A Soldier's Promise, page 1
part #1 of Coming Home Series Series
A Soldier’s Promise
A Coming Home Anthology Volume 1
Coming Home Series
Jessica Scott
Thirty One Fox Books
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Jessica Dawson
Cover copyright © 2023 by Jessica Dawson.
Because of You Copyright © 2011 by Jessica Dawson
Back to You Copyright © 2013 by Jessica Dawson
Cover design by Jessica Dawson
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at jessica@jessicascott.net. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
First anthology edition: January 2023
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Welcome home…back to the place where everything is worth fighting for. Available for the first time in a box set, the first two books in the acclaimed Coming Home series from USA Today bestselling author Jessica Scott.
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Because of You
Welcome Home - these are the words every soldier longs to hear after an endless deployment. But for Sergeant First Class Shane Garrison, there’s no one waiting when he arrives back at Fort Hood, unconscious and barely hanging on. The IED that nearly took his life took something more important - something he’s afraid he’ll never get back.
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Back to You
Dying has a way of changing a man. Ever since the day Army captain Trent Davila lost his life, he’s been fighting the demons that haunt him from that terrible day. Time and again, he’s left his wife and their two children behind as he’s volunteered to put himself in harm’s way until his wife had enough.
A Soldier’s Promise
A Coming Home Anthology
Volume 1
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Because of You
Back to You
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By
Jessica Scott
Contents
BECAUSE OF YOU
BACK TO YOU
Also by Jessica Scott
About the Author
Because of You is a beautifully crafted, wonderfully emotional debut.”~ JoAnn Ross New York Times bestselling author
Welcome Home - these are the words every soldier longs to hear after an endless deployment. But for Sergeant First Class Shane Garrison, there’s no one waiting when he arrives back at Fort Hood, unconscious and barely hanging on. The IED that nearly took his life took something more important - something he’s afraid he’ll never get back.
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Working as nurse at Fort Hood’s busy hospital, Jen St. James has seen her share of wounded warriors pass through her hallways. But there’s something about Shane that draws her close, even when she knows her own brush with death has left her scarred.
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As Shane struggles to recover, Jen is the only one who can see what’s happening to him. As the wounds of war drag him further away from healing and everyone around him who matters, Jen is there, pushing him, demanding that he continue to fight to get back to the only thing he believes he’s good at.
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Along the way, Shane learns the hard truth about life without the uniform and discovers that maybe, there’s someone for him to come home to after all.
THE COMING HOME SERIES
Because of You
I’ll Be Home for Christmas: A Coming Home Novella
Anything For You: A Coming Home Short Story
Back to You
Come Home to Me: A Coming Home Novella*
Carry Me Home*
A Place Called Home*
Take Me Home*
Homefront
After The War
Last One Home*
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Note – these books are fiction. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidence
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Learn More At…
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Author’s Note
The Coming Home series and Homefront series were originally published as separate series. I have rebranded them to get things organized as they were originally intended.
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Come Home to Me: A Coming Home Novella* was originally published as part of the Homefront series
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Carry Me Home* was originally published as Until There Was You as part of the Coming Home series
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A Place Called Home* was originally published as All for You as part of the Coming Home series
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Take Me Home* was originally published as It’s Always Been You as part of the Coming Home series
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Last One Home* was originally published as Find My Way Home as part of the Homefront series
To my husband, who smiled the first time he saw my name in print
To my mom, who instilled in me a love of books from as far back as I can remember
Prologue
National Training Center
Fort Irwin, California
Sergeant First Class Shane Garrison knew that life wasn’t fair. But after thirteen years in the Army, it still surprised him what a relentless bitch reality could be sometimes. He stood outside the tactical operations cell in the middle of the California desert and studied the legal-sized envelope he held in his hand. Everything out here was supposed to be a training exercise to prepare his men for their upcoming combat tour in Iraq. No one was supposed to get hurt. But they did anyway, and just like in Iraq, the wounded were sent on to the nearest hospital while their buddies were left behind to worry.
Noise raged around him—shouts, the constant crunch of boots on gravel, and the rumbling of the generators that powered the servers, radios, and—most important—the coffeepots that kept the war running at all hours of the day and night. There was no escape for him, not from the noise or from the fact that sometimes, life just sucked. He turned the envelope over in his hands. He didn’t need silence to guess what was inside.
