Chapter One
October 2006
JED DOZED on the plane, plagued by dreams and flashbacks. He’d rarely dreamed before he’d gotten shot. On operations, sleep was so rare and short, he’d blink and it’d be time to move again. Even on leave, he’d been too busy to find much rest. The dreams had begun as he lay on the dusty ground in Kirkuk and watched a syringe of morphine disappear into his leg. Since then, with a lifetime of bullshit to draw on, his subconscious had never looked back.
The plane had reached Oregon airspace when he started awake for the final time. He glanced around, his blood pounding in his ears, but the seat beside him was empty and no one was looking his way.
He shifted, stretching his injured leg as familiar discomfort began to bloom in his body. The pain was like an old friend. Exhaustion swept over him, but he fought his heavy, drooping eyes. He was weary and sore, but the relentless throb of his broken body was better than the bloody images his mind couldn’t shake. He let himself drift, floating back to a time when war had been a distant, innocent ideal. Not the devastating reality it turned out to be.
Jed’s story was typical, a cliché of the worst kind. He’d joined the Army at eighteen, on the run from a life left behind but never forgotten. His mom was dead, his… father couldn’t have cared less, and with his kid brother set to apply for college on the East Coast, there’d been nothing left for him in the sleepy hometown he’d grown to hate.
He’d never looked back. Who needed the dysfunctional life he’d left behind when he led a crew who called him brother? Where he was, in any given moment, became his home, and the languages flowed as naturally as his native tongue: Arabic, Swahili, Kurdish, in all its forms. Sometimes, it was all too easy to forget where he’d come from.
The plane began its descent, but the change in altitude passed Jed by. War could make or break a man. Ordinary men did extraordinary things, but others ducked and ran. Reading a man became the difference between living and dying. Violence became fluid, like water or blood, a constant motion he couldn’t escape. Doors closed, faces vanished. Buildings blew up.
He thought he knew life when he packed all he could carry into a backpack and boarded a bus. Turned out he didn’t know shit.
THE PLANE touched down in Portland. Jed disembarked and collected his Army-issue duffel from baggage claim. His whole life was in that damned bag.
He scanned the crowd, searching for a face he wasn’t sure he’d recognize. Nick was his younger brother by a mere twelve months, but Jed hadn’t seen him since he’d left home fourteen years ago, not until he’d woken up to find Nick crying over his hospital bed in Boston. Disoriented and in pain, Nick’s tear-stained face had been enough to convince Jed that life as he knew it had well and truly come to an end. In a moment of drug-addled weakness, he’d packed Nick off home and agreed to follow as soon as he was able, a decision he regretted the moment he caught sight of his brother across the bustling airport terminal.
Jed was tall, with blond hair and his momma’s green eyes. Though slimmer than he’d been in years, his cut, defined muscles coiled like wire around his lean frame. Nick Cooper was a different man altogether. Half a foot shorter, brown hair framed his dull gray eyes—eyes he kept on the ground as Jed approached.
The gravity of Jed’s mistake hit him like a stone, but he forced his reluctant legs to keep moving, thinking back to a time long ago when his kid brother had admired him, worshipped him. Nick had him up on a pedestal so high, it had been a long way to fall when he’d discovered the truth.
“This is a joke, right? A dare or something. There’s no way you’re a fucking faggot….”
Nick looked up as Jed trailed to a stop in front of him. “You look like hell. Where are your crutches?”
“My what?”
“Crutches,” Nick repeated. “Or a walker or something. The doctor told me you couldn’t walk unaided.”
“That was weeks ago.”
“Oh.”
Jed suppressed a grumble of discontent. He’d sweated blood to rid himself of any walking aids. A doctor in Boston had given him a cane for days when he was tired, but he’d ditched it in Colorado, when he’d detoured to Fort Carson to put his discharge papers in. He’d ditched his dog tags there too. He had no need for them anymore.
Jed steeled himself and followed Nick out of the airport.
Nick led him to a gleaming black sedan. The kind of sedan yuppie douche bags drove.
Jed raised an eyebrow. “This is your car?”
Christ, Nick was thirty-one, not fifty. Could the shady world of real estate do this to a man? Turn him into a walking midlife crisis?
Nick unlocked the car. “Kim’s set you up in the back room on the first floor. You know, until you get straightened out.”
“Kicking me out already?” Jed put his bag in the back and slid into the passenger seat, careful to hide his wince.
“What? No. That’s not what I meant.” Nick jammed the key into the ignition, and the car purred to life. “I meant until you figure out what you want to do. I’ve got a wife, two kids, and a three-story town house. It’s hardly the best place for you to recover.”
Jed refrained from pointing out that he was only there at Nick’s request. If he’d had his way he would’ve…. He caught himself. Stop it. With everyone he cared about dead or still fighting in the desert, he’d come home to Oregon because he had nowhere else to go. Mooching off his brother be damned; it was all he had.
Thirty minutes later, the car cruised by an ancient wooden sign that read “Ashton Welcomes All.” Jed closed his eyes against the irony. It still made him smirk, even after all these years.
