in too long—and on purpose. She could still tie him up in knots, that was for sure. Ben rubbed the back of his neck with one hand as he eased the truck to a crawl.
The turnout from the paved county road to the driveway was hard to find in the dark. It always had been. Scrub brush, salmonberry bushes and super-tall thistles that had yet to be tamed by a Weedwacker obscured the stake marking the edge of the driveway.
The tiny red reflector still hung crooked from the stake. It had been that way since he was in second grade. One misty morning while waiting for the school bus, he’d been bored, so he’d tossed rocks at the reflector, knocking it askew until one of the bigger Thornton boys had told him to stop.
There was a reason he didn’t like remembering. It wasn’t so good coming home. His neck was a tangle of melted-together fibers, his chest a tight ball of confused hurt, which seeing Cadence had caused even after all this time.
And on top of all that, driving up the road made his guts coil up, negating the fact that he was hungry as all get-out. He had been looking forward to raiding Rachel’s refrigerator. Right now, though, until his stomach relaxed, he couldn’t eat a thing. Maybe he could stay focused in the present moment—that he was just a guy coming home from the front, like so many soldiers. He’d think about the here and now, about Rachel, and wonder if she’d stayed up to meet him.
But the past reached out to grab him like a ghost in the dark as he bumped up the gravel driveway through the cottonwoods and over the rush of the creek. Images from long ago, grown fuzzy and dim with time—of a happy boy, in the days before he’d been an orphan, wading in the water watching tadpoles and little trout and searching for deer tracks.
He slid down the windows just to hear the wind and the water gurgling and the whisper of the small green leaves in the night air. He couldn’t stay in the present. Too many memories came with the sounds of the breeze. Darker memories came, of how he’d hidden in the culvert after his parents had been killed in a car accident, and no one could find him.
No, that wasn’t such a good memory.
Ben hit the control and the windows zipped up, cutting off the night, shutting off the memories and banishing the past.
But not entirely. The past was hard to erase. It was tenacious, and it lurked behind him like the shadows. As the truck rolled and bounced up the driveway, he realized the private lane was in terrible shape. It could use a grading and a new layer of gravel. Maybe he’d help Rachel with that. He desperately latched on to any normal thought as the truck careened the last few yards to the lone house on the hill.
The house was a neat rancher built when his parents had been alive, on a five-acre tract on the good side of town and along the river on the back of the property, within sight of the elementary school and the park. But right now it was nearly pitch-black. The only light to guide him was a small spill of porch light over the front door.
Rachel had left it on for him. He warmed up at his sister’s thoughtfulness. That hadn’t changed, nor had the tall leafy maples, older than he was, which stood at attention like gigantic sentries around the yard.
Rachel knew he was coming. They were the closest in age. She was less than two years his junior and seemed to understand him, if anyone ever could. She always made him feel comfortable without judging his shortcomings. And instead of scolding him on the phone for his sudden visit, she’d sounded truly happy, and not put out that he was springing a visit on her.
“I can’t wait to see you, and, hey, you’re getting better! Last time you called from the airport.”
“See? I can be taught.”
“The door is always open. It’s your home, too.” Her voice had dipped with emotion, and he closed off his heart and memory.
How did he tell his sweet and wonderful sister that he didn’t want a home? That’s why he was more nomad than anything, and she was the one who lived in the family’s house. She clung to the past as if it were something to be treasured, not forgotten.
Well, he was more than happy to forget, but not his sisters.
Rachel was probably asleep, or possibly reading in bed, since her bedroom was on the other side of the house. Affection stretched like a rubber band in his chest. His sisters sure worked hard, and he knew that Rachel often covered the morning shifts at the family restaurant in town, so she got to bed pretty early to be on the job by six.
The clock in the truck’s dashboard told him it was well after midnight. Yeah, he thought as he pulled up to the closed double garage doors and killed the engine. She definitely had given up waiting for him.
That was okay. He was beat. He’d be lousy company anyway. It had been a long drive from Pensacola and his back hurt, but not as badly as his leg.
He gritted his teeth as he tried to move. Oh, yeah, the adrenaline was wearing off, all right. He was too tough to admit it, so he tried to ignore the streak and throb of pain that felt as if he’d been shot in the calf with a bullet. Wait—that’s exactly what had happened to him.
Talk about luck. He still had his leg, so he didn’t care how much it hurt. He’d treated lots of guys who hadn’t been as fortunate. As he climbed out of the cab and transferred weight onto his good leg, he pushed aside the pain and stiffness and breathed in the silence.
Whoa, he’d forgotten how peaceful it could be here. There was no tracer fire, no beat of chopper blades and no rat-tat-tat of machine guns. Trouble was half a world away.
God, don’t let me be here for long.
“Go home. Rest up. Go fishing or something,” his colonel had told him. “When your med leave is up, we’ll see if we need to cr
oss train you into another job.”
No way. His guts clenched. He’d get this leg back into shape, he vowed with all his might as his feet stepped on the dependable Montana earth. Right, God?
But no answer came on the temperate warmth of the sweet summer air. Well, he wasn’t going to let that trouble him. He was determined. And he was home, for better or worse. He let the wind pummel him as he took a look around. So much wide-open space.
He’d been back for holidays when he was in the country. But that usually meant he was huddled in the house on the bitter Thanksgiving and Christmas nights while it snowed, busy catching up on the family news, eating cookies and telling tall tales. He’d always had a hundred different things on his mind when he’d been here visiting.
Besides, he avoided peace on purpose.
His M.O. always was to stay a few days, and then he was gone. Whether he was visiting here or on a quick break in his duplex at Eglin Air Force Base, he was always rushing off to strife in some part of the world, where strong men with guns kept this country safe. He was proud to be one of those men.
I’m anxious to get back, God, he prayed, studying the velvet tapestry of the night sky. Please heal me up quick.
He hauled out his crutches—he hated the dumb things—and tried to keep their clattering to a minimum. If he couldn’t go back to his work, he didn’t know what he’d do. He’d spent the last and best part of his life as a pararescue jumper, a PJ, stationed on bases around the world—Japan, Korea, Italy and, of course, the Middle East.
And since special ops was his thing, he did a lot of work beneath the night skies. Somewhere under a sky like this, his team was at work without him, pumped full of adrenaline, fast roping from a Blackhawk or checking gear in preparation for a high-altitude jump. Then they’d set up and secure a perimeter, and proceed with their mission. Often rescuing a downed pilot behind enemy lines or liberating captured American soldiers.
I miss it, he thought as he opened the club cab door. He’d been out of the field for six weeks—one in the hospital and five hanging around his duplex looking out at the Gulf of Mexico. Watching other soldiers gear up and head out, leaving him behind.
