Snowbound - Harlequin.com

JANICE KAY JOHNSON 235
unlikely to come anyway. She sounded plenty busy,
and content with their e-mail correspondence if invariably
concerned about him in a sisterly way.
He was surviving. There wasn’t much else he could say.
In some ways, he’d regressed since Fiona left. The nightmares
had returned full-force, and he’d had two major,
full-color, 3-D flashbacks, although in neither case, thank
God, had he actually tackled a guest. Once he had yelled
a warning and started running toward two men coming
down the porch steps. He’d seen—God, as real as they
were—a robed figure skirting the porch to intercept them.
He’d seen the odd way the robe draped, the mass of something
unnatural around the chest. But in his flashback,
there was no explosion, and he reached the foot of the steps
to find only the two bewildered guests. Sweating, shaking,
he’d looked up and found inspiration.
“I must be seeing things.” You think? he mocked himself.
“I could have sworn that icicle was breaking free.”
They both looked up as well, at the dagger of ice that
could indeed have done some damage if it had fallen, and
one of them said, “You might want to knock that baby off.”
He had, because they were right; with the melt, it
could fall at the wrong time. Solving the problem of
what he might do at the wrong time was another matter.
E-mails from buddies. He’d been sending more these
past few months—one form of progress—and therefore
getting more in return. One guy from his platoon was
in a Veteran’s hospital recovering from the loss of his
left lower leg, shattered by mortar. His e-mails were
somewhere between philosophical and pissed. John
wondered if Miller would be honest if John were to ask,