Homecoming Hero Read online

“I’ll take care of the candles and meet you on the front porch,” he called after her.

  “Sounds good,” she tossed over her shoulder.

  Wolf couldn’t stop a grin from forming. The night was suddenly looking up. But then he remembered what lay ahead and his smile vanished. Flattening his lips into a grim line, he snuffed out the candles. With each puff of air he mentally clicked off the reasons Hailey couldn’t go to the Middle East. Insurgents.

  Unstable governments.

  IEDs.

  Roadside bombs.

  He no longer needed to remind himself this wasn’t a date.

  Curious as to where Wolf had parked his car, Hailey let him lead her down the front steps of O’Brien House. A cool breeze blew across her face. She could smell the damp in the air.

  Night had completely blanketed the city with its inky stillness, but that didn’t pose a problem in this part of town. Since Savannah was best seen on foot, street-lamps had been erected at close intervals along all the sidewalks in the historic district, giving tourists enough light to see the city’s famous architecture.

  There was so much illumination on Hailey’s street she could practically count the leaves on the azalea bushes.

  Unfortunately, the lighting didn’t provide any relief from the cold. She shivered.

  And then Wolf halted beside a car parked directly in front of her house and she shivered again.

  Shock slithered slowly down her spine, skidding to a stop at the soles of her feet.

  What had she gotten herself into?

  Unable to speak, her eyes tracked over what had to be the saddest excuse for a muscle car she’d ever seen.

  “This is yours?” she managed to croak past the tightness in her throat, trying not to let her dismay show.

  Grinning like a proud papa, Wolf ran his hand lovingly over the roof. “Hailey, meet Stella.”

  It was years of training from her mother that kept her mouth from hanging open. “You named your car?”

  “You bet I did.” He gave the hunk of metal an affectionate pat. “This little beauty has been my only constant for the last ten years.” He grinned broadly. “Isn’t she great?”

  “Sure…”

  The car Wolf adoringly referred to as Stella looked ready for a permanent trip to the junkyard. Hailey squinted. Were those large, dark-colored patches splattered over the hood rust marks? Dirt? A combination of the two?

  “Are you sure that thing…er, Stella…is safe?”

  “Have a little faith.” Wolf leaned in close enough for her to smell his spicy, masculine scent and tapped her lightly on the nose. “Stella might be in desperate need of a paint job, but the old girl is in her prime.”

  Hailey slid a skeptical glance over the car—hood to tail, tail to hood. “I’ll have to take your word on that.”

  “Come on, sweetheart, where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “I think I left it in the house.” She deliberately turned her back on the car. “Maybe I’ll just head inside for a moment and look for it.”

  Chuckling, Wolf swung her back around with a gentle hand on her shoulder. “No way are you bailing on me now. You’ve come this far. Might as well go the distance.” He opened the car door for her. “Go on. Climb in. Stella doesn’t bite.”

  “I’m going to hold you to that.” Heaving a dramatic sigh, she lowered herself into the passenger’s seat.

  The crisp smell of lemon and new-car scent surrounded her. A single glance at the car’s interior and Hailey took back every negative thought she’d had about Stella.

  Delighted, she rubbed her hand across the butter-soft, blue leather seats and then eyed the shiny, chrome-plated dials.

  Wow!

  Wolf had clearly spent considerable time and money on restoring Miss Stella’s interior. Afraid to touch anything, Hailey perched on the edge of her seat, folded her hands in her lap and waited for Wolf to walk around to his side of the car.

  Now that her initial Stella-shock was wearing off, something Wolf had said earlier came back to mind. The moment he settled in behind the steering wheel, she addressed the issue head-on. “You mentioned that Stella has been your only constant for the last ten years. Does that mean you don’t have any family?”

  “That’s right.” Staring straight ahead, he placed his hands on the wheel at the ten-and-two position.

  The tone of his voice told her not to press the subject. She did anyway. “Not even a distant cousin?”

