One Night With a Cowboy (22 page)

“H
e’s going to Afghanistan.” Becca’s voice broke as she announced that horrifying reality
into the phone.

“Huh? What? Who?” Emma sounded as if she was about one cup of coffee into the day.
Awake, moderately alert, but don’t throw anything too heavy at her, such as the word
Afghanistan.

Becca drew in a shaky breath and tried to steady herself. “Tucker. That’s why he’s
been avoiding me and acting differently. He’s being deployed.”

“Jeez.” Emma paused, obviously taking a moment to absorb the news that had probably
sounded as crazy to her as it had to Becca just last night. “But at least he didn’t
have another girlfriend or want to break up with you, right?”

“Emma, he’s going to Afghanistan!”

“All right. I hear you. Well, you did say he was in the army. But I’m confused. I
thought he was a teacher now.”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand it, either.” She’d thought about it all night as
Tuck held her in his bed, and yet she still couldn’t fully grasp it. “He explained
a little bit about it, but he was talking about billets and battalions and I don’t
understand this stuff. I never knew a soldier before. How am I supposed to know what
he’s talking about?”

“We can probably look it up online.” Emma threw out her usual solution to everything.

“I’m afraid to.” She didn’t watch a whole lot of news broadcasts, but when she did,
there was always some sort of bad stuff happening in Afghanistan. And now, Tucker
was going to be there.

“Becca, try not to worry. Things aren’t as bad over there as they were at the start
of the war.”

“You don’t know that.” Becca frowned.

She’d love it to be true, but how could Emma know so much about everything? From rodeos
to war. Did the woman sit online all day and read? Actually, knowing Emma and her
job, she probably did. Maybe it was true. Maybe things were quieting down over there.

“Sure, I do. Why else would the president have called for troop reductions in that
region?”

“H . . . he did?” Becca stuttered. Troop reductions? She really needed to pay more
attention to current events now that she had a very personal stake in them.

“Yes, he did. Didn’t you hear that on the news?”

“No.” She hated to admit she’d rather watch one of the morning talk shows and see
what new movies were releasing and which celebrities were getting into trouble. Emma,
for some reason, was a news hound. “I’ll start watching.”

“No! Don’t do that. Now is definitely not the time for you to take a sudden interest
in international news. It’s best if you don’t see or hear anything else about the
war until Tucker is back home and safe. When will that be?”

“Six or seven months.” She had been much calmer before saying it out loud. Hearing
it now, it seemed like a very long time.

“That’s not so bad.” Emma put on her coddling voice. The one she saved for when Becca
needed . . . well, coddling. “You’ll come home to New York for Thanksgiving and the
long break between semesters. You’ll stay here with me. We can spend the holidays
at Mom and Dad’s. Then before you know it, he’ll be home, safe and sound.”

The school year always did seem to fly by, especially leading up to Christmas. There
never seemed to be as much time as she wanted or needed to get all her shopping and
decorating done. Hopefully that would hold true for this year and the months would
speed past until they were well into the new year and Tucker was back.

“All right.” She eyed the clock. “I have to get ready for my classes.”

She hadn’t even showered yet. She’d come directly home from Tucker’s as the sun was
rising and called her sister the moment she was in the apartment. Thank God for the
one-hour time difference. It was only early in New York, not insanely early.

“Wait, don’t hang up yet. One more question.”

“Okay.” She didn’t know if she could handle one more when the subject was Tucker’s
leaving for war.

“When does he have to leave?”

“Next week, but he’s spending the rest of his time with his family.” She swallowed
the sick feeling away. “Last night was our last together. We . . . we said our good-byes
this morning.” And she’d barely made it to her car before the tears started to fall.

“Oh, Becs. I’m sorry. That really, really sucks.”

Yes, it did.

 

“Jeez, Tuck. Afghanistan again?” Jace put down the coffee mug he’d just lifted halfway
to his mouth. “It feels like you just got back.”

“I’ve been back for a while.” Long enough to find out his wife had been cheating on
him, finalize the divorce, and get on with his life. That all had taken a good bit
of time.

“I guess, but I thought you’d be home for a little while longer before they sent you
back over there. Especially now you have the job at OSU.”

“Eh, you know the military.” Tuck shrugged, feeling bad for not telling Jace the full
truth. That he’d volunteered to go. “Ain’t no telling where or when they’ll decide
to ship you out to next.”

