River Road by Jayne Ann Krentz

either, so it was hard to gauge whether or not he was a womanizer.
    The car crash had been caused by a drunk driver, and it had changed everything. Mason was thirteen at the time; Aaron, eleven. Rebecca Fletcher had died at the scene. Jack Fletcher had survived long enough to make it to the hospital—just long enough to say good-bye to his sons and give Mason his marching orders.
Take care of Aaron. You two stick together, no matter what happens.
    The authorities had put Mason and Aaron into foster care while they set out to track down next of kin. Everyone had an excuse. Rebecca’s parents explained that they were living in a retirement community and could not bring in young children. Jack’s parents had divorced and remarried years earlier. Neither of them wanted to start all over again with two young boys. An aunt on Rebecca’s side refused on the grounds that she had never gotten along with her sister and, besides, she was a single mom with two kids of her own to raise. An uncle declined because he had recently remarried and his new wife refused to get stuck with someone else’s children.
    And so it went. Everyone expressed sympathy; everyone maintained that they wanted to stay in touch with Mason and Aaron—everyone presented a logical reason for why they could not take on the responsibility of raising two boys.
    That left Deke.
    No one, least of all Mason and Aaron, expected him to step forward and shoulder the responsibility of two boys. After all, he had the very best excuse of all. He was single, and he frequently deployed to war zones. Certainly no one thought that he was fatherhood material—just the opposite. The general opinion was that he would be a bad influence on impressionable youths.
    At that point, Mason had understood with blinding clarity that he and Aaron were staring down the very real possibility that they would both end up permanently in the foster care system. If that happened it was likely that they would be separated. He would not be able to carry out his mission to protect Aaron.
    He was making plans to disappear into the streets with Aaron when Deke Fletcher arrived, fresh from yet another war zone.
    Mason and Aaron had been sitting in the office of their very nice, very kind caseworker, having the facts of foster care life explained to them, when a gleaming gray SUV rolled into the parking lot. Mason knew that neither he nor Aaron would ever forget the sight of Deke striding into their lives. He was pretty sure the very nice, very kind caseworker would never forget it, either.
    Deke had not been in uniform that day, but one look at him and you knew that he was hard-core military. It was there in his ramrod-straight bearing—his clean-shaven face, the high-and-tight hair, the neatly pressed shirt, polished boots, sleek wraparound dark glasses and the you-don’t-want-to-mess-with-me attitude.
    When he walked through the door of the office, Mason and Aaron had stared at him, awed and thrilled. Mason knew in that moment that Uncle Deke had come to save them. For his part, Deke had taken one look at his nephews and nodded once, evidently satisfied with what he saw.
    “Let’s go home, boys,” he said.
    The very nice, very kind caseworker had given Deke close scrutiny, asked him a few questions, and then she had smiled. She, too, had been satisfied with what she saw.
    Not everyone else in the office, including the very nice caseworker’s boss, was of the same mind. There had been some hasty, behind-closed-doors conversations, but the caseworker had triumphed. She had blazed through the formalities with lightning speed—a warrior of another sort, Mason thought.
    And then Deke had taken Mason and Aaron home.
    Home had been a series of military bases for a few years. Deke stopped deploying, but he stayed in the Army. There was a lot of relocating, but none of them had a problem with that. They had one another.
    In the end they wound up in Summer River. Deke deployed one last time the summer