The “here” implying to Jake that she had another job somewhere else.
He reluctantly swallowed another mouthful of coffee. “I didn’t ask.”
“No, you didn’t,” Ellis acknowledged. “But I thought you might be wondering.”
“Nope,” he lied. “I was just running errands and wanted a cup of coffee.”
The other man shrugged and turned his attention back to his beer.
Jake left some money on the bar beside his cup, still half full.
As he drove toward home, he cursed himself for not even considering the possibility that he might trek all the way into town and she might not be there.
But at least he had the caulk he needed to fix the windows.
* * *
“Christ, it’s hot as hell out here,” Moore grumbled, sweat dripping down his face as he sprawled on his back under the camouflage cover.
“Thanks, Captain Obvious,” Lopez drawled.
The point man saluted. “My pleasure, Major Sarcasm.”
“That’s because we’re in hell,” Jake said. “And it’s not Captain but Lance Corporal Obvious. Don’t be giving him a promotion he hasn’t earned or a rank he can’t.”
A couple of the men chuckled. Most were too hot and irritable to manage more than weak smiles.
“It’s not really hell but purgatory,” Baker said. “And heaven is waiting for us all back in the U S of A.”
“Doesn’t mean we’re ever gonna get there,” Lucey pointed out.
“We’ll get there,” Lopez said, needing to believe it. “We just have to survive ten more weeks in this godforsaken dust bowl.”
“Nine weeks and six days,” Walker corrected.
“But who’s counting?” Jake asked dryly.
Of course, they were all counting. Because as proud as they were to serve their country, as deeply as they believed in their mission, no one really wanted to be stuck in the desert, more than seven thousand miles away from their families and friends.
Well, no one except maybe Lance Corporal Brian Lucey, who’d enlisted as soon as he turned eighteen, because the possibility of getting his balls blown off by an IED was preferable to the certainty of being pummeled by his father’s fists.
And while the prospect of seeing real action had seemed exciting when they geared up for their deployment, the reality of it had quickly dimmed the shine of their expectations.
But it was the assistant radio officer who spoke up now to say, “I’m counting. ’Cause me and Kelli-Lynn are gonna get married when I get back.”
“Hell, Lopez, why would you go and do something like that?” Moore wanted to know.
“’Cause after almost ten months here, marriage doesn’t seem quite as terrifying anymore.”
“You just want to put a ring on her finger before she realizes that she can do a lot better than you,” Walker said.
Moore snorted and offered a fist bump to the RO.
“I’d rather risk my life than my heart,” Moore insisted.
“We do that every day,” Lopez pointed out. “And having a wife at home means I’m guaranteed to get laid on homecoming.”
“You only need a uniform for that,” Baker told him.
They were all laughing when—
Jake jolted awake, his breath coming in short, shallow gasps, his chest tight.
Just a dream.
But it felt so real.
Even now, he could hear the echo of the blast ringing in his ears. The wailing sirens. The piercing screams.
“Concentrate on your breathing. Deep breaths. In and out through your mouth.
“Let the air fill your chest...hold it there...then slowly let it out again.”
With the doctor’s words echoing in his head, Jake silently counted to four as he drew oxygen into his lungs, held it for a count of one, then exhaled to another count of four.
He felt a nudge against his side as he drew in another laboring breath. He lifted his arm and Molly immediately moved in to snuggle close.
Her warm presence immediately soothed him, chasing away the lingering remnants of the dream.
Or had it been a flashback?
He was never entirely sure. Some of the details were indelibly imprinted in his mind, snippets of conversations clearly remembered.
But the blast hadn’t happened then. Not like that.
They’d been on their way to a recon post when their Humvee was taken out by an RPG.
Not that he remembered the event or much else about that day. And he wasn’t sure if it was a blessing or a curse that the brain trauma he’d suffered had wiped it from his memory.
All he had left were pieces and fragments that his subconscious mind tried to put back together—usually in his dreams.
Molly nudged him again.
“You want to go for a run?”
She leaped off the bed, ready to go.
“All right,” he conceded. “But let me put some clothes on first.”
By the time he’d pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and brushed his teeth, she was waiting at the door, quivering with anticipation.
When they’d first moved to Haven, he’d put her on a leash whenever they were out, worried that she might take off after a rabbit or something and not be able to find her way back. But she hated the leash and, after almost tripping him up more than a few times—on purpose, he had no doubt—he’d relented.
And she’d rewarded his trust by never venturing too far from his side.
He opened the front door and she bolted through it, in case he might doubt how eager she was to get going. But she waited patiently while he locked up and turned the knob to test that it was secure. He was probably the only homeowner in Haven who bothered with such precautions, but most of the other residents had lived there for generations and knew all their neighbors.
