Men of Courage (7 page)

“I see.” Riley kissed her ear. “Let’s let the paramedics take a look at you, okay?”

“But I’m fine.”

“We’ll do it anyway.”

Disgruntled, she said, “All right, but at least let me walk.”

“No.” Riley headed for the ambulance that had just pulled up.

Ethan watched him carry her off, a little surprised though he didn’t know why. Riley was…well, he was more dangerous than any modern man should be. He’d joined their group after they all met on a fishing trip. Since then, they’d been good friends, but Ethan was always aware of Riley’s sharper edge and thinly veiled civility. He hid it well, but there were times, such as now, when his primitive instincts shone loud and clear.

Ethan had seen hints of it with the way Riley fought, how he remained alert at all times, the precise gentleness he utilized in his everyday life,
as if he had to concentrate on that because it didn’t come naturally.

This was the first time he’d seen his armor crack around a woman. Interesting.

Shrugging away those thoughts, he gave his attention back to Rosie. “Honey, we can get married any way you want. It was stupid of me to—”

“You heard me, Ethan Winters.” The rest of the roof caved in with a thunderous crash. Rosie jumped, gripped him tighter and raised her voice accordingly. “It’ll be a small wedding, damn it, just us and the guys and well…maybe Regina.” She looked worried, and watched him with a frown. “You won’t mind that, will you? I like her and I kind of think Riley does, too.”

“You kind of think, huh?” Ethan glanced over at the ambulance where a paramedic tried to convince Riley to set Red down. Ethan grinned, knowing Riley had just claimed a woman in the most elemental way known to man. No way would he relinquish his hold on her. “I’d kind of say you’re right.”

“I do love you, Ethan.”

He sat—or rather his knees gave out—but he caught Rosie on his lap. “As long as I get you and the house and the dog and the kids, nothing else matters to me.”

She beamed at him. Ethan pushed her singed hair away from her face and kissed her. “You’re making me old before my time.”

She sighed. “Well, as long as I’m the only one making you, I can live with that.”

R
OSIE LAUGHED
as she got out of the limousine Ethan had insisted on hiring. They’d ridden to the small church with Harris, Buck, Riley and Regina. Her white dress was knee-length, simply cut, but it was lovely, the bodice overlaid with lace and pearls. The look on Ethan’s face when he’d seen her in it had made her feel more beautiful than any traditional wedding gown could have.

The church was another thing he’d insisted on. And Rosie loved him too much to argue. Only two weeks had passed since the fire, which was still under investigation. They’d found the man who had carried Regina out, but no one else. He denied taking her camera, denied any wrongdoing, and claimed the other man Rosie had heard was just a customer.

He did agree that someone had deliberately set his place on fire. Unfortunately, he wanted to blame Regina.

So far, the fire was a mystery, but Riley was now convinced that Regina had reason to worry—and he’d taken it upon himself to keep an eye on her.

Rosie started for the front door of the church, but Ethan sidetracked her. “We need to go in from the back.”

“We do? Why?” Everyone kept watching her, making her very suspicious. “What’s going on, Ethan?”

His smile made her heart do flips.

“You’re so difficult, sweetheart. Come on.” He caught her hand and she had to trot in her high heels to keep up with him. Regina carried her bouquet for her—a beautiful creation of roses and baby’s breath and lilies. There was a strange hush to the air as they traversed the cobblestone path to the rear. Rosie hesitated when she saw the flower-covered trellis, but Ethan didn’t give her a chance to balk.

They stepped through the trellis—and into an elaborate setting of orange blossoms, crepe paper and hundreds of chairs filled with guests. A multitude of trees had been decorated with ribbons and a white outdoor platform, complete with a smiling minister, had been erected on the immaculate lawn.

Thunderstruck, her mouth hanging open, Rosie scanned the crowd of grinning faces. She recognized her neighbors, all the people she worked with, Ethan’s relatives and co-workers and friends and…almost the whole town.

And there, right in the front row where her family belonged, was her brother with Michelle at his side. He looked at her for a long moment, his expression poignant, tender, then he grinned like a rascal and winked. Michelle gave a small, happy wave. Emotion choked Rosie and she started gasping, unable to catch her breath.

“Hey.” Ethan slipped his arm around her. “Don’t faint on me now.”

She stared at him through a haze of tears. “Oh, Ethan…”

He caught her chin and tipped her face up to his. “I love you, Rosie.”

She covered her mouth with a shaking hand, gulped, but it didn’t help. Darn it, she never cried.

