Mystical Warrior by Janet Chapman Page A

Fiona Gregor was familiar with at least some of men’s baser appetites, because she’d made him a sandwich big enough to choke a horse. He grabbed the glass of milk and downed half of it in one swallow, then sat staring toward the kitchen, listening to her explaining to Misneach that if he didn’t want to smell like their landlord, he’d better stay away from the skunks.
    Trace wondered when his ego had gotten so big that he thought he had to be everyone’s hero. Although he certainly had a knack for pulling off impossible military missions, when had he decided that his personal mission in life was to save the world one person at a time?
    And why in hell did that person always seem to be a woman?
    He gave a derisive snort and downed the rest of the milk. As near as he could tell, he’d started acting the hero at age seven, when he’d punched Johnnie Dempster—hisbest buddy at the time—in the nose for saying something to Paula Pringle that had made the first-grader cry. Having remembered how good it had made him feel, that punch had been the first of many schoolyard and then gravel-pit fights, which had eventually led to one massive explosion at age seventeen.
    That’s when he’d gone into the military in order to escape going to jail.
    After spending the night cruising the roads with his uncle Marvin in search of the man’s missing daughters, Trace had walked into his kitchen at two in the morning to find his mother cowering in the corner beneath his drunken father, cradling her ribs and holding her other arm protectively over her head.
    The towering brute had even had the balls to kick her in front of Trace, when she’d tried getting to her feet so she could pretend—again—that nothing was wrong. Trace had stood staring at his mother’s battered face for several raging heartbeats, only to realize that he was finally strong enough, and sure as hell angry enough, to rescue a woman who had needed a hero for her entire miserable marriage.
    All of his life, Trace had watched his father repeatedly make his mother pay for getting pregnant at sixteen and listened to the bastard blame her for trapping him in a dead-end job in order to support a wife and a child he’d never wanted.
    That was the day the unwanted child had liberated his father by beating him to a bloody pulp and kicking his drunken ass out the door and all the way down to the docks. Trace had then thrown the bastard into the ocean with a final warning that if he ever came near either one of them again, he would kill him.
    After taking her to a hospital to have her cheek sutured and her ribs wrapped, Trace had driven his mother to a divorce lawyer in Ellsworth. He’d changed the locks on the doors when they’d gotten home, tossed his father’s belongings into the old man’s truck and driven it to the cannery, and walked away without once looking back.
    Their peace had lasted exactly one week, before the sheriff had shown up with a restraining order against him and his mother in one hand and a warrant for Trace’s arrest for assault in the other.
    Waving a list of juvenile altercations under his nose and pointing out that Grange Huntsman would probably walk with a limp the rest of his life, the DA—who just happened to be female—had given Trace a choice between fighting for his country or prosecution, pointing out that he couldn’t very well support his mother from a jail cell.
    Three months later, on his eighteenth birthday, Trace had left for boot camp.
    His mother had moved in with her sister, Maddy’s mom, and started building a new life for herself. She’d gone back to school to become a paralegal, eventually growing independent enough that she’d started depositing the checks Trace sent home into an account in his name. And six years ago, she’d married a man who thought she alone was responsible for making the sun shine.
    Grange Huntsman had left Midnight Bay not long after Trace had, to pursue the life he claimed they’d stolen