She murmured a wordless negative and pushed up to sit with her back to the headboard in an effort to stay awake.
“Tomorrow, I’m taking you sailing,” he decided.
“You are?”
“Yup. Ever been?”
“It took me twenty-one years to see the ocean. Sailing on it never occurred to me.”
“They rent sloops at the Mimosa Harbor. Twist and I were gonna rent a fishing boat next week when we hit the vacation part of this trip, but I’ll see if they have a sailboat we can take out after your shift.”
“I’m on the brunch run with the final wedding stragglers before they ship out. You’re not guarding important people tomorrow?”
“McBain’s got me on escort duties, basically following principals and their retinue to the private planes that’ll take them back to ruling the little people. Should be done by midday.” He waggled his brows comically. “Perfect time for a romantic cruise for two.”
“You expected to get laid on this cruise, sailor?”
“Does a dolphin chirp?”
She snuffled into the pillow. “Is that supposed to be a maritime pun?”
“I know how you love a good one.” He shrugged and she sensed a sliver of embarrassment. “Humor is Twist’s job.”
“I dunno. You make me laugh plenty,” she observed, her quiet voice full of meaning he rewarded with a kiss.
“Why did you join the Navy?” she asked after a while. Quinn bit her lip when Jasper’s shoulder jerked with surprise. Shit, she shouldn’t have asked. She didn’t want to tarnish things with another heart-to-heart that could wind them up in a much worse place than the last one. But they’d gone through the skeletons of her sketchy family. How bad could it go from there?
* * *
Jasper swallowed the piece of peanut butter bread that’d stuck in his throat when Quinn asked her question. “I never told you?”
“No,” she confirmed without expanding on it.
Shit. What the hell had they talked about that they didn’t know each other’s most basic history? “My parents were killed in a car crash when I was thirteen,” he began. “Both were only children, so there were no aunts or uncles to take us in, and we went into the system.”
“We?”
“Me and my two brothers.” She reared back from him at that.
“You never mentioned having brothers.”
Yeah, he was getting that. Looked like there were a lot of things they hadn’t mentioned. “I don’t like to talk about it. Haven’t seen or heard from them since I was fifteen.”
“What happened when you were fifteen?”
“Our foster parents put me back into the system. Only me.”
“You’re not serious!”
He nodded. “Yup.”
“What the hell?!” she practically shouted into his face. “They can’t send you back like they’re—returning a damaged product to Walmart!”
Jasper felt a burn in his chest as he watched her get worked up on behalf of his younger self. He should’ve known she’d champion the angry juvenile he’d once been, especially now he knew her background. “They’d decided to adopt my younger brothers, but didn’t want a fifteen-year-old hoodlum around to drag them onto the same bad track.”
“But…you were just a kid! What kind of people abandon a kid like that?! And I don’t believe for a minute that you were a ‘hoodlum’.”
He had to choke back a laugh when the air quotes came out. She wouldn’t thank him if she knew how cute he found her this way.
“Believe it. I was hotwiring cars for joy rides by then and graduated to street racing for pinks a year after that. My brothers were ten and twelve and already looking to emulate their big bro. Our foster parents thought they were young enough to be worth the effort. To them, I was already a lost cause. They weren’t all that off target either. I knew they were my brothers’ best chance. No one was going to give me custody, not at that age, and I didn’t want them in the system more than I didn’t want me in the system. I was old enough, I only had another two years before I’d be out. They had a lot longer. It was the right decision.”
“No, it was not!” She scowled at him. “Lost cause, my generous ass. You needed someone to give enough of a shit to focus those talents in a more positive direction.”
“You my social worked now?”
She smacked his arm. “I should’ve been!”
“Baby, it was almost twenty years ago. I’m good.”
“Yeah, you are. Is that why you joined up? To get direction?”
