Fourteen

Dean hoped to hell she hadn’t seen him flinch. But when he turned around, he could see he hadn’t been that lucky.

He cursed under his breath. How the hell had she guessed? He’d taken special care not to walk, talk, or act like military.

She answered his question with a knowing look. “My father was a Ranger—and later Delta. I recognize the signs. Cool under pressure. Capable. Badass. Not to mention that you have obviously been trained in hand-to-hand combat and survival skills.”

Dean’s instincts had been dead-on. Being with her was a very bad idea.

Her father was Delta? What kind of shit luck was that? Dean would have to be way more careful. Guessing that he was military was bad enough—he didn’t want her any closer than that.

Realizing that he needed to cut his losses before it got worse, he said, “I was in the navy for a while.”

Technically that was correct. Retiarius Platoon didn’t exist anymore. And neither did he.

His confirmation seemed to seal something for her. Whatever interest there might have been sparking in her eyes—and other places a little while ago—died.

He still couldn’t believe she’d propositioned him like that. It had been a long time since anyone called him on something—and certainly never with an effort to get him off. Not that he hadn’t deserved it. But what the hell could he have done? Those big wounded eyes had been eating away at him. Maleficent was easier to take than Bambi.

But neither prepared him for the cool flatness of indifference. It wasn’t hard to guess the reason for her sudden change of heart.

He should be glad. Her not being interested in him made it a lot easier to fight the attraction between them until he could get her someplace safe. But he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “Don’t worry. You don’t need to say anything more. I know exactly how you feel about the military. We’re all a bunch of programmed machines, right?”

He didn’t quite erase all the bitterness from his voice.

She had the decency to blush. “You heard me?”

“The entire bar heard you.”

Her flush of embarrassment deepened. But she didn’t shy away from the taunt. She tilted her chin up to look at him. “I have my reasons.”

“I’m sure you do.” But he didn’t need to hear them. He picked up one of the buckets from under the sink and turned toward the door. “I’m going to see about getting us some water.” It was almost dark.

“Dan, wait.”

He was surprised how much he hated the sound of the false name coming from her lips. It was wrong, but he couldn’t make it right.

He stiffened as he felt her hand on his arm. He could feel his heart beating strangely in his chest. It felt out of place. Higher and too close to his ribs.

“I . . .” She stared but seemed to not know what to say. Only when he looked down into her eyes did she blurt, “My father killed himself.”

Fuck. Whatever he’d been expecting her to say—maybe some crap about peace talks and nonviolence being the answer—it hadn’t been that.

“Christ, Annie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .” He put the bucket down by the door and raked his fingers through his hair. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

She shook her head. “No. I want you to know. Delta. The war. They changed him. They made him into something I didn’t recognize. If you could have known him before . . .” She had a faraway look in her eyes as if she were in another time and place. “He was funny and kindhearted, always smiling and doing nice things for my mother and me. They’d married out of high school, and everyone said they’d never seen two people more in love. He doted on her—adored her—and me. I remember his carrying me around on his shoulders everywhere when I was young, and taking me fishing and to the park. He even tried to take me hunting one time.”

Her mouth quirked, and he couldn’t help wondering how that had gone. Something occurred to him, and he groaned. “Don’t tell me you are a vegetarian?”

“Okay, I won’t.” She managed a smile. “But I hope you have something other than fillet of Mickey planned for dinner.”

“Protein bars?”

“That’ll work.”

“Did he give you that?” He indicated the watch she was fiddling with. He’d noticed how careful she was to protect it in the rain and suspected it was special.

She nodded. “On a trip to Disney World before he left for Iraq. It is one of my best memories of him.”

Dean wasn’t sure if she would continue, but she seemed to want to get it off her chest, so he didn’t stop her.

“After my dad went to Iraq, he started to change. He was more irritable when he came home. He couldn’t sleep. He’d snap at me and my mother a lot. And he drank more—a lot more. Not beer like he used to but Jack Daniel’s.” She wrinkled her nose. “I still hate the smell of whiskey. But all that was nothing compared to after he was recruited for Delta and went to Afghanistan. He wouldn’t talk about it, but whatever he did over there—whatever they changed him into—he came back a different person. It got really bad after he was nearly killed by an IED. He’d lose his temper at the smallest thing, and his anger was terrifying—he’d go into this dark rage. He withdrew from my mother—and from me. He lost track of things and even forgot my birthday. But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was when they started fighting.” She closed her eyes as if she could block out the sounds. When she opened them again, he could see the horror. “He hit her. My smiling, loving father who never raised a hand to a woman in his life backhanded my mom so hard across the face that she needed stitches.”

