Navy Seal Promise

He seemed to hesitate. His outer shell was as good as a bullet casing. He kept tight to that casing. “He should be here.”

“If you’re here,” she calculated, “then isn’t his team rotating to active?”

“The team is,” he said and nothing more.

Harmony was growing irritated, too. “He’s my brother. If you know something, tell me.”

“It’s not my place,” he said shortly. “He should be the one talking to you about this. When was the last he came home?”

Harmony sighed. “I don’t know. Last summer sometime.”

“For how long?”

“He stayed overnight at the inn and left the next evening. Mom and Dad both wanted him to stay longer. We all did.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“He said he had training.”

“You believe that?”

She rolled her eyes heavenward, tired of the third degree. “I don’t know.”

“He visits once a year and is hardly around for twenty-four hours when he does. That’s bullshit, Harmony. I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it.”

“Maybe it’s hard for him to be here,” Harmony suggested. “You ever think of that?”

“Why should it be?” Kyle asked, finally turning his face to hers. There was anger there, and he opened up just enough for her to see the genuine mystification behind it.

“Because it’s a reminder,” Harmony replied. “The town, the inn, The Farm... They’re all reminders of Benji. Because Bea... She’s all that’s left of her father. She looks like him. She acts like him. God, Kyle, look at her. She even walks like him. Sometimes it’s difficult to process. Even for me.”

Kyle shrugged. “I’m here. Right?”

She measured the breadth of his stance, the realness of him.

“Why shouldn’t Gavin be?” he challenged. When she kept walking, his voice gentled. “Bea’s his niece. Flesh and blood. That’s no simple matter.”

Harmony licked her lips. “No. It’s not. But since Benji died, Gavin’s driven straight back into that big tough lone wolf mentality. He always had it, deep down. But then Benji...” She shrugged. “You know he was there, don’t you? The night Benji was killed? When Benji was shot. He was there when he—” she licked her lips again and made herself say it “—when he bled out. He carried him out on his back.”

Kyle nodded, eyes forward.

“It’s hard to say,” Harmony noted, “still. It’s hard to think about. It never won’t be. But to have been there...” She let out a shaky breath. “I don’t know how he carries that around with him. And part of me doesn’t blame him for being the lone wolf. I don’t even blame him for not being here. Because maybe that’s his way of coping.”

Kyle fell into thoughtful silence. The surly bent of his mouth was back.

Harmony had the absurd notion to feather her fingertips across it to soften it once more. She rolled her eyes, moving her shoulders back to loosen them. “We do appreciate it.” When he turned to her, she added, “You being here. You always show up, hard times or no. That’s big. Don’t think I don’t notice.”

He searched, eyes roving from one of hers to the next. His mouth curved at the end. Acknowledgment. Gratitude.

On the wind, a honeysuckle blossom skittered across her face. It danced into her hair and tangled. She reached up to pry it loose.

Kyle beat her to it, tugging it free.

“Thanks,” she said, tossing her hair back.

Methodical, he used ginger fingers to extract the long green stem where the nectar lived. He pinched off the petals, discarded them. “You know what honeysuckle makes me think of?”

“No,” she admitted, watching how he handled the fragile parts of the minuscule flower with infinite care.

“Springtime at Hanna’s. I knew it was spring when the honeysuckle vines burst on the trellises. You could smell them a block away.”

“I used to hide there,” she said. “Whenever I did something I shouldn’t have.”

“A frequent occurrence,” he remembered, smiling at her sideways.

“Yes,” she said with a nod. “Poor Mom. I gave her more hell than she deserved.”

“Growing up’ll do that to you.” Holding the stem up, he offered her the small bead of nectar dripping from the end in a motion that was as natural as the wordless shift from spring to summertime.

Harmony tipped her head back without thinking, accepting. It felt natural, sure. But she was very aware of his eyes on her face and the momentary brush with his laser focus. And she felt hot.

She frowned. She could blame it on June or the tropics. But she’d had these brushes with him since she was a girl. A girl with a crush so boundless and hopeless, it had nearly cracked her in two.

Before Benji, before womanhood, there had been only Kyle. Her daughter wasn’t the only young’un who’d ever been enamored with K.Z.B.

