Everything Changes by Melanie Hansen Read Free Book Online Page B

a beautiful man, the same way he appreciated how the mountains in Colorado were beautiful or the beach in San Diego was gorgeous. Jase was very easy on the eyes, and he had something that made everyone simply want to be around him. Carey was no different; he loved being around Jase. He wanted to bask in that larger-than-life personality that drew men and women like moths to flame. But he’d never, ever considered the attraction Jase held for him to be of a sexual nature.
    You’re a lying liar who lies, his conscience whispered, and Carey couldn’t suppress it anymore, memories swamping him suddenly, memories he’d tried so hard to bury deep until he could almost convince himself it hadn’t fucking happened.
    But it had.

C HAPTER 4
     
     
    Four years ago
     
    T HE LAST thing Carey clearly remembered about the day his life changed forever was a nap in the shade of a Humvee tire, his head pillowed on a hard thigh. There was something about cold water splashing in his face, then laughter, Jase shouting, “Fuck you, Gomez!”
    Not a whole lot after that other than some fuzzy images of Jase’s anguished face, smoke and haze, blackness… and pain, so much fucking pain. He remembered screaming, feeling like his body was on fire, thrashing in the dirt, Jase’s voice telling him to “Hold on. Oh Jesus, hold on, bud.”
    The next clear memory he had was of waking up in a hospital in Germany, learning he’d almost bled to death on the ground at the firebase and that his heart had stopped twice on the way to the hospital in Kabul.
    “You’re very lucky,” a grizzled surgeon had told him.
    Carey had closed his eyes and turned his face away, his right hand resting on top of his heavily bandaged leg. Well, half of a leg, anyway. The lower half, below the knee, had been mangled beyond repair from the explosion, what they called an incomplete amputation. Tendons and muscle had been torn away, bone shattered. The surgeons had finished the job the bomb blast had started, taking the lower part of his leg completely off so just a stump remained. His other leg was intact, but he’d suffered several deep lacerations to his thigh, which had nicked his femoral artery and caused the bleeding that had almost taken his life.
    “The medic you had deserves a medal,” that same surgeon told him. “He did everything right.”
    Jase. Carey knew Jase would have worked tirelessly over him, wouldn’t have quit until they’d dragged him away and tied him down somewhere. He owed it all to his friend, and he expected that someday he would be grateful, but now….
    When he’d first gotten to Walter Reed in DC, he’d faced another series of surgeries, including skin grafting due to the traumatic nature of his injury. His leg hadn’t been sliced cleanly off that day, but torn away. The surgeons had obviously wanted to save as much of it as possible, and from what Carey had been told, he was extremely fortunate to have the amputation be below the knee. That meant he didn’t need an artificial knee, had more range of motion, and would have an easier time being fitted with a prosthesis.
    Carey knew he was lucky to be alive and that he wasn’t disfigured. He’d been superficially burned in the explosion, but his heavy uniform and Kevlar vest, along with the bodies of the men in front of him, had shielded him from the worst of that. Carey thanked whatever god might be out there he didn’t remember seeing the teammates immediately in front of him getting ripped into pieces by shrapnel and burned by flames.
    When Carey woke from his latest surgery, it had been a little more than a month since the initial injury. As usual he was lying flat on his back, the lower half of the hospital bed elevated. He had a drain sticking out from the incision, and compression bandages were wrapped tightly around the whole stump to try to keep the swelling down. The lacerations on his other leg had healed, finally, but at first they’d become infected, requiring yet