Another reason he wasn’t sure that country living was for him, though he’d admittedly slept better since he’d made the move three-and-a-half months earlier. It was still rare for him to sleep through to sunrise. If he got four or five hours, he considered that a good night. More important to Jake, the nightmares that had plagued him since everything went to hell in Iraq were less frequent and less intense—this morning’s episode notwithstanding.
Of course, that might just be a normal part of the healing process and unrelated to his change of address, he acknowledged, as he jogged toward the road, Molly by his side.
And while it was certainly progress, it wasn’t enough.
Almost three years after his discharge from the Marine Corps, he still didn’t have a plan for his future.
Without the military, he’d been at a complete loss. Drifting. Unfocused.
He’d started to study communications in college, confident that those skills would be in demand in the private sector if he ever decided to leave the military. But when Luke had deployed to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, Jake had packed up his books and enlisted, eager to join his brother in the fight for freedom and justice.
He’d thought he might go back to college eventually and finish the degree he’d abandoned. But he hadn’t anticipated that the headaches, a less frequent but still lingering side effect of the trauma, would make it difficult for him to stare at a computer screen for long periods of time.
“What are you going to do with your life now?”
Major William Robert Kelly asked the same question every time Jake went home.
And his reply to his father’s question was always the same: “I don’t know.”
Because what could he do when everything he’d known and wanted had been taken away from him? His career was over and his other job prospects were dim; his fiancée had jilted him for one of his best friends; and he couldn’t even be in a crowd of people without starting to sweat.
“Well, you better figure
it out.” Not a suggestion so much as an order. “You can’t sit around for the rest of your life.”
Barbara Kelly would attempt to intercede on her son’s behalf, her patient and gentle tone a marked contrast to her husband’s brusque demands. “He just needs some time.”
“It’s been six months,” the Major would grumble.
And then, six months later, “It’s been a year.”
And another six months after that, “It’s been a year and a half.”
Because eighteen months should have been long enough to put the shattered pieces of his life back together.
But every time they had the same conversation, Jake was reminded again that he was a failure—his medical discharge an unsightly stain on the otherwise pristine fabric of the Major’s reputation. Because Jake wasn’t already distraught enough about the lack of any kind of direction for his future.
“You could reenlist,” the Major would offer as a suggestion. “There would be waivers required, but I know people who could help move things along.”
As if he was unaware of the process.
As if he hadn’t already looked into the possibility.
“No!” his mom would immediately protest, her tone no longer so patient or gentle, her eyes filled with tears. “Dammit, Bill, hasn’t he been through enough? He doesn’t need you putting those kinds of ideas in his head.”
“He doesn’t seem to have any of his own in there.”
A frustrating truth that would force an exasperated Jake to confess, “I don’t have a lot of anything but ringing in my head these days.”
“I thought you said the symptoms were going away.” His mother again, immediately concerned.
“Going away doesn’t mean gone.”
And so it went, every time Jake and his father got into a discussion about his life.
But over the past few months, he’d finally stopped feeling bad that he’d disappointed his father.
Mostly.
And while he hated knowing that his mother continued to worry, there was nothing he could do about that. No matter how many times he told her that he was fine, she refused to believe him.
Of course, she’d always had an uncanny ability to know when he was lying.
Chapter Eight
By the time they hit the mile and a half mark, Jake was feeling a lot better. He signaled to Molly to turn around and head back. As they neared the house, he slowed to a jog, already thinking about breakfast.
The dog had more stamina than he did, and at this point she usually raced ahead to the door, eager for her morning bowl of kibble.
Today she ran past the door and into the backyard.
He stopped and fisted his hands on his hips, gulping air into his lungs. “What do you think you’re doing?”
She turned to look at him, obviously wanting him to follow.
“Go on and chase rabbits, if you want,” he told her. “But I’m hungry.”
She whined, her big brown eyes imploring.
He sighed. “You want to play with Rey, don’t you? I’m glad you’ve made a new friend, but I doubt that Ashley’s out with her pup in the morning on a school day.”
Molly wagged her tail as she trotted closer to the split-rail fence that bordered the Ferguson property—likely designed to keep the Circle G cattle on their own property more than anything else. It certainly wasn’t effective at keeping his dog out.
“If you saw a rabbit, you might as well give up now, because you’ll never catch it.”
Molly was undeterred, though she paused at the fence, as if waiting for him to catch up. But she didn’t wait long before she sidled under the lowest rail and popped up on the other side.
“That’s Mr. Gilmore’s land and you’re trespassing,” he told her.
Actually, according to the lawyer, it was his land, but currently subject to a lease agreement with the Circle G.
Molly just wagged her tail.
He turned and started back toward the house, confident that she would fall into step with him. As tempted as she might be by rabbits or squirrels or even the possibility of finding Rey, her first loyalty was to the man who put kibble in her bowl.
But she didn’t follow.
Instead, she barked.
