The Way Back Read Free Page A

forty and fifty, but, damn, he still looked good.
    She’d met semi-famous people when she’d been the host of Wake Up Philadelphia. There had been the mayor of the city, the governor of the state, sports figures, local actors and performers who had made good. She’d interviewed Kevin Bacon for Pete’s sake. Once you knew him, you were basically connected to everyone else in Hollywood. It was a known fact.
    Jamison Hunter wasn’t any of those people, though. He was more. At least to her. Growing up without her father during her teenage years, it wasn’t hard to understand how she had formed such an attachment to a media figure—especially one who had seemed so perfect. A girl had to look for heroes where she could find them.
    Of course, she hadn’t been some silly twelve-year-old when Colonel Jamison Hunter first captured the world’s attention. No, she’d been twenty-three, engaged and starting her career. She’d had the world in her hands and had believed her father’s abandonment hadn’t made a single dent in her perspective or her life choices. Maybe she wasn’t the most romantic person, and wasn’t overly sentimental. However, she had committed herself to a relationship. That was an achievement. Something to be proud of.
    She really hadn’t had a reason to fall into a crush with an image on the TV screen. Something about him had captivated her.
    Air Force Colonel. Astronaut. American hero.
    It was a story everyone knew. As embedded into the American psyche as Apollo 13, the Challenger tragedy and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. Colonel Hunter had commanded a space-shuttle mission to help with repairs on the international space station. Once there, the crew of the station informed him the situation was more critical than first realized. In fact, they feared an imminent explosion would not only take out the station but the shuttle docked to it, as well.
    In an unprecedented move originally not sanctioned by NASA, Hunter did the unthinkable with an unplanned, untethered, space walk. He set out to make the repairs, knowing if he didn’t find and fix the problem, the lives of his crew and those on the station would be lost.
    Gabby never understood all the specifics of what he’d done. Reporters explained the science, the possible complications and ultimately the risk he took, but none of it mattered to her. All she cared about was after he’d taken that brave action and was safely on American soil and she watched him being interviewed time and time again, she felt safe.
    The world was a safer place because Jamison Hunter was in it.
    Gabby wasn’t alone in her hero worship of him. It seemed everyone had all come together to place him on a pedestal. It was one of the reasons he’d fallen so hard and so far when the scandal broke.
    A sunny day in Florida. A motel not too far from Cape Canaveral. A picture of Jamison Hunter standing in the doorway of the room with a woman wearing only a sheet. Next to them stood his wife with a look of sheer horror on her face. His deception had crushed the world. It had devastated Gabby. How could a man capable of such honorable and heroic actions cheat on his wife? And if he could cheat on his beautiful, accomplished wife, what chance did an average woman have of preventing much less heroic men from doing the same? Gabby couldn’t stop asking herself that question and becoming deeply suspicious of her own fiancé as a result. In retrospect that suspicion was a good thing…and warranted.
    Finding her fiancé in bed with her half-sister might not have happened if she hadn’t started looking for signs.
    Gabby owed Jamison Hunter for saving her from a marriage with a cheating scumbag—something for which she was eternally grateful. But she also blamed Jamison for her inability to make any other relationship in the past ten years since Brad work.
    “Stop it, Gabby.”
    The sound of her voice startled her. She needed the reminder though. She wasn’t here to contemplate