Because of You: A Loveswept Contemporary Military Romance Page 6

  “Sir. You can call me sir or lieutenant or LT Randall. But if you can’t be bothered to act like a professional, then it’s easy to see why your soldiers don’t, either.”

  He took a step toward the edge of the bunks, forcing Randall to either stand toe-to-toe with him or back up. Randall backed up. “Lieutenant, I’ve got two boys on their way to the hospital in Germany from last night’s attack. I’ve got a mission brief in fifteen minutes and I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours. I don’t have time to stroke your wounded ego. Find someone else for that. So get on with it, or get gone.”

  Randall flushed and swallowed. Shane was starting to hate that nervous habit of his. He really was.

  “I need the sensitive items report before you leave on patrol tonight,” Randall said, looking down at his clipboard like it held all the secrets of the universe.

  “And yesterday I needed parts ordered for one of my fifty cals. Guess which one got someone hurt?”

  “I can’t control the mechanics or the armament repair teams. There were other priorities more important than your weapons and trucks.”

  “Really? Because I checked with the motor sergeant and he said he never got the maintenance report that I turned in. To you.”

  Randall pursed his lips and clicked the cap on his pen. “I can double-check on that. But I need the sensitive items report.”

  “I already submitted it through Lieutenant Miller.”

  “I don’t have it and I can’t find Miller.”

  Shane rolled his tongue over his teeth and started counting to ten, buying himself some time before he jumped down Randall’s throat and ripped out his spleen. He made it to three. “I could really give two shits about what’s going on between you and Miller. I gave him the report; he knows when it’s due. If you two can’t act like adults and stop dragging the troops into your pissing contest, I’ll do it for you. But your incompetence has cost us time and blood, so my patience with you is running remarkably thin. Go find him and get the goddamned report yourself. And if I find out that you deliberately failed to get my equipment fixed because you wanted to get even with my lieutenant, I will personally nail your ass to the wall.”

  Randall’s jaw flexed as his nostrils flared. “So that’s how it is?”

  “I think I made it pretty clear.”

  The LT lifted his chin and walked off. Not quite stomped, but it was a close thing.

  Carponti snorted and a full-blown laugh wasn’t far behind. Shane’s temper finally snapped. “This isn’t funny. He’s not doing his job and people are getting hurt.”

  “Not the first time.”

  “And it probably won’t be the last, either, unfortunately. Did you check on Osterman like I asked?” Shane sat back down on his bunk, pulling out his weapons cleaning kit.

  Carponti sobered visibly. “Yeah. He’s already in Germany and he’ll be back in the States by morning.”

  “And?”

  “He’s stable, but he lost the leg.”

  Shane shoved his mail out of the way and rubbed his eyes as soul-crushing agony wrenched his guts. Osterman’s accident was just a tragic fucking mistake. They’d expected an easy path to the compound where their target had reportedly holed up, but what they’d gotten instead was a complex attack. And Shane had led the team into that goddamned choke point. The intel had shown a clear path through the village, but the militants had piled up burning trash and tires and created a funnel that Shane’s platoon had to either push through or turn and avoid and end up missing their objectivive. They’d pushed through the kill zone and captured the high-value target, but not without a cost. And it was too goddamned high for an intel mistake. Shane could do better. He’d get reports directly from brigade. He’d scrub the reports himself if the damned staff couldn’t do their jobs.

  But none of that would help Osterman. Shane could move heaven and earth to get correct intelligence reports, but it would still be too damned late for Osterman. He breathed deep and met Carponti’s gaze. He couldn’t change yesterday. He had only today to make a difference.

  That didn’t stop the regrets, though.

  “Fuck.”

  Carponti looked down at his hands and was silent for a long moment. “Yeah.”

  * * *

  “Laura, what’s wrong?” Jen approached her friend, who was directing a soldier’s wife toward the elevators.

