Waves of searing heat shimmered above the empty road, the endless road he had been walking for hours or days or all his life. How long didn’t matter, only that blurred spot in the distance, beyond the sea of dry, gold stalks, where the blazing sun reflected off what had to be a lake. The sight of it made his parched mouth ache with the memory of water, cool and fresh and unimaginably luxurious as his body slipped through it, graceful as a seal’s.
While his blistered feet stumbled forward, the walker’s mind returned to a jewel-bright pool of turquoise. As he sat along its edge, lush green fronds waved in the sultry breeze and giant coral blossoms spilled their honeyed fragrance. A woman in big sunglasses swayed toward him, a floral sarong molding to the sweet curve of her hips and a deep blue bikini top holding her firm, round breasts in place. But it was her smile that sent lust spearing straight to his groin, that dazzling smile so white against her summer tan.
“Ready for another?” she invited, offering him some creamy, icy beverage in a clear plastic cup. A chunk of juicy pineapple balanced on its rim, so vivid in his memory that he could almost taste it. He could almost taste her on his lips, too, just as he could feel the dark river of her long hair running through his fingers, gleaming strands of chocolate he’d watched her brush so many times.
He smiled, reaching for her. And felt the pain of his chapped lips splitting, tasted the thick, salt tang of blood instead of the hallucination’s sweetness. The mirage teased in the distance, a lie woven from refracted heat waves. You’ll never make it back to her, not even if you walk to the earth’s ends.
But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t, not while every step carried him closer to the oasis he dreamed of. Toward it and toward a woman, her name as lost to him as his own.
He knew one thing, though. He’d loved her. Loved her even if... The rest shimmered in the heat and vanished, an absence permeated with the bitterness of loss. There was fear as well, the anxiety that he’d done something unspeakable to poison what they’d had. That he’d been someone who deserved the scorched red skin, the knotted beard and the half-healed scars he’d glimpsed in the window of the pickup that had pulled over to offer him a ride an hour earlier. Or maybe it had been yesterday. Impossible to know, since time had grown as slippery as a live fish squirming in his grasp.
A single, splintered second pierced through his confusion: the moment when he’d met the driver’s eyes. Dark eyes, shaded by a broad-brimmed hat. A cowboy hat, like the ones they wore back in Texas. Like the ones he’d used to...
Before he’d been able to wrap his parched brain around the thought, those dark eyes had flared wide. The driver had hit the gas too hard, the back end of his pickup sliding around to spray the walker with pebbles. An instant later, the truck sped away in a plume of dust that he could still see hovering above the oasis.
The walker stopped and rubbed his eyes in an attempt to clear them. Because that growing smudge on the horizon—that was from now, not before. For a moment, he wondered if it could be the same truck whose driver he’d frightened away before with his appearance. Some buried instinct warned him the man might be returning to mow him down or shoot him, leaving his body to the blistering sun and the scavengers that he’d sensed watching, following his movements with hopeful, hungry eyes.
At the thought of dying here, of finally stopping, he felt an odd blend of disappointment and relief. Resignation, too, since there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it, with nothing but flat, oddly familiar rangeland on either side and no strength left to flee. So instead, the walker kept putting one foot before the other, figuring that if he died, it might as well be one step closer to the mirage on the horizon...and his memory of the poolside beauty who’d meant everything to him before he’d somehow, he felt certain, driven her away.
It was a blue-eyed man who pulled up beside him minutes later in a newer-model truck, a dark-haired man who reminded him of someone. Maybe of himself, or at least the version of himself who’d swum through cool blue waters.
Taking off his straw cowboy hat, the driver jumped down from the cab. Tall and muscular, he wore a rolled-sleeved cotton shirt, worn jeans and a single bead of perspiration, running from his temple to his jawline. Color draining from his tan face, he stared directly at the walker, searched his eyes with an intensity that made his heart hammer.
The walker took a step backward, glancing over his shoulder, his muscles coiling as he looked for an escape route.
“I told that fool pup of a cowhand to quit talking crazy,” said the driver, unblinking as he stared, “telling me he’d seen a man who looked like—looked like my dead brother out here on our land. Then I cursed him for leaving some poor, lost stranger way out here on his own in this heat, without even offering a drink of water.”
“You—have w-water?” The idea of it, the possibility spun from his dreams, was so powerful that he stumbled closer, forgetting his fear as trembling overtook him.
“Yeah, sure. Here you go, man.” The driver reached back inside the truck and pulled out a plastic bottle beaded with condensation. He cracked open the sealed lid and handed it over.
The walker was so overwhelmed by the cold moisture in his hand that he barely noticed the uncertainty darting through the other man’s eyes or the moisture gleaming in them.
“Ian, is it really you?” he asked, letting the question hang as the walker chugged down half the bottle.
When he started choking, the driver warned him, “Slow down. Slow down and take it easy. There’s plenty more where that came from. Food and clean clothes back at the house, too.”
His coughing over, the walker glugged down the rest of the bottle. When he was finished, he peered suspiciously into the blue eyes. “Why?” he asked, searching the stranger for some agenda. “Why would you do all that for me?”
“Could be one of two good reasons. Either because I don’t cotton to the idea of a stranger dying on my land. Or because you’re a walking, talking miracle—my only brother, Captain Ian Rayford, come back from the dead.”
* * *
Andrea Warrington stared down at the file her boss, retired army colonel Julian Ross, had handed her, her throat tightening the moment she read the name Captain Ian Rayford.
What she had to tell the man sitting behind the battered desk, his shirtsleeves rolled up and his tie loosened against the late summer heat, would be awkward enough under any circumstances. But despite the fifteen-year difference in their ages, Andrea had recently accepted the handsome forty-six-year-old’s proposal, so bat-sized butterflies attempted to flap their way free of her stomach.
Telling herself that putting it off was no longer an option, she drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders, just as she would have advised the wounded vets she counseled here at the Marston unit of the Warriors-4-Life Rehabilitation Center. “I—I’m afraid I can’t take this assignment, Julian. There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you