My Hero Bear Read Online Free PDF Page B

back.
     
    He said things to her in those letters that he never said in person. Things he couldn’t say in person. Given time to think, he was able to articulate all the feelings and emotions that he truly felt for her.
     
    He loved her, plain and simple. They made plans for the future. At first they felt like fun little fantasies. Just idle dreams to get them through the long years apart. But as time went by, their plans became more specific and more definite.
     
    Rory had no doubt Dylan meant the things he said. She believed they would be together forever.
     
    Then a month before Dylan and Hunter were scheduled to return home for good, Dylan’s letters stopped. She had no idea what was going on. For all she knew, Dylan was dead.
     
    That month was torture. Her imagination ran wild and of course she thought the worst. When she finally learned the truth, in some ways it was even worse than she feared.
     
    Dylan came home at the end of his service and told her the bad news. Her brother never made it back from his last mission.
     
    Dylan couldn’t tell her any details about what happened, although that hadn’t mattered to Rory. Only one detail mattered. Her brother was gone.
     
    She missed her brother desperately. He’d been older than her by a couple of years, the same as Dylan. She looked up to him like little sisters do. Hunter always seemed so smart and confident. So in control. If he was here, none of these problems would have happened.
     
    Damn the military, she thought. They’d taken her brother away from her for five years, and he never came back. And her brother wasn’t the only man Rory lost. Somehow, she’d lost Dylan, too.
     
    That was the other devastating piece of news she learned that day. Dylan told her they couldn’t be together. After everything he’d said in his letters, after all the secrets they’d shared, and the plans they’d made, Dylan broke things off.
     
    She told him to leave and that she never wanted to see him again.
     
    She could still remember the pained look in his eyes, as if she’d stabbed him in the heart and twisted the blade. At the time, she felt a dark satisfaction knowing she’d hurt him as bad as he hurt her. Now when she looked back on that moment, all Rory felt was sadness.
     
    He’d never told her why. That was the part that always bothered her. It still bothered her as she washed the shampoo out of her hair in Dylan’s shower.
     
    That mystery had burned inside her for the last four years. She still desperately needed to know the answer to that question. Why had Dylan suddenly turned his back on her?
     
    Thoughts of the past plagued her as she stepped out of the shower and dried herself off. She wished she’d handled that devastating moment better. But she was just a girl, barely twenty-three years old. She didn’t know anything about handling rejection or loss. Although she’d learned the hard way since.
     
    Now her father was dead. She had no doubt he would still be alive if her brother Hunter had survived. That one tragic event set off a chain reaction, the effects of which were still being felt four years later.
     
    Rory couldn’t bring her brother back, she couldn’t bring her father back, but she could still find out what happened between her and Dylan.
     
    Rory wrapped a towel around her body and frowned. Her filthy clothes lay in a heap by the door. The thought of putting those grimy garments back on made her shudder with disgust.
     
    She needed something to wear, and she had no choice but to ask Dylan. It was unlikely that he had clothing that would fit her, but even a loose T-shirt and shorts would be better than wearing the mud stained clothes she’d been wearing.
     
    She exited the bathroom to find Dylan, shivering when the cool air of the hall hit her bare arms. She found Dylan in the kitchen, clumsily trying to put together a meal.
     
    “What are you making?” she asked.
     
    Dylan spun around with a plate of chopped