“Ben, are you okay?” She leaned up to look at him, one hand on his chest.
He nodded, a sweet smile tracing his lips. “You’re so beautiful, it takes my breath away. I just can’t believe I’m this lucky. That you’re my girl.”
Oh.
He kissed her again, pulling her down to him, then rolled over, cradling her in his arms.
She felt the strength of him, and felt safe in his arms. He kissed her like he needed her. Couldn’t get enough of her. And she lost herself a little in his touch.
Him, too, because when he leaned up, he was breathing hard. He searched her eyes and said nothing for a long time.
Then, “We should probably go.”
His fingers traced her face, caressing her cheek.
“Not yet,” she whispered and twined her hand around his neck to pull him close.
Nobody will love you the way I do.
“Kacey, you okay?”
She looked up, knew that her eyes had widened at the sight of Ben standing just outside the glow of light. She couldn’t see his face, just his outline, but she didn’t need to.
She knew the texture of his blue eyes, the shape of his shoulders, the feel of his hand in hers. “I don’t think you ever get over your first real love.”
She put a hand to her cheek, found it hot, probably flushed, a little wet.
“Yeah. I . . . uh, sent a text.” Her voice crackled as if she’d been crying. She blinked hard, fast.
Yes, she needed sleep. Except not here, not tonight where she could wander off, find herself in the river.
“Howard is asleep in Lulu’s room with Mary Beth. Lulu took the cot in the storage room. She left you the sofa.” He stopped closer. “She makes a mean venison stew. She saved you a bowl.”
Kacey nodded, slid off the boulder. “I’ll just keep watch.”
He frowned at her. “Listen, if you’re worried about Howard, I can keep an eye on him. You need some sleep.”
She walked past him toward the house. Pocketed her phone.
“Kacey?”
She rounded on him. “I don’t need sleep. I’m fine.”
“Of course you do.”
She turned around, but he caught her arm. “What’s going on?”
She looked at his hand on her arm, back to him. “Nothing.”
But he wouldn’t let go, and the heat of his grip wheedled through her, turned her weak. “Okay, fine. I sometimes have a hard time sleeping.” She worked her arm free, folded her arms across her waist. “It’s just a little residue left from my tours.”
“A little residue . . . Wait, are you talking about your crash, the attack in Afghanistan?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She pinched her mouth tight.
“Enough with that. Kacey, it’s me. And I don’t care how long it’s been—I still care. I’m still your friend.”
“That goes two ways, Ben. Why don’t you tell me why you’re not writing your own songs? Why you’re recording songs you don’t want our daughter to sing. And why you decided to go duo—I thought you were a solo act.”
He recoiled, and in the dim light, his face turned dark. “I was never a solo act, Kacey. And that’s the problem. I thought you, better than anyone, knew that.” He strode past her then.
But halfway through the yard, he stopped. Turned. He wore such a stripped look on his face, it shucked the breath from her.
“I don’t write songs anymore because everything good I ever wrote came from . . . from you, from us.”
She stood there, nonplussed, frozen. And in that moment, he took a step back toward her.
“Now, how about you telling me why you can’t sleep?”
Oh. She licked her lips, rooted around for an answer that wouldn’t tear her open, expose her.
“I sleepwalk.”
He frowned. “You sleepwalk?”
“Yeah. It started happening after the . . . after my chopper was shot down. Not right away, but later. I couldn’t sleep right afterward—too many nightmares. And then I got dependent on sleeping pills. But if I didn’t take them, I’d get up and wander. Find myself standing in my skivvies in the middle of the room, or worse, wandering down the hall. I always woke up with this sense that I was supposed to be going someplace. But I never knew where.”
He’d taken another step closer to her. She rubbed her arms, suddenly chilled.
“What happened on that mountain, Kacey? What doesn’t the article say?”
She took a breath, shook her head, walked past him to the cabin.
She felt him behind her, though, and when she reached the porch, she sighed. “Okay. But you can’t tell anyone, Ben. Not a soul.”
