Hannah cooed at someone behind me, and I turned to see Dani weaving her way through the tables in the backyard in our general direction.
“Yeah, you and me both, little one. You and me both.”
Damn if it hadn’t been Dani who had somehow made my cold heart beat again with blood instead of lava. As if she really was the goddess Athena I’d teased her about being—gorgeous, smart, and able to smite a man to ash. The words she’d spoken to Truck while we’d been standing at the door, waiting to walk down the aisle, hit me again, bringing a frown to my face.
A frown that required I repeat to myself all the reasons she was off-limits to me. The obligation I had for the family Darren had left behind. My friendship with Mac. The fact that my job was not built for permanent relationships. Relationships and SEALs didn’t belong in the same sentence. After all, it was why Tristan and Hannah were now alone. It was why it should have been me who had died.
I didn’t have a death wish like the brass seemed to think these days. I just didn’t have the volume of people waiting for me to come home that Darren had. It was the rare person who would say, “I wish it had been him instead of Nash who had died.” Darren had a whole stadium full of people whispering it.
The lie I was telling myself twitched at the back of my mind.
I did have someone who would miss me. Who did miss me. We were just as impossible as Dani and me.
An ache filled me that I found hard to acknowledge. Sweet tea and myrtle and chess.
I was surprised to find Dani at our table. After avoiding me, she was suddenly at my side, wearing that magenta dress which tortured every particle of my being. She looked like a runway model. A model with a brain the size of Texas. Maybe the entire Eastern Seaboard.
She was wasting her talent sitting at her home in Delaware while she regrouped. While she took the twelve-year career she’d built and threw it away because some dickwad senator had decided to attack her in an elevator. Last night, she’d said it wasn’t the reason she’d given it up, but I wasn’t sure I believed her. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter what I believed. I didn’t have a right to say one damn thing about how she did or didn’t live her life.
“You’re going to give her nightmares,” Dani said, tugging Hannah out of my arms without asking.
Hannah did little to defend me. Her tiny smile turned into giggles as she immediately clung to Dani’s hair with an excited squeal and the word, “Ann.”
Because she couldn’t quite get the D or the ee part yet.
“Hannah and I were getting along fine until she saw you,” I said with a grunt of dissatisfaction I didn’t really feel because my stupid-ass body liked having her this close. Close enough that I could smell her unique scent. It smelled like sunshine. Like honeysuckle, and lemonade, and hazy days. And it brought more memories of people and a place I’d wanted to forget as if I was once again wandering the scented fields of blooming geraniums.
“Was he scaring you, munchkin?” Dani said in the baby-talk voice everyone seemed to adopt when holding babies. Except me. I wasn’t sure I knew how to baby talk to anyone. “Where’s Tristan?” Dani asked.
“Bathroom.”
Our eyes met for a moment above the baby’s head.
“I wanted to say I was sorry,” Dani told me, shoulders back, stiff. She meant it, but it was taking a lot out of her, and I couldn’t imagine what the hell she had to be sorry for. I was the asshole who’d slept with her—had incredible, heart-pounding sex—and then asked her to leave.
“Don’t,” I said, shaking my head.
“I am. About what I said last night. They’re not going to kick you out, Nash. You’re too valuable to them.”
I wasn’t ready to walk away from being a SEAL. I was still hoping to get back on active duty. I needed to slay a lot more dragons before I retired my guns and cammies. I wasn’t sure it was going to happen if the psychologist had any say in the matter.
I stood, bringing our bodies closer together, tantalizing and torturing us both. Wanting to beg for forgiveness in a way I never begged.
“Dani, I―”
She shook her head at me right as the song switched from something I didn’t know into the old-time “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and she swirled away with the baby onto the parquet dance floor assembled over the pool in the Whittaker’s backyard. They had enough money to buy most of the state of Delaware if they wanted, but you’d never know it on most occasions. They never flaunted it except when it came to things like this—weddings and celebrations. Then, everything was done at the highest level of glamour and cost.
It reminded me of the parties my mom used to throw before she’d drowned. Before she’d been lost to me and everyone else. I wasn’t sure why Mom was so close to me the last few weeks. Images of her from so long ago that I shouldn’t even have them anymore, but I did. Mom laughing, shaking her black hair into my face as she tickled me. Dad’s booming chortle joining her. Images and reminders floating about my brain, haunting me. Making me think of home and a house even bigger than this one that no one knew about. No one knew I had enough of my own money to buy a good chunk of Delaware if I chose. I liked it that way. No one needed to know.
I watched as the goddess Athena twirled on the dance floor with the baby. The hours
