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

believe it.”
    “Daniel, you snot-nosed kid,” Daniel
growled, although he felt like he wanted to grin like an idiot,
too. “Damn, you’ve gotten tall while I wasn’t looking.”
    “I was fourteen, last time you looked,”
Cristián pointed out. He waved toward the stairs that led up to the
main floor of the house. “Mom is in the kitchen. Come and say
hello.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose and turned and
climbed the stairs three at a time. Cristián had the long legs that
the whole Peña family seemed blessed with.
    Daniel eased the heavy pack off his
shoulders, then shrugged off the flak jacket. He transferred the
Glock to his thigh pocket and removed the holster, too. Isabela
Peña didn’t like guns in her kitchen, but he wouldn’t leave it
anywhere he couldn’t reach it.
    The smile kept threatening to break out.
Just standing in the front hallway of this house was bringing back
vivid memories of living here. Fighting with Duardo. Teasing the
girls. Giving Cristián a hard time whenever the opportunity arose,
which wasn’t often because Cristián had always been smarter than
everyone else, even at ten years old.
    Daniel climbed the stairs and when the
third one creaked as it always had, his heart squeezed painfully in
remembrance.
    Isabela was waiting at the top of the
stairs and she wrapped her arms around him, her eyes glittering
with tears. “We thought you were dead,” she said brokenly.
    “Just one of my nine lives,” Daniel told
her. She was as tall and as slender as he remembered, but the gray
in her hair was new. Had he contributed to that? He cut the thought
off quickly, as Olivia’s voice whispered in his memory. You’re
not the terrible person you think you are.
    Olivia. His wife. He paused for a
fraction of a second to savor the fact. While hiking to Pascuallita
from the coast where the boat had dropped him off, even when he’d
had to deal with a pair of Insurrectos he’d come across, the memory
of Olivia, her warmth, the scent of her hair, and that she had
committed to him irrevocably kept him warm and his inner core
bubbling with what he had only in hindsight recognized as pure
happiness.
    Daniel held Isabela at arm’s length. “It
is so very good to be here,” he told her truthfully.
    Isabela gave him a tremulous smile and
dashed her hand across her eyes. She sniffed. “Say hello to
everyone else,” she said and lifted her chin, indicating something
behind him.
    Daniel turned and was almost knocked off
his feet as Pía Isabela slammed into him. Her arms went around his
neck. “Daniel! You’re really here!”
    Trini Juanita stood back, but she was
smiling and her cheeks were wet. Daniel held his arm out and she
stepped into it, just like that, with no hesitation or distaste. He
pressed his cheek against the top of her head and his heart
hurt.
    This was happiness, too, he
realized.
    He caught Cristián’s gaze over the top
of the two girls’ heads. Cristián was smiling, too, but as Daniel’s
gaze met his, his smile faded.
    “Dinner!” Isabela declared from behind
him and Daniel’s stomach rumbled.
* * * * *
    They sat at the table for many hours,
not because the meal lasted that long, but because there was so
much to catch up on. When Isabela pulled yet another bottle of
mescal from the cupboard and cracked the seal, Daniel realized how
late it was. He also realized with a jolt of surprise that he had
been doing most of the talking.
    He hadn’t realized how cut off from
affairs Pascuallita—and most of Vistaria—was. Cristián’s Facebook
group gave them nominal information. Even though communication was
two-way, using the open code the group provided, Duardo and Téra
had been spare in personal news. Daniel understood that
instinctively. Every code could be broken, given enough time and
information. If the group’s wrestling fan code was broken, then
anything of a personal nature that Téra and Duardo shared would
lead the Insurrectos directly back to this