“Dammit,” he said in a soft growl.
He couldn’t deny it—but he couldn’t understand why it should matter. The past was the past. What did it have to do with the future?
Two different army shrinks had given him the same answer. The past was the basis of the present, and the present was the basis of the future.
Jake hadn’t returned for any more lie-on-the-couch-and-vomit-out-your-secrets crap. He’d never given up his secrets to start with. What was the point of having a secret if you handed it off?
Besides, the shrinks were wrong.
The pain behind his eye, his nonexistent eye, had become a drumbeat. He rubbed the bone around it with a calloused hand.
He thought again of the stories he and his brothers had grown up on.
“Never forget,” the General would say. “Everything we are, everything we have, we owe to the courage and convictions of all those brave men who came before us.”
The brothers had all grown up waiting for the chance to carry on the tradition. College first, because their mother would have wanted it. Business management for Jake, law for Caleb, finance for Travis.
But Jake had been the only one who decided to become a soldier. He’d joined the army, longed for, and snagged, training flying Blackhawks, often on covert missions.
He’d loved it.
Taking out the enemy. Saving lives when nothing and nobody else could do it.
Suddenly, with gut-wrenching speed, he stood not in the dark Texas countryside, but in a place of blood and fire. Fire everywhere …
“No,” he said sharply.
He drew a shaky breath. Straightened his long, tautly muscled frame and stood as tall as his aching head would permit.
He was not going to make that mental journey tonight.
Tonight, he would be the son his father had wanted, the man his brothers had known, the guy his sisters had adored.
The owl called out again. The bird was a hunter. A survivor.
Yeah, well, so was he.
He set off briskly over the night-damp grass, toward the house and the family that waited for him there. The moon was climbing higher. He felt its cool ivory light on his face.
The figures in the doorway grew clearer.
“Jake?”
Jaimie and Lissa cried out his name.
“Jake?”
Caleb and Travis shouted it.
“Jake,” Emma shrieked, and just as he reached the house, they all came racing down the porch steps and engulfed him, laughing, crying. He felt dampness on his cheeks.
His brothers’ tears. His sisters’.
Maybe even his.
CHAPTER TWO
A PROMISE MADE was a promise kept.