AFTER THE WAR
COMING HOME SERIES, BOOK 10
From USA Today bestselling author Jessica Scott, a compelling story of daring to love again. New York Times bestselling author JoAnn Ross calls it “beautifully written.”
Previously published in the Homefront Series
“After The War is Jessica Scott’s best book to date. It was a powerful and emotional book” – Smut Book Junkies
A touching story about finding forgiveness and love filled with emotional second chances
Sarah Anders has been running from the worst day of her life ever since the day the chaplain knocked on her door. Throwing herself into her Army career after the loss of her husband, she’s been trying to be a mother to her young daughter and a good soldier. But a freak accident has nearly derailed her career and losing the Army means losing the one thing that keeps her connected to her husband.
Sean has never been good at commitment but he never forgave himself for letting Sarah slip away all those years ago. But wars have a way of distracting you away from the loneliness of an empty home. For the last decade, he’s been focused on preparing his men for their next deployment and ignoring the quiet longing for something more. The one thing he is not prepared for is a little girl, who wriggles her way into his heart, despite her mother’s resistance.
When Sean and Sarah are thrown into a new assignment, they come face to face with the past they shared and the man who stands between them, even in death.
OTHER BOOKS IN THE COMING HOME SERIES
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EXCERPT
PROLOGUE
Al Fallujah
Late 2003
“LT, stop!”
Lieutenant Sean Nichols looked away from the fire and at the soldier holding him back. “Let me go.” A direct order, laced with violence.
Specialist Kearney shook his head. “Getting yourself killed isn’t going to do anyone any good, sir.”
Sweat ran from beneath Sean’s helmet and into his eyes, fogging the lenses of his eye pro. He dragged his gloved hand beneath his glasses and took in the chaos around him. Thunder from the fifty cal vibrated through his chest. The heat burned through his flesh to the bone. At the end of the street, one of the aircraft overhead let go with the main gun and pushed the approaching militia back.
The entire fucking city was burning. Smoke from the fire seared his nostrils and tore at his lungs.
Greeted as liberators, my ass.
Chatter and intermittent screams flooded the airwaves over the radios as everyone tried to get medical and fire support.
But the truck in front of them was all he could see. He started toward the truck again.
“Stop, goddamn it!” Kearney smashed his palms into Sean’s chest, knocking him back a step. “They’re already gone.”
The front end of the truck was melting into the asphalt.
The war surrounded them. Hot. Violent. A brilliant flash blinded him, followed by a wave of heat and sound that drove his skin into his bones.
He hit the deck, Kearney slamming into the pavement next to him.
Ammo started cooking off from inside the burning truck, tearing through the thin-skinned Humvee and slamming into the concrete around them.
Gravel bit into the skin of his cheek as a round ricocheted off the concrete. Sean closed his eyes but all he could see was the fire. He hoped Kearney was right. He hoped Jack and his boys had died in the initial blast. There was silence as he pushed to his knees. Or at least the appearance of silence. It wrapped around him and made the battle seem far away.
He looked up, his brain slowly registering the beat-up white sedan weaving through the wreckage and burning trash toward them. He punched Kearney in the shoulder and pointed. Kearney nodded once, his lips moving. Sean felt the vibration from the M249 on his vehicle where his gunner had opened fire. The sedan rolled to a stop near the burning Humvee.
He reached for the hand mike on the seat of his truck as all the sound came rushing back.
“Punisher Main, this is Warlord Blue. MEDEVAC follows.” Sean read off the lines required to get the MEDEVAC bird in the air. The number of wounded. Their location. The information rolled off his tongue line by line, ingrained with practice. His voice locked in his throat and he forced the words through the blockade.
When he was done, he doubled over, throwing up the little liquid and food he had in his stomach, heaving his guts out on the streets of Iraq. Heaved until his ribs ached and his throat burned from the bile or the smoke, he didn’t know which.
When he was empty and hollowed out, he felt it again, slamming into him. The cold violence in the pit of his stomach. The rage churning in the empty space his soul had just abandoned.
His hand tightened around the butt of his weapon and all he wanted to do was kill.
***
On another base in the center of Baghdad, Lieutenant Sarah Anders answered a knock on the door of her CHU.
Her company commander stood on the top of the rough wooden step. The chaplain stood behind her.
Sarah’s heart caught in her throat. She took a single step backward, shaking her head slowly, denying the hard, ugly truth of what those two visitors meant.
