White Dawn: A Military Romantic Suspense Novel by Tracy Cooper-Posey Read Free Book Online Page A

in
neat Times Roman and concluded that the bodies were being flown
back to the United States.
    “Who are you talking to now?” Garrett
asked.
    Carmen barely held in her yelp of
surprise. She dropped the lid on the laptop. “I’m just clearing the
cache and stuff. I forgot to do it last time.”
    Garrett didn’t look any the worse for
his dive into the bottle last night. His gray eyes narrowed and he
bent and snatched the laptop from her, sliding it out from under
her hands. She couldn’t try to grab it back. That would make her
look as guilty as she was.
    So she got to her feet, knowing there
was nothing she could do to halt this. She felt beyond guilty now.
There was a churning in her gut and her heart was racing sickly. It
didn’t help that she couldn’t get the image out of her mind of
Garrett lying bloodied and beaten on some concrete floor somewhere,
watching while his daughter…
    She pushed the image away, as Garrett
opened the laptop and waited for the image to reform on the
screen.
    His face darkened. “How dare you,” he
breathed. But there wasn’t just anger there. There was pain in his
eyes.
    “I’m sorry,” Carmen said truthfully. “I
know that doesn’t excuse it, but I am. I had no idea—”
    “For a reason!” he shouted. “I didn’t
fucking tell you, that’s why you didn’t know!”
    Heads were turning.
    Carmen held up her hand and wasn’t
surprised to see it trembling. “I don’t know anything about you at
all. Nothing. I wanted to know more about the man who gives the
orders around here.”
    “No one else wants to know,” he pointed
out. “Everyone except you is content to mind their own
business.”
    His vitriol sparked her own anger. Guilt
pushed her into firing back. “I wanted to know how you live with
yourself, Garrett. How can you practice medicine all night, save
lives and ease suffering? How do you even live with the knowledge
that every day you’re out there, a gun in your hand, breaking your
Hippocratic Oath?”
    “You’re fucking kidding me!” he cried.
“You’re losing sleep over my ethics?”
    She bit her lip. She had braced herself
for anger, but this white hot fury was more than she had expected.
“Look, Garrett—”
    “No, you listen,” he snapped.
“Stay out of my life. Do what you’re told. Be a good soldier, or
get the fuck out of my camp. Got it?”
    She was trembling. It would be so much
easier just to say ‘yes’. But she swallowed and made herself speak
the truth. “You shouldn’t be fighting.”
    There was a vein throbbing in his temple
and his jaw rippled. His gaze wouldn’t let her go and it seemed
like his eyes were dark with anger and a whole slew of emotions she
couldn’t name. Why had she ever thought him to be cold and
emotionless?
    “I don’t understand,” she added. “You’re
a smart man. You’ve got a heart. You feel. How do you live with
yourself when you’re killing people like you do?”
    He gave her a smile that had no humor in
it. “It’s called prophylactic medicine, Escobedo. Look it up on
your precious computer, if you don’t know what that means.” He
shoved the laptop into her hands.
    She watched him stride back to the door
that led to the hospital rooms and her trembling seemed to grow
worse now it was over. She sank back down onto her sleeping bag,
deliberately not looking at everyone who was staring at her. She
didn’t open the laptop again, but sat with her hand resting on the
cover. She knew what prophylactic medicine meant. It was
preventative medicine. Garrett justified how he spent his days by
telling himself he was preventing needless deaths of Loyalists at
the hands of the Insurrectos.
    It was such a weak argument. Did Garrett
cling to it because he wanted to fight?
    Her hand on the laptop reminded her of
the Times article.
    Perhaps he did want to fight, after
all.

Chapter Four
    Cristián surprised Daniel by hugging him
hard and when he stepped back, he was grinning hugely. “Danny, I
can’t