He stared her down. “Come.”
She didn’t come.
“I’m not chasing after you,” he said. “I’ve already run three miles today and I want my breakfast.”
Of course, his reasoning did nothing to persuade her.
In obedience classes, he’d been taught to encourage compliance with the command by grabbing her collar and tugging to draw her toward him while repeating the word so that she learned its meaning. But he had to catch her first.
“Molly, come,” he said, his tone firm.
She barked again.
Muttering under his breath, Jake marched over to the fence.
“I’m going to call that obedience school and ask for my money back,” he grumbled as he climbed over the rail.
Molly, confident that he would follow, headed off through the tall grass.
“I’ve heard that some ranchers in these parts shoot first and ask questions later,” he called out, as he followed her path to a clearing near a copse of trees. “You better hope Mr. Gilmore isn’t one of them.”
“He’s not...usually.”
He stopped abruptly when he realized Sky was sitting with her back against one of the trees, her legs stretched out in front of her.
“And my stepmother dragged him off to the antique and craft market today anyway, so no worries on that front today.”
He suspected that Molly had somehow known Sky was there, that she was the reason his dog had been so insistent on breaching the barrier.
And the dog was right now being rewarded for her obstinacy and disobedience with Sky’s attention. Of course, Molly was totally lapping it up, sprawled on her back with her legs splayed to afford easy access to her belly for rubbing.
He shook his head. “You are such a slut.”
Sky’s head tipped back. “Excuse me?”
Luckily she sounded more amused than offended by his remark.
“I didn’t mean—I meant—Molly. I was talking to the dog,” he said, stumbling through the explanation.
The hint of a smile played at the corners of her mouth. “I can’t believe it—you’re actually blushing.”
He scowled. “I am not.”
“I was talking about the dog,” she deadpanned.
“So much for man’s best friend,” he muttered.
Molly basked in the attention of her new friend, unrepentant.
“You’ve been out running,” Sky guessed.
“Oh. Yeah,” he admitted, suddenly aware of the sweaty T-shirt stuck to his body. “We were on our way back when Molly decided that she wanted to go exploring rather than go home.”
Sky lifted her hand to shield her eyes from the glare as her gaze skimmed over him. “I didn’t know you were a runner.”
He shrugged. “It’s not who I am, it’s just something that I do.” He dropped onto the grass beside her, so that she didn’t have to stare up at the sun. “So...how are you?”
“I’m okay,” she said.
“So why are you sitting in the middle of an empty field all by yourself?”
“It’s where I come to think sometimes.”
“Are you thinking about anything in particular?” he asked.
“Actually, just before you showed up, I was thinking about breakfast.”
“Coincidentally, that was my thought, too—before Molly took off,” he confided. “Do you want to come over to my place for bacon and eggs?”
“Are you cooking?”
He nodded. “Breakfast is my specialty.”
“In that case, yes,” she decided.
<
br /> * * *
Molly sat nearby, her focus on Jake at the stove as he pushed strips of bacon around in the pan. Sky was at the table, a cup of coffee in her hands, watching with amusement as the dog watched the man.
“Is there any chance that she’s going to get a taste of what you’re cooking?” she asked.
“No,” Jake said. “But she’s an eternal optimist.”
“Well, that’s at least nicer than what you called her earlier—assuming that you were, in fact, talking about the dog.”
“I was talking about the dog,” he insisted. “Because she’ll roll over and spread her legs for anyone in exchange for a belly rub.”
“Still, maybe we should talk about what happened with us,” she said.
“Why?” he asked warily.
“Because I don’t want you to think that I would have gone home with anyone who stopped to fill my gas tank—or waited for me in the parking lot outside Diggers’ after work.”
“I don’t think that,” he said.
“But you don’t know, do you? Because you really don’t know anything about me, despite the fact that anyone in town would be more than happy to fill in the details—real or imagined—if you asked even one question.”
“I try to mind my own business.”
“Because you don’t want other people shoving their noses into yours,” she guessed.
He just shrugged.
Not that Sky needed any more of an acknowledgement. And while she was frustrated by his continued reluctance to open up to her, she had to believe that his offer to feed her was at least a step in the right direction.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked him now.
“Cooking bacon and eggs isn’t really a two-person job,” he told her.
“I could make toast,” she offered.
“Except that I didn’t get to Battle Mountain this week for groceries, so I don’t have any bread,” he said.
“You do know there’s a grocery store in town, don’t you?”
“Yes, I know there’s a grocery store in town,” he confirmed. “I just prefer to do my shopping in the city.”
“The prices are probably a little cheaper at the supermarket,” she acknowledged. “But the cost of gas to get there would cancel out any savings.” She sipped her coffee. “Or maybe you don’t go to Battle Mountain just to save a few bucks.”
The Marine's Road Home Page 9
