And yes, of course that would cause all hell to break loose. What a great way to announce her arrival.
Within seconds, she was pushed and shoved along with a swaying crowd. No one seemed to know who they were fighting, but that didn’t appear to be the point of the riot.
She tried to see her way clear to the bar—or the door—but she was being carried along with the wave, and just trying to keep from getting hit by the flying fists was hard enough.
And then she lost her balance, found herself on her ass on the floor, about to be trampled.
Just as suddenly as she’d fallen, she was being hauled to her feet and then off them again, held closely against a hard, broad chest and carried. She held on for dear life until she was placed on a stool behind the bar.
She looked up to see who her savior was and her breath caught.
Mace.
Mace is larger than life, Gray once told her before she’d met the man in person, and now, with Mace towering over her once again, she remembered how true that statement was. It wasn’t simply his size, although he had to be close to six-foot-four, but rather, he exuded a presence that would’ve made the most jaded woman stand up and take notice. He was a man who could calm chaos or incite a riot, depending on his mood.
Tonight, he appeared stoic. But like there was a small part of him that wouldn’t mind picking up a chair or two and brawling with the best of them.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice rough enough to make her tingle, and all she could do was nod.
His eyes—they were the color of ocean—could be warm and inviting and then cold and ever changing. A shock against his dark hair and olive skin.
He was as beautiful as she remembered, rugged—there was no other way to describe him. She was still pressed to his body … and she never wanted to let go. Until he demanded, “What the hell did you think you were doing back there?”
Protecting myself. Looking for you. Finally, she found her voice. “Mace, I’m Paige, Gray’s sister,” was all she could say.
“I know who you are. Stay here,” he told her. He’d placed her behind the bar and she did remain there for a few minutes, watching him regain control of the bar. He grabbed a few men by the scruff of their shirts, another couple he caught by the upper arms. For the most part, his voice and the big man with the baseball bat seemed to soothe the masses. Within the space of ten minutes, the room had gone from a sprawling mass of people to nearly empty.
While Mace led another group out the door, telling them he would walk them safely to their cars, she noted the man lying on the ground, bleeding through his T-shirt.
She hopped off the stool, grabbed a few clean towels from the pile under the bar and a pair of gloves from the first-aid kit next to them and headed toward the injured man.
Kneeling beside him, she went to work, quickly assessing his injuries by pulling up his shirt and noting that he’d been stabbed. He was also unconscious, but she was pretty sure one didn’t have to do with the other.
His pulse was good—pupils were equal and reactive and so she concentrated on holding the towel to staunch the bleeding. She looked around then, because she didn’t hear any sounds of incoming sirens and realized Mace was standing over her, as if on guard.
She hadn’t heard him return, but she tended to zone out everything but her patients. Not the best thing to do, considering her recent altercation.
“I told you to stay put. Bad enough you caused this damned mess,” he told her.
She bristled at his tone. “He was hurt. I can help. And, for your information, the guy who grabbed me started it.”
Mace muttered something—a curse, maybe—and then called out, “Caleb, what’s taking so long?”
Caleb was the one wielding the baseball bat—he had a man in a headlock in his other as he continued to usher the last remaining people out of the bar. He called over, “Ed’s here.”
“The police,” Mace told her.
“I hope the ambulance is right behind them.”
“There is no ambulance. Just a doctor. He rides with Ed.”
A few moments later, two men walked in and hurried toward her at Mace’s urging, one of them a man in his late sixties who carried a black medical bag.
“Thanks, miss,” he said to her. “I can take it from here.”
“She’s a nurse,” Mace offered to the doctor, who smiled and nodded as Mace led her over to the sink behind the bar so she could wash her hands.
“I can’t believe there’s no ambulance.” She stripped the gloves off and disposed of them, then shoved her hands under the hot water and scrubbed.
He shrugged. “The closest hospital’s an hour away in good weather.”
“Where the hell am I?” she muttered.
“Not in the big city anymore. You’ll probably want to get back there soon.”
She didn’t bother to tell him there was no going back for a good long while. Not until everything blew over—and even then, starting over would happen someplace new.
She wouldn’t tell him anything until she got some answers. “Gray used to tell me that if I ever needed anything, I could come to you.”
“And what is it you need, exactly?”
There was no reason to dance around it. “I want to know how Gray died.”
Mace’s face hardened, closed off more than it had been before. “He died the way it was reported to you.”
“Nothing was reported to me. They just said he died in combat. They gave him a posthumous medal.” Gray’s dad had it hanging on the wall above his oxygen tank in Arizona.
Mace nodded. “Well, you know everything, then.”
“Everything? Everything!” Her voice rose and the officer and the doctor and Caleb turned to look at her. She lowered it as she spoke again but was unable to keep the emotion from spilling out with her words. “He died three months ago, I was just informed two weeks ago. They held his body for months. Months I assumed he was alive and well.”
“That’s the way the Army works,” was Mace’s answer, but the look in his eyes told her there was so much more to the story.
“I didn’t think you’d be like this. That you’d give me the same bullshit answer. I’m sure Gray didn’t either or he never would’ve given me your address.”
