A Man Worth Fighting For (The Wiccan Haus 2) Read online

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  A Man Worth Fighting For

  The Wiccan Haus

  Book Two

  Sara Daniel

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  An imprint of

  Musa Publishing

  Copyright Information

  A Man Worth Fighting For, The Wiccan Haus Book Two, Copyright © Sara Daniel, 2012

  All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

  ...

  This e-Book is a work of fiction. While references may be made to actual places or events, the names, characters, incidents, and locations within are from the author’s imagination and are not a resemblance to actual living or dead persons, businesses, or events. Any similarity is coincidental.

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  Musa Publishing

  633 Edgewood Ave

  Lancaster, OH 43130

  www.musapublishing.com

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  Published by Musa Publishing, March 2012

  ...

  This e-Book is licensed to the original purchaser only. Duplication or distribution via any means is illegal and a violation of International Copyright Law, subject to criminal prosecution and upon conviction, fines and/or imprisonment. No part of this ebook can be reproduced or sold by any person or business without the express permission of the publisher.

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  ISBN: 978-1-61937-208-5

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  Editor: Elizabeth Silver

  Cover Design: Kelly Shorten

  Interior Book Design: Coreen Montagna

  Warning

  This e-book contains adult language and scenes. This story is meant only for adults as defined by the laws of the country where you made your purchase. Store your e-books carefully where they cannot be accessed by younger readers.

  Dedication

  For my sister,

  who is too polite to say if she ever thought I was a baby factory.

  Love ya, sis!

  Chapter One

  “YOU SHOULD BE WALKING with a cane within a week, Sergeant.”

  Justin Lawson didn’t recoil when facing down enemy fire or when refusing another dose of pain medication, but the word “cane” made him come close. “How long before I’m back in the field with my team?”

  The doctor avoided his gaze, looking at the sterile walls of the hospital room instead, before focusing on the chart in his hand. “You took a bullet to the knee, sir. We had to completely rebuild—”

  “I’m aware of what you did.” Justin didn’t want a recap of everything that made him less than whole. He needed a timeline for when he could return to the one thing he excelled at. “How long?”

  “You won’t be back.”

  This time he did flinch. He’d worked on the top-secret paranormal team since its inception. The public might be clueless, but he knew firsthand that rogue assassins were a serious threat to the human world. “Of course I’ll be back. My men need me.”

  “You’ll be helping them from a desk.” The doctor ran a hand through his thinning hair as he stood at the end of the bed. “I’m sorry. We’ve done the best we can with the knee. The limp will become less noticeable over time, but it will always exist. Running, jumping, and overextending yourself will only make it worse.”

  Justin was willing to take that chance. He’d rather die defending his country with everything he had than limp off into a life of uselessness. But any man who wasn’t one hundred percent fit put the entire team in jeopardy. He would risk his own life but not the guys who trusted him with theirs.

  “Do you have family who can help you out for a while?” the doctor asked.

  “No family.” If he’d been the type to find humor in a situation, the thought would have been laughable. No one had wanted him when he was a cute little kid with fully functional limbs. He hadn’t been cute in decades, and he had yet to lift the sheet and look at his leg.

  “Girlfriend?”

  Justin clenched the sheet in his fist. He hadn’t had much to offer her before, but if he called, Holly would be on the first plane to see him, no questions asked. She deserved better. “No girlfriend.” He looked the doctor in the eye and spoke in his most commanding tone. “Send in my team. I need to talk to them.”

  “I’ll send in the guy who’s waiting to see you.” The doctor tucked the chart away and walked to the side of the bed. His eyes were full of compassion that Justin couldn’t stand having directed at him. “Sergeant, let me be frank with you. The Army is not going to coddle you and nurse you back to health. You need a civilian support system.”

  The Army’s paranormal special ops team was his family and his life. He didn’t have any more use for coddling than they did. He needed to get briefed on what went wrong on the mission and strategize the next step.

  Thankfully, the doctor left him alone. A moment later Corporal Tom Smith knocked briskly and stepped into the room, his combat boots clipping across the floor. Their perfect, precise rhythm taunted Justin that he might never again achieve what Tom was right now taking for granted.

  “You’re finally awake.” Tom stood at ease at the end of the bed. “How’s the knee?”

  “Perfect,” he lied over a stab of pain so sharp he almost regretted refusing the morphine drip. “Where’s everyone else?”

  His most trusted colleague hesitated. “No one told you yet?”

  Justin’s stomach plunged, and an ice cold sweat engulfed him. Someone had died. It was the only time his men wouldn’t look him in the eye. He’d blacked out for a few seconds when he’d taken the hit, but he’d been sure he was the only casualty. Now he couldn’t help thinking about Robby Vickers, who was still prone to panicking under fire. He hadn’t been ready to handle the stress of their missions, but Justin had pushed him to suck it up. If something had happened to him, Justin deserved the blame. “Told me what?”

