Sexy SEAL Box Set: A SEAL's Seduction\A SEAL's Surrender\A SEAL's Salvation\A SEAL's Kiss (93 page)

“You’re talking crazy,” he said, dismissively.

That was it. Sage’s emotions exploded like a potato in a microwave, splattering all over the place in ugly chunks.

“At least I’m willing to try. At least I’m not a coward,” she said, her jaw clenched so tight her throat hurt.

Not as much as his probably did, the way his mouth dropped open.

“You’re calling me a coward?”

“I am.” Letting the rare anger wash over her, wrapping herself in the comfort of it, she offered a glare. “Physically, you are the bravest man I know. You risk everything for your country.”

His icy stare thawed a smidge.

“But emotionally, you’re still seventeen. You won’t take any emotional risks, you won’t let anyone get close to you.”

“Bullshit.”

“Name one.”

“Your father,” he said, his words snapped tight.

“First off, your relationship with my father is as close to purely intellectual as it’s possible to get. The two of you are two volumes of the same encyclopedia.”

“Nice.”

“And secondly,” she continued, talking right over his sarcasm, “you’ve already emotionally disconnected. You saw this entire engagement as a way to pay him back. To pay your dues. As far as you’re concerned, we might as well hold the funeral.”

“That’s crap,” he snapped, the ice gone now as hot fury took over his expression. “I’ll be damned if you’ll dismiss my relationship with the Professor so blithely.”

“Are you saying you didn’t go along with our charade of an engagement because you felt as if you owed him?”

“Of course I owe him. And I care about him and respect him.” Aiden gave her a look that said she was going to have to do a lot better than that. “Do you have a point?”

“Of course I do.” She had to take a deep breath, steeling herself against it, though. “Do you think my father will recover from this cancer? That he’ll live to see Christmas?”

His silence broke her heart.

“You go on back to hiding in the navy, Aiden,” she suggested, her voice thick with tears. “I’ll stay here and deal with real life.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

She had to give him credit for not rising to the bait. But that was Aiden. He only dealt in logic, never in emotions.

Wanting it all to be over so badly she could taste it, Sage got to her feet and slowly made her way to the door. Her body ached, as if it’d taken a beating right along with her heart.

Hand on the knob, she turned back to face Aiden. He had that stoic, emotionless look on his face. The one that made her want to either hug him tight or hit him in the head with a pillow.

“We had an agreement,” she said quietly. “The rules of our engagement, remember? And even though you think I’m a complete flake, I don’t back out of my agreements.”

With that, and one last look at him and that damned stoic expression of his, Sage walked out. She made it all the way to the bottom of the hill before she lost it.

Tears streaming down her cheeks, Sage wrapped her arms around herself and stared at her father’s house in the distance.

Instead of celebrating, she’d blown their entire relationship all to hell.

12

“A
RE
YOU
FREAKING
kidding me?” Aiden glared at the lousy cards in his hand, then threw them on the table so hard they scattered cash into the lap of the guy across from him.

“Dude, you are one grumpy mother.” Castillo grinned as he plucked a five and twelve ones off of himself.

Aiden clenched his teeth to keep the threat of an official reprimand from flying out.

Not because he had a problem smacking down insubordination, even if it was from a friend. Nope. What kept his mouth shut was that, officially, Castillo outranked him.

Aiden dropped his head and sighed.

And, yeah, that Castillo was a friend.

“What’s your problem?” the friend asked, pushing back from the table and making a show of counting his money as he crossed the room.

“I’ve got a lot on my mind,” Aiden muttered, scooping up the cards to deal a round of solitaire. A game he should be good at, considering he’d be going it alone. “I just need time to sort it out.”

“You’ve had time. And distractions. Whatever’s in there ain’t gonna sort itself. So maybe you should tell ole Castillo your woes and there ya go, quick as a snap—” which he demonstrated by snapping his fingers, the sound echoing like a shotgun blast through the barracks “—I’ll fix up your life.”

Aiden smirked. At six-four, two-twenty pounds of muscle, and Auntie as his call sign, Castillo was known for being bossy, pushy and, damn the man, always right. His cocky attitude, quick fist and ready hand to a friend made Aiden grateful he was on their side. But his insistence on fixing everything, everyone, was irritating at best. Hence, his call sign.

