Hallowed Ground (2 page)

My fingers grazed over Dad’s face and that familiar ache returned. Two years, and I still missed him every day.

“I thought you might want to decide where to hang them,” Josh said, coming from the small dining room where our four-person table from my old apartment was a cozy fit. He kissed the side of my head and pulled me into a hug, chasing away the sadness with his love.

“That sounds great,” I answered, wrapping my arms around his back. He’d already changed into a pair of jeans and a Henley. I had to admit, I liked my Josh better than Lieutenant Walker. “What is that heavenly smell?”

“Takeout from the Italian place down the street. I grabbed your favorites,” he said, leading me to the table after I took off my jacket and dropped my bag.

We sat and my mouth watered at the tortellini Alfredo in front of me. “This looks so good.” I shot him a sly grin. “Is this what I have to look forward to at the end of my school days?”

He laughed. “Day three and you’re ready to divvy up the household chores.”

My cheeks flamed because…

“Don’t worry, I know you already have a color-coded chart somewhere dictating what needs doing and when. Just stick it on the fridge, and we’ll get it done.” His smile melted me more than the wine he’d poured.

He knew me way too well. “The chart isn’t color-coded, but that’s not a half-bad idea.”

“There’s a fresh pack of highlighters waiting for you in the desk drawer. Now tell me everything about the first day of your last semester of college.”

I filled him in on everything about the classes but paused when I thought about the application. “There’s…there’s a dig.”

“Another one? That’s awesome. Where are you going?” he asked as if it was nothing, simply taking another bite of his food.

And I loved him all the more for it.

Josh would never hold me back, never discount my dreams to pay for his own. That’s why I couldn’t abuse that love. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going. I don’t even know if I’d get in.”

“You’ll get in. Why don’t you want to go?”

“It’s not a two-week trip this time, it’s two months, in Ephesus, Turkey, and I don’t want to be away from you that long.”

“Turkey?” His fork paused on the way to his mouth.

“Yeah, and not the bird.” I shook my finger at whatever smart reply he was thinking. Jagger had rubbed off on his sense of humor.

He quirked an eyebrow. “You should go. That’s huge.”

“We just clawed our way through a very complicated two years, Josh. This is our time, our chance. You’re too important to me to press pause so I can play with some dirt.”
Some really cool, very rare, historically badass dirt.

“You really should go.” His voice dropped an octave, and his gaze fell to the tablecloth.

“Oh no, you’re not going to be all selfless and Joshy about this. I want this time with you—barbecues with our friends and sneaking off to watch you fly. I can do research from here. I don’t need to go to Turkey. I need to be with you.”

His fork hit the plate, the clanging obscenely loud in our bare house. “We won’t have the summer together, December. You should go, because I won’t be here.”

I carefully set my fork down, a sickening foreboding settling over us. My food turned over in my stomach as my heart jumped.

“Why? Why won’t you be here?”

“God, baby. I’m so sorry.”

And just like that…I knew.

“Say it.”
Don’t say it. Deny it.
I glanced over to where the double-star service flag hung in our window. Paisley and I had thought they were so cute when we’d bought our matching set. But while Paisley’s were both blue, one of our stars was gold for Dad. I ripped my eyes away, refusing to think of stitching any other color onto it, and locked eyes with the man who owned my very soul. “Tell me, Josh.”

“We’re on deployment orders.”

My eyes slid shut, like I could block this out, hide from it. It could be Honduras, Guatemala, hell, even Korea. It didn’t have to be over there, to that country that had nearly killed him and had ultimately taken my father from me.

“Where?” Our eyes locked, every ounce of the love we’d worked so hard for pouring between us, trying to fill the cracks that would soon become a canyon of distance.

“Afghanistan.”

So much for being
just happy.

Chapter Two

Josh

The word flew from my mouth, and I would have paid anything to take it back, to wipe the look of total and abject fear off her face. She didn’t deserve this.

Any of this.

Life dealt Ember a shit hand, and rather than being the prince, I’d just turned myself into the joker—some sick act of irony. “Babe.”

“When?”

“It’s complicated. I have to progress through some helicopter training before I’m ready to fly with the unit, and they want me to do that here before I leave.”

