Aaron Read online

  “Good idea. I’d better make my way upstairs again.” She turned to Aaron and added, “Did you come down here in your wheel—?” He was standing, having gotten his crutches under him.

  She nodded approvingly. “Crutches are hell on the armpits,” she said, “but there’s just something nice about being on your feet.”

  He inclined his head and slowly hobbled past her. She studied his movements, realizing that, even with lots of experience and knowing how to use them correctly, the crutches still pained him.

  She followed Aaron to the elevators and stepped inside with him. As the double doors opened onto the main floor, she asked, “Are you interested in having a coffee?”

  “Are you asking Levi’s younger brother, or are you asking me, as I stand before you now?”

  That jolted her into turning and staring at him in surprise. “Well, I have no problems with having coffee with Levi’s little brother, because I quite liked him way back then, the same as I liked Levi. However, I would like to have coffee with Aaron, as he stands in front of me now.”

  Boy, had that opened up a whole different set of attitudes she hadn’t expected. Maybe something deeper and darker rooted was involved in their sibling rivalry that she didn’t know about. She would have to talk to Levi and get the details. Maybe that’s what was holding Aaron back. That little bit of resentment could cause wounds to fester inside and out. He didn’t need to completely bare his soul in order to heal, but it did need to be cleaned out.

  They walked onto the deck, and she was overjoyed to see the sun still shining. They passed George, and he grinned at them. “You guys going to relax for a little bit?”

  She laughed at him. “It does happen. Maybe not enough but it does happen.”

  “I’m heading to the kitchen. Can I get you some coffee?”

  She beamed up at him. “Two coffees would be lovely. Thanks, George.”

  He waved over at the far side and said, “Go grab a comfy chair. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  She collapsed onto one of the deep cushions along the far corner as Aaron sat down at the table beside her. “Today would be a perfect day to play hooky. Except I have so much work to do.”

  “If you need a day off, then take it,” he said. “Life is way too short, as I’m finding out.”

  “Well, playing hooky when you’re all alone isn’t much fun. If I had a boyfriend, then maybe. Or a best friend to go for a long bike ride …” She shrugged. “As it is, I have a ton of work to do. So I should just focus and get that all done.”

  “How is it that you don’t have a boyfriend?” he asked, astonishment written across his face. “I’m sure lots of the guys are falling all over you. You’re gorgeous and look at the work you’re doing here.”

  She smirked. “If you remember way back when, guys weren’t falling all over me then either. I was falling all over them. I had more crushes than any girl my age. But I was also a klutz. I fell every time I tried to wear high heels, and every time I put on makeup, I looked like a clown.” She waved at the vast area behind them. “This is finally me. Natural. Jeans and a T-shirt. What you see is what you get.”

  “Still one thousand guys should be lining up to see what you’ve got,” he said calmly. “I don’t remember any of the rest of that, because I had a crush on you so bad back then.”

  Her laughter fell away, and she leaned forward to stare at him. “Honestly?”

  He nodded, and that grin she’d only seen once or twice, but remembered from way back when, peeked out. It was a heart-stopper. With a little bit of a hook on the side, meant to reach out and grab the heart and yank. She felt herself yanked right now. “No way.”

  “Oh, yes way.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “Because you were my brother’s girl. How could I say anything to you?”

  She fell back against the seat cushion and stared at him. “I was never Levi’s girl. Levi was my best friend. I was one of his best friends, but we were never boyfriend and girlfriend—and definitely not lovers for that matter.”

  Aaron settled back to stare at her, his gaze intense, as if deciphering whether she told the truth or not.

  She opened her arms and held out her hands. “Honestly.”

  He turned his head to stare off into the distance, and she wasn’t sure just how this discussion had changed something, but it had. As if something fell off his shoulders, and he could sit easier. Taller.

  His revelation affected her too. She wasn’t even sure how, but it did. She’d always liked him, but in her head, he was Levi’s little brother. Just as off-limits as he apparently felt she was.