“I guess so. And on such short notice, too. Damn. Glad I’m my own boss.” Jace grinned.
“Ain’t nobody can tell me what to do.”

“That’s true. You’re lucky,” he agreed, and figured this was as good a time as any
to broach another subject. The other reason he’d asked Jace to breakfast. “That brings
up another thing I wanted to talk to you about. My assistant coach is gonna be taking
over the rodeo team practices all on her own, but since you’re your own boss and all,
you think maybe you could help her out once in a while?”

“Help out that cute young thing? Oh, yeah. Not a problem.”

“Jace . . .”

“I know, I know. Hands off. Just yanking your chain. I’d be happy to help. I wanna
see if that one roper has been following my advice anyway. Did he get his time down
any since I worked with him?”

“He has, actually. You did good.” He smiled at Jace’s enthusiasm.

“Eh, it wasn’t exactly rocket science showing him a quicker way to complete that tie-down,
but I did what I could.”

“You helped a lot and I appreciate it.” Tuck felt a little better about leaving.

Jace, even with all his joking around, was basically a responsible guy. And the man
practically breathed rodeo. Tuck had no doubt Jace would fill the gap left in the
coaching staff just fine. As far as the gap he’d be leaving in the ROTC program, Logan,
in spite of all his bitching, would have no problem covering Tuck’s duties there,
either. A local guy in the Army Reserves was interested in the position and willing
to take over until Tuck returned.

The only thing left that still bothered him was leaving Becca, but unlike ROTC and
the rodeo team, that wasn’t such an easy fix. Tuck wouldn’t find a replacement to
fill the hole he’d be leaving in Becca’s life even if he could. Though it scared the
hell out of him, she might just find one on her own.

And that was exactly why he needed to go. He was too damned attached to her already.
Well on the way to feeling for a woman the way he’d thought he never would again after
the disastrous end to his marriage. If he stayed, he’d get more attached. They’d end
up getting careless and eventually get caught, and she’d be fired.

“You’re okay with going, aren’t you?”

He glanced up and encountered Jace’s intense stare. “I’m fine with it. Why?”

“You just looked . . .” Jace hesitated. “I don’t know, worried, I guess. You’ve been
there before. It’ll be just like that, right?”

“Yeah. It’ll be fine. I got a lot of loose ends to tie up before I go. And I’m leaving
for my parents’ house tonight, so I needed to get everything OSU related out of the
way now. That’s all.” He hated hearing himself say those words.
Loose ends
. Becca was many things to him, but that was not one of them.

“Well, I’m here for you. Whatever you need. And don’t worry about the rodeo team.
That loose end’s been tied good and tight.”

Good and tight—just like the knots saying good-bye to Becca this morning had tied
in his gut. He’d thought it would be easier on them both to say their final good-byes
this morning, after spending the night together, than it would have been later on
today when he was busy getting ready to leave. It hadn’t been. For the last few hours,
he felt as if he’d been punched, and the feeling didn’t seem to be going away any
time soon.

 

A
ll of the early-morning workouts with the cadets hadn’t prepared him for this. When—if—he
ever got back to the States, he’d give Logan a piece of his mind about the ROTC training.
Because even though Tuck had been deployed to Kandahar, and had kept himself battle
ready during his year on the faculty at OSU, nothing had prepared him for what he
found here in the mountainous region that lay between Eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan.

These mountains broke both men and machinery. Make that American men and machinery,
because it seemed the locals had long ago figured out how to use the terrain to their
advantage. The proof was in the numbers. The company he’d joined had a disproportionately
high percentage of both contact and casualties compared to elsewhere. One reason they
were happy to take Tuck. They had to rotate in new men to replace those sent home
either wounded or, sadly, in body bags.

And today was supposed to be a fairly easy assignment. Tuck and his team were hiking
into position to provide overwatch for a foot patrol. But for a man not used to these
conditions, the simple mission felt more like climbing Mount Everest.

Pain seared through his lungs, and he had to wonder if it had been the mountain or
the enemy that had gotten to all those men.

The weight of all he carried had long ago made various body parts go numb. Water,
food, weapons, ammo, first aid kit, body armor—it all added up to nearly half his
body weight. At one point during the five-hour hike, Tuck got so hot he started to
feel icy cold. Yet he kept going. To fall out would put all of them in danger. He,
the new guy among men who’d already been here for close to a year, was not going to
be the soldier to do that.

