Navy Seal Promise

“Ah, come on!” she chided.

“Not on your life, Carrots!” he shouted back. Lifting his chin to her, he disappeared into the throngs of spectators to join James, leaving her as spooled up as she had been in the cockpit of the old warplane.

* * *

DUSK FALLING ON The Farm was the essence of tranquility. As night approached, there was both a hush and a crescendo. Everything stilled. Even with the sun gone from the sky, the heat didn’t dwindle, but it banked, the air breathable once more. As the light faded, the sound of night bugs—crickets and cicadas—escalated. Amphibians struck up the tune, adding throaty backup vocals to the noise of the backcountry twang. Their combined pitch heightened to that of a diesel engine. After his time away, it was like a homecoming symphony from Mother Nature’s Philharmonic.

The mosquitos were out, but the farmhouse’s back porch screened them from feasting on flesh. Through the open window, Adrian and Mavis could be heard arguing lightly over the dish washing.

On the porch, James puffed a cigar. In his youth, he’d been a man of many vices. He was no longer controlled by substances. His weekend after-dinner Montecristos were his only remaining weakness. He tipped his head back, blowing rings into the air, looking every bit the striking, aging pirate. At fifty-four, he still cut an impressive figure, especially in the flickering light of Adrian’s tiki torches.

Kyle soaked it all in. The sweet scent of his father’s stogie. The familiar tumble of the land, rising and falling under wild grasses to the stable and pastures. A horse nickered in the distance. The animals’ slow-grazing silhouettes were fading against the inky backdrop of trees.

Some pockets of the world remained untouched. That certainty was what Kyle escaped to when the fighting was over. Change was inevitable. Cities moved forward. Small towns turned to progress. Backcountry places like this developed. People changed. Grandparents passed. Engagements broke. Teammates burned out or chose to leave the service to save their families. Some of them never saw the beauty of their final homecoming.

The Farm was rare. The way of life went on unceasing, the pace unbroken. It persisted and endured. Yet that shift in barometric pressure could be sensed here, too. The storm was gaining speed in the Gulf and hadn’t altered course. It would make a wet landing somewhere between Perdido and Pensacola. Home and business owners were already battening down in preparation for the first seasonal run-in with the tropics. Soon Kyle would help James and Adrian stable the horses, round up the litter of puppies spring had given them and board the windows.

The storm was small enough not to worry too much. The Farm would most likely remain unscathed. For now, Kyle drank an icy glass of tea and let his father smoke. “How bad is it?” he asked out of curiosity.

“What’s that?” James asked, turning his head from the view.

“The aviation industry,” Kyle indicated.

James took a final puff from his cigar, eyeing Kyle over the brown stump. Releasing a ragged stream of smoke, he leaned forward in his patio chair and stabbed it out in the tray at the center of the table. He’d take the tray out in the yard and dump it before going back inside, so the ashes didn’t get caught up in the breeze and dirty Adrian’s furnishings. Such courtesies between Kyle’s parents were simple and commonplace, performed with unspoken poignancy that was touching in the extreme. “It should be booming.”

“But it’s not,” Kyle surmised, daring his father to challenge the assumption.

James did a few more quick stabs with the Cuban before depositing it in the tray. Dragging a hand through his mop of hair, he settled back with a creak from the chair. “There’ve been some ruts in the road.”

“And?” Kyle posed the question again. “How bad is it?”

James folded his hands over his middle. “I’ve been a businessman for thirty years. I haven’t lost one entrepreneurship yet, and I’m not going to now.”

“No matter the cost?”

James hesitated. He glanced toward the window where Adrian and Mavis were talking. When he spoke again, his voice lowered to a murmur. “Those two are the chief reasons B.S. has to survive.”

Kyle frowned. “There’ll be collateral damage if it doesn’t,” he realized, trying to read James. It wasn’t easy. The man could bluff like a maverick and not just at the poker tables. “What did you mortgage? The cottage on the bay isn’t big enough. Was it the auto shop? Please tell me it wasn’t Flora or the nursery.”

“It wasn’t any of those,” James mused, no longer meeting his son’s eye. “It was a sure thing. Byron Strong went over the business plan. The best advisers on the coast took a look at the specs. The application market was ripe for new pilots. The only issue was lack of local training opportunities, but we fixed that with the teaching base of B.S.”

“So what’s the issue?”

