Don’t be so sad. You’re worrying too much. Men are going to line up to marry you. You’re twenty-one and completely gorgeous—
She’d looked at him, startled. He’d caught the edge of one of his flip-flops on the grass and tightened his hands on her waist, but his voice had sounded very steady. I’ll marry you when you’re a retired old colonel. I promise.
And then he’d kissed her. She hadn’t known, hadn’t guessed, hadn’t given a thought to how warm his mouth would be. How soft his lips would be when the rest of his body was so hard. Hard shoulders she clung to. Hard thigh muscles her legs brushed against.
He’d ended the kiss, and this time, he’d been the one who looked away.
Her heart had pounded because this was wrong, all wrong. She was graduating. She was being sent to her first duty station, far away from his. He was her friend, and she should tease him like he was her brother, but she didn’t feel like teasing him. She felt like kissing him again, on the grass by the fountain, under the moon.
It would mess up all her plans. It would be absurd to start a new relationship mere hours before they were leaving one another to begin careers at posts that were thousands and thousands of miles apart.
They’d danced some more instead. As long as the violins had played, they’d danced. This is it. Goodbye to Evan, goodbye to all of my friends, to this green and this college and this life.
Her heart had kept pounding and the future had suddenly seemed more scary than bright. This was the last night she’d live in a city she chose. The last year she’d be certain she’d be home for Christmas. When would she see all of her friends again? When would she see Evan again?
She’d broken the silence. Why should I marry you as a retired colonel? I’ll be too old to have children by then.
He had laughed at that and gone one rank lower. Lieutenant colonel, then. We’ll be thirty-five or thirty-six, right? Plenty of time for making babies. If we’re both still single when we get promoted to lieutenant colonel, we’ll marry each other.
His laughter had chased away some of her fears. His promise, as silly as it was, had given her a fixed point of certainty in the vast, unknowable future. She’d let go of him and stepped back, but she’d held out her pinkie finger in the moonlight.
Evan had only scowled at her hand. Dudes don’t do pinkie promises. You have my word.
Dude, she’d mimicked him. Pinkie promise, or I won’t believe you.
He’d hooked her finger with his own and repeated his promise. If we’re both still single when we get promoted to lieutenant colonel, we’ll marry each other.
“Lieutenant Colonel Grayson, would you like to say a few words?”
Juliet thanked everyone for coming. She thanked her son for being there, and she joked that perhaps the promise of cake had been of equal enticement to the promise of skipping a half day of school. She cut the sheet cake with a tasseled sword her new unit kept on the wall for just such occasions, cutting neat square after neat square, but all the while, her heart was pounding like a college girl’s at midnight.
Juliet knew Evan had already been promoted to lieutenant colonel. The army published promotion lists that were avidly read throughout the military, so she’d seen his name when he’d been promoted below the zone, one year early.
She hadn’t seen Evan in person for years, not since a chance meeting on an airfield in Afghanistan that had lasted less than a minute. Before that, there’d been an alumni tailgate at a homecoming football game. She’d had a toddler-aged Matthew in her arms then, and she’d still had hope that her husband would grow into his role as husband and father, still hoped he’d become a more reliable man.
Juliet watched Matthew now, a preteen who was eating cake with the gusto of a little kid. He’d carried his plate over to a group of men in uniform and stood right in the middle of them as he ate forkfuls of frosting. He always gravitated to men in any situation, proof to Juliet that he needed a man in his life. Her father and brother lived too far away to fill in the gap left by her ex-husband. Matthew had no one to serve as a role model beyond a coach he might interact with for a few hours each week during Little League T-ball season, or a teacher he might have for one hourly class each semester.
Matthew looked so very young, despite his necktie, as he craned his neck back to watch the men as they talked over him. While he ate black and white cake layers, his eyes followed their conversation like it was a ping-pong match. Did the men remind him of his father? Or was he so fascinated because they were nothing like his father? Maybe he gravitated toward the authority and stability that uniforms represented, although it was because she herself wore a uniform that Matthew had just been plunged, yet again, into a new school in a new town in a new state. He might turn out fine despite his unstable childhood, or he might be scarred for life.
Matthew’s future was so uncertain, so unknowable—which meant hers was, too. She was so tired of facing down the unknown alone.
When Matthew caught her staring at him, she mustered up a smile, but she was thinking ahead to her plans for the immediate future. For this afternoon. After the cake, after she drove Matthew back to school, Juliet had somewhere to go.
Along with the promotion lists, Juliet had read that Evan Stephens was a battalion commander now, a position of great responsibility. Evan had been a reliable friend back in the day, and now the US Army clearly depended on him as one of their most reliable officers. The battalion Evan had been entrusted with was headquartered right here at Fort Hood. As of two weeks ago, so was she.
It was time to let Lieutenant Colonel Stephens know that she was now Lieutenant Colonel Grayson.
And single.
Just like he was.
* * *
Evan sat at his desk, busy with paperwork, bored out of his mind.
He flipped to the last page of the police blotter and initialed it. He was the commander of a military police battalion, a unit nearly 600 soldiers strong. The buck stopped here, on his desk. So did the police blotter.
Actually, the battalion had 589 personnel today. Evan always knew exactly how many lives he was responsible for.
He tossed the blotter into the outbox on his desk. Reading the blotter wasn’t strictly one of his duties. The MP station sent it directly to Evan’s commander, who was the Provost Marshal of Fort Hood and the commander of the 89th Military Police Brigade. Colonel Oscar Reed signed off on it, and then his boss—the commanding general of III Corps—was sent a copy. But if Evan’s boss and his boss’s boss read the blotter, then Evan read the blotter. He was never surprised, never blindsided, not when he could prevent it.
It was rare for one of his MPs to make the blotter as either a perpetrator or victim, but it happened. If the brigade commander called him for more details, Evan always knew to whom and what he was referring, and he’d already taken corrective action. No surprises. No blindsides.
Being proactive had made him a good platoon leader. A better company commander. A great operations officer. His file was full of glowing evaluations from superiors who appreciated an officer who stayed ahead of problems and stopped them before they started. Evan had been promoted below the zone because of it, not only selected for lieutenant colonel, but promoted earlier than 90 percent of the other officers who had also made the cut. That had not been a surprise, either.
Evan sat back from his executive desk, a piece of burnished wood furniture that the army only provided for its upper echelon of officers. His career to this point had been conducted from sturdier, uglier, government-issued desks of metal and Formica. He turned his chair so he could look out the second-story window at the Texas landscape outside. Even his chair was executive-level now. This was it: the big time. Battalion commander. One of the most-prized, high-speed, low-drag positions in the US Army.
He