Fighting Redemption (39 page)

Seven months later…

Ryan stared out the kitchen window of the cottage and into the backyard. He’d mowed the lawn that morning, and now the sweet smell of fresh cut grass lingered in the warm afternoon sun. Pretty flowers fluttered from a light breeze that drifted across the garden Fin maintained with such care.

Fin was lying on her side in the shade of the tree, a brightly coloured blanket spread out beneath her. Her head was propped in her hand, laughter in her eyes as she watched Jacob fidget wildly as he learned how to move his little body.

He watched as Fin shifted to a sitting position and clapped her hands at a giggling Jacob. He was busy impressing his mother by displaying his new rolling technique, and she was lapping it up—encouraging him like he was the first child in the history of the world to perform the feat.

With Fin by his side, it was his chance to finally be free of his demons, but seven months later he realised they would never truly leave him. Maybe they would remain dormant, but they were buried in his soul, just like Fin was.

I can live with that,
he thought, his eyes opening to fall on his family.
As long as I have Fin and Jacob, I can live with anythin
g
.

Ryan closed his eyes at the sound of their muted laughter, remembering back to when he almost lost her.

“She’s waking up,”
Kyle had told him, and Ryan had trembled with relief.

Twenty-four hours after Fin stirred for the first time, they’d taken the tubes out and she began breathing on her own. He wanted to weep as he watched her eyes flutter open.

“Ryan,”
she rasped, her first word throaty and just a bare whisper on her lips.

“I’m here, baby,”
he replied, brushing her hair off her forehead with the flat of his palm.

“Can’t see you,”
she mumbled.

Ryan was hovering above Fin, looking right at her; but her eyes were blank and unfocused, staring at the ceiling like empty pools. He buzzed for the doctor immediately, fumbling the button in his panic.

“Ryan?”
she called out, her voice cracking on the word.

He squeezed her hand.
“Shhh, sweetheart. I’m right here.”

Her eyelids closed and she drifted back under again when the nurse came in.

“She says she can’t see,”
he told her.

Frowning, the nurse left abruptly, returning ten minutes later with Doctor Lee, the man who’d been working around the clock since Ryan had arrived at the hospital. He went straight to Fin’s bedside, lifting her eyelids and waving his bright penlight back and forth.

“Why can’t she see?”
Ryan demanded to know.

“How was her speech?”
the doctor asked him, ignoring Ryan’s question.
“Was it slurred? Did she know who you were?”

“It was fine. Scratchy, from the tube, but otherwise okay, and yes, she called me by name, why?”

Fin’s doctor moved to the end of the bed, picking up her chart.
“We’re going to have to send her upstairs for testing. If you can return to the waiting room, we’ll come get you when she comes back down.”

“Tests for what?”

Dr. Lee conferred quietly with the nurse. She left the room and he looked at Ryan as he tucked the chart away.
“It looks like Fin might have suffered a minor stroke while she was in a coma.”

Ryan’s brows drew together.
“A stroke?”

“It’s common for this to happen,”
Dr. Lee told him.
“Her body’s been under a lot of stress, along with her heart. When blood flow—”

“I know what a stroke is, but her sight? Is that permanent?”

“I can’t give you any guarantees right now, but if it was a stroke, then it was only mild. Loss of vision can be one of the symptoms, but in mild cases, it usually returns within twenty-four hours.”

And it had. Fin had overcome the twenty per cent chance they’d given her of surviving. They all watched the light slowly return to her eyes every day, until four weeks later, she returned home for the first time.

After months of physiotherapy, Fin could walk without effort, but her body had suffered. The cardiac arrest had damaged her heart permanently. She would be on medication for life and was now living with twice the odds of having a heart attack later in life, or a stroke. It was something they wouldn’t think of. Whatever the odds were for their future, they would overcome them, just like they had for everything else.

Kyle stepped up beside him in the kitchen, having just arrived for their late afternoon barbecue. “You ready to do it all over again?”

Ryan shook his head. “No. Not this time.”

He was clapped hard on the back and caught Kyle’s grin. “Well, last time you came home to a baby. Who knows what you’ll come home to after the next deployment, huh?”

Ryan smiled slowly. “A wedding,” he murmured, taking satisfaction in seeing Kyle’s grin getting smacked off his face from surprise.

“No shit?” Kyle peered out through the window, looking to the ring finger on Fin’s left hand. No doubt he was catching the giant sparkler right now. It was hard to miss. Rachael adored that ring more than Fin did. Fin
did
love it, but she was always scratching Jacob with it, or whacking it on something. She was worried the stone was going to fall out, but it was insured for God’s sake. It was easily replaced if that happened.

“But it’s not the same,”
she’d insisted, pouting until Ryan leaned in and nibbled her bottom lip with his teeth.
“It would be a replacement. It wouldn’t have the same soul.”

Ryan laughed.
“Baby, that’s mumbo jumbo hippy talk right there.”

“Maybe it is, but I’m all about saving the earth, aren’t I? I’m supposed to be hippyish.”

“Hippyish?”

“It’s a word.”

“Jesus Christ,” Kyle said, bringing him back to the present. “That ring would pay off the national debt.”

“Probably,” Ryan agreed with a laugh, bringing the beer in his hand to his lips and tipping it back for a long swallow.

“When did you ask her?”

“A few nights ago,” he replied, his eyes falling to Rachael and Julie as they returned to the blanket, both fighting over who was next in smothering his son.

Ryan had been impatient to ask her. He waited months for her to heal properly, but when the right moment came, he was suddenly nervous. Waiting until Jacob had been sleeping, he’d made love to her first, so slowly he thought he’d go out of his mind.

