Battle for the Soldier's Heart Read Free

matured, too. She was not sure she would say it was better. Changed. The mischievousness of a young man was gone. So was the devil-may-care light that had always burned like fire in the depths of those green, green eyes.
    Around his eyes, now, were the creases of a man who had squinted into the sun a great deal. There was a set to his jaw, a firmness around his mouth that had not been there before.
    There was something in his expression that was closed and hard. It was the look of a warrior, a man who had accepted the mantle of serving his country, but at a price to himself. There were new shadows in eyes that had once been clear.
    Rory Adams had seen things—and done things—that made the tatters of the birthday party behind her seem frivolous and superficial.
    Her eyes wandered to his hair. It was brown, glossy and rich as a vat of melted dark chocolate, shining with the highlights of the Okanagan early summer sun.
    The last time she had seen him, that dark hair had been very short, buzzed off to a mere shadow, vanity- and maintenance-free in preparation for hard, hot work in inhospitable climates.
    Now, Rory had returned to a style closer to that she remembered from when he was coming in and out of their house with Graham.
    Rory’s family had moved onto their block and into their school district in the latter half of Graham’s senior year. And then in those carefree days after they had finished high school, they had both worked for the same landscaping company.
    That was before they had decided it was imperative that they go save the world.
    Rory’s hair was longer than it had been even then, longer than she had ever seen it, thick, rich, straight until it touched his collar, and then it curled slightly.
    She supposed that’s what everyone who got out of the military did—exercised the release from discipline, celebrated the freedom to grow their hair.
    And yet the long hair did not make him look less a warrior, just a warrior from a different age.
    Too easy to picture him with the long hair catching in the wind, that fierce expression on his face, a sword in his hand, ready.
    He was the kind of man who made a woman feel the worst kind of weakness: a desire to feel his strength against her own softness, to feel the rasp of rough whiskers against delicate skin, to feel the hard line of those lips soften against her mouth.
    But Rory Adams had always been that. Even now Grace could feel the ghost of the girl she had once been. She could feel the helpless humiliation she had felt at fourteen because she loved him so desperately.
    And pathetically.
    She’d been as invisible to him as a ghost. No, more like a mosquito, an annoyance he swatted at every now and then. His best friend’s aggravating kid sister.
    She’d known from the moment he had first called her six months ago, that nothing good could come from seeing him.
    There had been something in his voice, grim and determined, that had made her think he had things to tell her that she was not ready to hear, that she would probably never be ready to hear.
    Besides, seeing Rory? It could only make her yearn for things that could never be. She had never seen Rory without her brother, Graham.
    The brother who was not coming home. Hadn’t she thought seeing her brother’s friend would intensify the sense of loss that was finally dulling to a throbbing ache instead of a screaming pain?
    Once she had blamed this man who stood before her for Graham’s choices, but a long time ago she had realized her brother had been born to do what he was doing. It was a choice that he had been willing to give his life for.
    And he had.
    But if Rory wanted to think she still held him responsible, and if it kept up some kind of barrier between them, that was okay.
    Because what shocked Gracie right now was that what she felt looking at Rory was not an intensified sense of loss. Rather, she was unprepared for how the yearning of her younger self—to be noticed by him, to be cared about