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“I am.” They’d reached her Jeep and Casey stopped, staring at the door handle as she slipped the backpack from her shoulders. Turning to look at him would be dangerous. Her pride was already bruised by John. She didn’t need the reminder of what could have been if she let herself look at Travis Heath long enough to remember he wasn’t the root of all evil. “I’ll probably be there until—”
There was movement at the front of her Jeep, and someone melted out of the shadows. Surely John wasn’t waiting, thinking he could shoehorn his way into her evening once again.
She turned her back fully to Travis, facing the newcomer.
It wasn’t John. A man appeared at the front of her SUV, a hood over his head casting his face into shadow, and a pistol pointed straight at her chest.
* * *
Travis’s muscles tightened, the heat of confrontation rushing through him. It took all he had not to shove Casey to safety and rush the guy. Instead, he edged between her and the gunman and balled his fists, forcing his attention from the pistol to the man, trying to size his advantage and figure out the best way to get Casey safely out of this.
In spite of the heat, their attacker wore a dark hoodie pulled forward to distort his features in shadow. Still, something about him was vaguely familiar, a flicker of memory Travis couldn’t grasp.
Now wasn’t the time to try.
The gun wavered from Travis to Casey, almost as though the man holding it wasn’t quite sure what to do next.
Travis eased one foot forward, getting himself in position to take out the foe, but the pistol stabilized, aimed squarely at him.
Whoa. Travis froze, reading confusion in the gunman’s expression. This guy was no pro, but he wasn’t a novice either. Rather than aiming at the head, he had the pistol pointed squarely at center mass, the mark of someone who had at least a little training. Something told Travis the guy could probably get off a fairly accurate shot, but that wasn’t a theory he wanted to test.
He’d trained for moments like this, but having Casey thrown into the mix complicated everything. Right now, Travis was physically trapped with the Jeep on one side and a car on the other, but he’d always been better with his words anyway. “Dude, you don’t have to do anything crazy.”
The statement hardened the man’s resolve, and his stance stiffened. “I want her backpack...and your wallet.”
“Take it easy.” He’d hand over everything in his possession as long as the guy didn’t pull the trigger on Casey. The barrel of a weapon aimed straight at them made Travis willing to do whatever it took to protect her.
But he had an idea. “Casey, hand me your backpack.” He lowered his right arm slowly, like he was reaching behind him for the bag.
The gunman steadied his aim.
Behind Travis, Casey hesitated, giving him a second to pray she wouldn’t choose this moment to argue, then she slipped the strap into his hand.
Perfect.
Travis wrapped his fingers around the canvas strap and eased forward, bracing himself for whatever came next. If this was the last breath he took, at least he could say he’d given it all he had. He threw his arm out, the backpack catching their assailant in the arm.
The gun clattered off the trunk of the car beside them and Travis rushed forward, but the narrow space between the Jeep and the car slowed his momentum.
The other man snatched Casey’s backpack, skirted the front of the Jeep and ran for a dark sedan idling two spaces away, leaving tire rubber in the parking lot as Travis skidded to a halt, trying in vain to read the license plate before distance made it impossible.
No good. The car was moving too fast and the lights weren’t bright enough.
Travis slammed a fist into the side of his leg, then turned and ran to Casey, his heart racing from adrenaline and exertion. If anything had happened to her...
She sat on the running board of her Jeep, face buried in her hands.
Travis knelt in front of her and rested his hands on her knees. Even though the weapon hadn’t been fired, relief still washed over him at the sight of her. “You okay?”
Her whole body moved with the effort of breathing. “Give me a minute.”
Easing away, Travis stood and pulled his phone from his pocket to call the police. He let his free hand rest on the back of Casey’s head, running his fingers through the loose blond strands that fell forward to cover her cheeks, the softness cascading across hands that shook from the adrenaline of the chase. How to handle this? He couldn’t put an arm around her to hug her. She’d probably deck him. But he also couldn’t let her suffer alone.
When he ended the call, Casey slipped her hair from his fingers and looked at him, her gray eyes cloaked in an emotion he couldn’t read. “I’m not your dog. You can stop petting me.”
In spite of the situation, Travis bit down on a grin. That was exactly what he’d been doing. Hey, it had worked for Harley the shelter mutt back in the day, when his family had ridden out hurricanes on the Florida Panhandle. And it had worked for Gus, the dog he’d had to give up when he deployed the last time. He ignored the ache the Australian shepherd’s memory brought. He always lost the things he loved. Life somehow seemed to work that way. “Are you sure you’re not hurt? What was in your backpack?”
