Chapter Twenty-Eight
Josh
The sunlight streamed through the window, hitting me in the face as I opened my eyes. No matter how late I slept, I was still exhausted. Always exhausted.
Ember must have beaten me out of bed, because her side was empty. I rested my forearm over my eyes after I saw the time on my cell phone. Ten o’clock. Damn, that fight had been brutal. I should have gotten up early, gotten her coffee. I should have done a lot of things. Instead I’d given in to my pride, my need for that thirty-second thrill, my stupid craving for the speed, and I’d let Evan push me into a race. Like he even had to push hard.
Her eyes, God, they’d killed me, but how could she understand?
She can’t when you won’t tell her, you asshat.
I groaned, wishing I could crush the tiny conscience that hammered away at me. My feet hit the floor, and I pulled on shorts and a Pearl Jam T-shirt before going in search of my fiancée. Mom only looked the other way on the tattoos as long as they weren’t thrown in her face.
The house was quiet in an uncomfortable way. Something was off. The tiles were cold under my feet as I walked into the kitchen, where Mom sat at the small table. She gave me a sad smile. “Good, you’re up. I poured you some coffee.”
“Where’s Ember?” I asked as I took the seat across from her, where a still-steaming cup of coffee waited.
“She’s gone,” Mom said softly, her eyes nearly dripping sympathy.
I sat up straight. “What do you mean, she’s gone?”
Mom shrugged. “I caught her on the way out. She said her brother broke his nose at hockey camp, and she was headed home for a couple of days to see him.”
“Gus, what? Why wouldn’t she tell me? I would have gone with her.” The chair squeaked as I pushed back from the table and stood. I needed to pack and find a flight.
“Sit down, Josh.”
Her tone didn’t allow for argument, and I did as ordered. She gave me “the look.” The one that my five-foot-three mother used to send me running for the hills. “Mom?”
“We haven’t really talked about what happened to you…over there.”
Fuck my life. Her, too? “Mom…”
“Stop. We didn’t talk the first time, and I thought maybe that was for the best, to let you deal with it in your own way. I figured as long as I didn’t get calls from the police department that you’d been racing, you were fine.”
“I don’t race the Harley.”
“Well, then I should have set that Ducati on fire,” she said with a smile.
I tapped my fingers on the table, knowing that anything I could have said would have only earned me another foot deeper in the hole I’d apparently dug. “I was fine.”
“If you’re so fine, then how did you send your fiancée fleeing first thing in the morning? She didn’t even pause for coffee.”
“She…” I shook my head. “I raced the bike last night.”
“Joshua Walker.”
“It was stupid, but Evan—”
“Evan? We moved away from here for a reason. I know you were hurt in Afghanistan, but I don’t think it knocked you back eight years.”
I dropped my head to my hands. “She wants things I can’t give. I’m not capable.”
Mom reached across the table until her hands covered mine. “Then figure out how to give them to her.”
“Maybe she’s better off without me. Did you ever think of that? Twice she’s had notification teams at her door, Mom. Twice. She’s buried her dad. We buried Will, and she almost buried me. How much more do I have a right to ask of her? At what point does me pushing her away become a mercy? She told me I’m breaking her, so how long until I destroy the one thing I love most?”
“What you two have is something I’ve never seen, never been lucky enough to have. You don’t let that just walk out. I’m incredibly proud of the man you are, Josh, never more so than the way you love December. But I’ll kick your ass from here to the Colorado border if you don’t pull your shit together.”
Our eyes locked and I knew she’d do it. “What’s inside me, it’s ugly.”
“You let her decide what’s ugly. You owe her that much.”
Let her go, my conscience screamed at me, but my heart couldn’t contemplate a life without her in it, not when she was the reason it beat in the first place. “Okay, let me find a flight.”
She tilted her head. “You have fifteen minutes to pack. You’re on the one p.m. flight into Eagle County.”
“What?”
“She’ll be in Breckenridge, at their cabin. That’s where her mother is sending her.”
“You talked to her mother and already booked a flight?”
She peered at me over her coffee. “Not all of us sleep in like seventeen-year-old boys.”
I let the jibe slip. “You’re not mad that I’m leaving? I’ve only been here a few days.”
