Long Road Home (12 page)

He gave her a slow, hot sweep of a look, the kind she’d gotten from him once before. Right before he’d pushed her up against the brick hospital wall and kissed her. “Believe me, I’m well aware of that.”

So she waited for him to open her door, then walk her to the front porch. Just like, she thought again, this was a real a date.

“I had a good time,” he said.

“Me, too.”

There was a long pause, sometime during which Austin entirely forgot to breathe.

The drizzle, which had softened to a mist, added moisture to the evening air, which caused little ghosts of fog to drift in from the river. The mountain air was rapidly cooling, which didn’t explain the crackling, like heat lightning, sparking between them.

He wanted her. Oh, he might not be willing to admit it, but Austin could read it in his eyes. He really had wonderful eyes. Like a yummy blend of warmed brandy and gold flecks.

She wanted him. He wanted her. They were both adults, so why didn’t she just put a stop to all this dancing around and make her move? The idea was so, so tempting. But just then, the wooden porch began to sway.

Before her brain could sort out what was happening, Sawyer had pulled her off the porch into the driveway, safely away from the house. Then they stood there in the open, his legs braced and his arms tight around her as the rolling earth settled.

The slight tremor, which was not unusual for this part of the country (she’d learned in school that micro ones happened all the time without anyone feeling them), only lasted seconds. But while it had driven her into his arms, it had definitely shattered the mood.

“We haven’t had one of those for a long time,” she said as she took a single step back. A step that caused those shields, which had lifted during dinner, to lower over his eyes again. Not wanting the evening to end this way, she decided to try again. “For a second I thought it might be us.”

“I suspect we could do a lot better than that.” He might have shuttered his gaze, but that low, raspy,
hungry
voice caused her nipples to perk up.

“Would you like to come in for a beer?” she asked. “Or maybe coffee?” Although she hadn’t seen any indication during dinner that Sawyer’s “issues” included alcohol, Trace Eastwood, a former president of 4-H who’d earned a trip to Washington to meet the president back in high school, had returned from Iraq with a drinking problem.

“I’d better not. I’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow, and you probably do, too.”

It was barely past six thirty, and while ranchers got up earlier than most of the world, even her father stayed up until almost nine. So much for making her move. Even having Mother Nature throwing her into his arms hadn’t had any effect. So, that was that.

“Well. Thanks for the ride to the café.” Her cheeks ached from the pain of the forced smile. “Have a good evening.”

She was climbing the three steps back onto the porch when Sawyer said, “I’m thinking of going furniture shopping tomorrow.”

She looked back over her shoulder. “Good idea.”

“So everyone keeps telling me.” He jammed his hands into his back pockets and gave her a hot, direct look that she was surprised didn’t set off at least a 5.3 quake. “I thought I’d begin with a bed.”

Leaving her with that enticing idea, he straightened his hat and strolled back to his truck. Damn, he did have the best. Cowboy. Butt. Ever.

Austin stood in the doorway, hand to her hopeful heart, watching until his taillights disappeared past the house.

Fortunately, her father must be watching TV in his bedroom, leaving her to practically waltz down the long hall to her room, where she texted Heather, as she’d promised.

He’s buying a bed.

And that, she thought, said it all.

When an answering text still hadn’t come in by the time she went to bed, Austin decided that Tom must’ve solved the problem with the foal and the anniversary couple had already begun their celebratory weekend.

Smiling at that romantic idea, Austin decided that Sawyer wouldn’t be the only one shopping tomorrow. She needed to score some lacy underwear, just in case she’d have an opportunity to show off her girls anytime soon.

13

I
T FELT LIKE
one of those old movies his dad liked to watch on the Western Channel. He and his team were walking through a box canyon with almost vertical walls. Looking up at the top of the cliffs, Sawyer wouldn’t have been surprised to see a tribe of Apaches illuminated by the faint predawn light. With high vertical cliff faces to the east and west and the end of the box at the north, the situation was tailor-made for an ambush.

This was definitely serious bad guy territory. They’d already passed signs of what, from all the spent shell casings on the ground, appeared to be a terrorist practice range.