“My laptop.” She gave him a weak smile. “He’s in for a surprise. The battery’s dead and the charger’s at my apartment.”
Casey was as sarcastic as she’d ever been, a quality she tended to amp to a thousand under stress. He’d encountered the trait more than once when her best friend was under the gun in February. “Bad day for him, huh?”
“For sure.” She dipped her chin and stared at the pavement between her feet, growing serious. “You know, if you hadn’t walked me out...”
Travis glanced toward the sky, grateful for the nudge that had sent him after her. If something had happened to her while he licked his wounds inside, he’d never have been able to forgive himself. He eased to the running board beside her, wary of touching her after her reaction. Running a hand down his face, he winced at the realization of what she’d lost. She kept her life on her phone and her laptop. Losing the machine would be a blow. “Were you working on anything?”
“An article on...” She froze, then waved her hand as though the question were a buzzing mosquito. “No big deal. Everything’s saved in the cloud, so it’s all retrievable. The machine’s password protected, so I doubt he can do much with it anyway.” Her hand fluttered up and fell. “It’s the hassle of having to deal with insurance and then finding the time to buy a new one. And knowing somebody held a gun on us and now has my whole digital life in their hands...” A shudder shook her, the biggest since she’d bucked up and tried to act like this whole incident was no big deal.
Travis slipped an arm around her as two police cars roared into the parking lot, sirens blaring. He couldn’t let her sit here and fight this internal battle by herself. And when she leaned into him he knew...
He was in this for as long as she needed him.
TWO (#u54979d0c-0a00-5ae3-8910-e0c7161b4408)
“You didn’t need to come over. Really.” Casey tried to block the doorway to keep her best friend from entering the apartment. There was a reason she hadn’t called Kristin James and told her what had happened at the restaurant. Casey had known it would go down exactly like this, with her stubborn friend practically bursting through the door.
Casey didn’t want a babysitter. She wanted a quiet place to curl into a ball and fall apart in peace. The shudders that had fluttered through her like wild birds for the past couple of hours were trying their best to work their way out to every limb. When she let go, the force would likely be epic, and the last thing an explosion of such a magnitude needed was a witness.
Of course, Kristin was having none of that. She slipped past Casey into the small hardwood entryway, dropping her backpack into the doorway of the guest room as she passed. “Seems to me I remember the same argument coming out of my own mouth a few months ago.” She crossed her arms. “Did you leave me alone when someone came at me and broke into my house? No. I’m pretty sure I remember you bunking in my guest room and, oh, calling the police even though I asked you not to.”
Casey crossed her own arms and mimicked her friend’s posture. “Your brother pasted a target on your back. This is different. Tonight was a random mugging.”
“With a gun.” Kristin stepped into her personal space and leaned even closer. “Don’t pretend everything’s all sunshine and roses.”
“Like you did?” Jerking away, Casey stalked for the den. Kristin had no room to talk. When the smuggler her brother had double-crossed came calling, Kristin hadn’t wanted help either, even after she was attacked in her own home. “If I want to be alone right now, let’s say I learned from the best.”
“Ooh. Ouch.” Kristin twisted the dead bolt then followed Casey, her relentless streak going full bore. “See? This is how I know you’re not fine. You’re not me. You don’t go around biting heads off.”
She was right, for the most part. “Maybe I’m not like you in some ways. But in others...” Casey dropped onto the couch and stared at the ceiling.
“You need to be alone to cry.” Settling onto the opposite end of the creamy beige sofa, Kristin smiled with a gentleness out of character for her. Rarely did her blue eyes soften with sympathy. “I get it.”
“Yet you’re still not leaving.”
“Nope.”
“How did you find out anyway?”
Kristin’s eyebrow arched. “Two guesses.”
“Travis called Lucas.” Casey sighed. She should have known without asking. Kristin’s fiancé, Lucas Murphy, was platoon sergeant in the same company as Travis. They’d been close friends for years. It shouldn’t surprise her Travis had contacted his best friend, who’d turned right around and contacted hers. After all, they’d met through the other couple, and although Casey had managed to avoid Travis for months, her days of avoiding him had likely run out.
“I never understood why the two of you didn’t work out.”
