Men In Uniform: Taken By The Soldier. Jo Leigh

grip. But if he was lying to Clint, she wanted to know about it. It was her job. ‘I might just do that.’

      The past fifteen minutes explained so much. Why wouldn’t you shut yourself away after an incident like he’d experienced in the military? Who would you trust?

      She thought about her father and what sorts of things he must have seen in his time in active service, what that might do to a man. How it must take extra strength even to do the day-to-day things, never mind the horrendous things they were tasked with. Had her father done any of that? She thought about how there was no weapon on this earth strong enough to fight the infection which took her mother, and how a control freak like the Colonel must have felt about being powerless. About the baby whose birth caused the deadly, aggressive infection.

      She frowned.

      Clint had been ripped out of his unit, away from the men he was closest to, and look how it had affected him. The Colonel was recalled unexpectedly from active duty to come home and raise a motherless infant single-handed and assigned forever after to passive training and admin roles. It didn’t change one moment of the misery that was her childhood, but it did make her appreciate, a tiny bit, how it must have been for the Colonel twenty-six years ago.

      And why he might have viewed her as the enemy her whole life.