by Cara Colter
“I could see you were dying of loneliness.”
He drew in his breath sharply. For a moment, he couldn’t speak. When he did, much of the anger was gone from his voice.
“You scared the hell out of them. An urgent message from someone they had never heard of? They thought something had happened to me.”
“And they contacted you to make sure you were all right?”
“The message was waiting for me when I got back from the cabin.”
“It seems to me that would be an indication your relationship with them is not as damaged as you thought. They care about you. It was as good an excuse as any to hightail it out of here, though.”
He was squinting at her dangerously. She was sure it was a look he could have used to intimidate the enemy.
But she could not let it work on her. It felt as if her life—and his—depended on that.
“I figured it out,” she said softly. “It’s not about them. And it’s not about me. It’s about you. The big, tough soldier. Terrified.”
He looked at her warily.
“For a smart woman, I can be kind of dumb sometimes.”
“You’re preaching to the choir. I saw you nearly die trying to save a dog.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Dumb about matters of the heart.”
His look of wariness increased.
“I meant it when I said I was falling in love with you.” How had this happened? She was saying the exact opposite of what she had planned to say if she ever saw him again!
But what could possibly be gained by lies?
She suddenly understood the absolute necessity of standing in her truth, of being who she really was, of not hiding.
“Well, there’s the dumb part,” he said.
But she looked right past the harshness of the words.
“Remember when you told me you were like my dad? And I said you weren’t? You are in this one way.
“I figured out you think you have to protect everyone and everything. You feel it’s your highest calling to protect what is yours, don’t you? You even said that.”
He didn’t answer.
“You said, ‘I think every man feels that way. As if it is his highest calling to protect what is his.’”
Turner was silent, and so she went on.
“You told me you had come to rely only on yourself. And when that failed you believed in nothing anymore. What happened?”
His lips pressed together in a hard line.
“What happened?” she said again, dangerously.
“The last mission went bad.” He choked this out.
“And was it your fault?”
“No. But a good man died. The best. And it was a reminder.”
“Of what?”
Turner glanced at the door. He looked as if he was going to put his hands on her shoulders and push by her without answering.
But she leaned on the door, blocking it with her body.
“It was a reminder that when it matters most, a man is powerless. I couldn’t save my dad, and I spent all those years trying to change that. Only to arrive in the same place. I couldn’t save anything.
“Don’t you see what a man who has lost all faith would bring to you?” He asked this desperately.
And she knew, then, that she had won.
That he was breaking wide-open in front of her.
She crossed the distance between them and looked up into his face.
“Poison,” he told her, desperately. “I would bring all the ugliness I have seen and been to you. And to my brothers. I’m going back after the holidays. I am going back to what I do.”
“What was his name?” she asked softly.
There was a long silence, and when his voice came, it was a whisper.
“Ken. Ken Hamilton. We called him Ham because he was such a practical joker. He had a wife, Casey, he had kids.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I didn’t protect him.”
She let that fall into silence. For a long time, she said nothing. A huge shudder shook him.
“Who protects you?” she asked.
“What?”
“You are trying so hard to protect everyone, to save the world. Who protects you? Who saves you?”
He stared at her silently, as if he did not comprehend the question, or was afraid of the answer.
“I do,” she said. She held out her hand.
He stared at it for a long time. She did not take his hand, or move hers. She waited. This step had to be his. And then, hesitantly, he put his hand in hers. And she drew him to her, and guided his head to her breast, and felt him give a great sigh against her.
“I do,” she said again. “I do.”
In the distance, she became aware of people calling out farewells to one another, the air full of Merry Christmases.
Car doors began to slam, engines to start.
For a while there were the sounds of things being put away downstairs. And then that, too, was gone.
Casey held Turner Kennedy, and was aware she would hold him for as long as it took. She guided him to the bed and he lay down, and then she lay down beside him and stroked his face.
“Not just for tonight,” she whispered. “I’m going to wake up beside you tomorrow, and every Christmas after that for as long as we both shall live.”
“You need to know who I really am before you say that.”
“You think I don’t know that?” she said, gently scoffing.
“I come with a lot of baggage,” he warned her. “Unusual fears. I’m terrified of tears.”
“You’re a man that dogs love,” she told him tenderly.
“And I have problems sleeping.” But for a man who had problems sleeping his voice was growing husky, and he yawned deeply.
“Children love you, too,” she said with deep satisfaction.
“I have a job that is hard on the people who love me.”
“I’m sure your brothers and I will bond over that. But yes, if you want, we’ll take it slowly.”
“I think we should go serve dinner with your mother tomorrow night,” he said.
“We could put that off for a bit.”
“No, we couldn’t.”
She could feel all the tension draining from him.
