lives.
But nobody had ever been able to tell him how to deal with the kids.
PTSD. Such a tidy little label. A dialect that civilians understood, or thought they did anyway. But it was just another label for shit. Shit that Riley didn’t want in his head.
He grabbed his pain meds from the pocket of his uniform and shoved one, then another into his parched mouth. Soon, very soon, he could start stomping the images back into that little shoe box he’d built in his head.
Soon.
He closed his eyes, the words finally coming that he needed to hear.
“Jingle bells, jingle bells...”
He really did need to come up with a more manly sounding song to kick some flashback ass.
“HI DA TOOKIE,” someone whispered.
Riley was sure he was still dreaming. At least, he was sure of it until someone poked him on the cheek.
Hell. What now?
“Hi da tookie,” the voice repeated. Again in a whisper.
Obviously this was some kind of code or foreign language, but Riley’s head was too foggy to process it. He groaned—and, yeah, it was a groan of pain—and forced his eyelids open so he could try to figure out what the heck was going on.
Eyeballs stared back at him.
Eyeballs that were really close. Like, just an inch from his.
That jolted him fully awake, and Riley automatically reached for his weapon. Which wasn’t there, of course. He wasn’t on assignment in hostile territory. He was in his own family’s home. And the eyes so close to his didn’t belong to the enemy.
They belonged to a kid.
A kid with brown eyes and dark brown hair. Maybe two or three years old, and he had a smear of something on his cheek.
“Hi da tookie,” the kid said again. He didn’t wait for Riley to respond, however. He jammed something beneath the pillow.
A cookie, aka tookie.
And it had an identical smell to the one Riley had just been dreaming about. Except it was no dream. Riley realized that when he lifted his head and the crumbs fell onto the collar of his uniform. Hell’s Texas bells. He’d slept on a chocolate-chip cookie. But why the devil was it there in Logan’s bed?
Like the women in his own bed and the gibberish-talking kid, an answer for that might have to wait a second or two because Riley had a more pressing question.
“Who are you?” he asked the kid.
“E-tan,” the boy readily answered.
That didn’t explain much, and Riley wasn’t sure how much a kid that age could explain anyway.
“Tookie,” the boy repeated. He took one of the crumbs from Riley’s collar and ate it.
All right, so maybe that did explain why he’d slept on a cookie-laced pillow. This kid was responsible. But who was responsible for the kid? He didn’t get a chance to find out because the little boy took off running out of the room.
Riley got up. More groaning. Some grimacing, too. The damage to his shoulder and knee weren’t permanent, but at the moment it sure as hell felt like it.
The docs at the base in Ramstein, Germany, had told him he needed at least three more weeks to recover from the surgery to repair the damage done by the shrapnel when it’d slashed into his right shoulder and chest. After that, he’d start some physical therapy for both the shoulder and his wrenched knee. And after that, there would be a medical board to decide if he could continue being the only thing he’d ever wanted to be.
An AF CRO. Short for Air Force Combat Rescue Officer.
It twisted his gut to think that it could all be taken away. That whole “life turning on a dime” sucked donkey dicks, and he could go from being part of an elite special ops force to someone he was darn sure he didn’t want to be.
That was a violation of man-rule number one: don’t be ordinary.
Frustrated with that thought, with the pain and with the whole world in general, Riley headed into the adjoining bathroom. When he came out, the kid was still nowhere in sight.
Brushing away some more cookie crumbs from his uniform, Riley went into the family room to look around. No sign of E-tan there. Someone had cleaned up the party remains, so Riley headed to his own bedroom. Good gravy. The two women were still there, still asleep. Riley was about to wake them, to tell them about the cookie-hiding toddler, but then he caught a whiff of something else.
Coffee. The miracle drug.
And he heard someone moving around in the kitchen. Since Della and her sister, Stella, had sworn on John Wayne’s soul and their mama’s Bible that they would follow Riley’s orders and stay far away from the place, there shouldn’t be any sounds or smells coming from anywhere in the house. Still, if this was a break-in, at least the burglar had made coffee. He might just give up everything of value to get a single cup.
Once Riley hobbled his way to the kitchen, he saw that E-tan had already crawled into a chair at the table. Like the rest of the house, the kitchen was sprawling, and even though they had two other dining rooms, Riley had eaten a lot of his meals in this room. In fact, he’d sat in that very chair where the kid was sitting now.
Riley immediately located the cookie source. There was a plate of about a dozen or so of them on the kitchen table. He spotted the source of the moving-around sounds, too.
Another woman.
A blonde this time. Her hair was cut short and choppy and fell against her neck.
This one was very much awake. She was at the stove, her back to him, and she was stirring something in a skillet. Her body swayed a little with each stir, and despite the F-5 tornado in his head, Riley noticed. Hard not to notice since she was wearing denim shorts that hugged a very nice ass.
An ass that was strangely familiar.
She turned slightly to the side when she reached for the saltshaker, and Riley got a look at her face. Familiar all right.
Claire.
A real blast from the past. Calling Claire Davidson a childhood friend was a little like saying the ocean had a bit of water in it. Once they’d been as thick as thieves, but he’d pretty much lost touch with her after he graduated from college.
Riley took a moment to savor the moment. There was always something about Claire that reminded him of home. Of the things he’d left behind. Not that she’d been his to leave, but it always felt a little like that whenever he thought of her. Now he didn’t have to conjure up a memory. She was right there in front of him.
Wearing those nice-fitting shorts.
Riley went to
