Masters at Arms (Rescue Me Saga, #0.5)(2)

Adam raised his head and wiped his hands down his face. Numb. He still felt numb, whether from losing Joni or from the two-week bender, he wasn’t sure. Probably a bit of both.

He guessed his units were out of Kandahar by now. Sounded like Iraq would be next on their dance card.

Bring it on. I got nothin’ left to lose.

Fuck! Stinkin’ thinkin’ like that would get the men and women under him killed. He knew he wasn’t mentally ready to go back, but his orders were to report Monday. He hoped he’d find the fire in his gut he’d need by the time he reunited with his units.

A cornucopia cutout hanging from a fluorescent light fluttered when a blustery wind blew in from the open doors. Joni had always taken so much pride in making their home festive for the holidays. She especially loved Christmas, even though it was just the two of them, well, when he wasn’t deployed. She even kept her nativity set and some other favorite decorations displayed all year long for whenever he did make it home. Not that he paid much attention to that. He’d just been happy to see her, hold her, love her, and make up for lost time.

So damned much lost time.

What the hell was he going to do with all that stuff now? He’d call her mother and tell her to do whatever she wanted with it. He had his memories and a few photos—and her wedding ring. Shit, he hoped Joni had gotten rid of their playthings before she’d moved in with her mom. Well, nothing he could do about that now.

Camp Pendleton—or wherever he would be sent—would be his home until he retired from the Corps. He hoped that, by the time he got back in country, whichever war zone that would be, he’d have shaken off this black mood that matched the frigid black night outside.

In a way, he couldn’t wait to get back. War and military life, he understood. What stumped him was cancer. Fucking cancer. Nothing in his tactical or weaponry training prepared him to help Joni fight against the insurgent that destroyed her body.

Not that she’d even wanted him to help her fight the disease. By the time she’d let her mom tell him about the recurrence, she was given a month at best. She’d managed to hold out for a couple weeks longer than that estimate.

God, his eyes burned. He rubbed them with a thumb and forefinger, then lowered his hand and clenched his fist. Damn it, he should have known sooner.

Joni told him she saw no point in pulling him away from a place where he could make a difference, just to sit by her bed and watch her die. She’d figured he’d have gone stir crazy with the helplessness of not being able to do anything to change the unalterable outcome.

God, he’d kill for another bottle of scotch right now. He looked at the wino passed out on the floor across the room. Adam thought about offering the man a wad of money for whatever he had left in the brown-paper wrapped bottle he clutched to his chest with both arms, like a lover.

Adam had held Joni in his arms for the last time, just like that, as she had slipped away from him forever. Before she died, two days short of their twentieth wedding anniversary, she’d assured him she wouldn’t have changed a thing in their years together.

Hell, he’d sure have changed a few things.

Togetherness wasn’t the best word to describe their marriage. She’d lived with him on base when he wasn’t deployed, and they had eight years together after the end of the Gulf War and before he’d been sent to Kosovo. Then came Operation Enduring Freedom and he hadn’t been home much since.

They’d talked about the good times they’d had in the ’80s and ’90s when he hadn’t been deployed to war zones. Their Dom/sub power exchanges had been total then. But that had been impossible to sustain while deployed.

Fire burned the backs of his eyes. Joni never wanted him to take his focus off the military missions to deal with her “little problems.” Like the time she’d totaled the car. She’d had to take care of everything herself. He’d been deployed, of course. As always, she’d handled everything perfectly. Except she hadn’t told him. Said she was afraid he’d be upset about the car. Hell, he didn’t give a shit about the f*cking car. He’d just been worried when he heard how close she’d come to being killed.

All of the times she’d needed him—from when she’d held their stillborn son in her arms in 1991 to when she’d fought her last rounds of chemo and radiation this past summer—he’d been fighting battles elsewhere. Long deployments in too many hot spots in the world had come before her more often than he’d wanted. Hell, he’d barely made it home in time to watch her die.

Joni, I’m so f*cking lost without you.

He blinked against the burning in his eyes. After her burial, Adam spent two weeks locked in a Minneapolis motel room trying to dig a hole deep enough to bury his sorrows. He’d only wound up in a drunken stupor, not unlike that wino’s over in the corner. Joni had told him to lay off the bottle twenty years ago because his excessive drinking scared her. Her father had been an alcoholic. He’d wanted her to be proud of him and had quit for her.

Until now. In the past couple weeks, there’d been a few nights where he’d come out of his stupor clutching a bottle of scotch to his chest.

A lousy substitute for Joni.

But, if he hadn’t been due back at Camp Pendleton in five days, he’d still be in that hell-hole motel—or buried six feet under beside Joni. He remembered how close he’d come one night, staring down the barrel of his pistol.