Navy Seal's Match

The weight of the second shovel lifted. Mavis tugged at the handle. “Go with them. I’ll pick it up.”

“I can’t let you dig,” Gavin said. “Not after that.”

She tugged again until his hold loosened. “Move aside.”

He watched as she shed her overshirt, the plaid number. She tied it around her waist, then hoisted the shovel. He moved to the right until her blade split fresh topsoil he already knew to be soft. And he watched her, her hair slicing backward just like the dull edge of the long-handled tool. The pale curve of her cheek. The lines of her. She was small with, he suspected, curves that she drowned subtly with her wardrobe of ceaseless black.

There was muscle there, too, he found. Will and might. He considered changing her nickname again, this time to Mighty Mouse. She dug without slowing or even a grunt of effort. She culled clay from its earth bed. He nodded approval, then began working beside her, letting their actions fall into rhythm.

He’d knowingly overlooked her for most of her life. Who knew Kyle’s sister would wind up an endless source of fascination?

The end of his blade met something solid as he sank it decisively into the loose ground. The impact sang up his arms and filled the air with a satisfying thunk. “Aha,” he heard Zelda utter.

Mavis dropped her shovel and knelt as he raised his blade. She didn’t hesitate to sink her hands into the red-tinged dirt, combing it up the sides of the hole.

Gavin took a knee beside her. He took over, leaving her to tug aside loose black roots moist from internment. The smell of earth was darker, richer. Gavin could practically taste it. It coated them both to the elbows as inches gave way to the flat face of a handmade box.

They worked together to loosen the ground hugging it close on either side. Finally, with one hand over and another under, Mavis hefted the box from its resting place. Gingerly, she placed it on the ground as Olivia and Gerald flanked her.

The flat of Olivia’s palm dusted the lid. Gavin leaned in until he could make out the carving of a rose. Until he could inhale Mavis’s mango scent and realized how close he was to brushing his lips across the point of her shoulder.

Gerald found a screwdriver to loosen the lid. As he pried the old screws from their corners, nobody moved.

“It should be you,” Gerald said as he looked to his wife. “Go on, love. Let’s see what Ward and his Olivia found worth saving.”

“Not me,” Olivia said. She beckoned William closer. “Come ’ere, Shooks.”

William obeyed, hesitant. “Mom. You’ve waited...”

“You never knew them,” she told him, scooting so that William could wedge his way between her and Gerald and take a knee. “I should wait for Finny, but God knows he didn’t give me a single patient bone in my body.” Placing a hand on William’s arm, she lowered her voice and said, “Go ahead.”

William paused only briefly before appeasing his parents’ ill-contained curiosity. He pried the lid free. Mavis, who had shifted over with the others, was practically beneath Gavin. He felt the excitement all but zipping from the top of her head even if it wasn’t her gasp that rent the air. “Letters,” she said.

“What’s the date on the postmark?” Olivia asked as Gerald lifted a ragged envelope to the light. “Is the stamp still legible?”

“It is.” A wondering laugh shook Gerald’s shoulders. “July 18, 1953.”

“Six months before they were married,” Olivia calculated. She handled the envelope with care. “From her to him.”

“It’s not the only one,” William said as he riffled through the collection. “The bundles tied with the ribbons are the ones she wrote, from the looks of it.”

“You can tell by the writing,” Olivia noted. “I’d forgotten how precise her penmanship was...”

“And the ones tied with the leather straps are his,” William finished. “Look, Dad. We found someone wordier than you. But I don’t get it.”

“What don’t you get?” Olivia asked absently as she thumbed through a stack.

“They both grew up here, or close by,” William said. “Didn’t they?”

“He was from Fairhope,” Olivia said. “She lived more toward Malbis.”

“They had cars in the fifties,” William expounded. “Why so many letters? It’s not like they lived on opposite corners of the globe. Even if they did, there were phone lines, telegraphs...”

“People used to communicate differently,” Zelda explained.

Olivia carefully unfolded a page of a letter. She sounded far off, near dreamy, when she added, “And when you love someone that much, there’s nothing like writing it down on paper.”

“It’s recorded,” Mavis concluded. “This way they could relive the feeling and pass it on.”

Gavin frowned at the side of her head. “Since when’re you a romantic?”

She glanced up. Her eyes went round when her nose nearly touched his. The gap widened as she edged back, but he saw her dark gaze race across his face in quick perusal. His mouth went dry. “I’m not,” she claimed and looked away.

“Mmm-hmm,” he said, unconvinced.

Underneath the point of his chin, Mavis’s shoulder hiked in a shrug. “It’s history, right? I like history. Especially the kind I can hold in my hands.”

Like those giant genealogical tomes back at Zelda’s.

A smile crammed, foreign, in the ball of his jaw joint. It felt out of place, but it hung there, like a lazy, back-sliding moon in its crescent. He was aware of it, just as he was aware of Mavis and aware of all the places inside him that didn’t feel dark when she coaxed it out of him.

He should move away. It was too hot to be this close. The contents of the box were too intimate. Ward and the first Olivia’s messages weren’t for him.