She smiled at me. “I just needed to see you, Josh. Every time you’re hurt I can’t seem to breathe until I lay eyes on you. I’ve done that now, and don’t need to hover, or tend you like a nurse. I need you to go be the man I raised, so you don’t lose me my daughter…or my future grandbabies.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I stood from the table.
“And Josh?”
I turned at the doorway.
“Make arrangements for that damn Ducati or it becomes my bonfire.”
I gave a single nod. “Done.”
Everything was ready. Or, at least, I hoped it was.
I’d gotten to the cabin two hours ago, parked my rental in the driveway, located the hide-a-key, and stocked the place with groceries for the next three days. That was all the time we had, but damned if I wasn’t going to use every minute of it.
The sound of tires crunching the gravel of the driveway sent my pulse racing. What if she was pissed that I was here? What if she refused to talk to me? What if I’d already blown it?
While my heart was telling me to get a grip, that this was Ember, my head had spun off into the twilight zone of insecurity and was in no hurry to bring its ass back to reality.
What if she really was better off, and I was just prolonging the inevitable? As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get Rizzo’s whole stance out of my head. Maybe he was right, and I’d done Ember the biggest injustice simply by falling in love with her.
Shut the fuck up. Open the door and fight for your woman.
My hand turned the knob before my head was ready, and then I stepped out onto the porch. The dying afternoon light caught in her hair, illuminating the strands of red like a flame as her mouth hung open just a fraction, her eyes wide. “Josh?”
I leaned on the heavy porch railing, my arms aching to hold her but knowing I needed her to come the rest of the way on her own. “Hi.” That’s the best you have?
“How did you know where I’d be?” Her footsteps were light as she came up the wooden steps.
“My mom called your mom and the rest is…” I gestured between us with my hands.
“Ahh.” She nodded, biting her lip. Her eyes dropped to her toes, and those four feet that separated us felt like a giant canyon.
Not for long.
“I’m an asshole,” I said, very matter-of-fact, and her head snapped up.
“Josh, no…well, maybe a little.”
“How’s Gus?”
“He’s already given us a list of A-list actors who have broken their noses. He says it gives him character.” She smiled but still held herself away from me. The distance between us, physical and emotional, was killing me.
I moved toward her and cradled her face in my hands. Her skin was unbelievably soft as I stroked my thumbs up her cheekbones. “Are you mad that I’m here?”
“No,” she whispered. “Embarrassed, a little, but never mad.”
“What reason do you have to be embarrassed?”
She rolled her eyes, instantly inflaming my need to kiss her. Ember was too damn cute. “I snuck out this morning because I just needed some space. Needed to breathe. I ran away like some drama-filled teenager instead of staying to fight things out with you.”
“We all need a little time to think sometimes,” I said, moving my hands through her loose, insanely gorgeous hair to the back of her head.
“I literally ran home to my mother, Josh. She then told me that she wasn’t going to watch my mope fest and to come up here if I wanted to breathe.”
“And now?”
“This is the first full breath I’ve taken since I left you this morning.” She sighed, a look passing between us that said everything words couldn’t.
“Yeah, I get that. You’re my oxygen,” I admitted. “I woke up without you this morning, and realizing I’d driven you to that—to leave me—I never want to feel that again. And yet, there’s still this part of me that says you’d be better off if I just let you go.”
“Josh.” Her face fell.
“No, if you want in, and I mean all the way in, that’s where this leads. There are ugly parts of me, December. Parts that think I should have spared you all this pain and walked away years ago. Parts that hate myself for loving my job, loving my mission. Parts of me that won’t stop screaming that my choice killed Trivette. That I killed Will, and he should be alive. Not me. That I’ll never live up to earning that sacrifice.”
“That’s not true,” she whispered.
“What’s true is a very clouded concept in my head. On one hand, I’m shoving you away from this nightmare because you’re not a part of it. You are the one place that isn’t shadowed to me. On the other hand, I’m holding on to you as tight as possible, because the moments I’m kissing you, holding you, it all evaporates and I’m whole.”
“And you think you’d lose that?” she asked.
“Like I said last night, I’ve never been willing to risk it. The way you look at me, the way you see me, Ember—I’m not sure that guy exists in me anymore. You said that I’m breaking you, but if you see those broken pieces of me…” I shook my head, words failing.
