To Have and to Hold

Book 3: Returning Home

by Serena Bell

Synopsis

He doesn't remember her. She cherishes every moment of their time together. Is there any hope for a second chance? 

 Hunter Cross has lost a year. A head injury during his last deployment stole his memories, and the beautiful, blue-eyed blonde who is living in his house is little more than a stranger to him. He slept with her, fell for her, loved her—and he doesn't remember any of it. He knows he should send her away, except that at night, when she slips into his bed, his body remembers hers.

Trina Levine is heartbroken, alone with her memories. Hunter can't recall any of what they shared—not the joyful days, not the steamy nights. It's like Trina dreamed it. Except when Hunter cries out in his sleep and Trina comforts him. At those moments, Hunter's strong, rugged body knows hers, and for a few, brief, blissful moments, Trina's sure everything will be okay again. But what will happen when morning comes? 

“I have loved every second of this series and I hope that there will be many more installments to come. This series has everything that I look forward to in getting my love and romance fix.”—Twin Spin
 
“An absolute must-read . . . To Have and to Hold is fabulous.”—The Romance Reviews
 
“Five stars . . . [To Have and to Hold is a] crackling read that's full of emotion and drama.”—Jeannie Zelos Book Reviews
 
“A great story that unfolds beautifully . . . There's a great balance of drama and romance, and I really liked the characters and their journey.”—The Escapist Book Blog
 
“A well-crafted welcome addition to a great series . . . [with] plenty of passion.”—I Love Romantic Fiction

Release date: April 23, 2019

Publisher: Jelsba Media Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

There he was.

Stepping through the glass gate doors at SeaTac. Striding, head up, not uniformed, as she’d expected, but clad in jeans, a gray T-shirt, and hiking boots. A backpack slung over both shoulders.

Trina felt like she’d never seen him before, and maybe she never really had. Because before, he’d been somebody’s dad. Somebody’s husband. And then friendship had morphed into love, so she’d never had that first-time-I-laid-eyes-on-you, love-at-first-sight moment. No heart stopping, no breath catching, no hormones firing in one big surge—

Not till now.

Because, damn. Dark hair and dark eyes, stubble smattered over his jaw, shoulders that poured off strength. Six-foot-plus of him, moving with intention. He was a guy who’d catch your eye on the street, pheromones setting you back on your heels before you’d registered that you’d turned to look. The hardness of his features, the everyman handsomeness, made an impression only after it was too late to decide how you felt about his appearance.

There were more lines in his face than she remembered—the laugh crinkles at the corners of his eyes, yes, but deep lines in his forehead, too. His eyes combed the crowd, looking for someone.

I’m right here.

Then his gaze swept past her and locked somewhere else, and his pace quickened until he was almost running. Behind her, someone broke away, flip-flops smacking heels.

“Daddy!”

Clara ran to her father and threw herself into his arms, forgetting Trina’s and her grandmother’s warnings to be gentle with him. Clara was laughing and crying and trying to tell her father everything that had happened in the last year, all at once.

“Slow down, baby.” Hunter knelt so he could hug Clara in earnest. “Slow down. We’ll have plenty of time.” He was smiling, looking so much like the man Trina remembered, and she realized she was silently pleading for him to raise his eyes and search her out. To turn that smile on her. And she shook her head, because this moment wasn’t for her. It was for Clara and Hunter. Trina would have her moment later. When she and Hunter were alone.

Hunter raised his head, and her heart skipped.

But his eyes caught on something behind her, and he rose and strode forward: “Mom.”

Trina wasn’t going to panic. She clutched her welcome home, hunter sign tighter, and tried to slow her pulse down.

Homecomings are weird, Hunter’s mom had told her when Trina met her flight several hours earlier. Don’t get your expectations up too high. He’ll need some time and space, and then it’ll be like he never left.

Plus, Trina had known they’d have to play it a little cool, to maintain the fiction for the girls.

In the meantime, Trina would remember what he’d said to her. Not only I love you, but also, I know my feelings, and they’re not going to change.

Hunter’s mom, Linda, was getting the full Hunter. Or the half Hunter, maybe, because Trina was pretty sure that Hunter at full strength would have swept both mother and daughter off their feet. Certainly in all her fantasies he’d swept her off her feet.

But with his chest wound just barely healed—a wound that had almost killed him—he wouldn’t be sweeping anyone off her feet for a while.

A hand snaked around her waist. Phoebe, at her side. Her daughter, awkwardly twelve and yet so beautiful, with that coltish mix of woman and little girl.

Phoebe was clearly feeling as awkward and left out of this homecoming as Trina was, and wanting solidarity.

That was the moment when Trina started to feel really, truly freaked out. Because she was fine with the fact that homecomings were weird and fine with Hunter’s priorities being for his daughter and his mother and fine with the secrecy that they’d agreed to keep up a while once he got back, but—

He hadn’t made eye contact with her. Not once.

