Hold Me: Delos Series, 5B1 Read Online Free

with Callie, the Army had been his mistress and he felt complete and satisfied with his lot in life. But once Callie came on stage in that purple belly dancing outfit, the silver coins beneath her breasts and around her hips tinkling and swaying, his moorings with the Army had been torn loose. Suddenly, Beau wanted more, much more. He dreamed of marriage, a partner, and becoming a parent.
    His mother, Amber, ever the wise woman, had shaken her calloused finger at him one day when he’d been living at home. He was helping her weed her garden and she told him that someday, he’d meet the woman he was going to marry. And when he did, she’d turn his world topsy-turvy. “Just like that,” she predicted, and she’d snapped her fingers, grinning at him from another row of onions she was weeding.
    “Ma, that’s never gonna happen,” he said, chuckling, squatting between two rows of stringed beans.
    Amber laughed. “You’re too young and you don’t know life yet, Beau,” she said, smiling over at him. “Your pa saw me when we were just kids, maybe six or seven-years-old, at the Thorn cabin. He says he fell in love with me then.”
    “How can a six-year-old know he’s in love?” Beau scoffed, shaking his head.
    “He knew,” Amber intoned. She always wore coveralls, the knees blackened with soil. Pushing her wide-brimmed straw hat up off her sweaty brow, she said pertly, “He knew and so did I.”
    “But did you ever talk about it?”
    “Never. We were too young to know what we were feeling, what was pulling us like North and South Pole magnets toward one another.”
    “You married him when you were eighteen,” Beau said.
    “Indeed I did. He was nineteen at the time. He’d already gone into his father’s furniture making business and was pulling in a right steady income for a hill boy that young. He brought the dowry to my folks and told them he wanted to marry me when I graduated from high school. They said yes.”
    “But didn’t my grandparents talk to you first?” Beau asked, alarmed, sitting up, resting his dirty hands on the thighs of his jeans.
    “Of course, but everyone on Black Mountain knew we’d eventually get hitched.”
    Smiling, Beau went down on all fours, hunting for those pesky weeds. He often helped his mother, as did his younger brothers, Coy and Jackson, with the five-acre garden. “Oh, that’s good. But I’m twenty-four, Ma. Not six. I’ve never met a woman yet that cold cocked me like Pa did you.”
    Throwing a bunch of weeds into her nearby, white five-gallon plastic bucket, Amber snickered. “You have the magnet gene, as Pa and I call it. When the right woman prances in front of you, you’ll go down like a felled ox, too, smarty pants.” She gave Beau a warm look, her mouth wide with a knowing smile.
    He snickered. “Okay, Ma, I believe you. But I just don’t think it’s gonna happen to me. Maybe to Coy or Jackson. But not to me.”
    “Just wait and see,” she said, waving her finger toward him. “I’m going to die laughing when it does because your head will be in the clouds and you’ll be completely flummoxed. Mark my words, young man.”
    As he dressed in a dark green Army t-shirt and trousers, Beau smiled as he recalled that moment with his mother. Her words had come true. In spades. He closed the locker and took his damp towel to a canvas container and dropped it inside. When he checked his watch, he saw that nearly an hour had passed. He calculated that he was ten hours and thirty minutes ahead of Butte, Montana. And it was still Sunday there, right around family dinnertime at five-thirty Mountain Standard Time. They’d all be sitting down for a feast at the long trestle table in the warm, ranch house kitchen.
    Beau had loved Sundays with the McKinley clan. His own family was like that, too. Everyone always looked forward to a late afternoon dinner on Sundays.
    Only this time, he wasn’t seated next to Callie. Graham and his wife, Maisy, would be at either end