Czytaj książkę: «The Colonels' Texas Promise»

Chapter One

“Attention to orders.”

The military personnel in the conference room came to their feet. Major Juliet Grayson was already standing at attention, as was her new commanding officer, who stood at her right. On her left stood the most wonderful person on earth: her son. Matthew was eleven years old and halfway through sixth grade, but he still looked boyish and acted goofy—most of the time. Not today.

Today, her little boy was trying to fill a man’s shoes. Juliet’s husband should have been here, standing at her left, ready to pin her new rank onto her uniform at this promotion ceremony. He was somewhere else. With someone else. Which was why he was her ex-husband.

“...special trust and confidence in the patriotism, valor, fidelity and abilities of Juliet E. Grayson.”

Fidelity. At least the US Army appreciated that quality.

“...she is therefore promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel on this date by order of the Secretary of the Army.”

There was polite applause in the conference room and genuine smiles. Promotions were happy occasions, even when the person being promoted had only been assigned to the unit for a couple of weeks. Juliet hadn’t yet moved into a permanent house here at Fort Hood, Texas, but the conference room was still filled with at least two dozen well-wishers, including her commanding officer, several senior noncommissioned officers, and a few of their civilian spouses. The spouses had come to welcome Juliet’s spouse, of course, but she didn’t have one. She hoped they would make a fuss over her son. Matthew had insisted on wearing a necktie.

Her son might be dressed as an adult, but he was still kid-sized. Juliet bent down so he could unclip her shoulder board from the blue suit jacket of her service uniform. The rank insignia for a major, a gold oak leaf cluster embroidered onto the epaulet, was now a thing of the past. Matthew had her new shoulder board in his fist. Juliet suddenly wished they’d practiced the clipping and unclipping at home. He was just a child, and every adult in the room was focused on him; he might get flustered. His life had been rough enough without subjecting him to another potentially embarrassing situation. She should have thought of the possibility, should have shielded him from at least one small hurt, although she’d failed to shield him from the big hurt of divorce.

But after a moment of awkwardness when Matthew didn’t know what to do with the old shoulder board—Juliet simply held out her palm, so he could place it in her hand—he clipped on the new shoulder board with its higher rank, an insignia of silver oak leaves. Juliet was prouder of Matthew for the dignified way he was participating in this ceremony than she was with herself for being promoted. She winked at him, then stood so that her commanding officer could pin the new rank on her other shoulder.

Just like that, she was a lieutenant colonel.

It had only taken a few minutes...plus sixteen years of active-duty service. Sixteen years ago, she’d graduated from college, changed from her cap and gown into her brand-new army uniform, then raised her right hand and made a promise to defend the Constitution.

Sixteen years ago, she’d bid farewell to her tight-knit circle of college friends before taking her diploma and herself to her first duty station. Most of her friends had stayed in the city to start new careers. Two had stayed at the university to begin master’s degree programs. Out of their little gang of eight, only she and Evan Stephens had made a military commitment, volunteering their lives in the service of their country.

Evan Stephens. Blue-eyed, athletic, lover of beer and baseball and blondes, not necessarily in that order. Juliet was not a blonde. She and Evan—and the six others in their circle—were just friends and had been just friends since their sophomore year.

Sixteen years ago, she and Evan had gotten behind the steering wheels of their separate cars and left the campus for separate army posts, he to Missouri for the Military Police Corps, she to Arizona for Military Intelligence. But the night before graduation, after her parents had gone back to their hotel to sleep, Juliet had run into Evan on the college green. Under a full moon, they’d talked about their futures, just the two of them.

Their parents were proud of them, and she and Evan were excited to don their new uniforms, which shone with the single gold bar of a second lieutenant on each shoulder, but by that fountain in the moonlight, they’d dropped their ROTC cadet bravado and gotten real.

Do you think we’ll be stationed at posts we don’t want?

Do you think we’ll miss Christmas with our families next year?

Do you think we’ll see combat?

Do you think we’ll die?

These were concerns that didn’t come with the civilian careers their friends had chosen. More and more students had gathered on the central green, milling about in the moonlight. Then one student had gotten down on bended knee as he held up a little ring box to an excited girl. Or rather, a woman. They were adults now.

