On the Way Home

  On the Way Home

  Clint

  For eight months I’ve been deep under cover as a special operator in the Army. On the plane ride home, all I want is a hot shower and a long sleep. But a Dear John text message leaves me stranded. I need a ride and a place to stay, and the pretty stewardess is more than willing.

  Della

  It’s supposed to be a simple trade—the passenger in seat 34B for my sister. But the sexy soldier is more than I can handle in all the best ways. He trusts me, but I can’t save him. No one can. Sometimes trouble has a way of following you home.

  On the Way Home is a dark new adult romance intended for readers over eighteen.

  Prologue

  Three plants lined up in a row on my windowsill, framed by the butterfly curtains Caro had made. My science-fair experiment was going to test how well plants grew under harsh conditions. That meant depriving them of water, of sunlight. And I just couldn’t do it. I was supposed to choose which plant would live and which one would die. It felt mean.

  Now all the plants were the same size, and I had no idea how to explain that in my report.

  Frowning, I tried to remember what the teacher had said, something about the difference between the result and the conclusion. I bit my lip. This was important. I’d told my teacher I wanted to be a nurse, and she hadn’t laughed. She said I better learn science if I was going to be a nurse, so I wanted to get this right.

  A crash came from outside, and the pencil fell out of my hand, clattering on the desk.

  Caro had been painting her nails purple, but now she stopped halfway through. She put a finger to her mouth. Shhh. She pressed against the door, trying to listen to the conversation. She always got to listen, and I had to do my homework. I wanted to hear too.

  More shouts came, but they were too muffled to understand. Georgia was out there, with the grownups. Ever since she had turned seventeen and started her secret job at night, she got to be out there when they were fighting. Georgia got to be in the living room and Caro got to listen at the door, but I was supposed to finish my science report. It wasn’t fair.

  The sound of someone getting slapped made me wince.

  “I’m going out there,” Caro said. Her face was as serious as I’d ever seen her. She didn’t even look as scared as I felt. “Whatever happens, don’t come out, okay?”

  I nodded quickly. My stomach felt like it was tearing itself up inside. Besides, I didn’t want to go out there anymore. Shouting was okay, but hitting hurt. A lot.

  Caro stepped forward and gripped both sides of my face. It made me tense even though I knew she’d never hurt me. Her gaze was steady on mine, clear as a sunny day. “I’m serious. When I walk outta this room, you lock the door behind me. No matter what you hear, you don’t come out. Promise me that.”

  I swallowed. “Okay. I promise.”

  She stood by the door another second. It got all quiet outside, the silence so loud I could hear it buzzing in my ears. Then she slipped into the dark hallway. I followed her to the door and turned the lock inside the knob. I knew it wouldn’t really hold someone back, but usually no one came to our room. My heart thudded in my chest. I could feel its beat all the way out to my fingers and toes, like the way your whole body thumps when a car with loud music rolls by.

  Caro wasn’t here to stop me anymore, so I pressed my ear to the door. Couldn’t hear anything, though. Maybe she had calmed everyone down. She did that for me too, holding me at night if I had bad dreams.

  There was a voice again, but it wasn’t shouting. Low, like from a man. Papa? Or the person who came to visit us? A door slammed. Maybe he was gone. We’d be okay again, I was sure of it. At least until he came back.

  I opened the door to see. A shot rang out, so loud in my ears, like an explosion. It made me go cold and still. Frozen. I’d never heard a sound like that so close, never inside our house. Only sometimes I heard it far away, from another street, while Caro would rock me in bed. Then the sirens would come.

  It was the sound of a gun.

  “Caro,” I shouted, running into the living room.

  At first all I could see was chaos, like how you spin and spin and then throw up. Everything was blurry. There were men here, lots of them. Papa was here and men wearing suits. I didn’t care about them. But then I saw Caro. She was okay! Relief let me breathe again.

  She was leaning over something, kneeling on the ground. Thick brown hair was spread all around. I’d seen that hair brushed and brushed. Georgia had such pretty hair. Dark red liquid was matting the strands, pressing it close to her head like clay.

  I stepped forward. “Caro?”

  She only cried harder, and I knew. I felt pain, harder than any slap I’d ever gotten. “Georgia?” I whispered.

  My oldest sister didn’t move. She lay on the floor with her eyes closed and Caro crying over her. I stood on the other side of the room, but it felt even farther away. On the other side of the planet.

  All I heard was the shot, so loud, ringing in my head like a bell. One man stepped right in front of me. He was smiling as if he’d just found something great, but I didn’t trust that smile. I didn’t like it.

  He bent down on one knee, at eye level. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  Caro! Georgia! I wanted to run to them. I should be with my sisters, but I couldn’t move. Especially when the man put his fingers under my chin. His eyes were cold and gray, like silver. His mouth moved, and I saw him speak more than heard him.

  “I know your mother’s preference for geography,” he murmured. “Georgia. Carolina. So what’s your name, little one? Texas? Montana?” When I didn’t answer, he laughed. “It’s okay. You’ll tell me eventually.”

