WHY IN THE hell was I so nervous? It was just Bree— Bree— my best friend’s little sister. She’d been like a little sister to me most of my life.
So what if I hadn’t seen her in six years? Or was it seven?
It was Bree. The girl who used to beg me to check for monsters in her closet as a kid. The girl I used to chase boys away from when she hit puberty. The girl I’d promised her brother, my best friend, I’d take care of . . .
It was a promise I’d failed to keep.
The metal tags I still wore around my neck felt heavier right then. Matt Chase. We hadn’t shared a strand of DNA, but he’d been my blood brother—my brother in battle. We’d fought together. We’d bled together.
Two of us left for Iraq. Only one of us came back.
My promise to Matt wasn’t the only one I’d broken. I’d made one to Bree too—to bring her brother home safe. I’d let them both down.
Maybe that’s why I’d distanced myself from her—guilt. Shame. They were powerful things.
But now she’s coming and I’d just have to figure out some way to deal with it all. The guilt I had for not being able to keep my promise to her. The guilt I had for not following through on my promise to Matt to look after her.
Shit, she was going to be here in a half hour. I had to find some way to put the past behind me, even when it felt like it’s been right in front of me every day since coming home.
Rushing through my little apartment, I tossed old to-go boxes and empty beer bottles into the big plastic garbage bag I was carrying. I should have done this last night before Bree was thirty minutes from knocking on my front door, but I’d pulled a late night working at the base and crashed the minute I got home. I should have set an alarm so I would have waken up early enough to clean out the fridge and mop the floors so I didn’t fulfill every bachelor stereotype when Bree showed up.
She was an investigative journalist now, writing for some big-time paper in some big-time city. When I heard about where she’d been hired after graduating from college, I guessed our paths would never cross again.
I lived in Alaska, about as far from New York City as a person could get and still live in the United States. I fought wildfires in the summer and was an underwater welder in Seattle in the off-season. My life went in one direction, and hers went in the opposite.
And then I’d gotten her call last week, and just like that, our worlds decided to collide.
IT HAD BEEN seven and a half years. That was almost a decade.
And I still thought about him every single day.
That had to stop. I couldn’t keep going through life measuring every guy by Jake Wilde’s measure.
At first, he was as much a big brother in my life as Matt was. Then when I hit twelve, I realized I spent a little too much time watching him at the beach and finding ways to get his attention when the girls his age descended on him. Instead of those feelings fading with time, they grew, and even though I hadn’t seen him in years—only occasionally exchanging an email or birthday card—I still couldn’t get him out of my head.
Jake had no shortage of “girlfriends” in high school. They never lasted long before he was on to the next, but as afraid of commitment as he seemed, he never had an issue when it came to me. Sure, our relationship was different, but it proved he was capable of it.
I knew the reason he’d been avoiding me had a lot to do with Matt’s death. The sixteen-year-old girl had asked believing Jake really could bring her brother home safe from a war, but the twenty-three-year-old woman understood that war was like life—out of our control.
I also knew Jake would have traded places with my brother if he’d had a choice. He wouldn’t have needed a moment to think about it. That’s the kind of man he was. That’s probably why I hadn’t been able to leave him behind me all these years later.
That’s why I
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