his truck away from the reach of the fire—he’d left the keys in the ignition—but the driver’s side was looking a little singed. Great.
Well, he didn’t have the energy to get upset about it. Long ago he’d learned that disasters happened, and so he’d taken out full coverage on his insurance. Good thing, because it was a brand-new truck and had four thousand, nine hundred and, oh, about thirty miles on it the last time he’d looked.
“Are you going to have someone look at that back?” Cadence asked.
“It’s nothing to worry about.” He took another step and gritted his teeth. Wow, his leg was hurting worse. As if the heavyweight champion of the world had decided to take a whole lot of warm-up punches on his calf.
“Did you forget something, wonder man?”
Then it hit him. “My crutches.”
“I thought you might need them. That would explain the cast on your leg.” Cadence had known Ben McKaslin most of her growing-up years. This didn’t surprise her. “Don’t tell me it’s broken and you’re walking on it?”
“Walk on it? I hiked ten miles to an LZ, a landing zone, and didn’t bat an eye.”
Good try, but you’re not impressing me, cowboy. Cadence folded her arms across her chest and did her best to glare at him. He was using that charming grin of his, the one he figured could make even the angels forget his every transgression.
She, however, was immune. Immunity gained long ago.
He reached one big hand for the crutches she held. “Contrary to popular opinion, if a fracture isn’t too severe, you know, like a compound with the bone sticking through your skin, you can walk on it. Some of us are tough enough to fight bad guys, secure a perimeter and treat wounded with all sorts of ailments in spite of an injury or two.”
Some things never changed, and that was Ben McKaslin. The grown man in his thirties standing before her was essentially no different from the eighteen-year-old she remembered. The one with an attitude and an overly high opinion of himself. Was she surprised? Well, she shouldn’t be.
She thrust his crutches at him to keep him as far away from her as possible. “You need to have the paramedics look at your back.”
“I’m good to go.” He took the crutches from her, and his nearness snapped between them like static electricity.
Like the tiny spark that had ignited the gasoline fumes from the van’s gas tank, the result shocked her. And had her stepping away from what had to be danger. “Your shirt’s started to smolder again.”
“I’ve had worse.” He said it as if he walked through flames every day.
Ben McKaslin was everything dangerous in a man. He was too handsome, too charming, too everything. She’d made sure their fingers didn’t touch as she handed off the crutches. The sticks of aluminum clanked as he took them in one hand, leaning now on his good leg as if the injured one was only starting to pain him just a bit.
Just like old times. Only Ben could turn a stop for gas into a three-alarm blaze, and it was never his fault. Where there was smoke, there was Ben.
Although something had changed about him, but she couldn’t place what. Everyone knew he’d joined the military—and not a moment too soon, lots of folks had said. Maybe it had done him good. One could only hope. “They’ve got the flames out.”
“So I see.” He reached into his shorts pocket, leaning awkwardly on one crutch as he did it. Then he shook his head, scattering short shocks of thick dark hair. “The keys are in the truck, not my pocket. Habit.”
She took one look at his dimples as he smiled more broadly, deepening them on purpose.
Right, as if he could actually charm her. She wasn’t even affected. Not in the slightest. She’d learned to be strong long ago. Ben McKaslin was no man to trust. Besides, he wasn’t here to stay. It was as plain as day he was injured on duty and so he’d probably be home for a visit for, what, a couple of weeks? Eight at the most, to heal that injured leg of his, and then he’d be racing back to wherever it was he was stationed.
Sure, Ben had always possessed great and admirable qualities, despite his flaws, but he wasn’t a stick-around kind of man.
She was beginning to think they’d stopped making men like that sometime before she was born, because she had yet to meet one man she thought would stick. One who would be responsible and honorable enough to depend on for the long haul.
Not that she had trust issues, of course, although on many occasions, her coworkers had pointed out that she did.
Okay, so maybe she did, but her trust issues had never been the only reason he’d left the day after graduation for boot camp. And never looked back.
Forgiveness, Cadence. It was sometimes the hardest part of her faith. She’d had to do so much of it throughout her life. Maybe the angels were giving her as many opportunities as she needed to get it right.
So she tried to let her resentment go. She wasn’t the head-in-the-clouds teenager she used to be. No matter how it seemed, Ben had to have matured, too. So it was with as clear a heart as she could manage that she tried one more time. “Let me take a look at your back. You can’t go home like that.”
“Sure I can. My family wouldn’t recognize me if I didn’t have something wrong.”
Where he could have said those words flippantly, he was steadier. Lines had dug their way into the corners of his eyes, and gave his face character. It was his eyes that had changed. They didn’t light up. They didn’t sparkle.
She couldn’t stop the cloying sadness that overtook her. A sense of loss overwhelmed her, and suddenly wrestling to forgive him didn’t seem like such a big problem.
By the looks of it, he’d had a tough road over the years, too.
He didn’t look at her as he made his explanations and his attempt at an escape and emotional distance. “I’ve gotta get home. Looks like they’re taking the mother to the hospital. She’s lucky. Goes to show a lot of folks don’t realize the danger when they’re filling up their tanks.”
“I guess no one really thinks about it. I don’t.” She got the clue. He didn’t want to remember old times. Neither did she. It was sad, the years that stretched empty and lost between them. As much trouble as the teenage Ben had brought into her life, he had brought laughter, too. Where once they had been close, now they couldn’t be more distant. Just two people who stopped to get gas during one summer’s night. They’d keep it polite, the type of conversation two strangers might have.
She didn’t know what more to say to him. She didn’t know how to broach the past. To ask if he’d gotten married, if he had kids, or if he’d stayed as carefree and independent as he’d always intended to be. What did he do in the military? How had he become injured?
She was so far removed from the local news. She didn’t live in the same small town any longer. She lived here in Bozeman and went home a few Sunday evenings a month to have supper at her mom’s, but her old life—including an innocent teenage romance with Ben—was so past history, it wasn’t even a shadowed blip on her radar.
“Goodbye,” she said to Ben casually, as