She brought her hands up slowly to my arms. “Josh, it’s all just you. Every tiny piece, whether you like it or not, it all combines to make you who you are, and I am wildly and desperately in love with you. Nothing is ever going to change that. There is nothing you could do or say that could make me stop loving you, so it would be a lot easier if you stopped trying to push me away. I don’t need you to lay bare every detail. I’m not pushing you for that, but if you can’t lean on me for support, then what are we doing? Why are we getting married?”
“Because even the pieces of me that know I’m in no shape to love you, can’t stop loving you. I don’t exist without you. You’re in every fucking beat of my heart. You are my first thought when I open my eyes. You were my last thought as we crashed. I almost ruined you. I…I could still ruin you.”
Her eyes didn’t leave mine—they were open, honest, and bluer than the Colorado sky above us. “I made my choice years ago. I knew all of this was a possibility, and I chose you. I still choose every part of you, every day.”
“And when you realize that those parts of me might be too broken to fix?”
She smiled, so beautiful and accepting. “Then I’ll fall in love with the broken pieces. You just have to trust me.”
“Okay.” My throat closed, emotion welling in my chest so powerfully that I was afraid of exploding from the pressure. I closed my arms around her as she tucked her head under my chin. Holding her was so easy when the world around us got too complicated. Everything else slipped away until I was left with the simple, incorruptible truth that I would always love December Howard.
I just prayed my love wouldn’t destroy her.
The next morning, I had coffee waiting when she stumbled out of the bedroom, her hair a riotous mess that made me want to take her right back to bed. But we weren’t doing that, not yet.
She’d accused me of sexing out of conversations, and she’d been right, and maybe last night we’d both been too raw to really talk, too emotionally exhausted to do more than curl around each other and sleep, but today I was coming out with all guns blazing.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” I said, passing her a fresh cup of coffee, already creamed and sugared.
“Hmmm,” she mumbled, sipping at the cup.
“Sleep okay?”
She looked over the cup at me. “Yeah. You only woke up once, right?”
Don’t lie. Lay it bare. “Once that you woke for. I got up again around three a.m. but fell right back to sleep.”
“Are the nightmares getting worse?” She hopped onto the counter, and déjà vu hit me. It was the same exact place I’d kissed her for the first time.
“No. They’re actually less frequent, less violent. If they weren’t, I’d be worried.” I leaned back against the counter, keeping a respectable distance between us, or I’d have those pajama pants around her ankles in two seconds.
“Good. That’s good.”
“I want to take you somewhere.”
She gave me a wan smile. “Last time that didn’t work out too well for you.”
“Yeah, well, no bike here. Just us.”
“Can I shower first?”
The image of water dripping down her tight little body took over every brain cell.
“Josh?”
I blinked. “Yeah, shower. All good.” A week without touching December and I was ready to combust. How the hell had I survived three months of deployment?
She hadn’t been standing in front of you.
I waited forty-five minutes while she showered, dried her hair, and dressed. I didn’t go after her, touch her, hell, even so much as peek. It was an incredibly long forty-five minutes.
“Ready,” she said, coming from the hallway in a baby blue sundress. Her hair was up in some kind of messy knot, with soft tendrils that caressed her cheeks. I clenched the arm of the couch to keep from sending my hands up her skirt. If sex had been my drug of choice, I was sure as hell going through withdrawals.
“You look…edible,” I said, getting to my feet.
“As do you,” she said with a smile, gesturing to my khaki shorts and short-sleeve button-down. Luckily it was green, so we weren’t too matchy-matchy.
“Shall we?” I offered my hand, and she took it. A ten-minute drive in my rental car, and we pulled up to the ski lifts in Breckenridge.
“What are we doing?”
I simply smiled and held open her door. “Trust me.”
She arched her eyebrow, knowing full well that I’d just used her own words against her. We walked, hand in hand, to the gondola station, waited our turn, and after I slipped the attendant a fifty, had a private ride to Peak Eight.
“This is beautiful,” she said, her nose pressed against the glass as we took to the sky over Breckenridge.
“Yeah, it is,” I said softly.
She smiled at me over her shoulder. “I love it here.”
“Me, too. This whole town makes me think of possibilities, reminds me that the things you want most, sometimes you can actually have.”
She turned to me and curled up on the seat just under my arm. “Like us.”
“Like us,” I said, then kissed her lightly, lingering just a moment to savor the way her soft lips clung to mine.
“I miss you when you’re gone.”