  “No, Hailey.” His hands clutched the wheel tighter. “No one. The Army’s all I’ve got.”

  She recognized the emptiness in his voice, understood the bleakness it represented. The emotion was so similar to what she felt herself that her heart skipped a beat. Yet even as she empathized with Wolf, she sensed his loneliness wasn’t as straightforward as hers. She feared his past held something dark, something she could never truly understand.

  Should she quote Scripture to him at this point, or maybe recite words filled with God’s truth about His unfailing love?

  No. Something in the way Wolf held his body slightly away from her, almost isolated, didn’t inspire her to introduce the fundamentals of God’s love into the conversation. Except…

  What if she started by addressing the one thing they had in common? “I guess we’re both alone in this world.”

  He made a noncommittal sound in his throat, one that clearly said the topic was closed. Without looking at her, he turned the key in the ignition and Stella roared to life.

  Hailey gasped as a succession of grinding metal, snarls and rumbles whipped through the air.

  Wolf pressed down on the accelerator. Stella responded with a loud, menacing growl.

  Gasping again, Hailey braced her hands on the dashboard and hung on for dear life.

  Stella wasn’t through. She shook. She shimmied. Until, finally, “the old girl” descended into a vibrating rumble.

  Needing a moment to collect herself, Hailey shut her eyes. She couldn’t think past the blood rushing in her ears. Or was that terrible noise coming solely from the car?

  “Ready for a sweet ride?” Wolf asked.

  No! She slowly opened her eyes. Be brave, Hailey, be brave. “Sure.”

  He put Stella into gear and pressed on the gas pedal. Surprisingly, the car’s engine settled into a low-pitched purr as she slid away from the curb.

  After several blocks of pitch-perfect propulsion, Hailey grudgingly admitted that Miss Stella did indeed give one sweet ride.

  Relaxing enough to unclench her fingers, Hailey settled back against the soft leather of the comfortable bucket seat. “Where are we going?”

  “I thought we’d head out to Tybee Island.”

  He wanted to go to the beach? So soon after returning home? “I would think you’d be sick of sand by now.”

  Clay had avoided Tybee for months after his first deployment.

  “I am.” A grim look crossed his face. “But I haven’t had nearly enough water.”

  Of course. “That makes sense.”

  “Besides.” His expression lightened and he hooked his wrist over the top of the steering wheel. “It’s a pretty drive.”

  “You think so?” She couldn’t say she particularly agreed. “The road is nothing more than a causeway that cuts through the marshes.”

  “Exactly.”

  She narrowed her eyes, confusion gathering inside her. “I don’t follow.”

  “There isn’t a lot of marshland in the desert.”

  “No. I suppose not.” She should have realized that on her own.

  After several moments of Wolf concentrating on the streets and Hailey watching him out of the corner of her eye, they broke free of Savannah.

  For the next five or so miles, Hailey tried to look at the familiar scenery from Wolf’s perspective. Not an easy thing to do. The marshes were just plain spooky under the silver light of the full moon. Even with the windows rolled up against the cold, the tall grasses were ripe with the smells of mold, mud and rotting fish. I
t was a perfect hunting ground for gators and snakes.

  Hailey shivered yet again, which was really quite enough of that.

  She had to admit, though, words like Middle East and desert did not come to mind as the scenery whizzed past in a blur. As a matter of fact, Miss Stella seemed to be gobbling up the road a little faster than Hailey would have thought possible.

  From under her lowered lashes, she checked the speedometer. Eighty-five. Eighty-five?

  A rush of adrenaline surged through her blood. Breathe, Hailey. Just breathe.

  “Are we late for something?”

  “No. Why?”

  She pointed to the speedometer, trying not to give in to panic, but—oh, my—he’d just pushed their speed past ninety.

  “We’re going a little fast, wouldn’t you say?”

  He flashed her that quicksilver grin of his, the one that had her thinking of big, bad wolves. “I like fast,” he declared.

