Forever a soldier, p.1
Forever a Soldier, page 1
part #1 of Always a Cowboy Series
FOREVER A SOLIDER
A wounded soldier searching for healing…
Hank Moreno returned home from combat not quite broken but definitely battered. His job now is to recover from his tour of duty and to keep a hundred-year-old house from falling down around his ears. No one calls, no one visits—just as he likes. But then one irrepressible woman invades his sanctuary, hunting the secrets hidden within.
A determined scholar searching for a legend…
Graduate student Lale Pehlivan is investigating a century-old mystery. Unraveling it will guarantee she becomes a star history professor. But one surly former soldier is guarding the family archives—and standing between her and the information she needs.
There’s no escape from the person destined to break your heart…
Lale launches a charm attack Hank can’t resist, and the sterling honor Lale finds beneath Hank’s surliness tunnels under her own defenses. But when Lale threatens to unearth Hank’s secrets along with those in the archive, their hearts might not survive the upheaval.
Copyright © 2016 by Genevieve Turner.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
For my kids—the Young Turks
GUIDE TO THE TURKISH WORDS IN THIS BOOK
Pronunciation of the Turkish Alphabet:
C: Pronounced like our J; can (life) is pronounced jahn
Ğ: Close to a w sound; Erdoğan is pronounced Ehrdowan
ı: e, like in open; Canım (darling) is pronounced Jahnem
ö: u, like in urge; Börek is pronounced buhrek
ü: U, like in cute; Büyük is pronounced Booyook
ş: sh; Hoş is pronounced hosh
Anne—Mother
Baba—Father
Baba Anne—Grandmother, specifically your father’s mother
Börek—a filled pastry that can be baked or fried (Lale’s mother serves her Sigara böreği)
Büyük Baba—Grandfather, specifically your father’s father
Cami—mosque
Canım benim—my darling
Dolma—stuffed grape leaves
Hala—Aunt, specifically your father’s sister
Hoş geldeniz—welcome
Hoş bulduk—happy to be here
Nazar boncuğu—an amulet to ward off the evil eye
Sağol—a more informal way to say thank you
Teşekkür ederim—thank you very much
Yeni Cami—the New Mosque
CHAPTER ONE
The knocking just wouldn’t stop.
The door rattled hard on its hinges, the thump-thump-thump turning frustrated. Angry. Demanding.
Hank Moreno kept on with his rocking, his foot pushing off from the floor at a steady rhythm, sending him back and forth, back and forth, as he watched the door take a beating.
“Goddamn it, Hank, open this door!”
The door bowed as if someone was shoving his shoulder against it. But it held, which Hank knew it would. He’d installed the hardware himself.
He looked to his dog, Gus, at his feet. “Should we open up for him? Or should we tell my overbearing, nosy cousin to go fuck himself?”
Gus flicked one ear back but said nothing. Didn’t even bark at the person pounding on the door, which was weird for a dog. But Gus had always been a weird dog, as marked by the service in his own way as Hank was.
Or maybe the dog was getting weirder. Maybe Hank’s moods were rubbing off and Gus was too depressed to even bark. Hell, if Hank could require psychiatric meds, so could his dog. It was the twenty-first century after all.
“I can hear you in there,” Benedict shouted through the door. “Open up or I’ll break it down.”
“Considering this house is over a century old,” Hank yelled back, “and you pay me to make sure it doesn’t fall down, I don’t think you will.”
The rattling stopped.
Gus’s ear pricked up, his gaze hard on the door.
Hank kept rocking. The last thing he wanted to do was talk with anyone. His dreams last night had been…
He rubbed a hand over his face but managed to erase nothing. His mood was not good today. Not good at all.
With everything that had happened in his life, Hank probably should have learned something about the uselessness of trying to hold off the inevitable. But some demon inside him made him do this, made him push back and say, This space is mine and you can’t come in unless I let you.
It’d be nice to have that power within his own brain. Which was probably why he was sitting here instead of letting his cousin in.
But Benedict rarely hauled himself out here. His cousin would wait as long as it took for Hank to open the door.
His little power play was utterly pointless, and he’d known it from the very beginning. Maybe that made him crazy, that he knew it was doomed to fail and still did it.
It was probably all the other shit that qualified him as crazy though.
Finally Hank said, “It’s unlocked.”
Benedict muttered something Hank couldn’t catch. The handle jiggled, and then the door swung open.
“It was unlocked the whole time,” Hank said helpfully, never stopping the rocker.
Benedict came in, his boot heels thumping against the bare floor as he took off his Stetson. His cousin looked polished and sleek. The very model of a modern major CEO. Hank acutely felt every trailing end of his ragged edges in comparison.
“I’m not just going to walk into here.” Benedict looked around at all the boxes stacked in the living room, his gaze bouncing off Hank’s each time they happened to meet. “You’ve been… jumpy lately.”