“I don’t need fixing,” Aiden said.

“You’re gonna keep throwing the cards around, copping an attitude and being a pain in my ass, you do.”

Three weeks back from leave, two days back from a training session in the Atlantic and Aiden was still in the same lousy funk he’d been in when he’d flown out of San Francisco.

He’d figured it’d take a couple days, max, to get over missing Sage. That’s all it’d ever taken before.

Of course, they’d never had sex before. They’d never been engaged before, nor had he been a complete dick and broken her heart before.

He figured all that would take at least an extra couple of weeks to get over.

He stared at the cards laid out on the table, not seeing a single move. Maybe because he’d made the wrong choice? He looked around the stark barracks, his bunk and wall-locker as barren and boring as the rest of the room. Was giving up all that, hurting Sage, worth this?

“You ever had to make a choice? A tough one?” Aiden asked quietly. Not looking up, he pulled the cards back into a stack and reshuffled.

“Life or death?”

Aiden grimaced, not surprised at Castillo’s tone. Yeah, yeah. Given the type of missions they went on, the objectives they carried out, that was a stupid question.

Crap. This talking about stuff was hard.

He debated sidestepping.

But, dammit, three weeks and he was still in a funk.

Clearly he wasn’t getting himself out on his own.

“No. More like, directions,” he decided with a vague wave of his hand. “Life.”

“I had to choose between a curvy blonde and a lithe redhead once,” Castillo said, dropping to his bunk, folding his hands behind his head and grinning. “Tough decision, given that they were both naked and offering up all sorts of enticements.”

“That’s not quite the life decision I was talking about.” Halfway through dealing out his solitaire pyramid, Aiden shot an arch look across the room.

“It was a life changer, my friend.”

“I’m sure.” Aiden dealt a hand of solitaire, his eyes locked on the cards.

“Don’t you want to know what I did?”

“I can live without the details.”

“Suit yourself.” With a wide grin, Castillo reached under his bunk and grabbed a small knapsack and started pulling out supplies.

“What the hell are you doing?” Aiden asked, eyeing the sports sock, blue buttons and a surgery-sized needle dangling thread.

“My nana sent me instructions for making a poppet. Sorta like a voodoo doll, but not.”

Despite his lousy mood, Aiden laughed.

“You’re making a Banks doll?”

The big guy glanced up from his awkward attempt to sew the toe into the shape of a head. His blue eyes were about as innocent as a three-year-old’s, and his expression pure as an altar boy. Yeah. He was up to something.

“A Banks doll? That’d be against protocol. I’m just researching a little family tradition. Sorta like an experiment.”

“That Banks’s sock?” Aiden asked, having read enough about indigenous beliefs to have a pretty good idea what the experiment involved. Since he had no belief himself in the possibility of it working, he didn’t bother asking about the hoped-for outcome.

If Castillo’s sewing was anything to go by, though, Banks’s head was in danger of falling off. Before or after he got a major belly ache and went bald.

“Found the sock in the laundry,” Castillo muttered, wincing when he stabbed the needle into his thumb. He wiped the blood on the cuff of the sock. Whether it was part of the ritual, or just sloppy sewing, he made a show of rubbing it in real good.

“Banks’s sock?” Aiden asked.

“Could be.” Castillo squinted over his sock project. “Got a problem with that?”

“As long as you stay outta my socks, I don’t care what you do,” Aiden decided. The last guy who’d had a problem with Castillo was an air-force jet jockey, and he’d ended up in the infirmary.

“Why do you have such a beef with the guy?” Aiden asked. “We’ve teamed with plenty of gung-ho, by-the-book, medal junkies. You’ve always taken it in stride before.”

“Dunno.” Castillo shrugged. “Why don’t we talk about those life choices that’ve got you all pissy. Then we can talk beef.”

Right.

Aiden tilted his head, conceding the point.

Before he could figure out if he wanted any more of Castillo’s questionable advice—because hello, who needed to think when the choice was between a blonde and a redhead?—the barracks door opened.

Petty Officer Brody Lane strode in.

