Amber Leigh Williams - Navy Seal's Match

Gavin felt a stone drop in his stomach. It sank to the bottom and spread cold everywhere. “I don’t think so.”

“Oh, why not?” Zelda asked hopefully. “You’d get an idea of what we do. He’d enjoy our approach at least, I think, Mavis. Tell him!”

“Every job we take,” Mavis said dutifully, “we approach as skeptics. Our main focus is debunking claims of paranormal activity. It takes up the bulk of what we do.”

“I still don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said dully.

“Come on, handsome,” Zelda said. “There’s nothing worse for the mind than confining oneself to the indoors. It’ll make you crazier than a holy roller on Sunday. The cure is fresh air and the outdoors.”

“With all due respect, ma’am,” Gavin said coldly, “I’m not going anywhere.” He lifted his hands from the counter. “Excuse me.”

He sidestepped Prometheus, nearly overcompensated and leaned unintentionally into Mavis. When he felt her hand on his arm for balance, he straightened, veered around her and made a quick exit.

Not quick enough to miss Zelda utter, confounded, “He called me ma’am again. I’m not sure I deserved it.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“I KNOW HE’S not eating like he used to,” Briar Savitt said as she walked alongside Mavis through the pecan grove. The salty breeze adhered the clothes to their backs. The swelling heat index hadn’t stopped Briar from taking Mavis aside just as soon as she’d arrived at the Leighton orchard. “He’s so much thinner than he was when we saw him last. But do you think he’s sleeping better now that he’s at Miss Zelda’s where it’s quiet?”

“I couldn’t tell you.” Since the brush-off from him several days ago, Mavis had steered clear of Gavin, opting to stay home for dinner as opposed to lingering at Zelda’s in the late afternoons.

“You and Miss Zelda talk every day,” Briar said. “She must tell you...how things are going.”

Briar was the kindest person Mavis had ever known. Her reasons for the inquest were genuine. Regardless, Mavis wasn’t comfortable. Especially since Gavin had already accused her of keeping tabs on him for his parents. She cleared her throat. “I think Prometheus sees Gavin more than Zelda does. I understand he comes down for meals and weight lifting. Zelda gave him one side of her private meditation room for his bench. She says he isn’t conversational.” Mavis shrugged. “That’s really all I know, Briar. Sorry.”

“I don’t mean to put you on the spot.” She rubbed Mavis’s arm in a motherly fashion, then seemed to remember that Mavis wasn’t the affectionate sort and eased back. “But Cole’s eaten up over the whole situation.”

“Because Gavin’s living at Miss Zelda’s?” Mavis asked.

“No. Well, yes. He wishes he was within arm’s length again. We all do. But the injury. The trauma. I wish we could do something to help Gavin be free of it.”

“He’ll probably never be free of it,” Mavis reminded her. Briar’s mouth folded into a line and worry knit her forehead. Mavis hated to see her this way. “He came back. And he tried to make it work at the inn. He’s never done that before. Not since he was a kid.”

“We think it’s only because it wasn’t working elsewhere,” Briar said, “on his own. He tried that first.”

“In my experience, admitting you need help is the first step to recovery.”

“Yes, but how long before he convinces himself again that he doesn’t need us?” Briar asked. “That he’s better off alone? We’ll do anything to make him stay.”

“You’re doing the right thing,” Mavis assured her. “Letting him be on his own—or with Miss Zelda... Letting him have his own space...it’ll all work out. Especially if he gives in to her. Miss Zelda wants him to try meditation. Maybe some yoga. It won’t help if he’s skeptical. And if Gavin is anything, it’s skeptical.” Of everything—of everybody , Mavis thought. There had been that moment under the bougainvillea where she’d seemed to get through that coarse web of suspicion. It had vanished at Zelda’s.

“It wasn’t just his experience on the far side of the world that made him that way,” Briar said. “You do know about his mother.”

“Yes.” Mavis frowned. Gavin’s mother, Tiffany Howard, had made large upsetting waves whenever she visited Gavin as a child.

“Thank goodness he cut off communication with her,” Briar stated. “I’ll never forget him as a boy, caught between two worlds. I know she tried for the longest time to poison his opinion of us and Fairhope.”

“He was smarter than that,” Mavis said.

“Yes,” Briar said, a small smile making the lines in her brow retreat briefly. “Though I’m afraid when that didn’t work, she tried another tack. She made him think he was different—that he’d never have a place here. That try as he might, he’d never belong.”

“That’s horrible,” Mavis muttered.

“The strongest minds can yield to the basest ideas if they hear them enough. So we understand why he feels he’s never been able to stay, and all we can do is reinforce that he does belong. To all of us.”

All of us .

“If you think he’s in trouble,” Briar said, “or you see he’s about to run, will you...”

“I’ll call,” Mavis assured her. “But I think you’re right. He is strong. He doesn’t think he is.” She thought of the weakness peeking through the bandage he’d placed around his open wounds. She’d seen the strength behind it, flagging but real. “I don’t think he wants to be alone. Not completely.”

“Thank goodness for you, Mavis,” Briar said, ignoring boundaries and squeezing Mavis’s hand as they approached the deck of the Leightons’ brick house. “I feel better knowing you’re close to him.”

“Why exactly?” Mavis asked.

“Because he’s always respected you,” Briar revealed. “A friend can save a life.”

Mavis felt a frisson of awareness scaling her spine. She crossed her arms. Did Gavin need saving? Would he want her to be the one to save him?

Doubtful . Regardless, she couldn’t let Briar down. And just like at the inn, she wouldn’t let him drown on his own. Not without him taking her down with him, if necessary.

The door to the Leightons’ rear deck swung ajar wide enough to bash the handle against the wall behind it. A short blond head streaked through, bounding down the steps to the ground. “Mammy! Mavis!”

“Here comes trouble,” Mavis said, a fond smile tugging at her lips as Briar waved a cheerful greeting.

Briar crouched to wrap her granddaughter up like a present. “The world is right again,” she murmured. She chuckled low in her throat, hugged Bea tighter, then sat back on her heels to skim curls from the girl’s brow. She pressed a kiss to the center of her forehead. “Your grandfather showed up early with you, as promised. Good man. But did he bring watermelon?”

Bea nodded eagerly. “They were selling them on the side of the road. There were hundreds of them, big and dirty—like they’d just popped out of the ground. He let me pick two, but I wasn’t big enough to carry them...”

“Give it time,” Mavis said, amused. The precocious four-year-old was growing like a weed.

“...so Uncle Gavin carried them for me,” Bea concluded.

“What?” Mavis said, slack-jawed, while a surprised Briar said, “Gavin? He came?”

“Uh-huh,” Bea replied. “He might not see so good anymore, but he sure can carry a watermelon!”

The happy report of barking brought Mavis’s head up. Prometheus, who’d been gleefully chasing squirrels since arriving in the back of her Subaru, trampled a shrub of Indian hawthorn as he made a break for the raised deck.