“I think I owe you a few days at the Waldorf.” His eyes were closed. The steady in-and-out of each breath was coming further apart. “Do you want to run away with me?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.”
“Not for three days. Not this time, Casey. Do you want to run away with me forever?”
“Yes,” she said, without a moment’s hesitation. “Just be warned. The next time you get down on your knees in front of me?”
“Yeah?”
“It won’t be to paint my toes or tighten my skates.”
“All right,” he said, his voice husky. “I consider myself warned.”
And then he slept, and she slept, too. His sleep was dreamless, but a different dream began that night.
It was a dream realized, a dream of being safe. And loved. It was a dream of belonging. And it was a dream of coming home.
It was a dream all the more cherished for the fact that it had once been given up on, seen as unobtainable and dismissed as impossible.
That was what love did—made the cynic a believer, made the fearful brave. Made a man who had lost faith in everything embrace the possibility of miracles.
EPILOGUE
“UNCLE TURNER, THE fireworks are starting in two minutes. Come outside.”
“Just a sec.”
“No. Now.”
Turner dragged his eyes away from the book he was studying, and looked at Tes
sa. She was eight, as bossy as ever, and the unchallenged queen of a new set of Gingerbread Girls that included his own seven-year-old niece, Hailey.
“Hasn’t your dad told you not to go into people’s cabins without knocking?”
“The door was open,” Tessa said. “And I’m not really in.” She waggled a foot at him to demonstrate it was outside the door. Hailey giggled approvingly.
It was the Fourth of July, and the Gingerbread Inn was full. He and Casey had rented one of the new cabins that Martin and Carol had added last year. They were quaint little log buildings facing Barrow’s Lake, set back from the main inn. Turner had hoped for a bit of privacy so that he could study for a particularly tough exam.
He had left all the doors and windows open, not just for a pine-scented flow of air on the hot summer evening, but because he liked the background noises. The quiet lap of the lake water against the shore. The evening cries of birds. The snap and pop of a bonfire at the water’s edge.
But the sounds were mostly the cries of lots of children. Carol had inherited a passel of grandchildren when she had married Martin. Emily and Cole’s daughter was two. Turner’s brothers and their wives, and his three nieces and nephews were here.
Next year, at this time, there would be a new baby. He and Casey had chosen not to find out if it was a girl or a boy, but to let life surprise them.
So far, life had surprised them a lot, and maybe especially him.
With its capacity to delight. With its opportunities for love.
That first Christmas he had spent with Casey had been a baptism by fire into the opportunities for love. They had joined his brother David at his brother Mitchell’s place to watch the kids open gifts. And then they had gone to help Casey’s mother serve dinner to the homeless.
After that was over, Turner had needed a rest. He’d booked a whole week in the presidential suite at the Waldorf.
And they’d done it all again.
Jumped on beds, and worn the white housecoats, and walked to museums and theaters, and eaten wonderful food.
Only this time there was no predeployment intensity in the air. And he’d still felt it: as if every single moment was infused with light.
He’d known the truth then.
Excitement was one kind of high.
And love was another. Quieter. Deeper. More lasting. All those years ago, he’d experienced the dropout punch of them both combined.
Of course, in time, as he wooed Casey in earnest, they had reached that place where he’d had to deploy.
And instead of feeling any of that intensity he usually experienced, he had felt only the sadness of leaving her to deal with a great unknown all on her own. But Casey was the strongest woman he had ever met. And at least he had been working on becoming the man he had always wanted to be.
Because when she cried, he held her and dried her tears tenderly. He saw what an honor it was that a man like him, who had almost turned his back on this most precious of things—love—would be so trusted, so cared about.
It had been easy to make the decision that he had wrestled with for so long. It had been easy to say goodbye to one life, and open the door for a new one.
The easiest thing he had ever done was get down on one knee and ask Casey to walk with him down the winding road that was life.
Were there wounds that he would never quite recover from, no matter what was said about time?
Yes.
But Turner had come to know he had no corner on tragedy. Each of these people who came here, his friends who were closer than friends, his family of choice, had known tragedy. Or defeat of some kind.
Each of them: Cole, Emily, Andrea, Rick, Casey, his brothers, had been tested by life and had known some devastating loss. That was probably the thread that had drawn them together that Christmas when Emily and Cole had renewed their vows.
And yet, woven into the fabric of that loss, were threads of light. Those threads were courage. Compassion. Patience. Forgiveness. Against the fabric of darkness, those threads of light shone as if they were the only important things.
Turner had come to this inn, like those wise men who had followed a star to a stable. He had not been sure what he would find, and he had not even been sure what he was looking for.
What he had found was the miracle he had stopped believing in.
It wasn’t a water-into-wine kind of miracle.