She turned, looked up at him.
The glow of the light swept away the years, and suddenly she was looking at the boy she’d run to when she’d discovered the truth about her biological mother. The teenager who’d held her in his arms, made her believe, at least for a season, in happily ever after.
The man she’d trusted.
He nodded, and she sat down on the porch, her hands between her knees.
He sat beside her, his leg touching hers.
“I never dreamed of being in the military—wouldn’t have joined, but back then I was desperate. Everything we’d planned was . . . well, I hadn’t thought beyond marrying you, building a life with you.”
He drew in a breath, his jaw tight. And thankfully offered no words of self-defense.
“I knew nothing about being a parent, and I thought if I could just get a job, provide for Audrey, I could fix it. My parents were thrilled to take care of her, and they’re good grandparents, Ben. They love her.” She glanced over at him, and he allowed her a tight nod.
“I enlisted and immediately enrolled in the flight school trajectory.”
“I should have never taken you flying with my dad,” he said, nudging her leg.
She nudged him back, a sweet memory rising.
“I scored nearly perfect on my Flight Aptitude Selection Test. I got accepted, went through basic, then warrant officer candidate school. By the time I started flight school at Fort Rucker, I was feeling like maybe I had a chance at really being someone. Audrey was thriving with my parents, and then . . . I went up in my first Black Hawk. It was nothing like the simulators. Once I swallowed my stomach back down, it was . . . powerful. I could leave behind this girl who was running from her past and be this person who saved lives. Within a year, they deployed me to Iraq and I was flying SAR and medevacs, pulling soldiers out of danger.”
She looked out into the darkness. “I talked to Audrey every week on my computer, and yeah, I missed her, but she was fine. And I was . . . better.”
Better. Not whole, but enough.
“The military is a great place to forget yourself, even rebuild. You focus on one thing—your job—and I figured out how to put my heart in this safe little box.” Or mostly safe—except when she started hearing Benjamin King songs on the radio.
“I’ll never forget the first time I heard ‘Mountain Song.’ I was in country, and a bunch of guys were playing basketball with an iPod playing. And there you were, in Iraq, singing about stars and dreams and . . .” She cast him a sheepish smile. “I nearly threw the iPod into Kuwait.”
He swallowed, his smile wry.
“Anyway, in a way it helped. I realized that you’d moved on, and I should too. I went home, extended my service, and headed to Afghanistan, did a fifteen-month tour, then another, and finally, the last one.” She took a breath.
“The one where you crashed.”
“We were in the Shajau district of the Zabul Province. It’s an area thick with forest and mountains. A chopper of rangers had gone down, and we thought it was due to mechanical failure. But . . . when my team—three of us—got there, we came under fire, and I had to do a hard landing. We found the troops pinned down, four dead—the pilot and three others—the rest fighting a group of Taliban.”
She stared up at the sky. “We fought them off
for thirty-six hours. Two more men died, including my crew, and by the time the reinforcements came in, myself and two others had killed a dozen Taliban.”
He said nothing.
“It was the longest night of my life,” she said quietly. “They had the high ground and kept coming at us from everywhere. We kept calling in for air support and didn’t get through until early morning. But they couldn’t get to us—and we were trapped on all sides.” She shook her head to shake free the memories. “I shot one in close combat.”
“Oh, Kace.”
“The worst part is that when we went down, my navigator was wounded. I got to the bunker and kept wanting to go back for him, but . . .” She could sometimes still hear the moaning, a low drill in the back of her mind. “He died in the rubble of the crash, alone.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah, actually, it was. I was his pilot. I should have rescued him.” She wiped her hand across her cheek. “I was just so scared. I kept thinking of Audrey, and how I wasn’t going to die on a mountain in Afghanistan.”
“How did you get out?”
“The PJs dropped in behind the insurgents and we coordinated an attack.” She could see the rosy gold of the morning as the sun crested, hear the staccato of gunfire, smell the sulfur, dirt, blood. Taste her own fear piling up in her throat, bile and heat, acrid.