But Mavis smelled like earth and life and threw all the shady parts of him into stark contrast when he breathed in and filled up with her scent.

The heel of his shoe caught the lip of a hole and he nearly tripped into it. Stumbling only slightly as he straightened, he looked down to keep from twisting his ankle in any of the rest of them.

They were spread out under the dead eaves of the tree, the grass-covered glade broken up by ruts and dirt tossed haphazardly. A minefield.

No. He blinked. The battlefield couldn’t intrude here.

But he had intruded, and the battlefield was always with him. Damned if he’d ever be rid of it, anymore than the stench of the loner—the outsider.

His mind began to grind into the sick death spiral of anxiety. He braced his palm against his brow. It was covered in clay. Red clay. Even the cloying scent couldn’t stop the visceral flash-bang of memory.

“He’s down! Benji’s down!” he all but wailed into his comms over the sound of cover fire. “Bring the Bradley! Bring that bitch around!”

“It’s four minutes out,” Pettelier said.

Benji was bleeding out against the underside of Gavin’s palm. “Get inside my pack. Get me the gauze.”

Benji struggled to talk through a taut grimace. Gavin couldn’t hear him over the sound of M60s going haywire. He leaned down.

“...in the gut.”

Gavin shook his head automatically. “Nah. The ribs. We’ll stop the bleed. You’ll be a’right.”

“No bullshit,” Benji muttered. “Don’t...b-bullshit me.”

Gavin knew where the bullet had gone through. He knew what gutshot meant as much as the next soldier in line out here in no-man’s-land. And he denied it. “Bradley’s comin’. Gonna be fine.”

Benji coughed.

Don’t do that, Gavin shouted from the walls of his head. “Pete! Where’s the fucking gauze, man?”

“Got it right here,” Pettelier grunted.

Another team guy shouted from behind, “We’re covered up!”

From comms, he heard, “Bradley, five minutes out!”

“Slow son of a...” Gavin pressed his teeth together. They stayed clenched. If they weren’t clenched, damn it, they’d be chattering. He moved his hand to plug the wound.

Blood rushed at him. Benji shuddered. Spasmed.

Gavin pressed his hand against the flow. He wasn’t a goddamn surgeon. He needed a surgeon!

“Harm.”

The name had Gavin riveted to Benji’s pained expression. The light hung there, but it was hard and forced and it caught Gavin like the last blind scream of sunlight off the bay at the end of a winter’s day.

Gavin shook his head. “Shut up, you’re fine.”

“I got somethin’ to say.”

I’m not a surgeon! “We’re not doin’ this!” Gavin said out loud.

The ground shook, the world coming apart with noise. Gavin threw himself on Benji as dust and mortar fell.

“The hell...we’re not,” Benji said. And he coughed again.

“I’m gonna save you,” Gavin persisted. He ground it from the marrow. “I’ll get you to a surgeon. This ain’t but a flea bite on a dog’s ass and you’re going home, you son of a bitch.”

The faint flicker of humor eclipsed pain momentarily. Benji’s mouth fumbled. “A s-s-sheepdog’s ass.”

“Right.” And thinking of his sister, Benji’s wife, thinking of Kyle and his father, Cole, the inn and the bay and everything about life there that was growing harder and harder to retrace in his mind, Gavin placed his hand over Benji’s brow and stroked. “You’re damn right, brother.”

The rest came at him in a rush. The squad hadn’t been able to hold their ground. The Bradley was eight blocks away. Running retreat was all they had. Benji had gone out on Gavin’s shoulder.

He died in the stupid Bradley, less than halfway back to base where even the surgeons couldn’t do a damn thing for him. He’d wanted Gavin to tell her—Harmony. Benji had wanted it to be him.

Gavin had failed there just the same. He hadn’t made it back stateside before Kyle had raced off to Wisconsin where Harmony was flying aerobatics to deliver the news.

She and Benji had been married less than a year. She had only just found out she was pregnant with Bea.

And Gavin hadn’t been there. Because even if he had made it back to the States before Kyle had gotten to her...he wasn’t sure he could’ve told her he was the one who couldn’t save Benji.

It was the anger that came swinging through the flashback, crashing through it like a ram. Gavin grabbed it by the horns, rode it bucking and thrashing—

A hand closed around his elbow. He threw it off to dislodge the hold, poised for attack.

Mavis’s features struck him, freckles dark, eyes round.

He let the fight go out of him when the shock painted her. He stepped away, seeing the others casting looks in their direction.

She shook her head and spoke first. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” He shot it off like a curse. He forced his feet into backward motion, winding away from her and the rest.

“Are you okay?” She reached out.

“Fine,” he said, still verbally swinging. She needed to go. He needed to get away from her before she found out how cold and vast the dark side of the moon really was. He moved in the direction of the house...or what he hoped was the right direction.

She came after him. “Gavin...”

He pointed at her. “Stay. I mean it,” he added in resignation before lengthening his stride.

CHAPTER FIVE

“WHERE IS HE?” Mavis asked. She’d changed from the work wardrobe she’d dirtied up into black jeggings and a tank. After checking on Cole and Briar to see that Gavin’s father had recovered from the heat, she’d hunted Gavin through Olivia and Gerald’s homey abode.