He brushed crumbs onto a paper towel, waded it up in a ball, and lobbed it into the trash can in a smooth arc. Then he scooted up the bed to sit next to her and took her hand, tracing the lines on her palm as he continued. “I got into a crash during a race,” he told her without emotion as if the events had happened to someone else. It was the only way he could talk about it, the pang of the life on his soul still sharp after all these years. “I walked away, but the girl riding with me died.” Jasper held Quinn in place when she made to face him. “Gangbanger who hit us went away for vehicular manslaughter since he’d hit us on purpose to knock me out of the race. But she was in my car; she was my responsibility.”
She leaned into his shoulder and whispered, “Honey.”
“I’d managed to avoid getting caught up till then, so with my clean-on-paper record, I got sent to a work camp for sixty days for the drag racing. The guy who ran it was a retired marine—gunnery sergeant—a real hard ass, but one of those who sincerely gave a shit. He kicked my ass into gear, made me think seriously about my future for the first time.” His mouth quirked with ironic humor. “Nearly disowned me when I joined the Navy instead of the Corps.”
“Wow. That explains a lot.”
An uncomfortable feeling took root in his gut. “Clarify,” he barked.
“You have got to stop commanding me.”
“You’re avoiding the point. What do you mean?” When she hesitated, he added, “Don’t stop now, babe.”
“You’re always so hard on yourself,” she said, giving in. “It’s a good thing those lovely shoulders of yours are so broad, with all that weight you insist on hauling around. You didn’t hit your own car,” she continued while he glared. “It’s a tragedy that girl lost her life, but it’s not your tragedy.”
“She was in my car; she was my responsibility.”
“Yes, love, she was, and I’m certain you took care of her as best you could. But accidents do happen, Jasper, that not even you can’t control, which is why they’re called accidents.”
“It’s not an accident when he meant to pull the trigger.”
Shit. Where the fuck had that come from?
“What?” she wheezed. “How—how did we get from cars to triggers?”
He jerked free and lurched out of bed, but she caught him at the edge before he made it all the way out simply by laying a hand between his shoulders.
That hand rubbed soothing strokes up and down his spine. “Jasper,” she said quietly. “What happened with the Navy? Why are you and Twist on enforced leave?”
“None of your business,” he gritted out. Her sharp, indrawn breath told him that shot hit true.
“I deserved that,” she allowed.
He reached back and dragged her hand around to hold it against his heart. “No, you didn’t. I’m a son of a bitch.”
She kissed him where her hand had been. “No, you’re not.” But she went quiet and he’d thought she’d given up when she said, “I’d like to know.”
“I’d like to know what has you so scared, but you’re not telling,” he reminded her, not caring that he sounded like a bastard.
“It’s not that big a deal,” she lied when he fucking knew it was a big deal given how badly she’d freaked out and begged for her life the night before. “I took on the wrong client. The gig looked good—expensive venue, rich attendees. A party for a millionaire client that could open some seriously helpful doors for my business. Turned o
ut, he was an asshole who tried to renege on the agreed fee. I left under a bit of a cloud and thought it’d be best to lay low for a while.”
He bought about half of that as true. The emotion in her voice was too real not to be authentic, but he was certain there was more to it. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she confirmed.
He wanted to press it, use some interrogation tactics if necessary to fuck with her head until he got to the heart of what was frightening her so badly. But if this new situation between the two of them was going to go anywhere solid, he couldn’t take it from her. She had to be the one to give it to him.
This trust shit was a harder line to hold than he’d expected.
Her cheek pressed against the back of his shoulder. “I’m not a psychiatrist like your friend Twist, but even I can see whatever happened with the Navy, this thing, it’s eating you up.” Her finger traced a light circle on his chest at the top of his heart. “Give it to me,” she entreated, unintentionally echoing his own thoughts and cinching his decision. “Please.”
His hand clenched around hers and then he started to speak.
“A man on my team shot and killed a civilian during a bar fight and then killed himself.” A wordless exclamation sounded behind him, so he finished it on a whisper he more than half hoped she wouldn’t hear. “Right in front of me.”