Ben reached out for her hand.
“At first, I was just grateful. So painfully grateful that I’d lived.”
He wove his fingers between hers.
“And just like they said, eventually the daymares started to fade. I stopped jumping at the sound of a shot. But . . .”
“They come back at night.”
She looked at her hand in his. “I feel like the tiny box I kept my heart in exploded into a thousand pieces, and suddenly I don’t have anywhere safe to hide. I cry at stupid things—a box of animal crackers Audrey sent me in a care package. And a replay of the Seahawks losing the Super Bowl.”
“We all cried at that.”
She glanced up, and he wore such a sweet smile that she thought she might just cry again.
“I still haven’t figured out how to rebuild the box. Maybe that’s why I keep finding myself up in the middle of the night, wandering around.”
He tugged her toward him, and although she knew better, she let herself lean in, let him wrap his arms around her.
Let herself close her eyes, breathe in the smell of him.
“I wish I’d been there—not in Afghanistan, but with you. I hate that you were so afraid.”
“You were there, Ben.” She looked up. “I know it’s going to sound crazy, but in the middle of the dark, on top of that mountain, I heard you singing, in my head.” She began to hum, sing the words. “‘After the big game, the bonfire’s on. I got my pretty gal, not doin’ nothing wrong. Wishing on stars, hoping in the night. Someday everything’s gonna work out right.’”
He was staring at her, so much emotion in his eyes, that she stopped singing, looked away. “Sorry, I just—”
“I wrote that song the night we made Audrey,” he said quietly.
She looked back at him, her throat full. “I thought so. Maybe that’s why I sang it. Because I was thinking of her too.”
His hand touched her cheek now, his thumb running over her skin, gentle. “I was such a fool to leave you.” His gaze stopped at her mouth.
And he wasn’t the only fool, because she leaned close and brushed her lips against his. Softly, like a whisper.
It elicited something of a groan inside him, as if he’d been holding his breath.
“Oh, Kace,” he whispered. He wound his hand behind her neck.
Then he was kissing her, sweetly, a delicious familiarity, yet something new, more powerful in his touch.
The man he’d become, now returning to her.
She heard voices in the back of her head but ignored them, just for a second, letting herself go. She touched his chest and folded into him. Lingering.
He finally moved back, his breathing just a little ragged.
Silence fell between them.
A smile slid up his face.
And then it sank in . . . What was she doing? She moved away. “Oh. Wow.”
“Kacey?”
She held up her hand. “I think, maybe . . . I’m just so tired, Ben. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Shh.” He kissed her forehead, caught her eyes in his. “It’s okay. You’re safe here. Listen, just lie down.” He scooted over to make room, and she hesitated.
“You’re safe here,” he said again.
And yeah, that did it. She curled up on the porch, her head against his leg, his arm on her shoulder. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said quietly. “Just close your eyes.”
And then he started to hum.
When you need a friend, a shoulder you can cry on, someone who understands what you’re going through . . .
She sighed, let herself sink into the song, the blessed comfort of the warmth of his presence, the smell of the woods, the aura of the past.
Okay, just for tonight.
10
The aroma of fresh eggs and bacon could rouse Kacey from her grave. She opened her eyes and adjusted to the morning light streaming in through the leaded windowpane across the smooth oak floor. She lay on the sofa, her feet tucked up under a blanket. She had to concede that she’d slept like a corpse.
How had she gotten from the porch to the sofa without her recollection? She pushed herself up, heard the chatter of voices behind her, felt the heat of the pillow grooves in her face.
She pressed a hand to her mouth. She’d slept so hard, she’d drooled. Pretty.
“Over easy or scrambled, Howard?”
Lulu stood at the stove, with bacon sizzling in a black cast-iron pan; a plate of flapjacks in a golden pile were in the middle of the table. Howard sat on one chair, his foot up on his wife’s leg. She sat in the other.
