Because of You: A Loveswept Contemporary Military Romance (26 page)

Osterman’s fiancée, Becky, was a cute, girl-next-door type, with brown hair and freckles. She helped Osterman through everything, day in and day out, no matter how silent her other half remained. But Shane saw a storm cloud gathering. Osterman’s eyes were dark and distant—he didn’t look at all like the fresh, eager kid he’d taken to Iraq just a few months before. And he was polite, freakishly so, with the girl who he’d been over the moon in love with before his injury.

He was pushing her away when he needed support, now more than ever. Becky had stood by Osterman through everything so far. She was pretty damn special to have stuck by his side through multiple burn surgeries and physical therapy. Osterman had no idea what he was doing: running off someone who cared enough to support him when things
got rough.

Shane started to roll his wheelchair over to Osterman. Maybe if he kept trying, he’d eventually find a way to get through to him.

“Sorry for the disappearing act. I wanted to show you something,” Jen said, returning suddenly and lowering herself to the bench beside him. Shane wished he had something more articulate to say to her other than, “What’s this?”

“Your latest images. The doc had to rush down to emergency surgery, so I get to be the bearer of good news for once. Your right leg is healing much faster than anyone expected. In about two more weeks, we can start looking at surgery to remove the external fixators and see how you do.”

Two weeks. In two weeks, he could potentially be on crutches instead of in a wheelchair. He’d be able to stand again. He was one small hurdle closer to getting back to his men. Something surged inside him. A feeling so foreign and strange he almost didn’t know what to do with it. It fluttered a little against his heart—faint but strong—and he found a name for it.

Hope. And just as quickly, that hope shattered.

“I’m tired of this, Aaron!”

Shane looked up sharply. Becky was glaring at Osterman, who was balancing on his crutches with a scowl.

“I said I’m going to work on it. What else do you want from me?”

Becky shoved him and Osterman rocked back on the crutches. “I want
you
back. I’m tired of this cranky, sullen crap. What about me, Aaron? Did you ever stop to think that this isn’t just about you?”

* * *

For a moment, Osterman looked like he was going to take a swing at his fiancée. Time hung still and Shane cursed his inability to separate them before one of them said or did something they’d regret. Osterman recoiled and the look on his face was pure anguish.

“Screw you, Becky! You sat back here and watched the war on TV while I was off fighting in some shit-hole country and getting blown half to hell. You think nagging the hell out of me is the best way to help me? I don’t need your sympathy, and I damn sure don’t need your pity!”

The Dee Snyder look-alike rushed up to intervene, but she was too late. The crack of Becky’s palm against Osterman’s cheek stunned the rest of the room into silence.

“I don’t deserve that, Aaron. But congratulations. You wanted me to leave. I’m gone. You want to kill yourself, do it alone. I’m not going to stand by and watch.” She snatched up her purse and left. The automatic doors swung wide, then slowly closed behind her, sealing the room into an awkward silence. Someone coughed after a moment, and then a throat was cleared. Osterman didn’t look around as he palmed his iPod and hobbled out of the room, his head hanging low.

“Shane?” Jen said, her voice a whisper.

Cold fear gripped his throat. He watched Osterman go, dead sure if he let the kid leave without saying something, the next time he’d see him would be on a gurney.

“I’ve got to try and catch him.” He maneuvered through the benches and weight machines and pushed himself down the hallway, hoping to make a difference, just once more.

“Osterman!” Shane powered his wheelchair through the hospital parking lot, toward the ancient medical hold barracks. It was a goddamned travesty that the soldiers who had nowhere else to go, some of whom required constant medical care, lived in these condemned buildings.

Right now, Shane had the more immediate concern of catching Osterman before he got into the building and up the stairs—where Shane couldn’t follow him. Elevators hadn’t been a part of army life when these buildings were designed half a century ago and guys like Osterman were forced to hobble up dark stairwells to mildew-infested rooms.

He hated the damned bureaucrats who made decisions like this. They focused on the almighty dollar instead of the well-being of the soldiers. They were the same bureaucrats who sent soldiers off to war without adequate ammunition or armor, then sniffed and said they were working on it when the media finally roused themselves enough to care.

“Osterman!”

