Almost Always AMAZON

by Christie Ridgway

  “Don’t,” Skye said quickly. Then she jumped to her feet, clearly flustered. “Sorry. It’s none of my business. I have to go.”

  Tess frowned. “Skye?”

  “He can’t see me,” she said, lifting a hand. Then, distress in every tense line of her slender body, she rushed away.

  They stared after her, the too-loose clothes flapping around her as she ran up the beach. “What was that about?” asked Jane.

  Tess looked grim. “I hate to think it’s another woman who’s fallen for the wrong man.” She slumped in her chair, her hands draped over its arms, her long legs splayed. “What a summer. Disaster abounds.”

  Considering she was still living at the cove with her kids and without her husband, Jane assumed the other woman included her marriage in that gloomy statement. “It’s not all bad,” she said. “Your daughter’s more consumed with her history project than pregnancy these days. Duncan and Oliver may have discovered a marketable skill.”

  “How so? You think there’s money in monkey imitation?”

  Smiling, Jane shrugged. “In ten years’ time, who knows?”

  “I’m developing a dislike of annoying glass-half-full types.”

  Jane cast a look at her. “Something tells me that’s your usual type.”

  Tess sighed. “Give me more to put in my glass, then.”

  “It’s summer. We’re sitting beachside. We have a pretty view of the sun setting on the Pacific.” Jane crossed her feet at the ankles. “Now you go.”

  The other woman groaned. “The mosquitoes aren’t out. Yet.”

  “You’re not even trying.”

  “Fine. Russ is too little for Cheetos.”

  “You are in bad shape.”

  “Don’t fall in love, Jane. That’s all I can tell you.”

  The warning only brought to mind a white grin, a big hand tousling her hair, a pair of reporter’s eyes that looked at her and seemed to see something beyond four plain letters. We’re both aware there’s more to you than that.

  “That’s a suspicious silence.” Tess groaned again. “Don’t say it. Don’t tell me you and Griffin—”

  “I didn’t say it,” Jane said, breaking in. There was no “she and Griffin.” “I mean, before, I meant to tell you that he’s actually working on the memoir.”

  Tess straightened. “Truth?”

  “Truth. He’s over there right now, productive as you please.”

  “Well, that’s good news.”

  “Very good,” Jane agreed. The only bad had been her silly self, which allowed her brain to head off on useless tangents. It had been a night out of time! “And it was good I came over here too, because now I can go back, refreshed. Thanks for the conversation.”

  As she headed for No. 9, dusk was falling. Tess’s voice came to her from the now-shadowy porch, a quiet warning. “Jane, just remember. That you… That Griffin—”

  “It’s all good,” Jane said firmly, repeating the word. “Everything’s under control.”

  She let herself into the house and set the postcard from Gage on the coffee table. No lamps were lit in the living room or the kitchen, so she turned them on as she went by, then trod down the hall to the office. Nearing the doorway, she noted there wasn’t any sign of life in there either—and she had to shake off the sinister feel of it.

  Then she heard Private whine, and she knew man and dog were inside the room. Still, her hand trembled as she reached for the light switch.

  “Don’t,” a voice said. It was gritty and dark and almost unrecognizable as Griffin’s.

  It took a moment to make him out. He was stretched on the floor like a corpse—except in a mirror of the first time they’d met, he balanced a bottle of beer on his midriff. Three empties lay beside him, knocked over like bowling pins. Private was nearby, attentive to his master’s needs.

  Whatever they might be. Jane didn’t have a clue.

  “What happened?” she asked, in her library voice.

  He was silent so long she worried he might have passed out on her. Just when she thought she should check, he lifted his head to take another draw from his beer. It was so quiet she heard him swallow. Then his skull clunked against the wood floor, and Jane winced. Griffin didn’t seem to notice.

  “Nothing. I’ve been working, just like I’m supposed to, honey-pie. I was going through the notes.”

