Chapter One
Chapter
One
Sam concentrated on his technique,
keeping limber as he moved around the punching bag, when he struck
he made sure to punch the bag not push it. When he punched
he–
“Your brother needs
you.”
Sam shook his head to
clear his father’s voice from his mind. What had he been
thinking? Punching. Yes, plant your feet
and then—
“I know, Daddy, but
I—”
“No buts, Samuel! Your
brother is sick, and without this, he will die. Do you understand
that? If you do not do this for Thomas then you will effectively be
killing him. You will be responsible for killing your own brother.
Is that what you want?”
Gritting his teeth, Sam jumped up and
down for a moment, loosening the muscles in his arms. He rocked his
head from side to side on his neck and took a few deep breaths in
an attempt to relax.
“Hey, Pretty
Boy.”
Sam briefly closed his eyes at the
nickname and tried to ignore the man walking toward him. He focused
again on his footwork as he pounded his fists in a steady
syncopated rhythm into the heavy bag before him and shuffled
sideways so that he put his back toward the man still heading in
his direction. He should have known it would be a waste of time.
Finn McGregor was not a man to be ignored.
“Aww, come on, Pretty, you
gotta know that just turning your back on me is not going to work,”
Finn said as he walked up to stand almost shoulder to shoulder with
Sam. “I cannot be ignored! I know all the words to ‘American Pie’,
and I will stand here and sing it over and over again until you
acknowledge me, and let me warn you, my singing voice is not my
strong point. In fact, it should come with a warning
label.”
Sam stopped his punching and stepped
back from the bag, breathing heavily, but that tight feeling
beneath his skin still very much there. “Christ, Finn, can’t you
just go away and annoy someone else? Surely you and Dev have
something to argue about so that you can spend the afternoon making
up.”
“As enticing as that
sounds,” Finn answered as he moved to lean against the heavy bag
and look up at Sam, “Dev is over at the new house build with Marcel
and Riley. I swear to God, he loves all this construction stuff.
You know I found him looking at an online hardware store catalog
the other day and he was turned on.”
Sam grinned. “Bullshit. You’re making
that up.”
“I swear on all that is
holy that I am telling you nothing but the truth. The man threw me
to the bed and put all that built-up sexual tension created by
looking at automatic nail guns to good use. Would I lie to you?”
Finn’s eyes were wide, the picture of innocence, but there was a
definite twinkle of mischief in them.
“Yes, yes, you would.
Especially if you thought I would believe it.”
Finn grinned unrepentantly. “Well,
that is just something you are going to have to work out for
yourself. Now that you’ve stopped beating the shit out of this old
bag, you wanna tell me what’s got you all riled up?”
Sam turned to walk over to the trunk
of the tree that housed the heavy bag and leaned back against it as
he removed the gloves he wore. “Maybe I just want to burn off some
of these extra pounds I’m piling on now that Marcel is all loved
the fuck up and baking up a storm.”
Finn’s eyes narrowed, and he stared at
Sam in silence for a moment or two. “Boy, you have got to be the
worst liar in Bravo team. Firstly, although Marcel is baking some
amazingly calorific baked goods because of his current loved up
state, you haven’t gained a damn pound. In fact, you, Dev and Glenn
haven’t gained a single pound whereas all I have to do is look at a
damn choux pastry and I go up a damn belt notch. Secondly,” Finn
stepped closer, and Sam had to fight the urge to look away, “I know
when a guy is fighting a war with himself. I have been there,
bought the damn t-shirt, and starred in the HBO special as
myself.”
Sam took a deep breath, knowing that
Finn had indeed faced his own demons months ago when Bravo team had
come to Redwood Falls. Dev and Finn had been lovers when his
homophobic grandmother ran him out of town, threatening Finn in the
process. Eight years later, when Devon made it back to town, it was
to discover that Finn had been fighting his own war that entire
time a lot closer to home, at the hands of his abusive
father.
Devon had stepped in and brought Finn,
his brother, Nate, and his mom to the farm to protect them, but to
also wage a campaign to win Finn back. It had taken them a while to
work their way through the past, but they came out the other side
together and that was all that mattered.
“Demons from my past just
rearing their ugly heads, Finn, that’s all,” Sam said quietly as he
unwound the tape he’d wrapped around his knuckles.
Finn smiled gently back. “Yeah, I get
that. Hell, Sam, we’ve all got demons, but I think you know as well
as I do that they are better shared than bottled up within
you.”
Sam exhaled, planting his gloved hands
on his hips. “I seem to remember saying something similar to you
not long ago.”