“You’re never far from my thoughts. I keep a picture of you on my kneeboard.” Which currently is spattered with my blood.
“Really?” Her eyes lit up. Had I never told her? Never let her know that she was with me on every mission?
“When we go into a situation where the landing zone isn’t clear, where it’s hot, there’s a moment when we all make sure that we’re in. Everyone agrees, and then we go to extract the wounded.”
“Because you know what could happen.” She didn’t flinch, just spoke as a matter of fact, and it gave me the courage to keep going.
“Yes. I always say yes.”
“I would expect nothing less of you.”
“Even if it means I don’t come home to you?”
She took a deep breath and then laid her legs across mine. “I have faith that you’ll come home. It’s all that gets me through each day that you’re gone. I can’t live thinking you won’t. That kind of fear is paralyzing, crippling. So I choose to believe that every choice you make will bring you home to me, and save others.”
“I always look at your picture before I say yes. I know what I’m choosing in that moment—the possibility of you holding a folded flag—and I do it anyway. I chose to go after Jagger, and I could have left you holding a folded flag. I chose the possibility of saving him over the certainty of coming home to you. How can you love someone who doesn’t choose you?”
“How could I not love someone who risks his own life to save others? Josh, you didn’t choose Jagger over me. I wasn’t lying wounded and bleeding on the ground in Afghanistan. I was hanging out with Paisley in our home. I was never in danger. Stop blaming yourself. You made the right choice. I know the debt you feel you have to pay. I see the war raging just under your skin.”
“What else do you see?”
“Besides the man I love?”
“Yes.”
She sat up enough to look at me comfortably. “I see the struggle, the way you watch the news, the look you get when you’re trolling the internet for what’s happening over there. Mostly…” She searched my eyes for a long moment and let out a stuttered breath. “Mostly, I see the moments when you’re not here. Your body is here, but your mind…it’s there. And those moments scare me the most, because I’m terrified that I won’t ever truly have you home again. Not one hundred percent. Does that make sense?”
“More than you know.” I grazed my thumb over the diamond on her hand as we passed through the first station on our way up. “Do you want the ugliest truth?”
“Yes. I want everything.” She forced a half smile. “And maybe if you tell me the worst, the rest will be easier.”
“I feel like I left pieces of myself there, and I don’t just mean the physical ones.” I looped my arm over her thighs, resting my palm on her bare skin, trying to ground myself in her warmth, her light. “Our unit is still there, filling in the gaps from me, Trivette…Carter. I’m not sure I’ll really be myself until they’re all home, everyone we left there. I feel like I’m split between home and Afghanistan, like I don’t really belong here.”
“Okay,” she said in simple acceptance that meant more than she could ever know.
“And when I’m with you, that all fades away. You ground me in a different reality, where there’s just you and me. I haven’t used alcohol or drugs, because I’ve used you.”
“I knew that,” she whispered. “It’s never bothered me. It only got under my skin when you wouldn’t talk to me, like sleeping with me would answer all my questions, explain everything I needed to know. Sometimes it felt like you were distracting me from asking. That, I despised.”
“No, I was distracting myself. Answering your questions meant examining them, because I’ve never been able to hold back with you. It’s always been full measures or nothing. No halfway bullshit.”
She ran her fingers through my hair, and I groaned when she scratched her nails lightly over my scalp. God, it felt so damn good.
“I’ve always loved that about us. We’re all in. Always.”
“Yes.”
“But that’s not ugly. Nothing you’ve told me is ugly.”
My stomach dropped, and we passed through the station on route to Peak Eight. I looked up to the green mountains, their beauty overwhelming, their sheer size distorted because we were too close to accurately gauge their mass.
“Even knowing everything we have, this incredible love that we share, our beautiful life that we’re building…” I shook my head and looked down at her knees.
“Josh.” She tipped my chin. “I’m here. No matter what you’re about to say.”
“Having done that mission, medevaced the wounded… Ember, I’ve found my purpose. I’ll always go when they call. How many deployments can you wait through? How many times can I leave you?”
Fear streaked through her eyes, but she masked it before I could question her. “As many as it takes. I would rather sit home and wait for you, than spend a lifetime with anyone else. By the time the next deployment comes along, you’ll be healed, and I’ll be stronger.”
“That’s not the life you wanted. We said I’d get out after my contract, remember?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I know, and I still want that. And this is the life I wanted, because I have you. Everything else will fall in place.”