  Something else had been in that big envelope: several small notebooks Griffin had used during his embedded year. They were dog-eared and dirty, but each was labeled with their dates of use and bound with a rubber band. She’d assumed that at some point he’d sent back a batch of them for safekeeping.

  Private whined again. Exactly, Jane thought.

  “Maybe we should get you something to eat,” she suggested. “Or drink. Coffee. A soda.”

  “Beer’s fine,” Griffin said. “Beer’s making me drunk.”

  He didn’t sound drunk.

  “Beer’s helping me mine my emotions, honey-pie.”

  Now he sounded angry, and just a little bit mean.

  Her stomach clenched, and her first instinct was to run back to Tess’s. But there he was on the floor, her dark pirate, looking just as alone as he’d been that first afternoon with the raucous Party Central all around him. His sister had said he’d declined invitations to be with family and refused to talk about his experience. Had he reached a place and time where he could finally tell someone about it?

  “What about the notes?” she asked, her voice soft. “Why did they bother you?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  That’s when she saw it. A slip of paper crumpled on the floor beside him, a tiny ball that she guessed had packed enough punch to knock over those beer bottles—and knock Griffin off his feet. Without thinking, she bent to pick it up, then flattened it out with her fingers.

  It was impossible to read in the dim room.

  “Always signed her name the same, goddamn it.” His voice was harsh. “Like a fucking fourth-grader. An E surrounded by a heart.”

  Jane’s heart gave a little lurch at the image. “This is from Erica?”

  Once again he lifted his head to swig his beer. “She would write messages on scraps of paper when we were embedded. Leave them on my bunk.”

  Jane could guess what kind of notes they were. An E surrounded by a heart.

  When he didn’t say any more, she found herself filling the silence. “I know it’s hard.” If only she could get him started, maybe he could express his grief and find a way past it. Find a way to…to someone else.

  She bit her lip, guilty at the thought, and forced herself to go on. “I can’t fathom how hard. Loving someone and losing them like that…”

  Now his silence seemed to grow, expanding until it pressed against the walls, a black blob that made the room more murky, the atmosphere almost threatening. Private whined again, and his furry head dipped to his front paws.

  Jane’s throat went dry. Light, she decided. They needed some light. A little warmth, a little glow, would take the menace out of the place. Maybe out of the man.

  Griffin lay between her and the lamp on the desk. Urged by an odd panic, she darted for it. Halfway there, his hand snaked out and grabbed her ankle.

  She yelped.

  “Is that where your sappy, overactive oven-mitt imagination has led you, Jane? You think I’m in a mood because I loved her?”

  His fingers were hot, and they bit into her skin, staying just on the not-quite side of pain. Despite that and the billowing tension in the room, Jane felt herself reacting to his touch. Hot chills arrowed up the inside of her leg, a straight shot that pierced her belly and then her heart.

  A feeling that was very bad indeed.

  * * *

  GRIFFIN TIGHTENED his hold on Jane’s leg. His fingertips met his thumb, she was so delicate, but that didn’t encourage him to be gentle. She’d brought him to this emotional place, damn it, and she was going to pay.

  “Sit down,” he said, releasing her
ankle. “Sit down right here.”

  His eyes were used to the dark, and he could see the wary expression on her face as she obeyed. She was wearing another of her maddening little dresses. Fussy and demure, its full skirt swirled around her thighs as she sank to the floor. In full Lady Jane mode, she sat with her legs folded to one side. A prim-and-proper woman waiting to be served a picnic.

  What a meal he had ready to dish out.

  He shoved himself up, his fourth beer still half-full. Tipping his hand, he drained the bottle, then let it drop with a clunk.

  Jane jumped.

  “Nervous now? Thinking about all those eels that are lurking in the corners of my soul?”

  Her head moved from side to side, though her eyes didn’t leave his. “I’m not nervous. I’m not scared of you.”

