The Colonels' Texas Promise

by Caro Carson

  “I wasn’t trying to, but I’ve already called a lawyer. We’ll be renegotiating your custody rights and your goddamned alimony while we’re at it.” Evan pulled him away from the door frame and pushed him over the threshold, releasing him.

  Rob staggered to regain his balance on their front steps. “You’re just pissed because I got her first.”

  “Get in your car.”

  Rob craned his neck around Evan to look at her. “You didn’t know that, did you? Your big hero here, he’s the one who turned me on to you. He told me you were wife material. He told me where to find you and how to get you, step by step. You really thought I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself when I joined the army? You think I liked being a frigging lowly-ass private while you two were lording it over me with your big-ass officer paychecks? I bought you flowers on a damn private’s salary, but it was worth it, because it worked. A dozen roses, he recommended. I’m still raking in the alimony from that investment.”

  What was Rob ranting about?

  Evan was deadly calm. “Get in your car, or I’ll put you in your car.”

  “The puppy was the best touch. Good thing he told me you were allergic to cats. Wouldn’t have been so romantic if I’d given you a kitten.”

  Evan pulled the front door shut behind himself as he walked outside and Rob scrabbled backward.

  The silence was sudden. Juliet sat on the stairs. She was shaking. Only now that it was over did she realize just how scared she’d been.

  Poor Matthew. He must be terrified. She needed to go check on him, try to find out if he’d heard horrible words shouted at his mother. Screw Evan every night. You’re keeping my boy from me.

  There’d been other words, too. The laughable idea that Evan had told him to buy her roses. Where to find her? She watched her own hands tremble.

  Then Evan walked in, shut the door and just stood there. She wanted to feel his arms around her in the worst way, so she stood on shaky legs and took one step toward him before she collapsed.

  “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

  Evan’s voice, Evan’s arms around her.

  She threw her arms around his neck, and she never wanted to let go. He was here, by some miracle, he was here—the man who had promised her, as violins played under a full moon, that he would be here right at this moment.

  “Evan, I’m so sorry—”

  “Don’t you dare apologize for that ass—”

  “Dad? Dad!” Matthew came thundering down the stairs.

  “Oh, Matthew, honey.” She kept one arm around Evan, but she reached out the other one to her son. “Come here, baby.”

  Evan was reaching out his arm, too. Two adults, reaching out to Matthew, come in for a hug, party of three, not two. Everything Juliet had wanted for her son.

  “Where’s Dad?” Matthew looked wildly from face to face to door.

  “Honey—”

  “Dad!” Matthew bolted for the door.

  Evan caught him by the shirt without letting go of Juliet. “He left.”

  “I hate you. I hate you!” Matthew backed up and looked at her as she clung to Evan, the man who was keeping her from crumpling into a heap. “I hate both of you!”

  He thundered up the stairs.

  Juliet turned to Evan. With both arms around his neck once more, she cried—not for everything her son had lost, but for everything he was refusing to accept.

  * * *

  Matthew was sound asleep. He’d cried his way through the day, refusing comfort from the two people he blamed for his dad disappearing again. When two o’clock came and went with no sign of Rob, he’d cried harder. He left the room every time Evan walked in, and he refused to eat the spaghetti Juliet made for dinner. Little wonder that he’d finally fallen asleep while sitting up on the couch.

  Evan had carried him upstairs as easily as if Matthew was a toddler.

  Juliet checked on Matthew again. His face looked so young, even though he was tall enough for the big coasters now. She kissed his forehead and went downstairs.

  Evan had been sitting on the patio ever since he’d tucked Matthew in. She went out to the patio and kissed him on the forehead, too, and sat down.

  “Well,” she said as the silence stretched on, “this sucks. Rob shows up for less than an hour, total, and now all three of us are unhappy.”

  Evan looked at her then, really looked at her. She was content to simply look back. The warm light from the house illuminated his face.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me, Juliet? The answer is yes. What he said was true. I’m the reason he courted you.”

  “You must have made me sound really terrific to inspire him to move to Fort Huachuca just to date me.”

  Evan frowned at her. “No, you did that just by being you. I didn’t have to tell him you were wife material. Every man who’s ever met you knows that.”

  “Aw, thanks.” She smiled.

  Evan didn’t. “I didn’t mean to do you any harm.”

  “Harm?” she echoed, to be sure she’d heard correctly. Rob was the kind of guy who did harm. Not Evan. Never Evan.

  “I was an arrogant fool. We were drinking and shooting pool, the whole team back together for this wedding. I was stupid, and you paid the price.” He looked at her as if he were confessing a terrible crime. “I will never forgive myself for the pain I caused you.”

  “What did you do?” I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me. Hush.

  “Everything he said I did. I told him you were at Fort Huachuca. I told him you wouldn’t be impressed with his little quick-buck schemes. Everything. The dozen red roses. The puppy.”

  “You told him to buy me a puppy? Why would you do that?”

  “Even the attitude he needed to have to impress you. I told him that.”