“You’d have to ask him.” While Casey appreciated Kristin trying to change the subject, she’d a thousand times rather talk about the mugging than her nonexistent relationship with Travis Heath. He’d been fun, had made her laugh, had been a perfect gentleman. Then one day, he was simply gone. The thought of his departure still burned bitter. “So how’s the wedding planning coming along?”
Kristin’s lips tightened into a thin line. Clearly, she didn’t want to change the subject.
Getting engaged had softened her hard edges so much that she now thought the rest of the world should pair up, too. Even though it had been months since Travis quit their relationship, Kristin still held out hope her best friend and Lucas’s best friend would somehow form their own happy little family. She sighed. “Wedding planning is good. We’re going for simple. Small. You don’t come around enough anymore.”
So they were back to that. Well, she didn’t like being the third wheel. “Busy. And you ought not to be here. You should be out with Lucas, cuddling in a coffee shop or running a marathon or something.”
“I don’t cuddle in public, and we ran this morning.” Kristin laughed, the sound a bright light in the apartment that suddenly seemed dim. “Besides, it’s past midnight. Lucas better be at his house sound asleep.”
“And you should be at your house sound asleep, too.”
“I’ve got better things to do.” Reaching across the small gap between them, Kristin aimed a finger at Casey. “Like it or not, it’s a good thing Travis was with you. If the guy had a gun, he was serious.”
A shudder quivered Casey’s insides as she pictured the tense posture of the man who’d aimed that pistol. How much different would her night be right now if Travis hadn’t insisted on being a gentleman? She could have lost more than her laptop.
“I knew it would hit you.” Sliding closer, Kristin leaned her shoulder against Casey’s. Kristin had never been a touchy-feely person, but she knew how to help carry a load, especially since she’d found Lucas and Jesus. The change had taken some getting used to, but her friend was definitely happier now than she had been in previous years.
“I can’t stop the video.” Casey’s voice quavered, but she didn’t care. Let Kristin hear it. She was safe here. “I fought Travis on walking me to my car. If he’d listened to me and backed off...”
“But he didn’t. You’re right here, safe in your own apartment.”
Leave it to Kristin to hit her with a truth she couldn’t deny. Casey shoved aside the what-ifs. It was better to focus on the actuallys, which were a little bit easier to handle. “He took my laptop.”
“You mean your right arm?” Thankfully, Kristin followed her down the rabbit trail away from nightmares. “You had a backup, I hope.”
“I have my old machine to use until I can buy another, and everything is backed up on an external disk and in the cloud, but it’s still a pain. It’ll take a whole day to sort everything out and put it all together again.”
“Well, before you do that, you ought to spend some time out on your great-grandfather’s farm with your bow.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?” It would feel good to pull back the string and let fly at a few targets. Really good. Load the fear and the stress into the tension of the string then release it forever.
It was a nice dream, but there was too much work to do. “Can’t. I’m wrapping up an interview with John Winslow tomorrow, and I have one with another guy the day after tomorrow.” No need to discuss John’s behavior tonight. She hadn’t even told Kristin there was a dinner. Confessing would bring too many questions Casey didn’t know how to answer.
She’d met John a year earlier, when she was writing an article about substance abuse among army veterans. He’d introduced her to a few other sources, and one of them had suggested the article she was working on now. When she’d contacted him again about discussing a mission he’d been on a few years ago, he’d been interested in everything she had to say, asking questions and talking for hours when they met for their first interview two days ago. He’d been the one to ask her to meet him for dinner instead of at her office, so the water was a little muddy when it came to what to call tonight. Especially since he kept disappearing with his phone, more distracted every time he returned to the table until she’d cut him loose.
“At least you won’t have to restart your story.”
“Thankfully.” Casey had already conducted interviews with two soldiers and had several more in-person and telephone interviews lined up... All except the one she’d rather not schedule at all. If she’d lost all her work, had lost her contacts or her calendar... She let her eyes drift shut, focusing on the averted technology disaster over the averted physical one. “The laptop’s locked, so everything’s safe, but still, the idea somebody has my stuff...”
“It’s violating. I know. I felt the same way when someone broke into my car and stole my keys last year. Even after I changed the locks, it still felt like somebody was creeping around in the dark corners of my house.”
“Well, they were.”
“Yeah, but—”
On the coffee table, Casey’s phone vibrated on the glass. Kristin reached for it and glanced at the screen, then turned it toward Casey. “Travis is calling you.”
