Book of the Month: CARRY ME HOME
CHAPTER ONE
Late 2008
Colorado Springs, Colorado
“So this is hell? Very scenic.” Claire shivered and slouched over a steaming mug of coffee, wishing it were a bathtub she could crawl into. The lobby of the Evergreen Lodge was polished ski-lodge elegance and pretty much guaranteed to give the budget overlords coronaries. A huge stone fireplace in the middle radiated a welcoming heat from all four sides. Overstuffed chairs were intermixed with coffee tables and potted plants. Tiny white lights decorated the rafters and looked like diminutive stars against the dark oak. The dining room took up half the lobby, and dozens of windows let the wild mountain view in while keeping the cold out.
Across the white tablecloth, Claire’s oldest friend and fellow army captain Sarah Anders laughed and stirred her hot cocoa. “You know, if you stopped complaining for a second, you’d realize that it’s called the Garden of the Gods for a reason.”
“There is not enough cold-weather gear in the entire army inventory to make me stop complaining. I’ve never been so cold in my life,” Claire grumbled. “I can’t believe I’m saying this but I’d rather be in Iraq right now. At least I’d be warm.”
“It doesn’t help that you get to stay in this beautiful ski lodge because the budget people screwed up?”
“Not a bit. They could have us at the swankiest place in Colorado Springs and I’d still complain about the cold.”
“But you love me, which is why you’re here.” Sarah’s flip remark belied the serious edge to her words. Claire had been friends with Sarah far too long to miss the fact that she was, in fact, deeply worried.
“I’m here because my brigade commander ordered me here,” Claire said as she cradled her coffee mug. “The only good thing about it is being stuck with you. Why did you have to be the one tapped for this mission?”
Sarah shrugged and sipped her hot chocolate. “I’m the only company commander who hasn’t deployed recently. It’s my turn.”
A shadow fell across her friend’s face and Claire reached across the table to squeeze her friend’s hand. “We’ll get your team ready, Sarah.”
In truth, nothing they did in training could prepare Sarah for the mission she was about to command. She was leading a logistics company into the tail end of the Surge, the buildup of American forces designed to stabilize Iraq. As someone who had recently returned from Iraq, Claire knew Sarah’s mission intimately.
Nothing was going to help take a company of combat-inexperienced soldiers and turn them into steely-eyed killers inside of a month. But Claire said none of that. It was the dead last thing that Sarah needed to hear right now.
Sarah tucked a stray lock of hair behind one ear and slid her water to one side of the table to make room for a briefing folder. “Okay, so let’s talk about the mission, because I’m in way over my head and I could use your expertise.”
Claire mirrored Sarah’s movement and leaned forward to look at the timeline of events Sarah had slid in front of her. “Inspections, mission briefings, ranges,” Claire read. She glanced over at Sarah. “What’s the problem?”
“Look at the first three days.” Sarah flipped the page over. “We’re shipping our equipment in exactly five weeks. We have a sixteen day training exercise to get our crap together because at the end of this exercise, we are shipping out our equipment, then we’re going on leave. All told, five weeks start to finish. And the brigade commander . . . Claire, he doesn’t understand our mission.”
“Wow.” Claire let out a low whistle. The training timeline was packed full of events that no one who’d deployed would waste time with. “Equal opportunity training? The only thing equal opportunity about this war is the roadside bombs that don’t care who they kill. Whose good-idea fairy was this training plan?”
“Someone who’s not paying attention to the fact that we are in no way ready for this mission. My company is full of supply clerks and the commander has us training mostly on shoot houses and hand-to-hand combat instead of convoy training. We don’t do convoy training until the last two days of the exercise . . . But that decision is way over my head. My focus right now is getting my team ready for running the roads in Iraq.”
“Then I’m your gal. I’ve got more than thirty thousand miles under my belt on the roads in combat.” Three tours to Iraq, one as a young enlisted soldier, two as an officer. She was all too familiar with the threat that was buried beneath Iraq’s roads. Sarah hadn’t deployed in almost four years. She should be nervous. The war had changed a lot since the first troops went in back in ’03. It changed every time Claire went back.
Sarah glanced over Claire’s shoulder and perked up. Claire twisted in the plush leather chair and groaned.
“Who is that?” Sarah murmured.
Claire sighed. “You’re just like every other female on the planet,” Claire said, ignoring the flip of her stomach. Evan Loehr was giving her an ulcer. Lovely. One kiss and it would freaking haunt her forever. She regretted ever touching him. “Sarah Anders, get ready to meet Captain America himself.”