  They stood in the middle of the hallway of the army medical center where Laura had spent the morning checking on a couple of wounded soldiers who had come in from Trent’s battalion. Laura worked for Trent’s brigade family readiness group. She often told Jen that the position was a thankless one. Some in the military considered the wives to be a small insurgency. Many times, the spouses felt ignored and maltreated by the military, who they felt didn’t care about their soldiers. It was Laura’s job to mediate between the two opposing forces and help the spouses take care of their own issues while getting the officers in charge to bend a little and care more about the wives’ challenges. And it was because of some dedicated spouses that soldiers weren’t charged travel days when they went on leave from the combat zone along with dozens of other quality-of-life improvements.

  Jen didn’t know how Laura balanced it all but she did. One of her duties as the family readiness group adviser was to check on the wounded and make sure they weren’t swallowed up by the medical system or forgotten by their unit. Not everyone had a family to come in and run interference between the hospital administrators and the docs.

  That’s where Laura and the rest of the family readiness group came in—all of them were volunteers. Laura’s was the only paid position. And asking a volunteer to sit with a family member who’d just lost a loved one … it was the hardest thing you could ask someone to do. Especially if that someone knew the next knock could be on their door.

  But today, her focus was elsewhere. She was checking on the wounded that’d just been flown in from Germany, doing her best to ensure that the officers and the wives all had the same information.

  Rumors could be deadly. But Jen was willing to bet that the soldiers’ recent arrival was not the main reason for the distracted look in her friend’s eyes. In the months following Trent’s departure, Laura had been relatively silent about her husband and that wasn’t like her. Laura always talked about her husband.

  Laura pressed her lips into a flat line, a shadow of her normal smile. “That obvious?”

  “Spill,” Jen said, as she threaded her arm through Laura’s, and started leading her toward the small coffee kiosk near the hospital’s main entrance. There were exactly five tables and six chairs and, happy day, two chairs were empty. It wasn’t really a place designed for comfort or confessions, but then again, a caffeine fix required neither. “And it’s my turn to buy therapy coffee.”

  Laura attempted to perk up at the mention of her favorite food group. “Thanks, but I think it’s my turn, isn’t it?”

  “Not with that look on your face it isn’t.”

  They sat tucked into a corner table, far from the crowd. Laura fiddled with her coffee stirrer while Jen waited for her to speak.

  “I haven’t heard from Trent.” Her voice cracked ever so slightly. “I always hear from him.”

  Jen leaned forward and squeezed her hand. Laura was the strongest person she knew and part of her strength was in trusting her husband. Trent’s constant deployments had taken a toll, but Laura had always bucked up. That was because Trent had always kept in touch. If she was worried, she had reason to be.

  The thought left a deep disquiet in the pit of her stomach. “What do you mean?”

  “He called last week, right? And the entire conversation was all about work. He didn’t ask about anything back here. I know he’s busy and has a ton of responsibility, but he always asks how I’m doing. It’s not that I need to talk to him about everything back here, but it helps that he always asks. Jen, he didn’t even ask about Ethan or Emma. He didn’t crack any jokes. He sounded exhausted and just hung up afte
r a minute. This isn’t like him.”

  “This is the Surge. We all knew this time was going to be different.” Jen heard the hollowness of her own words as she struggled to defend her friend’s husband. But sometimes she wondered what they did over there, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  “Jen, don’t make excuses for him. I know what he’s doing, and it’s not calling home. There is always time to call home. Hell, he called me right after a big fight in Najaf last time, just to ask me how my day went. It’s like he’s shut off or shut down. He never does stuff like this.” Laura rubbed her hands over her arms. “I just don’t know what’s wrong. I can’t fix it if I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  Jen stayed quiet, not sure what she could say to make things right again. Until her husband was home—permanently—nothing would be right in Laura’s world.

  Laura released a hard breath and leaned away from the table. “The last thing I want is to put pressure on him. I know how hard it is for him as a commander. He’s got a hundred and eighty soldiers that he’s responsible for. But something is wrong, Jen, I know it in my heart.”