“No.” The word tore from her throat.
She fell to her knees.
Far away, she heard someone screaming.
It was a long time before she realized it was her.
CHAPTER ONE
Fort Hood, Texas
2009
“You are officially the worst friend on the planet.”
Captain Sarah Anders smiled at the sound of a familiar voice. Captain Claire Montoya stood behind her trying to look offended and failing miserably. Sarah squealed as she hugged her friend close.
“You are the only thing good about being at Fort Hood,” Sarah said, holding on a little too tight. “God but I missed you.”
“Funny way of showing it, you ass,” Claire said with a grin. “How long have you been here?”
“Long enough to get settled. I was going to call,” Sarah said, knowing Claire wasn’t actually offended. She was that kind of friend. The one you didn’t talk to for ten months because of a deployment and when you finally did, you picked up right where you left off.
Claire waved aside Sarah’s half-baked apology. “How’s the munchkin?”
“She turned five while I was gone.”
“Wow, that goes by fast. Wasn’t she just in diapers a second ago?”
“Feels like it. Now, though, sometimes I feel like she’s going on fifteen. She can be so dramatic.” Sarah pulled Claire into her tiny nook that passed for an office. She was new here, which meant she had a shitty desk in a shitty space, but she wasn’t going to complain.
“Bet you can’t wait for puberty, huh?”
“I’m sending her to boarding school and volunteering for another deployment,” Sarah said. “Man, I missed you. How have you been since the epic disaster also known as Colorado?”
Claire pulled up a chair. “Oh, fine. Got thrown out of this brigade and sent over to the Cav Regiment. Ai-ee-ya, and all that,” she said, pointing to the patch on her left shoulder.
“You sound like you’re enjoying it.”
“Of course I’m enjoying it,” Claire said with an evil grin. Claire was a warrior, through and through. There was nothing she enjoyed more than leading soldiers in combat. And she was damn good at it, too.
“And how’s Evan?”
A warm flush crept over Claire’s face, matched by the smile that transformed her. “He’s good.” She held out her hand, revealing a square-cut diamond ring.
Sarah bit back an excited sound. “Now who’s the shitty friend? You didn’t tell me you were engaged!”
Claire flushed but the smile never left her lips. “Well, he pretty much had to hold me down to get me to agree.” She shrugged. “He’s…a good man.”
“I’m happy for you,” Sarah said.
Claire tucked her thumbs into her belt loops. “Okay, so spill. What the hell happened? You were leaving for Iraq the last time I saw you, and now you’re here. Which means mostly not good things as far as I can guess.”
Sarah looked down at her desk, the shame of failure a hot flush on her skin. “I got fired.” She looked up at her friend. “Training accident in Arifjan. I never even got to take my team into country.”
“Shit.” Claire sank back into her chair. “Is that why you’re limping?”
Sarah nodded. “Yep. Fuel exploded. Boss didn’t want to hear that it wasn’t my fault even though I was literally topping vehicles off. Contractors deliberately failed to properly ground the fuel stop.”
“So what you’re saying is you’re lucky to be alive, and instead you’re bitching about being fired?” Claire said dryly.
“Well, when you put it that way,” Sarah said. She grinned and shook her head. “The boss was looking for a reason to fire me and he found it.”
“Well, I’m not going to complain if that means you’re here. I have a shortage of female friends who can put up with me.”
“Ha! That’s just because you’re terrifying.” Sarah let the conversation drift away from her failure as a commander. She couldn’t face the memories, not today. Not when she needed to get her head in the game and focus on her new job here at Fort Hood. If she was planning on staying in the Army, she needed to get used to riding a desk on the staff.
One of the lieutenants in the ops stuck her head in Sarah’s cubicle. “Excuse me, ma’am?”
She glanced over Claire’s shoulder at LT Picket and felt positively ancient. The Army was a young soldier’s game, and at thirty, Sarah hadn’t been a young soldier in half a lifetime or more.
“What’s up, LT?”
“Ma’am, Major Wilson directed me to hand this to you.” The lieutenant looked like she expected Sarah to rip her throat out.
Sarah hadn’t had a run-in with Major Wilson yet, but that didn’t mean the battalion executive officer’s reputation didn’t precede her. She was not a warm and fuzzy kind of leader, apparently. She ruled by fear and intimidation. Always a fun mix with a superior officer.