  Those fucking eels, he thought, swiping a hand over his face. He couldn’t get them out of his head. The memory was there, Jane in his arms, the way she’d clung to him as he’d almost tossed her to her greatest fear.

  Her pretty wavy hair, tickling his chin as they sat together on the beach. He didn’t think she’d realized that a little tremor had run down her spine when she’d confessed her phobia. He’d been holding her that close to his heart. It had made him want to be a better brother to her than her own. It had made him want to be her hero.

  Her brother. Her hero. What a crock.

  He could never be anyone’s hero, and he didn’t feel brotherly toward her in the least. He’d been dying to fuck her again since that night in L.A. By God, she was going to understand that by the time he was through. Then she’d stop looking at him with those beautiful eyes filled with compassion.

  “I didn’t love Erica,” he said. “I didn’t love her, and the fact of that drove her to her death.”

  “Griffin…”

  “Don’t take that placating tone with me. You want the facts, don’t you? And the emotions, right? That’s what you’ve been asking for. That’s what you want on the page.”

  “I—” She hesitated, and he thought she might bolt. But then she clasped her hands together like a little girl at Sunday school. “Okay. I want it all.”

  He pushed to his feet and threw himself into his desk chair, which screeched as he swiveled to face her. It arrested him a moment, the sight of Jane at his feet, her expression expectant.

  Innocent.

  Could he tell her and ruin whatever pretty story she’d made up in her head? But it was his dishonesty that had been the beginning of Erica’s end.

  “Erica and I were…together before we left the States. We met through the assignment, hit it off, so to speak, started seeing each other as we prepared for Afghanistan.”

  He rubbed his face again. “I thought it was all fun and games, but she…”

  “Wanted more.”

  “I didn’t lead her on.” Hell, why he wanted Jane to believe that, he didn’t know. “At least I didn’t intend to.”

  “But then she started leaving you little notes.”

  “After the first couple of weeks in Afghanistan, I realized her feelings had turned serious. I should have been honest with her immediately, but Christ, we’d agreed to be embedded with thirty guys for the next twelve months, and I didn’t want that kind of awkwardness in the mix.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Makes me an effing idiot. The close quarters meant we weren’t having sex—at least I can claim some nobility there—but we were going out every day, getting shot at, being mortared…. It was pretty intense.”

  In his mind, Griffin heard the high whine of an incoming mortar round, then its thunder-boom and sharp jolt of impact. The smell of it was in his nostrils and on his tongue, rotten eggs mixed with cordite and red dirt. “You never knew if the thing you were doing—eating, on patrol, taking a leak—was the last thing you’d ever do. So I think for Erica, the last man she might ever be with became the man she had to love. The danger gave me a little shine.”

  “Because clearly you were pretty dull without that.”

  He waved Jane’s dry comment away. “When we first started dating in L.A., I tried telling her how it was. That I wasn’t looking for anything serious. I don’t do serious with women, never have. But she didn’t listen. She didn’t listen to anyone about anything.”

  “You told me what happened to her—the ambush. That wasn’t your fault, Griffin.”

  “She wanted to impress me,” he said, his temples beginning to ache. He needed another beer. “That’s why she went with the guys that morning, even though I had told her not to do it. Everyone had told her not to do it. I wouldn’t have done it. But she went anyway to prove something to me.”

  “Who said?”

  He thought of the note he’d woken to find in his hand. Jane was holding it now. He nodded at it. “She wrote ‘You’ll see.’”

  “You’ll see…what? You’ll see leprechauns? You’ll see Firefly shouldn’t have been canceled? You’ll see that the coffee stain will come out of your khakis?”

  She was being deliberately obtuse, and it made the knocking at his temples intensify. “You’ll see I’m good enough to love. You’ll see that I’m fearless enough to love. I don’t know exactly.”

  In a quick move, Jane stood. Before he could stop her, she leaned over to turn on the desk lamp. Though the bulb was low wattage, it still felt like an interrogator’s tool. He blinked against the light, one hand shading his eyes.

