To Have and to Hold: A Returning Home Novel

by Serena Bell

  It had been like waking from a dream of love to the reality of solitude.

  He let himself drift back toward sleep, and in those vague, cloudy moments just before he lost himself, there it was again, like a half-remembered dream.

  He could taste her, feel her against him. A vivid, desperate craving rose in him.

  What kind of voodoo was that?

  He couldn’t remember her consciously, but some part of him knew her. The dream part. His body.

  And, God. Had it always been like that between them? Because if it had, he understood why he’d let it happen. That wasn’t the kind of attraction any man resisted, not for long. It was only that jarring sense of waking from a dream—and his confusion—that had put the brakes on.

  If he hadn’t sat up and turned on the light—

  He’d been seconds away from sliding his hand down and finding her bare thigh. Pushing up that scrap of insubstantial silver nightgown to discover what she wore underneath. From what the faint light had hinted at, he seriously doubted he’d find anything.

  He would have brushed the slippery fabric away from her smooth skin, slid his palm up the inside of her thigh until he found the crease where her leg met her body. Until his thumb found the softness of curls—

  Memory, or fantasy, that she kept a landing strip of neatly groomed hair?

  Memory, or fantasy, that she got wet enough that slickness sometimes covered not just her outer lips, but her thighs, too?

  Memory, or fantasy, that when he parted her and slid his thumb along her seam, her clit would be already swollen and throbbing?

  His hand was on his cock.

  In his vivid inner world, she made a soft sound of pleasure and assent when he kissed her and touched her at the same time. She licked his mouth as he circled her clit. She sucked his lip when he slid two fingers inside her without stopping that insistent circular motion.

  His cock was at full attention, rock hard and demanding, a drop forming at the tip that he spread over the head and down, wishing it were her hand, wishing it were her mouth, her tongue, her wetness. His fist tighter now, the grip harsher, speeding up, his breath fast and ragged, too.

  Maybe memory, the sound of her breathing in his ear. Maybe fantasy, the way she begged him to fill her, yanked him against her, deeper, harder, faster. Maybe memory, the way she felt clenching around him, or maybe fantasy—it hardly mattered, because either way, she took him with her over the edge, and in the strange place between waking and sleeping, between dream and reality, he came, hard, shaking and trembling with the force of it.

  Chapter 7

  Things had moved. He couldn’t find the gas can for the mower. He felt a surge of irritation with Trina for moving his shit. And for taking the girls and going to the mall and leaving him to his own devices. And then an even sharper surge of anger at himself, because he was not that guy. Not the one who’d get pissed at someone who’d given up a year of her life to help him out, and not the one who needed her help to mow the fucking lawn.

  The can was on a shelf at the back of the garage. He didn’t recognize the shelf, but he recognized his own craftsmanship, meaning he’d built the shelf sometime in the fog lost to amnesia. Jesus. It gave him the creeps, the way things could fall into that gulf.

  The mower itself was a different model than he remembered. With the old one, he’d yanked the cord and it had started. This one wouldn’t start.

  A slow ache crawled across his skull. He rested his head on the handle of the mower.

  His left hand clutched two rods together and his right reached for the cord again. The mower started up with a roar that he felt like relief.

  Dr. Stephens had told him there was more than one kind of memory. This kind was called…procedural. If you’d done something before, you could remember how to do it, even if you couldn’t actually remember ever having known how.

  Maybe that was why she was familiar under his hands in the dark, too.

  He mowed straight lines into the lawn, and even with his head pounding, the simple work gave him a sense of satisfaction.

  He finished the backyard, then tackled the front. His headache began to recede. Maybe it was the steady rhythm, or the mere fact of being productive.

  Or the not thinking. Not trying to remember the dark, ominous heart of his nightmare, not trying to ask himself what the hell he’d been doing last night, kissing her, and then, afterward, reveling in it, when he knew how much his rejection of her must hurt.

  He cut the engine.

