Her Perfect Life Read online

  Her Perfect Life

  Vicki Hinze

  HER PERFECT LIFE

  Copyright © 2005, 2018 by Vicki Hinze

  All rights are reserved. All characters and events in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or via any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or via any information storage and retrieval system without the express written permission of the copyright holder and publisher.

  ISBN: 978-1499234824

  Cover Design by VK Hinze

  Published by Magnolia Leaf Press

  Niceville, Florida, USA

  Her Perfect Life by Vicki Hinze was first published by Harlequin Enterprises in 2005 for the general market. In 2018, the story was rewritten and this new Clean Read Edition was published.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Inspiration for HER PERFECT LIFE

  Readers’ Group Discussion Guide

  Prisoner of War Information Resources

  A Final Word to Readers

  Sneak Peek

  New Series Announcement

  About the Author

  Also by Vicki Hinze

  To Scott Speicher and his family

  And to my own son, Iraqi War veteran

  Raymond Hinze

  I love you, Ray.

  Thank you for the privilege of being your mother.

  Thank you for coming home.

  Acknowledgments

  As always there are many to thank for a completed work, and only me to blame for any challenges anyone finds with it. I’m grateful for the contributions of:

  Jessica Lewis and Sandie Scarpa, resident guardian angels. Thanks for keeping me on track, and for the million things you do I never slow down long enough to acknowledge. I do notice, and I am grateful.

  Chip MacGregor, agent and friend, for his steadfast and generous support.

  My family, who know and acknowledge my every flaw and somehow manage to love me, anyway.

  All those who serve in our Armed Forces, who take the risks and make the sacrifices, and all those at home who do the same and wait, keeping the home fires burning.

  Prologue

  Life should come with warning labels.

  Warning! At fifteen, you’re going to be tempted to give your virginity to Donald Simoneaux at Mel Ott Park behind the baseball bleachers. Don’t. He’s an arrogant idiot with a big mouth and, if you do it, you’ll never hear from him again. You won’t anyway—it’ll be a one-date train wreck—but if you sleep with him, you’ll feel you wasted your first, be down on lovemaking for the next decade, and be ticked off about it forever. If you don’t, you’ll be grateful you’ve been spared from a second date with the jerk and you’ll meet and marry a great guy with finesse. The first time you two twist the sheets, you’ll be glad you waited and you’ll totally understand all the fuss about sex.

  Warning! At seventeen, avoid the Pink Daisy. It’s a cute club with cool people, but when the place is raided, Marianne Demsey will stuff her dope in your purse and you’ll get busted because she won’t admit that it’s hers. You don’t smoke anything, including pot, but you’ll never convince your dad of it, or the police. On the up side, you’ll test clean, get community service, and your mom will know the truth. She’s psychic where you’re concerned, remember? She knows everything. But she won’t be able to convince your dad she’s not covering for you, and he’ll choke you nearly to death trying to keep you on a tight leash until you’re twenty-one. You will not be a happy leashee.

  And oh, while we’re talking about twenty-one, skip the Mardi Gras frat party at the LSU campus in New Orleans. You’ll save yourself an ex-husband. That’s where you’ll meet Wonder Man, the guy with finesse that makes sheet-twisting an art form. Unfortunately, he also considers fidelity a rule just for women. Definitely best to not go there.

  Warning! At twenty-four, you’ll be a pilot, just as you’ve always dreamed. Air Force all the way, baby. And right after pilot training, you’ll meet a jock that makes you weak in the knees. You’ll marry him three years later, have two great kids—a girl and a boy—and you’ll love your life.

  Okay, so in a few years you’ll get a little wistful now and then because your relationship could be better. Jock—a.k.a. Dr. Sam Slater, leading gynecologist in Willow Creek, Florida—isn’t perfect, but unlike Wonder Man, he’s worth keeping. He’s a faithful husband, a decent if uninspiring lover, a good dad so into having the perfect image he still hides all possible flaws from his parents (which you find endearing and annoying), and if at times he’s a bit selfish and seemingly unconscious about what’s really important, well, you’re not perfect either.

  Actually, his faults are relatively minor compared to those of the spouses of many of your friends. If you looked at vaginas and dealt with truly hormonal women all day, you probably wouldn’t get overly enthused on nights at home, either. Just saying. In the realm of male behavior, facts are facts, whether or not they are politically correct.

