by Caro Carson
“I want to go somewhere,” she told Helen. “My leave was approved. Just because Gerard-Pierre decided not to go, that doesn’t mean I can’t have a Christmas holiday, right?”
“Right. Where do you want to go?”
Home.
The pang was strong enough to cut through her anger. She wanted to go home, to a place where she was part of something. To a place where she belonged.
It didn’t exist.
“I want to come back to the United States,” she said, the words surprising her even as she spoke them.
It would feel familiar. There’d be all the foods and the stores and the street signs she’d grown up with. She’d be surrounded by American accents and oversize vehicles. She wanted to eat in a McDonald’s that did not serve gazpacho or koffiekoeken, in a KFC that served tea on ice without asking, because they didn’t even sell hot tea.
Her friend laughed. “The grass is always greener on the other side of the pond, then. You want to come to the United States, and I’m dying to go to Europe.”
There was a pause, and then, despite the satellite’s relay delay, the old roomies spoke in unison. “We should swap places.”
India seized on the idea. “We really could do that. We could swap houses.”
“Now?” Helen asked.
“Yes. You could spend Christmas here.”
“My reflex is to say ‘No, I couldn’t,’ but Tom and I just got extra days off. Minutes ago.”
India looked at the bra on her floor. A lot had happened in the past few minutes.
“It’s like fate,” Helen said, half-serious.
India pressed her point, trying not to sound frantic. “It would be perfect for you. My place could be your home base for your honeymoon. From here, you could catch trains to Paris or Rome. You could take a ferry to England. You could drive to Amsterdam or Luxembourg.”
“Stop, stop. I’m sold. I’ve been sold since you first pointed that phone out your window last year.”
Thank God. India really needed to get out of here. What she wanted was...
Well, it wasn’t here. What she wanted was time away, time to herself to decide what she wanted.
Helen was apologetic. “It’s great for me, but what would you get? An unfinished house and nobody to talk to except our goofy dog.”
“Do I have to meet the dog’s family?”
“No.”
“Sounds like heaven.”
* * *
This is going to be hell.
Aiden brooded at the brown, barren view. He’d been through worse, of course. Combat tours, with their eternal stretches of boredom flavored by the underlying knowledge that monotony could explode into a life-or-death situation at any second of any hour. There’d been the extreme sleep deprivation for months at Ranger School. The steady, prolonged pressure of four years at West Point. Those had each been their own sort of hell, but he’d made it through each one because he’d had a sense of purpose during them.
He also hadn’t been a father during any of them.
He wasn’t feeling particular purposeful this week. Nobody in the battalion seemed to be. As the staff arrived one by one, Aiden glanced at the array of expressions: resignation, anger, glumness. Plain old bad moods—and this was the senior leadership. The barracks full of eighteen-and nineteen-year-old privates must be a real barrel of laughs. Dragging an unmotivated unit through an unnecessary exercise? Yes, that counted as a kind of hell, when it took his children away from him.
He’d survive it, of course. He could survive anything, and he’d learned that not overseas or in a Georgia swamp or in the granite-walled environs of a military academy. He’d learned that in a hospital, by his wife’s bedside. He could survive anything, even if he didn’t want to, even if it was grossly unfair of the universe to expect him to take another breath.
He closed his eyes, blocking out the brown flatness, and missed the unsullied joy of his daughters. They gave him breath. They gave him purpose. They gave him happiness. They were gone until Christmas Eve. He rubbed the two pennies between his fingers.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.” The battalion commander entered the boardroom with energy, clapping his hands together and rubbing them in anticipation. It was entirely too much cheer for the start of a three-hour meeting.
Aiden turned away from the window and took his seat.
“The preparations for this exercise have been executed in an outstanding manner,” the battalion commander said, then he turned to Aiden. “Major Nord, well done.”
“Thank you, sir.”
It was an unexpected way to open a meeting, but Aiden supposed he couldn’t ask for better than that. The commander went around the table, congratulating each staff officer and each of the four company commanders, including Tom Cross, Aiden’s new neighbor. Captain Cross and his wife, Captain Helen Pallas, had bought the acreage adjacent to Aiden’s. Their new house was not quite complete. They’d moved in about a month ago, anyway.
“Which brings me to the highlight of this meeting.”
Aiden exchanged a look with the executive officer, who raised his brow and shrugged. Neither of them had been informed there was going to be a highlight of this meeting.
“The powers-that-be have completed their review of the plans and preparatory work we’ve submitted. They are certain that we have prepared for every contingency.”
A few of the officers and senior NCOs gave appropriately restrained, indoor hoo-ahs in response.
“In fact, they are so certain we’ll ace this exercise, they have decided not to hold the actual exercise.”
Silence.
The lieutenant colonel seemed to enjoy it. “Please, ladies and gentlemen, try to control yourselves. I know you were looking forward to ninety-six hours of no sleep and delicious MREs, but you’re going to have to find a way to cope with a training holiday instead.”
A training holiday? Time off without having it counted against his annual leave? Time off when he’d been expecting to work around the clock for days? Time off?
The stunned silence held. It was like they’d all just witnessed a Christmas miracle.
