Fierce Protector: Hard to Handle trilogy, Book 1 Read Online Free

Walter Reed, surrounded by others who were struggling with their own injuries, the vast majority far, far worse than his own. Within minutes of the explosion, all those months ago on a freezing Afghan hilltop, other SEALs had applied tourniquets, called for a medevac chopper and funneled Zack into a system of medical care so well organized that, if they made it through the doors of the NATO Role 3 Hospital in Kandahar, the serviceman had a 98% chance of survival. Initial surgery had repaired the life-threatening damage to his lungs, and by the end of the same day , he was on a flight to Landstuhl, Germany where his treatment would continue.
    He was training himself not to think about it, but it was hard not to concede he had been incredibly lucky. Nick Vines’ mother had visited Zack at Walter Reed; the painful confluence of emotions had been so intolerable that he had, for days after, wished he had not survived. The psychologists warned him that there would be a period of wracking guilt as he processed his own answer to that eternal survivor’s question: Why me ?
    He shrugged it off for the ten thousandth time as his careful, painstaking work came to an end for the day. The sun was an hour from setting when he put aside his paintbrush and climbed into the shower. Twenty minutes away was the bar, some dinner and his old high school friends, the only two guys left in the area from his graduating class. Looking around as he drove through town to Route 87, it wasn’t hard to see why; the flood was a century past but Sutherland had still yet to find a way of attracting investment or creating significant work. Even the old hotel, derelict for decades, had been razed; some ruins outside of town were the only signs that prosperity had ever visited Sutherland, however briefly. It truly had been a long time ago.
    Mitch and Flynn were waiting by the bar, beers in hand and shirts still marked with the day’s sweat. “All hail the conquering hero!” was their traditional welcome, however many times Zack ordered it to cease.
    Zack slapped his friends on the back and took his usual seat at the bar. In many ways they couldn’t have appeared more different; Zack’s neat, short, black hair contrasted with the habitually unkempt Flynn and his pony-tail, and Mitch’s explosion of nut-brown curls. Flynn needed a shave, too. Zack made a mental note to give them both a hard time. “Hey, guys,” he said, taking his bar stool.
    “Evenin’, ZackAttack,” said CJ the bartender; his own customary greeting went all the way back to high school. “Slinging paint again today?”
    Zack kept his friends informed, though each nugget of news would only bring more ball-busting and jokes at his expense. “Finished the porch,” was his description of ten hours’ meticulous labor. “The garden’s still a mess.”
    They loved the notion of ‘Farmer Zack’ and ribbed him mercilessly about his newfound green fingers. “He’s gonna show up here one night with a nice big basket o’ squash and carrots,” predicted Flynn.
    “Then it’ll be selling his fruit jam, door to door like a girl scout,” offered Mitch. Zack slapped his oldest friend robustly around the head.
    “A trained killer, a decorated veteran,” marveled Flynn, “reduced to planting potatoes and dolling up his stoop.”
    “Fuckin’ give it a rest, you assholes,” Zack growled in almost entirely mock anger. Only these two men were permitted this kind of needling; anyone else making fun of Zack’s Afghanistan experience would have found themselves on the wrong end of a ferocious beating. “What have you knuckleheads achieved today?”
    Guffaws hid their embarrassment. Neither Mitch nor Flynn could be considered high-achievers. They had graduated from high school ‘the way an egg graduates from a hen’, as Zack’s mother had put it. Flynn ran a small and unspectacular second-hand car dealership, while Mitch called himself a ‘landscape architect’, although everyone