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Rory understood better than anyone. He always had. While he hadn’t been shot out of the sky, he could relate.
Jessie filled up the empty coffee mug in front of me. “On the house for our returning heroes.”
I tried not to wince at those words, but I saw Rory grimace on my behalf. We’d left visiting with my smothering family to avoid that kind of talk. I might not know who I was these days, but I knew who I wasn’t. I wasn’t the hero everyone was making me out to be.
We’d always been protective of each other—Rory was the closest thing to a brother I’d ever had. But ever since the crash, he seemed to think it was his personal mission to keep me from any uncomfortableness whatsoever. His intentions were good, but what he and my family couldn’t seem to understand was that no amount of coddling would make the pain go away. My wounds had healed to ugly scars, but the wounds to my mind, to my psyche, I doubted would ever fade.
During this last tour, my helicopter went down during a routine mission. I was the pilot transporting six soldiers. Anti-aircraft fire had hit the tail and I’d fought to keep us airborne, but it had been a fucking lost cause. I’d been injured, put in the hospital for months, but I was the lucky one. I was the one who survived. The only one. I should be grateful, but it was hard to feel lucky when all I could think about was the men who hadn’t made it. Who I’d killed because I hadn’t kept the chopper in the sky. Why did I get to go home when they didn’t?
I saw Jessie’s gaze flicker down to the scar that was peeking through beneath my sleeve. “You doing okay, hon?” Her smile slipped a little as if she sensed my mood.
Her intentions were good, I had no doubt about that. But I couldn’t bring myself to respond. What could I say? Was I doing okay? No. But no one wanted to hear that answer. No one wanted to know the war hero was fucked up.
“So, what’s new in town, Jessie?” Rory changed the topic to avoid any further awkward silences. Funny, that used to be my role. I’d been the chatty one. The easygoing one. The one who could make conversation with anyone at any time. To smooth things over when Rory’s family life had been shit. Now he was the one who had to keep the conversation going when it grew too uncomfortable or someone asked the wrong question.
I didn’t mind the silence, but I knew it drove Rory nuts.
“There’s got to be some better gossip than us two returning.” His tone was too bright, too cheerful, as he tried to steer the conversation away from me, away from us. Away from what we’d been through overseas.
“Well, let’s see now,” Jessie started. “I suppose you heard that the Kane boys found themselves a wife.”
Rory nodded. “We met Katie during our last trip home. Sweet girl.” We’d been a year behind Sam Kane in school. His cousin, Jack, was a little bit older.
“Did you hear we have a new doctor?” She looked at me with raised brows, like she was waiting for me to comment.
“Is that right?” I mumbled, not surprised Dr. Murphy retired. He’d been around since I was a kid. He’d even set my broken arm when I was six. I’d jumped out of the big cottonwood in the back yard thinking I was Superman. I wasn’t then and I wasn’t now. It seemed I didn’t do a good job of staying in the air. That time, it had only been me who’d gotten hurt.
“Yes, sir. Hannah worked here at the diner for a while before taking up with Cole and Declan. You remember those boys, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Rory was toying with his coffee mug and I knew exactly what was coming.
“Any news on Ivy Walters?”
There it was. Ivy. The one who’d gotten away. We’d had our eyes on her for years back in high school. For the last few weeks of the summer, we’d done everything together—including one wild night of fucking—and we decided a long time ago that was how we liked it. My parents had a Bridgewater marriage—two men sharing one wife—and Rory and I vowed back then we’d do the same. With Ivy Walters.
It had been no secret we both wanted her and it was no secret—at least now that Rory asked Jessie about her— we wanted her still. In Bridgewater, both of us interested in her was perfectly normal.
And Bridgewater men? We knew how to find our woman. Call it fate or just a gut instinct, but when Bridgewater men found their mate, they just knew. And that’s how it was for Rory and me. After that night with Ivy, when she gave us the precious gift of her virginity, she became ours. She was the one, but she’d slipped through our fucking fingers.
With that long blonde hair and perfect curves, we hadn’t been the only guys with out-of-control hormones after Ivy back then. No, she’d had a boyfriend for most of senior year. Fuck, Tom something. It hadn’t been serious, but it had been hard to see them together out on dates. They’d broken up, and finally we’d had our one night.
Only one fucking night.
But it had been perfect. Ivy had admitted she wanted us as much as we’d wanted her. And Tom? Well, we learned firsthand that he never claimed her. She’d been a virgin that night. She might have dated Tom, but she’d given herself to us. My cock had been her first. I grew hard just remembering how she’d felt, how her eyes had widened in the moonlight when I took her deep, stretched her open. Filled her up with my cum. Then it had been Rory’s turn and she’d eagerly taken him, too.
That one time was enough for us to know, even all these years later…she was the one. We’d only been eighteen, wet-behind-the-ears boys and yet we hadn’t forgotten her. I thought of her often, wondered what she’d done with her life after her grandmother had passed away. All we knew was that after the funeral she’d never come back to Bridgewater. If she had, we would have known. If she had, we would have gone out to Baker’s field and had her all over again. This time, we wouldn’t come within two minutes. We’d seen to her pleasure, but now? Now, we’d take care of her like two men could. Not just in the bedroom, but in life. We’d protect her, love her, cherish her. Make her ours in every way. Put a fucking ring on her finger.
Of course, we couldn’t do jack shit about it at the time. Not with her going off to college in Seattle to become a teacher and us heading into the army. We’d never hold her back from her dreams and on top of that, we’d had nothing to offer her. She’d had to go and we’d let her. And since she was ours, we couldn’t hold her back. We had to give her everything that she needed, that she deserved, and that included leaving us for school. And so she’d gone west and we’d gone east to boot camp and then to the Middle East to war.
But now…well, now we’d saved up some money. Being deployed to a sandbox didn’t give much opportunity to spend any of it. We had enough to open our own helicopter business for tourists and the like. With the Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone National Park nearby, scenic tours were popular. Same went for taking well-off hunters and campers into the backcountry. Well, Rory would take them and I’d push papers. Regardless, we were back for good, with a solid plan for our business and more than ready to move on from the military.
All we were missing was our woman.
We aimed to get her back…if we could find her. We’d been trying to track her down for seven years, ever since we said goodbye to her and went our separate ways. At first we’d sent letters to her grandmother’s house from boot camp, but each and every one was returned. We found out later that her grandmother had passed away that first fall and her house was sold. Then we tried to track her down at that college she’d headed off to in Seattle, but found out she’d only been enrolled for one semester. Then nothing.
The woman we planned to marry had fallen off the face of the earth.