Aiden didn’t trust it. “The entire exercise, sir? The brigade as well as the battalion?” If the brigade was still a go, then he would still work. The brigade S-3 would want input from the battalion S-3.
“The whole enchilada. I don’t think it takes a genius to realize that, in addition to reviewing our plans, someone higher up also reviewed the amount of fuel the exercise would require and the amount of fuel budget they had left for the year. They don’t have a burning need to deploy hundreds of vehicles across Central Texas’s highways this week, after all.”
All around the table, faces were starting to smile.
The commander was openly laughing. “Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some of their spouses reviewed the calendar with them, too. This level of exercise being conducted this close to Christmas while all the kids are out of school was guaranteed to piss off some very important spouses—or entire organizations of spouses.”
No kidding.
Aiden’s surprise was wearing off. Anger was taking its place. Couldn’t they have foreseen the blow to morale among the military families? Couldn’t they have counted their damn money and their damn fuel and canceled the whole damn enchilada sooner? Before he’d promised his sister that she could have his girls for the week?
The three-hour meeting was over in five minutes.
The battalion commander stayed, wishing each person a happy holiday as the team cleared out with alacrity, everyone dialing their cell phones as they left to give their families the good news. Aiden was in no hurry. He had no one to dial.
Only one person came in the door instead of out, and that was Captain Helen Pallas, who’d no doubt sprinted over from the brigade headquarters building to see
her husband.
They were both in uniform, so they could not share any newlywed hugging and kissing—thank God, because Aiden couldn’t leave before he gathered up the papers it turned out he didn’t need—but their high five, a hard slap of victory, made up for it. Just the sound of that clap made his hand sting.
“Pack your bags,” Helen said. “We’re going to Europe, baby.”
“We’re what?” Tom asked.
Aiden stacked papers and listened as his new neighbor explained that she’d set up a house swap with an old friend in Belgium.
“How long before I knew the exercise was canceled did you know?” The laughter and approval in Tom’s voice as he spoke to his wife gave Aiden another pang of...wistfulness. He remembered what that had been like, to have a coconspirator. A friend. A lover. Long ago—it felt like a million years ago.
Helen made a show of checking her watch. “About fifteen minutes.”
“You set all this up in fifteen minutes?”
She pretended to dust off her fingernails on her camouflage lapel. “That’s right. One European honeymoon, arranged in fifteen minutes. We’re already on the list for a Space-A flight to NATO headquarters tonight. If we don’t get a seat, then we’re going standby on a commercial flight to Amsterdam out of Austin, and we’ll rent a car and drive to Brussels. Colonel Reed already signed my leave form. Any questions?”
Tom looked past her to the battalion commander. “Can I get a leave form signed in the next half hour, sir? I hope the answer is yes, or else I’m apparently going to miss my own honeymoon.”
Helen turned to Aiden. “Major Nord, I hate to impose on you. My friend India will take care of our dog once she gets to our house, but there’s going to be about ten hours where we’re passing each other over the Atlantic. Could you come over and feed Fabio in the meantime?”
Aiden had already met Fabio, a golden retriever with long, flowing hair. Aiden and the Crosses had already exchanged house keys, too. Not only were they all in the same brigade, theirs were the only two houses along half a mile of road.
“If you’re not going anywhere yourself, sir, that is.”
“I’ll be home.” Rattling around an empty house.
“Great. Can I leave your name and number for my friend, just in case she has any questions?”
“The name is India?”
“Yes. I’ve known her a long time. She’s...well, she was my mentor, really, when I was first commissioned.”
“She’s some kind of weird savant with languages,” Tom offered.
Swell. A mentoring, motherly, older lady who studied foreign languages and took vacations alone, in houses that were out in the middle of nowhere.
“I doubt she’ll need you,” Helen said, “but just in case.”
“Sure. Give her my number.”
At this rate, a call from Tom and Helen’s house sitter would probably be the most exciting thing that would happen to him all week.
Chapter Three
She was running on empty.
International travel was always draining, but this trip had been especially so. India had only fallen asleep for little fifteen-minute, neck-straining naps on the plane, despite spending the hours before her flight not sleeping, but instead gathering up every single thing Gerard-Pierre had littered around her house. The books she’d stacked neatly in the hallway outside her apartment door. She respected books; they hadn’t done anything wrong. The rest she’d dumped into a pile in the hallway.
The bra she’d hung on the century-old doorknob. Explanation enough in any language.
India checked the pickup truck’s gas gauge. Her body wasn’t the only thing rapidly running out of energy. She’d found Helen and Tom’s pickup waiting for her at the airport, right where their text had said it would be. The tank had been almost half-full, surely enough to cover the distance from the Austin airport to the countryside beyond Fort Hood. She’d passed a dozen gas stations leaving Austin. A half dozen through Georgetown. More in Killeen...but when Helen had said her house was out in the middle of nowhere, India had forgotten how big nowhere could be in the States. She’d been driving for ninety minutes, enough to have gone to another country from Belgium, but she was still in Texas, driving past miles of land occupied only by grazing cattle and the occasional barn. Sheesh.