Juliet and Evan’s questions had taken a different turn. Evan had wondered why any civilian woman with a successful career would want to marry him and be dragged from post to post. She’d have to restart her professional life every few years, going back to handing out résumés and going to job interviews with each move. Juliet had wondered if any man would be willing to be left behind to take care of their babies on his own while she was deployed. A civilian spouse was pretty much guaranteed to face time as a single parent during the military spouse’s inevitable deployment or hardship tour.

I’m probably killing my chance of finding Mr. Right anyway, just by serving in the army. Military women have double the divorce rates of military men. Did you read that article?

Yeah, real nice of Colonel Hodges to post that crap.

Students from the college of music had shown up at the green with their violins and cellos for an impromptu jam session. Juliet and Evan had carried on the rest of their conversation as they’d danced with the crowd to stringed versions of current hit songs.

Slow songs.

They’d danced as a couple.

I don’t know why I’m worried about divorce, she’d said. I’d have to get married first, but I scare guys off just by being in ROTC.

You don’t scare me.

She hadn’t laughed. Evan hadn’t said it as a joke. His hands had felt strong and warm on her waist. She’d been dancing with her hands linked casually behind his neck. At his words—You don’t scare me—she’d looked up at him and realized how well she knew his handsome face after three years of shared cafeteria pizzas, study sessions at the library, Frisbee games right here on this green. She was going to miss it. She was going to miss him.

She was holding on too tightly.

She’d looked away. You’re so lucky, Evan. You can wait until you retire and then get married and have your kids.

Why can’t you?

Because we’ll be, like, forty-one years old at retirement. We’ll be colonels. Colonels are old. You’re a guy. You can have babies at forty-one, but it’s not likely I can.

Don’t be so sad. You’re worrying too much. Men are going to line up to marry you. You’re twenty-one and completely gorgeous—

She’d looked at him, startled. He’d caught the edge of one of his flip-flops on the grass and tightened his hands on her waist, but his voice had sounded very steady. I’ll marry you when you’re a retired old colonel. I promise.

And then he’d kissed her. She hadn’t known, hadn’t guessed, hadn’t given a thought to how warm his mouth would be. How soft his lips would be when the rest of his body was so hard. Hard shoulders she clung to. Hard thigh muscles her legs brushed against.

He’d ended the kiss, and this time, he’d been the one who looked away.

Her heart had pounded because this was wrong, all wrong. She was graduating. She was being sent to her first duty station, far away from his. He was her friend, and she should tease him like he was her brother, but she didn’t feel like teasing him. She felt like kissing him again, on the grass by the fountain, under the moon.

It would mess up all her plans. It would be absurd to start a new relationship mere hours before they were leaving one another to begin careers at posts that were thousands and thousands of miles apart.

They’d danced some more instead. As long as the violins had played, they’d danced. This is it. Goodbye to Evan, goodbye to all of my friends, to this green and this college and this life.

Her heart had kept pounding and the future had suddenly seemed more scary than bright. This was the last night she’d live in a city she chose. The last year she’d be certain she’d be home for Christmas. When would she see all of her friends again? When would she see Evan again?

She’d broken the silence. Why should I marry you as a retired colonel? I’ll be too old to have children by then.

He had laughed at that and gone one rank lower. Lieutenant colonel, then. We’ll be thirty-five or thirty-six, right? Plenty of time for making babies. If we’re both still single when we get promoted to lieutenant colonel, we’ll marry each other.

His laughter had chased away some of her fears. His promise, as silly as it was, had given her a fixed point of certainty in the vast, unknowable future. She’d let go of him and stepped back, but she’d held out her pinkie finger in the moonlight.

Evan had only scowled at her hand. Dudes don’t do pinkie promises. You have my word.

Dude, she’d mimicked him. Pinkie promise, or I won’t believe you.

He’d hooked her finger with his own and repeated his promise. If we’re both still single when we get promoted to lieutenant colonel, we’ll marry each other.

“Lieutenant Colonel Grayson, would you like to say a few words?”

