Free February Lover by Rebecca Royce

 
     
     

Chapter One
     
     
    Aidan Roux strolled along the streetcar path, listening to the sounds around him. It would be wrong to say things hadn’t changed since he’d last set foot in New Orleans. A great deal about life here had altered completely in fifteen years. The city had never had so much direct sunlight before. Katrina had knocked over some of the shady trees on the busiest streets, and these days St. Charles Avenue blared in the afternoon sun.
    But it was February, a blessed month in New Orleans, not too hot or too cold. Years in Afghanistan had taught him what both temperatures really felt like. Even the city’s humidity wasn’t going to bug him anymore.
    Not that he intended to stay long enough to really get to experience the summer heat. He’d be out of there in a week.
    He kicked a stone as he walked, smiling at a woman who waited at a bus stop with her baby. His duffel, slung over his shoulder, swung as he moved. All in all, a good decision to take the slowest pace possible. Delaying the inevitable helped despite the futility of the act.
    Eventually, he was going to have to see his mother and face up to the fact he’d deliberately not come to his father’s funeral.
    Screw the old man . The same refrain he’d had in his head since the day he’d left NOLA and jumped into the arms of Uncle Sam played through his head like a jazz band stuck on the same refrain. Screw the old man .
    A driver pulled up next to the neutral ground where he strolled and honked the car’s horn. “How’s ya momma and dem?”
    Aidan jolted at the sound. I’d know her voice anywhere. Stacey Castle . He smiled as he approached her gray Toyota sedan and stared in through the rolled-down window.
    She leaned back in her seat, grinning at him in the unabashed, unconcerned way she always did. Stacey Castle never acted like she had a care in the world. Only he knew her attitude wasn’t true. Or he had known, fifteen years earlier. Maybe things had changed; maybe her act of nonchalance had become how she really felt.
    Once a beautiful girl of twenty, with blond hair she wore up in a ponytail and blue eyes that only flared to anger when someone blatantly lied to her, she’d changed into a sophisticated woman of thirty-five. Time had made her more beautiful, not less. Her long hair had been chopped. She wore it in a boy cut making her look ethereal, almost like a pixie from a fairy tale. Her arms, displayed beautifully through her T-shirt, held muscles indicting she either worked out regularly or did some job requiring her to lift a lot.
    Stacey was thin, had always been, but her boobs hadn’t changed. They were more than a handful, and his mouth watered while he discreetly took them in. Remembering his manners, he quickly looked back up to her eyes and smiled. Her strong chin jutted out as she half-smirked back at him. She’d totally caught him checking out her breasts.
    “So. Is this how you sophisticated Uptown women greet friends these days? Shout at men on the street?”
    “I wanted to know if you still remembered your New Orleans speak. Or if all your years away from here had made you too good to answer, Dr. Redhead.”
    He rubbed at his shaved scalp. For so many years in the army, he’d had to keep it really short. It had seemed silly to change it back. But Stacey would know when it grew in it would be curly, and what looked blond in a crew cut would be red at longer lengths.
    “Cute. Did you come up with the nickname, now, or did you read it somewhere?” He couldn’t believe how easily they’d rolled into this banter. Aidan hadn’t spoken to Stacey in fifteen years. Not a phone call, not a letter to the girl he had loved for five years. Their separation had been entirely his fault. She hadn’t had a clue he’d intended to leave until he’d knocked on her dorm-room door and told her he’d joined the army.
    Being Stacey, she’d even offered to make it work, her words said with tears running down her face.