  Life, however, has a way of balancing things. As compensation, you’ll have the coolest co-pilot in the Air Force, C.D. Quade, who is a walking violation to the libidos of women everywhere. He’s totally irresistible: gorgeous, sharp, funny, sensitive and straight. You two will be nuts about each other, and on occasion you’ll wonder what it would be like to be with him instead of the jock, but loyalty and vows keep your wedding band on your finger and your panties up around your hips. C.D. Quade isn’t the kind to trespass on another man’s turf anyway, so it’s just as well you keep your blood cooled to a simmer around him. It takes you a while to get that your relationship is deeper than anything physical, but your outlook on marriage in general works in your favor. What is it? Nobody says you have to marry, but if you do, then honor your vows. Do it out of respect for yourself and your spouse. If you can’t or won’t, then just stay single and spare everyone involved agony and heartbreak. Betrayal and breached trust doesn’t discriminate based on whether you do it or it’s done to you. No one escapes unscathed. Bottom line in all this is, with the jock, the kids and your beloved garden at home and C.D. at work, you’ll be reasonably content. That’s not bad for real life.

  Now for the grand slam, “kick your backside and pad your knees because you’re going to be on them for the duration” Warning!

  Love your family so fiercely that it almost hurts, and do all those things you keep saying you’ll get around to someday—like finding a way to make a living with your gardening, taking that Alaskan cruise you’ve dreamed about since your eighteenth birthday, and making that pilgrimage to Scotland you promised your grandmother you’d make to see where your dad’s ancestors lived. Don’t wait. Do it all now. Absolutely all of it.

  Because if you don’t, when you’re thirty-four, on June 23rd, you’re going to be assigned to fly a mission in Iraq and your plane is going to get shot down. You’ll be with your devoted sidekick co-pilot, C.D., who will still be incredibly gorgeous and single, but . . . well . . . There’s just no easy way to say this. Prepare yourself. The bottom line is he’s going to be rescued, and you’re going to be dead.

  At least, that’s the way it’s going to seem to you for a long, long time. And repeatedly during this dark period of your life, yo
u’ll remember the little list you made when you were eight: the one that detailed all the things you wanted when you grew up. Remember? You wrote it shortly after you completed the magical leap from the fat pencils you conquered in first grade to the brand new Number 2 slim-and-sleek writing machine.

  This list was the most important document of your life, and to mark the rite of passage in creating it, you pulled out your most prized possession: the black ink, clear barrel, comfort-grip, Bic pen—medium point—you’d been saving to first use on something really, really special. This was that life-defining moment. That momentous occasion you would forever recall as the one moment in time when you knew exactly what you wanted and needed to be content.

  You felt it the instant the tip of the pen touched the page and you printed in bold, broad letters:

  KATIE COLE

  AND

  HER PERFECT LIFE

  I’m sorry to say that many times during these trials you’ll have to fight hard to not lose hope and heart and let your spirit be broken. It won’t be easy. You’ll believe you’re in hell. You’ll curse that list and your life, and you’ll wish you were dead. Faith in anything—God, human beings, even in yourself will be sorely tested. So sorely tested.

  Oh, yeah. Life definitely should come with warning labels.

  But it doesn’t.

  And that, Captain Katie Cole Slater, is the most important Warning! of all.

  Chapter One

  Six Years After the Crash

  Her prison cell was dark and dank.

  Weak moonlight cut through the tiny barred window, barely casting a thin strip of a shadow on the sand-packed floor. The air lay still, silent and heavy, yet compared to the days of hundred-twenty-degree temperatures, it seemed blissfully cool.

  In just a few hours, dawn would come and the desert heat would again turn her cell into an oven. Trapped between the walls in this armpit of hell, the heat swelled and seemed to suck all the oxygen out of the air. Day or night, Katie felt choked. Midday, she often spent strangling, and when the sandstorms came, the misery increased tenfold.

  That which is endured is conquered.

  She gently held the photo of her husband Sam and their children Molly and Jake. It was far too dark to see it, but that didn’t matter; she’d memorized its every detail. Though it made the ache in her heart so acute she swore it would kill her, each night she forced herself to remember every quirk and expression and sound they made, terrified if she missed even one night she’d forget and never again be able to recall them. She relived each memorable moment and the way it had made her feel, the way they had made her feel, at least a million times and prayed it would be enough to last her the rest of her life.

  Eyes are unnecessary to view that stored in the heart.

  The photo’s edges were frayed and the images worn smooth in places—one on Molly’s hair and one on Jake’s nose. Katie had always done that; stroked Molly’s hair, and dragged her fingertip down the slope of Jake’s nose. Back then she’d been comforting them. Now she stroked their photo trying to comfort herself.

  In the last six years, there had been little comfort.

  But there had been an abundance of nightmares.

  Nightmares of the plane crash, of her injuries. The pain of setting her own broken bones. When she’d discovered she’d gone down in the lawless tribal area across the border from Pakistan, she’d known that there would be more pain to be suffered. And there had been. Much, much more pain suffered.

  Despite the warlords’ bets that she wouldn’t last a week, she had endured and conquered every single violation. She had survived. Yet each abuse had created horrible images that didn’t fade from her memory on awakening. Images that ignited resentment and anger and made it burn as strong in her as the loneliness of isolation and the constant fear of what the sadistic combatants holding her prisoner would do to her next.

