The Way Home

Chapter 3

YOU’RE SURE YOU CAN HANDLE things until I get back?” Jess walked back into the store after watching Ty’s taillights disappear down the road. She already had second thoughts about letting him talk her into dinner and leaving Kayla in charge of the store.

“You have to eat,” Ty had pointed out when Jess had insisted she couldn’t leave until closing time at nine P.M. “Besides, you’re the boss. Don’t you have someone who can cover for you for a couple of hours?”

She might have been able to stage a stronger argument if Kayla hadn’t bopped through the door about that time—all five feet and one inch of her, a college freshman who looked about thirteen instead of nineteen, with her bouncing brown ponytail, short-shorts, and halter top, and telling Jess, “Go. I can handle the dinner hour and close up for you. And if it gets too busy, I’ll call Blake or Lane. Those two always want extra hours. Hailey, too. She’s saving for an iPad. Cripes, boss. We’ve got you covered. Now, take a break. It’s been forever since you took any time off.”

That had pretty much ended the discussion, except for the part where Ty had said he’d be back to pick her up around six.

“So who’s the hot guy?” Kayla asked.

It would get out sooner or later, so she might as well tell it straight. While tourists came and went from the store in droves, men who asked her to dinner didn’t. At least, they never asked her more than once, because she always gently told them no. Still, in the small lake community, word would spread like wildfire. This would be her only chance to temper that fire before it took on a life of its own.

So she told her.

“OMG. He’s one of those commandos who shot up the bad guys at the Nelson cabin.” Kayla started digging into her hip pocket for her iPhone to spread the word.

Jess rolled her eyes. “Hold off on the smoke signals, Pocahontas. In the first place, he’s not a commando. In the second, I really don’t see the need to broadcast that he’s here. Let’s respect his privacy, OK?”

“So why is he here?”

Jess snatched Kayla’s phone out of her hand, then tucked it back into the girl’s hip pocket. “You know, I honestly don’t know,” she lied, hoping to sidetrack Kayla’s curiosity. “Maybe business brought him.”

“What kind of business?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

“Maybe you’re his business,” Kayla said with a suggestive grin.

That may have been true, but there was no way she’d let Kayla know it. “Don’t even go there. All I know is that he said he was in the area and he’d like to thank me for helping them out—”

“With the commando stuff,” Kayla interrupted with a leading look.

“Whatever,” Jess said. “So he’s taking me out for a bite to eat.”

“To say thank you.” Kayla reiterated Jess’s statement, making it clear she thought there was a whole lot more than a thank-you involved.

“Yes,” Jess said firmly. “To say thank you. Now, you said you wanted to work, so quit drilling me and work. There are two boxes of freight in the back room I haven’t had a chance to get to yet today.”

“Because Commando Cutie kept you otherwise occupied?”

Jess lifted a finger and pointed to the stockroom. “Go.”

Kayla giggled and headed out but not without one last parting shot. “’Bout time you had a date.”

“It’s not a date,” Jess said mildly, determined to deny, deny, deny. Only she couldn’t deny to herself. Just as she couldn’t stop wishing she had something upstairs in her closet that hadn’t been washed and worn a hundred times. “I’m going up to take a shower.”

Kayla poked her head out of the stockroom door, grinning like a goon. “Make sure you use some of that sexy-smelling lotion I got you for Christmas last year.”

“It’s not a date,” Jess ground out one more time, and headed up the stairs, trying to remember where she’d stashed the bottle of lotion.

THE CROSSROADS GENERAL Store sat between nowhere and the end of the earth at the junction of Highway 53 and a cratered blacktop road that led to a Minnesota lake with a name Ty hadn’t yet figured out how to pronounce. And as he pulled out onto the road, he wondered if maybe he should have played it differently with Jess Albert. Maybe he should have fudged and told her he was in the area on business and decided to stop by and say hi. See how she was doing. Thank her again for the help that long-ago winter night. Maybe she wouldn’t have been as jumpy. But that plan had felt as dishonest as it was, and in the end, he’d decided to play it by ear.

She was wary of him. Maybe even a little angry at him. Last time she’d seen him, he’d let her believe he would call, but he hadn’t, so she had good reason to be both. Still, she hadn’t run him off. She’d given him directions to the Whispering Pines Resort, where she’d arranged for someone named Shelley to hold a cabin for him.

Which meant he was staying. Which hadn’t necessarily been part of his plan when he’d arrived, because, as he’d told her, he didn’t really have a plan—except to take his cues from her.

And those cues so far were pretty mixed. It wasn’t only wariness. There was that underlying anger he’d sensed, maybe even a little fear, in her. Definitely resistance. Yet her eyes had told a different story from her body language. Enough to give him hope. She was glad he’d come back. She just didn’t want to admit it.

He glanced in his rearview mirror as the store faded from sight. The last time he’d left the lake and the store, the snow had been flying, and he’d had the shakes from an adrenaline crash following a siege on a wolf pack of hired assassins. As soon as he’d gotten his act together and had been debriefed by the federal alphabet agencies and thanked by the new secretary of State herself, he’d had every intention of calling the pretty little widow with the beckoning brown eyes.

