At My General’s Command
Romeo Alexander
ROMEO ALEXANDER
Published by Books Unite People LLC, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Books Unite People
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. All resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Editing by Jo Bird
Contents
David
Christian
David
Christian
David
Christian
David
Christian
David
Christian
David
Christian
David
Christian
David
Christian
Epilogue
Author notes
More books
David
Throbbing pulsed through his forehead as David stared at the screen on his desk. Grunting in annoyance, he pulled his attention away from the computer and began rooting through the drawers. They were far more cluttered than the neat and tidy appearance of the top of the desk, and he cursed himself for not taking the time to organize them. It seemed like every time he had a free moment, he was inevitably pulled into some ordeal or another.
Despite all his attempts at digging through the drawers, he found nothing that would alleviate the throbbing pain building up in his head. More than likely, he would have to send his receptionist off to find something, and he would prefer not to do that. The moment he alerted Christian there was something wrong, the younger man would immediately switch to nanny mode and David wouldn’t get a moment of peace until he’d dealt with the problem.
To everyone else at Fort Dale, David was General Winter. As the man in charge of everything that happened on the base, General David Winter did not expect much in the way of resistance from anyone. Yet his receptionist could give him shit like nobody’s business and had a strange way of making David feel compelled to obey him.
It was irritating.
Flashing on his computer screen brought his head up from the drawers, squinting at the display. His sister’s face and display name popped up in a window, with a shaking phone symbol next to it. For a moment, he considered leaving the call and letting it go to voicemail. But he instantly realized Sara wouldn’t stop calling him if he didn’t at least show her some measure of attention. His older sister was fairly laid back, but God save him when she wanted to talk to him, nothing was going to deter her, not even him.
Sighing, he reached out to tap the screen, answering the call with a faint ‘boop’ from the speakers. He frowned as another window opened up, displaying his sister’s face, and the kitchen behind her. David had only a moment to see that something was cooking on the stove in the background before she adjusted the camera, so her face filled the whole screen.
She arched a thin brow. “Wow, you answered on the first call? I’m a little shocked.”
David curled his lip. “What other choice did I have? It was either answer now, or have you pester me until I did.”
“I see you’re learning,” Sara chuckled.
“I’ve been bullied, harassed, and beaten down. I’ve learned my lesson.”
“Harassed. That’s putting it a little dramatically, don’t you think?”
“I notice you didn’t object to ‘bullied’ or ‘beaten down’, however.”
“Well, no, I can’t argue with the truth.”
David snorted. “What can I do for you, Sara?”
Her brow stitched together. “Really? You’re going to ask that? It’s been over a month since the last time we spoke, David.”
Squinting faintly, he ran the numbers through his head and winced as he realized his sister had been generous. It had been closer to two months since the last time they’d spoken, and even then, it had been Sara who’d reached out to him.
“Ah hell, I’m sorry. Things have been a little chaotic lately, and it seems a few things slipped the net,” David explained.
“Your sister included. Also, you look like shit.”
David scowled. “Thank you so much.”
Her comment, however, had the effect of drawing his attention to the little square in the upper corner of the call window. The head of once thick onyx-black hair had thinned a little over the last few years, and it was reaching the point where it was almost 50/50 salt and pepper. There were a few lines around the dark circles beneath his pale green eyes and a few more around his lips than there had been ten years ago. Still, he didn’t think he looked all that bad for a man on his way to forty-six.
“And I look just fine,” David finally said.
Sara laughed. “You do, but I made you look.”
“What are you, five?”
“No, just not a stick in the mud.”
Despite being the oldest, his sister had always been young at heart. Sara was generally the first to laugh, and quick with a joke to make someone else smile. Their mother had always insisted she try to take things more seriously, and then begrudgingly said Sara would learn one day...maybe. By the time their mother passed at the age of seventy-one from pancreatic cancer, she had long since given up any hope that Sara would ever ‘grow up.’
David thought that was a little unfair. Despite the various pitfalls his headstrong sister had fallen into along the way, she’d done well for herself. David still wasn’t sure what she’d got up to at college, but she’d come out of it with a major in education and had settled down to become a teacher at a high school in Houston. While her love life had been a little tumultuous at times, she’d even met, married, and settled down with Ryan, and their three kids were doing great.
For someone who’d been nothing but an exasperation for their mother, he thought his sister had turned out pretty good.
“You do look a little tired,” Sara said, interrupting his mental wandering.
