by Hill, Teresa
“So, we met Mace’s muffin girl and his supposed Realtor,” Leah said.
“I’ve met the Realtor,” Amanda answered. “She sold him this condo, but they never dated. Not that she doesn’t want to date him. Did Muffin Girl leave muffins? They’re really bad. They’re the only thing she knows how to make — and they’re probably from a boxed mix. Poor Mace made the mistake of saying they were good one time, just to be polite. She’s made him tons of them since then.”
Amanda held up her paint samples. “Okay if I put these on the wall? We’ll have to at least crack open a window, but they’ll dry fast and I got low-fume paint.”
“Sure,” Dani said. She wondered how she could bring the conversation back to Muffin Girl.
Leah came through. “So, they’re not still dating?”
“No. They broke up before his last deployment.” Amanda shook a little plastic jar of paint. “He always breaks up with them before he deploys. He doesn’t think it’s fair to ask anyone to wait for him while he’s gone and have to worry about what might happen to him.”
“Them? So he does have a ton of women?”
“He’s definitely a one-woman-at-a-time guy. They just never last through a deployment, so … Lately, that means six months, tops.” Amanda opened the paint jar, dipped her brush in and spread a patch of milky white on the living room wall. “He finds one, keeps her until it’s time to leave, breaks up with her, then starts over when he gets back home.”
“Right. Nothing serious. We’ve met tons of guys like him,” Dani said.
“I don’t think that’s it. He likes women — ”
“We know that,” Leah said.
“He’d do anything to help a woman in trouble. But he thinks it’s not fair to ask a woman to make the kind of sacrifices it takes to be with him while he’s in the SEAL teams.” She started shaking her next jar of paint. “But I also think he’s never met a woman he wanted long-term. He will one day, and he’ll be great to her. He’s still great to all of his exes.”
“Really?” Leah sounded skeptical.
“Oh, yes. I’ve never seen anything like it.” After wiping off her brush, Amanda applied a slightly deeper creamy white to the wall. “He finishes up with them as girlfriends and then somehow turns all of them into good friends. I mean, they want more, but he’s sincere about the friendship part. If he tells you to give him a call if you need something, he means it. He’ll help you move. He’ll beat up your mean boyfriend, handle your jerk of a boss, loan you money, jump your car battery or change your tire, give you a ride, whatever. Genuinely great guy. He made me promise to check on you.”
“He made me promise to check on you, too,” Dani said.
“See? Great guy.” Amanda stepped back from the wall to stare at the rectangles of white and cream. “What do you think?”
“White,” Leah said.
“Yes, white,” Dani said.
“Me, too. Now, let’s find a blue or a bluish-grey color that goes with it.”
She had two samples of those, too. “I think the bluish-grey. An implied color instead of an overt one.”
Dani and Leah agreed.
“We thought we’d do the painting while he’s gone,” Dani said.
“Sure. I’ll help. We have to do something to keep ourselves busy until the guys get back.”
Amanda waited, staring at Dani, who didn’t speak.
“Look,” Amanda finally said, “he told me a little about what you’ve been through. I get being leery of getting involved with another guy after that, but Mace really is the best. I adore him, and he always makes me laugh. He and Will have been the best of friends for about ten years. If there was anything bad about Mace, I’d know it.”
“You met him through Will?” Leah asked.
“He and Will saved my life. Uhh … hostage situation. Will got me out, and Mace was back here finding intel and feeding it to Will, running interference with the higher-ups to try to keep Will out of trouble. He and Mace risked a lot to save me. I’m always going to look out for Mace, as much as he lets anyone do that. So, I need you to tell me you’re going to be good to him.”
“Oh, we’re not … I mean … It’s not like that between us,” Dani said.
“Sure, it’s not,” Leah said. “Don’t listen to her. She just hasn’t accepted what’s going on yet.”
“No. That’s not it.”
“The night before he left, I went to bed in the spare bedroom with her beside me. When I woke up, he was gone, and she was asleep in his bed.” Leah gave Dani an explain-that look.
“Oh.” Amanda grinned.
“It wasn’t like that. I mean … It’s not like that. I had my clothes on the whole time. Nothing happened.”
“If you say so.” Leah laughed.
“He feels sorry for me,” Dani said. “He has a misplaced sense of guilt over surviving the train attack when Aaron didn’t.”
“He is good at misplaced guilt, but I think it’s more than that, too,” Amanda said. “I see his face when he talks about you. I hear the tone of his voice. He hated having to leave you, which is definitely not normal for him.”
“What do you mean, he’s good at misplaced guilt?”
“He has an exaggerated sense of what he should be able to do. He’s just a man, no matter how strong or fast or skilled at his job. I don’t know everything about what happened to him on the train last year, but I know he feels like he should have been able to keep anyone from dying that day. He always sets an impossibly high standard for himself. I bet if you asked him right now about the people who died, he could recite their bios off the top of his head. Names, ages, nationality, spouses, kids, parents, jobs, everything.”
“Did he try to find their relatives? Try to help them in some way?”
“No. Not that I know of.”
