The Letter Read online

  Another shiver worked its way along her spine, slithering over each and every vertebrae. Rick possessed a hardness, a darkness Billy hadn’t. She knew without asking Rick was a different kind of soldier. Two words formed in her mind. Special Forces. Something Billy had always wanted to be.

  “No, no.” She shook her head, her hair dancing across her shoulders. Lord, she hadn’t managed to do anything other than brush it that morning. She must look terrible. “Although…twenty years?” Studying his features, she picked up the fine lines around his eyes and the darkness within them. “You can’t be that old. What did they do? Put you in military school or something?”

  He smiled again, treating her to a brief flash of straight white teeth. “I’m thirty-eight. Joined up the day I turned sixteen.”

  Hattie whistled between her teeth. She’d guessed over thirty but not nearly forty. Not ten years older than her. Not and be that damn hot, anyway. Guilt threatened to rise again, but she ignored it.

  “Looking good for an old man.” She winked, not sure where the sudden bravery had come from. “You should be a model, not a soldier.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, her eyes widened. “Ohh…the letter.”

  “Letter?” Rick frowned, his drink halfway to his lips. “But, I haven’t—”

  She cut him off. “I got a letter.” Sliding from her stool, she retrieved it from the counter under the window. “Here.” Smoothing it out to show him, she added, “If you want to do something, do this in Billy’s place.”

  He took the crumpled piece of paper and read through it. Then he glanced up, green eyes spearing her. “Me? Model? With my ugly mug?”

  “Pfft, don’t you English have mirrors?” She shot him a grin at the deliberate mistake and waved her hand in a motion that encompassed all of him. “Hell yeah, you should’ve been a model.”

  He set the letter next to the sink. “Sorry, hen, I don’t think anyone’d want to take photos of me. I’ve more scars than a road map after so many years of being sh—” He stopped and shut his mouth with a click.

  The elephant crowded into the room again, watching them both. Bastard probably had popcorn and a super-size soda, too.

  “After so many years of being shot,” she finished for him in a soft voice. “You were with Billy when he died. Your wounds were his wounds. Can I see?”

  Fuck me.

  Of all the questions Rick had expected from Hattie, a simple request to see his scars hadn’t been one of them. He’d never been squeamish about the damage wrought to his body, neither from the incident a year and a half ago, or before that. His scars were as much a part of him as his tattoos. Both told the story of his life, written on his skin in ink and healed lines. “Please?” She took a step closer.

  Unable to resist the plea in her dark eyes, Rick put the tea down and fingered the buttons on the front of his shirt. The usual quip about getting his kit off in front of a pretty girl didn’t cross his lips. She couldn’t be interested in him. Much as he’d have liked her to be, this wasn’t the time or place for it. Instead she wanted…what?

  He paused after undoing the last button, the edges of the shirt flapping against his bare chest, and searched her face. “Hattie, are you sure you want to see this? It’s not—”

  She didn’t answer, only gripped the shirt. He nodded when she glanced at him, giving permission for her to carry on. Pushing the fabric aside, she peeled it away from his shoulders and it fell, forgotten, to the floor. His breath caught.

  Then she stared. Rick couldn’t help sucking his gut in, his abs tightening in pure male vanity when her gaze swept over him. Scars dotted his torso, some old, some not so old. Each told a story, each a memorial. She didn’t need telling which ones she searched for. With tears collecting in the corners of her eyes, she touched him. Gentle fingertips brushed over the newer scars, the ones matching the wounds that had killed Billy. In a heartbeat, Rick felt like a bastard for daring to find her attractive. What am I thinking? He was there for one reason and one reason only: to deliver Billy’s letter.

  “Thank you.”

  She floored him again, the words barely on the edge of hearing, but not as much as when she planted a kiss right on the mark closest to his heart. Rick started and grabbed her hands to stop her.

  When she winced, he loosened the grip, inwardly cursing himself for being a brute. “I beg your pardon? Thanks for what?”

