Here Comes the Groom by Karina Bliss Page B

recklesss. Let’s see if we can get some air on this thing.
    Dan smiled in the chill morning. Oh, yeah, they got air all right. Only luck had saved them from being hurt. But nothing had saved them from Herman’s wrath when he saw the damage to the ATV. They’d spent a week cut ting wood for that one.
    His vision blurred. He blinked hard.
    Two of the five of them dead and, eleven months later, two survivors still in bad shape. Ross was rehabilitating from horrific injuries; Nate had left the service and was roaming the States.
    A tooth abscess had saved Dan from the ambush. He’d been at the dentist when the news came through. His gum numb with novocaine, he’d run to join the retrieval team. The pain of a half-drilled tooth kicked in as the anesthetic wore off but he’d welcomed it. Blazing twisted scraps were all that remained of the vehicle. Of Steve.
    Lee had been missing and Nate crouched behind meager cover, holding off the enemy with Ross bloody and unconscious at his feet. Later, Dan had to peel a dazed Nate’s fingers from his weapon. He’d seen that look before, knew what it meant. Some experiences took a man past a point he couldn’t go…because if he did, he couldn’t serve.
    His knuckles whitened on the ATV’s handles.
    Lee had been found the next day…what was left of him. His body had been packed with explosives and detonated in the desert. Unidentifiable except by eyewitness accounts and an engagement ring he’d intended to give his girlfiend on his return.
    I should have been there.
    Maybe he could have done something…changed some thing. Though everyone and logic told him otherwise he couldn’t shake these pointless, debilitating thoughts that still shadowed him like buzzards.
    Dan had always been robust, whether through a gift of genes or an inborn balance. Whatever it was, psychological tests said he had it. The ability to endure. Withan effort, he loosened his grip on the handles, dropped the throttle. The only way through this was holding on to the person who always grounded him.
    Everything came back to Jo.
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    H IS MOM’S N ISSAN WAS parked by the farmhouse, a mattress on the roof rack. Dan had asked to borrow one until he could go shopping for furniture with Jo.
    â€œAlways the optimist, Danny,” Steve used to say to him.
    â€œDamn right.”
    He’d refused to sleep even one night on the lumpy double bed his dad had been using. Drawing abreast of the car he saw the mattress was a single and laughed. Well, if she thought a single mattress would stop her baby boy from having sex with his intended, assuming Dan could get Jo there, she was dreaming.
    To hell with it. He’d make time to buy a king-size tomorrow.
    He found Pat stuck in the doorway wrestling with an armchair as big as she was.
    â€œWhat are you doing moving that on your own?”
    â€œI can manage,” she insisted, but massaged her lower back after he took the chair off her. Small and slender with a swing of shoulder-length hair only lightly threaded with gray, Pat Jansen bore a close resemblance to Diane Keaton. “I only brought one comfortable chair,” she added, “so make sure you get it.”
    Dan maneuvered the wide-bodied chair through the doorway. “Okay, we’re alone. Tell me what’s going on with you and Dad?” There had always been stressful undercurrents in his parents’ marriage but they seemedto have turned into whitewater, at least on Mom’s part. Like his son, Herman kept his troubles to himself.
    She caught a falling cushion as he plonked the chair next to the fireplace. “Nothing.” She’d cleaned the house. Lemon polish scented the air and there weren’t as many dust motes in the sunlight streaming through the window. “At least nothing for you to worry about.” A small coffee table sat like an island in the middle of the empty room. The dog slunk out from under it,