  “Any idea what?”

  Laura looked away. “I have no clue.”

  “Can you tell him that? Tell him you need him to call home more, just to talk? It can’t be that bad over there, can it?”

  “What kind of wife would I be if I finally get him on the phone for more than five minutes and I give him shit about not calling home enough? Gee, honey, I know you’re getting blown up and all, but I need you to let me complain about the lawn mower breaking last week.” She lifted her coffee cup, then set it back down without taking a sip. “I can’t do that.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “You mean other than cry on your shoulder? Not much I can do.”

  Jen reached for her hand and squeezed. “Let me take the kids off your hands for a day. Or something. Why don’t you go to the library or relax or just take some time for you?”

  “Because …” Laura closed her mouth. “I might. Sorry. I shouldn’t be taking this out on you.”

  Jen laughed. “Um, pretty sure I owe you a meltdown or two. I dumped a whole lot on you when I was sick and my family didn’t bother to come down.”

  “Yeah, well, the least I could do was be there when they wouldn’t. Your family sucks.” Laura tucked her hair behind her ear and finally smiled.

  “And look on the bright side. At least you have hair when you’re giving me shit.” Jen smiled, still sometimes amazed that she could joke about what had happened to her. At least about some of the stuff. And it felt good to laugh. To be able to sit there and find something funny about the loss of her grandmother and her own brush with death. Anything was better than focusing on the missing pieces.

  “Great, thanks for that memory. Just where I wanted to be right now.”

  “At least it made you laugh.”

  “Yeah, it did. I just miss him so much,” Laura said. “I’m so damned tired of being alone.” She smiled sadly. “I told him a couple of weeks ago that he’d been replaced by my vibrator. You know what he said?”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “Send pictures.”

  Jen snorted coffee out through her nose. It burned and her eyes filled up as she tried to choke it back down. “Way too much information. Really.”

  Laura’s laugh echoed through the small coffee kiosk, prompting several odd looks from those around them. “Man, you should have seen your face. Priceless, truly priceless.”

  “Feel better now? I’m going to be smelling coffee for the rest of the day, thanks.”

  Jen turned at the sound of running footsteps to see Nicole rushing toward them, a panicked look on her face. She stopped at the edge of their table, breathing hard, her keys clenched in her hand. “Have you heard?”

  “Heard what?” Laura sat up straight. Focused. Attentive. This was the Laura Jen knew so well.

  “There are posts on the battalion Facebook page saying Vic’s whole platoon got hit.”

  All the color drained from Laura’s face and she went deathly still. Jen’s own skin went cold as she stood. “I’ll see if we have any information on the hospital manifest yet. I’ll be right back.”

  “I’m heading to the battalion headquarters,” Nicole said. “I’ll meet you over there.”

  Nicole was gone before either of them could answer and Jen rushed to find any information she could. Since Jen worked in the hospital on base, she kept an eye on the incoming personnel from Iraq, giving Laura a heads-up whenever she could. What they did wasn’t technically illegal, but it worked when the regular systems were too slow. Not a single soldier from Reaper battalion had been lost in the medical system, and they weren’t about to start now.

  “One of Trent’s soldiers.” She glanced at the sheet, just to make sure she didn’t make a mistake. “Aaron Osterman.”

  Laura’s eyes instantly watered, but she brushed the sudden emotion aside—a reaction that unfortunately came from too much practice. Jen knew she should be used to Laura’s stoic calm, but it still amazed her. Laura cared and cared deeply for the men in her husband’s company and, by extension, those in the other companies that made up his battalion. Jen didn’t know how she coped with so many notifications—of deaths, of injuries—over the years. Each one took a toll. Each one had to remind Laura that Trent had almost been one of them. All men Laura had known, whose wives she’d helped support after their husbands’ deaths. How did she do that after she’d come so close to losing Trent herself?

