Long Road Home

by JoAnn Ross

  “Damn. There goes one item off my bucket list,” Lexi said.

  “I may go over there,” Austin said. “But to hear how his visit with Ms. Grimsley went.” When the woman had mentioned visiting him yesterday evening, Austin had thought it strange that he hadn’t called, or at least texted her about it.

  “Go,” Lexi said. “Don’t worry about me. If you don’t think Buck would mind me borrowing his truck, I’ll drive into town and see what’s changed.”

  “He’d be fine with that.” Thanks to Layla, her father was practicing riding around the place in his new cruiser, which was as good off-road as advertised. Watching him out the window, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see him doing donuts in the corral soon. “Would you mind running an errand for me?” An idea had occurred to Austin during the night. One she thought Sophie would enjoy.

  “Sure.”

  When she heard what the errand entailed, she grinned. “That is so cool. She’ll love it.”

  Austin certainly hoped so. One thing she didn’t want to do was give the girl another reason to cry on what would have to be the worst day of Sophie’s young life.

  *

  WHAT THE HELL was it with people showing up all the time? The pounding on the door echoed that in his head as Sawyer pushed himself off the couch and staggered to his feet. The TV was still on, some perky blond’s voice stabbing like an ice pick into his brain.

  “Coming.” He dragged himself over to the door, and damn. Feeling like he’d stumbled into Groundhog’s Day, there was Austin on his porch, looking pert and pretty and smelling like those piña coladas again.

  “Hey.” The morning sun had turned into a blazing fireball that was scorching his eyes. He blinked and felt sandpaper behind his lids.

  The smile on her face turned upside down as she gave him a hard look he wasn’t used to seeing from her. “You look like death warmed over.”

  “Now there’s a coincidence,” he drawled, bracing one hand against the doorframe. “Because that’s pretty much how I feel.”

  “I can’t believe you’d do this, Sawyer Murphy.” Energy, and not the good kind, radiated from her as she pushed past him into the cabin as if she owned the place. Which, matter of fact, she did. She took in the bag of chips, the empty beer bottles, and when had he gotten that Jack Daniels out, anyway? “Not now. Not today of all days.”

  He dragged a hand over his hair. Ran his fuzzy tongue inside his mouth, which felt as if it had sucked up algae from a hundred-gallon stock tank. “I haven’t done anything today.” Not even peed. Or showered, which he really needed to do because even he could smell the alcohol oozing out of his pores.

  “Why don’t you, uh, you know . . . sit down . . . and I’ll, uh, be back in a few.” And with that brilliant display of intelligence, after nearly tipping over when he waved an arm toward one of the leather chairs, he staggered—okay, escaped—out of the room.

  Putting his hands on the edge of the counter, he leaned over the sink, squinting against the light at his face in the mirror. His eyes were as red-veined as a Modoc County roadmap and his face was the color of cement.

  After taking care of ridding his body of some of the beer and whiskey he’d drunk last night and scrubbing the fuzz off his teeth and tongue, he ran some water into his hands and swallowed three vitamin Ms, which was military-speak for Motrin.

  Next he took off his shirt, then, biting back a moan as his head threatened to explode, bent down and shoved his jeans down his legs. Fortunately, sometime between the baseball game and the chatty morning TV blond, he’d taken off his boots. Next he gingerly lowered himself to the closed lid of the commode, managed to pull off his socks with only the faintest of groans, then turned on the water, which—thank you God and Brody Ames for installing the on-demand water heater—took seconds to warm up to steaming.

  Climbing into that tall lion-footed red tub was a lot trickier than it had been with Austin, but thankfully he managed the maneuver without breaking his neck. Turning the hand shower spray to pulsing massage to hopefully beat the toxins out of his aching body, he couldn’t help wondering if Austin would even be there when he came back out. Which might not be a good thing since he wasn’t sure he was in good enough shape to walk into a human hornets’ nest.