“I always look tired to you.”
“Yeah, and?”
There wasn’t much he could say to that, he usually was tired. If their mother had wished Sara had been a little more serious about life, David was the epitome of everything their mother wanted in a child. Their father had referred to him as an old soul, claiming David had always been quiet and studious even before he could talk. He preferred to look at things with a measured approach, whether that had been his schoolwork growing up, or getting through his basic training and MOS training in the military.
“At this point in time, tiredness is just a state of being, not really a mood or an odd occurrence. You should know that by now,” David told her.
Sara shook her head. “You’re the oldest forty-five-year-old I know, David. You really need a vacation.”
He was overdue for a little time off, but every time he thought about taking a week or two to himself, something came up. His plate was currently pretty full as it was, and he didn’t want to imagine what it would look like if he had to put it all off for a while.
“And leave this place to fall apart? I think not.”
Sara raised her brow again. “And, don’t you have people who can handle things for a couple of weeks while you go and blow off some steam?”
“In theory.”
“But not in practice?”
David cringed, not wanting to divulge too much. The problem was the man next in line, Philip Rogan was not exactly the sort of man David wanted dealing with the day to day running of Fort Dale. Rogan was a decent enough administrator, but h
e wouldn’t be David’s first choice to run the whole base.
“Still having problems with Phil?” Sara asked knowingly.
“I wouldn’t describe it as a problem.”
“If you’re not willing to let him do his job because you don’t trust him, I’d call that a problem.”
It was both a fair and unfair assessment. Rogan could cope well enough, but David didn’t trust that he would do things the right way. Rogan had joined the military in peaceful times, not when the nation was at war, and knew nothing about what it was like to be a soldier in David’s opinion. Trained and growing up in peacetime had created a politician out of the current man in charge of Operations, and David was loathed to put his trust in someone who looked at the men and women at Fort Dale as little more than numbers to be crunched.
“I thought you were going to take care of that at some point,” Sara continued.
David snorted, looking at his screen where his to-do list still sat open. The damn thing was so long it required him to scroll down several times to reach the bottom. There was too much at Fort Dale that needed addressing, he found himself adding things more than subtracting them.
“It’s on the list,” David said with a gesture.
“The ever-growing list that’s going to send you right to an early grave. That one?”
“I’ll have you know I’m in good shape. My last check-up went by without a single new comment to worry about.”
“Meaning your blood pressure is still sky-high.”
David shifted uncomfortably. “It’s a tad high.”
“Which you refuse to either take medication for or lower your workload.”
“Is this a conversation or an inquisition?” David demanded.
Sara frowned at the screen. “You know damn well that I’m worried about you.”
“There’s no need to worry. I’m not in any danger of a heart attack or stroke. I’m eating well, and I always make sure to give myself time each day to get some exercise.”
“You’re also sleeping like absolute shit and have a workload that would make even a dedicated workaholic get gray hair at the thought of it.”
“Well, that’s not fair, I sleep just fine. I’m just not getting much of it sometimes.”
“David.”
“What? There’s a difference.”
Sara shook her head. “I love how you can only develop a sense of humor when you want to be a smartass to me.”
“This from the woman who won’t give anything a rest until she hears that she’s right. I find myself feeling more and more pity for Ryan every time we have one of these...fun conversations of ours.”
Sara smirked. “I can promise you he has his ways of shutting me up.”
“Oh, God.”
And if the devilish look on his sister’s face was any warning, he knew exactly where this conversation was heading.
David held his finger out in warning. “Do not.”
Sara, predictably, ignored him. “So, my dear sweet little brother, whatever happened to that love life you were supposedly getting ready to have?”
David groaned, giving up all pretense of dignity and flopping his head back to cover his face. He’d made the mistake last time he and Sara had spoken in telling his sister he had a date. His complete silence on the subject afterward must have caught her interest, and he should have known it would eventually come up.
“Things did not work out between the two of us,” David muttered.
“And what was wrong with this one?” Sara asked.
“Nothing, it just...didn’t work out. There doesn’t have to be a reason every single time, somethings just don’t work.”
“Right, because the woman before that one was too much of a hermit for you.”
“As a man who’s expected to go to cocktail parties, galas, charity functions and the like, having someone social by my side isn’t exactly an unfair expectation,” David told her.
“And the guy before that wasn’t serious enough.”
“Anyone who thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to drink themselves stupid on a work night, more than once a week, is not someone I need in my life, Sara.”
