Running a tired hand over his face as he
walked over the rutted path that led from the combat hospital to his temporary
barracks, Dr. Cain Turner glared at the cracked brown earth. He missed
grass. Hell, he missed anything green at all. A tree… a bush… a
plain shrub. In this ugly brown, burned wasteland, color was a dwindling
commodity.

Afghanistan looked exactly like the
shithole he always imagined it would.

Six months into his deployment, he still
hated the tiny, backward country as much now as he had on the day he arrived.

Only his reasons had changed.

When he’d landed in this godforsaken
dirty hellhole, he’d simply missed his life. As an emergency room doctor
in Paradise, Tennessee, he’d seen his fair share of tragedy. People
died. It was a shit consequence of living. It was also part of
being a doctor – dealing with mortality. You couldn’t save every
patient. At home, however, those deaths had been somewhat expected.
He watched his patients succumb to ailments like cancer, diabetes, heart
disease. He witnessed elderly patients dying of natural causes on almost
a weekly basis. Other than the occasional car wreck or freak
accident, the carnage and devastation he’d seen was minimal.

Here, in this hell on Earth, it was a
whole different story. Good men and women died every day. Sometimes
it was his own men, but even more often, it was their Afghani allies. Men
like the translator that had just flatlined on his table. Ahmad Marhat’s
greatest sin had been that he’d wanted to keep his family safe. He’d
taken the job as translator for the United States Armed Forces in order to
guarantee those he loved would be kept free of harm, protected from the Taliban
forces that ran rampant in his small village. He’d been blown up for his
effort.

And that was just the latest casualty
that had landed in his operating room.

There’d been scores of others, and Cain
didn’t see any bright light shining at the end of the long and winding tunnel
that he’d been living in for months.

The whole war was fucked.

Dusting the dirt from his Army Combat
Uniform before he walked into his sparse barracks room, he coughed, wincing as
he tasted the grit that seemed to forever be clogging his throat. Fucking
sand! There was no escaping it. It got into everything. His
ears, his eyes…his goddamn mouth. It was the first thing he tasted in the
morning and the last thing he tasted at night.

Slamming the door to his room with more
force than necessary, he rolled his head on his shoulders, and tried to relieve
some of the tension in his shoulders. He knew it was useless. His
tight muscles were a side effect of his job, hours spent hunched over the open
body cavity of a patient he’d known was doomed before he touched his scapel.

He’d stood over Ahmad for six damn
hours, working to stem the bleeding, shocking the dying man’s heart back to
life three times before he’d been forced to call a time of death. That
part… pronouncing a comrade dead… was a part of the job he’d become all too
familiar with - way too fucking familiar.

Shaking his head, Cain knew the man
would be yet another nightmare that woke him up, shaking and sweaty, in the wee
hours of the morning. If he was lucky, he’d get a couple of solid,
uninterrupted hours of sleep before the almost nightly terrors drove him back
to consciousness. He’d long forgotten what it felt like to sleep an
entire night. If some emergency at the hospital didn’t wake him first,
the fucking nightmares would.

Screams and blood and the gory agony of
too many gruesome deaths.

That’s what his dreams consisted of
these days. Though tired to the marrow of his bones, he dreaded closing
his eyes.

Who the fuck could blame him? They
were calling him the fucking Soul Reaper in the surgical ward, for Christ’s
sake. In the last month, he’d lost half his damn patients. Injuries
had been extreme and extensive lately. IEDs had been blowing with scary
regularity, rendering victims all but dead before they ever made it to
him. Hell, their own base had taken more than its fair share of indirect
fire over the past week. Tensions ran high and tempers burned hot among
his brethren.

At first, he’d tried to tell himself
that this God awful feeling he held in the pit of his stomach wasn’t going to
last forever. Called up from the National Guard, his tour of duty was
slated to be only fifteen months long. As one day had bled into another,
however, he realized that time moved at a different pace in this pit.
Nine months into his deployment, he’d learned a hard lesson.

One day could feel a thousand hours long
when you were surrounded by the violence of war.

He now understood why his dad, a Korean
War vet, had said that war was, indeed, hell. Those pitying looks he’d
received from the old man when he’d gotten his orders to report to Kandahar
made a lot more sense to him now.

Allowing his eyes to drift toward the
stack of letters on his makeshift desk in the corner, his heart sank. He
knew he owed the people that loved him some kind of communication. A
letter, a phone call … some kind of reassurance that this fucking place hadn’t
broken him. He just felt so damned disconnected from life at home.
Phoning home and making small talk with his brother and dad while he’d spend
the past month losing at least a patient each day just felt wrong. He’d
always been a shit actor and his relatives would see right past his lies
anyway. So, he’d maintained radio silence.

He knew he owed them far better than
that, but dumping his own worries and fears on their heads didn’t seem fair,
either.

Then, there was Faith.

Even thinking her name was enough to
constrict his heart.

His memories of Faith McKinnon were the
only thing on the planet that kept him sane most days. Beautiful and
pure, she was his beginning and end, his alpha and omega, the one constant his
heart could depend on during the darkest hours of the night. Closing his
eyes, he could imagine the feel of her long, silky blonde hair wrapped around
his hand as he had plundered her soft mouth on the day he’d left for
Afghanistan.

She’d promised to wait for him, and he’d
vowed that he’d give her forever when he returned to her.

At thirty-four, he’d had nearly a decade
on her, but that age difference had never worried either of them. What
they’d felt for each other was real, tangible in way he’d never experienced
with anyone else. They’d been together for a year and dated for a couple
of months prior to that before becoming exclusive. Hell, the Turner and
McKinnon families had been friends for years, farming together and sharing a
church for as far back as he could remember.