  “But you guys weren’t even friends. Why would you give him all this advice?”

  “I—I didn’t give him advice. He just took it. He listened to me as I bragged, and he used it. It was a bachelor party. Everyone started talking about how they’d have to find someone to marry someday, and I said I already had the best woman all lined up. I didn’t tell them about the pinkie promise. I just told them that you were going to be mine. Rob took it as a challenge.”

  “I still don’t see why you feel so guilty. It was Rob who presented himself as someone he wasn’t. You were just being you.”

  “A cocky, arrogant son of a bitch.”

  She smiled a little bit at that. “You were cocky in college, but you weren’t a jerk. You weren’t mean to people. That’s why women flocked to you.”

  “I was arrogant. Stop letting me off the hook, Juliet.”

  “I don’t know why you’ve put yourself on it.”

  “Don’t you understand? I’m the reason there weren’t any red flags. Me. I did that to you.”

  That silenced her. She’d berated herself for not seeing the red flags. She’d doubted her own judgment for years.

  “I see.” She was not panicking. There had to be a sane excuse. “But it was an accident. You were just bragging.”

  “The result was the same. The guilt is mine. I’m trying to fix it now.”

  “Fix it how?”

  He was silent.

  “By marrying me? You married me because you felt guilty? You felt obliged?” She pushed herself out of the deep Adirondack chair.

  “I’ll fix everything I can fix, but there is no way to give you back the years you lost with him. I’m so sorry.”

  “Those weren’t your years.”

  “They were yours.”

  “Exactly. They aren’t your years to fix or change or erase. I was young and finding my way through life and I made some bad decisions, but those were my years. I made that decision.”

  “He wouldn’t have gone after you if I hadn’t taunted him.”
/>   “Gone after me? He charmed me. I’m not the first woman to get charmed into something.”

  “He broke your heart. He cheated on you.”

  “Yes, he did, but that’s not a good reason for you to marry me.”

  She paced the length of the patio, trying to think, not to freak. Rob had married her so that she’d provide him with a stable home base, so he could continue to go out and play. According to Evan, Rob had married her as some kind of dare or revenge. But if Evan had married her out of guilt, that was no better. She’d wanted love. She’d wanted Evan to love her back.

  Which he did.

  She stopped in front of Evan’s chair and looked down at him. They’d been in these positions when he’d begged her to marry him. He’d dropped to one knee and told her there was no one else like her. It wasn’t guilt. It was love.

  “I wouldn’t have married you if you only felt guilty. How did I miss the red flags this time around, with you?” she asked.

  Evan shook his head, but before he could apologize again, she dropped to sit on his strong thigh. She put her arms around his neck.

  “It’s a trick question, Evan. I didn’t miss the red flags this time, because there weren’t any. You didn’t marry me out of guilt. You married me because you love me. You do. I’ve had eight days of marriage to prove it. You said one kiss from me was worth ten nights with anyone else. Well, one day of marriage with you is worth a hundred years with anyone else. For eight hundred years, I’ve been loved by you. I want eight million more, so you’ve got to stop feeling guilty. You’ll muck up my eight million years.”

  Evan was very still and very silent.

  Juliet put her head on his shoulder. “Take your time. Think it through. But if you’ve been feeling guilty for twelve years, you need to remember we’ve loved each other as good friends for nineteen, and we’re going to love each other every way we can think of for at least sixty more years into the future. So don’t let the guilt take up more space than it deserves. I’ll just sit here and kiss you while you think about it.”

  She did, kissing his cheek and the corner of his eye, smoothing her fingers through his hair as she kissed her way down his throat. “Are you done thinking?”

  “No.”

  “What are you still thinking about?”

  “I was trying to figure out how someone as young and sexy as you are can also be so old and wise. I think I solved that one.”

  “What’s the answer?”

  “I think you are a miracle.”

  She didn’t laugh, because he hadn’t said it like a joke. “I love you, Evan.”

  “Like I said, a miracle.” He sighed deeply, his chest rising and falling beneath her hand. “I was also thinking that we need one more miracle.”

  “For Matthew.”

  “Exactly. I don’t know how to make things right for him.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it for the past three years. How do you make things right for a little boy who has a lousy father? I decided the only thing I could do was keep loving him while I prayed for a miracle for him. And here you are.”

  He hugged her tight. “I’m just the guy who teaches him how to catch baseballs and who keeps kissing his mother, which isn’t winning me any points in his eyes, by the way, but I can’t seem to stop.”

  “I think you’re much more than that. I think you love him.”

  Evan placed his hand over hers and pressed it into his chest.

  Juliet smiled. “He’s got two people who love him, whether he realizes it or not, so we’ll have to trust that love will conquer all somehow. Someday. Did that sound very old and wise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we leave the old and wise Juliet out here while you take the young and sexy me to bed? It’s been a horrible day, and I’d like to do something that feels good.”

  “Insanely good.” Evan stood with her cradled in his arms. “I have one more question. What made you decide I was father material?”

