Gifts of Honor: Starting from ScratchHero's Homecoming

by Gail, Stacy

  His mouth opened, his eyes flaring with an emotion she couldn’t read. Hope struggled to separate itself from the encroaching darkness.

  He sighed in frustration and looked away.

  Really, hope was such a useless thing. Why it kept trying to make her believe in miracles was beyond her.

  “This road we’ve been made to walk,” she gritted through teeth that refused to unclench, “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”

  Regret tightened his face. “Lucy—”

  “But it’s up to us to make the best of it. We need to take it one day at a time and not try to force things to go back to normal. There is no more normal to go back to. Falling into bed with each other when we’re more or less strangers isn’t going to change that.”

  His brows pulled together. “Strangers? I used to be your husband.”

  “I know that, but you don’t. Not deep down. You’ve been told this information, but it doesn’t mean anything to you.” She grabbed the cookie box, shoved it into his hands and headed for the front door. “Unfortunately, it still means something to me. Until I can remember you’re as much of a stranger to me as I am to you, I need to take a breather.”

  “Stop calling me that. I’m not a stranger to you.”

  “I am to you.”

  “Then let me get to know you.” When she simply opened the door in dismissal, he headed toward her as if his feet were sticking to the floor. “What is it that you want from me?”

  The futility of the question almost made her laugh. “Nothing, I swear. I never made demands of you before you got injured, and I’m not going to do it now.”

  “A nondemanding wife. Now that kind of perfection I’d really like to remember.”

  “I was far from perfect, and let’s not waste any more time trying to remember what no longer exists. Let’s just...enjoy the present and look to a better and brighter future. That’s what you told me when our divorce was finalized, right?”

  “Yeah.” But he paused in the doorway, and the restless passion in his gaze made her flesh tingle. “Lucy?”

  “What?”

  “Was I a good husband?”

  For a second her mind blanked with too many answers. Ultimately one surfaced above all others. “Being married to you brought me my greatest joys and my deepest heartbreak, and everything in between. And I’d be willing to bet every military wife would say the same. Good night, Sullivan.”

  * * *

  “Better late than never, right?” With a gusty sigh Lowell stepped back to stare at the tree he and Sully wrestled into the stand in front of the living room window. “Not too shabby, considering it’s only three days until Christmas and all the good trees are gone. It doesn’t seem to have too many bare spots, does it?”

  “You definitely didn’t bring back a Charlie Brown tree.” And then he shook his head. “Damn. I remember that stupid cartoon, but I can’t remember the most important aspects of my life.”

  His father clapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, son. You’ve gotten back more than anyone ever thought you would, and you have your entire life ahead of you. It would be selfish to ask for anything more.”

  That seemed like small consolation. “Lucy hasn’t put a tree up.”

  Well, hell. That wasn’t what he’d meant to say at all.

  Lowell’s bushy brows shot up. “Really? That doesn’t sound like her. Just last year she was putting garland around everything that stood still. She had this whole house ready for Christmas by the end of Thanksgiving weekend. Every day in the month of December right up to Christmas, she was baking cookies. Though that was probably our fault. We kept sucking them up, so she kept having to replenish the cookie jar.”

  “She said she’s giving Christmas a pass this year.”

  “Ah.” Lowell contemplated the bare tree. “Well. I guess I’m not surprised, now that I think about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know you went through all sorts of hell, son, but you have to understand Lucy went through the trauma with you. But for her, it’s...different. There’s no treatment she can go through to heal her wounds. She didn’t receive any medals for her war injuries, and no one thanked her for all her sacrifices. No one told her she did a good job, though no one could’ve done it better. She’s probably endured more than we will ever know, so we shouldn’t expect her to be the same. She should be allowed to respond to her trauma in her own way, and we should respect her enough to give her the room to do it.”

  Sully stared at the tree while each word cut at him somewhere deep inside. From the moment he’d been injured he’d relied on medics, hospital staff, therapists, his father, friends and comrades to help him get back the shattered pieces of his life. But Lucy...she’d been alone. Her challenge to reverse their positions—to be the one who was forgotten and left stranded on the outside looking in—surfaced to punch him in the gut. The agony he must have inflicted on her by the simple act of not knowing her was incalculable, and the action of divorcing her had cut her off from any support connected with him. Who had been there for Lucy?

  The image of her ponytailed friend Coe snapped into place so sharply he almost heard the click. Her brooding, ever-present watchdog. For a few seconds Sully tried to be happy Lucy wasn’t completely isolated, but another wave of burning frustration hit and he had to bite the inside of his lip to keep from cussing out loud. Coe didn’t need to protect her from him. He might be Lucy’s ex-husband, but that didn’t make him untrustworthy or dangerous. He would never hurt her. At least not now, his mind supplied brutally. With his brain wiping her out of his world, he doubted he could have hurt her any more than that.

  “I have no doubt that Lucy’s dealing with more than her fair share of scars.” When Sully realized he’d been standing there like a robot that had lost its energy source, he tried to get himself unfrozen by shrugging a shoulder. “And I’m not pressing her to be the way she used to be. Hell, I can’t even remember what that was. I just don’t want her to give up on something like Christmas, when it sounds like she really loved it.”

