Heroes in Uniform: Soldiers, SEALs, Spies, Rangers and Cops: Sexy Hot Contemporary Alpha Heroes From NY Times and USA Today Bestselling Authors

by Sharon Hamilton

  * * *

  “Grif! Welcome home!”

  He hugged his aunt, her graying curls tickling across his wry grimace. Home? Closest thing he’d had to a home was using the same suitcase for a dozen years. Even at the house outside Washington where Ellyn, Meg, Ben and Dale had treated him like a member of the family, he’d known he was just visiting.

  “This is your home you know,” Marti added, as if she’d seen his expression. She stepped back from the embrace, gripping his forearms as if he were still a boy and she could give him a shake if she felt the need. “Far Hills Ranch always has been and always will be your home.”

  “Marti, I – ”

  “Even if you don’t come back near often enough. I wish you’d take some more interest in running the ranch. It’s your legacy, too, after all. At least now I can drag Kendra to business meetings and such. But sometimes, I swear, if it weren’t for Luke, I’d despair of anyone in the next generation caring about running this ranch.”

  Grif grinned. “That’s right – Luke’s still here. Foreman now, isn’t he? Does he talk any more than he used to?”

  “He’s no chatterbox. But as for still here – it’s not still. All you kids left Far Hills – for a while.” She gave the final three words an emphasis as if their returns had been preordained. “Luke’s family moved to Colorado not long after you stopped coming for summers. But a few years back he showed up looking for a job as a hand. Didn’t take long to see he was suited to a whole lot more. He ought to have a ranch of his own.”

  “Why doesn’t he?”

  “Says he can’t afford it. I could help him, but he won’t hear of that. I think he’s got a fool notion that he can’t leave me on my own – as if I hadn’t run this ranch since I was twenty years old. Besides, he loves Far Hills Ranch, just like...” she hesitated, then added briskly, “Just like he was a Susland. So, now that you’re here, how long can you stay?”

  “I’ve got a few weeks leave.”

  “Wonderful! Get your gear and put it in the – ”

  “No, no, Marti. There’s no need. I have a room at the – ”

  “ – room behind the kitchen. Of course there’s need – this is your home. You are not staying at the motel. Besides, room’s all ready. You’ll have your own door to outside, in case you’re worried about having your old aunt knowing about your comings and goings – ”

  “Old aunt?” he protested, but she paid no heed.

  “And you’ll have your own bathroom. Bed’s made up. I’ll get towels, and you’ll be all set.”

  “Marti, those are the foreman’s quarters. I wouldn’t put Luke out, even if –

  “You’re not putting anyone out. Foreman’s house is separate nowadays. Men don’t want to be living in the main house, especially not young, single men like you and Luke.”

  “Marti, I’m staying at Fort Piney – Bachelor Officer Quarters.”

  His aunt harrumphed, but didn’t argue more. At least not about that. “Bachelor Officer Quarters. What kind of a place is that for you to live? I never have understood why you aren’t married, Grif.”

  “It’s hard on a woman being married to an Army man.”

  “That didn’t stop your father.”

  “No. It didn’t.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And it doesn’t keep I don’t know how many thousands of people from having families while the husband or wife – sometimes both – is in the Army.”

  “I suppose not,” he acknowledged, knowing that what some people did, didn’t necessarily apply to others.

  “Well, you must be thirsty as all get-out. I swear flying on an airplane makes me drier than a three-day drought. ‘Cept that little plane of Daniel’s – that’s Kendra’s new husband, you know.” She opened the refrigerator, and began moving containers. “I don’t suppose you want milk, and you never did like apple juice. Here we go – lemonade.”

  “No, thanks, I just had some. I stopped at Ridge House.”

  “Did you now?”

  Her voice was even, so it must have been something in the way she looked at him that made him feel obliged to add, “You know I spent time with them in Washington. All of them.”

  “Of course I know. Grif this and Grif that – that was practically all those two kids could talk about when they first moved here, wanting to know what you did when you were here as a kid growing up with their mom and dad – wanting to do exactly the same thing.”