“Josh. Stop making me ask you things twice, and just be straight with me. You can’t hide this from me or protect me from it, so just be honest and tell me when.”

God, those eyes, they destroyed me. They were wide, wild, even though the rest of her was composed. “A month.”

Her little whimper broke my fucking heart. Her eyes focused on her wineglass, and her spine straightened. I witnessed that moment in the grocery store two years ago all over again, watching her take on a burden she shouldn’t have to and stand even taller for it. “Okay. For how long?” Her voice grew steadier.

She was magnificent.

“Nine months. Maybe longer.” Nine fucking months without seeing her. Kissing her. Feeling her wiggle closer to me while she slept.

December nodded. “I thought they told you that your battalion wasn’t on the patch chart?”

That stupid chart, the one that stated which units were up for deployment rotation, was about as trustworthy as a politician. “Right. When I got the welcome call from the unit, we weren’t. A different battalion was. But then they decided to go with a task force and pull different companies from different battalions—”

“I know what a task force is,” she said quietly, reminding me all too clearly that she was no stranger to this life.

“Right. Sorry. They pulled three of us. Medevac leaves early, but they’re leaving me here this month to progress. The rest of the company leaves next week.”

She sucked in her breath. “So soon.”

“Yeah.” An ominous silence settled over our table, the food growing colder by the minute.

“Jagger? Will?”

“Jagger leaves with me. Carter will rotate in a couple months after us, and stay a couple months later. They’re trying to make sure medevac doesn’t end up with the year-long version of this hell.” She nodded but didn’t speak, still absorbed in the glass in front of her. I reached for her hand, covering it with my own and squeezing gently. “Babe, this will be okay. I’ll be okay.”

Her head snapped toward mine, those blue eyes lit with a fire that was as beautiful as it was intimidating. “You. Don’t. Know. That.” She spat out each word through closed teeth.

Wrong thing to say
. “I know that I love you.”

She shook her head. “That country nearly killed you last time, and it did kill my dad. All the love in the world can’t save us from that.” She pulled her hand from mine and buried her face.

“Hey. I know this is scary—”

“I’m trying, I swear. I know I signed up for this. It’s not like I didn’t know what you were going to do, and I still chose you—
choose
you—but God, Josh. This…I can’t wrap my head around it.”

I pushed my chair out and reached for her, lifting her tiny, curved frame onto my lap. Her head tucked beneath my chin, and she curled into me, fitting right where she was always meant to be. My arms closed around her. “We have a month.”

“It’s not long enough.” Her fingers gripped my shirt like she could keep me here if she just held on tight enough. God, what I wouldn’t have given to stay with her.

“Forever isn’t long enough for us, December, but that’s what we’re going to have. You and I have never chosen the easy path. This is just another hurdle.” I rubbed my chin over her soft hair and tried to soak in every detail of holding her—the sweet way she smelled, the smooth texture of her skin beneath my hands.

She leaned back in my arms and cupped my face. “I can’t lose you.” Her voice broke, and tears pooled in her eyes.

I’d never hated myself more than I did in that moment. She’d made it through a nightmare no one should have to face, and I was about to ask her to chance that fire again. My breath hitched, barely passing the lump in my throat. “You won’t. It would take something a hell of a lot stronger than a war to keep me from you.”

I sealed that promise with a kiss, tasting her fear and desperation as she responded. She opened underneath me, and I fused my mouth to hers, surrendering to the heat between us to pull us through this moment. There was nothing hotter or sweeter in this world than kissing December, feeling her go soft and pliant.

We’d fought so fucking hard to get here, to be together. This wasn’t fair, and we both knew it. But we also both knew it didn’t matter. Fair wasn’t exactly in the U.S. Army vocabulary.

I retreated just enough to whisper against her lips, “I’ll come home. I swear it.”

Her chest trembled as she sucked in a stuttered breath. “Don’t make me a promise you can’t keep, Joshua Walker.”

“I’ll spend my life keeping it,” I vowed.

Her fingers skipped over my face, like she needed to memorize me. “You don’t get it,” she whispered. “That’s what I’m terrified of.”

I pulled her to me the second her tears slipped down her porcelain cheeks, and held her long past their end.

