The SEAL's Second Chance: An Alpha Ops Novella (2 page)

“I never got over her,” he said, still not looking up. “I’ve spent the last ten years wondering what might have been, if things had been different.”

“Oh,” Ian said. “Does she know how you feel?”

“Then or now?”

“Either.”

“Then, yes,” he said, remembering the last days of spring before he left for boot camp—his pleas, her refusals. “Now, not yet. But she will.”

Ian was quiet for a while, absently sorting toys into the three piles. “I don’t think she’s been dating anyone,” he said.

“How would you know?” Jamie asked, genuinely curious. Ian might spend time at the high school if they busted a pot or steroids ring, but social gossip normally wouldn’t hold his interest for more than a couple of seconds.

“A couple of cops have kids in high school,” Ian said. “You know the old saying about gossip … you can telephone, tell a friend—”

“Or tell a cop,” Jamie finished. “She was probably pretty busy with the school year and the team. She wouldn’t let herself get distracted during the season.”

Not Charlie. He flipped to the last page of the binder and froze, remembering what he’d stored there, using the trading cards as an excuse long past their sell-by date for a teenage boy. Pictures of Charlie, snapped just after she’d bounced her wicked crossover and left the opposing player stumbling in the dust; in a tight circle with her teammates, chanting
Whose house? Our house!
before a game. Some he’d taken himself from the stands when he’d bullied the boys’ team into turning out to support the girls, others he’d cut from the local newspaper, now yellowed with age. He sorted through them, assessing the damage of a season’s playing time on Charlie’s body. Taped left ankle, taped right knee. She’d played the tournament with that knee so sore and swollen she’d had to ice it as soon as she was benched for a breather, or more likely, for foul trouble. Scabs on her elbows and knees from floor burns, fingers taped, a deep-purple bruise on her shoulder when she went to the floor chasing a loose ball in the quarterfinals, the muscles of her legs and arms toned curves against her frame. Her expression in his favorite picture from the paper was one of ferocious concentration. Taken just prior to tip-off, she’d been staring down the leading scorer of the North High Wildcats, letting the girl know that it was on, it was
so fucking on,
and that any points she got that day would be claimed through a metaphorical fistfight on the court.

Charlie had held the state’s leading scorer to eight points while racking up almost thirty of her own. It was that performance that got her the scholarship to Connecticut.

God. He’d been so in love with her. It hit him like a physical punch, freezing his diaphragm as effectively as having the wind knocked out of him. He’d been so in love with her, and if this didn’t work, he was totally, epically fucked.

“I always wondered if you kept your porn in there,” Ian said from across the room.

“Behind the Hardy Boys books,” Jamie said absently. “You knew that. You borrowed it all the time.”

Ian laughed. “So what did you keep in there?”

Jamie was past the point of pride about this. He passed him the picture of Charlie, yellowed with age.

“Oh,” Ian said, looking at the picture. “Damn. I’d forgotten what a competitor she was. Every time she was on the court it was all-out war.”

I never forgot,
Jamie thought. “What brought her back here?” he said.

“Coach Gould had a heart attack right before school started,” Ian said. “Coach knew Charlie was retiring from pro ball and had a degree in education. I think they pulled some strings with the state to get her a provisional license, but she was here in a couple of weeks. That’s the whole reason for the banquet, Coach Gould retiring.”

“I knew that,” Jamie said. “I just didn’t know the details.”

“I don’t think anyone knew,” Ian said.

“Knew what?”

“How you felt about her.”

“She didn’t want anyone to know,” Jamie said, remembering the chip on Charlie’s shoulder, remembering how nothing mattered to her, not him being cop’s son, a contributor on the basketball team, popular, smart, good-looking, a good guy. The only thing that mattered to her was basketball, and a scholarship. She said the word like a prayer or a mantra, like she’d studied it carefully, broken the concept down like she broke down plays, understood what it meant. Tuition, room, board. “Tuition” meant an education. “Room” meant a place to sleep. “Board” meant food to eat. It meant that rarest of rarities, a chance to lift herself out of poverty.

“That’s not what I said,” Ian said carefully. “I wasn’t talking about keeping your thing together a secret. I was talking about you.”