  “I hope you didn’t let them,” he said with grin.

  “I tried my best, but I was about as successful as I used to be stopping you from doing harebrained stunts. Like using the top of the pole fence as a tightrope. You should have broken more than your arm.” She shook her head. “ ‘Course, that hero worship of Meg and Ben’s wore off, what with not hearing from you.”

  His smile dried up. Too late he recognized how closely she was watching him, and guessed her comment had been a deliberate attempt to gauge his reaction.

  “So,” she said, “are you passing through to give those kids ideas for more mischief to get into or are you – ?”

  The ringing of the phone interrupted.

  “Far Hills Ranch... Fran, you’ll never guess who I’ve got right here... Oh, you did... Yes, I knew that... Uh-huh... Uh-huh... What? A colonel? No, he hadn’t told me that!”

  Marti managed to frown and smile at him at the same time.

  Grif decided he needed a good, long look out the window at the once familiar sweep of land that bubbled briefly into sage-covered foothills before rising abruptly into the Big Horn Mountains.

  Once, coming here and seeing this land and those mountains had been like a homecoming for him. Once, the big, open sky above him had made him feel like any weight pressing on his shoulders had scattered and dissipated into all that blue space.

  Maybe Ellyn had felt some of that same relief coming back here. He hoped so.

  He hadn’t missed her faint tensing when she’d talked about weighing returning to Washington or staying here, and he’d known there’d been another choice. Her mother.

  He remembered the woman’s solitary visit from town to the ranch when he and Ellyn were kids, an excursion frequently punctuated by Rose Brindford’s exasperated sighs over nearly everything Ellyn did and how she did it. That changed to a twittering coo whenever an adult male came within range. Grif could have happily throttled the woman. For the first time he’d recognized an upside to his father’s complete lack of interest in him.

  Some instinct – or maybe a desire to get away from the past – made him tune into the one-sided phone conversation continuing behind him.

  “Uh-huh... He did...? Interesting...”

  Knowing that the string of “uh-huhs...” and “isn’t that interestings...” being murmured into the phone had to do with him brought an unfamiliar sensation into his chest. He turned his back to the window and faced his aunt, making it clear he was listening.

  He should have known better than to think that would intimidate her.

  “Uh-huh, I agree. That is very interesting,” she said into the mouthpiece in a decidedly provocative tone, eyes leveled on him. “You’re right, it does bear watching.”

  A moment later, she said goodbye to Fran Sinclair.

  “I hear you’ve got some time before your dinner date, so – ”

  “It’s not a date.”

  “ – let’s sit down and have a nice talk. I know you’re not thirsty, but I have cookies in the freezer – ”

  “You don’t have to – ”

  “Almond cookies. You always did like my almond cookies. And they’ll defrost fast enough.”

  “Almond cookies?”

  She chuckled and waved him to the table by the big window as she put a plate piled with cookies into the microwave. “So, how did you find Ellyn?”

  He’d expected that. “She and the kids look great. Ben seems his old self. Meg...it’s hard to tell. Maybe at dinner... And Ellyn...”

  Marti brought the plate to the table, and he
reached for a cookie, fully aware the movement masked his face from Marti.

  “What about Ellyn?”

  The back door opened to a mismatched pair, and saved Grif from answering.

  The man was above medium height, with the kind of understated, wiry toughness that Grif had observed during his years in the Army often matched an equally understated toughness inside.

  His companion was a girl of about four years old, with shining dark hair and sparkling brown eyes. She wore a pink jacket with a denim skirt and white tights.

  “Mama!” she called as she hurtled into the room. The girl threw her arms around Marti’s neck.

  Grif had never doubted that his aunt had an abundance of love to give to the orphan she’d adopted three years earlier from a storm-devastated island off South America, but seeing the child’s expression as she hugged Marti eased a doubt he’d harbored about whether that love would be returned.

  “Grif, this is my Emily,” Marti said unnecessarily.

  Grif met the little girl’s eyes. “Hi, Emily.”