  He would have to be very, very careful not to let that happen again, not even when sleep had made him muzzy and weak. Mindless lust, as he’d proved once, was the worst possible base on which to build anything—

  And that was assuming that he was in any position to build. When all he wanted to do was retreat into a corner, lick his wounds, and probe the lost corner of his psyche.

  “You missed a blade,” a voice said from the street.

  He looked up to see three men on fully loaded touring bikes, stopped in front of his house. It took him a moment to recognize the speaker.

  “Nate!”

  Nate Riordan had fought in his squad before an RPG had laid Nate out and killed his friend J.J. Nate had been retired a couple of years, living in the Seattle area with his wife, Alia, running a nonprofit.

  “What the hell are you doing here, man?” He let himself be pulled into a hug. Nate was easygoing, loyal, competent—the sort of man every soldier wanted at his back—and Hunter had missed him these last couple years.

  “We’re on this crazy-ass bike tour Jake dreamt up—trust a guy with only one leg to want to go harder core than the rest of us can stomach, right? He’s like, ‘We’re not fucking wounded warriors, we’re weekend warriors.’ ”

  “Two legs. Just happens one is meat and one is man-made.” The guy closest to Nate—who made Nate look small in comparison—tapped his prosthetic leg, then stuck out his hand and grinned at Hunter. “Hey, man. Jake Taylor.”

  Hunter shook it. “Nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you. Knew a few guys at Walter Reed who were headed your way.” Jake ran a veterans’ retreat. Some guys weren’t ready for normal life right after getting out, and retreats like Jake’s made the transition easier. Nate had spent time at R&R—that was where he’d met his wife, actually.

  “Headed Alia’s way, then,” Nate said. “She’s filling in for him so he can kick our asses to hell and back.”

  “And Nate’s jealous because he knows what she can do with those hands,” the third guy said.

  “Shut the fuck up, Griff,” Nate said. “This is Griff. We let him come along to make us feel better about ourselves, and because someone has to bring up the rear.”

  Griff swatted Nate across the back of the head and the two scuffled good-naturedly before Griff stuck out his hand in greeting and Hunter shook it.

  “I’ve got some beers in the fridge,” Hunter said.

  “Wouldn’t go amiss.” Nate grinned.

  They took their beers out into the backyard and sat on the patio chairs in a half circle, facing into the woods. “How’d you know I was home?” Hunter asked Nate.

  “Stopped by the base, asked about you and the team, heard the whole gory story. Amnesia?”

  Hunter nodded and sketched out the medical situation for them. Earlier this morning, he’d gone to the base to see if there was any new information from the front. Captain Carmichael had encouraged him to reach out directly to his squad mates, which he’d done, in a series of emails—but given how scarce communication had been even through official channels, he wasn’t optimistic.

  “That fucking sucks,” Jake said.

  There was a short, awkward silence while Hunter thought about that. About Jake’s sympathy for him and what Jake himself had been through. Whether it would be better, if you had to choose, to lose pieces of your mind or pieces of your body. That was no fucking choice, for sure.

  “Could be worse.” Hunter wouldn’t complain to these guy
s. “No big unpaid bills or paternity challenges or anything like that.”

  Nate eyed him doubtfully. “I call bullshit.” Nate had endured weeks of traumatic brain injury symptoms, then months more of unexplained pain, until he’d gone to R&R and met Alia, who was filling in as the physical therapist there. And she’d—well, to hear Nate tell it, she’d healed him. “That sounds pretty fucking unsettling.”

  Hunter shrugged. Thinking of the shredded wheat, of the gas can, of the lawn mower. Of what he knew about Trina in the daylight and what he felt at night. Fucking unsettling was a good assessment.

  “What does Trina have to say about it?” Nate shot him a quizzical look.

  “You met her?”

  “The four of you came to Seattle to hang with Li and me,” Nate said. “Damn. We had some good conversations, too.” He winked at Hunter. “I’ll fill you in some time. Short version: You were into her, she was into you, but nothing had happened yet. You weren’t sure it was going to, weren’t sure you wanted it to. I told you life was short and you should fucking go for it. Couple days later, I got a text message from you, said something like, ‘Thanks, man. ’Nuff said.’ ”

  “Did I tell you anything else?”

