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“Are you hiding something from us?”
    Caleb schooled his features to appear passive. “Like what?”
    “Are you in the reserves?” the younger man asked, taking a seat next to Tex.
    Caleb snorted. “Hardly.”
    Caleb had left the Army along with the rest of them, right after the bomb had taken out most of their unit. The man sitting across from him now had lost a leg in that ambush. Caleb had known from the moment he’d cut off Easy’s fatigues that he didn’t have the medical skill to save it. He had only been a combat medic, not a battlefield surgeon. He might have been a paramedic after his discharge, but he’d seen enough of that kind of trauma to last him a lifetime. He had another mission now that was just as satisfying.
    Slick stopped her fussing over Tildy and turned to look at him. Caleb froze with his beer halfway to his lips. He knew that look. It was the same look she’d gotten when Tildy and Hawk found out they were having a boy. Sarah had already been scheming to pair up Hope and their son.
    “Are you going to Sioux Falls?” she asked.
    Caleb grimaced. “Might be,” he replied, because although it was really none of her business, he didn’t want to lie to her.
    “Can’t she come here?”
    In the years that Caleb had been living in Rapid City, Sioux Falls had merged with “Sioux Falls,” the person and the city becoming one and the same. The guys left it mostly alone. The women, however, were a different story. It seemed Slick had set her sights on him as the last bachelor in the group and she was determined to set her little makeshift family to rights. But Caleb didn’t do relationships.
    “Shooter,” he grumbled. “Tell your woman to stand down.”
    Shooter shrugged. “I can’t. She never listens to me.”
    “Why can’t we meet her?” Sarah prodded.
    “There’s no one to meet,” Caleb told her.
    “You go there all the time!”
    “Let it go, Slick.”
    “But —”
    “Sarah. That’s enough,” Caleb snapped. He regretted having to put his foot down with her. She really was an amazing woman and he couldn’t fault her that her quest for happiness had extended to everyone around her. “I’m not the marrying kind,” he told her more gently.
    “But—”
    “Neither is Sioux Falls.”
    “Let it go, babe,” Shooter said quietly.
     
     
    The game wrapped up at just after midnight. Caleb took his modest winnings and stuffed them into the pocket of his leather jacket.
    “Don’t spend it all in one place,” Tex told him with a wink.
    Caleb shrugged it off. Sometimes he wondered about the cowboy and his ability to read people. Tex had certainly made the most of his psychology degree. Outside, the air had turned chilly and Caleb zipped up his jacket to guard against the cold. Hawk helped Tildy into the front seat of the truck and Caleb let them take off first down the winding road that led to the highway below. After the sun set, it was chilly in the fall this far northeast, but it was the same in Caleb’s native California. Rapid City had its wind while Stockton had the fog that settled during the winter and never seemed to leave. Even with South Dakota’s harsh winters, Caleb didn’t miss California or anyone in it.
    He gunned the Harley and headed for home , which was a tidy one-story house on the east end of town. Caleb rented it from an elderly couple. Tex would say it was a testament to Caleb’s insistence on impermanence. Caleb just wrote it off as a practicality. Why did he need to own a house? To whom would he leave it when he died? He owned his Harley and his Ford pickup and he didn’t need anything else.
    He stopped at the curb and opened the mailbox. He tucked the mail under his arm and pulled the bike into the small garage and lowered the door. Entering his house through the kitchen, he tossed his keys onto the counter along with the stack of mail that he didn’t bother to look at. He swept the stark, white envelope that lay on top immediately into the