Forever Mine: Callaghan Brothers, Book 9

by Abbie Zanders

  “Right,” Fitz said, nudging Brian. “We’ll just wait over there then.”

  Pulling away only far enough to see her face, Jack curled his index finger and tucked it beneath her chin, coaxing her to look at him. Her emerald eyes were, as he suspected, shiny with moisture. But he hadn’t expected to see the absolute conviction there.

  “You will come home to me, Jack Callaghan,” she told him.

  “Aye,” he agreed.

  She bit her lip and lowered her eyes just a little as she reached into her pocket. “And just so you won’t forget and be tempted by another, I want to give you something to remind you of what’s waiting for you.”

  Forget her? Was she kidding? He’d known in the first few moments that there would never be another woman for him, not ever. Maybe he should have done a better job of assuring her of that. There was no time left to explain about croies and soulmates and how he knew she was his, so he leaned over and tried to show her with his kiss instead.

  Kathleen melted in his arms as he poured his heart and soul into her in the only way he could. When he finally released her, he was vaguely away of her slipping something into his pocket.

  The final call came, a harsh, unpleasant voice magnified over the crappy bus station speakers. It was time to go.

  There were so many things he wanted to say, but they all jammed up in his throat. Kathleen smiled and stepped back, smoothing his shirt as she did so. “Go on, now,” she told him. “Be off with you.” Her voice was steady, but the thickening of her brogue gave her emotions away.

  Unable to speak, he nodded and joined the others lining up to board the bus.

  Kathleen was still there, smiling at him and standing proud when the bus drew away from the station.

  “You are one lucky bastard,” Fitz commented beside him.

  “Aye, I am at that,” Jack agreed.

  “Did she give you anything? You know, for luck?”

  Jack remembered that she had tucked something into his pocket. He reached down and pulled out a folded strip. He pulled it apart, his heart stammering in his chest as he looked upon a series of quick-succession poses, the kind that came out of the pull-curtain photo booths.

  The first frame showed Kathleen looking seductively at the camera, hands poised at the edges of her button-down blouse. The third showed her blouse hanging off to either side, revealing a feminine, lacy bra accentuating full, firm breasts. And the fifth and final frame made his heart stop entirely. The cups of her bra had been replaced with her hands. Her very small hands.

  From the seat behind them, Brian looked over his shoulder and whistled. “Now that’s what I call incentive.”

  Incentive, indeed. Jack shoved the strip back into his pocket; those images were for his eyes only. He’d been determined to make it home in one piece before, but now he’d move heaven and earth to get back to her.

  Chapter Four

  September 2015

  Pine Ridge

  Michael, now dressed in scrubs, made a quick stop in the waiting room. Six men jumped to their feet. Three of them held phones in their hands, no doubt providing updates to their worried wives back at the farm.

  Their eyes landed on him, searching for news in his somber features.

  “Well?” Kane asked. Nicknamed the Iceman for his hard, cold exterior, his voice belied none of the worry that Michael (and everyone else there) knew simmered just beneath the surface.

  “He’s holding his own.”

  A collective exhale was released. “What the hell happened?” asked Ian. The trademark mischief that normally danced in his eyes was notably absent, his face a mask of concern.

  “Blood tests and a cardiac catheter confirm a heart-attack. He’s got three blocked vessels, one of them a major artery. The OR is prepping for an emergency bypass as we speak.”

  “Jesus,” muttered Kieran, the youngest. “Does he know what’s happening?”

  “He’s under sedation,” Michael hedged. What he didn’t want to tell them was that after explaining the situation to his semi-conscious father, Michael felt a chill come over him, and a moment later, Jack had stared over his shoulder and murmured, “So you’ve come to watch over me then, have you?” Michael had looked behind him, to find nothing but a wall of blinking, beeping monitors. It was eerie as hell.

  “Who is going to do it?” Shane asked.

  “Jimmy Yim. He’s the best cardiac man there is.”

  “But you’ll be with him, right?”

  “Yeah, I’m assisting.”