  Then he stood and extended. “It’s good to see you, Luke.”

  Luke Chandler took off a work glove and shook hands firmly. “Hello, Grif. Or should I call you Major?”

  “It’s Colonel,” interposed Marti. “He got a promotion he didn’t tell us about.”

  “Grif will do,” he said mildly, earning a glance from Luke that blended amusement and empathy. Obviously Marti continued to treat Luke as a member of the family, as she always had, so the other man understood exactly what Grif was being subjected to.

  “Emily, dear, you should say hello. Grif’s family. He’s your cousin,” Marti prompted.

  Emily shook her head decisively. “Matthew’s my cousin.”

  “That’s true. But so is Matthew’s mommy, and so is Grif.”

  “It’s okay, Marti. All those family relationships still confuse me,” Grif offered.

  “Not at all. In fact, I’ve been researching the Susland family tree, and I’ve found out things – ”

  “Oh, Lord, don’t let her get started on that,” Luke groaned as he took a seat at the table and reached for a cookie.

  Marti swatted at his non-cookie-reaching arm without releasing Emily.

  Grif also helped himself to a cookie and sat back to listen to the banter of old friends and family.

  He’d wondered about Emily and he’d always liked Luke, but that didn’t explain why when they’d walked in, he had never been so happy to see two people in his life.

  It wasn’t Marti’s questions that had worried Grif – it was his answers.

  At The Heart’s Command: Chapter Three

  Ellyn did something she hadn’t done in years. She tried on three combinations of clothes before she settled on what to wear.

  Only because she wasn’t certain where they were going, she told herself.

  With money tight, she hadn’t bought anything new except socks, a pair of jeans and some necessary winter outerwear since they’d moved to Wyoming. Her wardrobe’s saving grace was that she’d bought classics since she was in college, where she was also introduced to the wonders of mix-and-match dressing.

  Continuing to mix and match in Wyoming what she’d brought from Washington had let her dress for work, school meetings, church and the few other occasions when she had to be presentable.

  In the end, she settled on the black skirt with a hint of swirl to it, a black cotton shell and a red wool cardigan. With the black, red and white scarf her children had given her for Christmas – with an assist from Fran, she suspected – at her throat and loafers with a chunky heel, she looked good, but without any expectations.

  That’s why she’d taken off her silk sheath dress – it had expectations. Now, as she considered her reflection, she was satisfied. After all, this was simply dinner with an old friend. An old family friend.

  She gave an exaggerated smile, then stuck her tongue out at her image in the mirror. Are we having fun yet?

  “What are you doing, Mom?”

  “Oh! Ben, you startled me.” She pressed her hand to her heart. “I didn’t hear you come in.” She considered that, then added, “I also didn’t hear you knock.”

  “That’s because you were making faces in the mirror,” he assured her, before adding quickly, “Mom, Meg won’t get ready.”

  She gave him a look meant to make it clear she had noticed the flaw in his logic, along with his infraction of house rules, but was letting it slide this time. “What do mean she won’t get ready? If she’s doing homework...”

  “Nah, she finished that a long time ago.” Ben had finished his homework in record time, bringing her all the papers to prove it, without being asked. He’d also meekly accepted her instructions on what he should wear. He must really want that steak. Ellyn’s internal grin twisted a bit, because she suspected what her son wanted even more was Grif’s attention. “She’s just sitting in her room, reading. And she’s got on those jeans you won’t let her leave the house in. I told her, she had to wear something else before Grif gets here, but she told me to go away.”

  Ellyn started down the short hallway from her bedroom to the stairs at the back of the house that led to her children’s bedrooms, a bathroom, closets and a “guest room” that was bare of everything except dust bunnies. Ben trailed behind her, clearly intending to witness his sister’s comeuppance. Ellyn stifled a sigh. Sometimes her children’s greatest joy in life seemed to be seeing the other sibling get scolded.

  “Ben, will you please go check that the front door is locked, so we’ll be ready to go when Grif gets here.”