Dean started to reach for her, wanting to give her comfort, but she shook him off and stepped back. “No, let me finish. I need to say it all. Do you know I’ve never told anyone this?” She didn’t wait for him to respond. “He was drunk, but it wasn’t an excuse. He knew it as well as everyone else did when he finally woke from his haze in jail. My mom didn’t waste any time. She packed a few things and took us to a hotel, planning to leave the next morning for Florida, where my grandparents live.”

Up until this point there had been very little emotion in her voice, but that was about to change.

“I was a teenager. I didn’t understand everything that was going on. I didn’t like what had happened to my dad, but he was still my dad, and I loved him.” She looked up at him, pleading somehow for understanding. He did the only thing he could and nodded. “I snuck out of the hotel to go back to our house to see him before we left. To ask him to work it out with my mom. I didn’t want to leave.” She drew a deep breath. “I was the one who found him.”

Ah, shit.

Dean hadn’t said it aloud, but she turned to meet his gaze as if he had. Her eyes were so glassy and full of pain, it felt as if he had a vise around his chest, squeezing out his breath. “He was so ashamed and so filled with self-loathing at what he’d become—at what our military had turned him into—that he put a bullet through his head.”

Dean had waited long enough. This time she didn’t resist when he drew her into his arms. He wanted to make it all better for her and take away all the hurt. But as that wasn’t possible, he did the only thing he could and just held her.

She let him for a few minutes, but then seemed to collect herself and pulled away. She dabbed a single tear from her eye and looked up at him. “So now you know. That’s why I said what I did.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d heard a story like that. A guy in Retiarius had killed himself a few years back after leaving the Teams. You didn’t come out of what they did unscathed, but it didn’t mean they were all violent volcanoes waiting to erupt, either.

He should just let it go. He had no reason to change her mind. It would be easier when they parted if he didn’t. But it somehow became the most important thing to him at that moment that she not see it that way. “Your father needed help, Annie. He should have gotten it. I’m not making excuses, but things have changed since then. There’s been more training, and the people in charge know the signs and what to look for. I don’t know what your father saw or did or what caused him to do what he did—and PTSD is a serious problem—but there may also have been a physiological explanation for what happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“You said he was nearly killed by an IED?” She nodded. “There were probably a half dozen other blasts that you didn’t know about—guys fighting over there had to deal with it constantly. The symptoms you describe—forgetting things, not sleeping, depression—are hallmarks of brain injury from explosions that doctors have identified in returning veterans.”

She looked stunned. “You mean like the football players?”

“Kind of. I’m not a doc, but as I understand it, it’s in a different part of the brain and doesn’t look the same under the microscope. CTE—the football concussion problem—is a buildup of a protein over time, but what they see with blasts is more like scarring.”

“How come I’ve never heard about this?”

“It’s only come out recently. But the military is taking it very seriously. They now have a written protocol for handling guys exposed to blasts—checklists, test questions, things like that.” He didn’t mention that guys actually learned the answers to try to avoid being pulled out, so the military had to develop a number of different tests. Not everything had changed. Guys were still resistant to being pulled out, but it was Dean’s job to make sure they were. That included himself. He’d seen a doctor as soon as he reached safety. Apparently he had a hard head. “And guys in combat zones wear tiny gauges on their uniforms that show if they’ve been too close to a blast.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed, obviously trying to process all he’d said. “So it might not have been his fault?”

“I’m saying there might have been a reason that had nothing to do with him being a ‘machine.’” He paused. “Look, I’m not saying that guys like your dad don’t have to deal with some fucked-up shit.” He’d seen his share of it. “And that can sometimes mess with their heads and make it difficult to adjust when they get home. But what he did—as a Ranger and with Delta—those guys are some of the best in the world at what they do.” Of course, Dean would never say that in front of any of the Delta boys—wouldn’t want to confuse them on who was the best. “No matter what the liberal pundits want to think, until this world turns into Disneyland, we need people like him to keep everyone else safe. People who make the hard choices and difficult decisions so you don’t have to.

“ISIS isn’t going to play nice if we put away our guns and go home. There isn’t going to be a meeting of the minds no matter how hard we all ‘try to get along.’ They have one goal and that is to destroy us and our way of life. That’s it. And they won’t stop until we stop them. That’s the ugly reality whether liberals want to acknowledge it or not. So every time you think about whether we need ‘machines’ like your father, think about the alternative. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be a woman under ISIS rule. Your father made a sacrifice so that you have the freedom to wear those little shorts you had on earlier, get your PhD, and protest a drillship.”

Dean didn’t realize how passionately he was talking until he stopped, and the resulting silence dragged on for a minute. Her mouth was slightly open and her cheeks looked a little pink—maybe from the shorts comment.