Turning her eyes to his, she closed her mouth around the drop. It was barely enough to taste. When his gaze held hers, she swallowed because her pulse began to work in double time. His beard drew her attention. “You need a shave.”

As she walked on, she breathed carefully. She was burning hot beneath the skin. It’d stopped being a problem for so long, she’d forgotten how difficult it was to cool. Go big or go home had always been her go-to phrase. It was typically her body’s response to everything, as well.

Sometimes that was nothing short of hell.

Kyle was still off-limits. Military. She could not under any circumstances love another military man like she’d loved Benjamin Zaccoe. And, frankly, she’d thought she was done with this hot mess she’d developed for Kyle. Before she’d moved out West and thrown herself into school and piloting.

It had helped that Benji had been stationed at Coronado by that point and had visited often. It helped seeing him fresh out of BUD/S. A new Benji. Hard-bodied, disciplined, with that cheeky grin peeking through, a hint of the troublemaker she’d known back home where he’d cracked jokes about her gangly build and ginger mane.

It had helped that, without Gavin around to police things between them, Benji saw her in a new light, too. No longer the petulant tagalong but an adult. You’re a frigging force of nature, he’d sized her up after watching her train without an instructor for the first time. You know that?

The only thing that had threatened to slow down the snowball of their relationship was Gavin and Kyle’s opinion on the subject. Benji had come away from a few days with them on the Gulf with bruises and five stitches in his forehead. He’d come away smiling, nonetheless, with cautious blessings from his bosom buddies.

It had helped that Kyle had been involved in a serious relationship as well, one that had gone as far as the potential of marriage. Laurel Frye had been the bane of Harmony’s existence from the moment she started tagging along behind Kyle, too. The whole fairy-tale romance had started in early high school. Kyle had been smitten with Laurel, which had made the whole affair worse for Harmony.

High school sweethearts were rarely lasting. It had seemed that Kyle and Laurel would be one of those rare exceptions...until his first tour and the frag grenade that had torn through his left leg. Laurel wasn’t the only one who’d wanted him to quit the teams after. Harmony had gone so far as to reason with him not to re-up. But Laurel’s voice had been louder. And when he did go back close to a year later, her voice was the one that had grown embittered.

Kyle and Laurel’s relationship hit the skids shortly after. By that point, Benji was dead, and it was clear that Harmony was going to have to raise a baby alone.

Not alone, Kyle had assured her. By phone. By email. He was right. A single parent she might be, but she hadn’t been alone like she thought she’d be. Not even in the delivery room. Kyle had returned just in time for the early labor. He’d driven her to the hospital, sat with her in the delivery room until her mother was there to relieve him. And he hadn’t just checked in through the years as Gavin had. There had been FaceTime between him and Bea. For the little girl, he’d been an example of what a man should be. Not a father. He couldn’t replace Benji and had no intention to. He’d been, as always, a friend. Harmony hoped she and Bea had returned the gesture in kind.

Because that’s what they were. Friends. That was what they would remain, she was sure as she mounted the small steps to the little screened porch and held the door open for him. He entered the house that smelled like dumplings and Briar Savitt’s peach pie, Bea slung comfortably over his shoulder. As he brushed past Harmony, he even turned his head and winked.

Steady, she told her insides when they started to quake. Steady as she goes, girl.

We are not wrecking through this flight path again.

CHAPTER FOUR

“SHE’S ASLEEP,” KYLE ANNOUNCED, hushed, as he returned to Harmony’s kitchen where she was doing the dishes. He reached back for his neck and tilted his head to work out a crick.

“How many stories did she ask for?” she smirked, knowing.

“A dozen,” he said. “She still likes Where the Wild Things Are. That was—”

“My favorite,” Harmony said, nodding. She turned to him, drying her hands. “You remember that?”

“Reading to you was always the better part of my day,” he told her.

Her lips seamed and pressed inward. She scanned his face before her attention seized on the hand massaging his neck. “You didn’t lie down with her, did you?”

“She asked me to.”

“Kyle. She sleeps in a daybed.”

“So?”

“So,” she said, “you’re six-four. I know SEALs are trained to sleep anywhere, but how did you even—”

“I was half off,” he admitted. “It’s all right. She was asleep in five minutes flat.”

“You’re a bona fide teddy bear.”

“I can accept that.” He nodded. “As long as I still get to shoot bad guys.”

