Chapter Two
CHAPTER TWO
G IDEON P AYNE CAME back to Pyrite Falls in silence, under cover of darkness.
Far from the way he’d left, with the roar of the crowd and the sun shining brightly.
He wanted it that way.
He’d spent the day driving around familiar mountain roads, and after talking to Fia Sullivan about coming to stay at Sullivan’s Point, he’d gone for a walk in the woods.
And there she’d been.
He had never seen a more beautiful woman. Not in his memory.
Granted, he hadn’t gotten laid in two years, but the truth was he hadn’t even wanted to.
Seeing that creature in the woods, her red hair long and curling. The sun had been shining behind her, making that demure dress transparent, showing the shape of her legs, her hips... She’d been perfect.
She was probably a Sullivan.
The Sullivans were all redheads; he remembered that much from when he had lived here all those years ago.
But he didn’t want to put a name to her. Not in that moment. He just wanted to enjoy that one thing finally felt normal.
His cock worked. Praise the Lord.
In the grand scheme of things, that felt like a mighty miracle.
The need to reach out and touch her had been... She must’ve seen it in his eyes.
That must’ve been why she ran away.
He had frightened her.
That wasn’t terribly surprising. He couldn’t be civil at the best of times, and when lust had grabbed him by the throat for the first time in years, he imagined he’d looked feral.
The people of Pyrite Falls would be surprised to see him now.
His sister had texted him about a parade of some kind, one marking his return. He didn’t want one. Maybe when the good citizens got a look at him, they wouldn’t want to throw one.
But he had nowhere else to go. No other ideas for how to climb back out of the pit he was in.
Rock bottom was an interesting place. And he had no real interest in staying there.
He was better. Better than he’d been, anyway. He’d been on the outcropping just above rock bottom for the last year or so.
He’d spared his family the worst of it.
At least, he’d tried.
He hadn’t managed to spare Cass the worst of it, but that was marriage, he supposed.
For better or worse, going down in flames together.
After the marriage had ended, however, his continued undoing was something he’d had to fight through on his own.
He was getting pretty damned tired of fighting, though. Truth be told, that was partly why he was back here. This was the last place things had been easy. This was the last place where they’d made sense. And he’d known who he was when he lived in Pyrite Falls, and he had no fucking clue who he was now.
He had a feeling he was never quite going to be able to get back to the man he’d been. Hell, he knew that.
He had the scars to prove it. Both physically and mentally.
But, maybe this would be easier. Something had to be.
Anything was easier than sitting in the hollowed-out shell of his military career, and the dissolution of his eight-year marriage.
Well, maybe not anything; some deployments had certainly been worse. But most things were easier than that. At least here he would have a purpose again. That had been the problem. That had been the slow slide all the way down. Having nothing, no idea what to do next, no idea who he was anymore.
Cassidy had said he didn’t know how to smile anymore.
And she was right. That was the problem.
She’d been right about him. Everything she’d shouted at him in a desperate rage to wake him up, to reach the man she’d married, had been true.
He couldn’t even be angry at his wife for ending things. Because he wasn’t the man she’d married.
He was unable to be the husband that she wanted him to be. Needed him to be.
All of those things were true.
She’d said it was like he’d died in Afghanistan.
He couldn’t argue that.
But maybe being back here would make him feel more like himself. Maybe.
But there was a reason he’d come back initially under the cover of darkness.
There was a reason that seemed preferable.
There was a reason it seemed a little bit easier.
He’d get the lay of the land before anyone was expecting him. Including his mom and Lydia.
He hadn’t told them about his intent to buy the ranch because he’d been afraid of it falling through. He’d been irritated when the sale had been held up, because he’d just been waiting for that to bite his ass and not be the heroic move he’d been hoping it would be.
Now, though...
He was sort of grateful for the reprieve.
He’d told them he’d had a hiccup with the place he was buying, and even though he’d managed to get it ironed out quickly, it had made the exact date of his getting to town fuzzy. He’d left it that way deliberately.
