CHAPTER 8
By noon, Sloan was starving. They had gone out twice to dive and explore the reef. She sat beneath one of the few trees high up on the beach. The shade felt good against the intense, dry heat of midday. Dan was about twenty feet away. He’d cleaned and gutted a small grouper that he’d shot with his spear on the second dive. He had thought of everything from the grate over the fire, to the frying pan, butter, salt, and pepper. Her mouth watered. Dan brought her a bottle of cold beer from a small ice chest and served himself a cold bottle of water.
Sloan was relieved to see he wasn’t drinking and flying. She never thought Dan would do that, anyway. Since she’d arrived, she hadn’t seen him tucking beer away, and she was with him until they went to their separate apartments each evening. He looked so much younger right now, he was barefoot, his hair tousled and drying in the sunlight. He wore a white T-shirt that stretched across his shoulders and chest, and a pair of dark blue shorts that fell halfway down his hard thighs. The tension he usually carried in his face was gone. Sloan understood how diving, being in the arms of Mother Ocean, cleaned her off and made her feel good once more. It did the same for Dan.
She sat with her back against the bark of the trunk, her arms around her drawn up legs. “This is the first time I’ve dived in the Red Sea,” she said.
He lifted his chin and nodded, moving the frying fish around in the skillet. “I didn’t know about the reef system until being assigned here. When I came here two years ago, I was going out of my mind with nothing to do to offset my work. There’s not much here at Port Sudan, and there aren’t any expats around to make friends with.”
“I can’t imagine,” Sloan said, watching him work over the thick, white flesh of the grouper. The breeze changed a little, and she could smell the butter the fish was frying in. Dan had given her the paper plates, napkins, and flatware earlier when he’d brought out a small blanket. He’d opened it beneath the tree where the shade was heaviest. While he’d done that, Sloan had gone to the truck, peeled off her wetsuit, and climbed into a pair of light blue cotton cargo pants, her sandals, and a sleeveless white tee. Dan had even brought a comb for her wet hair. Now, it lay around her shoulders, nearly dry.
“This place gets lonely,” he admitted.
“So you do a lot of diving when you have to fly to keep your skills up?”
Nodding, Dan flipped the grouper in the skillet, the fire small but intense beneath the grate. “Yes.”
“I would think you would have a girlfriend or something,” she teased. The look he gave her told Sloan that wasn’t in the cards. “No?”
“No. After I broke up with you, I never found anything as good as what we had. And when you have what we had, there isn’t any settling for seconds in my future.”
Her heart pounded as she saw the serious light in his eyes, the way his mouth was set, the regret in his voice. “Oh,” she whispered.
“What about you? Is there a guy in your life? Maybe back in Alexandria waiting for you?”
“No…no one,” she admitted. There was relief in his eyes when she said that.
“Why?” he demanded. “You’re young, beautiful, intelligent, great body.” He grinned. “You’re the whole package.”
“I guess I’m in the same boat as you,” she said.
“No one else measured up to me?”
Sloan was tired of battling her desire for him. Being around him was wearing her down. It wasn’t Dan’s fault. It was just that she now realized she had never stopped loving him—and that hurt a lot.
“No, no one has ever measured up to you, Dan.” There. It was the truth. She watched his mouth thin for a moment, and he looked away, as if he wanted to say something, but didn’t.
Dan rose with the skillet in hand, the grouper done and sizzling. Sloan laid out the two paper plates for him, and he divided the fish between them.
“Lunch. Doesn’t get any better than this,” he said. He rose and walked over to the fire, pulling the metal grate off and set the skillet on it. He pushed his fingers down his shorts and returned to where Sloan sat. She handed him the paper plate along with some flatware. He came and sat opposite her so he could face her, resting his plate on one knee.
“Mmmm,” she said, “this smells so good, Dan. Thanks for fixing it.”
He nodded. “Just like old times, isn’t it? You, me, diving, spearfishing, making our lunch or dinner on some deserted beach?”
She cut off some of the firm, flaky meat and dipped it in a bit of the butter, salt, and pepper. “It is.”
“Did you miss doing this kind of thing after I walked out on you? Because I did.”
“Yes,” she answered eventually, swallowing the sweet, flaky fish. Moving her fork around on the plate in her lap, she felt herself opening up to him. “I often dreamed of those times we shared.”
“We had it made.” He grimaced, cutting the fish into large chunks with his fork. “And I didn’t even realize it until it was too late.”
“I realized what we had,” Sloan said, bravely holding his darkened eyes.