He shrugged and looked toward the door—mainly, she supposed, so he wouldn’t have to look at her. She took that as a good sign.
“I need to know more than, ‘the cause of death is classified’,” she continued. “You have to understand that.”
He still didn’t say anything, his eyes on Caleb—who was helping move the unconscious man onto a stretcher—his fists on the bar, blood seeping between the fingers of his left hand. “Here.” She handed him a towel, pointed to his hand and he looked down as if he hadn’t realized he was hurt. He opened his hand to reveal the slice across his palm, a gash that would most definitely need medical attention. “I can take care of that for you.”
“I can take care of it myself.” He took the towel from her and their hands touched through the cloth.
The lights went up to full blast just then. Something forced her eyes from his hand to his face, catching first on the opened neck of the old flannel shirt he wore.
She clearly saw the scar, pink and fresh against his neck.
Someone had tried to slit his throat—and recently.
Unconsciously, her free hand went to her own throat, palm to Adam’s apple, as his gaze caught hers. And as badly as things had gone up to this point, they got immediately worse.
He jerked his hand free from hers, wrapped the towel around it. “You need to go. Tonight. Right now. We’re expecting a bad blizzard and if you don’t leave now, you could be stuck here for a while.”
“I wouldn’t mind that.” She looked at his throat and then dragged her gaze back up to his eyes. They’d gone wild and stormy again, but she realized that she’d have to face his wrath if she wanted the truth.
“You’ll never get the answers you wa
nt from me, so you might as well go back home,” Mace told her.
“She’s not going anywhere in this mess.” Caleb was back from helping load the stretcher into the police car, seemingly unbothered by the snow that hung on him in large white flakes. “Road’s already a sheet of ice. I took the liberty of moving your car away from the plow’s line of fire and grabbing your bags,” he told her as he carried the two bags with ease. Since she hadn’t given him her keys, she could only assume Caleb was also part of the Gray’s Delta Force team. “I’ll put them in the spare bedroom.”
She swore she heard Mace actually growl. But when she turned back to him, he’d disappeared, the swinging door leading to the storeroom the only indication of which way he’d gone.
Mace’s hand stung and his head throbbed and, dammit, Reid, his Delta teammate, was supposed to have let him know when Gray’s body was released to the family. Then he would’ve at least been prepared.
Except who the hell was he kidding? He would never have been prepared for Paige. He had no idea what to say to her, except maybe that he was sorry. Because he was in mourning too, although he had two and a half months on her.
He rubbed the outside of his hand where Paige had touched him. Granted, it had been through the towel, but still, had she sensed anything?
She’d seemed more caught up in the scar on his throat and, yeah, that was a real conversation stopper. There was no hiding the fact someone tried to slit his fucking throat.
He heard footsteps and the door opening. Cael.
Even though he knew who it would be, he still swung around, prepared for a fight. Because that’s where his head was these days, even three months out of the jungle.
“What’s the problem, Mace?” Cael kept his voice down out of habit, even though there was no way Paige would hear them through the heavy closed door that separated the back room from the main bar. “She’s really gotten to you. Want to tell me why?”
He turned to grab a first-aid kit from one of the shelves, opened it and prepped to stitch himself up. “She just found out about Gray a couple of weeks ago.”
“No wonder she’s upset.”
“It’s more than that,” Mace said as he poured the peroxide over the wound, the mild sting nothing in comparison to the headache that tightened around the back of his head.
Cael took the supplies from him and began to stitch Mace’s palm as if he’d done so a hundred times before. He had, of course, and when he finished, Mace knew he’d have that vaguely amazed and slightly frustrated look of a man who wanted nothing more than to remember everything.
Mace wished he could tell his friend that things were so much better this way, but that was bullshit too.
Caleb began to talk then. “We have to help her, no matter what the problem is. I know Gray made you promise that … because I made him the same promise.” He paused and looked surprised that he remembered that. Mace cursed inwardly, not so much because it was true, but because Paige’s arrival heralded something he’d feared would happen sooner or later—and now appeared to be happening sooner. “I don’t know much anymore, but I know I’d never do anything to hurt Gray.”
Caleb’s words were more effective than a knife to the gut … and ten times more ironic. And when Mace finally answered, his words were strangled. “I’ll help her. You shouldn’t be involved.”
“I know you’re afraid of what I’m going to remember. I may have amnesia, but I’m not stupid.” Caleb ran his hands through his hair in obvious agitation.
“She’s asking a lot of questions, Cael. About things she shouldn’t know.”
“I won’t tell her anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“That’s not it. Paige is … psychic. Gray used to talk about it a lot. She can read people with her hands.”
Cael blinked. “You believe in that crap?”
For a second, the old Caleb was back and Mace smiled. “With Paige, yeah.”
Because Gray had. And he’d been more levelheaded than any of them. “She uses touch to find things out. And we’ll be in a hell of a lot of trouble if she finds out anything more than what the Army told her.”
“So we don’t touch her. Something tells me that’s going to be more of a problem for you than it is for me,” Cael said as he finished bandaging Mace’s hand.