He could’ve stayed in Georgia for another month.
But he was so done with that place. So done with having to be confronted by any of the places where he’d once been Staff Sergeant Gideon Payne.
Because that man was gone.
But maybe Gideon Payne, rancher, could follow in his father’s footsteps and find a life.
Damn.
Regret hollowed out his gut.
His dad was gone.
He’d come home for the funeral, but there was something so stark about it now that he was home.
He hadn’t been back in four years. Not since his mom had sold the ranch. That distance had allowed him a healthy amount of denial.
And hell, he’d been in another world.
The military was all-consuming. His life away had been all-consuming. Until it wasn’t.
Until he’d been injured and left with nothing but his own echoing thoughts. His own weakness. His own failure.
What a nightmare.
In the end, coming back home felt like the only answer. Though right at the last minute was when he’d started feeling pressured by the whole thing. The stay at Sullivan’s was a godsend in that way.
He didn’t know any of the Sullivans all that well, apart from Rory, who was his sister’s friend. He didn’t know her now. He knew her as a teenager who chattered his ear off and sang tunelessly to the car radio on the way to school.
If he could find affection for his past self, for his memories, he’d have looked back on that time with warmth.
As it was, all he could do was look back and envy that idiot kid he’d been. The guy who’d felt bulletproof.
Well, he was not, it turned out, blast-proof.
He thought of the angel he’d seen earlier today.
And he pushed that to the side.
He’d forgotten how many complications a man could find in a small town.
He’d chosen to come back home. He’d found himself in a weird-ass place these past few months. He didn’t have the stomach to stay in Georgia, not when it was littered with the debris of his life, blown all to hell by a bomb from Afghanistan.
When he’d gone on deployment he’d always felt thankful that while he might be moving into the line of fire, his wife wasn’t. His home wasn’t.
He’d been wrong.
That bomb blast might have happened overseas, but it had sure as hell blown up that life on Dogwood Street, in Atlanta, Georgia, where he’d once had that perfect life.
He hadn’t been able to stand being near any of that. He’d considered going off somewhere new. Somewhere no one knew him. There was a hefty amount of appeal in that.
Also a lack of accountability that scared the shit out of him.
So he’d finally considered coming back home. He knew why he’d decided on this. It was just...doing it was harder than he’d anticipated.
He’d never imagined his life ending up like this.
After the blast, right at first... Right at first, it had been okay. Cass had been that brave military wife. The one who stood by her husband through his injuries. The one who sat in the hospital with him. She’d thought this was the testing of them, the making of them.
He’d believed that, too.
They’d both been wrong.
She’d found her breaking point.
He’d found his.
It was fair.
This wasn’t the life he’d promised her. If he could have left himself, he would have.
Hell, he’d tried.
He pulled his truck onto the dirt road that he knew would lead up to the rental house, based on his instructions.
He drove until it seemed like he had to have gone way too far. But he seemed to recall that Fia had said specifically that. That it would feel like he’d gone too far, but he had to keep going.
There was maybe a metaphor in there somewhere. But he felt a little too weary to try and grasp it in his hands.
So he just drove on. He turned off the road onto a narrower dirt road that went straight up the side of the mountain.
He was thankful he had a four-wheel drive. And everything that he owned was in a duffel bag in the back of the truck.
It just wasn’t much was what it came down to. His life, and everything he cared about anymore, fit into a bag.
He could never imagine such a thing a couple of years ago. He’d lived in a beautiful house filled with things. Furniture and decorations and clothes.
The day Cassidy told him to leave the house and not come back, he’d put all the things he wanted into one bag. It had been pretty easy. There was something in that, too. But, he wasn’t in the mood to think on that, either.
It had made this move easy, and that he could be grateful for. He had all the time in the world to rebuild. If he even really wanted to.
There was nothing wrong with living simple.
It appealed to that part of him that still felt like a military man, even though he wasn’t. Even though he never would be again.