So, it was just Dani. Why? Was it really because Aaron was a fellow soldier? Because Mace was there when Aaron died? Because he felt especially responsible for not being able to prevent Aaron’s death?
Dani was scared to ask him. She was scared to know.
“So, I meant it,” Amanda said. “You have to promise me you won’t break that huge heart of his.”
“I don’t know what to make of him,” Dani said. “He’s so insistent on trying to take care of me. Pushy, even. He wouldn’t stop until he got me out of the apartment where we used to live. He keeps showing up at the bar where I work. I think he even recruited some of his friends to make sure I’m okay while he’s gone. There’s been a guy both nights I’ve worked, who nurses a couple of beers all night and eats a burger. Two different guys I’ve never seen before. They try not to make it obvious, but they don’t leave until I do. They wait outside the door until I get into my car and leave.”
“That’s Mace,” Amanda agreed.
“Two really cute guys — not the same ones,” Leah said, “have shown up at the door saying they’re friends of his and asking if we need anything. I keep making things up just to get them in the door and keep them here for a while.”
“That’s what Mace would do, make sure people were checking on you.”
“Just because he feels responsible for me doesn’t mean he likes me, not that way.”
“No, but I can tell it’s different with you from the degree of responsibility he feels and the lengths to which he’s gone to protect you,” Amanda said. “Third time I’m asking — are you going to be good to him?”
“Well, I pepper-sprayed him. I tried to throw a drink on him one time to get him to leave the bar. We’ve argued so many times about how pushy he is, how frustrating.”
Amanda turned to Leah. “She’s not going to answer my question, is she?”
“I don’t think she’s ready to admit how much she likes him. Not yet.”
“You guys, I’m right here,” Dani said.
“We know,” Leah said, then turned back to Amanda. “She’s a good person. She’s just not used to guys being good to her. Not until Aaron came along, and that ended b
adly, so she’s fighting with all she has not to admit to herself how much she likes Mace.”
“I can accept that,” Amanda said. “For now. Should we head to the paint store? We can paint and talk at the same time.”
They did talk, not always about Mace. Dani heard all about Amanda’s plans for her tutoring foundation, which did sound great.
If not for her grandmother, Dani would have ended up in foster care. Things could have been so much worse. She loved the idea of making sure the kids Amanda wanted to help got what they needed to keep up in school. She had strong memories of a handful of teachers when she was growing up who cared about her and wanted to help her succeed. It mattered. Sometimes teachers were the only adults in a child’s life who cared.
Mace was right. This was a job she could do and love.
* * *
Chapter Seventeen
Mace
He did not like being back in Germany. He especially didn’t like being inside an ICE train car again, but it couldn’t be helped.
When Mace approached his friend at the German GSG 9 about giving Mace everything the agency recovered from Aaron’s cell phone, iPad and cloud storage account, the GSG 9 asked for a favor in return. They wanted to know how the SEALs would handle a terrorist situation on an ICE train.
So, here they were, in a train car set up deep in the obscure corner of Germany used as a GSG 9 training site. Mace’s guys were playing hostages and terrorists, while Will’s platoon rescued the innocent bystanders on a train capable of going one hundred and eighty-six miles an hour.
It was the kind of prep the SEALs were famous for, looking at every angle and practicing every move until they worked seamlessly together as a team and executed a rescue.
As a chief in the teams, Mace planned training exercises, so it hadn’t been hard to put this one on the agenda. The Germans were U.S. allies and fighting a constant terrorist threat within their own borders, so getting this kind of joint exercise with the Germans approved by his superiors had been easy.
Carrying it out was a real bitch, though. The last time Mace had been on a train like this, a bad guy really had been shooting people, including Mace.
He’d been lucky in his career with the SEAL teams. He’d been on some hairy missions, seen people die, lost friends. He remembered those times, of course, sometimes in way too much detail. Everybody did. You couldn’t escape it.
But he had managed to evade what he thought of as true Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. His eyes weren’t filled with a haunted, far-away look all the time. He didn’t suddenly snap out of the past to find himself yelling in the present and maybe trying to fight off someone he’d taken for an enemy. His mind didn’t play those scenes over and over until he wanted to scream.
But he’d come close to PTSD after the train shooting, and now he was back in one of these fucking cars. It helped that his guys were all around him this time. It helped that Will was leading the other squad, and that every guy in both squads wished he’d been there to have Mace’s back last year.
It was still messing with his mind.
So was being away from Dani.
He needed to set up some kind of security checkpoint to keep women he used to date from showing up at his apartment, but how?
Did that many women really show up at his door all the time? He wouldn’t know. He was usually gone.
Mace closed his eyes and wished he were anywhere but in Germany on a train again, especially playing a hostage.
Just one more day, he muttered to himself. One more, and the teams would switch places. Will’s platoon would play hostage, and Mace’s would charge in and rescue them. That had to be easier than sitting here and reliving, time after time, being on the train with Aaron and Harold, the little kids, the terrified parents, the people who’d tried to escape out the back and been shot.
He’d barely slept since they’d arrived here, often found himself breaking out in a sweat. He didn’t want to think about how poorly he was hiding the mess this was making with his head.