  Afraid to take her eyes off the road, Hailey white-knuckled her seat and stared straight ahead. Okay, yes, the causeway was a long stretch of uninterrupted highway. And there were no other cars out tonight. But still…

  Wolf must have sensed her agitation. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine. Never better.” She dug her fingers deeper into the soft leather of her seat, but she didn’t take her eyes off the road. Blinking was simply not an option. “Having loads and loads of fun over here.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “All right, Wolf, let’s face it. There’s fast and then there’s fa-a-a-ast.”

  He chuckled, but immediately eased up on the gas pedal. “I know what I’m doing.” He patted her hand. “Trust me, sweetheart.”

  Oh, sure. Trust him. That was just soooo easy to do when she was sitting in a muscle car with a guy named Wolf, traveling faster than she’d ever gone before.

  The best she could do was not talk. And maybe watch the scenery. What little she could decipher.

  She caught a flash of…something rush by on their left. She figured the quick burst of light had come from Fort Pulaski. The historic Civil War fort sat on a tiny island between the Atlantic Ocean and the Savannah River.

  “You can relax your spine a little. We’re nearly there,” he announced.

  “Praise the Lord!”

  Only after he eased up on the accelerator again did she slant a glance in Wolf’s direction. The bright moonlight revealed his features clearly, enough that she could see his brows scrunched in concentration. Obviously he was contemplating his next words very carefully.

  “You might be interested to know I ate lunch with your pastor the other day,” he said at last.

  “You did?” She wondered when he’d had the time to meet Keith Goodwin, Faith Community Church’s senior pastor, then remembered the e-mail she’d received this afternoon. “Oh, you mean J.T.”

  “We hammered out most of the details for the survival classes I’m going to teach at your church.”

  “That explains why he sent out a blanket announcement encouraging everyone taking a mission trip to attend. The class starts next Wednesday, right?”

  “Yep.” He proceeded to beat out a complicated beat on the steering wheel. “Will you be there?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  He fell silent for a moment. Thanks to the close confines of the car, she could feel the tension in him.

  “Tell me why you want to be a missionary,” he blurted out in a rush.

  She sighed heavily. “That was certainly straight to the point.”

  “Maybe. But we’ve put off this conversation long enough. You know why I agreed to come to dinner tonight.”

  No, actually, she’d forgotten. She’d settled into the evening as though they were on a first date, explaining away the awkward moments to the usual getting-to-know-one-another jitters.

  She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  “Yes, I know why you’re with me tonight.” She ignored the sting of rejection building into tears behind her eyes and continued. “You think you have to convince me to stay out the Middle East.”

  “There’s no ‘think’ about it.” He slowed yet again, enough to swing Stella down an alley leading to beach access. He slid the car into a parking place under a low-burning streetlight and then cut the engine. “But I promised you an open mind and that’s what you’ll get from me.”

  He sounded sincere. She wasn’t sure she believed him.

  “Help me to understand your motivation, Hailey.”

  “Why?” She frowned at the shadows dancing across Stella’s hood. “So you can use the information against me?”

  “I wouldn’t do something that low. I’m really interested in your answer. What can I say?” He gave her a crooked smile. “You intrigue me.”

  Glowing from the unexpected compliment, Hailey held back a gasp of pure feminine pleasure. Suddenly the interior of the car felt too small, too intimate. It was hard to think coherently with this handsome soldier sitting next to her. “Let’s discuss this on the beach. I tend to think better when I’m walking.”

  He gave her what she was starting to consider the “Wolf” look and then reached for the door handle on his side of the car. “Whatever will make you most comfortable.”

  His tone sounded so rigid, the angle of his jaw looked so implacable, Hailey feared he thought she was trying to put off answering his question.

  She picked at a speck of white fluff on her sleeve, wondering what he would think if he knew the real reason for her suggestion. She wasn’t stalling. She was merely finding it hard to keep her mind on her goals with his masculine scent teasing her nostrils and his presence scrambling her thoughts.

