Amber Leigh Williams - Navy Seal's Match

It was fear that he would open his eyes and the civilian world would be less clear to him than the assault of vivid memories from another world.

Funny that he hadn’t contemplated how stark and colorful those dreams were before his last mission, the one that had robbed him of half the visibility in his right eye and all of his left.

Gavin took a moment to quell the anxiety, to manage the fear, even if he couldn’t kill it any more than the flashbacks.

He braced himself, stomach tightening. Then he opened his eyes and confronted the odd blur of light and shade, the merging of shapes. He picked a fixed point out of his right eye to study...

The white house was like a beacon on a hill. Hanna’s Inn spread prettily, overlooking Mobile Bay. Even Gavin could see the proud and regal way it held itself up—columns, balconies, long narrow panes that glistened as the sun shrank from its high post. The winding paths through the gardens...he knew them by heart. Just as he knew the sand skirting the kempt lawn curved in a crescent shape to follow the slope of the Eastern Shore. Beneath its peaks and tumble-down kudzu-lined valleys, the beach formed the watery border of Fairhope, Alabama, the small town that had called to Gavin for most of his life.

He’d ignored that call, returning to Fairhope only out of necessity. However, nothing could compete with the inn that his father saw to alongside his stepmother, whose family it had belonged to for generations.

A smudge detracted from Gavin’s focal point. It was black and willow-slim. As he fixed on it instead of the inn, he frowned. It was getting closer, if not bigger, and he was definitely in its line of fire.

He knew only one person in the world who wore neck-to-toe black in July in the south.

Gavin sat up in the hammock and placed his bare feet in the thick grass his father tended well. There was a catch in his neck and his muscles were taut as wires. He had learned how to snatch his mind out of the dreams, but his muscles rarely followed suit.

He’d sought the hammock and the company of waves for relaxation to break the vicious cycle of PTSD, even if only for a short while.

He might’ve been able to do it if he hadn’t given in to fatigue and dropped off.

Smoothing his hand over the outer edge of his thigh, he wiped the damp from his palm. Oh, great . Night sweats were turning into day sweats, and the first person to find that out was potentially the last person he wanted to know.

“Have you seen a dog?” Mavis Bracken asked as she bore down on him in her combat boots.

He offered her a lazy salute. “Freckles.”

In spite of his limited field of vision, he knew she scowled. She’d hated the nickname he’d given her as a youngster. The dark speckles on pale cheeks made her stand out in a sea of faces. While his father, Cole, and stepmother, Briar, ran the inn, Gavin’s half sister, Harmony, had become bosom pals with Mavis, the daughter of the florist next door. Mavis was always younger—always aloof.

Some would say she was odd—those same people called him a loner.

With their close ties to Hanna’s, the flower shop, Flora, and the two families that had grown tight between the establishments, Gavin had always felt that he and Mavis shared similar experiences; they were both outsiders.

“You don’t look too good,” she observed.

He tried to release the tension ball inside him. It didn’t work. Gavin passed a hand over the back of his shorn head. “Hard to shave when you can hardly see a mirror.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Mavis paused and he felt her. His toes rolled in on themselves and a shimmy went through the fine hairs on the back of his neck. Mavis had a way, an eerie way that spoke of something otherworldly. She saw people in ways others didn’t understand.

She was downright spooky, and he felt far too raw to be the center of her attention. “You’re looking for a dog,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“He’s big,” she provided. “Black. Goes by the name Prometheus.”

“You’re kidding.” When she didn’t answer, his lips parted. “Right?”

Familiar sarcasm flooded Mavis’s voice. “Well, I thought Killer was overdone.”

“Prometheus.” Gavin shook his head. “Because that’s not over the top.”

“Have you seen him?” Mavis asked pointedly.

“Was he carrying a torch and running really fast?”

“Gavin.”

“No,” he answered. “I haven’t seen a dog or a Titan.”

Her arm rose to her head as if to shield her eyes from the sun. “Damn it,” she muttered. “It must’ve been herons. He always chases the herons.”

Gavin scratched his unshaven chin. “Is, uh, this by chance your dog?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“How’d you lose him?”

“He wanders,” she said by way of excuse.

“You’ve heard of leash laws,” he guessed.

“He’s called Prometheus and he weighs nearly as much as I do. You think a leash is going to make a difference?”

“He sounds like a legitimate beast,” Gavin mused. “At least you got the name right.”

Her arms crossed and her weight shifted. “You used to have a dog. Boots. Wasn’t that his name?”

Gavin’s hands folded. He clenched them against his thighs. “He wasn’t my dog.”

“What do you mean? During your visit two years ago, Harmony said you couldn’t shut up about him.”

“Boots belonged to the US government,” Gavin said. “Not me.”

“Oh.” She said nothing more. Because, again, Mavis sensed things. Like the fact that Boots had been shot outside a checkpoint in Kabul. Almost exactly like Benji had years before.

Don’t go to that place again , Gavin told himself. Once more, he focused on what was present. He picked Mavis as his focal point. A dark beacon. The kick-ass combat boots were followed up her slender ranks by black pants, or leggings. The heat index today was 102, which meant she either hadn’t checked today’s highs before leaving her bat cave or she was crazy.

Crazy , he thought. Let’s go with crazy .

There were white slashes in the fabric for venting at least. They went well with the punk look she’d owned since the tender age of sixteen. Or was it fourteen? By that point, he’d been in BUD/S, fighting to fulfill his dream of joining the SEAL teams.

“What are you doing out here?” she wondered out loud.

He spread his empty hands. “Reading the newspaper?”

She answered with knowing silence, making him more aware of the tremor in his knees. Mavis probably also knew by now about that vase he’d broken in the hall upstairs at Hanna’s and the semi-argument he’d had with his father as a result.

This isn’t working , he had told Cole as he stood by like a chump listening to the man and his wife clean up his mess. His third, in as many weeks.

We’ll move things around , Cole had replied.

Briar was quick to jump on the bandwagon. Sure , she’d said in her feather-soft voice. It’s my fault, really, for leaving the vase in your way .

The fact that they’d worked their butts off to accommodate him did little to temper the hot-burning coals inside him. The coals had been there since the surgeons informed him that he would be legally blind for the rest of his life, effectively shutting down his military career—the only calling he’d ever known.

It wasn’t fair to resent Cole or Briar. Yet with every valuable Briar had to sweep broken off the floor, those coals smoldered.

“When was the last time you slept more than an hour at a time?”

Gavin frowned at Mavis’s inquiry. Yeah, no. Not going down that road .