Something was wrong. Even Phoebe could sense it.

And all at once, the worry that she’d been holding at bay coalesced into a solid block in her chest. She had to fight it back so she could smile down at her daughter, an arm around her, and squeeze her reassuringly to her side.

I know my feelings, and they’re not going to change.

For the first few months after Hunter had left, it had been so easy to believe, unswervingly, in their happily ever after. She’d had letters and emails, reminders of his devotion. Sometimes even instant message sessions in which they’d planned and plotted—where they’d have dinner, the movies they’d see, the places they’d take the girls, what, in detail, he’d do to her in bed—when he got home. She’d felt their intimacy deepening through all of that, as he confided his doubts and his fears—a squad mate in danger of losing his shit, an unspecified plan from on high he couldn’t completely get behind, one too many small failures of his immediate leadership.

And, over and over: I love you. All I want is to make it through this and get home to you and Clara and Phoebs.

Then nothing.

He’d warned her he’d be off the grid for a while, on an extremely remote base where the satellite Internet connections were notoriously bad, where letters went to die. Even so, even with reassurance from the rear detachment commander that everything was copacetic, the silence had been terribly unsettling.

Then, finally, they’d had word: the notification that he’d been badly wounded in battle, which they received nearly two weeks after the fact. By the time he’d called Linda two days ago he’d been stabilized, evacuated to Germany, flown back to the U.S. to recover at Walter Reed—and booked on a commercial flight home.

When Trina had gotten off the phone with Linda, the mix of He’s okay, he’s alive, and He almost died had made her ill enough to actually throw up, which she did, very quietly, out of sight and sound of the girls, in the downstairs bathroom.

She’d tried not to think about the fact that the phone call had come from his mother and not him—and after all, he was coming home—home!—in two days. She’d tried to call him a few times in his hospital room, but the phone had rung and rung. She’d left messages with the nurses’ station but hadn’t heard back. Still, she’d decided not to worry unduly. He had his reasons, she was sure—she told herself that his fatigue must be deep, the process of getting discharged from Walter Reed convoluted. There was no need to assume the worst.

But now, the fact that he’d called his mother and not her, the fact that he hadn’t returned her calls, seemed ominous. It went, part and parcel, with his failure to see her.

“Phoebe! Trina!”

Hunter’s voice, so deep that she could feel its lowest vibrations—and not only in her eardrums—rang out.

“Thanks so much for coming out to welcome me home!”

Hearty. Jovial. Impersonal, almost formal. He reached out to hug her, but in the hug, she felt the careful distance that men keep from women they’re not interested in. Maybe his wounded torso was sore.

Or maybe that was a convenient theory she was clinging to so she wouldn’t fall on him and beg to know what the heck was going on.

His eyes, as he drew away from her, held only a faint curiosity, as if she were someone he had once felt something for and now was wondering what all the fuss had been about.

Clara was still talking, a mile a minute, softball this and theater that, and Hunter was beaming at his daughter proudly and asking questions. Meanwhile, Phoebe, who hadn’t even rated a hug but only a hair ruffle, Hunter’s huge hand almost dwarfing her blond head, looked small and lost at Trina’s side. Exactly how she felt, herself.

“What’s for dinner?” Phoebe whispered.

That made Trina smile for real. You could always count on kids to get down to essentials, even when there was an emotional mess around them.

“Spaghetti and pesto. Garlic bread. Salad.”

“Yum. At Hunter and Clara’s?”

She didn’t let Phoebe hear her hesitation. “Yes.” Because if they didn’t go back to Hunter and Clara’s, they had nowhere else to go. Trina’s apartment was still being sublet. The plan had been for them to stay, and even if Trina could hatch an alternative, they’d have to go back to Hunter and Clara’s to gather their things.

Trina thought, suddenly, of the voicemail on her phone from Phoebe’s dad, Stefan. It was still there, a periodic reminder that she hadn’t called him back.

It was an alternative. Just not an alternative she’d been able to consider with Hunter’s promise so vivid in her mind.

She had to believe that promise still held. At least for now. She had to have that much faith in him, no matter how strange things felt.

Besides, she had cooked dinner, the most recent act of service she’d performed—willingly, happily!—to take care of Hunter and his daughter and his house. And maybe it was only a defense against the shards forming in her chest, but she got mad. Because no matter what the hell had happened to him over the last eight months, he’d said those things to her. And no matter how tough the last year had been for him, he owed her more than a formal thank you and an awkward hug. It wasn’t the changes she’d made to her life that bugged her so much. Quitting her jobs, moving into his house, and accepting the generous stipend he’d offered for Clara’s care—those were just economic decisions, and although it would take a while for her to get her feet back under her, she’d do it. No—the harder part was that she’d allowed herself to love him. And trust him. Because he’d told her—because he’d convinced her—that it was a safe thing for her to do.