  After deciding that trying to shave might risk slitting his throat, he braved leaving the bathroom. The bottles and chip bag were gone from the table, the couch cushions straightened. Following the rich aroma of coffee coming from the kitchen, he found Austin standing at the stove, a frying pan in her hand.

  “You don’t have to cook me breakfast,” he said as his stomach roiled at the thought of food.

  “Don’t flatter yourself thinking I’m doing it for you.” She pulled out a carton of eggs and some butter from the fridge. He thought she might have arched a brow at the salad stuff, but his vision was still a bit blurry and he couldn’t be certain. “I need you in good shape for the children today. The eggs are full of amino acid that will prevent liver damage and help with that headache. Fortunately, you have spinach, which is, by the way, a big surprise, which provides potassium, which will help restore your electrolytes, and some toast will raise your blood sugar.”

  She ran a glass of water from the tap. “Drink this to start rehydrating. Then you can have your coffee.”

  He gulped the water like a guy who’d been crawling across some Middle East desert for a month, then curled his fingers around the mug she held out to him and breathed in the fragrant steam. “I think,” he decided, “I just may live.”

  “You don’t have any choice.” She waved a spatula she’d found somewhere in a drawer at him. “You have responsibilities.”

  The coffee scorched whatever fuzz might be left on his tongue, but as he felt the caffeine hit his dehydrated brain, Sawyer didn’t care. “Anyone ever tell you that you can be a little bossy from time to time?” He took another drink.

  “They have. And I’m proud of it. Now sit down and tell me about this Ms. Grimsley. I’m meeting with her for a home inspection at precisely ten this morning, and I need to know everything.” She suddenly paled. “Please tell me you weren’t drunk when she showed up last evening.”

  “I swear.” He lifted his right hand. “I hadn’t had a thing to drink.” He didn’t see any point in adding that if the social worker had arrived three minutes later, he would’ve been caught with a beer in hand. But since prohibition had been repealed a very long time ago, that wouldn’t have been a crime.

  “Okay.” She began whipping the eggs in a bowl while throwing some spinach leaves into the pan. Where they immediately began to shrivel up, but since she seemed to know what she was doing, he just drank his coffee and watched the show. “So, what’s she like?”

  “Like a Dickens character.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at him after putting the bread in the toaster. “Dickens wrote a lot of characters. Which one?”

  “I’m talking about the name thing. She’s well named because she’s really grim.”

  “Oh, dandy.” She poured the eggs onto the spinach. “What did she do?”

  “She checked out all the rooms. She seemed surprised the bedrooms had been set up for the kids.”

  “Surprised in a good way?”

  “Well, as good as she could show, I guess. She asked if I’d bought the stuff, and I said that, no, we’d had help. Then she made a crack about it taking a village. Which kind of pissed me off, so I told her, politely, that you and I had lost our mothers, but we’d had a lot of support from people, so we’d never felt deprived or alone.”

  “That’s a good comeback.”

  “Thank you.” He was relieved to have done something right and hoped that meant that she might let him off the hook when it came to the drinking thing.

  “Then she checked out the fridge and cupboards.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep. I actually seemed to get a point for having veggies.”

  “You do with me, too,” she admitted. “What e
lse?”

  “It looked like she was all done. She doesn’t give any real feedback for what she keeps writing on that damn clipboard of hers, so don’t let it make you nervous. I think it’s partly a power play on her part.” Sawyer had dealt with enough officers who got off on control games that he’d recognized the behavior right off.

  “You said it looked like she was done.” She put the spinach eggs on a plate, spread butter on the toast, and put it with a fork and napkin in front of him. “But she wasn’t?”

  “No.” He began shoveling it down. Hot damn, it was good. “She acted like she thought of something on the way out, but I’m pretty sure she’s just streamed too many old episodes of Columbo because it sure seemed like a setup to me.”

  “What did she ask?”