A shadow passed in front of him and Captain Trent Davila heaved himself up onto the hood of one of the command-and-control Humvees next to Shane. By regulation, when Trent had been commissioned as an officer several years earlier, they shouldn’t have remained friends. Relationships were prohibited between officers and enlisted soldiers, but they’d gone through too much together over the years to let something trivial like Army regulations dictate the terms of their friendship.
“Any word on Morrell?” Shane finally asked when Trent didn’t speak. The sun slid behind Tiefort Mountain, sending the desert sinking into darkness.
“Just came out of surgery. He’s going to keep the leg.” Trent cleared his throat. “That was real quick work you did, getting him out from under that Bradley track so fast.”
Shane shrugged and spat into the dirt. “Just doing what Uncle Sam pays me for.”
“Yeah, well, most people Uncle Sam pays wouldn’t have known what to do with a guy screaming under a thousand-pound vehicle.” Shadows cast by the headquarters’ floodlights cut across Trent’s cheeks as he nodded toward the envelope. “Anything good in the mail?”
“Divorce papers.”
“Shit.”
“Guess my wife decided not to wait for me to get back to make things official. Like I deployed to the National Training Center just to keep her from running off with her shiny new lover.” He couldn’t hide the bitterness in his voice. But he wasn’t irritated over the fact that his wife had left him for another man. He was irritated because she’d made him feel like shit when he should have been having a cigar because Morrell was going to be okay.
He was hot, tired, and dirty from forty-five days in this California desert paradise. Before today, he’d wanted nothing more than to pack all of his soldiers off to their wives and girlfriends, and then go home to try to save a few mementos from his dying marriage.
Funny how five years of marriage had finally ended with a whimper, and the only thing he’d spent the day worrying about was whether one of his boys would make it out of surgery alive and intact. Trent’s good news had sent that worry scrambling into the night, leaving only his failed marriage to occupy his thoughts.
Guess that had been part of the problem all along for him and Tatiana. He’d always been more focused on his men.
“Who pissed in your cornflakes?”
Shane sighed as Carponti strolled up. In any other unit in the Army, no sergeant would talk to his platoon sergeant or company commander the way Carponti did to Shane and Trent. For some reason, though, Shane let him get away with it. He was pretty sure it was because he’d never trained anyone who was better at infantry squad tactics at such a young age. Even in the middle of a firefight, Carponti would crack jokes while he maneuvered his fire team into position. He’d had Morrell laughing his ass off today as they’d carried him to the medical evac flight. Granted, the medics had Morrell so drugged, he hadn’t known his own name, but still, Carponti had a gift.
“My wife.”
“What, did she finally leave you? Good, now you can stop feeling bad about doing what you do best.”
“Dickhead, I’m getting divorced. That’s not exactly great news.”
“Hell yeah, it is. Your wife has made your life miserable for the last five years. She’s got her new man, you’ve got your freedom, and now I’ve got a designated driver whenever we go out to Ropers.” Carponti hopped up onto the hood next to Trent. “And speaking of which, Ramirez turns twenty-one when we get home. We’re christening him the first weekend we get back and it’ll get you back in the saddle.”
Trent snorted and choked on a laugh, and Shane hid his own wry grin. He’d love to go out with the boys, but contrary to what Carponti believed, it wasn’t as simple as sign the papers, get your life back.
“He’s right,” Trent said, still chuckling.
“About which part? Christening Ramirez?”
“About getting your life back. No one should make you feel guilty for leading our boys. You’re damn good at what you do. You make a difference and you know it.”
Shane glanced over at his longtime friend. “Does Laura still understand? You’re gone more than you’re home. How many birthdays and anniversaries have you missed?”
“Laura gets it. She understands what we do.”
Carponti snatched the papers from Shane’s hand. “Laura sends cookies to NTC, unlike your wife, who sends this bull.”
“Ex-wife,” Shane corrected, and snatched them back.
“Put this crap away and let’s go smoke a cigar. Morrell’s going to be okay and that’s worth celebrating.”
“I’ll catch up in a sec.”
He pulled out the papers. Tatiana Garrison, Plaintiff vs. Shane Garrison, Defendant.
He stared at the formal letter, lit by the floodlights overhead. He knew the exact moment his marriage had stopped being anything but a farce.
It was the first time he’d missed her birthday. She hadn’t understood that he’d had no access to a phone or the Internet. She hadn’t understood that he’d spent that day and the next two days in the hospital with one of his boys, who’d been on life support after being hit by shrapnel. Oh, she’d pretended to be sympathetic, but she had never gotten over it, and Shane had paid for it every single day since.
