by Hill, Teresa
Could she ever trust a man again? Love one again like she had loved Aaron?
He feared this would be the most difficult mission of his life. He had no margin for error, and so many paths led to disaster. He wasn’t even sure he should let her into his life permanently, because he wasn’t at all sure he could keep her safe. She would never make it easy. He would always worry about her.
And yet, he couldn’t imagine letting her go, either. Today had been hard enough. Saying good-bye forever?
No.
Couldn’t do it.
Everything in his body rejected the idea.
He’d never imagined falling love with a woman who was in love with another guy. His gut-deep fear was that he’d never know what to do or say to show her that he was the right guy for her, better than the guy who broke her heart.
He’d known loving someone would be a little scary, because it was a huge responsibility, as he saw it. But he’d always thought he’d push through it when the right one came along.
Instead, he’d found a woman who pushed him away.
He thought of all the women he’d turned down in his life. He’d always tried to be nice about it. Some women kept pushing to the point where a guy had to be blunt. He did everything he could to not let it get to that point.
Had they felt like he felt now? Like someone had stuffed his insides into a garbage disposal and was grinding them up?
Holding her on the balcony, he’d been struck by how small and slight she was, how fragile she felt in his arms, despite how fierce she was. But it had felt so right, having her there. He’d wanted to freeze those moments with her forever.
But the seconds had ticked away. It had been agonizing and surreal, like he’d felt every second that had passed on the train, watching the gunman, having to wait to take him down until hopefully no one else would get shot, all while the man Dani loved bled out on the floor in front of Mace.
He didn’t deserve to hold Dani close, to want more from her than a kiss goodbye and knowing she was sleeping in his bed while he was gone.
How had she felt about that kiss? He hadn’t been able to resist discovering the sweet, warm taste of her a second longer. It was something about leaving and not being certain he could make it back, even from a routine trip like this one. No one ever knew they’d be safe, not even walking down the street in Virginia Beach during an absolutely normal day.
So, he’d kissed her, he’d taken what he’d wanted, and she’d given it to him easily, letting him get lost in the taste and feel of her.
Would she regret it in the morning? Would she feel like she was betraying Aaron? Would she be mad at Mace? She always seemed to be mad at him for something, and damned if it didn’t make him all the more determined to take care of her, to keep her free from worry or sadness.
As if anyone could do that for someone else. He knew all too well the limits of what he could do and what he couldn’t. It pissed him off daily, when he let himself think about it.
He tensed as someone took a seat beside him. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. But he couldn’t ignore the person. He looked up and saw that it was Will, who looked as cheery as Mace felt.
“Fucking sucks, leaving the woman you love behind,” Will said.
“Yeah, I hate saying goodbye to Amanda,” Mace said. “You know she misses me more than she misses you, right?”
“Hey, I’ve never taken Dani out to dinner, and I’ve never kissed her. Just remember that, asshole.”
Yeah, Mace had done both those things with Amanda, when Will had tried to walk away from her. Mace knew his friend was gone over the woman, and he’d done what he’d known would get Will’s head out of his ass.
“It worked, didn’t it?” Mace asked.
“Just think about how you’d feel if someone pulled that with Dani. I have a lot of friends back at the base, and I never got you back for kissing Amanda.”
Mace thought about that. He wished it made him want to shove his fist through the plane’s skin, but it didn’t. It made him feel even more helpless where Dani was concerned.
“Dani wouldn’t go out with some guy. She wouldn’t let him kiss her. She’s still in love with her dead fiancé.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
“Because you asked? Or because you made a move on her — ”
“I’m pretty sure she is.”
“It hasn’t been that long for her,” Will said finally.
“Yeah. I know.” He had to give her time, but it felt like torture. No, not torture. He’d been trained to withstand torture. But not to feel like this or know how to handle it.
Will had experience with a woman with bad memories. Mace hated to bring it up, but he had to ask. “Did you think Amanda might never get over being held hostage and raped?”
“She’s not over it. You’re never completely over it. But it gets farther away. It gets to where it’s not the first thing that pops into your head every morning or before you go to sleep at night. I hope to create so many good memories for her life that they’ll crowd out the bad.”
“But she’s better, right? She seems happy with you.”
“She gets better all the time. Happier. Still, sometimes it comes back and smacks her in the face, and you can never be sure what will trigger it. You have to be ready to ride out those times with her, figure out whether to hold her or try to make her laugh or let her be, which is the hardest shit of all. You know she’s back there with what those bastards did to her. But it’s not about you. It’s about her. You give her what she needs.”
“What if I’m not what Dani needs? What if I never am?”
“You can’t think like that. That’ll make you crazy.”
“You’re kidding. That’s all you’ve got for me? That I can’t think like that?”
“I can’t think about the possibility of getting to that school too late to save Amanda from what they did to her. I have to think about us together now. Or it will be like when I get back to Virginia. About all the years ahead of us. I won’t let the past take that from me. Neither will she. She fought hard for us. She fights hard every day for the life we want together. So do I.”
