by Hill, Teresa
She could also imagine Aaron explaining it all to her sometime later, like it was no big deal. And it wouldn’t have been, she suddenly realized, if he hadn’t died. Would she have been angry if he’d come home a few months later and said, don’t get mad, but about that man who married us …
We’ll just have to do it all again, he’d have said. Any way you want. What sounds perfect for our second marriage ceremony? Courthouse? Base chaplain? Same Greek Island? Anything in between? He’d make it happen.
He’d have kissed her, told her how much he loved her, apologized for that tiny fib, and then taken off to make their second ceremony happen.
She could imagine it all so easily.
She probably wouldn’t have been mad at him. She’d never been mad at Aaron until after he’d died.
But none of what she could imagine would ever happen.
Aaron was never coming back to her, because he was dead.
She’d thought horrible things about him. She’d been so angry and dismissed every good thing that had ever happened with him. She’d berated herself for stupidly believing him. And she’d been wrong.
Maybe, she realized only in that moment, there was something worse than Aaron being a liar.
Worse was Aaron truly loving her, and telling her just one little lie, then dying.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Six
Mace
She was really scaring him.
Sitting on the balcony floor, she hugged her legs to her chest, rocked back and forth and let the tears keep falling down her face. She’d let him wipe them away, but she wouldn’t look at him and wouldn’t say anything. She wouldn’t let him sit next to her or hold her. She wouldn’t listen to him apologize for bringing this all back up, for how much she was hurting.
He was an idiot.
He’d thought she’d want to know she hadn’t been wrong about Aaron. He’d been a good guy who’d loved her.
And now Mace was here. He loved her, too. If he hadn’t known already, seeing her like this and feeling shredded inside with hurting and worrying about her, was enough to convince him.
He loved her.
So had Aaron. She’d thought he was the love of her life, and this must feel like losing him all over again.
“Dani, please.” He held onto her bare feet. She wouldn’t let him hold her hands or anything else, but he had to touch her, to offer her any kind of comfort he could.
“He loved me,” she said finally, like it was a puzzle she could not solve.
“Yes. He did.”
“I thought horrible things about him.”
“It’s okay. He would understand why.”
“I loved him, but I was so quick to believe he was a liar.”
“You were in shock, Dani — ”
“For months?”
“I think so.”
“It’s awful, the things I thought about him. The things I said. I had screaming conversations with him after he was gone.”
“It’s understandable, given what you thought had happened.” He wrapped his hands around her ankles, wishing he could will her some of his strength, infuse her body with emotions he felt for her, so she’d know she was still loved.
“No. I feel terrible about the way I treated him.”
“I heard the way he talked about you. I saw his face when he described marrying you and how happy that made you. He wouldn’t want you to feel guilty about anything.”
She stared blankly ahead. Tears kept rolling down her cheeks, off her chin and onto her shirt. He thought she was in shock. He wanted her inside and in his arms.
He could hold her together, couldn’t he? She wasn’t Annie. She hadn’t been thrown from a horse and left paralyzed. She hadn’t been shot and she wasn’t bleeding out in front of him.
But she looked like he and Aaron had broken her heart.
He was still trying to figure out what to do, how he could help her, when Leah came home. He went inside to explain. Leah gasped, horrified, when she saw the state Dani was in, and then told Mace to let her handle it.
It was almost impossible, but he did. He left Dani there that way, with Leah.
Not knowing what else to do, he called Will.
“I fucked up,” Mace admitted as he took a seat at the bar next to his best friend.
“With Dani? One more time, I have to try to explain to you … You can’t fix everything, especially for other people. If we get orders to go capture a bad guy, we go. If some people have been kidnapped, and we’re ordered to go rescue them, we do it. Your family’s in trouble, you do what you can. Someone you love, you do absolutely everything you can.”
“That’s the thing. I love her.”
Will took a minute to absorb that. “Okay. From what I’ve seen, all you’ve done is try to help this woman.”
“Yeah? Well, I think she was better off before I ever said a word to her. I mean, she was sad as hell and mad and hurt, but she was coping. Kind of. She would have gotten over it eventually, I think.”
“And now?”
“I think I broke her. I mean, what do you think would be worse? Finding out Amanda never loved you, that it was all a sick joke, a scam? Or she loved you completely, but you lost her, forever. One pisses you off and makes you feel stupid, but the other … ”
“Don’t say it. I can’t think about it. I’d never get over losing her.”
“Yeah. I see that now. Now that it’s too late.” Mace shook his head and took another drink of his beer. “All this time, I thought I was helping her. I made everything worse.”
“So, what are you gonna do?”
“I have no idea.”