  In the back of her mind had to be the fear that someday Trent’s name could be on that list again, like it had been those horrible thirty-six hours early in the war. Jen would have to ask her how—why—she still did what she did with the families after what happened to Trent. But now was not the time.

  “What are we looking at?” Laura made notes in her ever-present green notebook.

  “Burn trauma and lower extremity trauma.”

  “When’s he coming in?”

  “Tonight.” Jen frowned. As hard as it was to break the news to family members that their soldier was wounded, it was so much worse to see wounded men and women sitting alone, day after day, week after week when no one showed up to check on them. Jen knew exactly how they felt, but it didn’t make it any easier. Which was another reason why she helped Laura. Every little bit helped. “Do you know if anyone is coming?”

  “Yeah. I just sent a text back to battalion and checked our notification rosters. Becky Fitzpatrick. Fiancée,” Laura said, scribbling notes. “Okay. I’ll brief the rear detachment commander that we’ve got things taken care of here.” Laura shouldered her purse and stuffed her notebook back inside. She squeezed Jen close before she headed toward the door. “Thanks. For everything.”

  Jen waited until she was alone to let a guilty relief prickle over her skin. Shane was safe. She hadn’t gotten the chance to know him well, but she still held her breath every time she saw a casualty report. The relief she felt for her friends’ husbands was real, but in a secret part of her heart, she was glad Shane’s name hadn’t crossed any of her lists.

  * * *

  Shane sat on the edge of his bunk and stared at the floor. He bounced one leg constantly, needing to exorcise the caged frustration churning inside of him. Goddamn, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so amped up with nothing to do with the energy.

  He cradled his forehead in his palm, needing to shake the deep foreboding twisting in his guts. Five nights ago, Jennings had been shot. Three days before that, Wallid had been wounded, but he’d returned to duty with nothing more than twelve stitches and his second Purple Heart. He was still in the fight.

  Too many of his boys were walking around with Purple Hearts from being wounded by the enemy or with Combat Action Badges for engaging the enemy. Damn but he wished battalion would send some more soldiers into his sector. His platoon was on edge, overworked, and undermanned, with a battlespace that required two companies�
�� worth of infantrymen. He had sixty men, but needed more like two hundred to clear and hold the real estate they’d been assigned. He rubbed his hands over his face and forced the dread down into a tight box.

  A small, flat-rate U.S. Postal Service box poked out from beneath his bunk, partially hidden by his ancient, green sleeping bag. He had forgotten about it. Curious, he reached for the box, turning it until he could see the address label. Jen St. James.

  A slow smile spread across his lips. He hadn’t expected this. She’d kill him if she knew how sick he’d actually gotten after landing in country. His platoon had been on the range, verifying their battle sight zeros and making sure they could actually hit what they shot at before heading north, and he’d been balled up on his cot, sweating and shaking and puking so hard he thought he’d crack bone.

  But he wasn’t about to tell her any of that. He pulled his knife from its sheath and sliced the box open with a flick of his wrist. Shane swore softly as he dug through the white foam and a billion packing peanuts scattered on the floor.

  Buried beneath the Styrofoam was a small, vacuum-sealed bag of brownies, a couple of boxes of salted almonds, beef jerky, and a small envelope with Shane scrawled on the front. He felt kind of stupid, but the smile wouldn’t leave his lips as he flipped her letter open.

  Dear Shane,

  I hope its okay that I asked Laura for your address. When she mentioned you didn’t get a lot of mail, I thought this might cheer you up. Of course, she recommended that I send porn and junk food, but I don’t know you well enough for that. At least, not the porn part. I hope you like the junk food, though, and that the brownies made it all right. Several of the wives swear that vacuu-sealing them is the way to go. Will you let me know?

  Anyway, I just wanted to drop you a note to let you know I hadn’t forgotten about you. In truth, I haven’t—