The gondola stopped, and I helped Ember to her feet. We came out at the base of Peak Eight, and I walked us toward the superlift.
“Okay, now you have me confused,” she said, her hand tightly in mine. “Everything there is to do is over there.” She pointed toward the alpine slide.
“Oh, you think I’d sign up to hurl myself down a mountain with nothing but a sled and a tube slide?”
She scoffed. “Yeah, it’s probably not nearly enough of a rush for you.”
“You wound me.” I slapped my hand over my chest as we made our way to the base of the superlift.
“Mr. Walker?” the attendant asked.
“That’s me, well, us,” I said, gesturing to a very confused Ember.
“Ms. Patricks will meet you at the top.”
“Thank you,” I told him as we sat in the middle of the four-person lift chair. It accelerated at the very edge of the platform, and we were airborne, our feet kicking without ground beneath us.
“Oh my God,” Ember muttered, trying to tuck her dress under her thighs.
I laughed. “No one can see you, babe. Let it fly free.”
“No way in hell,” she muttered. “There’s got to be cameras.”
“Then they can catch this.” I captured her face and turned it toward mine, then kissed the breath out of her. She melted into me, her dress long forgotten. I kept the kiss slow, lazy, savoring every gasp from her lips, every time her breath stuttered. There was no distraction here, no phone ringing, no one in the background. The absolute quiet was perfection.
She giggled when my hand grazed her thigh. “One-track mind?”
“When it comes to you? Always.”
The lift reached the top of the hill and slowed. I helped her dismount and swung her into my arms when she tripped. She looped her arms around my neck, and I couldn’t ever remember feeling as happy as I did in that moment, carrying the woman I loved.
We made our way through the longer strands of grass, the tiny wildflowers that dotted the terrain, until we reached a large, wooden platform. “Are you going to put me down?” she asked.
“No,” I answered, climbing the few steps it took to come out onto the stagelike surface. “There’s room for about seventy people up here. At least, that’s what they’re telling me.”
“Oh?” she asked, not really looking at the platform. Her eyes focused on the view. “Josh, it’s gorgeous.”
The mountains rose before us in stark contrast to the blue of the sky. They were covered in green to the treeline, the town of Breckenridge appearing tiny beneath us. “It’s perfect.”
“I’ve never seen a more beautiful view.”
I set her down, her little sandals plunking against the wood, and then I stood opposite her, taking her hands in mine. “I think this view is as good as my life will get. Except maybe in about a year. This is perfect.”
“Perfect for what?” she asked, tilting her head.
“For marrying me.” I watched closely as her eyes widened and her lips parted. Her gaze swept over the platform behind us to the view in front of us and then back to my eyes.
“We can get married here?”
“We can. They don’t have an opening until early next summer, so we’d have to wait until June and pray there’s no snow, but yeah. You said a mountaintop in Colorado, and I thought, what better place than where this all started for us—Breckenridge. We can have the ceremony up here, and the reception in the lodge, which I’ve been told is very sought-after. Repeatedly.”
“We can ride the chairlift?” Her eyes lit up, and I wanted to fist-pump, to shout to the world that I was this woman’s man.
“We can, dress and all.”
She laughed, her smile wide and bright, clear of the shadows that had dragged us both down lately.
“Mr. Walker?” a woman asked, walking over to us with a clipboard. “I’m Mrs. Patricks, the wedding coordinator. What do you two think? Is it what you’re looking for?”
“Well, Miss Howard, what do you say?” I lifted her hand and kissed her palm.
She spun, taking everything in one last time while she deliberated. Then she turned back to me, radiating happiness from every line in her body. “I think it’s absolutely perfect.”
“Yes!” I shouted, scooping her into my arms and lifting her above my head. She braced her hands on my shoulders, and her laugh healed another broken line in me, stitched it together with love and the promise of our future.
I slowly lowered her until I could kiss her, and then I didn’t give a hot damn if the wedding coordinator was there or not. She tasted like summer and felt like home.
We broke apart, and I turned to the open Colorado sky and shouted at the top of my lungs. “I’m marrying December Howard!”
She laughed, and damned if it didn’t put a little more life into my soul. “Louder, babe. I don’t think they heard you in Kansas.”
I took a deeper breath and yelled even louder, pretty certain the whole world got the message that time.