He heard her move and then felt her everywhere as she spread her legs and wrapped them around his hips from behind. Her feet draped over and between his thighs. He could feel her bare sex against the small of his back. Her hand slipped free of his so she could wind both arms around his chest and settle her chin in the groove where his neck and torso met.
Warmth suffused Jasper. No lover had ever held him like this. Not since his parents died had he been embraced for anything more than sex, not even when he and Quinn had been married. He’d never noticed it, since, with his frequent deployments, they’d spent most of their time together having sex. But beyond holding hands here and there, Quinn hadn’t been a PDA kind of woman. Jasper hadn’t known any better to miss it.
But she’d heard his pain and immediately moved to counter it, wrapping him up in her like a safety blanket. Tilting his head to rest on hers, Jasper shut his eyes, gripped her forearm and thigh, and gave her the rest.
“Maverick’s been under my command for two years,” he began. “A good guy. Eager to serve. Good family, His dad was a Noncom—noncommissioned officer, someone who works their way up from the enlisted ranks—so Mav grew up in the life.”
“Maverick?” she asked gently.
“His real name was Neal Cooper. But he loved Top Gun. Quoted it endlessly, even though he hadn’t been born when it was new. Jesus, it was annoying. ‘I feel the need, the need for speed,’ practically every time we got on a helo—ah, that’s a helicopter. ‘Show me the way home, baby!’ whenever we finished a mission.”
“I think I get it.”
“Yeah, well. We almost christened him Goose for a call sign, but then he was always going maverick—off book and on his own. We work as a team, but we’re also about individual innovation. SEALs are expected to be as mentally fit as they are physically,” he explained. “We’re given the hard jobs because when it all becomes a clusterfuck, that’s basically a day ending in ‘Y’ for us. Maverick’s a long-range sniper. Best I’ve ever seen. They tend to go their own way within the strictures of command. Mav took that to a degree beyond, even for a SEAL.” He stopped and had to swallow past a sudden obstruction in his throat. “Was a sniper,” he amended.
Quinn soft breath ghosted his skin. “He sounds like a good guy to have on your team.”
Jasper snorted. “He was that.” And he was. For all the ridiculous quotes and annoying deviations, Mav always showed up when and where he was supposed to be.
Jasper trusted no one more at his back, other than Twist.
“Explain ‘call sign’,” Quinn said when he lapsed into an uneasy silence.
“Most SEALs are assigned a call sign, usually during training, provided they survive BUD/S. That’s the intense training SEALs are put through starting with Hell Week.”
“Is this why Twist calls you Queen? Wait, is this why he’s called Twist?”
Jasper nodded. “‘Queen’ is my official call sign, for obvious reasons, but also because, well,” he squirmed, uncomfortable owning up to what his men had told him for years. “I took command early during training.”
He felt her mouth curved against his collarbone. “Naturally.”
“All right,” he groused. “They probably would’ve called me ‘King’ or something equally ridiculous if not for my last name. But Twist also calls me Roy for ‘royal’ because he says I can be a royal pain in his ass when I’m a stickler for procedure and…responsibility,” he grumbled.
This time, she chuckled outright, and the coil in his gut eased to hear it. “Boy, does he know you.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“So, he’s Twist, because…”
“It’s his twisted sense of humor. His real name is Grant Sisti, so we call him ‘Twisted Sisti’ or just ‘Twist’. Call signs are meant to be ironic. For Twist, because he’s a SEAL and a shrink and a nutter, it fits from all directions.”
“Sounds like it was the same for Maverick,” she offered, carefully pulling them back to the original point.
“It was.” His head dropped, arms dangling off his knees. She came with him, settling her breasts against his spine. “I fucked up, babe. I fucked up big time.”
The sweetness of her kiss was a brand on his skin. “Tell me,” she urged.
