A half hourlater, the three men crowded around a roaring fire on a stony outcropping well back from the river’s edge.
Their dripping coats were laid over nearby rocks to dry. The woodsmoke, thankfully, held the midges at bay.
Malcolm had gutted one of the fish and threaded its gills through a branch of green birch. The filleted salmon currently leaned over the fire, skin crackling in the heat.
No one had said anything in at least fifteen minutes, the silence between them an easy thing. The sun beat on their backs, while the flames warmed their chests.
“Thinking deep thoughts, eh, Captain?” Ethan chuckled, resting back on his elbows.
“Something like that.” Fox tossed a twig on the fire, watching it curl as the flames wicked higher.
Malcolm turned the fish. “How about you, Ethan? Are ye planning to use this afternoon as fodder for your burgeoning poetic career?” His tone was entirely that of a pesky brother. “‘Ode to a River Soaking,’ an epic poem in rhyming couplets by Ethan Penn-Leith.”
Snickering, Ethan threw a pine cone at his brother. “More like ‘Ode to Why Malcolm Penn-Leith Is a Horse’s Arse.’”
“I’m fair certain ye wrote that already. I seem tae remember ye reading it tae me once. Something scathing which rhymedarsewithfarceand left Aileen in fits of laughter.”
Ethan grinned, entirely unrepentant. “That sounds about right.”
Fox snorted, a short laugh escaping his throat.
He missed this, he realized. This casual, teasing camaraderie with other men.
Fox had spent his entire adulthood in the military—an occupation that came with built-in friends, daily purpose, and rigid structure. Foolishly, he had often chafed against those very things.
Then came Coorg and his injuries.
Life as he knew it had been stripped away—his friends, his occupation, his sense of purpose . . . the ways in which he had formerly defined himself.
Poof.
All of them. Gone.
Since then, Fox had been so focused on recovering his health and protecting Susan and Madeline that he had scarcely taken time to think upon his own inner life.
How was he to know himself now? How could he transform into the father that Madeline needed? Into a loving husband for Leah?
The problem, of course, was that his former self wasn’t so much lost as shattered. Pulverized to dust. Obliterated.
He was desperate to build a brighter future, but he felt helpless to know where to start. As a soldier, he knew only too well that sometimes things broke too severely to ever heal.
His heart, he feared, was one of them.
But as Malcolm and Ethan continued to poke fun at each other, something within Fox relaxed. Oh, it was a minor sort of easing, to be sure, but happened nonetheless.
He might be a tattered husk of a man, but this—laughing and fishing with friends—he could do.
“Did I tell ye,” Ethan said into a lull of conversation, “that a publisher bought my first collection of poems?”
He said the words almost . . . shyly. As if wary of their reaction.
Malcolm froze, eyes flaring wide.
“That’s astounding, Ethan,” he said. “And you’re only now telling me? You’ve been in my company since Monday.”
“Yes,” Fox snorted. “That seems the sort of information you lead with, not drop casually into conversation several days after arriving. Congratulations.”
Ethan blushed, poking at the fire with a birch switch.