“See, that’s the thing. I don’t know if I’m what Dani wants. She’s fought more against me than she ever has for me.”
“Hasn’t been that long for her, man. Not even a year. Amanda and I have made it past the year mark, from the day I got her out of that school. A year of her surviving it, moving that far past it. She wanted to celebrate it. I didn’t want to even think about, but she said we should fill the day with something besides bad memories.”
Mace remembered Amanda’s idea of filling the day. She and Will each had to write down three things to do that scared them, and then draw half of them out of a hat and do them on that day.
Will made up his three. Nothing scared him much, except something happening to Amanda.
Amanda’s ideas? Cliff diving. Swimming with sharks. Base jumping in one of those squirrel suits.
They drew Amanda’s shark swimming and base jumping, and Will’s idea of riding the Las Vegas roller coaster that kind of hung off the top of a building. He would probably have to take her swimming with sharks one day, but for the anniversary he talked Amanda into combining Las Vegas with a long weekend in Taos for one of the highest bungee jumps in the world. It nearly killed him to see Amanda take a risk like that, but it was better than the crazy squirrel suit jump she wanted to do.
“I’d tell you to try something like that when the year mark comes up for Dani,” Will said, “but she might have ideas that are as nuts as Amanda’s.”
“You think it helped? Doing something like that on the anniversary?”
Will shrugged. “She laughed a lot. I think she was scared for a lot of the day, but not about what happened to her a year before. It was about showing herself she could face fears and survive.”
Made sense, Mace supposed. But Dani was mourning a man she loved. She had fears, but the bigges
t one was loving someone again, depending on him and losing him.
As a teenager back in Texas, Mace had spent a lot of time helping an uncle who was the best at handling skittish horses, getting them to trust him and trust other people enough to ride them. Some were wild horses and some had been abused in ways that made Mace sick.
By the time he left to join the Navy, he wasn’t bad at the job. Sometimes he thought training those horses was the reason he tended to be good with skittish women.
But Dani was the most skittish one he’d ever met.
She needed patience and time, but she was also living and working in dangerous situations. Mace couldn’t let her stay in those situations until she got around to trusting him.
So, he’d pushed. Hard. And just about gone out of his mind worrying about her, and now, he’d been forced to leave her behind without knowing whether she’d even let him protect her. She could take off and go back to her house at any time.
He could chew his nails down to the bone right now, he was so wound up.
Letting a woman into his life, letting her be important to him, had never been so scary.
* * *
Chapter Sixteen
Dani
She hated waking up to find him gone.
Light was coming through the door to the balcony when she opened her eyes, and she knew it was too late. Still, she raced through the condo looking for him. She had to fight the urge to run down to the parking garage, hoping his truck was still there, even though she knew it wouldn’t be.
She nearly cried thinking about holding him so tight, and him holding her like he didn’t want to let go of her, either. Falling asleep in his arms had been the most incredible feeling. Blissfully safe, content, not alone. He couldn’t have any idea what that meant to her.
That kiss … Her lips started to tingle, just thinking about it. She still wasn’t certain it had been real. She’d been at least half-asleep. He’d told her — more like ordered her — to kiss him good-bye and to sleep in his bed while he was gone. She remembered that, and she had woken up in his bed, which meant …
The kiss must have been real.
Her heart started thumping like crazy. The sheets, his pillow, smelled faintly of him — of the ocean, she supposed because he spent so much time in it — and a hint of spice. She wasn’t changing the sheets the entire time he was gone, and she might just bury her head in his pillow every night and try to imagine him here with his arms around her.
Imagine him doing more than kissing her.
Her mind didn’t want her to feel like this, but her body … Her body wanted it, wanted him close, wanted his hands, his mouth, his whole body pressed against hers. It had been forever since she’d felt this way.
And now he was gone, and she had no clue when he’d be back.
She killed time scrubbing every inch of his apartment. Not that it was the least bit messy. It wasn’t even dirty, unless you counted things like cleaning the baseboards, organizing the stuff in his cabinets. She checked the dates on everything and threw out things that were too old.
She stared at the walls, wondering which ones he wanted painted and which colors. She could start putting up painter’s tape on all the trim. That would give her something to do. She wished he’d agreed to let her start demo work, because she’d love to smash some things to bits.
His doorbell rang just before noon, and — crazy as it was to think — she wished it was him, already back, or here to tell her that things had changed. He hadn’t had to leave after all.
She threw open the door, willing it to be him on the other side of the door, only to find a gorgeous blonde wearing skimpy jean shorts and a minuscule hot pink bikini top with a mostly see-through cover-up.
Her smile barely faltered as she looked Dani up and down, taking in what the cleaning frenzy had done to her appearance. “Hi. Is Mace home?”
“No, he’s not.”
The blonde blinked, but smiled for a second. “Well, will he be home tonight?”
“I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
“He’s not still deployed, is he? It was supposed to be for three months, and it’s been almost four.”