“I don’t know, exactly. We’ve had two big contracts fall through based on minute technicalities. We’ve had farmers shy away after weeks of negotiation. Even advertising has had its windfalls.” James released an unsteady breath. “It was The Farm. I mortgaged The Farm to get B.S. off the ground.”

James might as well have pulled a WWE and hit Kyle over the head with his chair. For slow-winding seconds, he felt as if he were being choked out by one of his SEAL teammates.

Dragging oxygen into his lungs, he worked to clear the bright pinpoints in his head that told him blackout was imminent. Gripping the arms of his chair, Kyle stared at his father in something close to horror. “You...gambled The Farm?”

“Like I’ve been trying to explain to you, it wasn’t a gamble.”

Kyle pushed up from the seat. He braced his hands on his hips and walked to the far side of the porch. There were potted plants in most every variety hanging from chains, stacked on shelves and pedestals...and he couldn’t breathe. “Son of a bitch,” he hissed.

“Kyle,” James said, climbing to his feet, too. “It’ll be all right. We won’t lose. I don’t lose. The Farm is your birthright. Nothing’s going to change that.”

“Mom let you do this?” Dark gathered on the porch with only the torches to make up the distance between him and his father. “She knew what you were doing?”

“Of course she knew,” James said, insulted by the insinuation that she might not. “I’m always up-front with your mother. You know this.”

“Did you sell her the same old line of bull—that it was a sure thing? That we’d all come out smelling like roses?”

In a weary motion, James dipped his hands into his pockets. “Son. You’re angry. I get that. But there are no lies between your mom and me. There’s no subterfuge. We couldn’t be what we are if there was. It’s the same with you. Haven’t I always given you the truth, straight up?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t like that in the beginning, was it?” Kyle asked. He was on the verge of furor and he went there. “All those years ago. You didn’t exactly tell her why you missed the first part of my life. Why you left her when she was seventeen, pregnant. She had to find out for herself what kind of man you were before us.”

James stared, stricken. They’d rarely spoken in heated terms. They’d never hurt one another. It had been their silent understanding from the moment James had come back into Kyle’s and Adrian’s lives, a way of making up for all those lost years.

But The Farm.

Some things were sacred.

Hurt worked in the creases of James’s face, looking for purchase. Yet he spoke levelly. “Have I ever done anything to make you question my loyalty or motives? You’re my life, Kyle. You, your mother, Mavis... You’re my whole life.”

“Then why didn’t Mav and I have a say in this?” Kyle asked. “You didn’t do this for us. You did this to satisfy your own need for thrills on a day-to-day basis, Howard Hughes.”

“I did this,” James said, placing each word with care, “for our home. Family-owned agriculture is dying. Farms like ours are breaking up and being put to auction. I needed to do something.”

“You did it for yourself,” Kyle maintained. Another thought struck him, and it brought on great big flame balls of ire. “And what about Harmony? How much does she have riding on this? She lives here, too, Dad—her and Bea. This is their home. She’s staked money, probably most of what she has to her name. Her name itself is stamped on the business. You lose B.S., what does that mean for her? You won’t be able to pay back all she bet.”

“No one’s going to take a loss,” James said, the first signs of frustration bleeding through. “No one.”

“How much have you told her? She’s your partner. Her training is your big ticket item. What does she know?”

A pronounced frown took hold of James’s tight features. “I don’t want her to worry.”

“But there’s no reason to worry, right?” Kyle said, tossing the assertion back at him. He shook his head. “You’re a piece of work.”

“Kyle,” James said as Kyle shoved through the screen door.

“I need a minute,” he said as he descended to the grass and kept walking. He had to walk. The fighter in him was taking shots, and it needed to stop before he could face either of his parents again. He felt betrayed by the one person in the world who shouldn’t have betrayed him. His father had thrown his so-called birthright against the wall like spaghetti.

If Kyle stayed, he’d say something he’d regret. Do something he’d regret.

He’d walk until the sting of his father’s actions numbed. Even if it meant walking all night. The Farm went on for miles.

CHAPTER THREE

SOMETIMES A GIRL needed to see the moon. Especially if that moon was a strawberry moon.

“Mama,” Bea moaned as she gazed at the rising moonscape through the paper tube of her makeshift glitter-dotted telescope. “It’s not right.”

“Not right?” Harmony said. She was on her knees in capri pants in the middle of the dusty path that led from the gate of the Brackens’ farmland to the mother-in-law suite. She peered at the horizon. Rising over the trees was a wondrous, dusky red full moon. “That’s it. Right there.”