Even when it hurt so bad the only thing a man could focus on was stopping to rest,
he knew there was still more inside, and he dug deeper to find it. There was always
more. Mind over matter. Man versus mountain.

The echo of a single gunshot bounced between the peaks, and every man around him dropped
into a crouch. Tuck dropped as well. He crab-walked to the edge of the path until
his back was pressed flat against the rock, wondering if there was a sniper in the
area, until the sound of machine-gun fire cut through the silence. Bullets began hitting
all around them, pinging into the dirt and sending bits of loose shale into the air.
Short bursts of rapid fire interspersed with the slow
pop, pop, pop
of slower rounds.

“. . . we have TIC. I repeat, we have troops in contact. Request air support. Over.”
Between the louder bursts, Tuck heard one of the guys on the radio, calling back to
base with their coordinates.

He glanced to his right, where Conseco, a soldier of Cuban descent from one of the
tougher areas in Chicago, crouched calmly next to him. Beneath the dirt and sweat,
his expression looked as calm as if they were waiting for a bus. The man glanced down
at his boot as a puff of dirt was thrown into the air inches from his toes.

“That was a close one.” Conseco made the statement with a kind of detached excitement.
Kind of like a fan watching his favorite baseball team on television when the runner
had just made it safely to home plate. Like there wasn’t anything he could do about
it either way, but he was happy it had all worked out.

Incoming enemy fire from AK-47s, belt-fed machine guns, and RPGs all rained down hell
upon them. It was apparent this wasn’t a single sniper, but a full-out ambush.

“What do we do?” Tuck couldn’t take his eyes off the enemy fire hitting the ground
at their feet; he couldn’t stop listening to the boom of the rocket-propelled grenades
that had missed their mark. He felt more like the new guys everyone here called cherries
than a man with nearly a decade in the service as well as combat experience behind
him.

Conseco shrugged. “Wait ’em out. We’re pinned down. We move, we die. They’ll either
run out of ammo or the Apaches will get them.”

Tuck looked around him. Even the 240 gunner was pinned down, as helpless as the rest
of them in spite of the thirty-pound machine gun he cradled against his chest as if
it were his child.

“How long will that take? For the air support to arrive.”

The Taliban fighters must have been on the next ridge, firing down at an angle. It
was like shooting fish in a barrel. If Tuck and Conseco hadn’t been able to get to
the crevice barely as deep as their bodies . . . He didn’t want to even think what
would have happened. The rest of the squad had taken similar cover.

“An hour. Maybe less if we’re lucky. Depends.” Conseco shrugged.

At times the shots pummeling the area where the squad had taken cover were so close
together it made one continuous din.

“What the hell? I thought with the drawdown there wouldn’t be much contact here anymore.”
Tuck shouted over the noise.

Conseco’s response was a snort. “I guess the Taliban didn’t get that memo.” When Tuck
frowned at him, he continued above the noise. “Don’t get me wrong. The guys in the
valley, before we pulled out of Korengal in two-thousand-ten, used to get hit like
five, sometimes seven times a day.”

“Seven times
a day
?”

“Oh, yeah. My buddy was there. They had a guy hit in the leg while taking a nap in
his bunk. They’d get shot at while minding their own business trying to take a piss.
We’re usually only hit outside the wire. So yeah, I guess you can call that not much
contact.”

His back against the wall, Tuck was still trying to absorb that he supposedly had
it good compared to some others when Conseco asked, “So, you got a girl at home, Jenkins?”

The rounds had slowed, but they sure as hell hadn’t stopped. Maybe the enemy fighters
were starting to run out of ammo and were forced to ration it. Good. Maybe they’d
run out completely. That thought gave him a small amount of hope.

“You want to talk about home now?” Tuck still had to raise his voice to answer.

Conseco shrugged beneath his body armor. “Sure. Why not? You got something better
to do?”

Tuck glanced at him. “I’d feel better if I were shooting back.”

“We all would.” Conseco blew out a sound of disgust. “If you’d like some ventilation
holes in your helmet, go ahead. Stand up and try to take a shot. Otherwise, we’re
stuck here waiting.”