“Let it ring.” Right now, she was too vulnerable, too willing to let her fear and overwrought emotions fool her into thinking he was the one who got away, that everything would be so much better if she had him beside her right now, holding her close while she leaned on his strong shoulder the way he’d let her at the crime scene.
Kristin dropped the phone onto the coffee table with a clatter. “If you don’t answer, he’s coming over here. You know how he is. He was worried enough when he called Lucas.”
“Text him and tell him you’re here and all is well.”
“Casey...”
“Just do it. I can’t talk to him right now.”
Kristin fired off a text, clearly irritated, then shoved the device onto the table beside Casey’s. “He’s a good guy. No matter what’s happened between you in the past, you owe him a thank-you for being there tonight.”
Casey begged to differ about him being a good guy, but yeah, she did owe him a thank-you for being a hero if nothing else. But when it came to forgiving him? It would take a whole lot more than him playing superhero.
* * *
Travis dropped his cell phone to the desk and stared out the window at the small strip of trees standing guard behind his apartment building. He missed the beach, the deep darkness over water where the only light came from the moon and stars. Living in a landlocked town might allow him to be close to post, but it didn’t give him a whole lot of opportunities to indulge his appreciation for nature.
He should have joined the navy, then he’d have had all the water he ever wanted. Whole oceans of it.
But he wouldn’t have been in place to help Lucas when he stared down danger in February. And he wouldn’t have been in place tonight to save Casey Jordan from a man who may have wanted money or something more. He still wasn’t sure which. All he could see when he closed his eyes was the gun, pointed unwaveringly at both of them.
He’d seen the aftermath of violence before. Had watched a good soldier and a better friend take the hit right in front of him, an image that overlaid tonight’s near-tragedy in rivers of blood. Sergeant Neil Aiken had been one of the best, and he’d died right in front of Travis, leaving a wife and two little ones behind to face the world without him.
And he’d still be here today if it hadn’t been for Travis’s foolish mistake.
Travis’s arms still bore scars from the shrapnel, but he’d survived. Had he been at the head of his team like he should have been, he’d have been the one to plant a boot in the wrong place.
Pulse pounding, Travis jerked the cord on the blinds and shut out the world. In a couple of weeks, he’d pack his bags and go to selection, then on to training for the Special Missions Unit that would take him far away from here.
And far away from Casey Jordan. For a few months with her, he’d let himself believe he could hold her close without getting attached. Then one day, the danger of such a belief hit him from the left. He’d been at her apartment, sitting on the couch with her snuggled beside him, watching some silly rom-com, his fingers toying with the ends of her hair... In the perfect peace of the moment, he’d known a depth of emotion he’d never felt before. It quaked something inside him, and when he’d kissed her goodbye he’d felt a kind of desperate, indefinable something that made him want to cling to her forever.
That night, his nightmares had amped their intensity, walking him again and again through the horrible day he’d been injured and Neil Aiken had died. He’d paced the floor in a desperate blend of guilt and fear that had made him want to claw at his own skin. He couldn’t love a woman like Casey. Couldn’t let her take over his life. He had too much to pay for sending one of his men ahead of him to die.
The next morning he’d texted Casey to tell her they were finished, full of lame excuses, aware such disrespect was the coward’s way out but knowing he could never go through with it if he heard her voice.
Now she’d reappeared in time to bring a deluge of memories with her.
In time to remind him of everything he’d lost when he walked away from her. If anything, she was more beautiful than he remembered. Casey’s gray eyes still had the ability to stop him where he stood, those same eyes that had made other men look twice when they saw her, something she never seemed to notice. Her blond hair had grown longer, though it still didn’t quite touch her shoulders. Shoulders that came to his chest, a fit he’d never known before or since.
But the fit had been all wrong.
Adrenaline and memories wouldn’t let him sleep anytime soon—if at all—so Travis poured a tall glass of soda and only wished for a second he had something stronger to mix in. He’d been down that road after Neil Aiken died, hard and heavy. Drinking hadn’t solved anything, hadn’t brought anybody back from the dead. It had made the memories worse and his thoughts exponentially more morbid.
So instead of wallowing in the past, he’d tried to call Casey. After seeing death charge her this evening, all he wanted was to hear her voice one more time, to reassure himself he’d succeeded in saving her. If he knew she was okay, he could put all of this to rest again and go on with his life without her.
But she wasn’t answering her phone, having Kristin text him instead of doing it herself. It shouldn’t cut, but it did.