And wasn’t Benedict the diplomat with that?
“I’ve never hurt anyone. I never would.”
No one believed Hank though. He saw the fear in some people’s eyes, bright and sharp, whenever he forced himself to go out. They thought he might snap any day.
Joke was on them. He’d already snapped. Right now he was just trying to keep hold of all his pieces.
The lowest possible dose to make me functional. That’s what he’d told the doc when they were discussing his medications. She’d raised one eyebrow, but that’s exactly what they’d come to in the end. Of course, Hank’s definition of functional was different from most everyone else’s. Given how long it had taken to get him this far with the crutch of the meds and therapy, he wasn’t interested in going beyond this definition of functional. It wasn’t worth the effort.
“I meant I didn’t want to upset you,” Benedict said.
Upset him. As if Hank were a toddler asking for the blue sippy and not the red. Although, considering how rigidly Hank clung to his routine, maybe that wasn’t a bad comparison.
“I’m fine.” His hands tightened on the chair arms, but he kept up his steady rhythm in the rocker. “Just… I don’t want visitors.”
“You never do,” Benedict said. “But I’ve got to check on you sometimes. You been keeping up with your doctors?”
“Yes, mommy.”
Benedict tried to hide his smile. “You need a ride to the VA for anything?”
Just the mention of the VA made Hank break out in cold sweat. The VA was a nightmare of despair and bureaucracy even to someone who wasn’t a hermit. “No, I don’t.” He didn’t mention the appointment coming up in a few weeks. He’d get himself there and back just fine. He could still drive, for God’s sake. “Is that all you came for?”
He rose and moved toward the door, ready to bid farewell to Benedict.
His cousin stayed right where he was. He was staring at a portrait of their great-great-great-grandmother, Señora Maria Dolores Alvarado Jaramillo de Moreno. He pointed to it. “After nearly a year here, you’ve never bothered to hang anything else.”
“I like it.”
It was a photo of her alone, nothing there to soften the intensity of her gaze as she stared straight out from the frame, right at the viewer. She could have been thirty, forty, or even over fifty—her demeanor refused to have an age pinned to it.
Hank had been immediately grabbed by the picture, by her thousand-yard stare. So much so that he hung it in the living room, the only thing on the walls besides the hideous wallpaper someone had put up in the eighties.
Her eyes held secrets. Secrets she wasn’t letting go of. Hank could sympathize.
“Odd picture to like.” Benedict stepped closer, creases denting his brow. “She looks—”
“What else did you need?” Hank didn’t want to hear what Benedict thought she looked like. That picture was Hank’s icon—he didn’t need Benedict to pass judgment on it.
Benedict cleared his throat and turned back to Hank, his boots scraping across the hardwood as he did. “There’s something here I need your help with.”
Here being the house that had belonged to their great-great-aunt and uncle, Franny and Felipe Ortega. Hank got paid to live here, supposedly to keep the house u
Surprisingly though, Hank found he had a knack for this kind of work. He was surrounded by family while never having to speak to a soul. Good work if you could get it, at least to Hank’s mind.
“Like what?” Hank had the feeling he was going to hate this.
“A woman working on her history PhD contacted me. Apparently she came across one of Great-great-grandma Cat’s letters; she didn’t say where.”
Hank didn’t bother to point out that Cat was Benedict’s ancestor, not his. Hank was descended from Señora Moreno’s only son while Cat had been one of her three daughters.
“The letter was written when the incident with Isabel and Marshal Spencer was going on,” Benedict finished.
Isabel was another daughter, the middle one. The incident Benedict referred to was not one of the happier moments in family history. Isabel had been attacked, and Marshal Spencer had tracked down the man who’d done it. But the outlaw had been acquitted during the trial. Some members of the family still told that story with bitterness.
Hank couldn’t say he was bitter about it, but it wasn’t a story he’d ever repeated to anyone outside the family. “What did the letter say?”
“It was to some cousins in LA. Apparently after the not-guilty verdict, our ancestors tried to murder her attacker.” Benedict didn’t look too shocked by that revelation.
“Parts of that story have always been vague.” Hank looked at the señora, but as usual, she gave nothing back. “We’ll probably never know all the details.”
Benedict shrugged. “I guess she’s going to try to put them together.”
“Good luck to her then.”
Really, it wasn’t Hank’s concern. This history student would try to spin gold out of bullshit, no doubt. The whole thing had been a long time ago, and it was one of those things the older generation had spoken of in whispers, if it all. Probably because their ancestors had been up to something illegal, although their actions had been understandable considering Isabel was their sister and daughter. Things had been different then.
“I’m guessing she wants the letters Isabel and Spencer wrote?” Hank had found those a while back, but beyond noting who they’d been written by, he hadn’t dug any deeper. There was just too much stuff still to catalog. And the family was sending more every day.
