Geri Krotow - Navy Rules

Of all people, you can trust Robyn with who your new client is.

Robyn was the one person who knew the whole story, knew who Maeve’s father was. Robyn had never betrayed her, even to their mother.

Maybe she should tell Robyn. But Robyn would kill her if she found out Winnie was driving up to Max’s today.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you that the mother of the autistic boy I told you about wants you to bring Sam over at some point.” Robyn was off on another tangent, nothing new for her sis.

“Have her call the base. Maybe there’s another dog therapy team available. I only work with returning sailors at this point.”

“I told her that, but she sounds desperate.”

“She has to work through her pediatrician.” Winnie sensed Robyn’s frustration, and she wanted to help, but she and Sam could only be in one place at a time. Since she’d started dog therapy with Sam a year ago, requests for service work had increased tenfold.

She’d begun it with the intent of giving back to the Navy community that had so strongly supported her and Krista in the aftermath of Tom’s death. The basic obedience and Canine Good Citizenship tests had been easy for Sam to pass. True to his German shepherd genes, he was incredibly intelligent and motivated to please his trainer, Winnie.

“Okay, then, I’d better go. Brendan is off on a tear!”

Winnie laughed. “Of course he is. I still say you’d enjoy a day or two on your own each week. For your sanity, you know?”

“Maybe we could just switch lives for a day.”

Winnie understood what Robyn meant. Winnie had the girls taken care of, between school and day care. She had to—she didn’t have a husband or partner to support her. But true to her oversensitive nature, Robyn panicked at the immediate silence on the line.

“Oh, Winnie, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Stop it, Robyn. I know exactly what you meant. Please, please let it go.” Robyn ran on guilt as much as caffeine, a trait both girls inherited from their devout Catholic mother. Whenever the three of them got together over a cup of coffee, their father accused them of sounding like a beehive in overdrive. Thank God for their father, whose patient nature made him a revered high school teacher and track coach, and had kept their family on an even keel when they were younger.

“All right. But if your day turns out differently, come and meet me for lunch, okay? We can get takeout and eat it while Brendan naps.”

“Will do. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

Winnie turned off her phone with a sigh of relief.

Thai takeout in front of Robyn’s woodstove sounded like pure bliss. But the chances of there being enough time to drive up to Anacortes, the town north of Whidbey Island, and back again to get the girls from school in Coupeville, were slim.

She still had to finish her fiber inventory. Whidbey Fibers’ success wasn’t an accident. She’d taken the energy she’d focused on her marriage and put it into the corporation, client by client.

The farm-owners were, for the most part, great at raising livestock and producing viable quantities of fiber, but getting it spun into usable yarn was another story. Drawing on her business background, Winnie had recruited machine- and hand-spinners across the Pacific Northwest and became the liaison between the farmers, spinners and yarn shops. She’d begun receiving orders from Europe and Australia within eight months of start-up.

Her business model was unique in that instead of simply purchasing the fiber outright, she shared the profits of the finished product with the farmers. This increased their motivation to produce and created a camaraderie in the Whidbey Island fiber community that hadn’t existed before. Instead of competing, each farm benefited from the success of all the farms. She also employed hand- and machine-spinners who transformed the fresh fiber into usable yarn.

As she walked by bin after bin of sheared wool and alpaca and checked off her inventory master list, Winnie’s mind drifted back to her other commitment for today.

Her therapy-dog visit.

Max.

She’d accepted the assignment knowing full well that she risked losing the secure life she’d built for herself and the girls.

Self-recrimination washed over her. She took a ball of alpaca out of its bin and held the soft wool to her cheek. She should’ve told Robyn who her client was. When Robyn found out, and she would find out, she’d be furious that Winnie hadn’t told her she was finally going to tell Max about Maeve. Rightfully so, as Robyn had been her support and anchor through the past five years. She’d never judged Winnie and had kept her deepest secrets secret.

Ever since Winnie learned she was pregnant, Robyn had been adamant that Winnie needed to tell Max he was a father. And it wasn’t that Winnie disagreed. The timing had been hell, with Max headed to war. She’d planned to tell him when he returned, but then his deployment was extended.

Risking such a huge emotional upset to a man at war was not something Winnie would ever do.

Shivers of apprehension chilled her as she looked out the back window of her fiber studio onto Penn Cove. The gray sky covered the white-capped bay and she knew the waves on the western side of Whidbey would be even more powerful.

A spring storm was coming in from the Pacific. She hated making the drive up to the Naval Air Station on the slick black road, but her volunteer time at the base was one of the few sacrosanct commitments in her life, besides the girls.

She loved her daughters and wanted to cherish each moment with them. But she also relished her work and needed time alone to think about how to manage her burgeoning career without the neediness of a teen and toddler weighting her every move.

As she prepared to leave the studio, she paused in front of the window that overlooked the street. Her building sat in between the rocky narrow coast and a side road off Coupeville’s Main Street. Winnie watched the rain begin to fall. When she came back from this afternoon’s therapy visit, everything would be different.

She leaned her head against the studio’s front door and closed her eyes. She tried to let the rain pattering against the window panes of the century-old building soothe her.

It hadn’t been her choice to be a single parent to Krista. A mishap on an aircraft carrier had dealt a devastating blow to her life when it killed her husband and Krista’s father, Tom, more than five years ago.

She’d had a choice, however, in how she made a family for Maeve, her baby. She’d deliberately refused to tell her family, except for Robyn, who Maeve’s father was. Her parents had wondered if she’d used Tom’s frozen sperm. She’d assured them that wasn’t the case, but as they became more persistent she let them think whatever they wanted.

She’d told Robyn about Maeve’s father—with instructions to tell Max if anything happened to her. But she needed to tell Max herself; he deserved to know before anyone else did that he was Maeve’s father. Unfortunately she’d learned that a life can end with no notice, and that included her own.

While her parents had no idea who’d fathered Maeve, it was pretty clear soon after she was born—with dark, straight hair—that she had a different father than Krista, who shared Winnie’s curly blond mane.

Maeve’s father had moved back to Whidbey Island two months ago. In spite of her best intentions to tell him he was a father as soon as she could, she’d still procrastinated.

It’d been two years, three months and five days since she’d last seen U.S. Navy Commander Robert “Max” Ford. It seemed more like three minutes.

Especially when she looked at her beautiful baby daughter.

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