They exchanged looks, and Tuck realized Conseco was right. He gave in and answered.
“No, I don’t have a girl at home. Well, I kind of did. But not really. I don’t know.”

Tuck realized how pitiful that sounded. He laughed, but it was short, more like a
wheeze as the bullets peppering the ground in front of him kicked up enough dust to
make him choke.

“You don’t know?” Conseco laughed.

“I’m not quite sure.” Pressing back as close as he could against the wall—and safety—Tuck
admitted the sorry truth. “I didn’t mean to, but I think I might have totally ended
any chance we had by leaving.”

That he wasn’t sure where he stood with Becca, where he wanted things to stand between
them, was a pretty sad state of affairs. Especially since today could be his last.

“Sounds like there’s a story there.” Conseco angled just his head toward Tuck. “Tell
me about her. What happened?”

“Seriously? You want to hear it all?” The incoming fire had slowed to sporadic bursts,
making talking a little easier.

“Sure, I’m bored and we could be here a while. It’ll help pass the time. I’ve heard
all these other sorry bastards’ stories a hundred times over the last nine months.
It’ll be refreshing to hear something new for a change.”

Tuck had never felt so helpless, and Conseco was bored and wanted to chitchat. But
in this situation the man next to him was the one with experience, and like it or
not, Tuck was the cherry.

Since he hadn’t been struck yet, he calmed himself enough to glance around them and
reevaluate the hellish situation. Shooting back was out of the question. Even if his
weapon was trained in on where the insurgents were hiding, which it wasn’t, to get
a clear shot he’d have to expose himself to their hail of bullets.

His teammate was right. The best thing to do was sit and wait for air support, or
for the bad guys to run out of ammo. Either way, it was going to be a little while.

“All right.” Tuck shrugged and was reminded of the weight of his pack braced against
the rock wall.

Even though he’d never told the story in its entirety, not even to his best friends,
he swallowed away the dry grit in his mouth and launched into the tale of two city
girls who walked into a rodeo one July night in Oklahoma. He somehow felt he had to
tell it, from start to finish. That another living person knowing it all would keep
the memory alive because there was a very real chance he wouldn’t leave this valley.
At least not that way . . . alive.

He glossed over the very intimate bedroom details, but told Conseco everything else,
right down to his deciding to leave when they got caught in the library on the security
video and how he thought he had to, before they both got into trouble.

When he’d finished, Conseco shook his head. “That’s a hell of a story. Sounds like
true love to me. Like a damn fairy tale.”

“Nah. We weren’t that serious.” The statement rang so false in his ears, he elaborated
to make it sound more convincing. “Just having some fun together.”

That didn’t sound any more truthful.

Love
. The other reason Tuck had left in such a hurry. Love was a word Tuck had deliberately
avoided saying or even thinking, yet Conseco spat it out easily. Maybe daily near-death
experiences did that to a man. The fear of love and getting hurt by it was starting
to feel ridiculous as real pain, the kind inflicted by automatic weapons, loomed literally
at their feet.

But as for the fairy tale? No. Tuck couldn’t embrace that concept even a little bit,
because being crouched against a rock face braced for the impact of the bullet that
would take his life while Becca was back in Oklahoma totally unaware of why he’d really
left was certainly no fairy tale ending.

“Here’s my question.” Conseco paused to spit a dribble of tobacco-tinged saliva into
the dirt. “If you were having so much fun, then why the hell did you leave her and
volunteer to come to this shit hole? I would have said fuck it to the university and
their fucking rules and kept seeing her on the sly.”

Another bullet hit close enough to Tuck he could hear the whoosh of it passing his
ear. To hell with it. If this were the last thing he ever said, the last man he ever
spoke to, he intended on speaking the truth. That old saying was true. There were
no atheists in foxholes, and though he would give a year’s salary just to have a foxhole
to hide in right now, this shale crevice was close enough.

As if Conseco was a priest and Tuck at confession, he finally spoke the truth. “I
guess I left because I love her.”

“Did you tell her you love her?” Conseco’s dirt-encrusted brows rose beneath the rim
of his helmet.

“No.” A round hit particularly close, sending shards of rock into Tuck’s face. He
closed his eyes to protect them and then blinked away the dust.

Conseco let out a snort. “You should have.”

Didn’t Tuck know it.