Way of the Warrior (Troubleshooters #17.5)(33)
It wasn’t supposed to go down like this, damn it! He’d never told her he loved her, had never held her in his arms. Fuck. He was supposed to make it home. He’d promised her.
She was gonna be so pissed…
“Hang in there, Dawson!” someone was yelling as several pairs of hands suddenly grabbed him, jostling him unmercifully as they tried to assess his wounds. Someone pressed on his abdomen, sending him careening toward darkness even as he shouted, “Stay with me!”
He didn’t know who the hell was talking to him, didn’t give a shit. There was only one person who mattered. He strained harder, flapping his fingers with a groan of frustration, willing his hand to reach the damned photo. But now they were lifting him up, carrying him, the picture drifting farther and farther away from his grasp. And as he watched, the wind snatched the picture from the grass. It flipped end over end twice and then, for a moment, it was suspended in midair as if time had stopped.
Joe’s future seemed to hang in the balance while Fate deliberated. But before he could witness the outcome, darkness wrapped him in its cold embrace and dragged him down.
And there was no war. No blood. No pain. Only Sadie as she was the last time he’d seen her that autumn day before his deployment, her cheeks streaked with tears, her eyes swollen from crying, as she’d pleaded, “Come home to me, Joe.”
CHAPTER 1
Eighteen months later…
Joe snatched the bottle of Aquafina from the shelf and pressed it to his forehead, closing his eyes as the air from the open fridge seeped out and cooled his sweat-slicked skin. He’d finished his run two minutes better than the day before, but it still wasn’t anywhere close to what his time had been before. Not to mention his lungs were shredded, his leg was killing him, and he had a serious case of swamp ass going.
His rational side kept trying to reassure him that what the hell could he expect after sitting on his ass in the hospital for weeks and then being in rehab for months just to get to the point where he could even walk on his left leg again? The fact that he was running at all was a frigging miracle. And he wasn’t even going to think about the job that f*cking IED had done on his gut.
Joe squeezed his eyes tighter for a moment, pushing away the barrage of images that flooded his brain, a year and a half of therapy not helping a damn bit when it came to keeping them at bay. It’d taken him a couple of weeks after that day before he could actually remember what had happened. He wished he never had. Because then he wouldn’t have had to relive the sight of Pete Ryan being blown apart a few yards away from him.
Joe’s throat went tight with a mixture of sorrow and regret. And fear. It could’ve been him. And by all rights it should’ve been if Fate had had any sense of justice. Ryan had had a wife and three kids waiting for him stateside, people who needed him. And now those kids would be growing up without their dad while Joe got to come back home to what? A job he was no longer fit to perform and bills he soon wouldn’t be able to pay unless he got his ass back to said job.
Joe let fly a string of juicy curses and slammed the fridge door. Irritated with his body’s continued limitations, he opened the water bottle and chucked the cap with an enraged groan, then chugged the water, hoping it would cool the fire that raged within him. When that didn’t work, he stripped out of his shirt and made harsh swipes over his neck and under his pits before tossing it into the hamper in the adjacent laundry room.
He was just heading toward his bathroom to take a shower when the back door suddenly swung open. Instinctively, he wrapped an arm over his abdomen where the skin was puckered and discolored as he spun around, slightly crouched and at the ready to take on his intruder. When he saw who it was, the tension in his muscles instantly eased.
“Hey,” he managed, his breath catching in his lungs for reasons that had nothing to do with being startled. It was the reaction he always had when Sadie walked into a room. “What’re you doing here?”
Sadie gave him a wry smile, her flushed cheeks at odds with the playfully reproachful look she gave him. “Well, good morning to you, too, sunshine.”
“Sorry,” he fumbled with a quick shake of his head. He edged around to the other side of the tiny kitchen island to hide his scars from her view as he continued, “I meant—”
“I knew what you meant,” she interrupted with a laugh, the material of her pale pink skirt hugging her killer curves and hitting at just the right spot to accentuate very shapely calves as she drifted toward him to stand on the other side of the island. She tossed her keys on the counter. “Sorry I didn’t call—I wasn’t sure you’d be awake yet. I just wanted to stop by and give you a present to celebrate your first day back at the department.”
Joe grunted before he could check it. His first day back at the sheriff’s department wasn’t exactly cause to celebrate, in his opinion. Yeah, he’d been a deputy for ten years now, but about half that time had been spent on various deployments with his National Guard unit.
Well, those days were over, that was for damned sure. He’d never be able to serve again, not with his injuries. No matter how hard he pushed himself to get back into shape and return to the peak physical condition he’d been in before everything had gone to shit, he’d received his discharge papers and a purple heart—both of which he’d promptly dropped in the trash bin. Sadie had insisted upon rescuing them and putting them away in a safe deposit box “until he was ready.” Ready for what, he wasn’t sure. He’d never be ready to accept that he’d lost a damned good friend that day. He’d have to live with that for the rest of his life.