This wasn’t good. When Sawyer saw the imprint of a sniper on the ground—body, elbows, toes—as the insurgent had been shooting his rifle, he called in a report to HQ. This wasn’t his first rodeo. He’d been through enough battles that he knew what were normal adrenaline-spiked nerves and what were instincts developed in training and battle.

Instructed to stay with the mission to locate the insurgents’ camp, then call in the drones, he told his men, none of whom looked any more optimistic about their situation than he was, to keep on humping.

As they pushed on, he kept checking out the tops of those cliffs.

“Damn.” Internal alarm sirens started blaring when they found the goat trail they were using as a roadway blocked by a disabled Humvee. Before he could get on the radio, they were hit by a tsunami of gunfire from machine guns, rifles, and—oh, shit!—rocket-propelled grenades.

It was bedlam, which quickly descended into hell.

The able-bodied team members dragged the wounded behind the Hummer as the corpsman, who’d been hit in the shoulder in the first barrage, struggled to treat the injured while the others provided cover and threw up smoke grenades. Meanwhile, the aircraft that had been called in struggled to hit constantly moving targets in the difficult terrain. The voices echoing in the canyon made communication near impossible.

Of the two dozen members of the combined team of U.S. and Afghan National Army troops, eight were wounded. Their only hope was the medevac helicopters that couldn’t land while the kill zone was being bombarded with fire.

“Fuck this.” Fed up, Sawyer ran, zigzagging between rocks and stunted trees, whatever bit of cover he could find, while the remaining members of the team provided cover from behind the vehicle.

As a bullet pinged off a rock just next to his head, he decided this dodging attack method looked a helluva lot easier when John Wayne or Clint Eastwood did it.

Those miserable days of Special Forces training under actual fire, along with years spent scaling sheer rock faces in the mountains back home, paid off as he finally managed to climb the cliffs to an outcropping that allowed him to blast away with his machine gun.

Which provided enough distraction that the wounded could be carried to the copters and airlifted out.

Meanwhile, he’d taken a lot of fire that had peppered his arms and legs with rock fragments. A direct hit through his pant leg above his knee burned like a son of a bitch. Other shots had been stopped by his armor, which had left his ribs feeling as if he’d been gored by a bull.

But as Sawyer made his way back down the cliff, he was congratulating himself on still being alive when—shit—a bullet slammed into his shoulder, causing him to lose his death grip on the rocks.

Jerked out of the all-too-familiar falling nightmare, Sawyer realized that the hammering pounding in his head wasn’t gunfire but someone knocking.

While he wouldn’t object if Austin had shown up for a bootie call, he doubted that was the case.

Not taking time to pull on his boxers, he yanked the sheet off the bed, wrapped it around his waist, and stumbled into the other room to open the door. Cooper was standing there, illuminated by the spreading yellow glow of the porch light.

The time of night, along with his brother’s uncharacteristically grim expression, told Sawyer that the news was bad. “Is it Dad?”

“No.”

“Not Rachel or Scott?” Coop had already lost one woman to tragedy. Sawyer couldn’t imagine him losing another.

“It’s the Campbells.”

Sawyer raked a hand over his hair. “Heather and Tom? What about them? We just had dinner with them. They had to leave before we finished because Tom got a call about a breech foal he had to turn before they left for Ashland.”

“That explains what they were doing out on Duck Pond Road.”

Sawyer’s blood, which was already cold from lingering shadows of that night in the Afghan mountains, turned to ice. “They couldn’t tell you why they were there?” Even as he asked the question, he knew the answer. The unthinkable, impossible, very bad truth was written all over his brother’s face.

“They couldn’t because a boulder fell from the cliff onto the top of their car. A witness who’d been driving a lumber truck a ways behind them saw it happen and said that it was when that tremor hit. Which was probably what shook it loose.”

“Jesus.” Sawyer had managed to convince himself that once he got home to River’s Bend, he wouldn’t have to ever hear news like this again. Coming on the heels of the nightmare, it slammed straight to the gut like an iron fist, nearly doubling him over.

Then, another thought hit. “You haven’t told Austin yet.”