  “The bullet didn’t come from a rogue assassin. It came from one of our rifles.”

  The sweat congealed against his skin. He couldn’t breathe. Not even Robby was so green that he’d accidently shoot his superior. “Someone deliberately sabotaged the mission.”

  “That’s the consensus,” Tom confirmed with a short nod. “The higher-ups have suspended the operation so they can investigate. The way I see it, Mike and Dale are the only ones with good enough aim to make a dead shot in the middle of your kneecap while you were rolling for cover.”

  Mike and Dale were the best snipers in the whole division, maybe in the entire United States Army. Justin had never questioned their loyalty. He hated that he was doing so now. “That just means if the shot came from anyone else, they were probably aiming for my head.”

  The thought wasn’t comforting. Sure, he could be a hard ass at times, but it was because he was protecting his men’s lives. They knew and respected him for it. Or so he thought. In his line of work he expected to be shot at, but not by the guys who had his back.

  “Bottom line is the investigation is ongoing. I’m the only one here because I’m the only one they’ve released from questioning.” If Tom had been the traitor, he could have put a bullet in Justin’s head before he’d ever suspected anything.

  Justin was a sitting duck in this hospital bed. He wasn’t going to helplessly wait for someone he would have taken a bullet for to come after him and finish him off. “I’ve got to get out of this death trap.”

  “The doctor thinks you need to stay to heal.”

  Like Justin could heal when a guy from his own team was gunning
for him. If he could sit in on the questioning, he could decide for himself which of his men was guilty. The Army would never allow it. He doubted he’d even be allowed back on base until the investigation was over. “Then I need to convince him I’m leaving to go to some place where I’ll heal better than I would here.”

  “You know, I’ve heard of this place off the coast of Maine, called the Wiccan Haus. They’re big into healing your spirit and such.”

  “I don’t give a crap about my spirit. I want my knee healed.” Keeping his head from getting blown off would be a plus too. Who would think to look for him on an island near Maine?

  “The doctor might go for it. I bet our superiors would too. You’ll be out of the way and safe until they can weed out the traitor.”

  Having a plan made Justin feel ten times stronger. He’d rehabilitate his knee and be back in the field by the time the investigation was over. There would only be one casualty to this mess—his relationship with Holly. His chest ached almost as much as his knee, knowing he’d never hold her again.

  He didn’t have a choice. If his own men that he trusted with his life would turn on him, this woman he’d only been with once every couple months wouldn’t want anything to do with a crippled Sergeant who had no future outside of the military. He wasn’t just rejecting her before she could reject him, though. He couldn’t let her near him while he was a limping human target. The only way to protect her was to keep her far away from him.

  He waited until Tom left, and then took out his cell phone. He typed the text carefully, read it over, swallowed hard, and pushed send. He removed her name from his address book and blocked her number. His sexy, fun romance with Holly was over. She’d forget him before he made his reservation at the Wiccan Haus.

  I don’t want to see you anymore. Sorry.

  Holly Walters stood off to the side of the family gathering. Instead of checking and responding to her work e-mail like she needed to, she found herself rereading the text for what must have been the thousandth time in the past three weeks. She hadn’t believed it at first. It was a miscue in cyberspace meant for someone else. Justin hadn’t really sent it. It was a practical joke.

  But with every call, e-mail, and text that went unanswered or bounced back as undeliverable, she had to accept that, at least in his mind, she had done something horrible and unforgiveable to cause him to never want to see her again.

  She’d pissed him off when she’d washed his socks with her red sweater and turned them pink. And yes, she’d freaked out over that ginormous spider in the bathtub. But those weren’t deal-breakers, at least not to her.

  The only time he’d acted weird was when she’d asked if he could take leave to come to this family reunion with her. It wasn’t first time she’d asked him to meet her family, but this time when he tried to brush it off, she’d pleaded with him to consider it.

  She looked up from the offensive text and watched her sister cradle a baby in her arms while a toddler clung to each of her legs.

  “I have an announcement. I’m pregnant again.” Her sister laughed deliriously as her husband swooped in to hug her, and grandparents and aunts and uncles crowded around.

  “I keep thinking it should be your turn.” Holly’s dad walked toward her.

  Holly tucked her phone away and glanced at him. “I’ve got my PR company. Making it successful keeps me plenty busy.”

  “But I want to see you as happy as she is,” her dad said.

  “I can’t imagine how turning into a baby factory can make anyone that happy.”

  “It does boggle the mind, doesn’t it? I’m glad your business is making you successful, and at times I think you’re satisfied. But busy doesn’t equal happy,” he pointed out. “What about that military man? You always smile when you say his name.”

  Instead of smiling, Holly wanted to lay her head on her father’s shoulder and cry. She needed to move on and take control of her own happiness. She needed to get over Justin and concentrate on all the good things in her life—like her business, which was deeply satisfying, even if it didn’t make her constantly smile like her lunatic sister.

