Here And Now (American Valor 2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

if she wasted another forty-five minutes, he’d be leaving for work and she could avoid him completely.
    So she drove to the one place where she always found peace. The gravel crunched beneath the truck’s tires as she passed under the familiar iron archway leading into the cemetery. Rachel followed the single lane road around the perimeter, finally parking beneath a large pin oak in the back corner.
    Unlike so many other times when she’d come here, there were no weed eaters or lawn mowers buzzing around, no backhoes digging another grave site. Instead, the only sounds were the wind rustling the leaves in the trees and a dog barking in the distance.
    “Hello, Ethan.”
    She ran the palm of her hand over the smooth top of curved white granite before taking a seat in the grass.
    “You won’t ever believe who I saw today. Yesterday, really,” she said while brushing away the dried leaves and grass the wind had piled against the base of his headstone. “Lucky James is back in town. He left the army last month. I’m actually working with him at the hospital.”
    Of course, if everything she was taught as a child about heaven and angels watching over us was true, he probably knew that already.
    She traced the letters of Ethan’s name carved into the stone, using her fingertip to clear away the dirt caught in the little crevices, and making a mental note to come back the following week with a bucket and brush to clean it properly.
    “I avoided him most of the night since I almost ran him over with your truck.” She winced, hoping he’d missed that little incident. “I promise, I didn’t do it on purpose.”
    If she were a nicer person, she would’ve offered Lucky a ride home well before their shift ended. After all, she was partly at fault for his bike being in the condition it was. Okay, mostly at fault. And she shouldn’t have waited until she was climbing in her truck to leave work and happened to see him standing outside with his broken bicycle. She’d only just begun to consider offering him a ride when a pickup pulled up, stopped, and Lucky tossed his bike in the back.
    But giving him a ride home would have meant being in close quarters with him for the ten, fifteen minutes it would take to get him to wherever he was going. And that was a really long time, especially when one considered not just their last encounter where she damn near ran him over, but the one prior to that where she slapped him.
    She could practically hear her brother lecturing her.
    “I know, I know. I need to apologize. Not just for yesterday but for everything else. It wasn’t his fault that you died. I get that now. It’s just . . .” She paused, trying to find the right words. “You know I’ve never been very good at apologies. At least, not when it really counted.”
    With the sun now fully up and the temperature rising, she pulled off her jacket and wadded it up in a ball, using it as a pillow as she lay down on the ground. Rachel reached out with one hand and placed it flat against the cold stone.
    “I miss you. Every day,” she whispered. “So much.”

 
    Chapter Three
    R A C H E L E F F E C T I V E L Y A V O IDED him the remainder of their weekend shift. The few times their paths did cross, it was no different than when they were in school together. Nothing more than polite nods followed by one-word replies. The place where he’d felt most at home had become an emotional minefield overnight. And Lucky knew in his gut if he made one wrong move, the whole damn place would be blown to hell.
    As a matter of fact, the tension during his weekend shift had become so unbearable that by the time classes rolled around on Monday, he welcomed the loud, obnoxious coeds surrounding him. Even Brittany droning on and on to him about the latest Housewives marathon didn’t bother him.
    By the time he had his regularly scheduled Thursday morning breakfast with his dad, Lucky knew there was no two ways about it. At some point in time,