  Sad. But very interesting, given where they were now.

  George dropped off their coffees and left them to themselves again.

  Aaron stared across the long green and grassy fields ahead of them. His mind churned. She hadn’t been Levi’s girlfriend? There hadn’t been anything between them? He tried to cast his mind back and remember exactly what Levi had said, but too many years had gone by. Too many arguments between them. Too many heated words exchanged in anger to remember anything for sure.

  He’d certainly had the impression that not only were they boyfriend and girlfriend but that they were lovers. Had it been Levi who had put that idea into Aaron’s head, or had Aaron just assumed that fact, and Levi had let it ride? That would’ve been Levi too. If Aaron had jumped to a conclusion without asking, Levi would just ignore his brother and let the assumptions go on. He’d always been like that.

  What possible reason would there have been for him to lie to Aaron? Unless Levi didn’t want Aaron to know that they weren’t lovers. Maybe Levi wanted to be closer to Dani back then. It would look like a failure in his eyes if Aaron had assumed that they had that level of a relationship and they hadn’t. Aaron almost smiled at the thought. He also hadn’t exactly been a prize himself back them. There’d still been a ton of anger, and he had been on the wild side.

  If Levi was a good friend of Dani’s, he might not have wanted Aaron anywhere around her. Levi always was protective. He’d always been a champion of the underdog, standing up for the little guy. For a long time, Aaron had resented that. As the younger brother, he felt his older brother should have stepped back earlier. Only Levi didn’t seem to know how.

  Then they were two brothers with a different mother, and that made a difference too. After his own mother had died, he’d gotten wild. Levi had already lost his mother and had a more distant relationship to Aaron’s mother. Although cordial, they weren’t close. Their father had insisted on good relationships on the surface—for the public to see. Yet, as Aaron thought about it, he realized Levi had been the spitting image of their father—who was an abusive bastard when out of the public eye—not taking after those tendencies though, just carrying on his father’s looks. So Levi’d been closer to their father while Aaron had been closer to his mother. He’d bugged Levi about it a lot growing up.

  By the time Aaron became an adult, after a tumultuous few years, just enough distance was between the two of them to separate them. After his mother’s death when he was fourteen, he’d gone a little crazy. He was angry at life and everyone in it who wasn’t hurting the same as he was. That included Levi. As he grew up, he’d made no attempt to cross the growing divide between them. Only three years were between the brothers, but it might as well have been sixteen.

  He hadn’t even thought about if his brother was distressed by the loss of his second mother. Mostly because he’d been so sure Levi wasn’t. Yet how could he not have been? He’d spent fourteen years with her. There had to be some connection.

  Of course he’d never asked Levi. She just arrived one day, and for a while, she was there all the time. Of course, if Aaron were Levi, he’d have taken her to bed. The two brothers were both healthy young males, and that had been the drive back then. He stared down at his hands and frowned. Not so much anymore.

  “Thoughts?” Dani’s gentle voice broke into his trip down memor
y lane.

  He gave a hard shake of his head but managed a gentle smile for her. “Levi and I have been at loggerheads for a long time. I thought something was a given back then but wasn’t.”

  Her smile bloomed. “I never lost track of him,” she admitted. “We’d talk every now and then. When he went into the military, he took a different path, and he became so immersed in it I think a lot of us just felt left out.”

  “Levi is like that. Very focused.” Aaron wasn’t exactly sure how to feel right now. He’d been seriously crazy over Dani back then. Had he known she wasn’t with his brother, would that have changed the outcome years ago? Or what potential lay before them right now? If he had ever hated what he’d become, it was now. He wasn’t a whole man. He wasn’t sure what he would do for a job or career. It wasn’t like he would be the solid provider he’d always expected to be.

  “Levi’s turned his life around. His injuries were bad, but he’s recovering,” she said with a smile. “Even better is that he’s not in the military, and now he has a whole new company and a whole new life.” She spread her hands on the table, and with her gaze directly on Aaron’s, she said, “I’m proud of him.”