  Nate shook his head. “You didn’t have to.”

  Hunter looked out toward the wooded area behind the house to the tree house he’d built for Clara a few years back.

  “Hunter?”

  “I don’t remember,” he confessed.

  “Jesus,” Nate said. “So…?”

  “So, nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Nate raised an eyebrow.

  He couldn’t look at his friend. “She’s going to L.A. Her baby daddy’s out there.”

  Jake leaned in at that, and a deep wrinkle formed at the bridge of Griff’s nose.

  “And, what, you just let her walk away?” Nate asked.

  “What else am I supposed to do? She’s in love with me. I’m not in love with her. You know where that goes.”

  “You know, Hunt, this is not that different from what you were saying to me a year ago. ‘I think she’s in love with me. What if I can’t get there?’ Yeah, what the fuck happens then? You say, ‘I screwed up, I took a chance and it didn’t happen, and I’m sorry, but I did the best I could.’ ”

  Jake laughed darkly. “Do not, I repeat, do not take romantic advice from this asshole.”

  “Hey, I’ve done okay for myself.”

  In fact, Nate did have the self-satisfied look of a guy who was getting some regularly and thoroughly. So did Jake, for that matter.

  Griff, however, had the twitchy look of a guy who could use a change of subject matter. “You build that?” He gestured with his chin in the direction of Clara’s tree house.

  Hunter nodded. “Yeah. Couple years ago.”

  “That’s a pretty fucking nice tree house.”

  “Hell, yeah,” Nate said. “You guys should take a look.”

  “What’re you? Like the tree-house guy? On that reality show? What’s it called?” Griff’s eyebrows drew together.

  Hunter shook his head. “It’s just a kid’s tree house.”

  “This is not just anything,” Nate said. Nate wasn’t going to drop it, obviously, so they headed out into the woods, and Nate made Jake and Griff climb up into Clara’s house. It was true; it wasn’t really a kid’s tree house. It had stairs instead of a ladder, for one thing, and a front door instead of a trapdoor or floor hatch. It looked a lot like a miniature house, only up in a tree. It was completely weatherproof, made of the highest-quality building materials he’d been able to lay hands on, and the one room inside had been meticulously finished—wide-plank flooring, baseboards, quarter-round crown molding.

  “This thing’s fucking amazing,” Jake said, putting a hand out to touch the Craftsman-style front door, with its brass knocker. “Is this a real doorbell?”

  “Yeah.” The attention embarrassed and pleased Hunter at the same time.

  He’d built the tree house this elaborately because he hadn’t want to lose touch with his finish-carpentry skills—once upon a time, finish carpentry had been all he’d wanted to do, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that the home-building market had crashed and burned right when he was old enough to start his own business, he would have done that instead of joining up.

  “Sam would love this.”

  Sam was Jake’s son. Jake hadn’t known Sam existed for the first seven years of his life but, according to Nate, he was now making up for lost fatherhood time with a vengeance. Jake had wanted to bring Sam on the bike trip, but his mom, Mira, had put her foot down, saying that he wasn’t ready either for such a long ride or for so much adult male conversation.

  “This is nicer than the rooms at R&R,” Jake said, as Hunter followed him inside.

  Holy crap, it was nice. At some point in his missing memory, someone had decorated the hell out of this room. The walls had been painted sky blue, and there was a simple but beautiful white silhouette of a tree on one wall. A white daybed against the opposite wall was covered with a girlish—but not girly, Clara wouldn’t have stood for that—quilt and matching throw pillows. There were white wood-slat blinds on the windows, a plushy rug on the floor whose colors matched the quilt on the bed, framed posters on the walls, and a clock on a pretty white bedside table. Two sky-blue beanbags squatted side by side on the floor, not far from the double-sided desk where two girls could work face-to-face, with a bulletin board, organizer, and whiteboard combo on the wall beside them, and cups filled with pencils and pens within reach.