Finn’s grin widened. “Where do you
think I got it from? Now, come on, spill. You’ve been coming out
here pounding on this bag a lot lately, and I want to know
why.”
If anyone would understand it would be
Finn. Hell, if anything his father had been worse than Sam’s. “My
brother was born with a series of medical problems that were
difficult to treat back then. Not least of which was leukemia.” He
saw a flicker of compassion in Finn’s eyes. “My parents then made
the decision to have a second child.” The compassion was replaced
quickly by confusion.
“You see, Finn, I was
conceived out of love, but not for me, or for the chance to have
another child to love and spoil. My parents had me so that I could
provide blood cells and bone marrow to help save Thomas. From the
time I was born I knew that my life was second to
Thomas’s.”
“Did Thomas live?” Finn
asked quietly
Sam had undergone various procedures
to save his brother more than once. He had given blood, plasma,
tissue, bone marrow and they were even talking about taking a
kidney to try to save his brother, but in the end, it hadn’t been
enough.
“No, the doctors say he
passed due to complications from his illnesses. My parents blamed
me.”
Finn frowned. “That’s fucked up. What
do you think?”
Sam jolted in shock. No one had ever
asked him that before. “I think he simply gave up and embraced
death. He did it for me as much as himself.”
He blinked back tears and stared at
the heavy bag he had been pounding on for the past thirty minutes
and shook out arms that felt heavy. The heavy feeling in his chest,
and the sensation that his skin was too tight for him that had
driven him out to the old oak tree behind the main house an hour
earlier still lingered so he lifted his gloved hands and began his
workout combinations again.
“Sounds to me,” Finn said
softly, “like your brother loved you very much, even if your
parents were assholes who couldn’t see a good thing when he was
standing right in front of them.”
“Yeah. It’s just sometimes
easier to believe the bad stuff about yourself, you know? But I’m
working on changing that.”
Finn moved forward and placed a hand
on Sam’s shoulder, and he looked up to meet his friend’s eyes. “You
just make sure you do. I know that you and Bravo team are closer
than family, but I feel like y’all are my family, too.”
Sam grinned and nodded. “You know we
feel the same way about you, too, Finn. But that doesn’t mean I
won’t eventually make good on my promise and shoot you one day for
letting that Pretty Boy nickname get out there.”
Finn shrugged as he started to walk
backward toward the main house. “You know you love me too much to
shoot me. Now, I think I will take your suggestion and go make a
phone call to my beloved and get him pissed off about something.”
With an exaggerated waggle of his eyebrows, he turned and walked
back to the house.
Sam leaned his head back against the
tree. He had been coming out here every night to beat the shit out
of the heavy bag in an effort to tire himself out completely and
allow him to sleep. When that stopped working, he had added an
afternoon session. He had never suffered from insomnia before, but
it sure as hell was plaguing the shit out of him now. His mind just
never seemed to switch off.
He would have come out here in the
mornings, too, but Glenn had taken that time slot as his own, and
damned if Sam was about to deprive his friend of that time. Glenn
had been the victim of a guy who’d worked for the construction team
on site. He’d made it appear that he and Glenn had indulged in a
one-night stand when in fact the guy had pretty much date-raped
Glenn. It had been Glenn’s spotter Maddox who had walked in on the
two of them the next morning.
Without waiting for an explanation,
Maddox had acted like the hotheaded bastard he was and left CTF
almost three months ago. Maddox had left under a cloud of
misunderstandings, but according to Glenn, he had called and now
knew the truth.
But Maddox didn’t come back, and Sam
thought that the damage his leaving had done to Glenn might never
be fixed. Sam knew that neither Glenn nor Maddox had acted on the
connection that had been obvious between the two of them, but he
had always thought they would end up getting together once all of
them were out. Now he wasn’t so sure.
He grabbed the gloves he’d dropped to
the ground and headed back to the main house. He had attended
enough psych lectures in his time to know that his insomnia might
be caused by significant life stress. Leaving the military after
having almost lost his life on more than one occasion and suffering
a slight case of PTSD might do it. Or it might be the emotional
discomfort of that combined with the environmental changes of not
being shot at on a daily basis. Or hell, it might well be a
combination of both.
But what he refused to acknowledge as
a potential reason for the insomnia and resurfacing of those
childhood memories was the reappearance in his life of one dark
haired, green eyed bomb disposal expert and his tall, blond, hot
county sheriff.
Nope. They had nothing to do with it.
All he had to do was get his shit together and get the hell over
them.
It!
It, he had to get the hell
over it, not
them.
Shit.