  But as far as her calling to become a missionary? Well, Wolf would either understand her reasons or he wouldn’t. No matter what he said or did, he would not convince her to stay out of the Middle East.

  Forcing down any last remnants of unease, Hailey summoned a brisk air of confidence and climbed out of the car. Game on.

  Chapter Six

  Hailey started down the beach several feet ahead of Wolf. The full moon cast a brilliant, silver streak of light over the ocean, while the scent of salt water and sand clung to the cold air. Waves broke onto the shore in perfectly timed intervals, creating a sound track for their walk. But with so many thoughts working around in her brain, Hailey couldn’t enjoy the scenery.

  The sand squeaking under Wolf’s feet alerted her to his progress. He caught up with her just as she paused to watch a transport ship ride the distant waves. Its large, guiding light bobbed up and down as the vessel tracked slowly toward the horizon.

  Now that the time had come to tell her side of the story, her heart pumped wildly against her ribs. Or was her reaction because he was once again standing so close…too close?

  She slid a quick glance in his direction. He carried himself with an unmistakable air of seriousness. His gait was stiff and careful, as though the soft sand presented a slight challenge for him.

  Again, she wondered if he’d been wounded in the roadside bomb attack and whether or not he had a lingering injury. One that acted up in the damp beach air.

  Of course, now probably wasn’t the best time to ask him. She’d stalled long enough. “If I’m going to explain where I am and where I’m heading, it’s important you know where I come from.”

  “I know where you come from.” His voice matched his stiff gait. “Generations of family tradition, with the kind of long-reaching roots that didn’t just start a few years ago but centuries ago.”

  He didn’t sound impressed. On the contrary, his voice held a note of censure.

  She stopped walking.

  He did the same.

  The moonlight gave her enough illumination to see his face clearly. The sharp angle of his jaw made him look harsh and unforgiving.

  “You hold my upbringing against me.” She all but gasped out the words.

  “I’m trying not to.”

  A part of her appreciated his honesty, but the obv
ious doubt in his tone told her he wasn’t having much success.

  Hailey gave him a bewildered shake of her head. “Why is it wrong to come from an old family, to have solid roots?”

  He twisted his stance to look out over the water, shutting her out as effectively as if he’d completely turned his back to her. “There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just not something I have much experience with. My family wasn’t exactly like yours.”

  Something in his tone alerted her to tread carefully. “No?”

  He continued looking out over the water. “Let’s just say my childhood wasn’t as…secure as yours.”

  His softly uttered words said it all. Clearly, Wolf’s parents—one or both of them—had let him down in some terrible way. Although she didn’t know the specifics, her heart took a painful dip in her chest for all that he’d suffered. And, yes, she had no doubt he’d suffered.

  “I’m sorry, Wolf.” What more could she say?

  “I believe you are.” He turned and closed the distance between them—literally and figuratively. The barriers he’d erected earlier were gone. Completely. He’d simply let them drop and was now looking at her with stormy emotion waging a war in his gaze.

  Hailey felt honored that he trusted her enough to let her see all that raw pain. And yet, she was petrified she would somehow let him down. He kept so much inside him she had no idea how to proceed. Or what words to use.

  Fortunately, she didn’t have to say or do anything, because in the next moment he took her hand and cupped it protectively in his. She watched, fascinated, as he stroked the pad of his thumb across her knuckles. Once. Twice. Her heart did another quick flip at the same moment he twined his fingers through hers.

  “Tonight isn’t about me or my dysfunctional childhood,” he said at last, still staring at their joined hands.

  Perhaps any other time Hailey would have agreed with him. But if she’d learned anything in her countless Bible studies, it was to go in the direction God nudged her. At the moment, she felt a strong shove toward Wolf. “Maybe if you told me—”

  He spoke right over her. “Go on, Hailey, help me to understand your desire to become a missionary. And don’t use fancy clichés like we heard from the Mulligans. I want honesty from you.”