“Thanks. What is it?”
Picket placed her hands at the small of her back at the position of parade rest. “You’ve been appointed as the investigating officer for an incident that happened this past weekend. A fight between a lieutenant and a sergeant in Chaos Company over in Death Dealer battalion. Drunk and disorderly with assault. Some sergeant got drunk and was involved in a fight with his company XO. Now the brigade commander wants answers.”
“So much for getting integrated with the battalion’s logistics mission,” Sarah said. Being an investigating officer took time, time she could be using to establish herself as a valuable asset to the logistics planning team. Now she was going to be out chasing sworn statements and picking through lies, instead of doing her job, which was working logistics for the upcoming deployment to Iraq. Fights weren’t usually serious incidents, contrary to what most folks outside the Army thought. Why was this one being investigated?
Sarah frowned. “What kind of unit has officers and enlisted men fighting on the weekends?”
Claire smiled. “Oh, trust me, Death Dealer battalion is special.”
“And you know this, how?”
Claire leaned back in her chair. “Evan is the ops officer there. Trust me; when I say ‘special’, I mean ‘entire chain of command was relieved a few months ago’ kind of special.”
“Oh wow. That’s really serious.”
“You have no idea. New command teams are on board, but they’re busy trying to clean house and get the unit prepared for the next deployment coming up in” —she glanced at her watch— “seven months. I haven’t met any of the new commanders beyond Bandit Company but Sarn’t Ike says they are an interesting mix of characters.”
“Well, that ought to be interesting then.” Sarah flipped open the folder to look at the memorandum appointing her as the investigating officer.
Cold prickled over her skin. Her stomach twisted into knots violently as she read the name of the company commander again and again. It had to be a mistake.
Had to be.
“Dude, what’s wrong?” Claire’s voice came from very far away.
She said nothing, handing Claire the paperwork, her heart caught in her throat.
“Oh shit.” Claire’s expression hardened as her eyes scanned the paperwork. She looked up at Sarah. “Sarah—”
Sarah covered her mouth with her hand, a thousand memories storming forward all at once, flashing back to a terrible time years ago. Before she’d met Jack. Before she’d lost the man who’d filled the dead space inside her with love and laughter and understanding. Things she’d thought she’d lost forever when Sean Nichols had walked out on her.
The man she’d been engaged to marry. The man who’d left her when she refused to give up her career to be his wife.
***
“Goddamn it, Sean, I thought you were getting your men under control.” Lieutenant Colonel Gilliad jammed a finger in Sean’s chest and Sean deliberately kept his expression blank.
Captain Sean Nichols stood in his battalion commander’s office, hands at the small of his back in a parade rest stance. It was the preferred position for getting a wire brush run over his fourth point of contact. While the visual might have been funny any other time, right then, Sean wasn’t in the mood for a joke.
“Sir, I’m working on it. There’s a lot to unfuck in this unit, sir.”
“How exactly are you working on it? The lawyer tells me your company is the farthest behind on legal packets.”
“Sir, we’re processing the medical and mental health before we start the legal proceedings.”
The muscle in Gilliad’s throat pulsed visibly as he stood, leaning over the desk. “And now you’ve got sergeants picking fights with the officers?”
Sean ground his teeth. He was going to whip Kearney’s ass six ways from Sunday when he got a hold of him. And Sean’s executive officer? Oh, LT Smith was going to be lucky to still have a job if Sean had any say so. But like everything, firing any lieutenant, let alone that particular lieutenant, was complicated. “Sir, I’m still trying to get the answers as to what’s going on there.”
“Yeah, well, you’re out of options on that one. I’ve asked the brigade commander to direct an investigation on this clusterfuck since you can’t control your formation.”
Gilliad slapped a folder against Sean’s chest. Sean kept it from falling and dropped it by his side, feeling like now might not be the best time to read it and take notes. Not with flames shooting out of Gilliad’s ears, anyway.
“Roger that, sir.”
Gilliad sank down into his chair with a heavy sigh. He looked up at Sean quietly for a moment. “I hired you because you came highly recommended. I’m not sure what the problem is with this particular sergeant, but you need to get him under control or you need to throw his ass out of the Army.”
Sean ground his teeth. He really was going to kill Kearney. “Sir, he’s working through some difficult family issues.”
“Noted. Don’t care. He gets arrested one more time, and I’m coming for you. You want to put your ass on the line for this guy, you’ll deal with the consequences when he fucks up.”