“I had to keep it a secret,” Jamie said. “If I couldn’t tell anyone we were … fuck. We weren’t doing anything except playing ball and kissing. You put it into words and it’s nothing. But yeah. Inside, it was everything to me.”

“But not to her?”

He thought about the way Charlie kissed him, the way she fought on the court, her fierce, humiliated fury the night after his dad arrested her mom for shoplifting, again. “Her mom was a petty shoplifter. She wasn’t going to end up like that.”

“And she didn’t end up like her mom,” Ian said. “The question isn’t whether everyone knows she’s not like her mom. The question is whether
she
knows she’s not.”

“That’s what I have to find out.”

“Go get ’em,” Ian said. “Let’s get these boxes downstairs. You stink, I stink, and I want lunch.”

“You’re buying,” Jamie reminded him.

They stacked the boxes neatly and headed out to Ian’s truck. Ian drove with a cop’s confidence, heading down the hill and across the tracks to the barbecue joint the state health department would close down if it wasn’t the best ribs in town. They ordered the rib basket, five-alarm-fire hot, and a side of wings, then sat down at the picnic tables in the shade.

Ian looked around, then lowered his voice. “Since you’re going to be around for a while, I could use your help on a professional level at the banquet.”

“I’m not going to shoot DeMarco Jones for dumping honey in your shoes junior year,” Jamie said, shaking pepper onto his fries.

“Something big is about to go down. I need somewhere safe to get things rolling with the informant, and for a number of reasons, the banquet is the perfect opportunity. But if I use cops, it’s going to look suspicious. I can’t have anything tracking back to her.”

“Her?” Jamie said, pausing with a rib halfway to his mouth.

“Her.” Ian licked sauce from the side of his wrist. “She’s smack in the middle of what could be a multistate drug trafficking ring.”

“Okay,” Jamie said. “If you want backup, I can get you two more former SEALs. They’ll be at the banquet, so no one will wonder why they’re there.”

“Hell yes, I want them. Thanks,” Ian said, then nodded at the ribs. “Are they as good as you remember?”

Jamie nodded, the sweet sting on his tongue reminding him of Charlie. When they finished their meal, they drove home, past the court, empty in the middle of the day. The passion was still there. All he had to do now was convince her it was worth risking her heart.

Chapter Two

She was restless. Not that this was news. Charlotte Stannard was always restless. But she’d learned to identify her emotions, to think through appropriate responses.

Charlie stood in the open screen door of her little house and let the sounds of a Lancaster spring night wash over her. Crickets, evening birds darting against the darkening sky, no wind, not even a breeze. Only a few stars beginning to twinkle in the twilight. The air was losing the sun’s heat of the day and taking on the chill of spring. It was the perfect evening for sitting in her tiny screened-in porch, catching up on all the relaxing she didn’t do during the basketball season. The months between October and March were beyond hectic, with tryouts and regular-season games. This year the Lady Knights made the state tournament for the first time since Charlie’s senior season, when they won state, losing to the St. Paul Gamecocks in the semis. Next year they were coming home from the tournament with a trophy and nets cut from the hoops, and that meant Charlie, as their head coach, needed to think about summer workouts and designing plays to maximize the talent she had.

But she was restless. What she’d told herself was the most difficult part of the year—the season—was over, very respectably handled for her first year of coaching, leaving behind only the banquet honoring the coach she’d replaced, and the team members.

She shifted uncomfortably. That was the cause of her restlessness, if she cared to admit it. Instead, she blamed the night, the sky’s deep evocative color peeling back her carefully constructed defenses and opening up a well of memory and longing she thought she’d processed long ago. During her player days in Connecticut and Europe, spring didn’t bother her, the smells and colors unfamiliar enough to keep memory at bay. She’d returned to Lancaster in September, threw herself into patching up a program that had fallen into disarray, meeting players and parents, working out a practice schedule with the boys’ coach, and preparing for the classes she was teaching. Fall became winter, and bus rides to games in the dark, sketching plays while hunkered down in the aisle, ponytailed heads nodding in understanding, music tinnily streaming from earbuds looped around necks. Then the tournament, rallies and the pep band, the ongoing high school drama between one of the cheerleaders and her starting point guard, then a couple of weeks of nothing but sleep, eat, teach. She’d forgotten that winter came and winter left.