“But it’s not a strawberry,” her four-year-old insisted, disappointment laden in her voice.

Harmony felt the urge to laugh. Bea’s seriousness kept the brevity from breaking the surface. Clearing her throat, she said in the practical tones her intuitive preschooler would appreciate most, “It’s only called a strawberry moon.”

“Why?” Bea asked, features squelched as she gazed, skeptical, at the impressive nightly specter.

Harmony pursed her lips. “Well, it’s red. Like a strawberry.”

“Tomatoes are red.”

“True.” Harmony nodded.

“And Mammy’s tulips. And puppy noses.”

“All valid points.” And Harmony did smile, because the thought of a Puppy-Nosed Moon was too amusing to resist. She loved Bea’s mind. She loved its precociousness and the great kaleidoscope of imagination that kept it from maturing too quickly. “But I think it’s called a strawberry moon because... You remember talking in day school about the first people who lived on this land, the Native Americans?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Well, those same Native Americans needed to know when their strawberries were ready for picking. So the moon would paint itself up like a strawberry to tell them.”

“Oooh.” Bea tilted her head, as if viewing the moon through a new lens. “It looks like blackberry juice.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” A heady breeze stirred the trees into a whispering frenzy. It brought the smell of salt far inland, an early herald of the storm. Shifting from one knee to another, Harmony drew the folds of her sweater close. Planes would be grounded for the next few days until the damn thing spun itself north to the Plains and petered there.

June brought pop-up thunderstorms. It was a fact of life in the low south, but that didn’t stop her from feeling restless. She’d been grounded too long before James came to her with the proposal for Bracken-Savitt Aerial Application & Training. Summer was prime running time for crop dusters with fields ripening toward harvest, and yet the seasonal weather was a nuisance and a half.

Bea shifted from one leg to another then back. Harmony picked up on the telltale impatience, identical to her own. “Have you seen enough of the moon tonight?”

“Can I have a bath?” Bea asked, swiping her small round palm over her brow. Blond curls clung, damp, to her temple. “I wanna bath.”

It took some effort not to roll her eyes and remind her daughter that she’d firmly refused bath time not two hours ago. Settling for a sigh, Harmony stood up and helped bring Bea to her feet. “Bath time sounds good.”

“With Mr. Bubble?” Bea asked, hopeful.

“With Mr. Bubble,” Harmony confirmed. Dusting the frilly skirt of Bea’s fairy outfit and the petticoat layers underneath, she took the lead to the house.

Bea’s head turned sharply at the sound of rustling in the high-climbing vegetation. “What’s that?”

“Probably an animal,” Harmony said, tugging Bea along and eyeing the bushes warily. A big animal. Creature sightings were everyday happenings on The Farm. Aside from the horses and dogs the Brackens raised, there were squirrels, raccoons, reptiles and insects in abundance.

The crashing in the undergrowth grew louder. Bea’s mouth dropped. “Mama,” she whispered. “What is that?”

“I don’t know.” She stepped halfway in front of Bea to protect her.

Bobcat?

No. Bigger.

Deer?

“It’s a bear,” Bea said, eyes as round as the moon.

“It’s not a bear,” Harmony said doubtfully. Then she frowned. Is it? All of a sudden, she found herself wishing for the hot-pink high-powered stun gun her father, a former police detective, had given her for her sixteenth birthday. In case of a break-in, she kept it in her top dresser drawer under the naughty lingerie she never wore.

Bea’s hand tightened on hers as branches snapped and tossed. Harmony licked her lips and tensed. Whatever it was would have to go through her...

A swath of moonlight fell on the T-shirt-clad figure, and she breathed again. Just a SEAL.

He turned to go up the path, then stopped when he saw them, frozen and watchful.

A very surly SEAL, Harmony observed.

“Hi,” he greeted shortly.

“Hi,” she returned. She nudged Bea. “See? Not a bear.”

Kyle tilted his head to the side to get a look at the girl hiding behind Harmony’s leg. “Hey there, little wing.”

Energy zipped from the bottom of Bea’s frame to the top. She gave a short squeal, tearing off from her hiding place. She launched herself at Kyle as he went into a crouch, arms spread wide.

“‘You’ll fly like a bee!’” he shouted. Then he tossed her, giggling and kicking, into the air. “‘Up to the honey tree, see?’”

“I see!” she shrieked. “Again! Higher!”