Divorce.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the memory of when he’d first met her. He didn’t want to remember the girl she’d been, or the fool he’d been, trying to explain to her why what he did was important.
No, right now he wanted to remember this moment. The moment he realized that he no longer cared about saving a marriage that never should have been in the first place.
The only thing in life he’d ever been good at was the Army. He’d been a shitty son and a terrible husband. He hadn’t set out to be bad at either of those relationships. It had just turned out that way.
But he was a damn good infantryman. He had that going for him. His men needed their platoon sergeant focused and steady. He couldn’t be the leader they needed him to be if he was mooning over a woman who didn’t want to be with him. His hand didn’t even tremble when he signed the papers, ending the farce and freeing himself to focus on what he was good at: being a soldier. His marriage was over. This just made it official.
At least now their constant arguing about money and time—two things Shane had been too busy fighting a war and taking care of his soldiers to care about—was over. Sorry, but when asked to choose between picking out sheets at Bed, Bath, & Beyond or teaching a young soldier to shoot at the small arms range, he would always choose the range. Maybe that wasn’t fair to Tatiana, but it was who he was and she’d known that when she married him. Instead of trying to make things work, they’d done nothing but make each other miserable.
He tucked the papers back into the envelope and stuffed them into the cargo pocket on his uniform pants. Tonight, he wasn’t going to dwell on something he couldn’t change. Tatiana had made her choice a long time ago. No, tonight he was going to celebrate, and he wasn’t going to let the end of his marriage crush the victory that surged inside of him. His men didn’t need to know about his problems. He took care of them, not the other way around. Tonight, one of his boys was okay. Somehow, he’d made a difference.
And that beat the hell out of any bad news from back home.
1
Fort Hood, Texas
“What crawled up your ass?”
Shane shoved his last Ziploc bag of T-shirts into his Army-issued duffel bag and tried to smother his rising irritation. “What part of no don’t you understand?”
Carponti—aka the most annoying soldier in Shane’s entire platoon—picked up Shane’s grey ACU pattern patrol cap and put it on, strutting around like he owned the place. Then he puffed out his chest and swung his arms wide, like a bad caricature of an angry gorilla. Sometimes Shane wished he didn’t let Carponti into his apartment as often as he did. But Carponti had recently turned into a permanent fixture in Shane’s after-duty life. Shane wasn’t sure what that said about the state of his affairs. As if Carponti mocking him in the empty apartment wasn’t enough of an indicator. “I’m Sarn’t Garrison. I’m too badass to relax and have a good time.”
“Piss off.”
“Did your wife take your sense of humor in the divorce, too?” Carponti asked, flopping into Shane’s chair. “Come on, man, it’s just a few hours and a couple of beers. The whole platoon is going to be there.”
Shane sighed and hooked his duffel bag shut, tossing it into the corner of his apartment near the front door. He flinched as the sudden movement stretched the fresh stitches that were holding two tiny holes in his abdominal wall closed. Carponti didn’t know about Shane’s recent brush with death and Shane intended to keep it that way. If Carponti wanted to believe the divorce was keeping him from going out, then so be it. But the truth was that Shane had been too busy, over the past five months, to dwell on the end of his marriage. Of course, he missed feeling like he had a home, but he couldn’t lie to himself—Tatiana hadn’t made their life together a home any more than he had. She’d been familiar, though, and he missed that. At least, that’s what he told himself when he had time to think about it. So many of his guys were having problems in the lead-up to this deployment that Shane had barely seen the air mattress on the floor of the apartment they’d shared, let alone slept on it. And tomorrow he was leaving for good.
Shane shoved his body armor into a second duffel bag, then stuffed socks and more T-shirts into the gaps. It was a pain in the ass packing for deployment. It was easier just being deployed.
“The whole platoon being there is the problem. Makes it kind of hard to explain why the platoon sergeant is in jail with the platoon if you guys get too fired up tonight. Someone has to be around to bail your sorry asses out of Bell County tomorrow.”
Carponti rolled his eyes and rubbed the back of his neck, serious for one hot second. “Look, just come out with us. You’ve been a real asshole since your wife left; you need to unwind, or we might just shoot your ass when we’re in country for being such a dick.”
Shane rested his hand over his heart and blinked rapidly. “God, I’m so touched by the depth of your concern. I can drink beer here. Alone. Quietly.”
“Sissy.”