It was a quieter kind.
It was the ability to see that the human animal had an amazing resiliency of spirit. People could slog through loss and disillusionment and discouragement to come to this place.
A simple place, where they could pause and stand in the light.
They could come to these moments of pure and joyous life.
The Gingerbread Inn had been restored to being that place where everyone wanted to be with their families.
A place of simplicity in a complex world.
A place of serenity in lives that were full.
A place of utter safety in a world that could be dangerous and unpredictable.
In a few weeks, Turner would be finished with an accelerated program to get his master’s degree in business.
He had taken a detour from the life he wanted, but he was not sure that, given the choice, he would change a thing.
Out of all the people here, he suspected he had a deeper sense of how precious all this was.
Of the miracle of peace.
Children’s laughter floated in the warm night air. Above it all, he suddenly heard Casey’s, which rang out like a kind of truth.
“Are you coming?” Tessa demanded.
He put away the books and stood up and stretched. At the door, Tessa took one hand and Hailey took the other, and they pulled him eagerly to where a fire burned brightly on the shore of the lake.
In the distance, he could see Martin preparing the fireworks that he would shoot off over the black, still waters.
Turner moved toward the sound of Casey’s laughter, with the eagerness of a warrior who had been allowed to lay down his sword, who needed to fight no more.
He headed toward the sound with the heart of a man who had lost his way, and then found it.
As if she knew he was coming, Casey turned and searched the darkness until she saw him.
He headed toward the welcoming light in her eyes with the firm and utterly fearless step of a man who knew his way home.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from SECOND CHANCE WITH HER SOLDIER by Barbara Hannay.
We hope you enjoyed this Harlequin Romance.
You adore a feel-good story! Harlequin Romance stories are all about real, relatable women and strong, deeply desirable men experiencing the intensity, anticipation and sheer rush of falling of love.
Visit Harlequin.com to find your next great read.
We like you—why not like us on Facebook: Facebook.com/HarlequinBooks
Follow us on Twitter: Twitter.com/HarlequinBooks
Read our blog for all the latest news on our authors and books: HarlequinBlog.com
Subscribe to our newsletter for special offers, new releases, and more!
Harlequin.com/newsletters
PROLOGUE
CORPORAL JOE MADDEN waited two whole days before he opened the email from his wife.
Avoidance was not Joe’s usual MO. It went against everything he’d learned in his military training. Strike swiftly was the Australian Commandos’ motto, and yet...here he was in Afghanistan, treating a rare message from Ellie as if it were more dangerous than an improvised explosive device.
Looming divorce could do that to a guy.
The fact that Joe had actually offered to divorce Ellie was irrelevant. After too many stormy years of marriage, he’d known that his s
uggestion was both necessary and fair, but the break-up certainly hadn’t been easy or painless.
Now, in his tiny hut in Tarin Kot, Joe scanned the two other email messages that had arrived from Australia overnight. The first was his aunt’s unhelpful reminder that she never stopped worrying about him. The other was a note from one of his brothers. This, at least, was glib and slightly crude and elicited a wry chuckle from Joe.
But he was left staring at Ellie’s as yet unopened email with its gut-churning subject heading: Crunch Time.
Joe knew exactly what this meant. The final divorce papers had arrived from their solicitor and Ellie was impatient to serve him with them.
Clearly, she was no longer prepared to wait till the end of his four years in the army, even though his reasons for suggesting the delay had been entirely practical.
Joe knew no soldier was safe in Afghanistan, and if he was killed while he and Ellie were still married, she would receive an Army widow’s full entitlements. Financially, at least, she would be OK.
Surely this was important? The worst could so easily happen here. In his frequent deployments, Joe faced daily, if not hourly, danger and he’d already lost two close mates, both of them brilliant, superbly trained soldiers. Death was a real and ever-present danger.
Joe had felt compelled to offer Ellie a safety net, so he’d been reassured to know that, whatever happened to him, she would be financially secure. But, clearly, getting out of their marriage now was more important to her than the long-term benefits.
Hell, she probably had another bloke lined up in the wings. Please, let it be anyone but that damn potato farmer her mother had hand-picked for her.
But, whatever Ellie’s reasons, the evidence of her impatience sat before Joe on the screen.
Crunch Time.
There was no point in avoiding this any longer. The coffee Joe had recently downed turned sour as he grimly clicked on the message.
* * *
It was a stinking-hot day at Karinya Station in Far North Queensland. The paddocks were parched and the cattle hungry as Ellie Madden delivered molasses to the empty troughs. The anxious beasts pushed and shoved at her, trying to knock the molasses barrel out of her hands, so of course she was as sticky and grimy as a candy bar dropped in dirt by the time she arrived back at the homestead.