  “That’s certainly an interesting interpretation,” she said.

  His hand dropped, and he squinted at her face. The lamplight caught the gold tips of her eyelashes. He looked away from them. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “Maybe there’s another meaning to her note.”

  “Like what?”

  “Have you considered that she was saying ‘I’ll land this story’? Have you thought for just a teeny, tiny second, Mr. Ego, that maybe she wasn’t taking risks for you, but for her job. For her career. For herself.”

  Mr. Ego. His head pounded harder. “Nice spin.”

  “Why are you so sure it’s spin?”

  The annoyed note in her voice pissed him off. “Mr. Ego” pissed him off. There was a cup of pens and pencils on the desktop, and he swiped at it, sending the Bics and No. 2s flying. “Damn it, I don’t know!”

  Private rushed to his side. Griffin felt like shit for scaring the dog. He stroked his soft fur as the Lab pressed hard against his legs.

  Jane crossed to his side too, and knelt on the other side of his knees. “I’m sorry, Griffin. I know that whatever her motivation, it was a horrible event. A tragedy for her family and something that hurts you terribly.”

  He drew back, blinking at her. “Jane,” he began, then shook his head. “Jane, you’re wrong. I don’t know if it’s my reporter training or just a tic of my particular personality, but I don’t feel anything close to terrible.”

  A moment of silence passed, and then he dropped the truth on her. “Ninety-nine percent of the time I don’t feel anything at all.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  TESS SANK ONTO the couch in the small, low-lit living room at Beach House No. 8 and watched the flames lick the Pres-to-Log she’d put a match to before checking on the boys. It wasn’t cold, really; she was dressed warmly enough in a pair of yoga pants and matching top with long sleeves and a collar that she’d zipped to a point above her cleavage. But she’d decided the fire would be nice company for the night. Rebecca was sleeping over at a friend’s, and her sons had slipped into dreamland not long after dark. An inflatable canvas raft had occupied Duncan and Oliver all afternoon. Riding the small waves near the shoreline had so worn them out that they’d almost been asleep before Russ.

  She propped her bare feet on the coffee table, bumping the framed photo of the kids that she’d brought from home. With the four either asleep or absent, it was time to think of herself. It was time to decide what she wanted to do with her life.

  A knock on the front door startled her. Griffin or Jane, she
supposed, needing to borrow a cup of sugar or something similar. But it was Teague White standing in the dim glow of the porch light, his athletic build nearly filling the opening. He smiled, a flash of white in his tan face that struck her somewhere below her heart.

  She placed her hand there. “Hi.”

  He glanced over his shoulder. “I was at Captain Crow’s…and then I thought of you. Would you like to share a drink with me?”

  Oh, to be so free! She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to take off for a drink or anything else without making plans and backup plans and backup for the backup plans. Was that what she wanted for herself? she wondered. More freedom? She had divorced friends and knew it was an unexpected by-product of shared custody. When the kids were with Dad, Mom had hours and hours of alone time.

  “Tess?”

  “Oh.” She laughed. “Sorry, took a hike on a mind trail.”

  “Mind trail?”

  Her next laugh wasn’t as amused. It was a phrase that she and David had coined long ago. One of those private codes that came out of a long marriage. “I was daydreaming.” She took a breath. “But as to your offer—I’m sorry, I can’t go anywhere. The boys are asleep and—”

  “Even if I brought the drink to you?” He held up a chilled six-pack of Mexican beer.

  Her favorite brand. She hesitated only a second, then held open the door. “I have limes.”

  As he stepped inside, she hurried to turn on another lamp. She didn’t want to send the wrong message with a romantic ambience. In the kitchen, she sliced a Mexican lime into quarters and placed them on a small plate that she set on a tray beside a basket of tortilla chips and a bowl of mango salsa.

  “You didn’t have to go to all this trouble,” Teague said as she slid the items onto the coffee table.