  “Get with the right century, Dad.” She did her best to inject her voice with a light, teasing tone. “I don’t need a man to make me happy.”

  “Maybe you don’t, but I know the right woman made all the difference to me.” He patted her shoulder and walked away to join her mother and sister, his face breaking into a wide smile as he put his arms around both of them.

  Holly turned her back on her sickening relatives. She needed a plan. She had a business plan that she carefully executed; she needed the same attention to detail to help her move on from Justin and take control of her own happiness. Her starting goal would be to figure out what she’d done to make him dump her and completely cut her off, so she didn’t make that mistake again.

  The phone number she had for him was no longer operational. He’d never given her his work number, but she knew which base he was stationed at. She walked to her car as she talked her way through the dispatcher and lower-ranked servicemen with polite, grateful insistence that served her well in her career. Long after the reunion was over and she was back in her office, she still had the phone pressed to her ear.

  Eventually, she found herself talking to Corporal Tom Smith, who’d been introduced to her as someone who worked closely with Justin. The personal connection made her heart beat faster. “I’m looking for Justin Lawson.”

  “He’s out indefinitely. What can I help you with?”

  Out indefinitely? What did that mean? Once he dropped out of her life, it felt like he’d dropped off the face of the earth. “Is there a way I can get a hold of him? It’s personal.”

  “What did you say your name was?”

  She hadn’t said. Now she held her breath hoping he wouldn’t hang up on her, assuming Justin had told him whatever awful thing she’d done that had caused him to break up with her. “Holly Walters. Justin is—was—my boyfriend.”

  “Your boyfriend?” His voice was incredulous. “Justin’s your boyfriend? He has a girlfriend?”

  Her heart sank. Maybe Justin and Corporal Smith weren’t as close as she’d been told. She’d never heard of him either. “We’d been going out for a year.”

  “A year?” He sounded even more skeptical.

  With the military sending Justin who-knew-where and her busy work schedule, they’d really only seen and talked to each other for what added up to a month scattered throughout the year. But from the moment she’d met him, she hadn’t looked twice at anyone else. “Yes, a year,” she said in her most firm, professional tone. “After a year together, I deserve more than an eight word text to end our relationship.”

  Corporal Smith was silent for so long that she was afraid he’d hung up on her. “When did he send the text?”

  “Nearly three weeks ago. I need to understand what happened to make him change his mind about us.”

  He was silent for another beat. Then he said, “I don’t know why he broke up with you. Hell, I’m the Sergeant’s best friend and didn’t know he had a girlfriend. If you want to ask him yourself, you’re not going to find him here. He’s taken leave and is staying at the Wiccan Haus.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a spa on an island off the coast of Maine.”

  Holly shook her head. A spa was the last place she’d have expected to find Justin. But clearly she didn’t know him as well as she thought she had. “Do you have a number for it?”

  Corporal Smith gave her the phone number. She thanked him and hung up. She pushed aside a report on the security lapses at her pop star client’s highly publicized fan event. She had one more call to make to reach Justin. Then she could move on from him and give her clients and their concerns the attention they deserved.

  “Wiccan Haus Resort and Spa,” the woman on the other end of the line greeted her. “I’m Myron, and I’m ready to get you started on your way to spiritual and emotional healing.”

  H
olly paused. Spiritual and emotional healing were exactly what she needed right now. Her instinct was to snatch up the offer, no questions asked about the too-good-to-be-true impossibility of it. She shook her head. She was looking for Justin, the last guy who would go for that kind of touchy-feely stuff. “I’m calling to speak to a guest at your establishment, Sergeant Justin Lawson.”

  “Our guests come to the Wiccan Haus to get away from the outside world. I can’t put you through to anyone.”

  She understood the need to protect the guests’ privacy, but it was odd that the woman didn’t offer to let her leave a message. “Can you at least tell me if he’s a guest here?”

  “The only thing I can tell you is the cards are telling me you need to be here too.”

  “Excuse me? The cards?”

  “Yes. What’s your name?”

  “Holly Walters.” She Googled the Wiccan Haus and frowned as an explanation of a ferry as the only transportation on and off the island popped up.

  “The fates are with you, Holly. It just so happens that we have a week at the main house available starting tomorrow. You’ll need to be at the ferry dock at—”

  “Wait a minute,” she interrupted the pushy saleswoman. “I can’t drop everything and take an impromptu vacation for a week. I can take the day off tomorrow and come for a few hours. What time is the latest return ferry boat?”

  “The ferry only makes one trip.”

  Holly surveyed the papers covering her desk. Her pop singer’s issues needed to be addressed before they turned into a publicity crisis, but they could wait a day. Compared to how much emotional energy she was wasting on Justin, she’d be more productive losing a day and working him completely out of her system.

  At this point, she no longer expected to get him back or that the text was a mistake. She simply wanted answers and closure, so she could create her own happily ever after without him. “Okay, I’ll make a reservation for a night.”

  “The ferry only makes one trip a week,” Myron emphasized.