Only Love

  By GARRETT LEIGH

  NOVELS

  Only Love

  ROADS SERIES

  Slide

  Rare

  Published by DREAMSPINNER PRESS

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com

  Copyright

  Published by

  Dreamspinner Press

  5032 Capital Circle SW

  Suite 2, PMB# 279

  Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886

  USA

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Only Love

  © 2014 Garrett Leigh.

  Cover Art

  © 2014 G.D. Leigh and P.M. Blake.

  [email protected] and [email protected]

  Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.

  All rights reserved. This book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of international copyright law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines, and/or imprisonment. Any eBook format cannot be legally loaned or given to others. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA, or http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/.

  ISBN: 978-1-62798-574-1

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-62798-575-8

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  April 2014

  For Big G and the mini Gs. And for every soul out there who believes the love of another will guide them home.

  Acknowledgment

  This book has been a long time in the making. Based on the true stories of a handful of men, writing it turned me inside out. One love to my own soldier. Biggest man I ever knew.

  “It never had to be this way. We were on our way home… he was coming home.”

  Prologue

  August 2006

  Kirkuk, northern Iraq

  JED COOPER lay back on the bed of the truck. His pillow was a rolled-up chemical-protection suit wedged on a box of grenades. Not the most comfortable resting place, but it wasn’t the strangest place he’d ever laid his head.

  The convoy rolled on, picking its way through the dusty roads of Kirkuk. The desert dirt tracks were primitive, potholed, and laced with IEDs, but Jed closed his eyes against the blazing Iraqi sun and tried to switch off. The threat of a roadside device didn’t worry him much. He’d been around long enough to figure if a bomb had his name on, there wasn’t much he could do to avoid it. The potholes bothered him more. The truck lurched from side to side, and a familiar, nagging sickness brewed in his belly. He gritted his teeth, and despite the sweltering heat, felt cold as the blood ran from his face.

  Don’t puke. Not here.

  A hand landed on Jed’s shoulder. He opened his eyes and met the keen gaze of Glenn, his team’s lead medic.

  “All right?”

  Jed’s only answer was a slight shake of his head. I’m so fucking tired.

  “Rest easy, J. Not long now.”

  Easy for you to say. Jed closed his eyes and let his mind wander as he resumed the pretense of taking a nap.

  Glenn was the only soul who knew his secret—this secret, at least—aside from a discreet German doctor at the camp’s main hospital. A virus, borne on bad drinking water, had laid his whole team low, but for Jed it had morphed into something else: a brutal stomach flu that wouldn’t quit. In the end it became gastroparesis—a chronic disease of the stomach, caused by irreparable damage to the vagus nerve.

  Lucky me.

  The symptom list was long and unpleasant: nausea, fatigue, weight loss, and pain… fuck, pain like he’d never felt it before. The doctor said he’d spend the rest of his days anemic and tired, and now, six long weeks later, Jed was starting to believe him. His crew had three weeks left of their marathon tour of Iraq, and it felt like fate. His military career was over, and he didn’t much care.

  The depth of his apathy surprised him. He’d given the Army more than a decade of his life, and with his days numbered, he’d expected to feel more. Instead he felt nothing… nothing but a flat sense of impending doom. War had sucked the life from him, but without it, what was he? His momma was long dead, and he hadn’t spoken to his surviving family in years. Now he had weeks left on the job and no idea what he was going to do next.

  He let out a heavy sigh and opened his eyes, grateful the rumbling truck engine drowned him out. He scanned his crew. They were all in much the same position as him, slumped down with their eyes closed, trying to snatch some much needed sleep. Only his second-in-command was awake, fiddling with the crappy stereo in the cab of the vehicle behind Jed’s.

  Paul glanced up in the same moment Jed looked his way. Jed twitched his lips in a half smile. Paul winked and raised the middle finger on his left hand. His wedding band glinted in the sun.

  Jed’s smile faded. He dropped his head back to his makeshift pillow and let his eyes fall closed again. Paul was the second-in-command of the eight-man crew Jed led, and his best friend. They were close—perhaps closer than they should’ve been—but none of that would matter when Paul went home to his wife and son….