“You don’t have a man in your life.”
“Well, you don’t have a woman in yours, either. So?”
Dan quickly finished his fish and set the plate aside, wiping his mouth with a napkin. Wadding it up, he dropped it onto the paper plate. “Maybe fate has thrown us together for a reason? I know that Artemis pairs up an operator or team with the Delos charity that needs their help, Wyatt is careful who he pairs up on an op. You had to know going into this PSD who you were going to protect.”
Sloan nodded, appreciating the delicious meal that Dan had fried to perfection. “I knew it was you.” She couldn’t tell him the other reason why she was assigned. She couldn’t reveal her cover to him—and she still loved him enough to say nothing about it because Sloan hoped to prove to Artemis that Dan was clean and didn’t have an issue with alcohol.
“Why did you take the PSD?”
“Because I knew you. And I’ve been operating in Africa for four years and am familiar with the area. I felt I was the best choice of several that Wyatt had offered for this mission.”
“I see.” He frowned, looking down at his clasped, darkly tanned hands. He watched her finish off her food and lean over, setting her empty plate and flatware next to his. “Sloan? I made the worst mistake of my life by walking out on you.”
She leaned back against the tree trunk, her hands tucked into her lap, absorbing his somber expression. “Why did you do it, Dan? That’s what I can’t figure out to this day. You once told me a little about your mother, how she suddenly left you when you were young and never returned. I’ve often wondered if that played into our relationship.”
Dan pushed his fingers through his mussed, dried hair. “I owe you that,” he muttered. “My mother was diagnosed as bipolar. As a kid, I had no clue. All I knew is that she was up and down like a thermometer. For a few days or weeks, she was depressed, and then she’d kick into hyperactivity for the next few. I grew up thinking my mother was a yo-yo, and that all women were like her.”
“I’m sorry,” Sloan murmured. “Did your father know about her mental issues?”
“Yeah, he married her when they were nineteen. I came along a year later.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how he stood her storms.”
“What do you mean her storms?” Sloan asked quietly.
“Storms of emotions,” he sighed. “If she was depressed, she wanted nothing to do with me. She would go to her bedroom, shut the door, and not want to be disturbed. My father, when he got home from work, would do the cooking, the house cleaning, and take care of me because she couldn’t. I just knew that when she closed that bedroom door, that she was sick and to leave her alone.”
“And you grew up with this?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you think all women were like her?” It was a key question, and she saw his mouth flex, the corners deepening, the pain real.
“Yeah, I did. I thought the girls in high school were like that. I liked girls, but I wasn’t ready to commit to one of them. I was afraid they would be up and down like my mother.”
“Did that make you avoid relationships then?”
“Yes,” he admitted, “it did. When I went into the Army after college, I decided to jump in and start having a relationship with a woman.”
“You were twenty-two at the time?”
“Yes.”
“Did you put your rules on what a relationship was with the woman who interested you at the time?”
Nodding, Dan said, “Right or wrong, I did. I didn’t want any of them to get tied down like my father had been tied down with my mother. I saw what it did to him. I didn’t want it to happen to me.”
“I see.” She pursed her lips, holding his bleak gaze.
“It worked,” he admitted, his voice sounding tired. “I laid out the rules with the woman, and if she went along with what my boundaries were, it served both of us.”
“But you had commitment phobia. That’s what it’s called, Dan. There are lots of men who have this issue. You aren’t the only one.”
“I was trying to protect myself against the inevitable,” he said.
“I’m so sorry,” Sloan whispered, reaching out, and resting her hand against his clasped ones.
He cocked his head. “Was your family like mine?”
“No…very different. I come from a very loving family.”
“In all the time we went together, I never asked you anything like that. I never really asked you any personal questions.”
She released his hand, giving him a sad nod. “That’s because you probably assumed all families were like yours?”
“I knew they weren’t all like mine because of going to school,” he admitted. “As I grew up, I realized that not all families were broken up as mine had been. Boys never talked about such things, but I saw signs like parents coming out to watch their kid play a basketball game.”
“Was your dad ever able to be there like that for you after the divorce?”
“No. He had his job as a truck driver for a meat-packing company out of San Diego five days a week. When I got home from school, and he came home from work, we ate together because I fixed the dinner. We rarely talked. I would go to my room, do my homework, play computer games and then go to bed.”
“Did you have family there in the San Diego area where you grew up?”
“No. My mother’s parents were dead. My father’s parents lived in Vermont. I knew of them, but had never met them.”