Harmony came down the stairs. “He’s taking a shower.”

Mavis could tell by her expression that she’d seen him. “How is he?”

“I don’t know.” Harmony shrugged. “He won’t talk. Not that he ever has about how he’s feeling.”

Because it’s weakness, Mavis knew. Gavin didn’t accept weakness. Most men like him, soldiers, didn’t. “Where is he, exactly?”

“Liv told him to use William’s room,” Harmony said. She grabbed the stair rail to stop Mavis from climbing up. “Whoa. Where’re you going?”

She’d promised not to let him drown alone. “I’m going up.”

“Mavis.” Harmony grabbed her hand to stop her from passing. “I’m not sure you should. Not right now.”

“Look,” Mavis said shortly, “you’re trying. Cole’s trying, Briar’s trying. No approach seems to be working. The other day at the inn, he was having flashbacks and...and I helped him.”

Harmony’s wide-arched brows lifted. “How?”

Mavis forced an exhale. She couldn’t tell her friend everything that had happened with her brother in the bougainvillea. And not because she didn’t know why, precisely, Gavin had responded to her touch. She couldn’t tell Harmony because of what Mavis had felt the moment she’d sensed Gavin’s walls trembling...when she’d thought maybe she had done the impossible. “All I really know is that for a few moments he felt safe enough with me—he trusted me—to help him out of it, and it worked, if only temporarily.”

Harmony searched Mavis’s face. She stepped aside. “I can’t stand to see him like this. I’m scared of what’s on this path if he keeps going down it alone. Do what you can for him.”

“Okay.” Mavis climbed the rest of the stairs. Glancing back briefly, she said, “Thank you.” For trusting me, too, she added, silently.

When Harmony nodded in answer, Mavis moved from the landing. The Leighton house was laid out with rooms tightly knit. An ideal nest that kept its inhabitants close. The master suite was on one side of the hall and William’s and Finnian’s rooms were on the other, connected by a Jack-and-Jill bathroom. Mavis had been there once. She’d gone from one boy’s room through the bathroom to the other so she could climb out the back window and escape without Olivia and Gerald’s notice.

It felt odd choosing the first door on the left. She’d dated William in secret so their families wouldn’t find out and make noise about the two making things more permanent. It was strange seeking another man through the same door, intruding on the space of her ex.

Gavin’s shirt she found hung at the foot of the full bed, and his shoes near the bathroom door. She heard the shower running.

She bypassed the shirt, stepped over the shoes and came to the door. Raising her fist, she quelled hesitation and rapped her knuckles against it.

She heard a curse. The door was snatched from the jamb. Gavin filled the space of the frame.

Mavis blinked. He was a mountain. Like Prometheus, he was a fricking beast. Toned. Muscled out—definition on top of definition.

There were ribs, however. Enough of a hint that on anyone else might’ve looked ordinary. On him, they smacked of self-neglect. His rib cage as a whole should’ve been lost to the ripple of abs and the scintillating muscles that honed his waistline to perfection. Behind the eyes, she saw truth. There, he looked gaunt. As if the sharp bones of his honest self peered through the coat of naked flesh.

She caught the moment...the very brief moment that his honest self reached for her. She nearly reached back.

Then he blinked. Resignation resumed. Annoyance followed. “What do you want?” he asked.

“No questions.” Placing her hand on the deep-inked, red-eyed wolf as black and forbidding as the storm he held inside him, she moved him back into the bathroom, stepping in, too, until she could shut them both in.

His expression turned puzzled as she shut off the tap in the shower stall. “What’re you up to now?”

“This is me pouring water over the fire,” she told him.

He stared. Shook his head. “No. No, this is you dressing up as a can of lighter fluid and throwing yourself at it.”

“Give me your thumb,” she said, extending her hand.

He held it back. “I’m fine.”

“You let me in the other day,” she reminded him. “Why?”

“I thought we weren’t asking questions.”

“Gavin. Why?”

“Maybe I was desperate.”

“Maybe you do need someone.”

“This is hell. I’m not dragging you into it.”

“I do what I want. And what I want is to help you. So stop being a man—a big stubborn man—and let me help you!”

The staring didn’t cease. She wondered how much he could see in the closeness of the whitewashed room, under the single bright vanity bulb. Not her pulse tripping against her throat. Not the frisson of nerves in her wrists and knees. Hopefully not the desperation pressed between her lips.

He brought his hand up to meet hers.

She fought a tumultuous sigh. There was dirt on his fingertips still. There was dirt on hers, too, despite several scrubbings in the powder room downstairs. It was caked red under both their nails. The scent of it, of their work together, came between them. She hoped he found it as grounding as she did. Gripping him lightly, she extended his thumb toward her. She moved her shoulders back, trying to grind the edginess out of her joints. She started to press her thumb and forefinger against the web between his. Then she stopped and bent her head, releasing a long breath that streamed cool over his thumb.

The shower steam, fine and damp, was suspended around them. Silence closed them in. She saw his lungs expand against his ribs and noticed his pulse trip against the base of his throat. His breath moved over the center part of her hair, at the apex of her brow.

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