Ethan turned them both so that he blocked her from view with his body. Smiling, he used one fingertip to wipe the tears away. “You’re going to ruin your makeup, sweetheart.”

“But I thought you didn’t want this.” She sniffled, tried to pull herself together without
much success. “Ethan, it’s wonderful, it really is. But you’re all that’s important. Nothing else matters to me…”

“It matters to me, Rosie. I used to think if I did this, everyone would see me and remember how I’d been jilted.” His mouth curled in a crooked smile. “Now I know what they’re really thinking.”

“What?”

His thumb rubbed under her chin, teasing her, keeping her face turned up to his. “That you’re beautiful, and that I’m the luckiest man alive.” He bent and kissed her to the roar of their guests. When he lifted his head, he grinned. “And I want the whole town to know that you’re mine.”

Rosie heard soft music begin, saw the guests all smiling and the flash of a camera capturing the moment.

Regina rushed up and handed her the bouquet.

Rosie stopped crying. She had everything—because she had the perfect man. Forever.

She caught Ethan’s hand and dragged him to the platform. To the surprise of the other guests, Harris and Buck and Riley all whooped, cheering her name and swinging their fists in the air. But then, they were used to Rosie and her pushiness.

Once they were standing in front of the min
ister, Ethan pulled her close. “Love me forever, Rosie.”

She laughed and threw her arms around him. “I already have.”

Donna Kauffman

H
ALEY
B
RUBAKER
was somewhere over Texas when disaster struck. The pilot announced that an earthquake had just rocked Northern California. More important, the epicenter was being reported as just south of San Francisco. Which was exactly where Haley called home.

The extent of the damage was unknown, but they were being rerouted to a different airport well south of the area.

Her first thoughts weren’t of family and friends, as she didn’t communicate with the former and hadn’t been in the Bay Area long enough to develop the latter. Okay, so it had been two years. Maybe she needed to come out of her home studio more often. But this new life, the new business she’d started, meant everything. Slavish devotion was to be expected.

But, at the moment, her jewelry-making business was the furthest thing from her mind. All of her lovely, painstakingly handmade pieces,
which she’d just signed a very nice series of contracts to sell in small, exclusive shops from L.A. to Dallas, were tucked away in velvet-lined cases, back at home, awaiting shipment. Her whole future was in those little boxes, and yet she didn’t give them even a passing moment of thought. She was only worried about one thing.

Digger. Her four-year-old Jack Russell terrier. The one and only living, breathing creature in the whole world who had never let her down, never turned his back in a time of need, never sneered at her big plans, never embezzled her hard-earned money, nor stomped on her too trusting heart. Digger. Her little four-legged fountain of unconditional love and affection. Possibly trapped…possibly worse.

She refused to think that, to allow herself to think that. The rest could be gone, she’d rebuild. She’d done it before. “Just let Digger be okay,” she murmured as she stumbled from the plane, almost numb from worry, and headed directly to the nearest phone. Lines were jammed and she finally had to borrow a fellow passenger’s cell phone to place the call to her pet sitter. Service was disrupted, so she tried the cell phone number. Finally, after a dozen tries, there was an answer.

“Mrs. Fletcher? Thank God! It’s me, Haley. Please tell me you—” She paused, barely able to hear the older woman over the pounding of her heart. A heart that fell rapidly as what the woman was saying sank in.

“I knew you were coming home today and thought you’d enjoy having him there waiting for you,” she was saying. “So I took him up to the house this morning.” Pauline Fletcher, who ran a little pet-sitting service in the oceanside town of Blue Moon, down below Haley’s house, was beside herself with despair. “I—I’m so sorry.” She broke down in tears.

It took a moment for Haley to get the lump past her throat enough to speak. “The town—the damage—”

She’d already heard enough, seen enough on the airport television monitors, to know several small towns along the coast, just south of the city, had been particularly hard hit. Blue Moon was one of them. But she hadn’t been able to gather any more specific detail than that. She knew she had to get to a rental car counter as soon as possible or there would be nothing left to rent, as many other flights had been diverted here, as well, and everyone was scrambling to
find a way home. But she needed to know everything Pauline could tell her first.

“Have you seen the town? Are you okay?”

Pauline sniffled, cried, then finally sucked in a steadying breath. “I was up in the city when it hit. I haven’t been able to get back. The road looks like someone took it and shook it, like a ribbon. It’s all buckled. You can’t get close. I’m stuck up here. I don’t know.” She started to cry again. “I just don’t know.”