“She did ask if we had anything like that, yes.”
That wasn’t too bad of a request. Hank didn’t see why Benedict had come all the way out to tell him this. An e-mail would have done just as well.
“I’ll get the letters together and send them to her,” Hank said. “Does she want anything else?”
Benedict shuffled his feet, cleared his throat. Hank’s heart began to skip every other beat.
“Here’s the thing,” Benedict said, as if it would be a simple request. “I don’t want those letters leaving the house. We let them out and who knows what might happen to them. They’re part of the family legacy, and we have to protect it.”
Hank felt ice creeping beneath his skin, the crystals pulling and tugging at his nerves. “If the letters aren’t leaving…”
“She’ll have to come here.”
“No.” Hank bit that out without thinking, his pulse taking up a hard, fast drumbeat, echoing through the hollow parts of him. “No, she can’t.”
He started to pace, not giving a shit if Benedict saw. Better that than a full-blown attack. Because he felt it coming, a wind of clenched teeth and tight fists and black anxiety blowing in, the worst coming in right behind it.
There couldn’t be someone else in the house. Not a stranger, not for hours at a time. Once, Hank might have been able to handle that, before his discharge. But not now.
“Hank… if this is PTSD,” Benedict said. “If you need to see someone…”
“Fuck you.” Not another goddamned armchair diagnosis. “It’s not PTSD, and I am seeing someone and taking a fuck ton of pills. Okay?” He opened his fists, sharp and quick, trying to let go. But the mood clung, his fingertips heavy with it. He closed his fists again, the better to keep it all in. “It’s not like some virus I can just throw off.”
Benedict watched him like he would a tennis match, head swiveling back and forth. “Then what is it? You’ve always been on the quiet side, but ever since you got back from Afghanistan—”
“Got back? Like it was a vacation?” Hank barreled through that eruption, still pacing, pacing. “I was shipped back, unconscious, bleeding to death…”
The rest was lost as his throat closed off. He pulled at his hair, or tried to. There wasn’t much to grab since he’d given himself a buzz cut. But strangely, his throat closing helped. He couldn’t talk anymore, so he wouldn’t have to. He could keep quiet, which he liked to do.
Quiet was good. Quiet was calming.
“We know.” Benedict was calm and quiet himself. “But we can’t help you with the rest unless you tell us.”
Hank went still. He looked to the portrait there, the señora staring down at her two descendants.
Hold on to your secrets, her gaze said. I held on to mine.
The agitation began to leave him, starting with his head and sinking down to his feet like melted slag. It wasn’t going to blow into a full-on attack then. Thank God.
“There’s nothing you can help with. Just… Don’t worry. I’m seeing someone. Okay?” Hank didn’t know how many times he had to say it until it sank in, but he’d say it as many times as necessary. And then probably a few dozen more for good measure. He wanted to be done with people telling him he needed help. He was getting help. This was as far as help was getting him these days.
“If you say so.” Benedict’s tone made Hank’s jaw clench. “But outright refusing to have someone in the house is not a good sign.”
As if Hank didn’t know that. “It’ll be fine. Just let me know when she’s coming, and I’ll make myself scarce.”
He wouldn’t see her and she wouldn’t see him—why, he’d probably almost be able to pretend she wasn’t in his house.
“You can’t.” Benedict’s expression was unyielding. “I’ll need you to make sure she’s not taking anything she shouldn’t be.”
Benedict thought she might take something, but he was letting her paw through all the family stuff? “Why’d you say yes if you think she’s going to steal something?”
“It’s good PR.” Benedict shrugged. “Doing our part for history and such. We do hold a unique place in California’s history.”
Yeah, Hank had heard that a lot growing up, about how unique and distinguished and amazing the family was. After going through some of the memories preserved in this house, he couldn’t argue with that.
“You just said she was coming into the house,” Hank said, “not that I would have to babysit her.”
His cousin’s stance didn’t budge. “You get paid to upkeep the house and take care of all this stuff.”
Hank shook his head. So much for Benedict-the-helper. They were right back to Benedict-the-CEO. “Fine. I’ll do it. Since it’s my job.”
God forbid Hank be fired for dereliction of duty. As for having her around… He’d manage. There was nothing that couldn’t be endured. If he’d learned anything from life, it was that.
“Thank you,” Benedict said with equal sarcasm. He tugged his hat on and headed for the door. “I’ll text you when I know she’s coming. She’s at UCLA, so it might take her some time.”
“Maybe it’ll take her forever,” Hank muttered, throwing the door open wide and wishing Benedict far on the other side of it.
Benedict only laughed as Hank shut the door behind him.
As the click of the latch echoed through the house, Hank realized he’d never asked the historian’s name.
CHAPTER TWO