He stopped. Thank God in heaven, Osterman stopped, right in front of the door to the barracks. Shane let gravity power him down the gentle slope and damn near burned the skin off his palms when he tried to stop suddenly. “Hey. What happened?”

So much for eloquence.

Osterman fiddled with his iPod, one earbud still dangling around his neck. “I’m so fucking tired of her crap. Have you taken your medicine? Have you eaten? Have you wiped your ass? I’m sick of being treated like I’m a fucking baby. By her. By Carponti. By
you
.”

“I haven’t treated you any different. You’re still my best gunner.”

“Ha-ha. Nice. I’m not a gunner, and I’m not an armorer. And you keep looking at me like I’m going to blow my fucking head off. So don’t try and play the hero, Sarn’t G, ’cause I’ve known you since I was a private, remember? You always sucked at bullshitting us.”

Shane bit back a surge of anger. “Who the hell do you think you are? You think you’re the only one who’s gotten hurt? Shit, I know amputees who run marathons. Hell, they’re better with the new legs than with the ones they were born with.”

“I’m twenty-three fucking years old! I don’t want to be a fucking cyborg. You don’t see the looks I get every time I hobble around the hospital. The goddamned pity. You think I want to wave the freak flag of a fucking mechanical leg? I want my life back!”

“This isn’t the way to do it. You’re running everyone out of your life who gives a shit about you.”

“You’re going to sit there and lecture me, too? I’m the one missing a fucking leg. You’ll be up and walking soon.”

“And I’m going to be in fucking rehab for at least a year. Are you really sitting here playing a who-has-it-worse game with me? That’s unworthy of you. You’re better than that, Osterman.”

“Correction. I was better than that. Now? Now I just want all of you to leave me the fuck alone.”

Osterman disappeared behind the ancient, rust-colored door of the barracks. Shane closed his eyes and let out a vicious stream of profanity. Goddamn it, he needed to get up to that kid’s room and snap him out of it. That wasn’t the kid who’d patrolled Sadr City
with him. That wasn’t the kid who’d taken down an entire house laden with explosives with a fifty cal. He needed to find Carponti and send him up after Osterman.

Shane stared at the door, and at the stairs behind it, and swore as helplessness gnawed at his soul.

“How’s Vic?” Jen set a bottle of wine on the coffee table in Laura’s living room, sidestepping a Tonka truck.

Laura started to pick up, but Jen stopped her. Once upon a time, her living room had looked like a Pottery Barn display. Now? Now it looked like a playroom with a couple of push toys stuffed in the corner near the fireplace. “Sit. Clean later. It’s just us.”

Nicole smiled sadly and reached for the bottle. “He’s fine, now that I’ve taken all his pills away. He got pissed when I asked him about his prescriptions for the first time. After the accident, though, he practically dropped them into my lap.”

“He did?” Jen said.

“Yeah. Said he was sorry he screwed up. He thought he had everything under control and he didn’t. He didn’t want to accidentally kill himself, so would I please keep him from overdosing again.”

Laura frowned and looked up at the ceiling. “Sorry, thought I heard the kids. Is this the same Carponti I know?”

Nicole offered a faint, lopsided shrug. “At least he’s okay and he’s letting me help. I felt so powerless before.… What’s this?” she asked, as she reached beneath the coffee table and pulled out a large photo album. “Laura and Trent, circa August 2001.”

A younger version of Laura stood smiling on the front of it, her hand pressed to the
heart of a much younger looking Trent, who was also smiling.

“I borrowed that wedding dress,” Laura said, leaning over. Instead of looking away, she scooted even closer so that she could look over Nicole’s shoulder. A hint of a smile played on her lips. “Trent looked so good in his Dress Blues.”

“Most men do,” Jen said.

“Oh no.” Nicole ran the tip of her finger around the rim of her glass. “You obviously have not been to a military ball. Some of the paunches those guys try to squeeze into uniforms they wore when they were privates or lieutenants are downright scary. Should be criminal.”

Laura laughed and turned the page. “Most men look sexy in their blues, how about that?”

Jen stopped hearing anything. Trent stood next to Shane on the page in front of them. Younger, his face not quite so worn by the elements or time. His shoulders were just as broad and his blues tapered into narrow hips that were clothed in lighter blue pants. She leaned closer and looked at the awards on his chest and wished she knew what they represented. There were a lot of them. At least, it looked like a lot to her.