  A dull thud broke the monotonous grumble of the truck. Jed’s eyes flew open. RPGs. Fuck. He shot upright, searching for the source as Saja, the combat dog on Paul’s vehicle, began a persistent warning bark. In the distance, a smattering of AK47 fire broke out. It sounded close… too close.

  The vehicles in the convoy stopped. Their hulking tires sent dust up into the perfect blue sky. Jed leaped from the truck, shouting orders, and hunkered down behind the back wheel. He counted his men as they hit the ground running. One through seven. Seven men, all present and whole, at least for now. The chaos of gunfire rocked the earth, and around them, the air crackled and glittered, shimmering with the invisible energy of an IED just before it went off.

  Somewhere behind them, a vehicle blew up.

  Jed’s world shrank to the immediate battlefield. Debris fell from the sky, and his crew cranked into motion like a well-oiled machine. Ambushes were common. Every man knew his role.

  Jed darted across the sand and lay down in a firing position. The attack seemed to be coming from the back of the convoy. He took a risk, raised his head, and made a split-second analysis. Eight vehicles in the convoy. They had superior firepower, but with the smoke of the mortar-hit truck clouding the air, he had no idea how many enemy fighters lay beyond the initial ambush. Two or twenty, did it matter? Some days, he wasn’t sure. Fuck it. He called his men forward. Inaction was suicide.

  Jed led the way back through the smoking convoy, with Paul, Kip, and the dog at the rear. He dodged the burning truck as the men behind put down covering fire. Another explosion rocked the earth. Jed dropped to the ground. Body parts rained down from the sky. He rolled to avoid a charred limb and hardly felt the bullet as it sliced into his leg and tore through muscle and bone.

  The world slowed and dulled, as if powered with a fading battery. Jed squeezed the trigger on his weapon, but nothing happened. Shrapnel blasted holes in the dusty earth around him, and he watched through hazy eyes as his blood oozed into the sand. Flames from a burning vehicle reached him. He smelled his desert gear smoldering, but even thro
ugh the heat of the flames, he felt cold—cold like he’d never be warm again.

  Time stopped as he lay facedown in the dirt. He heard the shouts of men fighting, and the screams of them dying, but they sounded far off, like a forgotten TV in a backstreet bar. A muted cloud of euphoria floated through him. It was good, like the best sex he’d ever had, and he enjoyed the strange sensation of his life seeping into the earth.

  An aircraft roared in the sky. The sound was deafening, and a different emotion rushed over him. Anger. He was annoyed. He wanted to sleep. Stubborn, he closed his eyes to the noise and let the silence of death wash over him.

  I like this place.

  “Jed! Jed! Move, goddammit, move!”

  The acrid smell of burning flesh took over Jed’s senses, and then pain. Red hot, burning pain.

  Fuck!

  Jed rolled, extinguishing the flames on his shoulder. He tried to get up, but nothing happened. He was frozen, caught in a haze of blood and agony.

  Shit.

  “Jed!”

  Jed followed the sound of Paul’s voice, and there he was, running across the smoke-filled battleground, paying no heed to the carnage around him. Damn. Even in the sickness of war, he looked like a quarterback. A quarterback looking to get himself killed.

  New pain flared in Jed’s heart. Stop, go back. Get your head down. But the words stuck in his throat. He watched Paul dodge the hail of bullets sweeping the convoy and thought of Paul’s young family waiting for him back in Phoenix. Don’t do it. Not for me.

  The aircraft roared again. Another explosion shook the ground, and Paul disappeared. Jed waved the smoke from his eyes, but the wait for the air to clear felt endless. Vehicles burned around him. Another voice yelled his name, but he ignored it. He felt nothing. Saw nothing, except the crumpled form of his best friend, facedown on the ground.

  Jed scrambled to his feet and ran, his broken body moving on instinct. He reached Paul’s side and hauled him up. He dragged him toward an embankment before his leg gave out, and they fell together into the ditch. The radio on Paul’s shoulder crackled. Jed reached for it and called for help, but even as his voice fell away, he knew whoever came would be too late.

  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-fille
d 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?”