They’d fallen naturally into a
relationship when she’d graduated from college and come back home to Paradise
to work in her family’s business, the I Don’t Care Café. Part restaurant
and part bar, it was the only place in their small community-oriented town to
sit down and get a decent meal and have a beer. Run by Faith and her
three sisters, the small enterprise thrived.

After Faith’s mother and father had died
a few years ago, the girls had decided to sell the farm, but kept the popular
mom-and-pop diner and bar. The third of four sisters, Faith had been
happy to join with her siblings and keep her Momma and Daddy’s longtime dream
alive. Patience, Faith, Harmony, and Honor were without a doubt the closest
siblings he’d ever known. Almost identical in looks, their long blonde
hair and beautiful features well-known in their small community, the four
ladies were tied together by blood and by love. They’d do anything for
each other. Working together came naturally for them.

His wonderful fiancé had already lived
through enough tragedy and pain to last a lifetime. First, there’d been
the unexpected deaths of both her wonderful parents at the hands of a drunk
driver. That horrible disaster had happened the summer she’d turned
sixteen. He’d been finishing up his residence at the time at Vanderbilt Hospital
in Nashville, Tennessee, but he’d taken time off and traveled home for the
funeral. He could still remember holding her at the funeral home as she
cried her eyes out against his shirt. Even then, there’d been a
connection between them, although it had never been inappropriate.

He’d held her again two years later when
her youngest sister, Honor, had been abducted after a local high school
football game. A county-wide search had immediately commenced and as a
young doctor, he’d immediately volunteered for the search party. His
little squad had consisted of himself, his brother Abel, his father, Seth and
Ezekiel Monroe. Zeke, now the sheriff of their tiny town, had been the
first to spot the sinkhole where Honor’s kidnappers had thrown her then unconscious
body into the ground. As the only trained medical professional among
their search party, however, Cain had been the first one to go down into that
pit with her.

What he’d seen had changed his
life.

It had changed the life of every man out
there that night.

A peaceful town at the base of the Smoky
Mountains in the Appalachians of Tennessee, Paradise and its residents had
never seen evil up close until that terrible dark night. Crimes in their
small hamlet were rare, and when they did happen, mild in nature. What
they found… the memory still turned his stomach.

Badly beaten, Honor had been barely
aware of her surroundings. It had been instantly obvious that the
youngest – and tiniest – McKinnon girl had been violated in the worst possible
ways. He’d covered her with a blanked and done what triage he could in
the limited space they’d had while they’d waited for an extraction team.
Mostly, though he’d just stroked her hair and begged her not to die while he
prayed to God that He’d allow her to live.

By the time they’d gotten her body
raised back to the surface, all three of Honor’s sisters had joined them, and
it had been Faith’s tearful gaze that he’d met first after he’d climbed out of
that hole. He’d held her while the paramedics had loaded her sister into
a waiting ambulance and she’d clutched his hand all the way to the hospital as
they’d followed in the back of Zeke’s squad car.

Neither of them spoke a single word to
each other during that entire ride, but that’s the moment he’d realized just
how deeply he cared for the younger woman with whom he’d been doomed to fall
deeply in love.

He’d watched as Faith had gone off to
college and rejoiced when she’d come home all grown up, all long legs and
soulful eyes. She’d been a knockout and he hadn’t been the only man who’d
noticed. He’d just been the lucky son of a bitch that had gotten to her
first. It was after a night spent watching half the male population of
Paradise flirt with her during one of her shifts at the bar that he’d made his
move, inviting her out to a dinner that had led to a movie that had somehow
ended with his tongue halfway down her throat, kissing her like she was the
last woman on Earth. Despite their volatile sexual chemistry together,
he’d kept things casual between them for as long as he could, offering her the
opportunity to look around the town and see what other options she had
available to her. He’d even ground his teeth and watched while she’d
dated other men.

Finally, when he’d been convinced that
she was ready for a deeper commitment, he’d suggested that she limit her
adventures to him alone. He smiled as he remembered how happy she’d been
when she’d laughed in his face, a secretive smile affixed to her lips.
Cain had wasted no time asking her what that sneaky grin was about and was
shocked when he learned that his darling woman had merely been humoring him
with the pretext of dating other guys. She’d taken great delight in
sharing the truth with him. Those assholes that he’d worried himself
nearly into early heart failure about had all been friends of hers, and she’d
always been clear with each of them about one thing. Her heart was
already taken.

By him.

Cain Turner.

He’d been the man that had taken her
innocence that night that they’d decided they belonged to each other. In
the bed of his dimly lit bedroom, he’d peeled off her clothes and worshipped
her body with his. He could still feel the tight clasp of her pussy
gripping his cock that night when he’d irrevocably linked their lives together and
made her his. Clamping his jaw as he remembered the hot feel of her soft
lips beneath his, he felt his dick harden behind the pants of his uniform.

She’d been liquid fire around him, her
wet pussy greedily sucking at him, drawing him inside and casting an unbreakable
spell that he hadn’t wanted to fight. There’d been pain for her, but it
hadn’t slowed his sweet angel down at all. When Faith wanted something,
nothing stopped her. And she’d wanted him.

“Christ!” he bit out, sweating as he
ripped off his soft cap and drove his fingers against his scalp, his present
surroundings invading the sweet memory of his past. Hurling his cap
at the wall and stomping toward the small john attached to his room, he started
the shower and stripped out of his dirty clothes, leaving them in a heap on the
floor.

He needed to decompress to think
clearly. Just a few minutes to get his head on straight and then he’d be
able to do what needed to be done, he promised himself as he rubbed the heels
of his hands against his forehead.

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