  General Amid had been a godsend.

  Still, it’d taken a couple years to come to grips with being left behind. C.D. had to be dead, or he would have found her by now. She still mourned him. Mourned losing Sam and their kids. Mourned having her life stripped away from her and being left with… this.

  It’d taken a couple more years to give up hope of ever being rescued. But on the fifth anniversary of her crash and capture, she’d reached critical-crisis point: accept it or go insane. That night, alone in her cell, she had slogged her way through a minefield of emotions, latched onto a lingering spark of faith, and faced the truth. No one could reach her here. No one would even try—not anymore, if they ever had. Too much time had passed, and living in this cell, cleaning General Amid’s home, shopping for his personal household at the market—that was her life now, and likely that’s all it would ever be.

  She refused to think about the general’s leaving. She just wasn’t that brave or that strong. Without his protection, the guards would revert to the way they’d treated her before he’d stepped in and that incited more nightmares, more withdrawing deeper and deeper inside herself, closing even more shutters in her mind, locking away the memories of torture to stay sane.

  Yet on still August nights like this one, where she lay alone in her cell on a bare cot with but one thing of her own—the photo—she silently wept inside, crushed under the weight of her darkest fears. She would die in this awful place, still wearing her tattered flight suit because it made the guards feel superior and powerful to hold her—an American—captive. They preened and flaunted it daily. Had she been a man, they would have enjoyed flaunting it more. Being a pilot helped, hence the flight suit. But in their eyes, that didn’t make up for the fact she was a lowly woman. These tribal warlords did not respect women. Use them, yes, but women were regarded as totally expendable. The harsh reality was that she would die here just as surely as C.D. had died in the desert the night of the crash.

  She would never again see Sam or Molly or Jake.

  She would never again know the joy of watching them play while she worked in her beloved garden. It too likely stood as withered and overgrown as the day she’d first found it. Sam was not a master gardener. He wouldn’t even remember to water the lawn if it were not on an automatic sprinkler system. She had worked two years on that garden. But… Another harsh reality intruded, hitting her hard. Everything in her life ceased to be when she had ceased to be.

  Except for Sam and the kids.

  Yet even with the most heartfelt and resolute rationalization, she couldn’t convince herself that they weren’t gone from her life forever.

  On her cot, she curled on her side, pulling her knees to her chest, trying to shut out despair. God, how long must I endure to conquer this? How long? If this is the way it’s to be, why am I here? I’m of no use to anyone. Why can’t I die, too? I don’t work without them. Nothing works without them. Please, just end this pain…

  For the hundredth time that long, sorrowful night, she swallowed a sob and buried her hopelessness. The guard was apt to come in at any time, and she didn’t dare let him see her in tears. She’d made that mistake once early on and would kill herself before doing it again. He and the other guards had tortured her for six hours straight.

  Shaking head to toe at the memory, she crossed her chest with her arms and squeezed. The sensation of pressure swept sweet relief through her body. She was awake, not asleep, not dreaming those haunting dreams. She had survived.

  That which is endured is conquered.

  Rubbing the U.S. flag patch on her sleeve, she wondered. What were the children doing? Was Sam home from the hospital, tucking them into bed, singing them night-night songs? Did he notice that Molly showed signs of being as psychic as Katie’s mother? Did he remember that she hated the crust on her sandwiches and Jake had to have orange juice every morning to jumpstart his sugar? Did Sam remember to kiss them good morning as well as good night? How often did he remember to tell them he loved them? He’d seldom slowed down long enough to give Katie the words, but love had always been there in his eyes. Always there in
his eyes. Molly would sense that. But would Jake? Would her babies be secure in the knowledge they were loved?

  A tear splashed onto Katie’s cheek and her heart ached. God, how can I keep taking this, day after day? Please, please let what happened today matter. Please let that French doctor report seeing me.

  He had seen her. Hadn’t he? He definitely had made eye contact, been startled and quickly covered it up, then pretended not to have noticed her at all.

  General Amid, who ran the prison camp, had sent her to the market for his fresh vegetables. There was no danger of her running away. There was nowhere to run and no one to run to, and anyone foolish enough to try would die in the desert or be slaughtered by the lawless hiding out in the region. Either way, the runner would be dead long before reaching help. In the market, there had been a small group of medical workers treating the sick, passing out medicine… That’s where she’d seen the French doctor. He had to have reported seeing her…

  But nothing happened that night to verify it.

  Katie consoled herself. It took time to notify people. Time to identify her and to debate options on what to do. Time to plan a mission in hostile territory. Warning herself she was being a fool, she couldn’t seem to stop hope from flickering to life inside her.