Free Heather Graham by Hold Close the Memory Page A

remembered. Still, she didn’t know if that ache for what they had shared could take the place of love.
    She could suddenly remember so much. It was impossible not to, not while she was in the bed they shared, knowing that he was down the hall.
    She owed him, but she owed Keith, too….
    She realized suddenly that she was raking her nails across the sheets, grasping them, releasing them. No, there was no one quite like Brian, and she wasn’t terribly sure she was happy remembering that.
    He lay awake, too, and though he stared at the ceiling, he was seeing beyond it. He was home. He was actually there. A dream remembered, a reality. Not so terribly different from what he had imagined. The pool and patio were really nice. So was the wallpaper in the kitchen, the living-room set….The kids. My God, they were twelve years old. As tall as Kim. And they were spit and image of him.
    There was something damp on his cheeks. He touched it. Tears. I’m crying, he thought. How ludicrous.
    Groaning softly, he twisted on the foldout bed. He was scared.
    She was still here; she hadn’t remarried. Half his time had been spent wondering where she was, what she was doing. At first it had been Chou Lang’s favorite torture to taunt him about his wife.
    He closed his eyes tightly. He knew that she had been left behind, but he had never wanted to leave her; he hadn’t wanted to be a hero. All he had ever wanted to do was to come home.
    She looked good. Her hairstyle was softer, feathering around her face. But she had changed so little, so little from that first day he had fallen in love, so little from those hectic years when they had fought like caged tigers yet made up in wild, beautiful explosions of their love.
    He had dreamed about her night after night. He had prayed, prayed and prayed that he could get home before it was too late. And he had almost made it. Almost. He would never forget that day Jim Barnes had come to him and dropped the newspaper on his lap as he lay on his cot.
    “Hey, Brian! Looks like we’re going to get out of here! With the election coming up, there’s a lot of political action going on, peace talks in Paris. We’re going to pull out.”
    “Yeah?”
    He had read the days-old paper thoroughly. Every word. Jim was right. The Americans were going to start pulling out, but he had never got to pull out. He and Jim had been sent on a bombing raid the next morning.
    He had protested. “Hey, Captain, you know I’ve got twins at home that I haven’t seen since they were a few months old. And I’ve acquired more damned air time here than any other man on base.”
    Captain McPherson was a nice guy, a good guy. No pretensions, no military bull. “I know all that, Trent. But I don’t pull the duty rosters. I’m in the Air Force just like you. It’s a tough break, Trent.”
    Real tough break.
    He and Jim Barnes were together in the chopper with a crew of eight men when they were hit, when they went down, when the chopper started going up in flames.
    He never meant to be a hero, but the guys were in the helicopter, and it was burning. He acted on no more than instinct when he pulled them out, and he was the ranking officer. He had to see that the men got aboard the one rescue copter that made it down for just a few minutes before the heat became so overpowering that it wouldn’t have been able to land.
    He and Jim Barnes were left behind. He and Jim, another married man like him, had spent hours tactfully looking at each other’s pictures of their wives, his twins, Jim’s baby daughter.
    Suddenly shells were raining all around them. They were trying to get to the chopper. Then there were flamethrowers. Everything was burning. The smell was rancid on the air. The deserted huts, the jungle, even the damn grass were burning….
    He saw Jim caught by a shell, saw him fall, tried to get to him, but the smoke was awful. His eyes were blinded by gas and tears. He kept crawling toward Jim, and the burning smell