“You know him?”
Oh yes, she knew him. Many a long night in the tactical operations center downrange had been spent fantasizing about those shoulders, along with other parts of his anatomy.
Stupid hormones.
“Wring out your panties, honey, he’s not someone you want knocking on your door.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Sarah said. Claire laughed quietly. It was good to see Sarah show some interest in a man—she hadn’t dated much since her husband’s death in Iraq four years ago. Claire wasn’t sure how Evan would react to Sarah’s appraisal, but she wasn’t about to tell him. That man’s ego did not need any stroking.
She took a deep breath, reminding herself she was not here to fight with Evan. Or pant after him. Neither would do her a damn bit of good. She was here to train her best friend for her deployment to combat. Lusting after the officer in charge was not part of the plan.
His gaze met hers across the wide-open space. He nodded once in greeting, but his mouth was set in a grim line. Obviously, Captain America wasn’t happy to be here, either.
Lovely. Just what she wanted to deal with on this last-minute Hail Mary mission: a cranky superhero.
* * *
Evan winced and shifted his assault pack to the opposite shoulder as he studied the only woman in the room wearing a military uniform. Glancing at the other woman’s name tag as he approached, he recognized Captain Sarah Anders, the support company commander. But Evan couldn’t take his eyes off Claire. A woman who ate napalm and pissed razor wire and inspired Evan to want to throttle her every time they were in the same room together.
An officer who could not spell doctrine if it was stapled to her forehead.
A woman he could barely be in the same room with without watching her body move, without wondering if she was as wild in the bedroom as she was on the battlefield.
He stopped and looked down at her where she sat, next to the massive fireplace in the center of the lodge with the support company commander. “Why are you in uniform?” His words came out too sharp, but then again, what else was new.
Claire raised both eyebrows. “I’m working, ergo I’m in uniform,” she said. “Is there a problem with that?”
“You’re in a civilian ski lodge, off-post, after duty. You should be in civilian clothes.”
She smiled coldly. “That’s rich, coming from you. You’ve practically got ‘Duty, Honor, Country’ tattooed on your ass.”
Evan sighed and shifted his pack to the other shoulder. “Fine. Sleep in your damn uniform if you want.”
“What crawled up your ass?” she said. “You’re not usually this charming until day four of a field problem.”
“Never mind. Forget I said anything.” Evan sighed hard. “I have more important things to do on this mission than argue with you.”
“I would have thought you had more important things to do in, oh, say, Iraq but you still managed to argue with me all the time over there.”
He pinned Claire with a deadpan look. “Are you trying to piss me off?”
She smiled sweetly. “I don’t actively have to try, now do I?”
“Okay, well, you two obviously have some catching up to do.” Sarah stood and Evan shifted to let her by. “Claire, call me tomorrow?”
Evan watched as Claire stood and hugged the other woman. An odd sensation caught in his throat at the genuine emotion on Claire’s face. She looked soft and appealing, in a way he had forced himself not to notice. He stared at her for a long moment before he caught himself and roughly cleared his throat.
“I need to run through the plan with you,” Evan said. Claire looked like she was about to argue but she didn’t say anything. “But I need some coffee first. Can we go to the restaurant?”
“Sure, I could use a refill,” she said.
Wary of the sudden truce, he followed her back to a quiet corner, wishing he didn’t notice the way her hips moved. There was an aching familiarity about seeing her in uniform. As though he’d been missing it—missing her, which was ridiculous. He didn’t even like her, let alone miss her.
He supposed it was just part of the transition of coming home. Every single time he returned from a deployment, he went through a period during which he wanted nothing more than to be back with the team he’d been with downrange. Seeing Claire in uniform fed the need for the familiar he’d found himself longing for since he’d been back from this most recent trip to the sandbox. Being around her was comforting, even if it was Claire.
He let himself wonder if she ever wore her hair down. He hadn’t seen it down since the first night they’d met. Was it still long, or had she cut it? It was a beautiful color—dark, dark red, halfway between copper and deep cherry.
He’d long ago come to think of Claire Montoya as all hard angles and sharp edges. Prickly. But with her head tipped forward and her hair starting to come loose at the back of her neck, she looked . . . soft. Soft and—dear lord, was he about to think desirable?