He probably shouldn’t have said that. Not because it might be construed as sexist—whatever—but because it gave too much away.

He’d been looking.

•   •   •

Annie shouldn’t be surprised by the captain’s defense of her father and other men like him. She’d heard many of the arguments before—albeit not so plainly and forcefully put. But the possibility that her father might have had a brain injury still had her reeling.

“You certainly don’t mince words, do you?” she said. “Disneyland?” She shook her head. “I’ll remember that. But in defense of ‘liberals,’ we don’t all live in Fantasyland—conservatives just don’t allow for the possibility that they could be wrong. You make it sound too simple, but good and evil aren’t always that black-and-white, and the people making the decisions don’t always know what’s right. Actually, if you look at recent history, they tend to make plenty of mistakes. Toppling Saddam”—she couldn’t resist pronouncing it like the first Bush president—“made room for ISIS to step in. And frankly a lot of political leaders today—on both sides—are not the ones I want making those ‘tough’ decisions.” She paused, taking his silence perhaps as begrudging agreement. “Look, I’m not saying that the military or Special Forces aren’t sometimes necessary. I’m saying that they are being overused for questionable purposes when the cost is so great. There are too many families like mine.”

He didn’t disagree—with that, at least. “If we let everyone make decisions, nothing would ever get done,” he said. “Someone has to be in charge. That’s why we have elections.” He thought for a minute. She liked that about him. He thought before he spoke. And even if that speaking was too blunt, it wasn’t hyperbole and inflammatory statements. “The system doesn’t always work, but it’s the best one we have.”

“Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying to make it better. And there are other ways to make a difference.”

“You mean like your stunt with the drillship? The only difference that was going to make was alienating anyone who might be inclined to agree with you. Inconveniencing people, interfering with their jobs, and making them angry isn’t the way to persuade anyone. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you get more bees with honey?”

She felt her temper pricking at his sarcasm. “Don’t you think that’s a little ironic coming from you? Did you use a lot of honey when you were in the navy?”

He surprised her with his reply. “Sometimes yes. Despite how the media like to portray us ‘machines’”—her cheeks heated—“combat is usually the last resort. When I was in Afghanistan, we spent a lot of our time making friends with the locals and training them to defend themselves.”

Her heart sank on hearing that he’d been in Afghanistan. What hidden scars did he have?

She forced her mind back to the topic. “But weren’t you just saying something about ISIS and justifying the use of our military because diplomacy is never going to work?”

“You aren’t equating a drillship looking for oil with fighting ISIS?”

“No, I’m just saying that honey isn’t always enough. Of course I didn’t want anyone to be inconvenienced or angry, but sometimes agitation isn’t just effective—it’s also necessary to get people to listen. It’s a method. Not one I’d want to rely on all the time, but peaceful, orderly, sign-holding protests don’t always work. Sometimes you have to do something dramatic—something big—or maybe even something unpleasant to get the job done.”

“Said every terrorist everywhere. That’s exactly the type of argument that the bad guys use to justify their ‘wars.’ I bet that’s how Julien and his friends were justifying what they were planning to do, too.”

Her cheeks heated. “That isn’t fair. There’s a big difference between a sit-in on a ship and blowing it up.”

“Agreed. Just as there is a big difference between what our military is doing to combat threats like ISIS and trying to prevent drilling for oil. Even so, we aren’t doing very much blowing up at all. But as much as I’d personally like to hit the reset button, that isn’t how our government operates.”

“Reset button?” He waited for her to understand. She was incredulous. “You mean wiping them out?”

He shrugged. “These are evil people, Annie, who want to set our civilization back hundreds of years. They aren’t messing around. They’re fighting a war with us, but we’re engaged in some kind of PC bullshit. Our response has turned reactive rather than proactive. George W might have opened the door in Iraq, but it was later administrations that allowed these organizations to flare up again. If we’d taken care of them when we had a chance, we wouldn’t be in this position.”

She didn’t disagree with everything he said, which was surprising. “You might be right, but that is part of the cost of being a civilized nation. We don’t go around hitting the reset button just because we don’t like someone’s beliefs. You conservatives love to hold up the Constitution and wave it around anytime someone mentions guns, but I sometimes wonder whether you’ve actually read it.”

To her surprise he didn’t argue with her; he just laughed. “I’m beginning to feel like I’m on CNN.”

She smiled back at him. “Minus all the yelling and vitriol.”

Which was nice. She liked that they could disagree and still have an intelligent conversation. Maybe they understood each other better now, too.