The week had passed too quickly. The days did that now, too, no matter how I tried to slow them down, to savor every second I had with her. It seemed daylight slipped through my fingers.

“I’d almost forgotten how much paperwork there was,” I muttered, flipping through the stack.

“God, I thought college applications were bad,” Jagger muttered next to me.

The SRP site was packed with orderly lines of soldiers picking up their papers and checking their immunizations, all preparing to deploy.

“What is this?” Jagger waved a paper at me.

I grabbed my own. The DD93 stared up at me, the most macabre piece of work I’d seen since the last time I did this shit. “It’s for your next of kin.”

“Well, until I marry Paisley, that’s probably you,” Jagger said, tapping his pen on the paper.

“I’m pretty sure I’d know if something happened to you before a notification could come down, but I get what you’re saying.”

“Oh.” The pen paused. “This is…”

“Yeah,” I answered. It was for notification purposes, determining which doors the army would knock at if we were KIA.

“Who are you putting?” Carter asked from the other side of me.

Shit.
“Last time it was Mom, but she was alone when she found out I’d been hurt. I don’t want to put her through that again. But Ember…”

Jagger sighed. “That’s a tough fucking call.”

“Why?” Carter didn’t look up, filling his out with quick strokes of his pen.

“She’s already answered that knock once, and it nearly destroyed her,” I said quietly. His eyes shot up to mine, widening. “Her dad. He was the doc who fixed me up in Kandahar. He’s the reason I’m alive.”

“Damn. I had no clue.” He shook his head. “She’s so put together, you know?”

“Yeah. It’s been a couple of years, but she’s always had that strength. She carries everyone around her, including me some days.” My chest tightened, and my fingers tried to rebel, but I scrawled her name for the primary next of kin. She was my life, everything about me began and ended with her. When…
if
something happened to me, she needed to be first to know. I put Mom in second, with the express wishes that she not be alone when they told her.

I closed my eyes, trying to breathe away the images assaulting my overactive imagination. Ember collapsing in the doorway of our house, holding a folded flag at another military funeral, bringing flowers to a cold grave while she cursed the choices I’d made that brought us here.

“What about you, Carter?” Jagger asked.

He didn’t answer, just stared at the paper. It dawned on me—for all our time in flight school, I didn’t know anything about his family. He’d always been the self-righteous asshole Jagger had gone toe-to-toe with over Paisley. But then Carter had given his Apache slot to Jagger, all in the name of what was on the right side of his moral code, and I couldn’t help but put a few more points on his side. When he’d stepped up and helped me during the Blackhawk course because I’d spent way too much time traveling to be with Ember and not enough time studying, I started to genuinely like the ring-knocker.

I glanced down and saw that for all his writing, he’d left that slot blank. “Will?”

He startled, probably because I’d never used his first name before, and shook his head like he was clearing it. “Yeah, I don’t know. My parents…well, let’s just say there was a reason I needed a school that didn’t charge tuition. They’re not exactly going to know what to do, if they can pull themselves out of their respective bottles long enough to do it.”

Jagger and I threw side-eyes at each other, and he gave a nearly imperceptible shrug. “Grayson would know what to say,” Jagger whispered.

“He’s not here, smartass.”

“Chill the fuck out, we’re not having a moment,” Carter growled, scrawling a name quickly into the blank.

“Noted, West Point.”

“This thing is thicker than the 160
th
packet,” he muttered.

“You thinking of flying for SOAR?” I asked. Part of the 160
th
Special Operations Aviation Regiment was based here out of Fort Campbell, but it had never occurred to me to put in a packet for an assessment straight out of flight school.

“Yeah,” he answered. “They need the best, right?” He shot me a cocky grin and stood to turn in his SRP packet. “But they’re not even going to look at me until I have some deployment hours under my belt, so I’ll wait until we’re back. You should think about it.”

“I thought you said they needed the best,” Jagger joked.

“Yeah, well I’ve seen Walker fly.” He looked back at me. “You have that edge.”

“No, thank you,” I said, turning back to my papers. Even though flying for SOAR would be badass, it wasn’t the kind of life Ember would sign on for.

I sent up a quick prayer that the army would never have to so much as look at these forms again and gave my packet to the clerk.

One step closer to zero day.