Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64419 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64419 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Until he came crashing back into my life.
He’s a rugged mountain man and ex-soldier with scars that run deep.
Lincoln Matthews isn’t just broken—he’s dangerous, unpredictable, and impossible to ignore.
And now, fate has us working side by side.
But as I get to know him, I see the pain he hides behind those hardened eyes.
He’s fighting his demons, and the closer we get, the more our chemistry ignites.
Just when I think I can trust him, his past returns with a vengeance.
Now, his enemies have me in their sights.
I want to run, but I need him more than ever.
Will he protect me... or break me for good?
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
LINCOLN
War is a terrible thing. When I signed up, I just wanted to get away from the shitshow that was my homelife. I didn’t have the money to travel or go to college, and when the Army recruiter started talking about free tuition and bases all over the world, I was sold. I was fresh out of high school when I transferred to basic training.
Basic wasn’t that bad compared to actual combat. At the time, it had seemed like hell. All the things I thought I was good at—fighting, building things and, working out—seemed like they would be a good match to military skills. But I quickly learned I would have to do better. My drill instructor was on us 24/7, demanding perfection. We woke up at three in the morning to go on hikes with fifty pounds of cargo strapped to our backs. We stayed up all night in a foxhole that we exhausted ourselves digging.
I made some good friends. It’s hard not to make friends when you’re all going through the wringer together, but the real trial began when I was deployed. I went to Afghanistan straight from Georgia. Getting off the plane, the only thing they let us do was focus on the mission. It was like we had blinders on, but we were seeing all these new things at the same time.
I had never been outside of Tennessee, except for basic, and that didn’t count. That was just an Army base and looked pretty much the same as my hometown. Afghanistan was halfway around the world, and nothing was the same. The land wasn’t green. It had cliffs and cracked earth, deserts, and mountains. It was like being in another world.
The people wore strange clothes and spoke a different language, but they were people, just like my countrymen and me. We would go door to door at these little stone houses to check and see if there were any hidden enemy combatants. People hated us. Old women would beat us with spoons. Young women looked at me like I was about to hurt them, and I couldn’t shake the fear from their eyes.
I was in a Jeep, driving back to the green zone, when an IED exploded our front tire. The driver was killed, and the vehicle ran off the road. There were four passengers, me, this kid from basic plus two other guys. We pulled out our weapons and tried to return fire, but nothing happened. We waited for an hour, radioing our position in for reinforcements. We thought we were in the clear, but when the next Jeep arrived, there was a hail of bullets. They were spraying from the top of a hill and we couldn’t see them. Bastards had waited for hours until there were more of us to kill.
I was the only one who made it out alive. I ditched the two Jeeps on the roadside, cutting down through a valley as the sun dropped behind the hill. I spent the night out in the open, not sleeping, not eating. I had a compass, but my brain wouldn’t focus on how to use it, and I wandered for the better part of a day before finding the road again. An American patrol picked me up and brought me back to base.
I had a shower and a meal and went back to work like nothing happened. And that wasn’t the worst I experienced. It was weird after all those war movies I grew up watching. In Afghanistan, you couldn’t tell the difference between the innocent and the guilty, you weren’t supposed to destroy property, and you weren’t supposed to shoot unless you were a hundred percent sure that the enemy was trying to kill you.
Friendly fire, angry old women, and the creaking of the wind paralyzed you so that when you came up on someone who actively wanted your head, you didn’t know what to do. I had eight years of it. When my time was up, I stayed. It wasn’t just that the combat got into my head, but I didn’t know what else to do.
My family and I weren’t on great terms. and I didn’t want to go back home. Other kids had moved to Nashville or Austin. One of the guys I used to hang with dropped me a text every now and then. He had gone to college, graduated, and started working at a bank, all while I was still digging sand out of my boots and jumping at my own shadow.
My choice was taken away from me when my leg was nearly blown off. It was a situation just like a million I had been in before, going door to door looking for the enemy. The patrol I was with consisted of five people, three guys and two women. The women were talking to the Afghan women, trying to calm them down. They were screaming at us in Arabic, clutching their toddlers and spitting like we were devils.