  “Maybe she’s just not in the Christmas spirit this year, son.”

  “She’s lost enough. There isn’t one hint of the holidays anywhere in that loft of hers.” That loft that was over Coe’s garage, where he seemed to be a permanent fixture. Sully jerked his head to the side, but the image of that hyper-protective jerk was like a pit bull. No matter what mental corner Sully turned, there it was—the thought of Coe and Lucy. Together. Twisted up in the sheets. His hands on her body. His mouth on hers. Making her writhe and cry out Coe’s name.

  Not his.

  He gritted his teeth as his stomach knotted in on itself, and the need to smash something, anything, consumed him. Logically he knew he had no right to feel proprietary over Lucy. But the memory of her smile haunted him from the moment he saw it as she’d passed by the diner window...and it had been for Coe. He dreamed about that smile, and he wondered to the point of obsession if she’d ever looked at him like that. If his brain knew the answer to that one, it wasn’t letting him in on the secret. That left him with one option—making her smile himself, like she was so happy with life she couldn’t contain it. Like she was bursting with joy and hope and all things good in the world. Like all her wishes had come true.

  If he could give her all of that, his world would be complete.

  And he’d start by getting her a tree, dammit. If she’d once loved Christmas the way his father described, she should at least have a Christmas tree.

  “You saw Lucy’s place?” Clearly going for a subject change, Lowell picked up a coil of lights. “How does it look? The only time I saw it was right after she moved in this past summer, and it was nothing but a filthy storage space. I couldn’t imagine anyone living there.”

  “It’s...welcoming. It’s like you know yo
u belong there the moment you walk in, the way a real home feels.” Then his father’s word sank in. “Why the hell did you allow her to move out of the apartment if the place she was moving into was unlivable?”

  “I know you don’t remember her, but no one allows Lucy to do anything. She’s as bullheaded as they come, and she’s used to taking care of herself. Nothing stops her once she’s set her mind, and nothing scares her. Well,” Lowell added thoughtfully. “Except moths.”

  “Moths?”

  “Yeah, it surprised me too. In fact, her fear of moths might be the reason she doesn’t want to put up a tree. You see, last year—”

  “There were moths in the tree.”

  Lowell paused in the process of winding the lights around the tree. “That’s right.”

  “Lots of moths. Like a whole damn herd of them. I remember...” So close. It was so frigging close. “Screaming.”

  “That would be Lucy. She ran out of here like her hair was on fire and wouldn’t come back in until—”

  “We had to kill every single one of them.” His teeth snapped together as the memory hit his brain. But not one glimpse of Lucy. It was like she’d been edited out of existence. “It doesn’t make any sense. Why can’t I remember Lucy? Of all people, why can’t I remember my wife?”

  “You’re trying too hard.” Lowell fiddled with the lights, his expression sympathetic. “You’ve been told you should have a connection with her, so you’re trying to make it happen.”

  “Wouldn’t you try to get those memories back? Not just because filling in the blanks brings back the life I used to have, but because of Lucy Jax herself. She isn’t the kind of woman a man just throws away.”

  “Lucy Crabtree now.”

  A dangerous sound escaped Sully. “Crabtree doesn’t fit her.”

  “But Jax does?”

  “Better than Crabtree.”

  “That’s another positive sign.” With the firm nod of a man who believed he knew what he was talking about, Lowell resumed twining lights around the tree. “You’re getting more back every day now that you’re in your home environment. That’s exactly what the doctors told you to expect, right?”

  Yeah.” With the frustration building, Sully stalked over to the box of Christmas cookies and opened it to breathe in the scent. Yep, just like he remembered it. “They also told me I might not get everything back. This might be all there is, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “You’ve still gotten more than one hell of a lot of people in your situation ever get back, Sully.”

  “Right. I’m lucky.” The problem was he didn’t feel lucky. As he crunched down on a powdered sugar-covered cookie and the spicy sweetness filled his every sense, the image of Lucy haunted him until it was all he could see.

  Chapter Seven

  “I can’t believe Bitterthorn is suffering a traffic jam.” Celia peeked out the sweet shop’s front window at the chaos going on beyond the glass. It was quite a feat to see anything out the shop’s front windows. They were now decorated with Celia’s artistic concept of a Christmas cookie factory run by a robust Mrs. Claus that resembled Pauline. Celia had been hired around the same time as Lucy to man the counters, but when she’d volunteered to paint the front windows with a summer theme, she proved herself to be far more valuable as the shop’s decorator. Manning the register was still her primary role, however, and it was a task she seemed happy to ignore as she tried to get a look at the madness going on beyond the shop.

  “I wouldn’t call having to wait for Sheriff Berry to wave you through an intersection a traffic jam.” Since the ovens were now off and the pieces of Mayor Weems’s gingerbread house were ready for transportation tomorrow morning, Lucy did Celia’s job and rang up the last customer of the day. “Traffic is much worse in San Antonio. I’ll take Bitterthorn’s version of congestion any day.”