Jess Albert had saved lives that night. She’d taken a long, hard look at him and his brother, Mike, and a very desperate Joe Green and his wife, Stephanie, when they’d shown up in the dark, stomped snow all over her floor, and asked for the impossible. Blind trust.

She’d led them to a back room, spun the combination to a gun safe, and opened it up to four strangers. Inside, a pair of AR-15 rifles sat alongside several hunting rifles, shotguns, and handguns.

“They were my husband’s,” she’d said, crossed her arms over her breasts, then stood back and invited them to take whatever they wanted.

There had been a critical word in her statement.

Were?

She’d hesitated. “IED. Afghanistan. J.R. was spec ops, too,” she’d added with a tight smile. “And yes, I can spot one of you guys a mile away.”

Some might think she’d exhibited a kind of trust normally reserved for fools or dreamers that night. She’d made it pretty clear, however, that she was neither.

He swiped a hand over his lower jaw as he steered his rental—a black Jeep Cherokee—down the bumpy asphalt. Complicated. This was every bit as complicated as he’d thought it would be.

Yet here he was. Determined to take it slow, feel his way along, and see if there was anything more than wishful thinking on his part where the vulnerable and oh so tempting Widow Albert was concerned. If it turned out to be wishful thinking, he’d take it on the chin, cut his losses, say good-bye, and get on back to his life. Maybe he’d even take his brother, Mike, up on his offer to join a top-secret spec-ops team and go back to fighting the war on terrorism.

But if she was interested… well… if she was interested, he had a feeling he might be in this for the long haul because even with everything that had happened since he’d last seen her, he’d never been able to get Jess Albert’s all-American-girl face and dark brown eyes out of his head. Those eyes had haunted him and told volumes about her. About how brave she was, how alone she was, and how determined she was to keep all of her feelings tucked away. Only she hadn’t been successful. He’d seen interest in those eyes. And no matter how many times and how many ways he’d tried to convince himself he didn’t want the complication of getting involved with a woman who most likely still mourned the death of another man, what he’d seen had compelled him. He’d intended to call.

Then his whole life had changed.

“Do you have a clue what you’re doing, Brown?” he muttered, as second and third thoughts about his harebrained idea to fly up here nipped him in the ass.

“Not lately, no,” he admitted aloud, and wondered when he’d started talking to himself.

About the time he’d left the store, very much aware of Jess’s softly curling hair and strong tan limbs as she stood in the open doorway, a shoulder propped against the jamb, arms crossed beneath her breasts, watching him pull away with a troubled furrow between her eyes. Eyes that said he had the power to hurt her, which probably made him a selfish bastard, because he really didn’t know where this was going.

He only knew that she’d been there. In the back of his mind, tucked in a corner reserved for unfinished business. Business that would have stayed unfinished if life wasn’t full of so many curves.

He hoped this didn’t end up as one of those “sounded like a good idea at the time” experiences he’d live to regret. Or that she would.

Losing Maya was something he regretted. Hell, losing her had pretty much knocked him down. But he kept thinking about Jess. Of how she’d soldiered on.

In all honesty, he wasn’t one-hundred-percent certain when he’d decided to come back here if the reason was to heal or that he’d simply never forgotten her. He needed to find out. And he needed to be honest with Jess about that.

He needed to be honest about Maya, too. He’d loved her, and he wasn’t looking to replace her. He was looking to move on. Jess Albert was a good place to start. She was a special woman. And he’d grown weary of grieving. He figured she had, too. And if not, hey, he’d been due for a change of scenery.

And boy, howdy, had he gotten it. The Crossroads General Store, with its three gas pumps, time-worn exterior, and cute-as-a-button proprietor, was a far cry from Key West. It looked a lot different in daylight from when he’d first seen it through the low beams of a rented pickup in the dead of winter on the hunt for a pack of predators hell-bent on killing some people he cared about. At least, he cared about them now. Now that he’d gotten to know them through his brother, Mike.

The terrain was as far from palm trees and sand as you could get. Dense pine and birch forest crowded within ten feet of the road’s shoulder in spots as he followed Jess’s directions, which he’d plugged into the onboard navigation system. Huge boulders and rock outcroppings popped up in the middle of a rare open meadow. He passed a couple of driveways that he assumed led to houses tucked back in the woods, a tidy log restaurant and bait shop—with an eye-roll-inducing marquee sign inviting travelers to “Eat here and get worms”—a small country church, a very rural fire department, a marina, and Albert’s Guide Service.

He wondered if that Albert was related to Jess’s husband. The nav system dinged softly then, followed by the dulcet tones of a computerized woman’s voice. “Turn right onto Gamma Road in two-tenths of a mile.”

He drew a deep breath and flipped on his turn signal, although this deep into the forest, there wasn’t another vehicle in his line of sight.

“Turn right.”

Turn right toward what might be a new chapter in your life…

It was time.