“This ain’t the place for your kind, boy. Get your faggot ass out of my house.”
The car eased to a stop as Frank Cooper’s gruff, hate-filled voice echoed in his head. Startled, he stared through the tinted glass at the tall white house. He didn’t recognize the tree-lined street. “Is this place new?”
Nick got out of the car and waited until Jed followed suit to answer. “Yeah, they developed the old town park about nine years ago. I bought this place when I finished college.”
It was on the tip of Jed’s tongue to ask why Nick had come back to Ashton after four years in New York, but he didn’t. Instead, he appraised the large house his baby brother called home. It was nice. Real nice. After a lifetime in a tent, Jed hated it on sight.
Jed waited for Nick to open the shiny front door, then preceded him inside. Out of habit, he let Nick pass him again and surveyed his surroundings, checking for weapons and available exits, before he reined himself in.
Nick strode through the first floor to the kitchen. Jed tailed him at a more sedate pace, peering at the pictures on the walls and the belongings scattered around. A set of child’s handprints on the refrigerator caught his eye. He had two nieces he’d never met. He wondered to which of them the tiny palms belonged, six-year-old Belle, or four-year-old Tess.
“This is your room.”
Jed moved slowly, two days of traveling beginning to catch up with him, and followed Nick to a door at the back of the kitchen. It led to an alcove that contained another door, and behind it was a small room.
At least, Nick said it was small. Jed had seen smaller houses.
Jed stared around the room, taking in the queen-size bed, flat-screen TV, and antique dresser. Yet another door led to a closet and a bathroom. With the kitchen a few feet away, he’d hardly have to get out of bed. Great. Jed suppressed a shudder. He’d spent enough time flat on his back to last him a lifetime.
He set his tattered duffel bag on the pristine white bed. “Is that my old ball glove?”
Nick shrugged. “Dan’s mom brought over all the stuff she took from the house when you left.”
“She did that?”
“Yeah. Dad dumped all your stuff at the end of the driveway the day after you left. Anna picked it all up and stashed it in their attic. I think she figured you’d be back in a few days. We all did.”
Jed averted his gaze, but the silence that settled over the room was heavy. Dan Valesco was his oldest friend, though he hadn’t set eyes on him since he left. He wondered what had become of him, but he didn’t have to wonder for long.
“Dan was going to come with me to the airport,” Nick said, “but he got caught up at the garage. He left a cell phone for you with his number punched in.”
Jed had to grin at that. He followed Nick’s gaze to a shiny cell phone on the nightstand and shook his head. Dan clearly hadn’t changed. The dude had never been subtle.
“You haven’t asked about Dad.”
Jed stifled a world-weary sigh. He’d been waiting for this, but still found himself unprepared. “What about him?”
“You know he’s in a nursing home in Portland, right?”
“So I hear.” In the years of silence between the two brothers, Nick’s wife, Kim, had taken to sending him erratic postcards filled with Cooper family news. Somehow, they always found him, no matter which ass crack of the world required his attention.
“Thanks for the money you sent,” Nick said. “The home is pretty expensive. I can manage it on my own now, but things were tight back then.”
Jed glanced around the room again, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. He had a healthy savings account, but of the two of them, Nick was clearly the one with cash to burn. “I sent the money for you to get through college. Not for him.”
“I know,” Nick said. “But he got evicted a month after I left, and the landlord sold the house. What did you expect me to do? Put him up in my dorm? Anyway, I didn’t use it all for… never mind.”
Jed sighed at the irony, too tired to be curious as Nick’s tight, clipped voice fell away. He’d sent Nick a check every month for years to keep him away from their father. How the hell had he ended up paying for Frank Cooper to rot in a cushy retirement village?
The urge to say so was strong, but Jed swallowed the words. He’d traveled a long way to get to the last place on earth he wanted to be. He didn’t have the energy to bicker with Nick. Instead, he summoned what little enthusiasm he had left and held out his hand. “Thanks for putting me up. I appreciate it, more than you know.”
Nick clasped his outstretched hand, and for a moment it almost felt normal. “Like I said, it’s just until you get settled. Kim had some ideas. Her brother lives up by the lake. His place is all on one level, and he has a spare room. She’s going to talk to him this weekend.”
Jed nodded, still bemused by the sight of his childhood possessions dotted around the room. He figured the conversation closed until Nick cleared his throat and dropped his artfully concealed bomb.
“Max is like you, actually.”
Jed cut his gaze to Nick. Something in his tone set his teeth on edge. “Like me? What? A veteran? A cripple?”
“No, he’s, um, gay.”
“And you figured you’d be safer with us all in one place?”
Nick squirmed. “Christ, no. I didn’t mean that. Look, I figured it would be easier for you to stay there. You’d have more space and privacy. Do you want to live in my kitchen?”
Jed sighed. Nick was right, and the longer Jed stood in this damned house, the more he could see it. Coming back to Ashton had been a big mistake, one he couldn’t fix until he got back on his feet.