The Majors' Holiday Hideaway. Caro Carson
too.
They were right. I wouldn’t know how.
“I enjoy being just two adults who share some time together, you know? Nice and simple. Meeting the family is always the kiss of death. I’d rather not go there with Gerard-Pierre.”
“It’s just sad that you’re breaking up with a man you enjoy sharing time with just because his family is visiting for Christmas.”
“We haven’t shared a lot of time. Not lately. We were going to try to get to Paris for the holidays, but now that his family’s here, I’m guessing that’s off.” She waved the note again. “That’s probably what he wants to talk about after dinner, which could be midnight, by the way. I wish he’d just say he has to cancel Paris. It’s not a big deal.”
In fact, it was a relief. The prospect of reviving their sex life in a hotel near the Eiffel Tower had been a little intimidating. She didn’t know why he’d lost interest, but she’d had a feeling Gerard-Pierre was going to use this trip to list all of her shortcomings as a sexual partner—neatly, and in French.
“Canceling plans for a romantic trip to Paris is no big deal to you? I’d be weeping.”
“It’s only a train ride from here. Maybe an hour and a half. Maybe a hundred bucks. I didn’t really want to go.”
“Honest, roomie?” Helen pointed at her through the screen, wagging her finger in warning. “Are you telling the truth? I don’t have to worry about you being lonely at the holidays?”
“Honest, roomie.” But as India looked at the extra sparkle in her friend’s eyes and that sparkle on her ring finger, that pang of longing for that something sharpened.
* * *
Aiden folded his sister’s note and slipped it into one of the pockets of his camouflage uniform. Two pennies in the pocket jingled together, one from Olympia, one from Poppy. He used to carry a penny from their mother. There would never be another penny from her; it made the other two pennies all the more priceless.
There would never be another penny from any woman. He dated now and then, when there was some event that was clearly for adults only: a rock concert, a wine tasting. But he couldn’t imagine loving another woman enough to turn his little family of three into a family of four. She’d have to be so special, impossibly special, someone he wanted very badly, someone who loved his daughters as much as she loved him.
He stood and shoved in his desk chair, then left his office to head for the battalion headquarters conference room.
He couldn’t imagine it...but if he could, what would that be like?
The pang of longing that hit his heart was sharp.
Unexpected.
There was plenty of love in his life. He’d be a greedy man to want more.
He strode into the conference room, tossed his binder onto his seat near the head of the table, then headed for the window. He had four minutes to get his mind back on work before the battalion commander arrived and expected him to conduct the meeting.
The view was boring: square army buildings on flat Texas land. The grass had turned brown for the winter, but there was no snow. They never got more than flurries in Central Texas. It was just as well; there was nothing to remind him how close to Christmas they were.
The reason his sister had been able to take his daughters for a week of fun was that her employer had given her the time off for the Christmas holiday. The reason Aiden had watched them leave for the airport without him was because he was an officer in the army; he didn’t get to decide when he got time off with his family.
That came with the job. In his twelve years of service, he’d missed family holidays before, twice while deployed to combat theaters. But today, it chafed. The reason he had to be parted from his family wasn’t something critical, like combat overseas. It wasn’t an essential task, like security or law enforcement here on post. There was no natural disaster to respond to, no citizens who needed immediate help.
Instead, Aiden was looking at a week without his girls because of a training exercise. A pretend deployment. That was what the army did when they weren’t at war: they pretended they were at war.
Bad attitude, Nord. Check yourself.
They rehearsed their wartime missions.
Better.
But the week before Christmas was just about the worst time to schedule a monster-sized training exercise that could have been scheduled for any other week of the year.
That’s not a bad attitude. That’s a fact.
It wasn’t his call to make. The schedule had been set by someone much higher up. He would stand at this window and get his head in the game because today’s meeting mattered. It was their last opportunity to fine-tune their plans before the simulation began tomorrow at dawn.
Those plans were Aiden’s responsibility. He was the battalion operations officer, known as the S-3. The S-3 wrote the orders. The S-3 designed the training that kept the entire battalion in readiness for future missions, and the purpose of this week’s exercise was to test that training.
The battalion consisted of four military police companies here at Fort Hood, including the 584th MP Company, where Aiden had first served as a young lieutenant. Back then, he’d led a platoon of thirty soldiers. Now, twelve years and six other posts later, he was once more at Fort Hood, serving as the operations officer for roughly six hundred soldiers.
Out of six hundred soldiers, the order of command responsibility went from the battalion commander to the executive officer to him, the operations officer. The CO to the XO to the S-3. Put bluntly, if the commander and the executive officer were to die, Aiden took over command of the battalion. That had never happened, never come close to happening in real life, but during these training exercises? Yeah. They’d pretend to kill off the CO or the XO at some point, and Aiden would take over the battalion.
In other words, he had to be here.
His children did not. It was better for them to go have fun with his sister than it would be for them to stay in the house with a sitter, wondering why Daddy didn’t come home for ninety-six hours straight. He’d done the right thing by letting his sister take them away.
Aiden looked out the window at the dead grass and jingled the two pennies in his pocket.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” India asked, just to be sure Helen meant it.
“I agree you should break up with Gérard-Depardieu-Pepé-Le-Pew, but not because he wants you to meet his family. It’s because you can live without going to Paris with him. That is proof that he is not a man with whom you will ever be madly in love. You might as well end it now.”
“Thank you very much for your approval.”
“It’s what you called me for, isn’t it?”
India was startled into silence. Maybe it was.
“I should go,” Helen said. “We’re starting a monster-sized training exercise tomorrow. I won’t see daylight for a while. Show me the view before I hang up. Pretty please. Make me jealous.”
This was the traditional way they ended their calls. Helen was crazy for all things European. Ironically, her friend was also one of the few soldiers whom the army had never stationed in Germany—not yet, at least—so she used India to get a little peek at Europe now and then.
India held her phone up as she walked toward her window, a rectangle cut out of stone walls that were almost two feet thick. The square beyond was a mix of old and new, eighteenth-century spires soaring into the sky with the flashing green