  Their gazes connected and a jolt ran right to his soul. Awareness, attraction, something deeper, surged through him. He’d never felt such a link with a woman before. Why here? Why now? Why with a woman he couldn’t have?

  “You shouldn’t be thanking me,” he said, his tone lowering as he tried to impart reason. She had beautiful dark eyes, deep chocolate with an outer ring of caramel. “I came to say sorry for n—”

  “Stop right there. People are always saying that to me. Why say sorry?” Anger tightened her expression. “Did you kill him? Did you fire the shots that ended his life?”

  Rick closed his eyes and in an instant returned to the war. Dust coated the back of his throat as he dragged air in to run, the oppressive heat surrounding him like an abrasive blanket. Sweat slid along his spine, trapped between him and Billy as he half-carried, half-dragged the younger man. The base gates rose up in front of them. Triumph. Relief. Then the sharp, staccato sound of gunfire. Bullets slammed into them with the force of sledgehammers, spreading heat and numbness in their wake. Billy jerked. Rick roared and dropped his rifle—the weapon useless—and ran.

  “Rick?” Hattie’s query brought him out of the memory with a jerk. “Are you okay?”

  He opened his eyes and met hers, then made the most difficult admission of his life. He should have been able to. Should have been stronger, faster, but….

  “I couldn’t save him.”

  ***

  “So, how did it go?”

  Rick lay sprawled across the bed in Hattie Jameson’s spare room, phone to his ear. Answering his twin sister, he said, “Better than expected, to be honest.”

  “She hit you?” The rustling of papers in the background told him Rach worked at her desk. Again. “I’d’a hit you.”

  “Yeah, thanks for that.” The chuckle escaped before he could stop it. Sometimes, he and his sister were too alike for comfort. Whereas he’d taken the military world by storm, Rachel had forged her own path in the world of IT. Two years earlier, she sold the little recipe app she’d built to one of the big multinationals and made more money than Rick could dream of. “She didn’t hit me, but she did tell me to go to hell.”

  Rach snorted. “I like her already. Then what?”

  “What do you mean, then what?” Safe in the knowledge she couldn’t see him, Rick rolled his eyes. Like a bloody terrier at times, his sister determined to root out each and every detail. An invaluable skill in the charity they’d set up together helping to re-train and re-home veterans when they came out the army.

  “Don’t you huff and roll your eyes at me, young man,” she shot back, reminding him, as always, that she was older than him, if only by a few minutes. In the world of twindom, those few minutes meant she’d lorded it over him their entire lives. “What did Hattie say after she told you to go to hell?”

  “She burst into tears,” Rick grudgingly admitted.

  There was silence for a second but he knew better than to think he’d gotten off so lightly, the small intake of breath all he needed to wince and pull the phone away from his ear.

  “What do you mean she burst into tears? What did you do to the poor girl?” Rachel demanded. He had her full attention, going by the sudden absence of papers shuffling. Like gaining the attention of a man-eating shark. Not wise. “Am I gonna have to come over there and kick your arse?”

  “Yeah, right.” He snorted. Laughing in the face of danger. “I’d like to see you try…midget.”

  His sister didn’t take offense. Instead, she hurled abuse right back. “Bloody giraffe. No wonder you’re dumb; the air’s too thin up there.�
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  “Ankle-biter.”

  She laughed, the rich, deep tones of her voice soothing even over the line. “Typical Weeks man, always have to have the last word. You like her, don’t you?”

  At that, he paused, his hand stopping halfway up to run through his hair. Sometimes his sister’s perceptiveness scared him.

  “Maybe.” Aw, hell. No point denying it. She’d rag on and on until she got all the details out of him anyway. “Yeah…. But how the hell did you work that out?”

  A soft chuckle reached his ear. “Brother dear, I didn’t spend nine months in a womb with you and not come out of it knowing you as well as I know myself. How do you think I knew you’d been injured? How do you think I always know when you’ve been injured?”

  “Shit,” he breathed in reply. “Yeah.”

