"Hey Reb. You're up next."

     J.D. Rivera, aka Rebel, watched the F-14 fall away in front of him. "Nice vapes," he said on the fly-by. High speed and low altitude created dramatic vapor trails—a visual display he'd never tire of watching.

     His turn. He banked left taking the Tomcat into a dive between two other F-14s, his execution flawless. The cloudless blue sky was perfect for the air show. And after one more pass, they'd be on their way home.

     Plenty of time for the wedding rehearsal.

     "Time to spare," he told Eric, his radar intercept operator, and about-to-be best man.

     Eric, aka Zeus, hadn't wanted to do the show, but J.D. had insisted. Hell, he had to do something to take his mind off the fact that in 24 hours he'd be walking down the aisle. Something he thought he'd never do.

     "What's he doing! Watch your 12'O clock!" Zeus shouted.

     The F-16 came out of nowhere, swooped up in front of them, pulling their Tomcat into its jet wash. In the turbulence, the blast distorted the airflow to his right engine and Boom! —in less than a second, the engine flamed out. The tail swung around in a yaw. He shoved the stick to the left to correct, but he couldn't bring the nose up. Now they were spinning and dropping altitude fast.

     "Punch out!" J.D. shouted.

     "We're too low!"

     "Eject! Now!" J.D. grabbed the loud handle. The canopy exploded and shot upward, and he blasted out of the cockpit on a tornado of wind, debris spraying like buckshot. Something crashed against his leg and at the same time he heard a sickening crunch.

     Through his screaming pain, J.D. felt the pilot seat fall away. His chute ballooned open, snapping him upward. He squinted, searching for Eric's chute, but saw only the black contrails of the F-14 as it crashed into the ground in a ball of flames.

     J.D. bolted awake drenched in sweat.

     Dr. Chastain, his physician at the V.A. Hospital walked into the room. "How're you doing? Ready to go home?"

     Home. Where the hell was that? For seventeen years, the Navy had been his home. His life.

     "I can't walk. How the hell am I supposed to go anywhere?"

     "You've made excellent progress. It'll take a while for the surgery on your leg to heal completely, but you should be able to get around just fine with a cane."

     "Yeah, between my cane and my disability checks every month, what more could I want?"

     The doctor frowned. "You're alive. You've still got your leg, and I've got ten other patients a lot worse off than you, Rivera, so stop feeling so sorry for yourself. I made a recommendation for you to see Dr. Lange. The rest is up to you."

     A freaking shrink. What was he going to do? Could he bring Eric back?

     The pain of losing his career didn't even come close to the grief J.D. felt over Eric's death.

     "You're going to be discharged tomorrow morning, sometime before noon. Do you have a ride?"

     "Yeah. I've got transportation." The yellow cab company. Because his fiancé—his former fiancé —was in Hawaii on the honeymoon they were to have taken together. Jenna had postponed the wedding as he'd expected. He hadn't expected her to dump the relationship. But why not? What good was he to anyone now?

     The doctor moved toward the door.

     "Doc."

     The white haired man turned to look at J.D.

     "Sorry I was such a crappy patient. I appreciate all you've done."

     Yeah. Eric was dead and he was going to walk away. They should've let him bleed to death.

     HE KILLED A MAN.

     The words—spoken in low hushed tones behind his back at the general store yesterday—echoed in J.D. Rivera's head.

     Only two weeks since he'd returned to Los Rios, Arizona, and the locals were already talking. He should've stayed away. Stayed in the flea-ridden motel where he'd spent the last six months.

     Twenty years away from this town hadn't changed a thing.

     Bam! Bam! Bam! Three loud thuds sounded outside, the perfect accompaniment for the killer headache about to split open his skull. He burrowed under the pillow and wrapped both arms over the top. If he died right now, it wouldn't be too soon.

     Probably what the two guys who ambushed him on the road last night had in mind. He touched the baseball-size lump on the back of his head.

     The banging noise sounded, again, from the front of the house somewhere. He groaned and rolled his battered body to the side of the bed, shoved both legs over the edge and sat up, vaguely aware of the cool adobe tile against his bare feet. After a few shaky starts, he made it upright, but just as he did, a lightning bolt of pain shot up his leg. His knee buckled, and he swayed to the side.

