“SEALs don’t quit,” he said gruffly.
“Whittakers either,” I returned and dealt the cards. Except I think he knew it for the lie it was. I’d quit. Once upon a time, Mac had quit, too. Sometimes, it took a knock to our heads to make us realize our mistakes. I was pretty sure walking away from Capitol Hill had saved me, but what I was doing right now…accepting the dare Nash had laid down? I didn’t need a knock to my head to know it was a colossal error.
Nash
SWEET CHILD O’ MINE
“She's got eyes of the bluest skies…
Her hair reminds me of a warm safe place,
Where as a child I'd hide,
And pray for the thunder and the rain to quietly pass me by.”
Performed by Guns N’ Roses
Written by Rose / Hudson / Mckagan / Stradlin / Adler
I watched as Dani unknowingly put a tortilla chip in her mouth. She’d eaten as many as she’d won. If she kept eating them, we weren’t going to have anything left to play with, and playing with her was the one thing keeping me on course at the moment.
Since going back to the base, I’d seen the shrink daily, seen the platoon zero times, and been asked to return to the fucking academy until they could figure out what to do with me. The US Navy had invested a lot of time and money into me over the years. They weren’t really ready to let me go, even if I’d fucking punched a team member. They wouldn’t want to let me out, even if the shrink said I had PTSD. Which I didn’t.
Did I have nightmares about that mission? Hell, yeah. Did it work itself into my head and my heart? How could it not? Hearing the AK47 gunfire start at the exact location I’d left my team had almost made me lose my cool. Instead, I’d slithered back from where I’d just taken the kill shot, knowing my team’s only advantage was in the enemy not knowing I was out there.
But none of that. The nightmares. The regret. The self-hate. None of it gave me the shakes or had me freaking the hell out enough that I couldn’t hold my gun steady and take the shots I needed to take. Instead, it gave me even more motivation to do my job right. To make sure I continued what Darren and I had started from the moment we’d been roommates at Annapolis. To do the one and only thing I’d ever wanted to do, much to my family’s chagrin.
What did give me the shakes was Tristan not returning one text or call over the entire week. I could feel Darren’s breath on my back even now, pissed I wasn’t watching over her. Pissed I wasn’t in my car on my way to New York, making damn sure she was okay. Driving to Church Beach had been my first step, but now I couldn’t leave.
When I’d walked in to hear Selena Gomez music blaring, I knew it wasn’t Tristan. Tristan was all country, all the time. Entering the kitchen with Molly in my arms and seeing Dani shaking her butt in her skimpy athletic gear, singing in a throaty voice that was almost as good as the singer’s, it had taken every ounce of me to not drop Molly and put my arms around her.
Challenging her to poker had been stupid. Or rather, accepting her challenge had been stupid. She had an edge in this game by simply being her, distracting me with her looks and her brain. She was like the goddess Athena. Wisdom, beauty, and deadly sins. She made moves that didn’t always make sense to my logic-trained brain. She followed a set of rules I hadn’t yet deciphered, which put me at a disadvantage.
However, the drunker we both got, the more tells I saw in her, and the easier it was to simply react to the tells and the cards without overanalyzing it as some great war campaign. Dani was right; we weren’t at war.
I watched as she rubbed her index finger along the edge of the table, which meant she was bluffing. It was a small movement, just like the one I’d caught earlier when her eyebrow rose for a millisecond at the good hand she’d been dealt. Between that and her eating away at her winnings, we were pretty much even, and pretty much out of chips.
I poured us the last two glasses of whiskey, watching her face as she realized her pile was almost empty.
“What did you do with the chips?” she asked. There wasn’t a slur to her words, but her eyes were a little glossy. They probably matched mine. I was surprised at the amount of alcohol she’d been able to consume.
“You ate them,” I responded with a smirk.
“I did not! Did you? Cheater,” she said. I leaned over the table and picked up a crumb stuck to the shoulder of her tank top. The thin cotton showed her sports bra underneath. The bra that couldn’t hide the way her breasts pebbled at my touch. At a touch that was nothing. A mere grazing of fingers on clothes.
My entire body lit up at her physical response to me, but I locked it down. Sleeping with Mac’s sister wasn’t the way to go. It was a good way to ruin our friendship. Plus, Dani was Tristan’s friend, and Tristan would be almost as unhappy about it as Mac, knowing my less-than-stellar track record with relationships.
I held out the chip on my finger for Dani to see. Her eyes took it in before pushing my hand away. “This is what I get for playing with real chips. They’re too tempting.”
But her eyes were on my mouth when she said it.
“I guess we both win,” I responded, returning her look, eyes trailing down to her full pink lips. They were the perfect kind of lips for kissing. The kind you