Juliet thanked everyone for coming. She thanked her son for being there, and she joked that perhaps the promise of cake had been of equal enticement to the promise of skipping a half day of school. She cut the sheet cake with a tasseled sword her new unit kept on the wall for just such occasions, cutting neat square after neat square, but all the while, her heart was pounding like a college girl’s at midnight.

Juliet knew Evan had already been promoted to lieutenant colonel. The army published promotion lists that were avidly read throughout the military, so she’d seen his name when he’d been promoted below the zone, one year early.

She hadn’t seen Evan in person for years, not since a chance meeting on an airfield in Afghanistan that had lasted less than a minute. Before that, there’d been an alumni tailgate at a homecoming football game. She’d had a toddler-aged Matthew in her arms then, and she’d still had hope that her husband would grow into his role as husband and father, still hoped he’d become a more reliable man.

Juliet watched Matthew now, a preteen who was eating cake with the gusto of a little kid. He’d carried his plate over to a group of men in uniform and stood right in the middle of them as he ate forkfuls of frosting. He always gravitated to men in any situation, proof to Juliet that he needed a man in his life. Her father and brother lived too far away to fill in the gap left by her ex-husband. Matthew had no one to serve as a role model beyond a coach he might interact with for a few hours each week during Little League T-ball season, or a teacher he might have for one hourly class each semester.

Matthew looked so very young, despite his necktie, as he craned his neck back to watch the men as they talked over him. While he ate black and white cake layers, his eyes followed their conversation like it was a ping-pong match. Did the men remind him of his father? Or was he so fascinated because they were nothing like his father? Maybe he gravitated toward the authority and stability that uniforms represented, although it was because she herself wore a uniform that Matthew had just been plunged, yet again, into a new school in a new town in a new state. He might turn out fine despite his unstable childhood, or he might be scarred for life.

Matthew’s future was so uncertain, so unknowable—which meant hers was, too. She was so tired of facing down the unknown alone.

When Matthew caught her staring at him, she mustered up a smile, but she was thinking ahead to her plans for the immediate future. For this afternoon. After the cake, after she drove Matthew back to school, Juliet had somewhere to go.

Along with the promotion lists, Juliet had read that Evan Stephens was a battalion commander now, a position of great responsibility. Evan had been a reliable friend back in the day, and now the US Army clearly depended on him as one of their most reliable officers. The battalion Evan had been entrusted with was headquartered right here at Fort Hood. As of two weeks ago, so was she.

It was time to let Lieutenant Colonel Stephens know that she was now Lieutenant Colonel Grayson.

And single.

Just like he was.

* * *

Evan sat at his desk, busy with paperwork, bored out of his mind.

He flipped to the last page of the police blotter and initialed it. He was the commander of a military police battalion, a unit nearly 600 soldiers strong. The buck stopped here, on his desk. So did the police blotter.

Actually, the battalion had 589 personnel today. Evan always knew exactly how many lives he was responsible for.

He tossed the blotter into the outbox on his desk. Reading the blotter wasn’t strictly one of his duties. The MP station sent it directly to Evan’s commander, who was the Provost Marshal of Fort Hood and the commander of the 89th Military Police Brigade. Colonel Oscar Reed signed off on it, and then his boss—the commanding general of III Corps—was sent a copy. But if Evan’s boss and his boss’s boss read the blotter, then Evan read the blotter. He was never surprised, never blindsided, not when he could prevent it.

It was rare for one of his MPs to make the blotter as either a perpetrator or victim, but it happened. If the brigade commander called him for more details, Evan always knew to whom and what he was referring, and he’d already taken corrective action. No surprises. No blindsides.

Being proactive had made him a good platoon leader. A better company commander. A great operations officer. His file was full of glowing evaluations from superiors who appreciated an officer who stayed ahead of problems and stopped them before they started. Evan had been promoted below the zone because of it, not only selected for lieutenant colonel, but promoted earlier than 90 percent of the other officers who had also made the cut. That had not been a surprise, either.