She laughed. “Isn’t that what teddy bears do when children fall asleep? Defend them against the monsters in the closet?” Laying her hands on the back of one of the chairs surrounding the small round table between them, she asked, “Ready?”

“For?” he asked, blank.

“That trim,” she said.

“It’s late. You still wanna?”

She pulled out the chair. “Have a seat. I’ll get the shears.”

To Kyle, the ritual was more sentimental than anything. After the frag had torn through his lower body, he’d been in and out for weeks thanks to the powerful pain meds. His first lucid memory was waking up in a military hospital, disoriented. Then... Harmony. Harmony leaning close. Fingers skimming through his hair. It took him a moment or two to realize that she was giving him a trim and that she’d shaved his beard down to the fine black stubble he preferred off-duty.

When she saw his eyes open, she’d stopped. Said his name. Fighting against the sensation of cotton-mouth and the anxiety of not knowing where he was, he replied with, “Carrots.”

She’d gone misty-eyed. It occurred to him then that he hadn’t seen Harmony cry since she was in diapers. There was a wavering fear that she would break down and that seeing her do so might break him down, too.

She held it together, like a boss. “It’s good to have you back, K.Z.B.” And, after offering him a sip of water, she went back to trimming his hair, smiling.

She’d gone a long way toward holding him together over the agonizing months he spent recouping.

As she combed his hair now, he felt all the tension in his body slide toward extinction. As she raked wet fingers through to dampen his hair, her small nails teased his scalp. His eyes closed. Comb in one hand, shears in the other, she silently, meticulously went about the task of snipping the thick curls growing toward the nape of his neck.

He’d spent a week on the Hellraiser trying to lose himself amid wind and tide. He’d come home, a task that usually brought him necessary reprieve. But it wasn’t until now, he realized, that he’d felt truly relaxed since departing Little Creek.

Her hand rested on his head. “You’re not sleeping, are you?” she asked in a low voice that trickled down the back of his neck.

Kyle blinked. Had he been? “Why?”

“Your head started to bob.”

“Sorry.” He cleared his throat. He sounded groggy. “Long day, I guess.”

“We’ve kept you up.” She snipped strays one by one. He heard the drone of the buzzer. Using the hand on his head, she pushed his chin to his collarbone. “Let me get your neckline.”

She buzzed him down to his shirt collar, then walked around to his front. Bending to his level, she squinted at her progress.

Kyle studied her. Hers was a chameleon face. From one angle, it had the potential to be soft and feminine. From the other, it could be sharp, inflexible, even cold. All her life, she’d had a notorious mercurial habit of flying from one mood to the next. Her features reflected that well.

Unlike him, she’d never favored one parent or another. Aside from the warm honeycomb irises that had been imprinted by Briar, Harmony’s eyes were narrow and feline. By turn, they could make her look catty or uncompromising. Her red hair in particular proved her to be the perfect Savitt-Browning hybrid—a genetic toss-up between Cole’s dark brown and Briar’s ash-blond. She was athletically built. Tall and leggy. In fact, she’d out-inched her old man by the time she was legal. She’d never been curvy. She was more angular, and each one of those intriguing angles came with its own road hazard. Caution. Speed Bump. Sharp Turn Ahead.

Erring, his study fell upon her lips.

Slow Down. No Crossing. Dead End.

She wet them. The lazy river of his blood began to eddy and flow. As she reached out to test the evenness of his ends, her outer thighs nudged against the inner seam of his, and she caught her lower lip between her teeth.

He felt taut again, but in a way which spoke of his six-month deployment and the lack of anything besides male companionship over that time. His thigh muscles flexed as something unfurled there, around his gut and the base of his spine.

Her teeth were slowly releasing her lip, letting it round gradually, red and wet. A strawberry ripe for the plucking.

No Thru Traffic. Wrong Way, Moron!

Kyle snatched himself out of the off-color reverie. Blink. It was Harmony’s face in front of his. Carrots. He’d read her to sleep with Little Golden Book stories as a kid. He’d watched her learn to walk.

He’d taught her to ride her bike, damn it. To swim. Soon the Little Golden Book readings had warped into E. B. White, Beverly Cleary, Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder. He’d even spent one sulky summer speed-reading through a tattered copy of Anne of Green Gables for her. And ever since, he’d called her “Carrots” in consequence.