Haley tried to reassure her, but she was just as bewildered, just as lost. They finally broke connection and Haley numbly pushed herself to a car rental counter. Then another, then another. It took almost two hours, but she finally got a car—a small sports car far beyond her budget, but literally the last car on the lot—and got on the road.

She’d shut her mind down, focusing on driving took every bit of her will. Mercifully left behind was the incessant reporting on the television monitors. She left the radio off. She’d fall apart completely if she had to listen to it anymore.

She knew enough to understand that getting close via the coast road was her best chance. The highways were jammed, huge parts of them sunken into the ground as if a giant had danced upon them. She couldn’t let herself picture it,
couldn’t let herself think about it. She had to get home. Had to find out if Digger was okay.

The closer she got, the calmer she got. It was a surreal calm, but she clung to it, ticking off one mile, then another. Fighting the occasional log jam as she passed through each small town. It felt as if it took forever to reach the outskirts of her county, then her town. Her house was up a semiprivate road just south of town, which wound up into the hills to three houses built literally into the side of the mountain. There were originally more planned, but heavy rains and two serious mudslides had ruined the developer’s plans and he’d bailed out. Leaving the three model homes at bargain-basement prices.

Haley had been at the right place at the right time, or so she’d thought. Unafraid of Mother Nature after mankind had already done a tap dance on her soul, she’d snapped up one of the houses. “I should have known Mother Nature would have as mean a streak as everyone else I’ve come across in my life,” she muttered as the traffic once again began to clog up.

She was less than a mile south of town when her trip came to an abrupt end. It was late afternoon, a little more than eight hours since she’d been in that plane, hearing the news for the first
time. It felt like a lifetime ago. A roadblock had been set up and as she pulled over and parked along the side of the road, with the media and television crews and other travelers, she got her first glimpse of what Mother Nature could do when she was really good and pissed off.

Haley sat there, in shock. No television monitor could prepare a person for the reality of it, the enormity. The road beyond the block looked just as Pauline had described: like a crumpled ribbon. Only it was a ribbon of concrete and blacktop. She looked up into the hills above the road, toward her house, but she was too far away and the trees hid her home from view anyway. Unless, of course, the trees were no longer there, sent tumbling like so many Pick Up sticks, her house along with it—

Again she shut that mental path down. Ruthlessly.

“Breathe. Stay focused,” she schooled herself, then went about finding someone who could tell her what was going on. Men in yellow rescue-worker jackets and helmets swarmed like bees around the roadblock and the makeshift headquarters that had been set up in a gas station parking lot. In addition to the amazing numbers of media trucks with dishes mounted on top and
cables running everywhere, there was rescue and emergency equipment, fire trucks and heavy machinery lined up, with more rolling in as she fought her way through the small throngs of on-lookers and worried homeowners such as herself, looking for someone who might know something. Anything.

She stopped several men, but they all told her the same thing. A makeshift shelter had been set up at the high school gym a mile down the road. She needed to go back there and they would tell her what they knew, when they knew it. He said insurance adjusters were there, claims people, and there were forms she should start filling out. Just in case.

She couldn’t even think about that now. “You don’t understand. My dog—”

“They’ll have lists,” the man said shortly, if not unkindly. “Go to the shelter.”

Lists. Haley felt a little dizzy. She knew what kind of list he meant.
No. No, wait.
She raced after him, wanting to know about the other lists. The people who were rescued, sent to hospitals maybe, or makeshift first-aid centers. Surely pets and animals were being rescued, too.

He’d already been swallowed up in the rapidly growing sea of people and workers. It was then
she saw the dog. A black Labrador, trotting at the side of a man wearing the dark blue pants and T-shirt of a firefighter, but without the helmet and heavy coat. He had a dog.
He’d understand,
was all she could think.

Pushing through the crowd, ignoring the few who stopped and tried to direct her the other way, toward the shelter, she finally moved in behind him. The dog turned first, ears perked slightly, tail up, an animated look on its face. Tears suddenly surged forward and her throat grew tight. Haley fought them down as she put her hand on the man’s arm and tore her gaze from the dog’s friendly welcome. Would she ever see Digger’s bright eyes, hear his friendly yip of hello?
Stop it. Don’t think like that.

The man stopped, turned. And for the first time in what felt like a lifetime of hours, minutes and seconds, she forgot about Digger, the quake, all of it. “Brett? My God, Brett Gannon?”

She’d been running from her past for several years; had escaped it entirely, in fact, when she’d settled in Northern California. But this was a blast from a different past, a happier past. Her college years. A time and place out of her regular life. If you could call anything about her life up to that point regular. She’d reveled in those years,
her anonymity, her ability to be, for once, blessedly normal. Just another coed. Not Haley Brubaker, of the Litchfield County Brubakers. It had been a time for learning, for discovering who she was and for falling in love. Not with the younger man who stood in front of her. With his older brother, Sean.