“Did your dad have siblings?”
“No, he was an only kid like me. Why?”
Sloan shrugged. “You were in San Diego with no relatives that might have been able to stand in and help you and your dad. That’s why I asked.”
“No, there was no one. Dad was never an extrovert, and he didn’t have many friends. He played poker on Saturday night with a group of buddies from work, but that was all.”
“And what were you doing?”
“I lived in San Diego. When I was thirteen, I got a part-time job on a scuba diving boat. I would spend my weekends on it, working as a deckhand.”
“That’s where you got your love of diving then.”
“Yes, and the captain of the boat, an ex-Navy SEAL who everyone called Cap, felt sorry for me.”
“Did he know your story?”
“No, never spoke about it. But he was divorced and had a couple of kids he never saw from what I learned over time. He took me under his wing and taught me a lot about diving, air compressors, mechanics and running a boat. He always had ex-SEAL buddies who would hire his boat out, and we’d go up the coast to the La Jolla kelp beds where they’d dive for abalone and spear fish for dinner.”
“So, in a way,” Sloan searched, “they were like a family of sorts to you?”
“Yeah,” Dan said, “in their own way. Cap was always playing tricks on me to lighten me up. I was a very withdrawn kid by that time. He made me responsible, made me realize that you had to work hard to gain another person’s respect. He imbued me with the SEAL culture—how I should always be a team player, be there for the team if a member needed help.”
“So he was a mentor of sorts to you?”
Nodding, his voice grew warm. “Yeah, Cap sort of took over being a second dad to me, I guess, looking back on those years with him. I looked up to Cap because he never lied to me. He was always straight with me. I worked hard, played hard and over the years, I came to realize I wanted to be in the military. He was a man of integrity, morals, and values, Sloan. So was my dad. But I couldn’t reach him. He had disappeared inside himself. I could take the bus down to the wharf area in San Diego, hop off, walk to Cap’s boat and I’d spend the weekend working with him.”
“I’ll bet you looked forward to it.” She smiled wistfully, thinking of Dan growing up under the salty ex-SEAL, who she was sure, was a tough, but fair, taskmaster.
“I always did,” he admitted. “And my dad was okay with it. There wasn’t much left between us, anyway. And when Cap started teaching me scuba diving, I was a natural for it. We had a lot of good times together.”
“Was he proud of you?” Sloan saw a faint smile pull at Dan’s mouth.
“Yeah, he was.”
“How did you know that?”
“He’d pat me on the back if I did something up to his standards. Give me a smile or a nod of a job well done. He pretty much gave me a template that served me as an Army pilot and later, as Night Stalker pilot. I made the team first, and I learned that being part of a team was everything to me.”
Sloan sat there digesting all the information. “There’s one thing I don’t understand, Dan. When you crashed, and the investigation report came back as weather-related?”
“Yes?”
“Why did they release you from the Night Stalkers? I never understood that.”
Sloan watched Dan wrestle with her question. He opened his hands, enclosing hers. “It was a three-man board,” he began hoarsely. “Composed of my peers. Two majors and a colonel, all had been Night Stalker pilots. The colonel, a man named Bob Baker, never liked me. I’d been assigned to his squadron, and for whatever reason, he never warmed up to me like he did other pilots in his command. I eventually got transferred out of his command and into another one. When I saw him as the head of the investigation, I knew there wouldn’t be a good outcome for me. It was just a feeling. I felt he had it in for me and to this day, I don’t know why. Maybe his personality clashed with mine.” He gave a painful shrug. “I just don’t know.”
“What did he do to you, Dan?”
Taking a deep breath, he said, “Even though the accident report cleared me, he orchestrated the final decision on the crash to have me transferred out of the Night Stalkers permanently.”
“But why?”
“Because he could, Sloan. He never liked me. I never gave him a reason to dislike me, but sometimes commanders didn’t like a certain pilot. It’s not that I screwed up in his command. I didn’t. In fact, just the opposite happened. I was one of the top three pilots in flight skills, and I was up for early rank. Maybe I reminded him of another person in his life he hated. I won’t ever know.”
“Did the other two officers on your tribunal feel the same way about you?”
“No. They argued strongly to stop the colonel from jettisoning me out of the Night Stalkers. They were for me staying, but the colonel overruled them by rank and by being the head of the investigation. He could do it, and he did.” He looked over at her, holding her hand gently between his. “I have fucked up so damn badly with you, Sloan. I can’t even give it words. I walked out on you just like my mother did to my father after he was fired from his job. My God…”