“Roger that, sir.”
“Get the hell out of my office.”
Sean saluted sharply and left the office quickly, before his mouth decided that discretion was not the better part of valor.
“That was fun.” First Sergeant Morgan fell into step with Sean outside the colonel’s office.
They stepped outside of the headquarters, and Morgan paused to pluck a fresh cigar out of the breast pocket of his uniform.
“A blast. We should do it again tomorrow.” Sean pushed his sunglasses on to shield his eyes from the brilliant Texas sunlight. The trees overhanging the battalion headquarters offered shade, but the heat was oppressive, and it wasn’t even summer yet.
“Heard from the XO yet?” Morgan asked.
“Nope. Where the hell did we get these lieutenants? Clown college?” Sean shook his head. “Fucking Tweedle Dum and his merry band of miscreants.”
“I love that you call your XO Tweedle Dum, sir,” Morgan said dryly. “It warms the cockles of my twisted little heart.”
Sean grunted. He’d nicknamed LT Smith Tweedle Dum out of sheer frustration. He and his buddies were all part of the same class at West Point. All but one had a mother or a father currently on active duty but somehow, they were the least competent officers Sean had ever seen. He’d never encountered more unprofessional behavior in his entire career.
God save him from lieutenants who thought they knew everything because they were related to someone who did.
“Probably time to strategically apply some pressure to their fourth points of contact. You’ve given them the benefit of the doubt and, well, they’re not really rising to the occasion, are they?”
Sean shot his first sergeant a sidelong look that said no shit. “Does Kearney have a good story for this one?” Sean wished he hadn’t quit smoking. It might have been six years ago but, right now, he’d give anything to relieve the tension winding around his chest, and a cigarette seemed just the thing. Something. Anything to take the edge off.
“Nope.”
Sean sighed heavily. “He still at the company?”
“Yep. Bleeding on the conference room table.”
“Well, it ought to give the medics something to do,” Sean said dryly. “Have them stick him with an IV and patch him up.”
“Want me to draw up the counseling packet? He needs a boot in his ass.” Morgan clipped the end off his cigar and flicked it into the bush. “Maybe taking some time and money will smarten him up.”
“I doubt it,” Sean said. “And no, we can’t do a damn thing right now. The boss appointed an investigation.”
“What’d he go and do that for?” Morgan held the lighter to the tip of his cigar. “Kearney’s problems are pretty simple.”
“Guess he doesn’t believe me when I tell him that Kearney and his wife just enjoy making each other miserable.” Sean scrubbed his hand over his mouth. “How do we fix this, Top? This is five weeks running we’ve had boys arrested.”
Morgan blew out a smoke ring. He did his best thinking when he was smoking. “First, we need to figure out what the hell happened last night. Kearney getting into a fight with the XO is bad juju, but the more I think about it, the more I’m with the boss. We need someone else to take a look at this because clearly there’s some bullshit going on that we’re not seeing.”
“I love how you read my mind.” Sean grinned. “Want to snuggle?”
“Just because I read your mind doesn’t mean we’re going to be taking long showers together,” Morgan growled.
Sean laughed at the long running joke between them and some of the tension that had been squeezing his chest eased back. He released a deep breath.
They walked in silence to their company headquarters, a small, one-story brick building, with bushes cut in the guitar pick shape of the First Cavalry Division patch. All of the company ops were lined up in the same building.
There was a lone female standing on the front steps. Her hair was tied back in a severe bun, her eyes masked by dark Wiley-X sunglasses.
“Lost?” he said.
She didn’t turn right away. There was something familiar about the curve of her neck, the line of her jaw. It nagged at him, just out of reach.
She turned, her face shadowed by the sun. “I’m looking for Captain Nichols.”
He stopped, his heart pounding hard in his ears. He stood for a moment, convinced that lack of sleep had him hallucinating. That he was hearing and seeing things he’d long ago tried to forget. He knew that voice. Hadn’t heard it in half a lifetime at least, but it blasted him with a sense of knowing.
She shifted then, turning until the sun no longer cast a shadow over her features and reality slammed into him. A thousand brilliant points of pain exploded somewhere in the vicinity of his chest. The sounds from the world fell away, leaving him in a vacuum filled with memories and the silent regret of long ago mistakes.
“Yeah, Sean. It’s me.”