The Homecoming Queen Gets Her Man

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in thirty years of marriage, it’s that the woman is always right.” Doc Malloy grinned. “And even when you think she’s wrong, you agree anyway. Happy wife makes for a happy life.”

“Uh, Meri and I aren’t...she isn’t...” What was with him? Since when did he stumble and stutter? “She’s just visiting her grandpa.”

Across the room, Corinna’s face broke into a smile. She fiddled with the chart, but kept a pair of coquettish eyes on Jack’s face.

Doc Malloy bent to study Jack’s injury. In the end, he decided a few stitches were called for, after all. Corinna stayed by the doc’s side, handing him supplies, but keeping her attention on Jack. She’d flash him a smile from time to time, when she wasn’t contorting herself to give him a direct view of her best assets. Once Jack’s hand was bandaged, Corrina ducked out, with a little sashay, to refill the supplies.

“There you go, good as new,” Doc Malloy said.

It was almost the same thing Meri had said earlier. Did people really think a bandage or two would change anything about Jack?

“I’ve been so battered and bruised in the last year, Doc, I’ll never be good as new.” It wasn’t just what had happened to Jack on the outside—those scars had healed, faded to almost nothing—it was the burdens he carried inside his heart, the guilt that weighed down his every step, like an elephant hanging off his heel.

Jack was the one who could sit out on his back porch and look across beautiful Stone Gap Lake, soaking up the warmth of the sun, breathing in the fresh, clean air. Eli never would again. Would never know those joys or moments of peace. Because of Jack’s decisions, Jack’s choices, Jack’s mistakes.

Doc Malloy laid a hand on Jack’s arm and met his gaze. “You know how they temper steel? They take it to its limit over and over again, then let it cool, until it becomes so hardened and strong there’s almost nothing that can break it or change it. That’s how people get tempered, too. They get broken, they go through tragedies, triumphs, pain, loss, new lives being born and others lost to death.” The kindly doctor’s eyes met Jack’s with a knowledge that came from years of continuity. Doc had given Jack his kindergarten polio vaccine and his last checkup before he shipped off to boot camp. Doc’s blue eyes were eyes that knew Jack, knew him as much more than another file in the cabinet. “The hells people go through make them stronger in the end, stronger than steel.”

Jack lifted his newly bandaged hand and cradled it in the opposite palm. There was no bandage to fix what was wrong with Jack inside his soul. “Sometimes the tests go too far, the heat too great, and they break.”

“The people? Or the steel?”

“Doesn’t matter, Doc. Does it?” Jack slipped off the table and headed for the door. “Thanks again for fixing me up.”

“I only fix the outside problems, Jack. A man’s gotta fix the inside ones on his own.”

Jack just nodded to that and headed out to the waiting room.

Meri was reading a magazine when Jack entered the room, her blond head bent over the glossy pages. The sun streamed in through the window behind her. Like a halo, he’d say, if he was a sentimental guy.

She looked up and a smile curved across her face, and something caught in his chest, something that fluttered like hope, that made him feel like the kid he used to be a long time ago. Then the smile was gone and she was all business, putting the magazine to the side and fishing her keys out of her purse. “All set?”

“Yup.” He paid the bill, then the two of them walked back into the bright sunshine. Meri unlocked the truck and climbed in the driver’s seat, waiting for him to get in on the other side. Without a word, she put the truck in gear and traveled the mile to the hardware store. Jack glanced over at her, but she kept her gaze on the road. He told himself he was glad.

The air between them chilled, and the silence thickened the air in the truck. When he unconsciously reached for the door handle with his right hand, he winced when the newly bandaged injury let out a protest.

“You okay?” Meri asked. “Sugar?”

“Is that jealousy I hear in your voice?”

“I’m not jealous of anyone. And especially not of that plastic enhanced former cheerleader.”

He arched a brow. “Are you sure about that? Because it sounds like you might want to go back in there and stick her stethoscope in a painful place.”

Meri waved toward the hardware store. “Why don’t you go get what you need, and I’ll hit the grocery store. Kill two birds with one stone.”

On any other day, Jack would have welcomed the opportunity to be alone, puttering around among tools and nuts and bolts. But instead, he found himself raising the bandaged hand and giving Meri a pity-me smile. “I’m, uh, not so sure I should be lifting tools and plywood with this. I could open the stitches up. That could lead to an infection. Gangrene. Amputation.”

She shook her head and laughed. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a drama queen?”

“I’m just trying to head off further injuries.” He worked up the pity-me smile again. “If you suffer through the hardware store with me, I promise not to complain when we’re picking out cereal at the Sav-a-Lot.”

She shifted in the seat and narrowed her gaze. “Your hand hurts that much?”

“Oh, it was a really deep cut. Doc Malloy said I almost severed a nerve.” Okay, so he hadn’t said any such thing, but Jack figured telling a white lie to garner a little sympathy from Meri wasn’t a bad thing.

“Okay. But only if you promise one thing.” She wagged a finger at his chest. “You won’t spend an hour in the power tool section, drooling like a five-year-old in the candy aisle.”

He caught her finger with his good hand. “I promise not to spend an hour in the power tool section. But I don’t promise not to drool.”

At least over the tools. Right now, with her hair loose around her shoulders and those faded denim shorts hugging her thighs, he couldn’t promise not to drool over Meri. Seemed his hormones kept forgetting his brain’s resolve to stay far, far away from her.

“It’s a good thing Nurse Sugar made sure you had plenty of bandages on your hand, should you need to wipe your chin.” Meri slid her finger out of his grasp, then stepped out of the truck and marched into the hardware store before he could even open his door.

Jack chuckled. Seemed Corinna’s flirting had lit a fire under his old flame. For a second he wanted to explore that spark, see where it led. To touch more than a single digit on Meri’s hand, to explore more than just the look in her eyes.

The glass door shut behind Meri’s curvy hips, and Jack’s reflection shimmered before him. He had a day’s worth of stubble on his chin, a tear in the neck of the faded T-shirt he was wearing, and a hole in the knee of his jeans. But like Doc Malloy had said, those outside imperfections were temporal, a mask for the damages underneath.

He closed his eyes for a second, and in his mind he was back on the battlefield, surrounded by dust and diesel fumes and frustration. He could hear the rumble of the engines, the whoop-whoop-whoop of the helicopters above them, and the frightened cries of the wounded. And he saw himself, standing there for a moment, just like he was now, his reflection shimmering in the panel of the Humvee, its back half still sitting as pristine as if it had just been driven off some car lot, while the front driver’s side was gone, erased with a blast.

“Jack?”

His mind was caught in a tumbling wave, spiraling backward, drowning, dark, as if he couldn’t find the surface.

“Jack?”

Then a soft touch on his arm. He jumped, adrenaline shooting through his veins, then his mind caught up with his eyes and his heartbeat slowed, one beat at a time. “Sorry. I was...daydreaming.”

More like having a waking nightmare, but Jack didn’t want to talk about that. Not with Meri, not with Doc Malloy, not with anyone.

“Are you okay? You look a little pale.”

“I’m fine,” he barked. “Now let me get what I need here so I can get back to work. I don’t have all day to stand around and jabber.” He brushed past her and into the store, knowing he was being an ass and not caring. Because caring would mean explaining, and he sure as hell wasn’t doing that.

She lingered at the back of the store while he grabbed a cart and filled it with the supplies he needed. By the time he reached the checkout counter, guilt weighed on his shoulders. None of this was Meri’s fault. Taking it out on her, simply because she reminded him of his mistakes, was wrong.

Jack shoved the change in his pocket, then wheeled the cart over to Meri. “Sorry for biting your head off.”

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