“Okay, that’s a fair point. You made it sound like it was only the once.”
“He and I talked for a couple of weeks, and he informed me it had happened four times.”
“Wasn’t he my age?”
“Yes.”
Sara wrinkled her nose. “Alright, you win that one.”
“Nice to know I can win something with you,” he said dryly.
“But that doesn’t change the fact that it is about time you stopped being so damn difficult and tried a little romance in your life.”
This wasn’t a new argument, and neither of them was likely to come out on top, either. Along with his sister’s zest for life and insistence on tackling every problem head-on, she was also a woman whose passion for romance and love had not been diminished in the slightest. That wasn’t to say that David didn’t have some quiet aspirations for a companion in his life.
“You and I both know that I’ve made several attempts to date in the past two and a half decades, Sara,” David reminded her.
“For someone who has a larger dating pool than most people, you certainly have a harder time finding someone than anyone else I know.”
David frowned. “That’s not fair. And my pool is not ‘bigger’.”
“Right, being interested in both men and women doesn’t open things up a bit more.”
“A heterosexual woman does not exactly suffer from a dearth of choice,” David said dryly.
That and the pool got a little narrower for him when people he considered dating found out he was, in fact, bisexual. While twenty years ago he would have fully understood people’s reticence to date a bisexual man considering the mentality toward men being attracted to men at the time, and would have even begrudgingly accepted it ten years before. Yet there was still an ugly stigma hovering around being a bisexual man in the modern-day, even as acceptance of gay men was shaping up to being the norm.
“And need I remind you of the handful of men and women who immediately ‘lost’ my number or whatever excuse they chose to give me when they found out I was into both men and women?” David asked.
Sara wrinkled her nose. “At least you were spared having to find out they were an asshole further down the line, right?”
“Not the point.”
“The point is you can’t keep using all sorts of excuses to avoid it.”
“You are aware that I have a full schedule, right? If I can’t bring myself to take time off for a vacation, what makes you think I have time to get into a full-time relationship with someone?”
“You can make time, you just don’t want to.”
David sighed. “What was the point of this call again?”
“To check on you, and to go full worrying sister on you.”
“Thank you, between you and my receptionist, I’m sure I’m quite well covered at this point.”
Sara’s eyes lit up. “Oh, Christian? He’s cute.”
David’s eyes darted to his message box icon, which had blipped with an unread notification. He could easily see where his sister’s delight was leading, and he was not ashamed to take a moment to leave the conversation before she tried to find a new avenue to harass him.
“Yes, Christian. Speaking of, he’s just messaged me, and I’m going to assume it has something to do with my job. So if you’ll excuse me, I really should get going,” David said.
Sara smirked. “Have you really got a message from him, or are you just trying to get off the phone with me?”
David snorted. “The amazing thing about my job, dear sister, is that I am more than capable of multitasking. So I can both do my job, and use it as an excuse to escape this conversation.”
Sara laughed, waving a hand at him. “Fine, you can run, but you can’t hide.”
“Love you,” David said, ending the call.
Shaking his
head, he opened the message from Christian to see if he was right about it being important. Reading over the contents, he realized his receptionist had put off his next appointment because the system had told the man David was in a private, personal call. Shaking his head, David replied, telling him to send his next appointment in and to alert him next time rather than putting it off.
He opened the files he would need for the scheduled meeting. Out of the dozens of problems that cropped up every day, David was desperate to bring the current team of specialized soldiers back to full strength. Team Maelstrom was in desperate need of both help, and a team member to fill out their ranks. As much as David despised having to shove a new member onto the team only a few months after the men had lost one of their own in battle, his hands were tied.
His door opened, and David took a moment to make sure everything was arranged on his screen for ease of use. He already had a good idea of what he wanted to say to the Sergeant, but it never hurt to have notes on hand.
“Sergeant Rider,” David said by way of greeting.
The soldier snapped a salute. “General Winter.”
David looked up, immediately noticing how absolutely exhausted Sergeant Aidan Rider looked. The man had been thrown from the desert, and then to the other side of the country in the same week, it was amazing he could even stand up. His expression was impossible to read accurately, but David watched as the man’s eyes swept the room quickly before resting on David’s face again, watching him, observing.
David waved a hand toward the chairs. “At ease. Make yourself comfortable.”
Maybe when this was over, he could get Christian to order some food along with finding some damn pain relievers. The man certainly did know the best places to find good food, and David had yet to be disappointed.
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