  “Don’t you remember how you found out I was allergic to cats? I found those abandoned kittens junior year, but they made me so sneezy and itchy, you made me give them to you. You took care of them for me until we could get them to the pet rescue.”

  “Kittens.” Evan laughed softly. “Better than a puppy, after all.”

  He carried his bride over the patio’s threshold, all the way up the stairs and into his bed.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Evan sat at his desk, busy with paperwork, but nothing could chase the thoughts out of his mind.

  He was a family man, and his family was in pain.

  Sunday had been just as hard for Matthew as Saturday. Juliet’s patience had won out by the end of the day, and Matthew had finally told her a little bit of what he was thinking as she’d tucked him into the security of his bed. Evan had stayed in the hallway to listen, because Matthew seemed to be barely able to look at him.

  “Dad said he didn’t recognize me. I’m nothing like him. I’m just a little off-ff-offshoot of you and Evan.”

  “Not true. You are Rob Jones’s son, and nothing will change that. He said that because he was mad at me. When people are angry, they don’t always say things that are true.”

  “It was true. Dad meant it. I don’t do anything like him.”

  “Let’s think about this. He played baseball at school, and you play baseball, too, don’t you?”

  “That’s ’cause of Evan, not Dad.”

  “You played baseball before you ever met Evan.”

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t any good at it until Evan.”

  Juliet had gone silent for a moment. Evan had imagined she was as nonplussed by that argument as he was.

  “Are you mad at Evan because you’re getting better at baseball? That makes no sense.”

  “I’m mad because he pushed Dad out the door! I s-saw it from my window.”

  “Oh, honey. Dad wasn’t supposed to be in our house. He was shouting at me. I think he wanted to pick a fight, but Evan made him leave instead. Evan was protecting us.”

  Yes, Evan had been doing just that. He couldn’t regret pulling Rob away from Juliet, not when the man had been casing their house, waiting until Evan had left before convincing a child to let him in. None of that was going to make sense in an eleven-year-old’s world, though.

  Evan flipped to the last page of the police blotter and signed it. He tossed it into the outbox on his desk.

  Sergeant Hadithi appeared in his door. “Sir, the watch commander is on the back line.”

  That was a surprise, the kind that made Evan avoid surprises.

  The watch commander ran the actual police station on post. He was in Evan’s battalion, but there was no reason for the station to call the battalion commander about routine law enforcement. None. If a soldier was in a holding cell, the watch commander would call someone in that soldier’s chain of command to come get him. That person had to be at least two ranks higher than the detainee. For Evan to be the one getting the call, the detainee would have to be a captain.

  It was inconceivable that one of his company commanders was in a holding cell. That left only one other possibility: a soldier in his battalion had been killed on duty.

  The moment of surprise passed. This was going to be news of the worst kind.

  Evan took the call. “Colonel Stephens here. Go ahead.”

  “Sir, this is Sergeant First Class Montoya at the station. I’m sorry to bother you, sir.”

  Sorry to bother me?

  “We dispatched a unit in response to a call of vandalism in progress.”

  What in the actual hell...? Why would he be getting a call about vandalism?

  “We took juveniles into custody at the middle school.”

  Evan had already figured it out and come to his feet before the word juveniles. Middle school was unnecessary.<
br />
  “One of them, a Matthew Jones, age eleven, according to self-report, has been asking where you are, referring to you as Evan. I can’t tell if he wants you to be here or if he’s afraid you’re here at the station. Do you know him, sir?”

  “Yes. It’s Grayson-Jones, hyphenated last name, for the record. Have you contacted his mother yet?”

  “No, sir. He’s only given us his father’s name and number, a Robert Jones. The area code is out of state. We left messages, but so far, no call back.”

  Of course not.

  “Is he hurt?”

  “Just scared to death. Trying not to cry.”

  That description of Matthew squeezed Evan’s heart like a fist. The watch commander didn’t know Matthew was Evan’s family. He was only speaking as Sergeant First Class Montoya to Colonel Stephens, an MP to an MP. He probably wouldn’t say such a thing to any kid’s real parent.

  “I’ll be there in five.”

  Hell, he could run there in five. The station was less than a mile away, but he’d take his car, because he wouldn’t be leaving without Juliet’s child, the child he’d always wanted. His child.

  * * *

  Evan parked in the middle of the patrol cars behind the station and shoved open the back door to the briefing room. The MPs who were on their way out were startled to see him. They said their “good afternoon, sir”s and pressed their backs against the wall to let him pass.

  It still took an eternity to reach the watch commander’s desk.

  Sergeant First Class Montoya stood as soon as he spotted him. “Good afternoon, sir. There’s been no call back from the father yet.”

  “Don’t hold your breath waiting for it. I already called Matthew’s mother. She’ll be here any minute. Let me see the report.”

  Evan looked at the preliminary accounting of damages. Spray paint, of course. Juliet had described how Rob had bragged over doughnuts about raising hell at Matthew’s age.

  Curse words had been spray painted on the outside of the school, words that were almost innocent in their mildness. Ass. School sucks. Damn.