Chapter 1

Gabe Cortez liked to think of Christmas as a ritualized torture simulation that would ultimately prepare him for any horrible war zone he found himself in.

If I can survive Christmas, I can survive anything.

And he’d survived his fair share, but this Christmas was seriously testing his limits, even with all war zones firmly in his past. Because the only thing as tortuous as Christmas was a wedding, and he was smack-dab in the middle of preparations for both.

“I don’t see why Jack and I have to sit through this,” Gabe announced, crossing his arms behind his head and kicking his legs up on the coffee table in front of him. Like the little army general she was, Becca was standing in front of the group discussing timelines and the chore schedule for a wedding that was something like weeks away and after Thanksgiving at that.

Becca’s green eyes moved to him, and if Gabe hadn’t spent almost fifteen years in the military, many of those being a Navy SEAL, he might have wilted at that look.

“You and Jack are part of this wedding,” Becca replied calmly, though her gaze was fierce and not at all calm. “And a part of this ranch.”

Gabe didn’t allow himself any time to dwell on the soft, weak swell of pleasure that gave him. Part of this ranch. Well, of course they were. He, Alex, and Jack had shown up on Becca’s doorstep over six months ago to start this little venture—Revival Ranch, a place for wounded veterans to heal and find purpose—and all five foot nothing of this shy little woman had whipped three injured former Navy SEALs into shape.

Mostly though, she’d helped Alex out of the depression and PTSD that had plagued him after their accident and injury discharge. Gabe could only ever be grateful to Becca for that. He’d spent nearly all of his fifteen years in military service at Alex’s side and he’d never had a better friend, a better SEAL brother.

And now he’s Becca’s.

Well, so be it. Gabe had learned a long time ago that people didn’t stick, especially when loving someone else was involved. At least Alex had chosen wisely. So had Jack, much as Gabe was loath to admit it. Rose might be all mouthy, sharp edges, but she made Jack happy, and Jack deserved that happiness.

If it left Gabe on his own, well, he’d been used to that before he’d joined the navy. He could get used to it again.

“Think of this like a mission, Bec. You give us orders. We’ll follow them,” Jack offered, sitting on an armchair, his increasingly pregnant woman sitting on his lap. “But we don’t need discussions or meetings.”

Becca frowned. “I will not think of my wedding as a mission.”

Alex grinned at her from his seat on the far side of the couch Gabe was on. “You know you want to.”

Becca grunted in frustration.

“That’s actually smart,” Monica offered from her seat on the other chair. “Weddings are a bit like war, at least in my experience.”

Gabe tended to forget that Monica Finley, Revival Ranch’s on-site therapist, had been married before. No matter that her ten-year-old was currently wrestling with Star and Ranger, the two ranch dogs, over by the fire. She seemed like such a solitary, no-nonsense figure to Gabe. It was hard to think of her getting caught up in all this wedding planning.

Mostly, he tried not to think of her at all. She didn’t belong here. Oh, she might be helping Alex and Jack with their PTSD, but she wasn’t part of the group, their unit. She was an outsider. A shrink. Even before his military discharge, Gabe had learned to distrust mental health professionals and the lies they were willing to spew when the right pressure was applied.

He hadn’t realized he was glaring at Monica until her gaze turned to him and she smiled that empty therapist smile. Blue eyes blank and vast as the Montana sky. He returned it in kind, because he knew how to deal with nosy people who thought they could tell you what you thought and felt.

“Besides,” Monica continued, turning her attention back to Becca, her blond ponytail swinging with the movement, “this isn’t wedding by committee. It’s your wedding, and whatever you and Alex want is what matters. We’ll do whatever you two need.”

“Could you tell that to my mother?”

Monica laughed. “I’ll try. But don’t lose sight of the fact it’s your day. And it’s a symbolic day, but it’s not a do-or-die day.”

Becca blew out a breath. “Okay. You’re right, and the best maid of honor ever.” Becca smiled. “Maybe I’ll just have Alex make up one of his binders with instructions.”

Gabe groaned, and so did Jack. Alex’s binders were legendary. Even though Alex had relaxed a lot in the six months since his iron grip on controlling everything had nearly killed him, figuratively and maybe even a little literally, he was still his uptight self.

“I’m going to need a beer if we’re going to start talking about binders. Anyone need anything?” Gabe got to his feet, committed everyone’s drink request to memory, then headed for the kitchen.

Once inside the small room, he gave himself a minute of quiet and silence to just breathe. He felt…tense, and he wasn’t sure why. An edginess had been creeping into him for months now, and he was having a harder and harder time being his pretend-nothing-matters self.

If he told anyone, they’d assume it was PTSD and insist he have a session with Monica, but Gabe knew better. While Alex and Jack grappled with the aftereffects of the accident they’d survived, Gabe only suffered physically. He didn’t have nightmares of the grenade being thrown into their vehicle and Geiger shielding them from the blast with his own body. It had caused Alex to crash the vehicle, and so all three of them suffered either from the blast or the crash. None of that, not even Geiger’s death, affected Gabe mentally the way it had Alex and Jack.