  Aaron swallowed hard. He wanted to be proud of his brother. He wanted to think such feelings existed. But he wasn’t sure they’d ever get past all the other garbage they’d had growing up. As he looked back, even he could see that a lot of it was caused by his own anger problems. “I haven’t talked to him in years,” he said. “I’d heard he’d been injured, but by the time I got the whole story, he was back on his feet and doing fine again.”

  “Well, it certainly wasn’t that fast, but he is definitely back on his feet. He’s running a private security company here in Texas right now.” She picked up her coffee and took a sip. “I don’t know what happened between the two of you, but he’s certainly hiring a lot of former military men for his company.”

  “Ex-military doesn’t mean damaged and disabled,” he said, his voice hard. The last thing he wanted was charity.

  “Well, he’s got Stone, Merk, and Rhodes with them. They were injured as well in the blast that caught them all up—although not as badly, I believe.”

  “Right, the men in Levi’s unit. Levi’s secret unit. The best of the best.” That must’ve been very hard for his brother. “Maybe he started the company so his unit would have employment.” He almost laughed at that. It took a hell of a lot of effort and time, not to mention money, to set up a company. Most people wouldn’t do that just to give a few friends a paycheck.

  “Oh, I don’t think so. Maybe it started out as something like that, but he’s gotten pretty big. I think a good dozen-plus men work for him now. They are looking at opening a second office on the West Coast too.”

  Tempting. But he was a long way away from doing something like that. Interesting that Levi took on disabled men. Giving them a new life. Aaron knew a lot of vets who had less than a full life. In fact, they were living on the streets, surviving day-to-day, while trying to find new purpose in their world gone crazy. So many vets just stayed at home and watched TV.

  Not the life for a warrior. Even after the war was over.

  Again it didn’t matter, because he wasn’t whole. Yet, he couldn’t keep that thought from rolling around in the back of his mind.

  “So back to when you had a crush on me,” she said in a teasing voice. “I never knew. I’m surprised.”

  He snorted. “I’m not. Back then I was a very angry teenager. I’d lost my mom a few years earlier and pretty much hated the world. I wouldn’t have let you know anything back then. My father drilled a few things into us both that Levi and I agreed upon. Integrity and honesty. A combination of traits that’s very hard to come by in this world. But Dad forgot all that when he had a bottle in his hand.” He picked up his coffee cup and stared at the thick black brew. “Because somebody else didn’t follow those simple rules of ethics is why I’m here.”

  She leaned forward to stare at him. “What do you mean?”

  He wrestled with himself. Should he tell her? Would it just put her off? Come across as sour grapes? On the other hand, she’d read his file and likely some notes were in there about him fielding the blame, accusing a fellow officer.

  He settled back, looking for a way to change the conversation.

  “No,” she snapped at him. “You can’t say something like that and then walk away. Obviously this is very important to you. I need you to tell me what’s going on.”

  Woodenly he placed his cup back on the table and brushed away nonexistent crumbs. “You won’t believe me,” he muttered.

  “That’s not true. I can’t make a decision as to whether I believe you or not if I don’t know exactly what your story is.”

  He glared at her. “The military doesn’t believe me, so why would anybody else?”

  “I’m not anybody else.”

  She had said it so simply, he realized the truth. She wasn’t coming from a background of protecting the military. She was somebody looking from the perspective of healing.

  He took a deep breath and slowly explained about being in Afghanistan and how they’d been expected to face enemy fire and deal with the dangers of landmines on a daily basis. It wasn’t that they didn’t expect to be injured—they always knew it was a possibility—but because they were doing what was right and protecting their country, they just always shrugged it off.

  He stopped talking for a long moment. She reached across and cupped his fist in her hands. His white-knuckled fist. He made himself continue.