  “How the hell did this happen?” That from Sean. There was no simple answer to that. They knew, just as Michael did, of the history of heart disease among the men in their family. At sixty-five, Jack Callaghan had made it farther than most of his male ancestors before him. It was more of a rhetorical question, anyway, so Michael didn’t bother to answer.

  “Don’t you let him die, Mick,” Jake, their leader by unspoken agreement, commanded.

  There were always risks with surgery, especially in emergency situations like this. He wasn’t about to spout a bunch of statistics to his brothers, though. Chances were, they already knew. A quick glance at Ian’s tablet screen confirmed that he’d been researching heart attack treatment options.

  Michael nodded soberly. “It’ll be a couple of hours.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Jake said firmly, just as he’d expected. They’d been in this situation too many times to expect anything less.

  Michael turned on his heel and went to scrub in. He prayed that the next time he saw his brothers, he’d have good news.

  He returned to Operating Room 3 to find his father already prepped. Cardiothoracic specialist and his personal friend, Dr. James Yim, acknowledged his presence with a nod. The bright hazel eyes of the anesthesiologist met his. He couldn’t see her smile, but the crinkles at the corners over the surgical mask were plain enough.

  “Hey Mick.” She was the only one that called him that besides his brothers.

  “Hey Tish. Thought you were supposed to be on vacation.”

  She shrugged those tiny shoulders. If the woman topped a hundred pounds, he’d eat his scrubs. But she was the best. There was no one else he’d rather have controlling things at the head of the table, keeping watch over his father. His cautious optimism rose substantially.

  “I was there when Jimmy got the call, thought you could use an extra set of hands.”

  Michael raised his eyebrows. Sure enough, the swath of skin exposed between the surgeon’s cap and mask was turning pink. Those two had been circling around each other for years, but it looked like they finally decided to stop fighting Fate.

  “Appreciate it.”

  Michael took his father’s hand in his. “You hear that, Dad? You’ve got the best of the best. The Dream Team of open heart surgery. Everything is going to be just fine.”

  June 1970

  Near Kompong Speu, Cambodia

  “Everything is going to be just fine.”

  Jack heard the words, floating to him on a wave of white hot pain, but he couldn’t see who had spoken them. It was dark, too dark to simply be nighttime.

  “What happened? Where am I?”

  A telling pause. “Your team was ambushed two days ago. You are in a mobile medical unit. You sustained injuries to your head and chest.”

  Hazy memories began to surface. New intel had come through, a small cell of unfriendlies mucking up the works for a bunch of Army boys. It wasn’t supposed to be anything major, just a blip on the big picture radar, but they’d stumbled upon a veritable rat’s nest of bumblefuck. Trees and mud had come alive, eyes filled with hatred and hands sporting automatic weapons as the South Vietnamese and Cambodian Armies engaged in a battle to recapture the capital.

  Vastly outnumbered, they’d run for cover... Fitz had been only a few steps ahead, Brian at his six. Fitz had looked over his shoulder, reached his arm out and yelled something, and then they were airborne...

  Pain exploded at the back of his hea
d. Jack squeezed his eyes shut, or at least tried to. The bandages around his head were wrapped too tightly to allow much. His eyes weren’t working, but his ears were functioning just fine. And it was too fucking quiet. No moans, no curses, no medics working urgently.

  “Where’s the rest of my team?” Jack asked. Silence was the only answer, but his heart ached with knowledge. Fitz. Bri. Tommy. G-man...

  “I’m the only one?”

  A heavy, rough hand landed on his shoulder. “O’Connell’s in surgery. You two are some lucky sons of bitches. We’ll take the bandages off tomorrow. For now, you need to eat.”

  The news hit him like a second blast. His team. His friends. His brothers. Fucking gone.

  And this guy had the balls to say he was lucky? Jack felt the bowl pushed into his hands. He gripped it with clumsy, almost-useless fingers covered in more bandages and flung it into the black space. A second later, he heard the dull splat and thwack as it hit the heavy canvas wall of the medic tent, then another as it hit the ground.