But his shoulder and hip still bothered him off and on, more so since winter had set in. He’d left military life behind, and while he missed it like a lost limb, it didn’t haunt him.

But other things did, and it seemed living civilian life brought them all back to the forefront.

He pushed those thoughts away and jerked open the fridge, grabbing himself a beer. He’d down one first in the quiet of the kitchen, away from that odd flutter of panic he got whenever Becca and Alex discussed the wedding, or Jack and Rose discussed the baby who’d arrive in the spring.

Gabe popped the top of the beer and then drank deeply. He tried channeling that inner center of calm that had gotten him through war zones and physical rehabilitation.

“Can I have one?”

Gabe eyed the kid, who’d entered the kitchen soundlessly. Impressive, really, the way he’d learned to sneak around. Gabe had hit it off with Colin the moment he’d met him, and he enjoyed having someone around who was young and eager to experience things. Whenever the kid’s mother unclenched a bit, Gabe got to spend time with Colin at the ranch, and in the six months Colin had been here, Gabe knew the boy had grown to look up to him.

It felt good. Gabe might not trust the mother, but he had a soft spot for Colin. The boy was desperate for a place to belong and a little desperate to stir up trouble, and reminded Gabe so much of himself at that age it physically hurt sometimes.

He’d been a fatherless kid too, but Gabe’s mother hadn’t been like Monica. Which meant Gabe had to be careful where and how he stepped with the boy.

“And what do you suppose your mom would do to me if I gave you a beer?” Gabe asked casually.

Colin shrugged. “It could be a secret?”

Gabe merely raised an eyebrow, and the boy’s shoulders slumped. He might not care much for Monica’s profession, but she was a hell of a mom.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. She’d find out,” Colin groused.

Gabe reached into the cabinet where he knew Becca hid treats she didn’t want to be demolished by the rest of them. He found a Twinkie and tossed it at Colin. “Here’s a compromise.”

The boy grinned, immediately tearing open the wrapper. “Mom never buys these,” he said through a giant mouthful of junk food.

“And there’s a good reason I don’t,” Monica said primly right before she stepped into the kitchen.

“Busted,” Gabe muttered as Colin shoved the rest of the Twinkie into his mouth and looked up innocently at his mother. But Monica only stared at Gabe.

He refused to squirm, though he was sure that look was supposed to make him do just that. Instead, he grinned at her with as much careless charm as he could muster. “Did you want one?”

Monica smiled sweetly. “Sure,” she said, because she never did quite what Gabe expected her to do, and that irritated him as much as anything—as much as her being a good mom and pretty besides, which sometimes made him forget she was not to be trusted. Not a part of the group. Shrink.

Yeah, he never forgot for long. Monica Finley might not be your average snake in the grass, but she was still a snake.

* * *

Monica took the proffered Twinkie and delicately unwrapped the plastic from the moist, tasteless cake. She hated these things, but surprising the people around her was something of a favorite pastime these days, and she knew taking the crappy excuse for cake would shock both her son and the large man who stood imposingly in the kitchen with him.

Even if she didn’t know the basics of Gabe’s military background, his body, his posture, his assessing, quiet way screamed military. She’d grown up with these men, married a man just like them, knew them.

Mostly.

Gabe was proving to be quite the enigma. It shouldn’t have haunted her like it did. Shouldn’t have mattered that there was one person on Revival Ranch she couldn’t figure out.

But she found, when he grinned at her with all that fake charm, no matter that she knew it was fake, her stomach jittered in that old, silly schoolgirl way that could only ever spell trouble.

Monica Finley had never done trouble, and she didn’t intend to start.

“I thought I’d help with drinks,” she said, trying to surreptitiously slide the rest of the Twinkie in the trash while Colin chewed the lump he’d shoved into his mouth. “I’ll grab the pops.” She skirted around Gabe, trying to ignore the fact she felt compelled to give him a wide berth, for her own peace of mind. She pulled the two cans from the fridge.

She turned to her son, focusing on him instead of Gabe, and held the cans out to Colin, who’d finally finished swallowing. “Take these into the living room and give them to Jack and Alex.”

“Why do I have to?” Colin demanded in that way that was increasingly getting on her nerves. As though every time she asked him to do something it was an epic insult of the highest order. Heaven forbid he do anything she asked without a metric ton of attitude. Weren’t the teenage attitude years supposed to be a ways off yet?

“Why wouldn’t you want to help your mother and your friends?” Monica returned calmly, smiling sweetly at her precious baby who would someday grow out of this obnoxious prepubescent stage. Please, God.

Colin rolled his eyes, but he took the cans of pop and exited the kitchen. Which Monica realized belatedly was quite the mistake, because now she was left with Gabe. Alone. In a very small room where his body seemed to take up far too much air.

“You guys have been in Blue Valley for almost half a year. Are you ever going to trust him alone around us?”

Monica startled. “I… What?”