“I should’ve watched him closer. Should’ve been more aware of how far he’d fallen. He was on the team, full throttle, in with the guys, first one always ready to carouse and blow off steam after deployment. But I knew he was spiraling. His good humor was gone. The Top Gun quotes stopped almost entirely. I never thought I’d want to hear him say, “Keeping up foreign relations,” so badly. Fights off base were getting more common. He started rolling through SEAL groupies like they were Kleenex. Red flags I didn’t miss, but didn’t put together fast enough either.”
She hugged his chest, but didn’t speak, so he kept talking, almost without knowing what he was saying, vomiting out what had been clawing at his insides for an excruciating week.
“We’d gotten home from a long deployment that night. It’d been days since I’d slept.”
“Did you still have to take a sedative to get any?”
“No. That evened out after a few months. Twist benching me on a medical was a damned effective wake-up call.”
“I bet.”
“Twist…Twist is messed up over this. He and Mav were tight, and he’s feeling it deep because he lost his friend and he failed as a shrink, or at least that’s what he thinks.”
“You’re feeling it deep too, honey.”
“Yeah,” he grunted. He clasped his hands between his knees, gripping tight. “Everything was wrapped, the guys off home, weapons accounted for and stored, paperwork could wait till morning. I’d been in bed five minutes max when Twist called me out to a roadhouse because Maverick got into another fucking fight.
“He’d been finding them more frequently, enough that Twist and I had agreed to make sure he didn’t go out without one of us or the other guys at his back. That night, he’d come onto some biker’s woman, and they’re not the kind of men who let shit like that go. By the time I got there, they’d already drawn blood, but I got the biker leader to agree to a cutoff point. Until the guy Mav was fighting pulled a knife.”
“That’s enough, honey,” she whispered, but he was on a roll. If he stopped now, he’d never get it out.
“Mav lost it. He was fucking gone, babe, totally not at home in there. I’d seen a version of that in him before when he’d come back from a long in-field surveillance. Twenty days on your own in the bush keeping watch over tangos can really dick with a man’s head. Which is why having a shrink like Twist on the team gave us a
leg up. He kept an eye especially on Mav and any of the others who gave signs their shit was unraveling.”
Agitated, his heel began to bounce on the floor. “But I’d never, never seen Mav as gone as he was behind that roadhouse. The biker came up with the knife, and Mav destroyed him. Quinn, I have no idea how I got through, but he was seconds away from slicing the guy’s throat before Maverick finally clued into me and stood down.”
Even now, he could see it, the sheer emptiness in Mav’s eyes. “His face was blank,” he murmured to Quinn, and felt her shudder. “Blank. That was not the man I’d known and fought and bled with for two years. And he’d always been so fast. He’d do card tricks, sleights-of-hand stuff to keep the boredom at bay on long flights. Maverick had the gang leader’s gun in his hand in an instant. Without blinking, he shot the biker he’d been fighting, then turned the gun on himself.”
“Oh, Jasper,” she said, and there were tears in her voice, tears he felt on his back when she pressed even more deeply into him as though trying to climb under his skin to hold his aching heart.
Maverick.
“You were exhausted. The situation was crazy. You’re not to blame.”
“There is no excuse. I knew the guy had a weapon. I clocked it when Twist and I arrived. I never thought Mav was that far gone, but it doesn’t matter. I knew it was there and when things went to hell, I didn’t do anything about it.
“I couldn’t shoot for days,” he admitted, the words hoarse and broken. “Twist forced me onto the range. He knew if I didn’t get right back to it, I’d never command another team. I emptied five clips before he deemed me done and puked my guts out for ten minutes after.”
She hummed in comfort and the vibration skated down his spine to his dick.
“And after all that, they put you on leave?”
“Gotta blame somebody. Might as well be the commander who failed his man.”
“Shame on you, Jasper McQueen,” she scolded.
He went rigid. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
She shoved free, but only to swing around and straddle him front to front. “Stop asking me that!” she ordered with a smack on his shoulder for good measure that made his eyes narrow.
Wild on the Rocks Page 17