Evan sat back from his executive desk, a piece of burnished wood furniture that the army only provided for its upper echelon of officers. His career to this point had been conducted from sturdier, uglier, government-issued desks of metal and Formica. He turned his chair so he could look out the second-story window at the Texas landscape outside. Even his chair was executive-level now. This was it: the big time. Battalion commander. One of the most-prized, high-speed, low-drag positions in the US Army.

He was bored as hell.

If he were a platoon leader fresh out of school or even a company commander in his midtwenties, he would leave his office and go check on his soldiers. Like practically every soldier in the army, he wore his camouflage uniform with his coyote-brown leather combat boots daily, so he was always ready to jump into a situation. Boots on the ground: that was the best way to gauge a unit’s preparedness. He’d go to the motor pool and walk the lines of the hundreds of vehicles that were his responsibility.

But he was a battalion commander now. The only difference between his uniform and everyone else’s was the embroidered oak leaf cluster at the center of his chest, but that was a big difference. If he showed up at the chain-link gate to the motor pool, there’d be a flurry of activity. His motor pool officer would drop what she was doing and come out to escort him, a matter of military courtesy as well as her pride. The motor pool was Chief Braman’s domain. Nobody, not even her commander, roamed around her turf without her knowing what was going on.

The first sergeants of every company would appear within minutes, jogging over from their company headquarters. If Evan spotted anything out of line, the NCOs would get it fixed immediately—and chew out the soldier who had let it slip in the first place.

A simple walk through the motor pool might make Evan feel less restless, but it would pull too many people away from their day unnecessarily. He should and did conduct inspections of the battalion’s equipment without notice, but he didn’t jerk his people around just to alleviate his own boredom.

Evan turned his chair back around and continued doing paperwork in his combat uniform.

Three short knocks on the open office door were followed by Sergeant Hadithi entering silently to collect everything from the outbox. He deposited more papers in the inbox. Evan nodded; the sergeant briskly left to go back to his desk, the metal-and-Formica kind, one of several in the administrative office that acted as a buffer to Evan’s inner, more executive office.

A few minutes later, he heard the sudden creaks of chairs and the squeaks of wheels that meant his administrative staff had all come to their feet. Someone of a fairly high rank must have walked in. How ironic—maybe his brigade commander was pulling a pop inspection on him. He’d wanted something to relieve the tedium of this day, hadn’t he?

Evan checked his watch. Still not quite three o’clock. Would this day never end? He tossed his pen on his desk and waited.

Sergeant Hadithi reappeared. Three more knocks—but this time, the sergeant didn’t cross the threshold. “Sir, there is a Lieutenant Colonel Grayson here to see you.”

Evan drew a blank. “Colonel who?”

“Grayson, sir.”

Grayson. Good God, Juliet Grayson from college? It had to be. Just like that, out of the blue, Evan’s day rocketed from mind-numbing to adrenaline-inducing.

The sergeant pushed the door open wide and flattened himself against it.

Juliet Grayson walked in.

She was wearing the blue service uniform with its knee-length skirt and black pumps, her hair smoothed back into a military bun. The medals and ribbons and badges she’d earned were displayed in precise rows on her dark blue jacket, attesting to a career in the profession of arms that had been as demanding as his. She was no longer a carefree college student with golden-brown hair that fell freely to the middle of her back.

He still would have recognized her in an instant. She was still tall, still energetic, still full of purpose—

Still beautiful.

Still another man’s wife.

“Hello, Evan.” She turned to the sergeant and dismissed him with a nod. “Thank you.”

Sergeant Hadithi backed out of the room, closing the door behind himself. It shut with a quiet snick, the only sound in the room as Juliet crossed the carpet to Evan’s desk. He’d never seen her walk in high heels before, had he? Sharp as hell. Sexy as hell.

She set her hat on the corner of his desk as he began to stand, but then she leaned forward and planted her fist squarely in the center of his desk. She opened her hand and stepped back, leaving a shiny pin on his desk, a silver oak leaf insignia.

He sat back down.

“I was promoted today.”

That was all she said.

It was all she needed to say. The memories he’d spent so many years deliberately repressing broke free. The fountain, the moonlight, the promise—and now here she was.

He’d never been more surprised in his life.