     Groping wildly for something to hold on to, he crashed into the night stand and spiraled down, knocking over the lamp and a half-empty can of Michelob before he hit the floor on his knees. Stabbing shards of pain launched him forward—flat on his face in a puddle of stale beer.

     He closed his eyes, the smell of alcohol a potent reminder of all the nameless hole-in-the-wall bars where he'd spent the last year and a half.

     Waiting for the pain to pass, the sting of inadequacy and his own helplessness burned in his gut.

     But lying there wasn't going to get the work done. He braced himself on an elbow, sat for a second, then grasped the rumpled sheets and struggled to his feet again.

     Gently, he put pressure on his leg, testing it a couple of times. Yeah. That's it . . . Okay. He was good to go . . . He hoped.

     As he flipped open the blinds, bright white sunlight flooded the room, the glare so intense it hurt his eyes. He braced himself against the wall and closed the blinds. Damn. It was late. And probably blast furnace hot outside.

     Had it been this hot before? In September? He didn't think so, but then . . . he'd been an angry fifteen-year-old and the weather had been the last thing he'd noticed.

     Since then, he'd been back to Los Rios only once on his way from Miramar Naval Air Station in California to Fallon near Reno. He wasn't used to living in an inferno.

     Yeah . . . well, your life is shot to hell, anyway, so you might as well be living here.

     Images he'd shoved into the darkest part of his brain crawled from the blackness. For eighteen months now, wherever he went, the images followed—from the Nevada mountains to the salt marshes of Maryland and finally to the sleazy Las Vegas hotel where his crazy aunt's attorney had found him four weeks ago to tell him he'd inherited the rundown ranch near Los Rios.

     Like a horror movie on perpetual rerun.

     Work. He needed to get to work. Ignoring the fire in his knee, he pushed off the wall and staggered into the bathroom. At the sink, he tossed down pain killers and caught his reflection in the mirror.

     Man, oh, man. He looked like he'd gone ten rounds with Rocky Balboa.

     No big deal. Those creeps might have laid him out last night, but not before he'd gotten off some of his best shots. He'd bet his wings they looked worse than he did.

     The battered face in the mirror mocked him. If you had wings, buddy boy. You're finished. Done. Kaput!

     Bitterness rose like bile in his throat. Anger burned in his belly. Hands clenched, he swung out, slashing at the shelf full of pills above the sink. Bottles flew. Plastic containers bounced on the floor, spewing their contents in multicolored profusion around his bare feet.

     Spent, he slumped against the old cast-iron pedestal sink, palms flat, head bowed as he tried to drag oxygen into his lungs—tried to find a reason to make it through another day. More banging outside sent another round of cymbals clanging in his head. "Dammit, quit making all that racket, willya."

     "Hello-o," a faint, high-pitched voice trilled from outside.

     Crap. Probably some town do-gooder come to save his soul. Where the hell had they been when he could've used some of their concern? No one in this poor excuse for a town had ever done him any favors, and it wasn't likely they'd start now.

     "Go away!"

     The banging continued. He glanced down at his naked body, at the angry crimson scar that jagged along the side of his leg—a permanent reminder that he was responsible for Eric's death. A reminder that he'd been the one who'd convinced Eric to do the air show . . .

     He hauled in a deep breath. He should probably put on some pants.

     Or . . . maybe not.

     He grinned as his perverse side urged him to go to the door as is—shock the hell out of the church lady, and she'd be outta there faster than Mach 1.

     But he couldn't do that in his grandmother's house; she'd lecture him from her grave.

     He snatched a pair of dirty jeans from the top of the hamper and shoved one leg in and then the other. On his way through the living room, he could see a woman's form outside the front window. As he got closer, he saw that she was young, passably pretty and severely uptight in her buttoned-to-the-neck shirt and beauty-shop hairdo that didn't move.

     Prim and proper was stamped all over her. Soul saver.

     Perfect. She'd soon find out he had no soul to save.

Excerpt from WHAT MADELINE WANTS by Linda Style
Harlequin Superromance (September 2003)
ISBN 0-373-711155-7
Copyright © 2003 by Linda Fensand Style
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher.
The edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.