Holy hell, he needed to get some sleep if he was going to keep this little obsession under control.
The waitress saved him from any further awkward thoughts. Evan ordered a coffee, and then flipped open his files. “So let me ask you this,” he said, pulling out a timeline. “What’s your assessment of the unit? Are they prepared?”
“They’re a brand-new brigade. More than half the soldiers have never deployed and Sarah’s company, sadly, is just as inexperienced as they are. Hell, Sarah hasn’t deployed since ’04, right before her husband died. The war has changed so much since then. So the long answer to your short question is no, they’re not prepared.” Claire’s eyes darkened, the strain showing in the tension in her neck. He looked down at his coffee as she continued to sift through his files. “There is not enough time for all this,” she said, her movements stiff and jerky, and he caught the slightest tremble of her fingers. She set the papers down, picking up a sugar packet. She sipped her coffee and set the cup down abruptly, pulling out a folded sheet of paper from her notebook and drawing his attention there. “Look at the timeline. It’s filled with things we don’t need to waste time on. We don’t have time for this stupid bonfire tonight. We need to get these guys on the range and start training as soon as possible.”
He recognized the gesture for what it was: an attempt to shift the conversation away from the worry for her friend to something she could control. He tapped the paper in front of her. “I take it we didn’t manage to get out of the bonfire?” He wondered if she would be changing out of her uniform for the evening, and then mentally slapped himself for falling down that rabbit hole again.
“No, we didn’t, and I resent the hell out of glad-handing and ass-kissing when we could be training.”
Evan sipped his coffee silently, watching her try to rein in her emotions.
“The platoon leaders brief their mission plans to the brigade commander the day after tomorrow, and the next day we start training. They don’t have enough tents, though, so they’re sleeping in their motor pools to simulate small forward operating bases in the cities. We’re back in the hotel every night instead of sleeping in the field like we normally would on a mission like this.” Her voice lowered, dark and husky and filled with unsaid things.
“Are they ready for the inspections to start?”
“The fact that these inspections are another stupid waste of time notwithstanding, no, they’re not ready. But we’re starting tomorrow, regardless.” She blew out a hard, frustrated breath. “If I were running this damn thing, I’d skip all the useless PowerPoint briefings and go straight to running missions. Training isn’t something you talk about, it’s something you do.”
A spark of passion lit her eyes when she spoke about training. Her intensity sparked a latent energy inside him, twisting in his belly. His lips curled into a faint answering smile as it dawned on him—she got a charge out of training. Call it an adrenaline boost or a combat high, but Claire didn’t just enjoy what she did, she loved it. Her eyes were dark and aroused, her body keyed up. It was singularly the most stunning change he’d ever seen in a woman.
“What?” she asked.
“The army. You really love it.”
Claire smiled, the first real smile he’d seen on her lips since their team had arrived in Colorado. “Yeah. I do.”
It wasn’t her hot temper or her fierce beauty that drew him. It was something else. A barely contained fire, a spark on the edge of a pool of gasoline, waiting for a gust of wind to ignite the world around her. And the reaction it caused in him was no less intense. No less fierce.
He shifted uncomfortably, then cleared his throat. The sound pulled her attention from the agenda and made her look up. She shifted the paper, and he gripped the edge to angle it so he could see it better. His fingers slid against hers, and he froze. She looked up, their fingers still touching, her green eyes darkening. Then she swallowed and pulled her fingers free from his touch.
This was not the woman he knew—the wildfire, out-of-control officer he was used to seeing in the tactical operations center. That woman made snap judgments and spoke before engaging her brain. This woman was restrained. Tense. This was new, a side of Claire that Evan had never seen before.
Her gaze met his, hesitant.
“What are you doing?” Her voice was thick, edgy and filled with a wariness that made his heart flip in his chest.
“Listening to your brief.” His voice sounded off to his own ears, harsh and rough.
“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said.” She leaned back in the booth and stared at him, a sharp, hunted expression in her eyes. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
Silence hung over them, awkward and cold. She said nothing, and he could see her searching for the right words, fighting the edge of panic. “Like you’re looking to start rumors. Captain America doesn’t sleep with members of his team, remember? Violates some superhero code or something.”
“I wasn’t planning on sleeping with anyone, let alone with you,” he said dryly.
She laughed out loud and just like, that, the tension snapped and fizzled into an almost comfortable silence. “Well played, Captain America. Well played.” She paused then. “Do you have any issues with this training plan?”