  A host of emotions swarmed around him, suffocating him. Anger. Rage. Guilt. Remorse. Grief. Questions whirled through his splitting head, but they all started with the same word. Why? Why did they have to die? Why hadn’t they been more alert? Why hadn’t they sensed the trap? Why hadn’t he been the one in front instead of Fitz?

  When those had run their dizzying course, another set followed closely behind. How bad were his injuries? Did he still have all of his limbs? Would he be able to see again, and if so, how was he going to look into Fitz’s mother’s, father’s, and sisters’ eyes and tell them? How was he going to live with himself?

  And then Kathleen’s voice whispered in his ear. “You promised me, Jack.”

  Jack reached beneath the sheet, fumbling for his pocket, but he wasn’t wearing pants.

  “Looking for this?”

  Jack felt something pressed into his hand. He recognized the smooth feel of the photo paper, though it was significantly smaller than it had been, and the edges were no longer clean and straight. He held it between his fingers, rubbing his thumb over an image he couldn’t see. That was okay; he didn’t need his eyes to see the soft, smooth skin, the perfect rose-colored lips curved into a mischievous grin, or the glittering desire in the pair of clear, emerald eyes. He had stared at those pictures so often, each frame was indelibly burned into his mind; if he had an ounce of artistic talent he would have been able to recreate each one down to the small detail.

  Just thinking about her helped. It didn’t dull the pain, it didn’t take away the ache, but it helped him pull back just enough to get him through the next minute. And the minute after that. It wouldn’t be the first time. This place was hell on earth, and Kathleen was the glimpse of heaven he needed to keep going. Her letters reminded him that there was a world outside this hellhole, waiting for him.

  “Your girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good reason to make it home.”

  Yeah. Yeah she was. He couldn’t explain it, but a tendril of peace snaked its way into his aching chest and he was able to draw breath. She was the reason he was still here, still alive. Jack hadn’t broken a vow yet, and he wasn’t about to start now. He would make it back to her.

  But first he had to get the hell out of here.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Travis.”

  “Well, Travis, do you think you can scrounge up another bowl of sludge for my ungrateful ass?”

  “I think that can be arranged.”

  Chapter Five

  September 2015

  Pine Ridge

  “Dad. Dad, can you hear me?”

  That voice; he knew it well. Not Travis, though. And while the antiseptic smell was somewhat familiar, this didn’t feel like a field hospital.

  Jack pried open his eyes, wincing against the bright light.

  Definitely not Vietnam. Definitely not Travis. And he wasn’t twenty years old anymore, though the heavy pressure in his chest did remind him of that hidden mine blast so long ago.

  He looked up into familiar blue eyes, into the handsome, compassionate face of his third-born son, Michael. The doctor. That was good. That meant he wasn’t dead yet.

  “You had a heart attack, and we had to perform emergency bypass surgery. Do you understand?”

  Jack tried to answer, but his mouth didn’t seem to be working properly. He blinked in acknowledgment.

  Michael smiled down at him. “You did well, Dad. Came through with flying colors. Keep it up and we’ll be moving you out of Recovery and into the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit soon. I’m going to leave you in the capable hands of these lovely nurses for a few minutes while I talk to the others and give them the good news. No flirting, though,” he winked.

  Unable to move, Jack followed his son’s retreating form with his eyes. Such a good lad, he thought. Michael had always been the one fixing up the others when they got into it, as boys often did. Kathleen had said early on the boy would be a doctor someday. She had known each of her sons so well, predicting their personalities with eerie accuracy within minutes of their birth.

  She would be so proud of them. Of the fine men they had become. Of what they had accomplished.

  His eyes were already closing again, but not before he caught a glimpse of clear, emerald eyes flashing above the mask. “Just relax, Mr. Callaghan,” said a kind, feminine voice. “We’ll take good care of you. Just leave it to us.”