Kyle grunted, tossing her up toward the stars.

After the third toss, again Bea cried, “Again, again!” and Kyle eyed Harmony.

She shrugged. “You brought this on yourself,” she told him.

“Yeah, but you made it,” he countered. He threw Bea up one last time.

As she came back down, Bea latched on to him around the neck, much as Harmony had earlier in the day, and didn’t let go. Nuzzling her cheek against his, the smile in her voice was clear. “I missed you!”

Any trace of the sullenness Harmony had glimpsed when Kyle had trudged out of the thicket vanished quickly. He folded his arms over Bea’s back, letting one hand stray into her vivid curls. “Missed you, too, Gracie Bea.” Turning his lips into her cheek, he closed his eyes and rocked her from side to side.

Harmony tried not to melt too much over the pair. She failed. Bea’s pink high-top sneakers dangled free, four feet from the ground. Kyle’s hard muscly arms tightened around her, his hands splayed over her slender back, soothing. Those hands were made for fighting, for pumping rounds through an M-60 machine gun. They were calloused and rough. They could put a man down in seconds. Yet they cradled the child of his buddy and his best friend’s sister, and his expression was putty. Soft, soft putty.

What chance did a mama have?

Harmony sighed a little, sliding one hand slowly into the back pockets of her capris. She gave the pair another moment, two, before stepping forward. “Bea.” Touching her other hand to her daughter’s back, she let out a laugh. “Bea. Let him breathe, baby.”

“She’s fine,” Kyle assured Harmony, meeting her gaze through a tuft of downy hair that had blown across his face.

“She’s choking you.”

“Not since I joined the navy have I been so happy to be choked out,” he admitted.

Harmony patted the ringlets just beneath the hand Kyle used to crib Bea’s head to his shoulder. “What are you doing out here?”

He shuttered, giving a slight shake of his head. “Walking.”

“Walking?” She eyed the tree line he’d been blazing a trail through. Give the man a machete and he could pave the way to town. “You were fighting kudzu. We thought you were a predator.”

“Oh, yeah? And what are the two of you doing out?”

Bea’s head lifted finally. “Me and Mama found the strawberry.”

“Strawberry?”

“Strawberry moon,” Harmony said, gesturing toward the sky. “It’s tonight.”

“It is, huh?” Kyle asked, hitching Bea on to his hip. She pointed and he nodded sagely. “How about that, little wing? They hung a strawberry in the sky just for you.”

“I can’t eat it,” she said, crestfallen. “I love strawberries.”

“Don’t we know it?” Kyle set Bea on her feet. He crouched to her level. “When you lay your head on your pillow and dream, I bet you’ll be able to reach out and grab it.”

“How will I get all the way up there?” she asked, her dark wondrous stare seizing on his.

Harmony rubbed her lips together as Kyle eyed her briefly over Bea’s head. “You could climb up on my shoulders,” he offered.

“You’ll be there?”

“If you want me to be.” He dug his fingertips into her ribs. She shrieked. “Do you? Huh?”

Bea wriggled. “Yes, yes!” She snorted and squealed as he kept tickling. When he subsided, she settled down with a smile, rubbed the hair plastered to her brow again, and asked, “Will you come home with us?”

“It’s late,” Harmony pointed out. “Kyle probably wants to go back to the farmhouse and rest. He’s been gone a long time.”

“A long time,” Bea echoed.

“What’s a few months to buddies like us?” Kyle suggested.

Bea placed her hands on his cheeks. Rubbing her palms over the soft texture of his beard, she said, “We could watch Stuffins.”

“Stuffins,” Kyle repeated, clueless.

“Doc McStuffins,” Harmony elaborated. “Disney. She’s allowed to watch one episode before bed. I’m sure Kyle would rather finish his walk and go home.”

“Actually,” he said, “Stuffins sounds perfect.”

“Really?” Harmony asked as Bea cheered his decision-making skills.

“Really. If you don’t mind.” He smirked. “Mama.”

Harmony rolled her eyes as Bea sounded off with a chorus of pleases. “I don’t have mac-and-cheese. Tonight’s leftovers.”

“Chitlins and dumplin’s,” Bea informed him very matter-of-factly.

“Chicken and dumplings, baby,” Harmony said when Kyle’s brow peaked. To him she added, “I don’t feed her pig intestines. I swear.”

“They’re not so bad.” When Harmony and Bea’s noses wrinkled in sync, Kyle grinned in a wicked sort of way that resonated from the past. “Come on. You’d try them once.”