He studied the chart that outlined the key measures of success for the convoy operations. After a long moment, he glanced up at her. Shadows fell across her face, casting it in a soft, subtle glow. “No. The timeline sucks, but the convoy stuff is a good plan.”
“All right, that does it,” she snapped.
“What?”
“You’ve never said ‘good job’ to me on anything. Why are you suddenly signing off on this without an argument? What’s wrong with you?”
He stared at the simmering anger reflected in her features, his body tightening at a sudden, vibrant image of Claire rising above him, her body glorious as her hips spread over his. It slid through his veins insidiously, taunting him with Claire and suddenly so much more. No more tight hair and harsh angles. Lush hips and full, heavy breasts and wild, unrestrained passion.
Claire the woman, not Claire the soldier.
“Nothing.” Abruptly, Evan pushed away from the table and walked from the room. He had no idea where this massive error in judgment was coming from, but there was no way in hell he was attracted to someone like Claire.
Except that he was. And it shook him to the core of his soul to admit he had been from first time he’d first met her. He’d just spent every waking moment denying it since then.
It unnerved him to think Claire was suddenly more than a woman in uniform. He didn’t date army women. He didn’t bring many women into his life or his bed, and invariably, they left, and it was always the same story. He was cold. He was distant. He was too rigid, too controlled.
Maybe that was true. But it hadn’t mattered to him until now.
What he saw when he looked at Claire was a dark and primitive being. It was Evan surrendering to the wild need burning inside him.
.
* * *
An hour later, Evan closed the door to his room, wishing he could appreciate the understated luxury. High-vaulted ceilings made the room feel bigger than it was. The wide bay windows disappointed him—a gnarled old oak blocked his view of the mountains. Dead branches swayed gently in the evening wind. Snow coated the grey bark, creeping down the branches and dripping into the white mound below.
For a moment he was thrown back into a field soaked with blood, to another oak tree twisted with smoking metal and dusted with ash.
He wished he could blame the trembling disquiet inside him on Claire’s distracting presence, but he couldn’t. He’d be lying to himself if he tried. Giving himself a shake, he yanked the curtains closed. He needed to get another room. One where the trees didn’t spark such painful memories.
It wouldn’t help. The room wasn’t the problem.
It was this place—too many memories and not nearly enough sleep collided with a single resurrected ghost. Turning his back on the window, he walked into the bathroom. It felt tiny compared to the high ceilings of the main room, but it beat the hell out of the tin trailers he’d called home on his last deployment to Iraq. He washed his face and brushed his teeth, then ran his wet fingers through his hair. Hell, he was just happy to have running water.
Still, he couldn’t rein in the emotions churning in his gut. Panic? No, not by a long shot. But the feeling was so foreign and unsettling, he didn’t know what to call it. He felt . . . like the boy he’d been once upon a time. Like the kid who’d stood in his parents’ living room and listened to his mother’s heartbreaking sobs.
He stretched his arms over his head, easing the tendons and focusing on what he could control. The tight pull of muscles across his damaged shoulder forced him back to the present.
Just weeks before they’d been scheduled to come home from the latest deployment—and wasn’t that always the way?—their brigade tactical operations cell had been blown up and a freak piece of shrapnel had sliced across his upper back. Four months later, the wound had healed, leaving a jagged scar. It still ached if he didn’t take care of it.
Taking over a brigade readiness exercise with less than two weeks’ notice was going to limit his ability to take care of it. But what the hell. The entire Iraq war was run on less planning and even less preparedness.
He’d survived burning command posts, blown-up trucks, and complex attacks by an enemy they were supposed to easily subdue. His entire experience from West Point through Armor Officer Basic Course to his four tours in Iraq had instilled in him one thing: purpose. Training had readied him for the fog of battle. He knew how to react to sniper fire and how to hit the deck when the whir of a rocket blew up overhead. From the moment he’d turned seventeen, his life had had a direction. A purpose. To lead soldiers. And he was good at it. That wasn’t arrogance, it was fact. But nothing had prepared him for the single act of coming home.
He was not used to feeling so unmoored and off balance. Having Claire here didn’t help matters, either. But he was a professional and he wasn’t going to let Claire distract him from the reason they were here: to prepare the soldiers of Golf Forward Support Company to face that same war, that same chaos.
It was a no-fail mission, and Evan Loehr did not fail.
ONE CLICK CARRY ME HOME TODAY…
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