“If you don’t think we notice you popping up every time he’s with us alone, well…”

“Colin wouldn’t be anywhere near any of you if I didn’t trust you,” she said, ashamed there was a bit of defensive snap in her tone. Irritated with herself that he was right and she hadn’t quite realized it. She didn’t love Colin being alone with someone who wasn’t her.

It wasn’t Gabe or Alex or Jack she didn’t trust. It was life. It was Montana. Cows and horses and whatever lurked in the mountains. It was all this space that could eat up a little boy and spit him out, and men who might not fully understand how vulnerable a little boy—her little boy—could be when they felt so physically invulnerable themselves.

No matter that she knew giving Colin the space to explore and grow was necessary for both his happiness and his well-being, Monica hadn’t quite gotten a handle on her own insecurities and fears. Or rote reactions.

But she was working on it. Life was a work in progress. Et cetera. Et cetera. If she said it enough, she’d believe it. The power of positive thinking.

She blew out a breath. “That being said, it isn’t easy letting my only child out of my sight in a new place. It isn’t easy trusting when…” She’d heard such terrible things in her job. The abuses and accidents and neglect that had shaped some of her patients over the years. The cruelties of war that seemed so close when she watched someone relive them. Then there was the fact she’d learned how precious life could be when she’d lost Dex.

“It’s not so new, this place,” Gabe replied, not unkindly and yet not kindly at all. He had somehow mastered a neutral way of talking that grated on her nerves because that was how she talked.

She frowned at him in spite of her inner admonitions to remain stoic. “Is that for you to say?”

“No. Not at all,” he returned, but there was something like a challenge in the way he backed down. Somehow that challenge always seemed to exist in their interactions.

There was a contentiousness with Gabe she didn’t have with the other two men, and definitely not Becca. Oh, Jack had vocally objected to her presence, and it had taken him some time to agree to therapy. Alex had been as opposed to it as anyone, but they never acted as though they existed to challenge her. It was a distrust of the process, a worry that needing help equaled weakness.

With Gabe, she couldn’t figure it out, and she was certain her body’s reaction to him was rooted somewhere in that. He didn’t feel like a patient.

She wished she could make him feel like one. After all, he was the lone holdout in the injured SEAL trio here.

So, maybe instead of focusing on the way her body sometimes reacted to Gabe Cortez or that she couldn’t figure him out or the way her heart got a little mushy whenever she saw how he and Colin interacted, she should focus on earning his trust.

He’d been through an awful incident and seemed to fall somewhere between Alex’s minor injuries and Jack’s more substantial injuries on the physical side of things. But she could not get a read on his mental state, and that was what she was here for.

Revival Ranch was supposed to help wounded veterans heal. Men like her father, who’d come home from war someone else. Someone had helped him eventually, and she wanted to have that kind of effect on people and their families. She wanted to be that agent that helped them heal. It was why she’d uprooted her son and herself and embarked on this unknown journey—to help.

“Do you find being in the presence of children more comfortable than being in the presence of adults?”

Gabe laughed, that hard edge of bitterness at odds with the cheerful, charming exterior he so often put forth. She’d sensed that bitterness in him from the beginning, and it came out more and more these days.

It was something like a sign. He needed someone to talk to. He didn’t trust her, and therapy wouldn’t work without that trust. She’d have to work harder on being his friend, instead of letting her own reactions keep him at a distance.

“Don’t shrink me, shrink,” he said, grabbing another beer out of the fridge before closing the door a little too hard.

“I think that’s my job, SEAL.” Not friendly, Monica.

“Former SEAL,” he said, holding up the beer in mock salute. “I’m a cowboy these days.”

“And I’m more than just a shrink.”

“Noted.” He took a long pull from the bottle, looking out the doorway of the kitchen. “For the record, I think you’re a damn fine mother.” He never looked at her as he spoke the words, and then he strode out of the kitchen.

Monica stood in the kitchen, alone and far too shaken. It shouldn’t matter what Gabe thought. He was a coworker at best, a rather surly person she had to put up with at worst.

It wasn’t often that she got any sort of pats on the back these days, though. Her parents were still miffed at her for moving. Dex’s family had never been particularly involved in her or Colin’s life. She’d never had a lot of friends because she’d been so dedicated to her education and then her career.

Becca was an amazing friend to have here, but Monica felt so old sometimes in comparison. She’d been married and widowed, raised a ten-year-old almost alone, and while Becca certainly hadn’t lived an easy life, she was still youthful. Sweet and strong and driven, but youthful nonetheless.

Gabe’s opinion might not matter in the grand scheme of things, but damn if she could deny it felt good to be praised, to be called a good mother. Even if she didn’t believe it coming from him…

Someone saw she was trying, and he’d gotten over his animosity toward her profession to verbalize it. It was hard not to be a little shaken about that.

But she never let herself be shaken for long. She’d turn it into action. Gabe Cortez needed a friend, and then he needed a therapist. She’d set out to offer him both. One first, then the other.

And then maybe she could stop getting those silly flutters in her stomach whenever he grinned at her.

A girl could dream anyway.