  The chances of the rarely used front door being unlocked were nil, but the possibility that it might delay their departure for dinner got Ben moving.

  “Meg?” Ellyn knocked on the halfway-open door to her daughter’s room.

  “What?”

  Ellyn ducked her head through the small doorway of the room tacked on by some past generation of Suslands.

  Meg was curled up on the upholstered chair that had once sat in the Sinclair family room. Ridge House had no family room, so Ellyn had been happy to agree to Meg’s plea that it be in her room. She’d recognized her daughter’s need to have tangible reminders of that earlier period of her life. Especially because in selecting what to sell before they came West, Meg’s little-girl bedroom set of white and rose had been among the items to go.

  “Meg, Grif’s going to be here in a few minutes. You need to change.”

  Meg slowly lifted her head from her open book, and gave her mother a look that it took Ellyn a moment to interpret. When she did, it gave her a jolt.

  Pity.

  Meg didn’t believe Grif would come. She didn’t believe he would live up to his word. He would disappoint them all – except Meg, because she was too smart to believe in him.

  Grif’s not like your father.

  The thought came too fast to block, but Ellyn had no temptation to speak it.

  Their first months at Far Hills, the final months with Dale, had revealed what their network of friends and neighbors back East – especially Grif – had masked. Dale hadn’t been much of a father to the kids for quite a while. Meg had learned not to trust Dale over a longer period of time and with harder lessons of events missed, plans canceled, promises forgotten. But Grif, too, had disappointed her. Not breaking a promise, because he’d made none, but breaking an expectation he had built by being there time after time.

  “Meg, honey... I know it’s hard, but...”

  “Grif’s here!” Ben called from downstairs. “I’ll let him in.”

  Meg glanced toward her window that overlooked the driveway, but didn’t move.

  Ellyn walked across the room and looked out in time to see Grif emerge from the car. Right on time.

  “It’s Grif,” Ellyn confirmed, then added firmly, “You need to change, and quickly.”

  She headed out of the room, as if in no doubt that Meg would follow that order, but felt tension ease from her shoulders as
she heard Meg moving around in the room.

  With her mind less occupied by her daughter, she spared her son’s room a glance in passing – a glance was all she could take.

  Downstairs, she found Ben regaling Grif with tales of both Meg’s behavior and his own triumphs in youth rodeo – simultaneously and very confusingly.

  “Benjamin Madison Sinclair,” Ellyn intoned, stopping Ben in mid-word. “You will not be going anywhere tonight if you don’t get upstairs and deal with your room. The wet towels now residing on the floor and furniture are to be folded neatly over the towel bar in the bathroom. The clothes you were wearing are to be put in the hamper, or folded neatly and put neatly in the dresser or hung up neatly in the closet. Have you recognized the important word in all this?”

  “Yes’m. Neatly.”

  “That’s right. Now get to it. You don’t want to keep Grif waiting, when he’s so kindly offered to take us to dinner.”

  “Yes’m,” Ben repeated with an anguished look toward Grif. “I’ll hurry. Honest.”

  Then he was gone. Ellyn could almost imagine she heard the word steak floating in the air behind him like a prayer.

  “I’m sorry we’re not ready, Grif.”

  He smiled faintly. “You’re ready, Ellyn, aren’t you? You look very nice.”

  “Thank you.” She must have had a dearth of compliments lately to have such a standard one from an old friend threaten to jumble her thinking. “Yes, I’m ready. But with Ben on cleanup duty and Meg, uh, delayed, we won’t be getting out of here on time. If you made a reservation for six-thirty – ”

  “I didn’t. Seven, with a request for salads to be served immediately in case the kids were starving.”

  “That’s very thoughtful of you – and wise.”

  He handled compliments even worse than she did – he simply ignored them. “Ben said Meg didn’t think I was coming back.”

  “It’s nothing personal, Grif, it’s – ”

  “Of course it’s personal. I disappeared on her – on all of you. She’s got a right to be angry. And cautious. It’ll take a lot more instances of being on time to get her faith back than it took to lose it.”