Page 31 of Her Summer Hope

He walked out to the living room, where Aiden was in his usual place beside the picture window. “Your first fitting is today, are you excited?”

Aiden gave him a droll look. “Hardly.”

“You’ll be able to get around a lot easier. Eventually, you’ll be able to do a lot of the things you used to enjoy,” Kyle pointed out.

“What’s the point? Sure, I’ll get around okay, but to what purpose? So I can be alone the rest of my life?”

Kyle frowned and Aiden went on.

“No woman is going to want to tie herself to a damned cripple. No woman is going to want to have children with me…sure maybe if I’d only lost my legs…but with this?” he asked, gesturing at the scarred side of his face. “It’s a fucking horror to look at. What woman in her right mind would want to sleep with me? To wake up to this every day?” he asked bitterly.

Kyle was silent for a moment, trying to process Aiden’s words and figure out the best way to help him cope.

“The other side is untouched, and any woman that wants you just for your looks isn’t worth having,” he said carefully. “I guarantee that there is one out there for you. You’ve just got to get out there and find her.”

“And why haven’t you found yours? You have two good legs and a pretty face,” Aiden scoffed.

“I haven’t been looking,” Kyle said quietly, feeling every moment of his age. “And I’m far from pretty,” he added with a huff. “Evans is the pretty boy around here.”

Aiden gave him a ghost of a smile but it didn’t last long.

They were silent again and Kyle could practically see the self-loathing rolling off of him in waves. He didn’t know what it would take to help the younger man see himself more clearly, but he thought the prosthetics and some exercise would help.

A car drove carefully up the driveway and for a moment, Kyle’s breath caught as he found himself hoping it was Madison, even though she wasn’t due for another seven hours.

He scratched his stubble and felt a little pathetic, a thirty-nine-year-old man looking forward to a visit from his married employee.

“That must be Jace,” John said, coming up behind them.

He thought back to Jace’s file and application.

Jace was the twenty-eight-year-old Marine with a missing hand, a TBI—traumatic brain injury— and nobody in the world left to call his own. One of his buddies had brought him here and Kyle intended to make him feel as welcome as he could.

His circumstances were up in the air at the moment.

He was conscious of his injuries and he had no real cognitive decline. According to his medical records, he was forgetful, sometimes combative, suffered from migraines, and nightmares, and had a bad case of PTSD.

Kyle commiserated with that. He just hoped this was the right place for him, and that they might be able to salvage a future for him.

He watched the men in the car as they sat in the drive. He thought that Jace was probably trying to talk his buddy into getting him out of there.

His friend, if he was a good one, would not.

It only took a few more moments before both doors opened and he got his first look at Jace O’Neal.

Jace was a tall man, gaunt-faced and much too thin for his stature. He had dark brown hair that was slightly long and slicked back. His eyes were brown and sunken and his cheekbones stuck out at jagged, sharp angles. Deep shadows marred the skin below his eyes. He looked haunted…hunted.

He scanned the building and the trees, taking in everything in a single glance before he approached the doors. His buddy stayed at his side, talking low and pointing at the mountains behind the large cabin.

Kyle wouldn’t be surprised if the man had even spotted Murdock in the trees near the edge of the driveway. The guys were always on guard, but Murdock especially liked to make sure he kept an eye on things.

Security was a priority at McClellan’s Hope because there were people in the world who would make it a mission to cause them harm in any way they could. They were people whose war didn’t end at the borders of Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever, and it always paid to be wary.

Jace didn’t need to worry about that. Jace’s biggest enemy was himself right now, Kyle could tell just by the way he looked and walked.

His stump was hidden by a shirt sleeve, and he knew from the application that he’d declined a prosthesis.

He opened the door before they could knock and Jace took a step back and moved his hand—the injured one— as if he was reaching for a weapon, only to find that even if he’d had one, he wouldn’t have been able to grab it.