  “I’m an EOD specialist,” he said with a humorless smile. “At the camp, we were sorting through our supplies. We were making explosives for a run to be done the next day. I had four men with me. Two were working off to the side, but two were right beside me. I looked up to see my best friend, Cain, standing there in front of me, with an odd look on his face. Then he said something weird. He said, ‘Have a nice life,’ and then he turned and walked away. I studied him for a long moment, confused, and then I called out, ‘What are you talking about?’ He turned and held up a device in his hand. A detonator. He said, ‘I’m sorry, but this is what I mean,’ and he pushed the button.

  “I was already running toward him, hoping to stop him. The blast lifted me up and threw me a good twenty feet away. I woke up in the hospital to find out my two other buddies had taken the blast full-on. The two off to the side survived with just a few scrapes. Of course I lost my leg and damaged my back.” He forced his fingers to open wide and spread them across the table as she continued to cover his hands with hers. He stared down at her long slim fingers resting against his big thick muscled ones. He shook his head.

  “It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t such a betrayal.” He gave an ugly laugh. “No, it still would be as bad. Because nobody in the military believed me.”

  She leaned forward. “What do you mean, they didn’t believe you?”

  “They didn’t believe Cain deliberately blew us up.”

  She sat back, a look of shock and disbelief on her face. “Did Cain die in the blast?”

  “Cain is listed as MIA,” he said calmly. “But he was running damned fast in the opposite direction of the blast when I was after him. So …” His anger spiked. “Missing in action might be the truth, but if that’s the case, he’s missing because he wants to be.”

  “That’s horrible,” she cried.

  He realized he had to get the last of it out. “It’s worse than that. Because they didn’t acknowledge Cain had done this deliberately, and they needed to look for reasons, they put the blame on me, saying I had been careless. That it was my fault everything blew up. Essentially saying I killed my friends.”

  Then he sat back, feeling the same damned wall of defeat crushing in on him.

  Chapter 6

  Back in her office, Dani sat in her chair and stared out the window for a long moment. Betrayal, as root causes go, was a big one for Aaron. She didn’t blame him one bit, and she could also see how th
at betrayal was compounded by those who he had trusted, respected and looked up to. Not believing in him was creating this massive pit of anger. No wonder he wasn’t healing. She wasn’t sure what she could do to help, but he had to do something to move past it.

  The only person she knew with those kinds of connections was Levi, but she wasn’t sure he even understood what his brother had been through. It would be a betrayal again, from her, if she were to talk his brother about this without Aaron’s permission. If he had wanted Levi to know, then Aaron would’ve called and told his brother himself. Yet a part of her mind understood that thanks to the estrangement, Aaron wouldn’t say anything to Levi.

  Her fingers itched to grab the phone and call Levi. But she held back. It was very much a tangled web right now. She had a history with both of them but not enough of a history, according to Aaron. She still couldn’t get over the fact that he had had a crush on her. Because she’d had a crush on him back then too. Levi had told her that Aaron was a bad deal. He was messed up and needed to get his head straight before anybody could spend time with him. She had believed Levi because she trusted him. Maybe he had been right back then. When she listened to Aaron talking about the loss of his mom and the anger about his brother, when she remembered the bits and pieces that Levi had said to her, she could see how all that would gel.

  The thing was, Aaron was still a bit of a messed-up guy right now. One vague idea of how to help came to her, but she figured he might get very angry about how it came to be. So, if she had any feelings forming, or if she wanted any relationship with him, she would have to kiss all that goodbye because he would never forgive her for crossing the line.

  Not that any relationship interested her at the moment. Not after Jim. And a lot of the residents here were either clingy or straightaway asking her to marry them—she’d had something like seventeen proposals over her time at Hathaway House. Then others were standoffish and didn’t want anything to do with single women. That usually stemmed from a belief they were no longer whole men. They were incapable of being who they used to be, and therefore, who they were now was less than satisfactory. So, an already attached woman was less threatening to them.