Alternately, the greatest discovery along the road with these characters was that although love goes a long way toward healing him, Gavin and Mavis embark on their journey knowing that it won’t take the disorder away. Yet they still choose to pursue it. In a lot of ways, this book is for service members and those who love them, through the good times and the bad times. It is a great joy to give you my sixth Superromance novel and Gavin and Mavis’s story.
Always,
Amber Leigh
PS: If you know a veteran in crisis, please contact the Veterans Crisis Line at 1-800-273-8255 or visit veteranscrisisline.net.
To those who serve.
And to Karen Reid—editor and friend.
May the Force be with you always.
Contents
MAN DOWN! ZACCOE’S DOWN!
The flashbacks had to stop. They came at him in the middle of the night when he was ready for them. They came at him in the middle of the day when he wasn’t.
Fall back! Get him to the Bradley!
Gavin Savitt jerked from the clutches of sleep. Colors bled through his eyelids. He could hear civilian life. Better, he could hear the soft wash of waves against the shore and the chatter of wind chimes, the kind that hung from the eaves of his father and stepmother’s bayside bed-and-breakfast. There was laughter, far off. Gulls crying overhead. He tasted sunshine on his lips.
The soothing sounds of the half of his childhood that had been good and whole and stable should’ve brought the unrest to a standstill. Should’ve obliterated it. It was fear that made the flashbacks hang around. The fear was all too real these days and had been his since his final deployment as a navy SEAL six months ago.
It was fear that he would open his eyes and the civilian world would be less clear to him than the assault of vivid memories from another world.
Funny that he hadn’t contemplated how stark and colorful those dreams were before his last mission, the one that had robbed him of half the visibility in his right eye and all of his left.
Gavin took a moment to quell the anxiety, to manage the fear, even if he couldn’t kill it any more than the flashbacks.
He braced himself, stomach tightening. Then he opened his eyes and confronted the odd blur of light and shade, the merging of shapes. He picked a fixed point out of his right eye to study...
The white house was like a beacon on a hill. Hanna’s Inn spread prettily, overlooking Mobile Bay. Even Gavin could see the proud and regal way it held itself up—columns, balconies, long narrow panes that glistened as the sun shrank from its high post. The winding paths through the gardens...he knew them by heart. Just as he knew the sand skirting the kempt lawn curved in a crescent shape to follow the slope of the Eastern Shore. Beneath its peaks and tumble-down kudzu-lined valleys, the beach formed the watery border of Fairhope, Alabama, the small town that had called to Gavin for most of his life.
He’d ignored that call, returning to Fairhope only out of necessity. However, nothing could compete with the inn that his father saw to alongside his stepmother, whose family it had belonged to for generations.
A smudge detracted from Gavin’s focal point. It was black and willow-slim. As he fixed on it instead of the inn, he frowned. It was getting closer, if not bigger, and he was definitely in its line of fire.
He
