toyed with the idea of looking the old man up and thrashing the shit out of him. Someone needed to, at any rate.
Jamie’s gaze slid to Payne. Payne’s father had been at home while Payne was growing up, but from the little things that his friend had shared over the years, he might as well have not been. Payne’s father had always had one eye on the door and the other on another woman. His parents had apparently stayed married for Payne’s benefit, but Jamie suspected Payne would have had a lot more respect for both of them if they’d merely divorced and done away with the infidelities.
They finally ended the marriage when Payne graduated from high school and since then, Payne’s father had systematically married and divorced women who were craftily garnering another portion of his inheritance. He needed to be thrashed as well, Jamie decided, but for different reasons.
Quite frankly, all three of them had been raised in unconventional households and the older Jamie got, the more he suspected that no one’s family was normal. Normal was as real as Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Normal didn’t exist.
And after Danny’s death, he wasn’t so sure that the ideas of right and just weren’t myths also. If they existed, if they were true, then why hadn’t Danny walked away from that ill-fated mission with the rest of them?
Being in the military, death was a distinct possibility. One didn’t enlist without knowing—without believing—in the greater good and being willing to die for that cause. Jamie, Guy, Payne, Danny—they’d all felt the same way.
Being a Ranger was more than a career. It had been a labor of love. Brave men had essentially committed treason when they’d formed this country. Thomas Jefferson had been in his early thirties when he’d penned the Declaration of Independence. That still amazed him, Jamie thought. So young and yet so wise. A vastly different world and set of values from where they were today. But that was a whole other issue.
At any rate, their very freedom was based on bravery, on loyalty and on a belief in a cause that so many, quite frankly, didn’t appreciate and took for granted. There were thousands of men in marked and unmarked graves all over the globe who’d boldly gone to war and sacrificed their lives for this country. Jamie would gladly give his own…and yet living with the grief of a fallen friend somehow seemed more difficult than dying himself.
Something had changed that night. Not just for him, but for Guy and Payne as well. Rationally they’d all known the risks. But knowing it and dealing with it had turned out to be two completely different things. Did Jamie still believe in his country? In his service? In the merit of even that particular mission?
Yes, to all of the above.
He just didn’t believe he could watch another friend die.
Danny, a brother to him in every way that counted, had taken his last breath in Jamie’s arms. He’d watched the spark fade from Dan’s eyes, felt his life slip away like a shadow…and Jamie had felt a part of himself die on that sandy, blood-soaked hill as well.
The familiar weight of grief filled his chest, forcing him to release a small breath. Whatever Garrett wanted him to do had to be easier than that, by God. It had to be.
“Look at it this way,” Guy finally said in a blatant attempt to lighten the moment when the silence had stretched beyond the comfortable, a still too often occurrence. He shrugged. “She could be ugly.”
Payne nodded, smiling encouragingly. “It’d definitely be easier for you to guard an ugly woman, Flanagan. Less temptation.” He selected a celery stick. “What’s her name?”
Smiling in spite of himself, Jamie rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Audrey Kincaid.”
“Pretty name,” Guy remarked thoughtfully. “But that doesn’t mean anything,” he added magnanimously, the smart-ass.
“Right,” Payne said. “She could still be ugly.”
Not even with the luck of the Irish, Jamie thought, but it didn’t matter. She could look like a friggin’ supermodel and he wasn’t going to touch her with a ten-foot pole.
Actually, he had a grim suspicion who the granddaughter might be and he knew for a fact that not only wasn’t she ugly, but in fact, she was drop-dead instant-hard-on gorgeous. The Colonel only had two pictures of family in his office—one Jamie knew for a fact was Garrett’s wife because he’d met her several times.
The other was of a young blue-eyed beauty about the right