Page 4 of Too Broken to Love

That ended tonight. “I promise I’ll open the present when I get home.”

“And I promise to bring you back a big ass bass to go with the chili you’re making for dinner.”

As she watched him walk toward his car parked in front of the duplex, she prayed confessing her sins to Sam wouldn’t conjure the devil. She couldn’t explain why the underworld had blessed Frank with an uncanny ability to sense when she found the courage and strength to rise above her fears. As if that perceived ability wasn’t irrational enough, she knew with absolute certainty he’d blow into town harder than a hurricane and destroy what she’d built.

Again.

And she’d leave town—again—because nothing in her life lasted forever. Not happiness, not friendships, and certainly not love.

Hudson stopped a foot from Chris’s room in the military medical center outside of Washington, D.C. Two weeks since he’d narrowly escaped a burning hell, and he still hadn’t fully healed, not from the injuries anyone could see and not from the ones they couldn’t.

“Fuck.” He rubbed at the sweat dampening his T-shirt and sucked in a breath. Breathing shouldn’t be painful. Neither should visiting a patient post-trauma. He’d never hesitated outside a doorway, not even when duty called for him to deliver an unfavorable prognosis.

Chris is alive. You saved his life.

But had he?

Metal crashed inside the room. A scream swallowed the reverberation. Hudson lunged for the doorway as a woman ran out. Was that Chris’s wife? A guttural wail cut off his thought.

“Help.”

“Don’t leave me.”

Hudson surged into the room. Chris howled in his bed, his hand clamped above the tight wrapping on his shoulder. With each ravaged syllable, his body jerked in a physical echo of the memory gripping his mind.

“Hey, man. It’s Hudson.” He gripped the bed rails and leaned as close to Chris as he dared. “You’re having a flashback.”

Chris punched out his fist, a shriek ripping from his throat like his other arm had been torn off.

Hudson jumped to the side as two men rushed into the room. One readied a syringe while the other wrangled Chris into a safe position. The desperate fear in his voice hurt Hudson’s heart more than the funerals he’d attended for the fallen SEALs since he’d returned stateside.

He backed to the door. They didn’t need help sedating Chris. And when memories from the inferno that took his buddy’s arm—and a massive piece of his soul—burned through the drugs, the punishing cycle would start again.

Flashback.

Drug.

Repeat.

Vowing never to tell Chris he’d seen him in that position, Hudson raced to his rental car and peeled out of the parking garage. Today wasn’t the first time he’d questioned if he’d sentenced Chris to hell on earth by saving his life.

Now he had the answer.

Stepping on the gas of his rental car, Hudson headed toward the place that never failed to calm him and parked under a leafless cherry blossom tree. A crisp breeze drifted over the tidal basin as his legs twitched to run between the columns of the Jefferson Memorial like he had as a kid. Instead, he paced the curved steps of the circular monument.

Footsteps stopped him. Tensing, he spun toward the sound.

A man halted and raised his hands in surrender. “Whoa, son.”

Hudson nodded to the guy around Pop’s age in the Vietnam Veteran ballcap. His vigilance eased, but his body didn’t. “Thank you for your service, sir.”

The veteran zeroed in on the Navy Hospital Corpsman insignia on Hudson’s T-shirt. “And thank you for yours, Doc. Your brothers before you saved my life in Nam.” He tapped his fist over his heart and backed away. “Keep fighting, son.”

Hudson knew the veteran wasn’t talking about fighting wars. Hell, Chris was fighting from a hospital bed. Hudson had endured his fair share of traumatic experiences too, but this last mission broke something inside his thirty-eight-year-old brain. Right now, his grandfather felt like the only person who could put him back together.

“Fuck it.” He pulled out his phone and tapped a message to the General, his old family friend who’d been relentless about pushing him to consider the classified program known as Project V.

Cancel my meeting tomorrow. Decided to retire. Fully.