“Maybe you’ll share your good news with us when you’re done undressing Shane with your eyes?” Nicole asked.

“What good news?” Jen blinked and looked up from the photo. There might have been good news had things not gone so badly between them. But they had. So many times over the last few days, she’d almost stepped over the barrier between them. And each time, she’d turned away.
He had to be the one to cross it
.

“Don’t lie. You and Shane, you know …”

Embarrassed heat crawled over Jen’s skin. She tried to find somewhere else to look besides at her friends, but her gaze just landed back on the photo of Shane.

“Spill,” Laura said. “I’ve spent so much time with my vibrator, I’ve forgotten what a penis looks like. I’m living vicariously through your sex life.”

Jen flushed and Nicole pounced. “Laura, look, she’s blushing.”

“So it was good then?”

Jen closed her eyes and nodded and wished this wasn’t such a disaster. The conversation or the sex, for that matter. “Yeah.”

“Um, I can’t have some sexy hot fantasy involving Eric Bana if you don’t give me more details than just a yeah,” Laura said. “Where is he tonight, anyway?”

“He’s home. He’s been quiet lately.” Jen lifted a page and peeked on the other side. Shane was dancing with a striking woman with black hair and pale skin. She looked like a goddess.

“That’s his ex-wife,” Laura said, tapping the page with her middle finger.

“She’s beautiful,” Jen murmured. She tried not to compare the woman in the picture with the scarred woman she saw every time she looked in the mirror. But she did. Where Tatiana was willow thin and gorgeous, Jen was petite and, well, she supposed she wasn’t hideous. At least not until her bra with the silicon mold came off.

“She’s a bitch,” Nicole said. “I don’t care how lonely you are, you don’t cheat.” Laura flipped the photo album closed. “This whole trip down memory lane is pointless. I don’t need to look at my wedding pictures. I was there, remember?”

“Just because something went wrong doesn’t mean you can’t still love him,” Nicole said.

“Loving Trent isn’t my problem. He’s the father of my kids. I’m always going to love him. I can’t be in love with a picture. I’m tired of waiting for him to come home.” Laura set her wineglass down with a hard tink and stood. “I love you both, but you have no idea what it’s like raising two kids by yourself. I’m not a single parent by choice, I’m a single parent by my husband’s choice. He’s literally been home for long enough to get me pregnant and that’s it.” She bit her lips and stared into space. “I can’t trust him. Not about being faithful. Not about his reasons for deploying. How can I possibly stay married to him?”

Laura didn’t speak for a long moment. When she reached for her glass, her hand shook.

“It doesn’t sound like that will make you happy,” Nicole said.

“It won’t. But I’ll stop caring eventually.” She poured another glass.

“Maybe he’s busy,” Nicole said. “I know Trent. I really don’t think he would cheat. You should give him the chance to explain.”

Laura scoffed and dragged out two large scrapbooks, one pink, one blue. “Want to see what more time gets me? Look. Here’s Emma’s birth. Just me and my little girl alone in the hospital. And here’s Ethan’s. Noticing a trend so far?”

“No Trent,” Jen murmured.

“And we have a winner. But wait, there’s more. If you turn the pages of these albums, you’ll see first birthdays, second birthdays, Halloween, and every single Thanksgiving since 2003. You know what you won’t see? Any pictures of Trent. Because he wasn’t there.” Laura dashed her fingers beneath her eyes and attempted a watery smile. “I’ve tried. I’ve done five different tours alone now and I would have waited a
decade or more for him if things were different. But, cheating rumors aside, he’s been
volunteering
to go. I’m done waiting for a man who doesn’t want to come home to me.”

And Jen couldn’t argue with that. No matter how badly she wanted Trent and Laura to fix things, Trent had hurt her friend, and badly. It was going to take a miracle to get through her pain, and Trent wasn’t even trying.

He’d given up his family to go to war and Laura had every reason to be furious and hurt and finished.

* * *

Shane looked up from the magazine he’d been pretending to read for the last three hours. The front door open and Jen walked through. He was hit with a potent kick of relief mixed with desire. He was fixing this. Tonight, one thing in his life was going to go right, damn it. Maybe he couldn’t be with her, but he could damn well get things back to what they’d been like before he’d screwed up. He could get back to being her friend.