  The ringing cleared from my head, leaving only my teacher’s voice. Results are what happened. The conclusion is what it means. I knew then that my sister Georgia was dead. And it meant nothing would be okay ever again.

  Chapter One

  Clint

  I could be comfortable strapped into a Chinook, with full body armor and another hundred fifty pounds of equipment on top of that. I could HALO down to a cross-fire insertion, no problem. But flying coach on a standard commercial airline was killer.

  Everything seemed tiny, as if I’d walked onto a display version of a real airplane. Due to the design of the plane, the rows on this side only had two seats. My buddy James had taken the window seat, but the aisle didn’t give me room to stretch. My legs were folded like a pretzel to fit into the small amount of legroom. My head cleared the headrest by almost a foot. My body jutted into the aisle, but there was nothing to do about that without pushing into James beside me.

  The pretty stewardess walked by, her hip brushing my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured.

  Della, her name tag read. She was slender and careful, but that didn’t matter when I was taking up half the aisle with my shoulder.

  “My fault,” I managed to say. It came out more like a rumble.

  The lightest whisper of cloth, her blue uniform against my fatigues. A wisp of heat and a faint smell of peaches. It was too much. As if I were goddamned Sleeping Beauty, my dick woke the hell up.

  She smiled then, and it was way too late to pretend I wasn’t getting hot at the sight of her.

  Jesus, those lips. And the little upturned smile, the one that said she knew exactly what I was thinking.

  Well, maybe not exactly. No way were her thoughts as desperate as mine. Eight months away from the States had taken its toll, with not even enough time or energy to beat off with regularity.

  No privacy, either, but then we didn’t care about that. You couldn’t be fastidious in a godforsaken jungle. They send a bunch of eighteen-year-old testosterone junkies into the wild, what else is gonn
a happen? There’d been a time we’d all go into a firefight, walk out with no bullet holes, then head back to our bunks and jack off like we were synchronized swimming.

  Not this time, though.

  After our first two tours in Afghanistan, James and I got picked up to work as part of a joint task force. Guess we impressed somebody. We couldn’t even drink back then—at least, not legally—but we were handed some of the most lethal weapons and secretive recording equipment in use.

  Since then we had continued to fight, but not on any sanctioned battlefield. Our ops were secretive and lethal and mostly not even acknowledged by the US government. We lived and worked in the darkest parts of the world, then came home on leave so we could remember why we did it.

  My twenty-third birthday had come and gone, spent with some of the most disgusting human beings I’d ever met and had to pretend like I was their new best friend. I shuddered just remembering some of the things I’d witnessed, unable to do anything without blowing my cover. I’d seen some bad shit in my life, but nothing compared to those sights. When I closed my eyes, I could still see those young girls. Way too young. I wanted to wash myself off just for being around that, even if we had taken it down in the end.

  Mission accomplished. Go home.

  So it was a real fucking surprise when my body was suddenly interested in the sweet-smelling, hot-as-hell stewardess.

  “Can I get you something?” she asked. “Water? A soda?”

  Suddenly my mouth was dry. “No, thanks.”

  She smiled again. God, she really needed to stop that. “I think I can rustle up some pretzels if you ask nicely?”

  Nope, wasn’t doing that.

  “I could use some pretzels,” James said from beside me.

  Really? “Nah, we’re good. Don’t worry about us.”

  “All right. You boys let me know.” She sauntered off, leaving both James and I staring. Man, that skirt hugged her so nicely…

  “What the hell was that for?” James said. “She would’ve come back.”

  “And then what, asshole? You’ve got Rachel.”

  “And you’ve got… what’s her name? Chelsea.”

  “Yeah,” I lied. I’d been lying for a few weeks now, ever since I’d landed at the base in Germany where I could check my messages. Dear Clint, I’m sorry to tell you like this but… A Dear John text message. A remote control breakup. It had happened to enough of our friends that I knew what the reaction would be if I told people. Pity, from the guys who could still look at me. Avoidance from everyone else, as if the condition of being dumped was contagious.

  So I hadn’t told anyone, not even James. And hell, maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. Me and Chels had a good thing going. Maybe not good, but it wasn’t bad either. And separation was always hard. For all I knew, we’d patch things up right away and then I’d be glad I never told James, who would’ve given her a hard time after that.

  She was probably going to pick me up at the airport, just like we’d planned, and here I was checking out another woman. The eight months had done a number on both of us, that was all. We’d work it out.

  I glanced down the aisle at the stewardess—Della—who had bent to speak to another passenger. “The point is, she’s doing her job. She doesn’t need us bothering her.”

  “Hey, you were the one groping her.”

  “With my shoulder?”

  “And flirting,” James added.

  “I was not flirting.” I would have known if I’d been flirting, right? And I definitely hadn’t done that. She was working. The last thing she needed was two horndogs using up her time or ogling her. “And stop looking.”

  “That’s your argument? There’s nothing wrong with looking, man. It’s harmless. You think when our girls are back home, they don’t look?”

  I did not like where this conversation was going. One of the main reasons to send a Dear John letter, as opposed to waiting until I got back, was for another guy. It pinched something in my chest to imagine Chelsea moving on that quick. I turned my irritation on my best friend. “Do you actually hear yourself talk?”