He’d watched her grow into a skinny-legged teen, then a self-possessed adult. He’d watched her and Zaccoe collide headlong. When something unexpected and timeless had grown out of that collision, he’d watched their destinies entwine. He’d been happy for them.

He’d been the one to tell her Benji was KIA. He’d stood next to her on the tarmac as his brothers-in-arms carried the flag-draped casket off the angel flight.

He’d been the first person to learn she was pregnant while she bent over Benji’s face one last time in the visitation room at the funeral home. She had wept then, tears dripping off the end of her nose combined with long piercing cries that belonged in the wild to some poor felled animal with no chance of mercy.

He’d cradled her baby in the crook of his arm and wondered not for the last time why fate had left him alive and taken Benji.

A space of a lifetime passed between blinks. Kyle tried to reassert himself in that space, but all he got was disorientation akin to what he’d felt in the hospital upon waking after being blown up by that mother-humping frag...

“Kyle?” Harmony’s gaze had zeroed in on his. She stilled.

All trace of relaxation was lost. So taut was he from head to toe, he felt like a live, loose electric line, crackling and precarious.

Yellow lights were flashing behind his eyes. Danger Ahead, the signs read, one after the other. He tried to get the message across to his body. Half of it was log-jammed by panic. The other was need-bound and gluttonously wondering still what that strawberry would taste like if he leaned forward...and nibbled...

You sick bastard.

The words were in his head, but they sounded doubly like Gavin.

Unlocking the breath trapped in his lungs, he exhaled tumultuously. Her honey-crisp eyes were out of focus, but they were there, framed by thick black fringe he’d never noticed before. There was a tiny beauty mark trapped like a tear beneath her right eye. How had he missed that?

Invoke ninja smoke. “Thanks, I gotta go.” One sentence rear-ended the other as he stood, removing the towel she’d draped over his shoulders before the trim.

Harmony rose, too, and touched the collar of his shirt. “I didn’t nick you, did I?”

“No. You’re fine. I’m fine.” He nearly ran into the jamb of the doorway that led from her kitchen to her living room.

One forbidden mouth. Years of training, instinct and self-awareness in the toilet.

“You forgot your hat,” she pointed out, chasing him with it.

“Thanks.” He squashed it down over his new do. Don’t follow me, woman. If you know what’s good for you, you will not follow me.

“You’ll come back, right?” she asked from the door as he found the screen door of her porch.

Doubling back, he asked, “Come back?”

“For mac-and-cheese,” she reminded him. “Bea’ll be devastated if you don’t.”

“Ah, yeah. Rain check on that.” Because she waited, he realized how rude he was being. It wasn’t her fault he hadn’t been with a woman in so long his testosterone had gone loafing after her. Holding the screen wide, he leaned against the rising wind that wanted to rap it shut and trap him in her comely circle. “I owe you.”

“You’re back,” she said in answer. “A haircut and macaroni are small change compared to Bea’s Kyle home from battle.”

It snagged him, the thought of Bea dreaming her dreams and climbing up on his shoulders to touch the moon. “Tell her I’ll see her. Tomorrow night. You’ll need to get your shutters up.”

“You let me worry about the shutters,” she told him, “and get your butt over here for dinner. Deal?”

Kyle nodded. “You all right, Carrots? Out here alone?”

The slant of her eyes narrowed further. “Locked and loaded.” And with a salute, she added, “Petty Officer, sir.”

“That’s Chief Petty Officer to you, ma’am.” Kyle touched the brim of his hat and backed down the steps when a laugh answered. It was a laugh timbered in brass like the tubes of the wind chimes she’d hung from the eaves of the porch tossing against the rising wind. It was a “crazy person” laugh. A “don’t give a damn” laugh. It was his favorite laugh in the world.

It was one of the myriad items he could add to the list of the sexy things he’d never noticed were sexy about Harmony. And that was bad. Real, real bad.

* * *

BRACKEN MECHANICS DIDN’T look like much, but the family business had been Kyle’s home away from home for most of his existence. In case the building itself didn’t draw enough attention, the vintage lineup of cars outside did. Shiny, waxed—they were just a few of his father’s many toys. But the garage itself was modest, a block structure made of rust-colored brick crowned only by the Bracken logo.

