Deployments and Desires

MILLIE

He said it was just for fun.
A one-night kind of forever.
Connor was charming, damaged, and impossible to forget-the kind of man who didn't believe in happy endings but still gave me one of the best nights of my life.
We got married in a blink, for a bucket list he never explained, and then he was gone. Deployed. Out of reach. Out of sight.
Until he walks into the Silver Horseshoe, and everything inside me stops.
Because my husband-the one I never expected to see again-is standing in my small town, haunted and hurting. And all the feelings I buried? They're still there. Just waiting to break me open.

CONNOR

I didn't expect to see her again-especially not in the town my sister calls home.
Millie. My wife. The woman I married before deployment on a whim. I didn't expect to survive.
But now I'm back, medically discharged, broken in ways I can't begin to explain, and she's here-bright, beautiful, and so damn good it hurts.
She fell for the version of me I don't recognize anymore.
I didn't expect to remember her laugh. Her kindness. Her hands in mine when I swore to love her after just one night.
I didn't expect to want to come back.
But war leaves its mark. I didn't come home whole. But fate brought me back to the one woman I never should've left behind.
And I don't know if I'm ready to love her again...
But I've never stopped.