He was thoughtful, watching her for a moment before speaking. “You really think that climbing on board a drillship in the middle of the ocean is the best way for you—a scientist—to make a difference? You sure that your ‘big and dramatic’ aren’t about something else?”

Maybe he understood more than she wanted. “Like what?”

His gaze was cool and steady. “You tell me.”

She knew what he thought. That this was about her dad—or rather his memory. But he was wrong. She wasn’t trying to prove herself to him or anyone else.

She did want to make a difference, and protesting was a legitimate way to do so. “I think we’ll have to agree to disagree about methods. But just because you don’t like my way doesn’t make it wrong.” She eyed him speculatively. “Besides, if you believe in the system so much, what are you doing here hiding?”

From the way his jaw clenched, she could tell he wasn’t happy with the question. Nor did he have an answer for her. “It’s getting dark. I’m going to see about finding some water. You can get started on one of those protein bars if you want.” He gave her a long look. “We should get some sleep. Assuming the storm breaks, I want to leave at first light.”

“What about the boat?”

“I’ll fix it as best I can, but without the waves and the rain, it should get us there.”

Should.

“Where are we going?”

“The closest island is Lewis, but as I don’t want to risk that, it’s North Uist instead. It’s in the same chain, but I don’t think they’ll be looking for us there.”

“And then?”

He held her gaze, giving her nothing. She hadn’t thought he would. He would leave her and go on his way. What else was she expecting?

It was for the best anyway. She’d avoided his type for a reason. Even if he wasn’t in trouble, she couldn’t go there. Conservative, former military, and alpha. The trifecta of not going to happen. No matter how attracted she was to him. And how hot that kiss had been. She’d had enough of wannabe superheroes.

“Get some rest, Annie. I’ll be back.”

When the door closed behind him with a slam, something in her chest seemed to do the same.

•   •   •

They left the small island not long after dawn. Dean hadn’t slept well, and he was anxious to be away. The longer he spent with Annie, the greater the risk—and not just from discovery. He knew there was something growing between them, and it had to stop.

He needed it to stop. And not just because he’d spent the better half of the night calling himself a fool for not having her under him. On top of him. In front of . . .

Fuck.

But it wasn’t just a hard dick. He wished it were. No, the reason he wanted to get away from her wasn’t just that he wanted to fuck her—which he did really badly—it was that he liked being with her.

He’d never talked to a woman the way he did with her. With her it was more like talking to the guys on the team, although with them it was usually preaching to the choir. They all had pretty similar politics. Who knew idealistic left-wingers could be so much fun?

She also wasn’t intimidated by his rank and gave it right back to him. And didn’t seem intimidated when he challenged her back.

It was oddly freeing. He could say what he wanted and not worry about how she took it or hurt feelings. Had he unconsciously been holding back in previous relationships? Maybe. Although admittedly the women he met at Hula’s weren’t usually environmental scientists with a PhD.

He might need to change things up when he got back and this was all behind him. Which had better be soon. Dean had never had much patience, but what little he had had been exhausted a long time ago. He couldn’t sit back and wait with his hands tied much longer.

As soon as he landed somewhere safe, he was going to make a call. She was right. He did believe in the system, and going dark like this went against every instinct.

“How much farther?” Annie asked.

She’d been unusually quiet all morning—and contemplative. Other than thanking him for another protein bar and for sharing the small travel-sized soap and toothpaste he carried in his bag to freshen up in the morning, she hadn’t said much. It was almost as if she was as anxious as he to put this all behind them.

He was glad they were on the same wavelength about not getting involved. He might not like her reasons, but it made things easier. He didn’t know whether he’d be able to stop things a second time. Not after a long night of thinking about the first time. He could still taste cherries—from the lip balm he saw her use—and feel the spasms of her body as she came apart, and the firm grip of her hand on his cock.

That most of all.

He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed that Mickey hadn’t made another appearance.

“Not far,” he answered, forcing the memories away. “Probably another ten miles or so. You can try the radio again. We’ll have a better signal now.”

Dean had turned on the radio this morning to check the weather report before they left. It had stopped raining in the middle of the night, and the skies were clear, but he wasn’t taking any chances—not with the inflatable being held together with duct tape.

In the emergency box on board, he’d found a hand pump that enabled him to do a bit of repair work on the boat before leaving the island. Sometimes inflatables of this size also had acetone and tape or a repair kit on board. He wasn’t that lucky. The acetone would have given him a better seal on the tape. But so far it seemed to be holding.

The signal earlier hadn’t been good enough to hear the full report, but “clearing skies” had sounded promising enough to leave.

The signal was much better this time. They caught the tail end of the weather, but it was what they heard next that changed everything.