Kyle had learned everything there was to know about car engines, domestic and foreign, under its unpretentious roof. Long before training courses at Coronado, he’d learned how to maneuver in a stick shift versus an automatic, how to draw as much horsepower out of a car’s engine without overworking it and how to fix most motorized problems known to man.

When restless nights following deployment stalked him on land, there was one last vestige of peace to strike at. That was suiting up in a pair of coveralls and getting greasy beneath the hood of whatever the motley crew his father had long-employed was working on at the garage.

“Manifold’s cracked,” Murph “Hickory” Scott said, the words muffled somewhat by a wad of Copenhagen. He snorted, giving Kyle an earful of nasal congestion. He was Marines, retired, hard as hickory—true to his moniker—and still carried Vietnam with him behind the patch over his left eye. The shrapnel bugged him at the onset of rain, so today he was more ornery than usual. “Distributor cap, too.”

“Made in America.” Kyle leaned against the open hood, elbows down. “Parts’ll be easy to come by. It’s just cleaning her up. That’ll be the trick.”

Wayne “Pappy” Frye beamed at the thought. “Yes, sir. Needs everything down to seat cushions.” He didn’t look it, but Pappy was approaching eighty, a hobby-man who had taken the job alongside Hick in Bracken Mechanics’s early years, not because he needed revenue but because he worshipped cars. Like all Bracken employees, Pappy was as good as family. But as Kyle’s ex-fiancée’s grandfather, Pappy and Kyle had nearly been family by law.

Pappy kicked the treads of the old Trans Am. “Good tires.” He caught Kyle’s eye. “Have you heard about her mystery origins?”

“A lady of intrigue?” When Hick grunted and chewed, Kyle pushed up from his elbows to the heels of his hands in interest. “Don’t keep it to yourselves.”

Pappy and Hick exchanged glances. When the latter raised his brows, Pappy took it upon himself to illuminate Kyle on the subject. “Two days ago, Mavis came in early for some filing business and found this beaut waiting patiently outside. A Trans Am wasn’t on the roster, so she called your dad up to ask if he knew anything about it.”

“Did he?” Kyle asked.

“She said he was as surprised as she was,” Pappy elaborated, “but asked no further questions, insisting on seeing it for himself. Later that morning, we found him standing much as you are now having a look under the lady’s bonnet. I asked him if he knew whose car it was. He would only say it belonged to an old friend.”

“He’s got a good many of those,” Kyle speculated. His father had once worked the underbelly of the GTA circuit. Then after getting cleaned up, he’d worked for NASCAR, among other things, before returning home to Fairhope and building a respectful name for himself through small business.

“Yes, but this one seemed...sentimental,” Pappy continued. “We’re guessing this old friend isn’t an old rival at the poker tables.” He exchanged another look with Hick. “We were hoping you might settle the mystery. If he’s bound to tell anyone other than your mother, it’s you.”

Kyle pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes as he stood back from the car. He crossed his arms, feet spread. James wasn’t in the shop today; he was out at the airfield. Kyle might’ve liked to have been there if last night’s conversation hadn’t lingered. The walk after hadn’t quite done what it was supposed to, and, despite the brief clutch of tranquility he’d felt at Harmony and Bea’s, the odd turn of events there had made him doubly agitated.

He was barely fresh off a homecoming, but he needed to get his head right before he returned to The Farm or his family. Maybe most especially to Harmony and her strawberry-shaped mouth.

Goddamn. He shifted slightly when the image hit and made him taut in the loins again. Pivoting his thoughts in the opposite direction, he plugged back into the Trans Am. “What’s he planning to do with it?”

Hick sniffed. “He’s been coming in every night, asking me to meet him.”

“After hours? What for?” Kyle asked. His father rarely worked overtime at either the airfield or the garage. He liked going home to his wife, who, for him, reaffirmed the grind of life on the straight and narrow.

“Don’t know exactly,” Hick opined. He snorted unceremoniously. “At first I thought he’d want to start breaking down the engine. Mostly he just looks at it like some complex algebra problem he can’t solve.”

“Strange,” Pappy said.

Kyle agreed. James Bracken, a man never unsure of himself. “Why the hesitation?”

“We were hoping you’d know,” Pappy admitted.