He would always be marked by the military. That was for sure.
So he supposed it was fair enough to think of himself that way.
He kept on going.
He was surprised when he saw lights shining through the trees, and when he pulled into the driveway, he saw what was a very neat, bigger-than-expected cabin.
It was all lit up and welcome, and the porch light was on.
He sat in his truck for a long moment, examining that feeling. Of the light being left on for him.
He could remember coming home late in the latter days of his marriage. And that light being off.
Because she wasn’t waiting up. Not anymore.
He couldn’t blame her.
It wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t have kept on being there for someone who wasn’t there for her. That was the truth of it. He wasn’t owed endless service just because he’d been wounded serving the country. She was his wife. She had needed things, too.
But damn, he’d missed that sense someone might be waiting for him. More than he cared to admit.
He cleared his throat and got out of the truck, moving around the back and grabbing his duffel bag. He walked up to the steps and looked at the way his shadow cut through the light. He didn’t need to pause and ponder that metaphor. It was self-evident. It was him, all the way around at this point. He was the shadow. If he could’ve just been better, then...
He’d ruined Cassidy’s life. Sometimes that was like acid in his soul.
She married him... In that white dress, looking so beautiful and so full of hope. She was an Army brat. She knew the deal. She was in it for the long haul. She was the kind of woman who could withstand the deployments, the moves, all that stuff. She was perfect. And he had somehow managed to ruin all her dreams.
Because neither of them had really had an idea of what the long haul could mean.
Tragedy happened to other people.
Other men were broken apart by war.
Other men were hobbled by brain injuries, PTSD and addiction.
He’d now learned too well that the line separating him from other men had been a trip wire. And once it had been activated, everything had been blown to hell. Now there were no lines left.
He was the shadow.
And hell, he couldn’t blame her for keeping the porch light off so she didn’t have to see it anymore.
He shook his head and walked up to the front door. He had a code to open up the padlock that contained the key, centered right there next to the door.
That worked easily and quickly, and it was a weird thing to marvel at such a small detail being easy.
But he wasn’t used to easy. Not at this point.
He walked inside and looked around. It was clean. Freshly so, and it beat the hell out of the mildew in the apartment and old motel rooms he’d been staying in.
Cassidy hadn’t wanted spousal support from him. But there had been some gaps in pay while he’d been moving around, and while he’d waited to get his disability from the military. And after he put all that money down on the ranch.
He’d been living lean. That was over now. He had the money.
Still, he hadn’t stayed anywhere this nice in some time.
It was the cleanliness that got him.
He moved deeper into the room, and there was a table. And on that table was a giant basket. Inside the basket was a bottle of wine, which he immediately took out and moved off to the side.
It wasn’t difficult for him to be around alcohol, but he wouldn’t be opening the bottle.
There was food in there, which he did appreciate. Candies and nuts, some bread and muffins. The basket overflowed, really.
It was amazing, and his stomach was growling. He went over to the fridge and opened it. There was a glass bottle with milk, some butter, a pie. He opened up the freezer and saw a tub of vanilla ice cream, and he gave thanks to a God he rarely acknowledged anymore.
He took the pie out of the fridge and cut himself a generous slice. That was one of the perks of living by himself—there was no one here to judge him. He heated the pie up in the microwave, then put a generous scoop of ice cream right on top. He didn’t care much about exploring the rest of the place, not when there was a blackberry pie for him to dig into.
It felt like home.
This place.
Homemade pie, a big scoop of vanilla ice cream and a clean kitchen.
He sat there in the silence, eating.
It wasn’t a parade. But he didn’t want a parade.
He thought of that woman again. Surrounded by sunlight. It made something warm bloom inside him that he hadn’t felt in a long time.
As welcome homes went, this was just about perfect. He hadn’t even turned the lights on. He looked around the dim room, the only sound his fork on the plate and the steady ticking of the clock on the wall.
“Welcome back, Gideon. Welcome back.”