Watch Me (Stepping Up 1)

“Why?”

“It’s what I was born to do, what I wanted to do. What my father, my brother and my uncles, all did.”

“And you weren’t scared? I mean you were a kid, Sam.”

“I wasn’t scared but my mother was. My brother was in Iraq at the time and my father was on active duty. She, like most spouses, found a place to tuck away the fear of losing her husband to combat. But her son, or sons, rather, were another story. She struggled to deal with the potential loss of her boys.”

“I can’t imagine how hard that must have been for her.”

“My father saw her distress and tried to talk me into waiting a few years to enter the army,” he said. “He figured that would give my mother time to get used to my brother serving. I didn’t think that was the answer. I thought my mother needed to go ahead and get past her fear because the army was going to be my future. Eventually, she and I talked about it, and she gave me her blessing.”

“So you went ahead and enlisted.”

He nodded. “And then ended up in a fluffy desk job I didn’t want. I’m pretty sure my father pulled a lot of rank to make it happen, too, though he never admitted it. Able-bodied young men do not end up at desk jobs in the army.”

“I’m surprised,” she said. “With him serving himself, I’d have thought he would have supported you.”

“He was trying to protect my mother and he really wanted me to finish college to be eligible for officer training, which my brother rejected.”

“From what I know of you, a desk job must have been hard for you to deal with.”

“Oh yeah. It drove me crazy. I felt guilty for sitting at a desk while my own father and brother, and plenty of others with them, were fighting to protect our country. I would have gotten out of that desk job if I could have and I tried. It worked out though in the end. By twenty-one I’d completed my degree and I entered the officers’ program, then Special Forces.”

“Why Special Forces?”

“I was in for life,” he said. “I wanted to be challenged and contribute everything I could, on every level possible.”

Meagan absorbed those words thoughtfully, captured by him in ways she didn’t want to be, didn’t expect to be when she’d first met him. He was just so much more than she’d expected he’d be. This man had seen war, he’d fought to survive, and fought for the lives of others. “But you weren’t in for life,” she finally commented, hoping he’d explain why, nervous she might be in choppy waters he didn’t want to enter.

“No,” he said a bit too softly. “I wasn’t in for life.” He inhaled and let it out. “A few bullets in my leg took care of that.”

“Oh, God, Sam,” she said and added, “I’m sorry.” She wanted to pull back these last words, knowing from her own injury how much she didn’t like hearing them.

“Yeah, me too, because even if I could have gotten a doctor’s release, which was doubtful, I knew I wasn’t one hundred percent. And I wasn’t willing to risk other people’s lives by ignoring the reality of what I had to face.”

Suddenly, her lost dream, her knee injury, felt tiny, inconsequential. “That was brave, Sam. It was very brave.”

He glanced at her, surprise etched on his handsome face. “No. Those men and women out there on the front lines are the brave ones. I refused to let my ego put them at risk.”

“Yes,” she conceded. “They are.” And he’d been one of them, he still wanted to be one of them, and couldn’t. She knew how that felt, as well. How it hurt to want things you could no longer have. “Where are your parents? Are they here? Is that how you ended up in L.A.?”

“No,” he said. “This is technically my home, but as a military brat, I traveled all over the place. My parents spent a good number of the last ten years in Germany, but managed to end up back in Japan just in time for the recent tsunami. Both me and my brother got a good dose of the kind of worry my mother has for her sons and her husband. We couldn’t reach my parents for days. Jake—that’s my brother—was on a mission overseas, and he was in rare completely freaked-out mode.”

“But they’re okay, right?”

He gave a quick nod of his head. “Yes. They’re fine. My mother’s a nurse. She was working at a Red Cross shelter at the time and refused to leave when the military families were evacuated. My father’s still on active duty, and as a high-ranking officer, he had his hands full.”