Afterwards, with her tucked in his arms, he’d told her to close her eyes.

“Why?”

“No questions. Just do it.”

And she did.

“Ryan?”
she called out when his weight left the bed to rummage quietly in the drawer of his bedside table. Finding the ring, Ryan took it from the box, his hands trembling so hard he almost dropped it on the floor. He shook his head at himself. He could lock everything down in the middle of a war, but over this he had no control?

Holding it in his fist, he said,
“You can open your eyes now.”

They flew open, finding him standing naked beside the bed.
“Come with me,”
he commanded, holding his other hand out towards her.

Putting her hand in his, he tugged her from the bed.

“It’s cold,”
she told him, frowning.

Grabbing the sheet and bundling it in her arms, he led her down the hall, and after undoing the locks, he walked her through the French doors and outside.

“Ryan. We haven’t got any clothes on!”
she hissed, her eyes wide as she pointed out the obvious.

If he had his way, she’d never wear clothes around the house ever again, but she hadn’t liked that idea when he told her.
You can’t win them all,
he thought, grinning.

“That’s what the sheet is for.”

Reaching the middle of the lawn, Ryan took the sheet from her and after shaking it out, he wrapped it around the both of them until they were bundled together. Her breasts rubbed against his chest, and he tried not to get hard all over again. He had a proposal to get to, not lawn sex, though that one time after they’d lost the house key in the grass was hot. Maybe after.

“What are we doing out here?”
she whispered, looking up at him, the cool air swirling harmlessly around them as they shared body heat.

“Look up,”
he told her.

A smile spread slowly across her face, but Fin did as he asked. She tilted her head upwards, her long tousled waves flowing in the breeze as they fell down her back.

He looked up with her. It was the perfect night. No clouds. Black sky. Clear bright stars.

“I read the other day that our universe contains more than a hundred billion galaxies, and each one of those galaxies has more than a hundred billion stars. Did you know that every single one of those stars is unique? Out of all of them, not a single one is the same.”

“I did know that,”
she murmured, a smile playing on her lips.

“And they’re all beautiful,”
he told her.

“They are,”
she agreed.

Ryan’s heart started pounding a little harder. What if after everything they’d been through, she decided that life with him—a soldier—wasn’t something she could deal with anymore? Was love enough? It had to be. He had to take that chance.

He took his eyes off the stars and looked at Fin, the weight of love he felt for her crushing his chest. “
Ask me, Fin, what I see when I look up at all those stars.”

She met his eyes, shifting closer, her smooth skin brushing against his rough, hardened body.
“What do you see?”

“You,”
he said simply.

Tears filled her eyes.

“You’re all I see. Nothing holds more beauty in my eyes than you do. No one will ever love you the way I do.”

“Ryan,”
she whispered thickly.

“Remember that day I let you drive my car? You had to agree to that one condition, and when I eventually told you what it was, you weren’t allowed to say no.”

“Uh huh,”
she murmured.
“But you never told me what it was.”

“Marry me, Fin.”

Feeling Ryan’s eyes on her, that prickle of awareness tickling her spine, Fin tore her eyes away from her son and looked up.

Ryan was standing at the kitchen window chatting to Kyle, but his eyes were fixed on her. Catching her glance, he winked and her heart fluttered. His eyes dropped to the ring on her finger, turning those flutters to hard thumps at the reminder of him asking her to marry him.

It had been the singularly most beautiful night in all her life.

He’d looked down at her, his eyes dark with love and apprehension and asked,
“Marry me, Fin?”

She’d had to close her eyes for a brief moment against the waves of emotion that took her on a wild path down memory lane.

The first time she’d met him that connection had been instant, and had never gone away. Growing up, she’d always been aware of him, the love for him growing inside her, falling into an ache that she was too young to recognise as heartbreak when he’d walked away, leaving her and joining the Army, giving
them
the heart that should have been hers all along.

“Six years, Ryan. Do you know how hurt I was, each day passing by and getting nothing—not even a note or an email? Both of you left me, and I was okay with that. I understood that this was what you needed to do, so I moved on. I built a life that doesn’t include you … I’d have given you my entire heart if you’d only asked, but it’s not yours now. It’s not yours.”

She hadn’t meant the words because she’d already given him her heart. It had only ever been his.

“I hurt too. For six years
I fought every day not to think of you
, and I lost, because every day you were all I could see.”

And now here he was, in her arms, telling her she was still all he could see, and asking her the one thing that would tie them both together forever.

The smile on Fin’s face grew wide. “
Yes, Ryan. I’ll marry you.”

Jacob’s little legs kicked her in the thigh, startling her out of the memory. “Hey, little man,” she murmured as she tickled his belly, warmth spreading through her as he giggled. “Beating on your poor old mum already. That’s not nice. We’re going to have to get daddy to teach you how to treat a lady, huh?”

He babbled noisily, the sound ranging from a sweet, low pitch to a decibel breaking squeal.

“Wow, Fin. Your son is loud,” Rachael told her, as if Fin couldn’t hear it already. “It feels like a thousand rusty forks are stabbing me in the ears.”

She swooped down on the blanket to pluck Jacob into her arms, but her mum snatched him up before Rachael got the chance. Lifting his little white singlet, she blew a noisy raspberry onto his little belly.

Rachael watched on, her eyes flat, hands on her hips, making sure Fin’s mum could see she was unimpressed. “Excuse me, Julie, but I believe we agreed it was my turn?”