Free LEIF (Blake Security Book 3) by Celina McKane

She didn’t smile back.
                  “Why is he showing you a picture of his dad?” Karli looked anxious. I tried to give her a reassuring look. I wasn’t about to say anything to Hunter about his dad. That wasn’t my place.
                  “He just asked if I wanted to see him.”
                  She looked like she was holding her breath as Hunter handed me the photo. I looked down at the face of the man I’d impersonated. Hunter’s blue eyes looked at me out of the photo and looking at it that way made it a little easier. I swallowed the bile in the back of my throat and said, “He’s a handsome guy.”
                  “He was a soldier, and he was really brave, and he fought all the bad guys.”
                  I smiled, and then I glanced at Karli. Her eyes were filled with tears. Damn. Hunter looked like he expected me to say something though so I said, “I’ll bet he was an amazing guy. I’d like to be that brave someday.”
                  “Me too! When I grow up, I’m gonna be in the army too and fight the bad guys.”
                  “You know, sometimes army guys do other things too besides fighting.”
                  “Like what?”
                  I looked up at Karli, and I saw that she was thinking the same thing I was…that day we ran into each other in Texas. It was the day I decided absolutely that fate or karma or whoever it was really wanted us in each other’s lives…if only for a moment.
    ********
     
    KILLEN, TEXAS
    2014              
     
     
    After I was injured in that explosion, I spent close to six months in the hospital in Germany. I had at least ten surgeries during that time. I was burned over eighty-five percent of my hands and arms, and there was a lot of damage to my lungs because of inhaling all of the chemicals that were burning that day. Our truck and the truck following us had been full of cleaning supplies that only served to make the explosion more lethal. I had to have one of my lungs removed and multiple skin grafts from the backs and sides of my thighs to cover the areas on my hands and arms where the skin was completely gone.  I lost three fingers, they re-made two of them for me. I also had a concussion…and the vision of Gonzo roasting to death in front of me haunts me to this day. You would think that a guy who had been through all that would want to run as far and as fast as he could from the army, but like I’d told Karli once, I ain’t never been accused of being normal.
    The day I walked out of the hospital and reported to my new command, the army tried to get me to leave. I begged them to keep me and told them I’d do whatever they assigned me to do. There had to be something I was qualified to do. I was an officer by that time, so I could teach, or I could go stateside and recruit. I knew I had seen the last of combat—and I was actually okay with that. A little bit of getting nearly burned to death solves that whole wanting to be a hero problem. I just didn’t want to be alone again, on my own and trying to figure out how to survive in the world. I didn’t know how to do it, and my anxiety was off the hook. I was twenty-three years old at the time and I’d never lived completely on my own without someone telling me what to do. I was ashamed of the fact, but I knew that I needed that.
    Someone took pity on me and assigned me to logistics on the base in Germany for a while. Two months after that, they accepted my re-enlistment papers and assigned me to Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. I laughed when I got my papers. I’d been assigned to honor guard detail. I never felt there was too much about me that was honorable, but I wanted to stay in so badly that I wasn’t going to even try and turn it down.
    Before I left Germany, I was able to finagle an address for Gonzo’s family out of the clerk. I wasn’t a talker, but I