  Even if he’d had the imagination to envision this as the perfect homework nook, he was pretty sure he’d never have thought of the details that made it look so cozy and serviceable. He was 100 percent certain he’d had nothing to do with the mural, the quilt, or the throw pillows. And his mother, as lovely a human being as she was, had never listed interior design among her talents. No, he was pretty sure Trina had done this.

  “Did you do all this? These built-ins?”

  There were secret nooks and crannies hidden throughout, just because it had been a fun challenge, and shelves tucked in every corner, crammed—he was pleased to see—with books. So the girls had been spending time up here. Not that he’d resent it if they hadn’t—he’d built it as much for his own reasons as for Clara—but there was something satisfying about knowing it was getting used.

  “All the finish, all the built-ins. But not the decorating.”

  “Trina—?” Nate asked, but when he saw the look on Hunter’s face, he quit mid-question. “Look at this,” he said instead, and pulled back two sliding bookshelves to reveal more storage, filled with games, puzzles, stuffed animals, and knickknacks. To keep the clutter away visually.

  “You could do this. Like, for a living.” Griff was examining the mechanism on which the bookshelves slid, which had taken Hunter awhile to work out. It had to be sturdier than the average sliding doors because of the weight of the books. “The tree-house guy does. People pay him, like, $150,000 to build a room like this. And he does hotels, B&Bs, that kind of thing.”

  Hunter shook his head. “It’s just a hobby. A way to keep in touch with my skills.”

  “You planning to deploy again?”

  “Not sure. Medical discharge, maybe.”

  “You were talking about getting out, last I saw you,” Nate said. “You said eight years was enough for anyone.”

  There was that feeling again, like his life had branched at some point and there were two different Hunters, the one who’d done stuff in that year he didn’t know about and the one he was now. How was he supposed to make sense out of it? He didn’t connect with the stuff Nate was telling him about himself. It felt like a story about something that had happened to someone else.

  Nate didn’t press. They climbed back down from the tree and returned to drinking beers. They didn’t talk about Hunter’s life anymore. They talked about what was going on with R&R, Jake’s plans for expansion. Griff told some funny stories a
bout bad jobs and bad dates. And then Nate said they still had 125 miles to go thanks to Jake’s ridiculously overambitious itinerary.

  “You got a bike?” he asked Hunter. “You could come with us.”

  It was tempting, for a moment. On a bike, on the road, he wouldn’t have to contemplate what had been lost in the branching of his life. He could just—go. Follow someone else’s plan for a few days.

  But he needed to stay here and get up to speed on things. Trina had agreed to stay till Friday—enough time to help him and Clara make a transition. He couldn’t leave now.

  “Thanks,” he said. “But I gotta stick around here for the time being. Maybe catch you guys on the next trip.”

  “Any time,” Jake said.

  And then they were gone, and Hunter turned toward the house, gathering the beer bottles up and heading inside to try to figure out what he was supposed to do next.

  Chapter 8

  The definition of insanity, Trina thought, making her way up the stairs, was doing the same thing twice and expecting different results.

  Hunter was dreaming again, that same rough, broken cry piercing her sleep, and when she slipped through the door into his room, that same agonized expression contorting his chiseled features.

  “Hunter,” she whispered.

  She was playing it safer this time. She thought.

  “Hunter.”

  “No!”

  “Hunter!”

  But he was deep under, someplace she couldn’t reach him with whispers or words. She put a hand on his arm, which was warm, solid, and slick with sweat. Squeezed.

  Her body answered with a squeeze of its own. His skin was hot and smooth, the muscle underneath solid and shifting as he thrashed.

  “Hunter, you’re dreaming again. Wake up.”

  And then suddenly his hands were on her, grabbing her, pulling her down. For a split second she thought of a television show she’d seen—Gray’s Anatomy, maybe—in which the traumatized veteran had attacked his girlfriend in the night. But this wasn’t that. There was no threat in him, at least not that kind of threat. His hands were roaming, roving, finding the back of her head, the curve of her ass, drawing her down, in, and even though a shred of her dignified self kept insisting, You can’t do this again, she socked that smarter Trina in her self-righteous jaw and let Hunter tug her mouth down to his.