Caleb was right—Mace was supposed to take care of Paige. He’d promised Gray, had always promised him, every fucking time they’d gone out together.
But now he was taking care of Cael. The man had done so much for his country—for Gray and for him and for their other teammates, too, especially Reid.
Reid had been the fourth man on that mission, had been held in another cell, didn’t know anything until the rescue—blamed himself as much as they all did. And he was out there somewhere, attempting to bury the failed mission by hunting down the remains of DMH and looking for Kell.
Kell wasn’t on that fateful mission, but he blamed himself for what happened anyway. No amount of telling him not to feel guilty would stop that.
Mace had tried to talk to both men and failed to stop their self-blame. The team was fractured and their CO, Noah Wright, was looking for them to pull it together.
Cael with no memory was much freer than the old Caleb, which Mace found slightly unnerving and refreshing at the same time. And Vivienne, the woman Caleb had been involved with, knew nothing. She thought Cael was still on a mission or that he’d come home and fallen for someone else.
Mace had no idea what the hell to do about that, but figured the last thing Caleb needed was girlfriend problems right now.
Noah had agreed. He’d given the men extended leave and had all but ordered Mace to get Cael’s memory back.
Noah had no idea what he was asking for.
“She can stay the night,” he said, relenting because there was no other choice at the moment.
“At least the weekend,” Caleb said. “If we don’t touch her, we’ll be fine.”
We’ll be fine. Gray’s last words. Yeah, they were all really fucking fine.
“I’ll go get her settled in,” Caleb said.
“Just remember, I’m not running a bed-and-breakfast,” Mace muttered.
“Right. Wouldn’t want anyone to know you’ve got a heart. I’ll keep that a deep, dark secret,” Cael said right before he left the room.
Paige wouldn’t leave without some semblance of the truth. He’d tell her the sanitized version he’d told Caleb. And then she’d go back to her home and he’d head to the next town over, find some woman to help him get rid of the damned hard-on he’d had since Paige walked in.
He went outside, letting the freezing cold work its magic as he stood there in just his jeans and flannel shirt, the sleeves hiked above his elbows, hoping it would clear his brain.
“Gray, man, you have to understand why I was such a dick to her … for her own good,” he said into the frigid wind and got a howl in return. “I’ll do better. I’ll fix it all somehow. But fuck, I wish you were still here.”
Gray had been his sounding board, his go-to guy since they’d met in boot camp. The void in his life was indescribable—hadn’t been this bad since his mother had left him when he was ten and he’d been dragged up here, kicking and screaming.
Amazing what a kid could get used to. He’d spent a lot of his childhood moving from town to town—and for a while state to state before his mom semi-settled in North Carolina. But he remembered a haze of drugs and booze and a pretty steady stream of assholes who’d treated his mom like crap, one-room shitty apartments and not a hell of a lot of food to eat. But it was all he’d known, until he came here to live with his grandparents. From the second he’d entered this place and met them for the first time, he’d felt a chill, which only left him when he left this house and this town. Whenever he came back here to tend bar, he found it lingered still, long after they’d both died.
When he turned eighteen, he’d enlisted. He’d spent his entire life up until that point looking for an
escape hatch every second of every day.
When he joined the Army, that fierce need had dissipated almost immediately. There was a magic to the training, the orders, the command. The structure gave him exactly what he needed to free himself.
The inherent suspicion didn’t go away as easily … or not at all. Mace found that it was better to assume everyone was guilty until they’d proven themselves otherwise.
The Army was about obedience and discipline, two things Mace had never really taken to well. But somehow, it worked. It had been hard, but quitting had never been an option. Mace had always been a fighter and knew he had what it took to make it.
Knew that he’d never let himself be helpless again.
He’d simply always assumed he’d do all of that as a solitary man. That teamwork got left behind when the job was finished.
He’d found out how wrong he was once he’d been placed under the watchful eye of Noah Wright. The man treated his teams with the utmost respect and dignity, while kicking their asses at the same time. He demanded teamwork. Showed them that being able to bond was really the key to survival.
Making friends was a way to ensure insanity didn’t set in.
Mace had never really felt at home until he enlisted and found the core group of men he’d grow to trust with his life. Gray was the first one he’d met; and then Cameron Moore and Noah; and finally, Caleb and Reid, and Kell.
Mace had always taken rules and regs in more of a meant-to-be-broken kind of spirit. He’d also been labeled the most suspicious of the bunch.
To be called that in the group of men he was a part of … well, that was saying a hell of a lot. But, although suspicious by nature, he’d also never been one to pass up a good time. Partying was something he’d had in common with Caleb’s youngest brother, Zane, and he’d done a right good share of it.
He hadn’t felt up to partying since they’d gotten back. Cael had taken over that role and picked up the slack. With the absence of memory and his struggle to feel something, he turned to the nightly crowds at the bar to pass the time.
The thing was, Mace was pretty sure he hadn’t slept with any of the women who were crawling on him. Maybe he remembered somehow that he’d left someone behind, even though they’d only been together for a few weeks before he’d shipped out for the mission.
In the Air Tonight Page 3