And he couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that he’d never told Dani about the shooting in any detail. She hadn’t wanted to know, but one day, she would. He didn’t see how she —
A loud bang ricocheted through the train car. His ears rang, even though he was wearing earplugs and the training flash bangs weren’t nearly as loud as real ones.
Mace, caught in the past, wasn’t ready for it, and he jumped a good three inches off his seat. His ass was barely back in the seat when someone shoved his upper body down onto the empty seat beside him to keep him from getting shot during the simulated rescue. For a moment after the all-clear he wasn’t sure he could sit up, stand up and act anything close to normal.
“All right,” he heard Will say. “That’s enough for now. Find some food. We’ll hit it again after lunch.”
Mace sat up very slowly, but made no move to get to his feet. His heart was jackhammering in his chest. His ears were still ringing as he pulled out his earplugs with shaking hands. And dropped both plugs on the floor.
Fuck.
He bent over to pick them up, but a hand — Will’s hand — beat him to it.
“I got ’em.” Will took a seat beside Mace. “Not sure this was the best idea you ever had, coming on this training exercise.”
“Maybe not,” Mace admitted.
“Sit out this afternoon. Observe so you can plan how you’re going to save me when we switch places.”
Mace gave his friend a hard look that said that idea was a no-go.
“Fine. Torture yourself. That’s smart. You know, we could set up this exercise just the way things were the day of the shooting. I could put any of our guys in your place, and they’d all do the exact same thing you did.”
“We have enough fake blood so one of them could lie on the floor and bleed out in front of me, while I crouch down behind a seat and do nothing?”
“If you need to see it, then … Yeah, we do.” Will was not the kind to back down.
“Dani doesn’t know about the whole guy-she-loved-bled-out-in-front-of-me thing. She hasn’t let me tell her what happened that day in any detail,” Mace said.
“She’s not gonna hate you for it. At least, not for long.”
“She could disappear on me. Anything could happen to her.” He could hardly breathe thinking about that.
“So, slip a tracker on her car and put one on her phone. You think I haven’t done that with Amanda?”
“Does she know you track her every move?”
“I’ve never looked at the tracking information, except when I first set it up, to know it was working. But if she ever gets in some kind of trouble and can’t call for help, I’ll know where her phone and her car are. Hell, I’d get a tracker implanted in her arm, if she’d go for it. I might ask for that as a wedding present from her. I am not losing that woman.”
Mace couldn’t help but laugh at that. “It would be one helluva wedding present.”
“If a woman you loved had ever been held hostage, you’d do it, too.”
He probably would. “Do you worry all the damned time about something happening to her?”
Will shrugged. “It’s an ongoing battle. It was easier when she was back in Ohio. Much as I hated having her so far away, I knew she was safe with her father. Sam and Emma and everybody else would watch out for her, too. I love having her here, but I worry more about her when I’m gone, even with her living in a building full of Navy SEALs.”
Will’s whole family — the people he considered family — were in Ohio. Seriously good people. Mace had spent some holidays and spare leave time with Will’s family. Maybe Mace should take Dani there for Christmas. They did Christmas in a big way. From what she’d told him, she’d never had a big family Christmas.
Or maybe he’d work up his nerve one year and take her home to Texas, but then she’d see that Mace’s family was great and want him to explain why he avoided them as much as he could.
Assuming, that is, D
ani would go anywhere with him, that she wouldn’t hate him one day and run off and not let him find her.
Will chuckled. “Amanda said when she showed up at your door for the first time, Dani and her friend thought Amanda was another one of your ex-girlfriends.”
“Great. That is just fucking great.”
“Just so you know — Muffin Girl’s muffins are as bad as ever.”
Mace groaned. Dani must think he was some always-horny sailor who’d lined up women so he could get laid every chance he got when he wasn’t deployed. He’d already been hearing hints of that in the text messages they’d exchanged.
“Hey, it’s okay. She’s still there.”
“For now.” Mace shook his head. “You really know how to cheer a guy up.”
“Got you to stop thinking about the shooting, didn’t it? Now, come on. Let’s get something to eat. Then get this thing done, so we can go home.”
* * *
Dani
She stood outside the school where she’d failed so spectacularly six months ago in her first teaching job. She fought with herself about going inside and explaining.
She wasn’t good at asking for help or accepting it. That was one of the ways Mace made her crazy — always giving, helping and wanting her to be the one taking, accepting. She wanted to prove to herself and to him that she could do something herself to move her life in the right direction.
Dani loved the idea of being part of Amanda’s tutoring program, but she had always tried to have a back-up plan. It made her feel safer, stronger, more capable. She needed that.
If she ever wanted another classroom teaching job, she’d have to explain what happened in this job. An employer would likely want to talk to the principal of this school. Mrs. Glover had seemed like a nice person, even when she hadn’t known why Dani was falling apart, so she figured she had nothing to lose by talking to the woman now.
She’d put on her best teacher outfit, a plain, dark-blue skirt with a happy, colorful floral-print blouse because, once upon a time, she’d liked to look bright and happy in front of the kids in her class.