I nodded. “Absolutely. It’s a wedding, a party, some of my favorite things.”
But I had an ear listening to the conversation of the couple in front of me.
“How’d you know I was looking for Jers?” Truck asked.
Dani snorted. “Your face is all scrunched up, and I can practically hear your heart trying to escape its chest to run back to her. You have it as bad as Mac.”
Truck nodded with a smile just as the frazzled wedding planner told them it was almost their time to head down the aisle.
“It’s true,” Truck said. “So, whose heart have you tied a noose around?”
Dani laughed as if she’d never heard of such a ridiculous thing, and my throat seized up. The thought of her and someone else. I had to cough to clear my airway, and I saw Dani stiffen and start to turn just as the wedding planner shooed her out the French doors and into the backyard. They paused again at the start of the bright-turquoise runner lining the way between hundreds of chairs. The runner ended at an arch where my remaining best friend stood waiting for his bride.
Raisa and I followed Truck and Dani, stopping at the French doors just as Dani tossed back, loud enough for me to hear, “I’m not interested in lassoing anyone’s heart. I might just remain a serial bachelorette like Mac had once planned to remain a bachelor.”
Goddamn, she was doing it to torture me. To make sure the only vision I had was her with other men’s hands on her. It almost made me lose the last ounce of willpower I had left when it came to her, longing to rip her from Truck’s arm and show her just exactly how much she shouldn’t be single for the rest of her days. I must have made another noise, because Truck half-turned toward me, too, before he asked quietly, “Mac is otherwise engaged today. Do I need to take on the role of big brother and bust anyone’s head for him?”
I wanted to snort. Truck was big and bad, but I wouldn’t lose in any fight he and I might engage in. Dani let out another light-hearted laugh. “God no, that would imply I was actually upset about something. I’ve never felt freer in my life.”
I was responsible for her wounds. I’d inflicted them the moment I’d said I couldn’t have Tristan find us together. Dani had gone from the flirty, sexy woman moaning my name to the professional, smart-mouthed woman most of the world saw. As much as I’d wanted to, I was unable to take the words back. They were the truth. Tristan would have gone off on me like a time bomb if she’d found Dani in my bed. Because she liked Dani. Because Tristan knew I couldn’t commit and I certainly wasn’t in the headspace to commit even if my work didn’t prevent it.
I had one job outside my real job these days, and that was to look out for Tristan and Hannah. The night Tristan had delivered Hannah, I’d promised him. It had been an easy promise because we’d both known Darren wasn’t the one who took risks in the field. He was the one guaranteed to come home. Until he hadn’t.
Now, I owed it to my brother who’d lost his life covering my back while I’d completed a mission we’d both known was all about money and very little about freedom or democracy. While I’d put a bullet through the head of the scumbag militant dictator holding the world’s gold and a new slush of oil at his mercy, Darren had covered my ass and then paid the ultimate price.
So, yeah, taking care of his wife and baby was my only job, and I couldn’t risk Tristan being mad enough to send me away. To ignore my texts and calls like she’d done while she’d been with her grandmother. I just couldn’t.
???
Tristan had reluctantly left Hannah with me while she went to the bathroom. It wasn’t because she didn’t trust me; it was because she’d been using the baby as a shield between her and everyone else all day. With the baby on her hip, everyone’s focus was on Hannah, and they didn’t look too closely at the specter holding her.
Hannah tugged on the medals hanging from my chest. There was one missing, but I would never put that one on. It had been given for all reasons I could never accept. I watched as the baby tugged at the bright-colored objects, babbling to herself about who knew what. My chest tightened. This golden girl with amber eyes and wheat-colored pigtails had a tiny bit of my heart she wouldn’t give back.
Before last weekend, I’d been pretty sure the hardened muscle was as burned up as a used briquette. I’d been sure it was going to turn into some form of a diamond before the next decade rolled around.
Hannah cooed at someone behind me, and I turned to see Dani weaving her way through the tables in the backyard in our general direction.
“Yeah, you and me both, little one. You and me both.”
Damn if it hadn’t been Dani who had somehow made my cold heart beat again with blood instead of lava. As if she really was the goddess Athena I’d teased her about being—gorgeous, smart, and able to smite a man to ash. The words she’d spoken to Truck while we’d been standing at the door, waiting to walk down the aisle, hit me again, bringing a frown to my face.
A frown that required I repeat to myself all the reasons she was off-limits to me. The obligation I had for the family Darren had left behind. My friendship with Mac. The fact that my job was not built for permanent relationships. Relationships and SEALs didn’t belong in the same sentence. After all, it was why Tristan and Hannah were now alone. It was why it should have been me who had died.
I didn’t have a death wish like the brass seemed to think these days. I just didn’t have the volume of people waiting for me to come home that Darren had. It was the rare person who would say, “I wish it had been him instead of Nash who had died.” Darren had a whole stadium full of people whispering it.
The lie I was telling myself twitched at the back of my mind.
I did have someone who would miss me. Who did miss me. We were just as impossible as Dani and me.
An ache filled me that I found hard to acknowledge. Sweet tea and myrtle and chess.
I was surprised to find Dani at our table. After avoiding me, she was suddenly at my side, wearing that magenta dress which tortured every particle of my being. She looked like a runway model. A model with a brain the size of Texas. Maybe the entire Eastern Seaboard.
She was wasting her talent sitting at her home in Delaware while she regrouped. While she took the twelve-year career she’d built and threw it away because some dickwad senator had decided to attack her in an elevator. Last night, she’d said it wasn’t the reason she’d given it up, but I wasn’t sure I believed her. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter what I believed. I didn’t have a right to say one damn thing about how she did or didn’t live her life.
“You’re going to give her nightmares,” Dani said, tugging Hannah out of my arms without asking.
Hannah did little to defend me. Her tiny smile turned into giggles as she immediately clung to Dani’s hair with an excited squeal and the word, “Ann.”