  “I stand by my assertion. I don’t care if Rachel checks out some hot doctor at her hospital. Long as she saves up the horniness for when I get back.”

  “Yeah, okay. You write that on your anniversary card.”

  “Shit, it’s my anniversary?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  We were quiet a moment. James was probably working out the dates in his head, trying to figure out if he needed to pick up a present from the airport gift shop. Me? I pretended to be asleep. Shut my eyes, even when the stewardess came back this way. But I could still see her long legs and black heels, and I had to admit: I was peeking. I couldn’t help it. There was something about her… the way she moved… so alluring…

  “She walks like a stripper,” James muttered when she’d passed us by.

  My eyes snapped open. “I am seriously going to punch you in the face right now.”

  “What? I didn’t mean it in a bad way. It’s a good walk. A good, professional walk.”

  “Your nose will be broken, and then you’ll have to explain to Rachel why it’s broken.”

  “Okay, I’ll stop. But only because Rachel would freak out. She worries about me.”

  James said the last part carelessly, but I still felt it like a blow, as if he’d beat me without even trying. Rachel did worry about him. A lot. It was a point of contention between them, but also a sign of how much they cared about each other.

  Had Chelsea worried about me while I was gone? Hardly.

  “Hey…” I cleared my throat. “How do you and Rachel reconnect when you get back home?”

  “You really want me to answer that question?”

  “Besides sex.”

  “What else is there?”

  “Nice. I mean… hell, I don’t know. The emotional connection.”

  James narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Are we secretly on Oprah? Look, man. The emotional connection is the easy part. You like a girl, you spend time with her, you get closer. That’s the connection. And the sex doesn’t hurt. Well, unless you want it to.”

  “Ha-ha,” I said, but unease speared through me. It sounded so simple when James spelled it out. You like a girl, spend time with her. I’d had that with Chelsea once, hadn’t I?

  I couldn’t remember.

  Leaning over, I looked forward and back. The aisles were clear. No sign of Della or any other flight attendant. Frustrated for reasons I couldn’t explain, I settled into my seat—as well as I could—and closed my eyes. One thing you learned in the army was how to sleep, even if you were uncomfortable, anytime, anyplace.

  Not this time, apparently. But I kept my eyes shut and pretended.

  Chapter Two

  Clint

  “Shit.”

  The low word snapped me out of sleep. I went on high alert, my body recognizing the stress in James’s voice before I was fully awake. My hand went to my back, where a handgun had been stashed for most of my time undercover, a shitty substitute for a bona fide holster. But my waistband was empty. In fact, I had no gear at all.

  I was on a plane.

  Wiping my face, I demanded hoarsely, “What’s wrong?”

  “Trouble,” James murmured with a nod to the front.

  The plane. We were on the plane, and the first place my mind went after trouble was Della. If Della was in trouble, I was going to… what? I jolted out of my seat, pushing back the people who had stuck their heads into the aisle to see better.

  There was Della, kneeling in the aisle, holding someone’s head in her lap.

  “Back up,” I snapped to the man who was leaning over Della’s shoulder for a better look. He’d been sitting beside the woman who was currently on the ground, but he was of no use.

  After handling many medical emergency situations in the military, two things were clear to me immediately: one, the older woman was in anaphylactic shock, and two, Della was an asset. Worry filled he
r eyes, but she was calm and breathing steady. No panic, though the same couldn’t be said for some of the people around us. I heard James behind me, clearing the seats nearby to give us room.

  Della looked at me. “She has a medical exception for her EpiPen.”

  That’s right. Needles wouldn’t be allowed except in extreme cases. As the stewardess, she would know about them. “Do you know where she keeps it?”

  “It’s not in her pockets. I already checked.”

  That was the most common place to store it for easy access. A quick search of the purse didn’t reveal anything. Shit. Even kneeling on the seat, digging through her bags, I could feel the tightness of the space, closing in on me. I forced myself to stop and think. If she were sitting down… She might have kept an EpiPen in her pocket, but if it poked her uncomfortably in the tight quarters…she might have stuck it into the seat pocket in front of her.

  I reached my hand in and pulled it out. “Got it. Can you apply it?”

  In response, Della held out her hand. As soon as I handed it over, she bit the lid off with her teeth and injected the woman in the thigh. I recapped the EpiPen while Della gently rubbed the injection site, something that would help the medicine disperse faster.

  Della kept the woman on her side with her breathing passage cleared while I took the pulse. It was slowing as I counted, down to safer levels. However, the woman was clearly still out of sorts, her breathing evening out but her eyes glazed.

  “Let’s get her to the front,” Della said. “There’s a seat free in first class. We’ll be able to recline her there.”

  I carried the woman to the front and then left her in Della’s care, along with another stewardess who met us there. Another man stepped forward to help. The air marshal. Nothing designated him so, but I could tell he was packing from his stance and the grim set of his mouth. Seriously late to the party. I shook my head but let him pass. Fall asleep on the job? I figured both the stewardess and the marshal had received rudimentary first-aid training and could at least support the woman until we landed.