  Their mother had told him about that. One night, the family had been about to have dinner when Rach dropped the dish she carried, scattering carrots all over the floor while she doubled up in agony. And it hadn’t been the first time. When he’d been injured in training, and then again in the Middle East, he’d been medevac’d each time while Rachel bugged the shit out of Family Affairs to find out what had happened to him—to the point their troop admin staff called her The Bulldog.

  “Yup. So I always know. Now tell me. Is she pretty?”

  It took him ten minutes to get Rachel off the phone. She’d wanted to know every little detail about Hattie, and given that the damn woman was more than capable of upping and flying over to take a look-see herself, Rick opted for the path of least resistance and gave her what she wanted. It wasn’t difficult to talk about Hattie though. He only had to close his eyes and his overactive memory brought up an image of her as if she stood right in front of him.

  He hung up and dropped the phone onto the bed. A groan escaped his lips. Even as pretty as Rick found her, Hattie wasn’t his, but Billy’s, and even though the kid was dead, it didn’t mean Rick could go stealing his girl away. He moved his leg and frowned as something crinkled under it. Reaching down, he recovered the crumpled letter Hattie had pushed into his hands after she’d gotten him settled in the spare room—the room just along the corridor from hers. He put that thought from his mind and opened the letter again, scanning it quickly.

  On behalf of a Leonidas Russo, it asked for Billy’s help to raise money for some charity to support the families of fallen soldiers. Rick’s jaw tightened in anger that Hattie had received it. Talk about an admin error, sending a request for help for soldiers to the family of one who had fallen.

  But errors happened, departmental records got out of sync, or a systems upgrade replaced new data with old. He’d seen it many times while out in the field waiting for a shipment of ammunition. Once they’d received only a crate of toilet rolls. Luckily for the troop, the mistake had been realized and the correct shipment had arrived within a couple of hours. Good news for Rick and the lads, because, unless the enemy planned to attack them with a bad case of diarrhea, they couldn’t do with a truckload of toilet paper.

  His lips curving in a smile at the memory, Rick carried on reading. Apparently, Leo had been so confident Billy would say yes, he’d gone ahead and booked the photo shoot, scheduled for…. Rick checked the date and swore. Tomorrow. Too late to call the guy and give him the bad news about the dead soldier. Crap. Rick dropped his head back.

  He’d have to do the shoot in Billy’s place.

  Chapter Four

  He wasn’t what she’d expected.

  Hattie made herself comfortable in the seat of Rick’s rental car. For calling him British, not English—she wouldn’t make that mistake again—he didn’t seem at all bothered by driving on American roads. She took advantage of his distraction to study him.

  Tall, he had the sort of muscle implying he either worked at a manual job, or spent a lot of time in the gym. Given what he’d said about being medically discharged, and the slight limp she’d noticed that morning, she’d go with time in the gym. But hell, there was a difference between exercise for physiotherapy and exercising to get ripped.

  Her fascination with his body didn’t stop there. She studied his cropped dark hair, not high and tight like Billy had preferred, but more short back and sides. At some point, he’d been in a fight. Possibly several if the bumps on his nose from past breaks and the small scar flirting with his lower lip were anything to go by. His eyes were a clear, startling blue, the color so crisp she’d thought at first he wore navy-blue contacts. Now she wasn’t so sure. No matter how closely she looked, she couldn’t spot the faint ring of contact lenses around the iris.

  He caught her scrutiny. “What?” Sliding her a crooked, sideways smile, he asked, “Am I doing it wrong or something?”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Somehow I doubt anything you set your mind to is done less than perfectly.”

  Truth be told, she’d been surprised when he’d come down that morning, and rather than say he planned to head to the airport, had given her the letter and said he’d do the photo shoot Mr. Russo had organized. A couple of phone calls later, they’d been on their way.

  “Yeah, right,” he muttered cryptically, peering at the road signs before signaling left. “Doubt my troop leader’d see it that way. Some days it seemed he liked to yell my name just to hear the sound of his own voice.”

  Troop leader. One more clue in the puzzle that was Rick Weeks. Shifting position to get more comfortable, she said, “You didn’t get along with him?”