  July 1972

  Pine Ridge

  “Just leave it to us,” the National Guardsman assured him. Jack’s heart lodged somewhere in his throat when he looked down from the chopper at the devastation of his beloved hometown. Hurricane Agnes had ripped through a week earlier, dumping anywhere from six to sixteen inches of rain across the area, leaving thousands homeless.

  Local rivers and creeks overflowed, turning the lower level regions into a vast, temporary lake. Centuries-old homes were destroyed, ripped from their foundations and carried away. Cemeteries gave up their ghastly treasures; bodies in various states of decomposition were found floating in attics and yards and upon rooftops. The flood waters were receding, leaving a sticky, pungent muck in their wake. The stench hung in the heavy, humid air.

  The National Guard had been flying in aid around the clock. Big Army helicopters brought food, medicine, and clothing to those who had lost everything. Today, one of them brought Jack Callaghan home.

  But the flood wasn’t why he had been given a temporary, week-long ticket to Pine Ridge. Not directly.

  No, he was here to bury his father.

  Liam had suffered a massive coronary while trying to rescue a family from the rising waters. One minute he was reaching for a woman leaning out of her second story bedroom window; the next, she was safely in his bass boat with her kids and dog and he was grasping his chest and plunging over the side.

  Until the call came, he hadn’t known about the hurricane or the flood or any of it. He had been out of contact for months, unable to write or phone. He’d been so looking forward to a break from active duty, to getting back to a secure base camp to do just that, but it hadn’t worked out quite the way he’d thought it would. When he’d gone to pick up the hefty stack of accumulated letters written by his mother and Kathleen, he had been directed to the commanding officer’s tent instead.

  His father was gone, and now he was gazing at what was left of the valley he called home.

  With the help of Guardsmen, he made it to his parents’ house. Luckily, it was far enough above the flood plain that they hadn’t been directly affected by the rising waters. It was only a small consolation.

  His mother Mary ran to him, embracing him with red-rimmed, puffy eyes. She looked as if she’d aged twenty years instead of four, but that was probably the grief. After thirty years of marriage, his parents had still been very much in love. Now the light in her eyes was dimmed, her heart broken right along with her husband’s but still somehow beating. That was the power of croies.

  The
priest was there, too, offering words of condolence and faith. Jack nodded and thanked him, but the words provided little comfort. He wasn’t the same man he’d once been. He’d seen too much, done too much. He was numb, so numb to the horrors of life.

  What Jack did thank God for was the fact that his family didn’t know, hopefully would never know, those horrors. That was why he and the tens of thousands of other young men did what they did.

  Neighborhood women bustled about with food and candles and flowers, but there was only one face Jack searched for.

  He found her in the kitchen, neatly organizing the well-intentioned offerings of food. For long moments, Jack just stood in the doorway and watched her. Waves of black silk were twisted and coiled at the base of her neck, so dark against her much-lighter skin. The summer sun had touched it though, lending a radiant, healthy glow.

  She wore a dark, flowing, ankle length skirt and a short-sleeved, plain blouse. So damn feminine. His heart thundered in his chest and for a moment, he was afraid to move for fear that this vision –—that she—– wasn’t real.

  Kathleen reached up to tuck an errant lock back into place, turning slightly in the process. Her eyes widened when she saw him.

  “Jack?” she whispered. And then she glided across the room and wrapped her arms around him, uncaring of those who had stopped what they were doing to watch the scene. He pulled her close, burying his face in the crook of her fragrant neck. He closed his eyes, letting her warmth, her love, soak into him.

  “I’ve missed you,” he managed. The words were woefully inadequate, but in that moment there were no words ever written that could have conveyed what he felt. This woman, the one he had known for barely a week before he’d shipped out, really was the other half of his ragged soul. From the moment he’d looked down in her beautiful eyes, he had known.

  “I’ve missed you too,” she said. Her hands traced over his arms, his shoulders, his face, as if assuring herself he was really there. “I’m so sorry about your father.”

  He squeezed her to him again. As awful as the situation was that had brought him here, he was overjoyed to hold her. A throat cleared, and then another, reminding him that they were not alone.