“Yo, Castillo. Masters,” he said in greeting as he crossed the room.

Aiden responded with an absent nod, more interested in how Brody was moving than whatever he had to say. Even after two weeks of maneuvers, the guy moved with ease. Good. That meant he was completely recovered from the injury that’d jacked up his leg and almost taken him out of the game earlier that year.

“You’ve got company,” Brody said, tossing his cap on his bed before snagging his stack of mail off the table. The guy lived two hours away from his fiancée, saw her often enough that his toothbrush barely had time to dry, and she’d still sent him at least a half-dozen letters. Hell, she’d have had to be writing some of those when he was lying in bed next to her.

Love. It was crazy.

“What company?” Aiden asked.

“Pretty lady. Didn’t want to talk to you here in the barracks,” Brody said, one eye on Aiden while thumbing through his mail. “She’s in the Joint Reception Center.”

She?

Why she would visit him on base?

Dammit. Aiden sighed. As if he needed to wonder.

“Sage is here?” he asked, tossing his cards on the table, not caring that they sent the others flying. Clearly, he was through playing solitaire.

“Sage Taylor,” Brody acknowledged with a nod. His tone was casual, but the look in his eyes was piercing. “She claims she’s your fiancée.”

Aiden didn’t have to glance over to see that Castillo was looking just as intrigued.

Shit.

“You’re engaged?”

No. Before he could deny it, rule three flashed through his brain. Dammit.

“Yeah. Sorta.” He shrugged. “We had a fight.”

“Ahhh, one that made you question life directions,” Castillo surmised with a grin, pointing the sock at Aiden.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Aiden said, not willing to have this discussion. Now, or ever. He grabbed his cap out of his back pocket and pulled it down to shade his eyes. “Can’t keep my fiancée waiting while I hang around chitchatting with you guys.”

“Not a problem,” Brody said, scraping the cards into a pile without glancing at them. His eyes still locked on Aiden, he nodded and tapped the deck on the table. “We’ll be here when you’re done.”

“Yep, waiting to chitchat,” Castillo said, holding his sock up in the air as if inspecting his lousy sewing. The eyes on the thing were lopsided, but it was actually starting to take on an eerie resemblance to Banks. Aiden made a mental note to refrain from pissing Auntie Castillo off.

“You said she’s at the Joint Reception Center?” he asked Brody.

“Yep.”

A nod of thanks and he headed out the door and across the base at a double-step.

What the hell was Sage doing here?

His guts were in knots, the emotions he’d been carefully ignoring churning. Maybe it was news. Something she didn’t want to tell him over the phone.

He’d just talked to the Professor two nights ago, so he knew the older man was recovering from surgery well and they were pretty sure they’d got most of the cancer.

He’d had his thrice-weekly email update from Dr. Brooke this morning.

They wouldn’t lie about Lee’s health.

Sage must be here for a different reason.

The logical ones all ran through Aiden’s mind and he let them run right back out. Because every one of them was tied to the emotional nightmare of their last encounter. But she wasn’t a masochist. Nor had she outed their engagement to her father. He knew she hadn’t because the Professor was still pitching job changes and property purchases.

So why ever she was here, he was sure it had nothing to do with logic.

He was equally sure his funk was about to take a nosedive, skating somewhere along heartache and misery.

He wondered what advice Castillo would have for that. A threesome with triplets, probably.

* * *

S
AGE
PACED
. Five steps to the window wall, seven steps to the door, three steps to the lumpy couch, then do it all over again.

Nerves.

They sucked. She couldn’t decide what she hated more. The miserable pain that was now her constant companion. The sense of loss in realizing that she’d finally found the answer to everything she’d been searching for, only to have to let it go. Or the giddy rush that had her skin dancing in anticipation of being near Aiden again.

Find the silver lining, Sage, she warned for the millionth time this month.

At least she’d found her bliss, and had mind-blowingly incredible sex. Lots and lots of it, too. There were plenty of people who went through life without either.

As far as silver linings went, it was pretty weak. But she had the rest of her life. She’d shore it up eventually.

Feeling a smidge better after that dreary pep talk, she took a deep, meditative breath. Zen. Find Zen.

She’d just about found it when the door opened.