  Rick snorted, the sound derisive. “Yeah, the Ruperts liked me fine, but the RSM hated life and everyone in it.”

  “Rupert? You had a boss called Rupert?” She blinked. “What’s an RSM?”

  The earlier snort developed into a full-on chuckle. Deep and rich, it sent a shiver along the fine hairs on her arms. Lord, the man had a voice made for whispering sweet nothings. And with that accent, she could listen to him for hours.

  “No…that’s what we call officers, junior officers at least, in the army. RSM stands for Regimental Sergeant Major…usually referred to as God by those of us who worked for a living.”

  Hattie barely followed the rapid-fire delivery. She had a somewhat lazy drawl, but Rick spoke fast, sometimes shortening or rolling words together. It was wonderful to listen to. So much so, she’d snuck along the corridor the previous night to listen to him on the phone. She hadn’t been able to hear his words, only the lyrical rise and fall when he spoke. “So, you were a sergeant?”

  He shot her another sidelong glance, but his expression blanked before he returned his attention to his driving. Not guarded, but…a nothingness. “Yeah. How’d you know that?”

  “One of the men in Billy’s squad came on by to pay his respects while on leave. Filled me in on some of the details of what happened.” She shrugged. “Mainly, the stuff not in the official letter of condolence. Told me you guys had only been on the base a day before…before it happened.”

  “That’s right.” Rick didn’t take his eyes off the road.

  Silence stretched out between them with only the hum of the air-conditioning and the rumble of the rough asphalt a background noise. Tension hummed between them for a moment, not the good kind, then Rick started to talk.

  “That’s what we did. Dropped into areas in small groups. We were supposed to go out the night before, but the powers that be wanted us to hold off for twenty-four hours. Better intel on…on…just better intel.”

  She stayed quiet, not wanting to say anything for fear he’d stop talking. The way he paused mid-sentence as though changing what he’d been about to say reinforced her feeling from the day before that he’d been something other than a normal soldier. Normal soldiers did not go into combat in small groups…that was kind of the point of the word army. As in, a lot of people.

  “But we got split up on the way back. I ended up coming in on a different route and found Billy.” He shrugged. “Kid was wounded, but good. Got himself holed up in an alley, waiting for dawn to move.”

  Tears th
reatened the back of Hattie’s eyes. Rick had spent those last few precious hours with Billy, in some backstreet alley in a foreign town. It hurt, but she had to hear it. She wanted to, as much as she sensed Rick wanted to tell her.

  “He’d been shot already,” he said, the words low and devoid of emotion, as though he commented on the weather. But his knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. “I patched him up and we waited until a little before dawn to try and make the base. The hour before dawn and hour after sundown are the best times to move. The light’s all weird and hazy.”

  She pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms around her knees, tension rising within her. Billy…no, they had been shot not far outside the base.

  “Billy’s leg started to bleed badly, so I had to help him. With his arm over my shoulder, we made a good pace. The base saw us and opened the gates….”

  She lost the battle, tears welling. How he could be so calm and drive and everything, she didn’t know. But then, they were trained to do that, weren’t they? Shut down and stay operational. She wished she could.

  “But it made no difference. A sniper opened fire and got us. I remember heat and numbness. Numb is bad; you know you’re fucked if things go numb. I dropped my rifle and ran for it.” He chuckled, but the sound held no humor. “Did the hundred meters faster’n the regimental champion, I reckon.” The smiled faded. “Didn’t do any good. Billy…he….”

  Unable to bear the pain in his voice, Hattie touched his arm. “He died just inside the gates. They told me. But you got him home, Rick. He died among friends rather than alone and in the dark. Thank you.”

  ***

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

  Hattie hid her grin at Rick’s indignant splutter as he stared at the costumes the photographer had brought along.

  “I know I said I’d do this.” He wrinkled his nose and lifted one of the outfits, more like a collection of straps than an article of clothing, although he seemed to recognize it. “But do I have to dress up like bloody Rambo as well?”