But the earth traveled around the sun, and spring was here, royal skies and chilled air making her remember the sensation of game-warmed muscles and hot skin cooling under sweat, kisses stolen in the darkness between lights around an outdoor court …

Don’t do it. Don’t go there, mentally or physically.

“The hell with that,” she muttered.

Avoiding the night wouldn’t help, because there would be another, and another, until summer came. She’d been avoiding more than the night. She’d been avoiding the court, playing indoors at the school or the Y where she taught a fundamentals class to grade-school kids. No more.

She pulled on a thin hoodie over her sports T-shirt and performance leggings and grabbed her phone and earbuds for the walk, spinning up one of her upbeat playlists to get herself in game mode and set off down her front steps to the cracked sidewalk, dribbling as she went.

The neighborhood was settling in for the night, bikes abandoned behind chain-link fences enclosing front yards, the light from televisions flickering in windows until she cut over to Second Street and walked the rest of the way along the railroad tracks. To her right loomed the steep, heavily wooded rise separating Lancaster’s working-class East Side from what was known prosaically as the Hill. Back when trains were the town’s lifeblood, railroad workers lived by the tracks. Railroad executives lived on the Hill, a separation that continued to the present day. The town had more industry than the railroad now, so all kinds of white-collar workers bought the old Victorians and renovated them, CEOs and entrepreneurs, doctors and architects and finance wizards.

She refused to look up the Hill in search of the windows of a particular house. Back in high school she’d been too proud to do that, broadcasting the attitude of the ashamed as she practiced on the court, located in the DMZ between the East Side and the Hill. Now she coached high school students, which meant she couldn’t afford to act like one, dreaming that maybe he’d be there, waiting for her like she’d made him wait all those years ago, refusing to let him come over or to call her house, much less to climb the steep wooden staircase cut into the trees and bushes growing wild and thick up the Hill to his house.

Wait for me at the court. Maybe I’ll be there. Maybe I won’t.

The lights were on at the basketball court, one lone player shooting around at the far end. A man. Too big to be Jamie, taller, broader through the shoulders, wearing track pants and a body-hugging T-shirt when Jamie wore baggy 90s gangsta shorts and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut to the hem just to piss off his father a little. Short hair, when Jamie’s had skimmed his jaw, because his mother hated it, and when you grew up the son of the town’s police chief, you took your rebellion where you could get it.

She’d grown up fast living in the East Side, and picked up a few tricks from self-defense classes in college, so she wasn’t afraid to stop and stand in the darkness under the trees sheltering the tracks and watch. He had decent moves, probably played in high school, nothing spectacular, but it was hard to show off your best stuff when you played yourself. For that, you needed a teammate, an opponent. His back to her, he worked on his crossover, knees bent, center of gravity low to the ground, the ball bouncing tight and hard off the cement as he switched it from hand to hand. Then he broke left and went in for a layup, and a thrill of recognition and something far too much like delight shot through her.

It was in the long parabola of his body, stretched from his fingertips to his toes, pointed from pushing off for the layup, the key that turned the lock of her memory. Why wouldn’t he be there? She knew he was coming back for the banquet; the chairwoman of the booster club burbling over with excitement at having all of the boys’ team members back, including a U.S. Navy SEAL fresh off a deployment.

Jamie.

All this she thought in the split second he hung in midair. Then the ball rolled off his fingertips, into the hoop, rattling the chains that served as a net. It dropped to the ground, bouncing once before he palmed it back into his control, dribbling absently.

“Come on out of there.”

She knew an order when she heard one, and this one was given in his voice, a sandy curl no less compelling for the tenor tone, for all she knew actually roughened by sand. Her muscles jerked, not toward the court in response to his command but rather the temptation to run strong enough to make her twitch in the direction of home. She caught herself. Lifted her chin. Stepped out of the darkness, onto the court, the ball balanced between her forearm and her hip.