The Accidental Christmas

Two: Talon

Cameron looked beautiful–stunning was more like it–and Talon couldn't stop staring at her. Her blue eyes were as magnetic as he remembered, and her long blonde hair, falling down her shoulders from beneath a knit cap, was straight and lustrous.

Her son, Jeremy, had her blue eyes though he had someone else's Roman nose and broad lips. And as the boy excitedly glanced back at him as Cameron made her way out of the tree lot, Talon saw dark wavy hair sticking out from under the boy's woolen cap. His throat tightened, the holiday greeting he'd wanted to say to them drying on his tongue. He was just as Talon's sister had told him.

He looks like you.

It was knowledge Talon kept with him through all the years he spent fighting the wars he'd signed on to fight, praying he'd return in one piece to see the boy for himself. When Adele told him that Jeremy was deaf, Talon asked her to send him educational materials to learn sign language on his own. He worked hard at it, dreaming of the day he'd one day be able to sign with Jeremy like it was the most natural thing to do.

And now he'd done just that. The boy couldn't stop looking at him with his wide blue eyes, a broad grin on his lips.

Talon wanted to touch mother and son to make sure they were real. But of course, they were real. He wasn't crazy enough to be seeing things, at least not yet. He may have been damaged by the wars he'd fought on foreign lands, but as far as Talon knew, he was still sane. Distressed at times, and often plagued with nightmares, but still sane. Wasn't that why he was back on the East Coast, fixing an old beach house that had long needed his attention while he was deployed so he could try to go back to the way he used to be?

Normal.

But what was Cameron doing here?

Last he'd heard, she was somewhere in Arizona, not far from where she used to live with his former friend, Edwin.

Former friend. The thought made Talon scoff. Though Edwin hadn't stolen Cameron from him, for Talon had long believed no one steals someone's affections from another–it's a deliberate choice, he'd told himself–it was a much better excuse than what happened: that Cameron had picked the rich kid over the mechanic's son. Former friend, because before the idiot ran off with his lover after stealing all that money from the city, he'd filed a restraining order against Talon, forbidding him to come near his family.

His family, my ass.

At least, the coward fled, giving Talon a chance to do what he needed to do. According to an old news report he found online, Cameron was last seen at a women's shelter in Phoenix. It was where Talon had been searching for her until the nightmares came again, and he decided to busy himself with something more familiar lest he'd do something he'd regret. Besides, with winter in full swing, the house he inherited from his grandmother needed his attention more than a woman who probably preferred not to be found. For why else would she disappear as she did with no forwarding address? At least, the house would root him to reality and keep him busy.

Preoccupied, as his sister told him.

"Keep me out of trouble, you mean?" he'd asked Adele two weeks earlier when she came by the beach house to see the improvements he'd made in the two months since he moved in. With forecasts of winter storms approaching, Talon had a long list of things to fix around the house, a job that kept his nightmares at bay.

"True, and this," Adele had said, running her hand against the doorframe that had been so warped that Talon could barely open the door when he first arrived. It was a miracle the house was still standing after all the years of neglect. "You've done a lot since you got here, and you've only been here, what, a month?"

"Six weeks."

"And already the house looks amazing with all your impeccable handiwork. Now I wish Gran had willed it to me if I'd known I'd get free labor to go with it."

"Shut up and hand me the drill," Talon said then, grinning as he shook his head. Adele may be two years younger than him, but she was smart as a tack. Smarter than him in many ways. Fresh out of law school and already working for a top law firm, she doted on him like he was her kid brother. And why shouldn't she?

He may have grown up fixing cars at his father's shop, but the moment the Marine Corps handed him a rifle, he became someone else. Adept with keen sight, Talon excelled in land navigation and range estimation, the formulas running through his head like a second language. It helped that he didn't mind being alone most of the time, his thoughts on the woman who'd chosen someone else over him but whose promise he never forgot. And then the ambush that changed everything, one that killed seven of his men while on patrol. Not even the awards helped, not when nothing could bring them back alive. At least, living in the beach house again, the sight of the Atlantic Ocean tempered his nightmares somewhat, even if the only thing he yearned for was the warmth of the woman who'd made the wrong decision so long ago–and paid dearly for it.