No sign of Ben.
Kacey ran a tongue over her shaggy teeth, made a face. She needed coffee, a shower, and toothpaste, not necessarily in that order.
Instead she got up, folded the blanket.
“Oh, you’re up,” Lulu said, and as if she could read Kacey’s mind, she came over with a hot cup of coffee, black. “I hope we didn’t disturb you.”
“Disturb—no. I was dead to the world.” Apparently.
“You don’t remember walking in here, standing in the middle of the room?”
Oh no.
“Well, you were pretty groggy. Ben guided you to the sofa, and you fell onto it like you hadn’t slept in years. You’ve been out for a couple hours.”
“Where’s Ben?”
“He left over an hour ago, trying to track down some help. Pull up a chair—have some breakfast, then we’ll see if we can coax the old Ford to life and get Howard to a hospital.” Lulu set a plate down at the end of the table, and Kacey sat down, her stomach suddenly roaring.
Lulu’s pancakes filled the hollow crannies inside, and Kacey ate three, topped with raspberry jam, without stopping.
She was working on two eggs over easy and a crispy strip of bacon when Ben opened the door.
He stood there, looking a little shaggy with a burnished swath of whiskers and his baseball cap backward, and suddenly their kiss rushed back at her.
Oh, Kace.
His voice, but she wanted to say the same thing. What had she done?
She looked away from him before she could betray her horror. She could not . . . could not fall for Ben again.
Not with her heart roaming around outside her body, unprotected, too easily crushed.
“I got hold of Sam. He’s going to bring a body recovery team and alert Jess and Miles to meet us on Going-to-the-Sun Road.”
“I can drive you out,” Lulu said as she fixed Ben a plate.
He sat down opposite Mary Beth.
“I don’t know, Lulu. I took a look at your truck. It doesn’t look like it’s been dri
ven in a decade.”
She served him a plate of eggs, sunny-side up. “My grandchildren shop for me, but she’s a runner. I drove a lost hiker up over Logan Pass all the way to Saint Mary a few years ago.”
“A lost hiker?” Ben said, taking a sip of coffee.
“Yeah, a girl about seventeen or so. She’d been separated from her group, had gotten lost on the trails. I found her near the lower falls. She was pretty rattled, so I brought her back here. I wanted to bring her to the Apgar Visitor Center, but she insisted I bring her to Saint Mary. I dropped her off at the lodge there.”
Ben had stopped eating. “Lulu, do you remember what she looked like?”
She picked up a towel, wiped her hands. “I don’t know. Blonde hair. She had the most beautiful light blue eyes.” She paused. “Wait, I have something of hers.”
She turned to the windowsill, grabbed a bowl, fished through it, and plucked out a ring. She handed it to Ben.
“She left this behind. I found it on the bureau after I got back. I didn’t know what to do with it.”
Ben stared at it, then handed it to Kacey. “Recognize that?”
She held the ring in her palm. Gold band, with two hearts holding up the crown, each embedded with a diamond, and in the center, an emerald. Circling the crown were the embedded words “Mercy Falls High.” “It’s a class ring.”
“You had one of those.”
She nodded. “These are expensive. Why would she leave it behind?” She handed it back to Ben. “You don’t think . . .”
Ben turned to Lulu. “Where did you say you dropped her off?”
“Saint Mary Lodge, on Highway 89, north of East Glacier.”
“Can I hang on to this?” Ben asked.
Lulu nodded, and Ben pocketed the ring. “Thanks.” He got up. “I think we need to start hiking out.” He turned and took Lulu’s hands. “Do you need anything?”
“I’m fine, Ben.” She smiled up at him.
He leaned down and pressed a kiss to her cheek. The gesture caught Kacey’s attention; the kindness in his eyes was something she knew but had forgotten.
In fact, it seemed she’d forgotten a few important key characteristics about Ben. Like his willingness to sacrifice himself for others. She didn’t know where he’d slept last night, but she could guess it wasn’t comfortable.
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