She had just decided it would be wise to turn around and head back to the last gas station she’d passed when she saw a mailbox, the standard American kind, a black metal shoebox with a rounded top, mounted on a wood four-by-four. When she’d been a little girl, she’d thought the shape looked like the Road Runner tunnels that the Wile E. Coyote was always trying to enter—with no luck. He was shut out, denied, every time.
Gold letters on the black metal read 489. Who opened this mailbox every day without even thinking about how easy it was? India slowed the truck as she passed the driveway. Its single lane of asphalt ran for at least a quarter mile, unwaveringly straight, to a classic two-story brick home. The colors of the bricks were distinctly Texan, though, gold and beige and cream that reflected the afternoon sun, which was bright even in December in this part of the world.
She didn’t need to turn back, after all. Helen’s house number was 490. Her mailbox was up ahead, a little sentry on the side of the road. India hit her turn signal, then scoffed at herself. Who was there to signal? Her truck was the only vehicle on the road. But as she slowed and started to turn, she looked down Helen’s straight driveway—and tapped the brakes.
Someone was there.
The garage door was open and, even though a red pickup blocked most of her view, India could see that someone was moving around. A thief.
She didn’t turn in, but kept driving. Tom and Helen had a dog, but Helen had texted her that the dog would be at the neighbor’s house, so India could sleep off her jet lag without having a dog wake her. A barking dog might have scared off a thief, but the house was empty.
Don’t be crazy, India. Why would a thief go to an empty house when the owners are out of the country?
Not so crazy. India could dial 911. Maybe. She’d turned off cellular data on her phone to avoid astronomical international roaming charges. Wasn’t 911 supposed to work from all phones, regardless? But she didn’t have an American phone. Maybe it wasn’t programmed for that emergency service. How long would it take a sheriff to get out here, anyway? The thief would have plenty of time to help himself to whatever he wanted and then drive away with a flat-screen television in the back of his pickup.
She stopped the truck on the road’s shoulder. Think about this, India girl; stay awake. She scrubbed her hands over her face, then dug in her bag for a peppermint. The bracing flavor woke her up. She turned the truck around and drove by one more time, slowly. The parked red truck was awfully nice, shiny and new, hardly the getaway vehicle of a criminal.
She pulled in the driveway of 489 to turn around and head back, feeling exceedingly stupid. She was just tired. And emotional—she’d failed to protect her own home. Hadn’t that thought been relentlessly circling in her head as she’d kicked out Gerard-Pierre? Well, kicked out his stuff, anyway. That was why she was thinking of homes being invaded.
Damn. She’d passed her own driveway again. With a sigh, she made a U-turn in the middle of the empty road. Helen’s house wasn’t finished yet. The truck probably belonged to the general contractor who’d been building the house, supervising all the subcontractors. The truck could belong to one of the subcontractors, too. Maybe to an electrician. A tile layer. Who knew?
She was getting so sleepy, she didn’t care. If it did turn out to be a thief, she’d at least get a license plate number as the truck drove away, before she fell asleep waiting for the sheriff to show up.
She drove up to the house and debated parking behind the truck to block it in, just in case this person had no reason to be here. But then she caught a better view of the man in
the garage. His back was to her, but the width of his shoulders was enough to make her decide to park out of his way. She was a soldier, but she’d spent the last four solid years tied to a desk. She was super rusty when it came to close quarters combat. She wouldn’t want to take on this guy, anyway, not without a stick or a bat or something. Gee, I’m fresh out of ninja staffs.
He wasn’t a thief, anyway. He wasn’t moving in a sneaky, furtive way. As she parked, he walked calmly over to a refrigerator in the garage. She’d forgotten how Americans not only had giant fridges in their kitchens, but they often kept one out in the garage, too, the good old beer fridge that held the leftovers when holiday dinners called for a mammoth turkey. The man with the buff shoulders opened the door and took out a beer. He wore a leather tool belt around his waist, a hammer hanging from it. Someone in construction, of course.
She was an idiot and she wanted to go to bed, but she supposed she’d have to make small talk with this contractor and hope he was almost ready to leave for the day. She opened the door and practically fell out of the cab, dropping the foot from the cab to the ground, landing with all the grace of a tired elephant. She slammed the door. This man was all that stood between her and a soft bed with fluffy pillows.
The man in the tool belt turned around.
Oh, my.
India abruptly felt awake and alert. Just the sight of that man, that tall, dark and handsome man, sent a jolt through her system better than a whole roll of peppermints.
* * *
Aiden had shaken his head as he’d watched his neighbors’ pickup drive by, drive by and drive by again. She couldn’t read the numbers on the mailbox, maybe. Poor little old lady, he’d thought.
Aiden looked at the woman standing in the driveway.
Poor drop-dead gorgeous woman.
He didn’t let the beer bottle slip out of his grasp. That was something, anyway, but he sure as hell was knocked speechless. This woman was the definition of a knockout. Literally, the sight of her knocked the sense out of his brain—because she looked rumpled and sleepy, and all his brain could think about was that he’d like to be rumpled and sleepy with her.