He owed her one hell of an explanation for his behavior. And if he didn’t deliver it the moment they were alone, she was going to demand to know what the f—heck—was going on with him.

* * *

Hunter stared into the open suitcase he’d laid on his bed.

There were pieces missing from his life.

He remembered leaving Clara with his mother. But listening to his daughter’s bubbling, joyful stories of the last year she’d spent living with Trina and Phoebe in his house, it had become apparent that something was very wrong.

In the space of that realization, he’d gone from confused to freaked out.

Why would he have left Clara with Trina? And why wouldn’t he remember leaving Clara with Trina?

In the hospital, they’d asked him if he could remember the battle that had sidelined him. And he’d said no.

Retrograde amnesia, they’d said. It meant forgetting things that had happened before a traumatic incident. Very common after trauma. There had been no evident blow to the head, but the battle had been chaotic and he’d been separated from his squad. The doctors hadn’t been certain whether the long period of unconsciousness that followed had been the result of bleeding and his collapsed lung or something more ominous. So they’d given him a test called a Glasgow Coma Scale and asked him all sorts of questions to determine what he did and didn’t remember.

They explained that retrograde amnesia could stretch back days, weeks, or months before an incident, so to rule that out, they asked him if he could remember the events leading up to the battle, which had taken place in a small village in the north.

Yes.

He’d reconstructed everything he could. The orders he’d received, the planning and preparation, how he’d distracted his squad the night before with a Skype session with Zach Jones, the Seattle Grizzlies quarterback and a friend of a friend.

The doctors had asked Hunter to let them know if any other holes appeared in his memory, and he’d promised to do so, but nothing had shown itself.

Not till now.

Now there were holes all over the place.

His mother seemed to have spent most of the last year on the back of a Gold Wing motorcycle driven by some guy named Ray who owned a double-wide in Southern California. A guy named Ray who, ostensibly, Hunter had met and liked. If the blushes and glow were any indication, his mother was in love.

Clara had gotten involved with theater, something she seemed to think wasn’t news to him. She’d also grown an absurd number of inches and—well, she looked more sixteen than eleven. Could all that have happened in a year?

And there was that look Trina had given him. Not one look, actually—a whole series, like she was wrestling with big emotions and, more to the point, like he should do something about it.

The first time that expression had crossed her face, something had taken a dive in the pit of his stomach. The last woman who’d looked at him with that much disappointment had been Dee, his late wife. It was the kind of look you only gave someone you were involved with. Which would explain so much else—Trina’s presence with Phoebe at the airport, her beautifully lettered and intricately drawn welcome home, hunter sign, the fact that she’d been so painfully quiet on the way home.

It would also explain the way she’d snuck looks at him throughout dinner, as if trying to figure him out, while he’d listened quietly to the girls’ chatter, saying as little as possible and desperately trying to piece together the puzzle of his own mind. There must have been two battles in a small village in the north, and somehow he’d combined them in his head to make one, so that what he remembered as the “before” of his injury had actually happened at some point in a past deployment.

And if that was true, it was quite possible he didn’t remember anything from the whole of his most recent deployment, or the weeks immediately preceding it.

Jesus.

How much time had he lost? How much of his life? How much of himself? God, that was disturbing to think about. He’d always thought of amnesia as waking up and not knowing who you were. He knew who he was—

Or . . .

He knew who he’d been, more than a year ago . . .

But since then, what had happened to him?

Obviously, something significant between him and Trina. Something that had made him trust her enough to leave his daughter and house in her care. That had put that look on her face, as if he owed her an explanation.

What had he done? He’d been so damn careful, since Dee, not to lead anyone on. Not to create expectations he couldn’t meet.

“Hunter?”

She stood behind him, her posture tentative. With those big blue eyes, heart-shaped face, and simple, straight blond hair, she looked barely out of girlhood.

There was something painful and intimate about her presence there, in the doorway of his bedroom, as if she belonged there, as if she’d stood there many times before.

“I know you need time. I don’t want to push. I just— When you left—”

He felt like he was on the edge of a cliff. That if she kept talking, he would plunge over it.

“You said—”

But he didn’t want to know what he’d said. He didn’t want to know what he’d promised or what she expected. He didn’t want to know anything at all. If she wasn’t a stranger to him, she was the very next best thing, and he didn’t want her confessions or her fear, the open rawness of her expression. He wanted her to close herself up and take herself away, because he was not who she thought he was. He didn’t know that man.

He was someone else now.

“I guess I just wondered. If you thought it still could be true.” She looked like she might be trying not to cry, and he cursed his lost self for whatever expectations he’d set up in her.

There was nothing for it but the truth.

“I don’t remember,” he admitted. “I don’t remember what I said, or what we did—”

He took a deep breath.

“I don’t remember any of it.”