“Only if you wolf that big strawberry down first,” Harmony suggested.

Kyle frowned at the moon. They both knew he was allergic to the fruit. It’d always puzzled Harmony—someone as strong as him, felled by a berry. “Did, ah, these leftovers come from your mom, by chance?”

Harmony ran her tongue over her teeth. He was allergic to strawberries. But unlike her mother—the culinary goddess of the south—she was allergic to cooking. “Yes. But I mashed the taters.”

“With the raw bits left in?”

“How else would they stick to your ribs?”

Bea tugged on his hand, and Kyle followed her, rising to his feet and swinging their linked fingers as he fell into step with Harmony. “Now, that sounds like a treat.”

“You didn’t eat with your family?” Harmony asked as they began to walk down the lane to the suite.

“I did,” he admitted. “Mom made her glazed Andouille-stuffed pork because she knows that’s all I think about when I’m away. But when I’m really tired of MREs, I’ve been known to think about Briar’s chicken and dumplings.”

“Anything else?”

“Your freaking macaroni and cheese,” he noted. “Though it is bound to kill me eventually.”

She smoothed her lips together, pleased to make the cut.

“And if your mother’s thinking about making a blackberry pie or her coq au vin anytime soon...”

“I’ll be sure to bring leftovers home for you.” Harmony picked up the hint.

He sent her a sly sideways smile. “Thanks.”

Bea skipped ahead, buzzing with excitement. The wind swept up her hair as it tossed through the alley of trees arcing like an awning over the narrow pathway. Honeysuckle blossoms tumbled down, a soft white rain. The sweet fragrance teased up memories of summers long ago. Summers when life was still simple, rich and undefined. “I envy her,” Harmony mused as she watched her daughter caper toward the lights of the white-framed house. Kyle turned to question her. She explained, “She gets to grow up at The Farm. Could childhood be any better?”

A frown toggled Kyle’s mouth, and he looked at the ground as they kicked honeysuckle blossoms up under their feet. “No.”

“I was so jealous of Gavin when we were kids,” she pointed out. “All those weekends he got to come here and run wild with you.”

“You came with him,” he remembered.

“Not as much as I wanted to.” They walked on, quiet together. Almost at the point of lollygagging. The night was one of those lulling complacent ones, tepid and inky, luring people outdoors like a crooking finger. “And, anyway, you boys reveled in leaving me behind.”

“Not true.” When she arched a brow, he digressed. “Not entirely true. Not on my part.”

She smiled at bit over the admission. “Have you seen him? Gavin? He hasn’t called in a while. I know he’s all right. Dad tells me. He gets emails. I know y’all are on separate teams and you take turns on the hopper, but I was hoping, in the crossover, you might’ve seen one another.”

“I haven’t seen him,” Kyle said shortly, that frown pulling at his mouth again.

Harmony licked her lips. “I know the new job in DC has kept him tied up when he’s stateside. Still, it’d be nice to have him visit.”

A line burrowed between Kyle’s brows. “Job?”

“He didn’t tell you?” Harmony crossed her arms, oddly chilled. She knew things hadn’t been the same between Kyle and Gavin since Benji’s death. Their business was their own, and, when it came to the details of service, they kept it that way. Harmony understood even as she bristled at the not knowing what had gone amiss between her brother and the friend he’d once claimed was like a brother to him.

“No, he didn’t,” Kyle stated. The frown deepened. “Harm, when was the last time you talked to him?”

“A while.”

“What’s a while?”

She thought about it. “Must be six months now. Maybe seven.”

“Seven...” He trailed off, perturbed. “Did he visit then?”

“No. He rarely does.” At Kyle’s curse, she added quickly, “There’s been the job. And I know he has a life. From the sound of it, there might have been a girl at one point...” When Kyle only shook his head, she trailed off.

“So you spoke on the phone,” he surmised. “What about?”

She crawled back into her memory. The conversation had been brief, stilted. Yawning absences did that to the tightest of siblings. “He talked about work. He asked after Bea, made sure Dad was telling him the truth and all’s well with him and Mom and the inn...”

“Nothing else?” Kyle asked.

What was he waiting for her to say? She took herself back over the conversation with Gavin but couldn’t think of anything more. “Don’t think so. Why?” she asked. Though nothing changed on the surface, she could all but hear the hum of Kyle’s indignation building. “Do you know something I don’t?”