  “Since I haven’t gotten my license yet, I guess I have to take your word for it.” With her dark eyes glued to the wall clock, she pounced on the front door the moment it was closing time, turning the dead bolt and flipping the sign to Closed. “You lived in the big city before you came back to Bitterthorn, didn’t you, Luce?”

  “Bigger than Bitterthorn, but I wouldn’t call Fort Benning a big city.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  Surprised, Lucy hit a couple of keys on the register. “Every now and again, I guess. But Bitterthorn has everything a larger place has, Celia, believe me. Now come on over here and total up your receipts for the day.”

  Celia groaned. “My totals always come out differently. Last week I did it three times and each time it came out a different number.”

  “Willard’s still in the back office, he can help you if you need it.”

  “I’d rather watch the mess Sheriff Berry’s making of the traffic flow while setting up tomorrow’s parade route. Omigod, there are the Brody boys.” A squeal escaped her before she waved with such wild abandon it would have been enough to flag down a ship passing Gilligan and the other castaways. “Aw, man. They didn’t see me.”

  “They must be blind.”

  “I know, right? Maybe I was hidden behind Mrs. Claus.”

  “Or,” Lucy drawled, coming to hand the cash drawer to the teen, “they did see you, but decided they didn’t want to play with lovely, oh-so-tempting jailbait.”

  “Another year and I won’t be.” With a sniff, Celia headed for the back office. “You’ve got no romance in your soul, Lucy, but I’m not like that. Maybe true love is only for the young.”

  “I’m twenty-six,” Lucy began hotly, then gave up when she realized the door was already closing behind Celia. Who gave a crap about romance anyway? Scowling, she checked the kitchen one last time to make sure all the ovens were off and everything was in its place before heading out the back. Maybe romance did have a sparkly, new-car kind of feel to it at Celia’s age, if only because everything was so new it hurt. But that sparkle didn’t have to be lost forever. Though the mere thought of romance, love and happily-ever-after was about as palatable as mud at the moment, she didn’t believe she’d always feel that way. Someday, after her wounds had healed, she could foresee a time when she’d be ready to once again share her life with someone. The kind of white-hot passion she’d had with Sully was probably out of the question. That sort of magic was a once-in-a-lifetime deal. But she could still shoot for a warm relationship built on the foundation of companionship.

  Companionship. Geez. Maybe Celia was right and romance really was for the young.

  Lucy’s stride easily outpaced the traffic inching along what would be tomorrow’s parade route, with the town’s rotund sheriff directing traffic into an abysmal snarl. Relieved her own car was parked safely behind Lefty’s, she glanced into the garage to see Coe busily cussing out an engine block. With a quick wave she left him to it, hustling up the wooden stairs to her landing...and almost face-planting into a tightly netted tree leaning outside her door.

  “What the...?”

  “Surprise,” came Sully’s voice from the tree’s other side. “Merry Christmas.”

  Still rocking, she managed to make it up to the landing to find not just Sully and a bound Christmas tree, but also several bags filled with what looked like boxes of ornaments. “Okay,” she began, while trying to keep her teeth from falling out. “I’ll bite. What is this?”

  “The moth incident.” Sully’s eyes were the exact color of the tree next to him, and it was nearly impossible to resist the smile that grew there. “I might not remember you, but I definitely remember the moths. I was thinking you might be worried about putting up a tree all by yourself because of that, so I thought I’d offer to put one up for you. And if you don’t want it, I’ll understand,” he added quickly when she opened her mouth. “You won’t hurt my feelings, if that’s the case. But maybe you’ll start to feel a bit of the Chri
stmas spirit if we put on some schmaltzy Perry Como, drink a little hot chocolate and hang a few decorations. Oh, and another part of this deal—I solemnly swear that if even one moth flies out of this thing, I’ll kill it before you can let out so much as a peep.”

  “You brought me a tree?” Surprise, and a silly, touched tenderness moved through her with all the magic of a cloudless sunrise to warm her from the inside out. Then realization shattered the spell. “Wait. You remember the moths, but not how I almost peed my panties when they attacked me like they had a personal grudge?”

  “Oh, wow. When you put it like that, it makes me doubly pissed off that I can’t remember.”

  Great. Moths were more memorable than her. With a sigh, Lucy unlocked the door and barreled inside. “I really appreciate all the trouble you went to, but unless my memory’s suddenly as much on the fritz as yours, I do believe I told you that I was giving Christmas a pass.”

  “You also said I wasn’t the reason behind it, but I didn’t believe that either.” Hesitating on the threshold, his gaze locked with hers. “You were right when you said I should be on my knees thanking you for everything you’ve done for me. I know I don’t have the right to ask you for anything more, but I am. I’m asking you to give me the chance to say thank you.”

  She put a hand to the sudden ache in her chest. “By giving me a tree?”

  “By reminding you that you love Christmas.” He gave the tree a little shake. “So, what’s it going to be? Are you going to send this tree packing into the cold, cruel world with no place for it to call home? Just think—a sad, homeless tree wandering the mean streets of Bitterthorn, with no one to give it love or popcorn strings at this joyous time of year—”

  She snorted with reluctant laughter. “Okay, okay, you win. Get that thing in here already.”