  “About my war stuff.” He talked around the bite of buttered toast he’d just taken. “And whether I had any PTSD issues.”

  She’d paused in wiping crumbs off the counter. From the way her shoulders had tensed, he knew she’d caught the significance of that question, too. “And?” she asked with what he could tell was forced casualness. “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her no.”

  “Which isn’t exactly the truth.”

  “No,” he admitted. He polished off the veggie eggs, then put down the coffee and went over and drew her into his arms. “You, your dad, and my family know I have issues. Hell, everyone who comes home has to have some problems. But I swear, I won’t let them get in the way of the kids’ happiness.”

  “But last night—”

  “Was an anomaly. It won’t happen again.”

  She pulled away from his light embrace. Sat down at the table. Knowing they were going to have to talk about it, he decided to move the venue.

  “Would you mind if we went out on the porch?” He needed some fresh air and wide-open spaces for this conversation. And no way did he want to return to the scene of last night’s crime.

  “Sure.” He noticed her starting to glance at her watch and decide not to. Knowing she was willing to risk being late for Ms. Grim, he found that encouraging.

  The foreman’s cabin didn’t have a swing like the main house, but it did have two rockers side by side. He waited until she sat down in one, then chose the other.

  “It’s been a rough few days.”

  “For everyone,” she pointed out.

  “True. But it kicked in some memories that I’d stuffed down. Ones I’ve been trying to ignore.”

  “I imagine war brings a lot of bad memories.”

  “True. But except for nightmares, which everyone has, for some reason, I was mostly able to deal with that stuff. Which doesn’t have anything to do with strength of character, or personality. Maybe it’s just the way our different brains are wired. I mean, look at doctors who cut into people’s bodies. Or Tom, who’d have to put down animals. They can do their jobs and not have it haunt them or they wouldn’t make it through med school in the first place. Or they’d quit when it got too tough.

  “Or cops, like Coop. You know he had to deal with stuff when he was working those mean streets in Portland, and hell, he was leading the search team that found Ellen’s body. But somehow he managed to deal with all that, while most people wouldn’t be able to handle it without stress having them crack.”

  “I get your point. So, are you saying you’re not haunted by battle flashbacks?”

  “Well, sure. But, like I said, they’re not that big a deal. I can shake them off, and some days it’s even like those things didn’t happen to me. That they’re more like some movie I’ve seen.”

  “Yet something bothered you last night.” She reached out and took his hand, linking their fingers together.

  “It’s the funeral stuff.” He drew in a deep breath. Blew it out. “You knew that my last mission turned into a blood bath.”

  She nodded. “The one where you got injured. And were given those medals for.”

  God, he got sick of hearing about those damn medals. “Yeah. That one.”

  He told her some of it, leaving out the worst details because there was no way he wanted anyone, least of all her, to have those images in her head.

  “I’m so sorry.” She was holding his hand so tight she’d probably cut off his circulation, but Sawyer didn’t really care.

  “It was bad. But, like I was trying to explain, I sort of got past it. For the most part. Maybe the same fog of war fogs memories or emotional connections for me. I don’t know.” He shrugged. “But then, after I got out, I visited all the families of all the guys who didn’t make it home.”

  “How many?”

  “Six.”

  “Why?”

  “They were my team,” he said simply. “I owed it to them to let the families know that their last thoughts were with them. And that as bad as it had admittedly been, there’d been a moment of peace.”

  She tilted her head. Studied him. “Was that true?”

  “With some.”

  “But not all.”

  “No.” He could still hear the screams and sobs. And not only when he was sleeping. “Not all.”

  “That was your way of honoring them, wasn’t it?”

  “I guess.” Another shrug. “To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t thought through the reasons. All I knew was that since they hadn’t come home, at least alive, I couldn’t come home until I met their families and visited their graves.”

  “Oh, wow.” He saw her taking all that in and realized that she was probably one of the few civilians who could, in some small way, understand what he’d ended up going through. “That’s a lot of raw emotion you were taking on.”