Eight years had done a lot for the gangly sixteen-year-old, she noted. Couldn’t help but note. Because Brett was far from a teenager now. He was all man, every six-foot-plus, perfectly muscled inch of him. He’d always been cute. The bright blue eyes that all the Gannon men had, the thick, dusty-blond hair like his mother’s, the blinding bright smile. But whereas Sean’s smile had been confident and a bit edgy, at least to her nineteen-year-old mind, Brett’s had been more mischievous and fun-loving.

He smiled now and she noted the slight crinkles at the corners of his eyes, probably a result of the deep tan that gave him a somewhat weathered, surfer boy look. The eyes were just as bright, the hair bleached a great deal blonder. Total beach boy, very sexy. Except the last time she’d seen him, he’d been back home in Baton Rouge, at the Gannon spread on the Mississippi River.

“Haley? Haley Brubaker? My God, it is you!” He grinned and pulled her into his arms for a tight hug. Unlike her family—the polar opposite in fact—the Gannons had always been an exuberantly affectionate bunch. Except for Sean. Leave it to her to fall for the one Gannon who wasn’t in touch with his emotions, she’d always thought. Of course, that was likely what had drawn them to each other in the first place.

The brief hug was a shock to her battered nerves; the hard length of his body an even greater one. She wished he’d held her longer. Not for any sexual reason, but for the sudden wave of affection that managed to neatly destroy the shaky wall of confidence that had brought her this far. Tears firmly sprang to her eyes and her throat completely closed over. There was no wishing them away.

She felt a wet nose press into her hand and looked down to find Brett’s dog looking up at her, tail wagging, eyes filled with concern. At least, it looked that way to her. Which only made the tears fall faster.

“Whoa, whoa,” Brett said, turning her to face him, pulling her, mercifully, back into those strong arms.

Refuge,
was all she could think. She wanted to
lose herself inside his embrace, burrow against him, close her eyes, drink in the smell of warm skin, laundered shirt and—well, man.
Just make it all go away.

But that lasted all of ten seconds. She hadn’t gotten to where she was by hiding when things got tough, much less letting someone else call the shots. The last time she’d done that she’d ended up bankrupt. Both financially and morally.

She fought to pull herself together. And to do that, she had to extract herself from his arms. But when his hands lingered on her elbows, his concerned face hovering above hers, she had to admit a momentary waver. “My dog,” she finally managed to say. “Digger. He’s up there.”

She lifted a shaky hand and pointed to the long ridge that paralleled the ocean. “I don’t know—” She stopped, took a breath, fought the gasp of a sob and definitely didn’t look at the dog still wagging its tail by her thigh. Instead she looked up at Brett. And found strength in a sea of blue. “I don’t know if he’s okay.”

“Come here,” Brett said, his tone calm despite the worry clear on his face. “You need to sit down. Let me get you some water.”

She yanked her arm free, suddenly ferociously angry. She knew it was the stress that she’d been
bottling up since the moment the pilot had announced the disaster, but she couldn’t seem to stop it. “I don’t want to sit down, damn it! I don’t want water. And I don’t want to go to the shelter. I want to find my goddamn dog!”

Brett lifted his hands, palms out, at her sudden outburst, but surprised her by smiling. “You know, I don’t recall you having a temper. Or swearing, for that matter.”

“A lot has happened since I last saw you,” she said evenly, but was shocked to find her mouth wanting to twitch, ever so slightly. That had always been Brett’s role in his rowdy, sometimes tempestuous family. The one who made everyone laugh, broke the tensions that only a large family could produce, with a quick joke, a cocky grin. She should resent him for doing it now, and so smoothly, so easily. But she needed to regain her footing, needed to stay calm and centered. He’d never listen to her if she was an irrational, screaming mess. And getting him to listen was critical.

Because she’d already decided he was her ticket in. Her ticket up there. To whatever lay beyond the flashing lights and grinding gears of rescue equipment, the endless cables and collective drone of television reporters.

To her home. Her livelihood. Her life.

Because Brett and his dog, which she now realized had some kind of rescue designation strapped to its sleek, muscular body, was her ticket to finding Digger.

Once again she placed her hand on his arm, once again found her center in the steady, calm depths of his eyes. And found it amazingly easy to do the one thing she swore she’d never do again. Turn to someone else and ask for help.