Amber Williams - Navy Seal's Match

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 .

“There are people,” she suggested.

“People?” he chimed.

“That you can talk to.”

“I don’t want to talk to them,” he said quickly. He’d seen enough doctors. They were all in agreement that he was a head case who needed to be on the antianxiety meds that made him spin out of turn.

He’d take his chances with the flashbacks.

Gavin pushed himself up from the hammock, finally feeling steady enough. He crossed his arms and lowered his head, hiding the pink scars raked across his face by the winter’s RPG blast. He’d forgotten to use sunblock again, as instructed. What did it matter? The scars wouldn’t fade any more than the blindness. He started to walk away, then heard her drawn-out breath and stopped. “What would you know about it?” he ventured. “Ever had a flashback, Freckles? Night sweats? Hypertension brought on by stress?”

“No,” she answered plainly.

He gave a nod and began to walk toward the inn again.

“But I know someone who has,” she said at his back.

“I’m sure,” he replied, and kept walking.

“Which is your good side?” she asked, following. “Your right or your left?”

Why was she following? He’d never been one for glossing things over. Would he have to bite her head off to get her to stop chasing him with the same good intentions as everyone else? “I don’t have a good side,” he replied. When she only continued to follow, he elaborated, “The left’s worse. Why?”

She didn’t answer, but he found her in his right periphery. A shadow. With a quick glance semi-close, he was better able to pick up on her dark hair, cut raggedly, longer in the front where it tickled her fine-arrowed chin and shorter in the back where it rode just above her hairline. He could see she was wearing a flowy sleeveless top, feminine even if it was black as brimstone. A hint of skin underneath turned him on to the dark cut of her bra.

When in God’s name had Mavis started wearing flowy, see-through blouses? She was in her late twenties, but when Gavin could see twenty-twenty, he’d never known her hips to swing quite like they seemed to now.