  “The Marines have a notification officer who informs the family of a death,” he said. “And unlike the other branches of the military, stays with them through the burials, and longer, if needed. Those guys take on a lot and tend to burn out. But as good as they are, and as much as they care, they didn’t know the Marines personally.”

  “Not like you did.”

  “No. Not like I did.”

  A long silence stretched out. Then, finally, she said, “Okay.”

  “Okay? That’s it?” Surprised to get off that easily, Sawyer stood up and looked down at her.

  “Any time you want to talk about it more, or about the men you lost, I’m always here. But I get why the past few days had to trigger some really painful emotions, and I’m certainly not one to preach about trying to ease pain by turning a flamethrower of alcohol onto a lake of gasoline. It’s not effective, has the totally opposite result that you’re hoping for, and it leaves you messed up. However, in a way, I suppose it can be cathartic. So.”

  She stood, as well, went up on her toes, linked her fingers around his neck, and kissed him. “I’m going to go have myself a good cry about all this, then get myself together for Ms. Grimsley.”

  He put his hands on her hips. “What are you going to do afterwards?”

  “I have to pick up the kids. We decided they’d be spending the night here and going with us to the church for the funeral.”

  “Good plan. I do have one question.” He played with her braid, brushing the silky loose hairs below the elastic band holding it together against her throat.

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you think you could pencil in a quickie before leaving to pick up the kids?”

  “Just like a man,” she said on an exaggerated sigh. “How soon your people give up the effort of a slow seduction after getting the woman to give it up.”

  “I’m up for a slow seduction any time you want. But don’t judge until you’ve experienced my quickie.”

  “Nothing wrong with your ego, is there, Sawyer Murphy?”

  He bent and kissed her again, slow and long and deep, thinking he could easily spend the rest of his life doing nothing but making love to this tropical-smelling, sweet-tasting cowgirl.

  “It’s you,” he said, releasing her when what he wanted to do was drag her, caveman style, off to his bed “You’re my in
spiration.” He ran a hand over her shoulder, down her arm, linked their fingers together, and lifted her hand to his lips. “My everything.”

  “Well.” She took a deep breath. “You’ve convinced me. I’ll be back, hopefully before noon. Be ready.”

  31

  SAWYER HAD BEEN right about Ms. Grimsley being every bit as grim as her name. Austin became more and more nervous as she was subjected to an hour-and-a-half-long interrogation that had her expecting the woman to go out to that gray sedan and pull some bright lights and rubber hoses out of the trunk.

  Still, she did her best to answer calmly and truthfully. Even when it came to Sawyer.

  “We’ve been best friends most of our lives,” she said when asked about their relationship. “His mother stepped in after my mother left.”

  “To return to Sweden.”

  “Yes.” Sawyer had also been right about the note-taking.

  She glanced up at Austin over the rim of her cheaters. “That must have been difficult.”

  “It wasn’t easy. But I suspect growing up with a chronically unhappy mother would have been more difficult,” she said mildly. “And I had a great deal of support. As I said, Sawyer’s mom was wonderful, as was Winema, our housekeeper. And there were teachers and so many others who made certain I never felt abandoned.” That might have been fudging the truth a bit, but she couldn’t see that part of her life was any of Ms. Grim’s business.

  “Yes, Mr. Murphy mentioned all that,” she said. “How close were you and he when you were married?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “To be more to the point, did your friendship with Sawyer Murphy have anything to do with your divorce?”

  Austin felt the color flooding into her cheeks. She wasn’t embarrassed but angry. Folding her hands together so tightly she could feel the nails biting into her skin, she lifted her chin and looked the officious, annoying woman straight in the eye. “No,” she said. “He did not. I wasn’t in contact with him during my marriage.”

  “I find that strange.” More damn writing. “Given that you’d been so close all your lives until then.”