that descended between them as he pulled her close, leaning up against the brick wall of their high school gym, with his cheek resting against her hair, just behind her princess tiara.
Woodman was grateful for Ginger.
But Ginger was grateful for the external silence because inside, her heart was in chaos.
The kiss they’d just shared? It was a good kiss. A really, really good kiss. And if it had been her first kiss, she might have even believed that it was the best kiss that life had to offer.
But it wasn’t.
She had kissed Cain.
She had kissed Cain and she knew—the way a little girl crosses the threshold to adulthood and truly begins to understand womanly things—that as much as her mind wanted to love one man, her heart would not be so easily swayed.
PART THREE
Three years later
Chapter 7
~ Cain ~
Cain sat beside a sleeping Woodman, his hands on the wheel as he drove their rental car closer and closer to home. It was a nine-hour drive from Bethesda, Maryland, to Apple Valley, Kentucky, not including stops for food, gas, and pissing, which had added another two hours to the drive. Thankfully, Woodman’s pain meds had kicked in about an hour ago, and he’d been snoring ever since. Cain checked the dashboard clock: with a little under two hours to go, he was hoping he could pull into the circular drive of Belle Royale before nine o’clock tonight and surprise his aunt and uncle with an early arrival.
Woodman muttered in his sleep, a soft, low, guttural sound of pain, and instinctively Cain reached over and placed his hand over his cousin’s, rubbing his thumb over the white, freckled skin until Woodman quieted down. It was over two months since the accident that had crushed and almost claimed Woodman’s foot, and thus far the road to recovery had been long and painful.
On their way back to Norfolk, Virginia, after a port visit in Barcelona, Woodman was on deck, acting as a safety observer, when his right ankle had been accidentally crushed between an aircraft wheel and forklift. He’d been taken by helicopter to the Morón Air Base, then airlifted to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where they’d set his broken fibula, but he’d had to wait several days for the swelling to go down on his ankle before the medical staff was able to reconstruct his ankle’s crushed talus with cadaver bone, a plate, and five screws. After three weeks, his ankle bone had started to die from a lack of oxygenated blood, and he’d required follow-up surgery to reroute his veins to feed the remaining bones. Stable three weeks later, he’d been transferred to Walter Reed hospital in Maryland, and yesterday, nine weeks after the accident, Woodman had finally been given the okay to go home. His retirement was still under adjudication, but that was really just a formality since he’d been injured after three years of a four-year, active-duty contract.
For now he could get around okay on crutches since his upper-body strength was solid. He’d require at least a year of physical therapy (which could only do so much to improve the strength of his rebuilt ankle) when he got home, but the sad reality was that Woodman would probably walk with a limp and a cane for the rest of his life.
Cain, who’d taken several days of liberty at various ports of call over the past three years, hadn’t actually taken an extended vacation since his enlistment. With seventy accrued days, he’d used ten of them to be with Woodman at Landstuhl and asked to use another thirty days to accompany his cousin home to Kentucky. It was unusual for a man of Cain’s rank to be given a full month of liberty, but exceptions had been made based on his cousin’s condition, which found them—here and now—speeding down Interstate 71 toward Cincinnati with the dying sun out Woodman’s open window and the open highway up ahead.
Cain rolled down his window and leaned his elbow on the sill, his mind shifting to the moment he’d heard that Josiah was en route to Morón. Without a full account of his cousin’s injuries, Cain had been almost paralyzed by the fear that Josiah’s wounds were mortal, and had headed straightaway to his commanding officer, demanding, with all the composure he could muster, to be released from duty immediately so he could follow Josiah’s transport. He’d be forever grateful for the compassionate calm that Lieutenant Carlson had shown, directing a distraught