“No. I figured it would probably be better if you were there when I did.”

“Jesus,” Sawyer repeated. “Yeah . . . Right. Just let me put on some clothes.”

Cooper followed him into the bedroom as he pulled a pair of knit boxer briefs from the duffle bag he was still using for a bureau and scooped the jeans he’d worn to dinner off the floor.

“We just had dinner with them,” he repeated, knowing how inane that sounded. But was there anything more effing inane than two best friends being killed on their way to an anniversary celebration? Two parents leaving their children . . .

“Aw, shit. The kids.”

“I stopped by the house on the way over here, and Rachel’s going to keep them away from the TV in the morning and not answer the phone unless it’s one of us. I figured you, Austin, Rachel, and I would tell them together.”

“Good idea.” Sawyer pulled a T-shirt, which was lying on the floor next to his jeans, over his head. It was the one he’d worn yesterday to clean out a stall and smelled like horse and sweat, but he figured that was the least of his problems. “Good,” he repeated numbly.

Thoughts were bombarding his brain like incoming shrapnel. “We were looking at photos,” he said as he sat down on the sleeping bag and pulled on a pair of socks that didn’t smell too much like a wrestling locker room before reaching for his boots. “The wedding, the kids’ baptisms.”

As Cooper’s news sunk in even more, memories of standing in front of helmets, inverted rifles, boots, and dog tags of the fallen flashed before his eyes. “Hell. Now we’re going to be going to their damn funerals.”

“It sucks,” Cooper agreed. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” As much as Sawyer felt like hurling up his guts, he had to stay strong for Austin. He stood up, put his hands on his thighs, and drew in a deep breath. Sent it exploding out.

His head cleared, his vision focused, he grabbed his jacket, which he’d tossed over the doorknob when he’d come home. “Let’s go get this over with.”

*

A
MOMENT AFTER
Cooper’s knock, the porch light came on. There was another pause, then Austin opened the door.

“Sawyer? Cooper?” Dressed in a pair of pale blue pajama pants with clouds printed on them and a knit camisole, she looked sleepy, tousled, and delicious. On any other night, Sawyer would be tempted to take her back to bed and make up for lost time. But this was not any other night. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Austin,” Coop said. “Could we come in?”

“Oh.” She backed up and opened the door wider. “Of course.” Sawyer watched as comprehension on why they’d be showing up at her door at this hour of the night clicked in. “What’s wrong?”

“Maybe you’d like to sit down.” Cooper’s tone was kind but, Sawyer noticed, had shifted into cop mode. Which had him wondering how many times in his life, first as a military cop, then working for the Portland Police Bureau, then here, his brother had been required to make a visit like this. As hard as the visits Sawyer had made to the families of his fallen teammates had been, this had to be far worse.

“Do I need to?”

When Coop appeared prepared to give some oblique cop answer, Sawyer decided this was one of those bandage cases. Ease it off, taking more time and dragging out the pain, or just rip and get it over with. He decided Austin would rather just have it rip.

“Heather and Tom were in an accident after leaving the Carpenters’ place,” he said, earning a sharp look from Cooper for having interfered in his official police business. “A boulder fell onto their car out on Duck Pond Road. Coop says they died instantly.”

“Died?” Even as Austin’s heart denied it, her head knew that Sawyer had no reason to lie. “No.” Feeling as if she were about to shatter, she folded her arms across the front of her tank top, trying to hold herself together.

When she’d been a little girl, younger even than Jack, all the yellow diamond
Watch for Falling Rocks
signs along the upper river road had made her nervous because she’d never known what she’d do if she actually saw one crashing down the side of the cliff. Austin had never shared her fears with her father because she didn’t want to sound like a scaredy-cat. Over the years, after having never heard of anyone being killed there, she’d put her concerns aside and had gotten so she didn’t even notice those signs anymore.

“I’m sorry.” Sawyer drew her into his arms. “So damn sorry.”

Austin was cold. So very cold. The last time she remembered feeling like this, chilled to the very marrow of her bones, had been eight years ago, when a devastating blizzard had blasted down from Canada and Washington.