“No. It’s not a four-month deployment. I mean, not a regularly scheduled one. I guess it could turn into one like that.” Dani’s gut churned. “He said he never really knows for sure how long he’ll be gone.”
“Yeah. I remember those.” The woman looked thoroughly deflated. “Are you his … uhh … friend?”
“Sure. I guess you could call it that.” If this woman wanted reassurances that Dani wasn’t his girlfriend, Dani wasn’t going to give them. Mace could explain, if he wanted to. Once he came back.
“Well, uhh … we dated. Before his last deployment. I’ve been waiting for him to get back home. Silly man. I thought he’d lost my number or something, so I thought I’d drop by and, uhh … bring him some muffins.” She picked up a plate wrapped in red plastic wrap with little white hearts on it. “He loves my muffins.”
Muffins?
Dani wondered whether muffin was slang for some body part other than a muffin top, because this woman didn’t have one and she couldn’t imagine a woman bragging about a man loving her muffin top.
She decided to ignore the muffin comment, except to say, “Would you like to leave them for him? Maybe with a note?”
“Uhh … I don’t know.”
Dani waited.
“I guess I will. I’m Charli, by the way.” The woman’s big smile was back. “Charli with an i, no e.”
Dani introduced herself, let Charli in and waited as it took her all of ten minutes to compose a note. Finally, Charli finally left.
Dani stewed on Mace having a woman like her looking for him, maybe thinking they were going to date again or that they’d never stopped while he was deployed.
No, he’d said he hadn’t had sex the whole time he was deployed and hadn’t done anything about that situation since he’d returned. Surely if he and Muffin Girl had been kind of dating still, he’d have called her and taken care of it. Clearly, he hadn’t.
Dani glared at the plate of muffins.
“You’re jealous,” Leah said, laughing in Dani’s face. “Are we going to eat the muffins?”
“And deprive Charli with an i of the pleasure of having Mace eat her muffin?”
“Now I’m picturing her naked with muffin crumbs all over her body and Mace slowly licking up the crumbs — ”
“Stop! Right now!”
“Okay. I’ll go back to ignoring you while you give the death-stare to a plate of muffins.”
That night, Mace texted her. On the ground & safe. Tell me you’re still at my condo.
Dani stared at that simple message, looking from it to the muffins and back. She was house-sitting, technically, and someone had showed up. It was her duty to tell him.
Charli came around today. Missing you. Wondering why you haven’t called. Brought you muffins.
The text practically dripped with questions, Dani feared. He’d know what she was really saying.
Okay.
Really? Okay? That was it? She fumed so long, he texted back. Anything else?
Dani had to say it. She said you’re dating.
No. I broke it off before I left on my last deployment.
Not sure she understands that.
No big words were involved.
Dani groaned. What else could she say? Or ask? Without being even more obvious?
Nothing.
Will text you when I can. Don’t worry if I can’t. Doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Thank you for staying.
She stared at the text for much longer than was warranted.
Night, Mace typed.
Night, Dani typed.
By the next day, she was still disgruntled over Charli with an i and muffins and her text conversation with Mace. Then the doorbell rang and another woman showed up. Real stunner. Impossibly tall heels, snug short skirt, fancy blouse with one too many buttons unbutton
ed.
“Hi, I’m Bridget.” Her hand shot out like she couldn’t imagine not shaking hands with everyone she met.
“Hi. Dani.”
“Is Mace here?”
“No. He’s out of town. Not sure when he’ll be back.”
“Oh.” All the poise and sparkle went out of her, as if Dani weren’t worth the effort of projecting them. Then the poise came back. No sparkle. “I’m helping him upgrade his condo.”
“Dressed like that?” Dani asked.
“No. Of course not. With decorating advice and decisions.”
Dani bit her tongue so she wouldn’t say she doubted the woman would lift a finger for any kind of physical work. “Do you need to come in to take some measurements or something like that?”
“No. No, I have all those. I just thought I’d stop by and see if he needed anything else from me.”
“Okay. I’ll tell him you stopped by.”
Poor Bridget. She pouted for a moment and left.
When Mace texted Dani that evening, she tried hard not to say anything or ask anything about Bridget, but in the end, she did.
Someone named Bridget showed up at your door today.
She’s my Realtor.
She didn’t mention that. Just something about helping you redo your condo.
Her company handles rentals, too. She knows what does well on the rental market.
When the doorbell rang the next day, Dani let Leah answer it.
“Dani, it’s another one. How many girls is the man juggling at one time?”
Someone laughed.
Dani didn’t think any of this was funny. She charged over to the door, ready to deal with another of Mace’s women …
“Oh, this is his friend Will’s fiancée,” Dani told Leah, then turned back to Amanda. “Sorry about that. Mace has had a lot of visitors.”
“He always does. Women turn shameless around him.”
They invited Amanda in. She had paint samples she wanted to test on the wall, a couple of cream colors and a couple of blues for an accent wall. Dani tried to figure out how to ask her questions about Mace without giving away how much she wanted those answers. Leah didn’t care about hiding anything.