* * *
Mace
When he got back to the condo, Dani was gone and Leah was freaking out. Dani was supposed to work at the bar that night, but she never showed. Jill called Leah to check on Dani, and he and Leah prayed Dani had had a flat tire or something on the way to work. They drove from the condo to the bar three different ways and back.
No Dani.
They called her phone and texted her a thousand times. No answer.
Leah said she’d been quiet and calm after Mace had left. They’d talked, she’d cried some more, but then had been determined to go to work. Leah felt awful about letting her out the door.
They went to the girls’ old apartment. No Dani. Mace shoved his way past Randy and searched the entire apartment to make sure.
Jill was at work and would be watching for her there. They talked to Nico and the other employees in case someone had seen or talked to her.
Mace wished he’d put a tracker on her phone and her car, like Will had done to Amanda’s. Dani would be pissed as hell, but at least Mace would probably know where to find her now.
She didn’t have any relatives left. She had been in Virginia Beach only since August, so she didn’t have a lot of friends that Leah knew about, other than the people who worked with her.
Where the hell would she go?
He stayed up all night pacing and driving around. Nothing.
By morning, he went to the only other place he knew that he hadn’t already checked — the school. They probably thought he was a crazy man, the way he looked, the way he sounded. Sherry Abbott, the teacher who had kept trying to hit on Mace, didn’t even take another stab at getting his number.
He went back to the bar. Still nothing. They promised to call if she showed up there.
The condo. Still nothing.
He walked the beach, felt like he was on the train again, the minutes slipping away, the man Dani loved, who, it turned out, loved her back, bleeding out in front of him. Time was the enemy all over again. He had to find her.
She didn’t have anyplace else to go. Leah, Jill, Nico, Amanda … They’d all racked their brains, trying to remember anyone she’d mentioned seeing, any place she’d mentioned going. He didn’t want to think about it, but he knew Leah and Amanda had called local hospitals, checking on whether she’d been in an accident.
He had the guys in his squad and Will’s calling motels, asking for a call to be put through to her room in the hopes of getting lucky. A fucking platoon of Navy SEALs, and they could not find one woman in a U.S. city. If she’d been in a war zone, they’d have had a drone on top of her and GPS coordinates to her location. They could have taken a helicopter and fast-roped down to her, grabbed her and gotten her out of there.
Amanda tried to take care of him. She hugged him and told him he needed to sleep, but he couldn’t. The sun would be going down soon, making it a second night with no one knowing where she was. He drove aimlessly through town until midnight but knew he had to sleep if he wanted to think clearly tomorrow.
She was somewhere. He just had to figure out where.
Back at his condo, he stretched out on the couch. Not in his bed. He’d do nothing there but think of the nights he’d shared it with her.
Up by seven, he took a quick shower, made a pot of coffee and drank half of it. He paced, grabbed a legal pad and started making lists. He wanted to make another round of calls to hotels and motels. Maybe she had checked in somewhere by now.
He wanted a list of everybody who worked at the bar and the school so he could check with them all. He’d call hospitals again. The police would take a missing person report at noon, when she’d been missing for forty-eight hours, and put out a BOLO on her car then.
Mostly, he kept thinking he should have never gone to find her in the first place, never insisted on talking to her, never turned her life upside-down. She’d be at the bar tonight, working, and still in that apartment with Randy, but he wouldn’t be as worried about her as he was right now.
He felt sick inside, like he had when he was seventeen and realized his little sister wasn’t anywhere in the house, and then saw that her horse wasn’t in the barn.
He’d had to go and figure out what really happened in Greece with her and Aaron, like he knew what she needed, like he could fix anything for her. He was an idiot. If they didn’t find her and she wasn’t okay, he would never, ever forgive himself. He would —
Aaron’s grave.
The one place he hadn’t looked. A place where she might want to be right now.
Mace knew where it was. He’d gone there once, not long after he’d finally gotten out of the U.S. hospital after the shooting. It was in a Veteran’s Administration cemetery on the other side of Norfolk, about an hour away.
He hauled ass as much as he could, but it was rush hour. So damned many people were on the roads, and they wouldn’t get out of his way. He was ready to run over some of them. He got caught behind a minor accident that left traffic inching along, and he thought he was going to lose his mind. Then it started to rain, which slowed down traffic, too.
Finally, he pulled into the cemetery. He didn’t want to look at the gravestones. Rows and rows of them, all the same size and shape. Guys he knew were buried here. He couldn’t be here without thinking about each one, of twenty-one gun salutes, tightly folded flags, tridents pounded into polished caskets. He’d been to too fucking many funerals.
Aaron’s grave was near the back on a slight rise in the land. He thought he knew which one it was, even from a distance. Yes, that was her car, he was almost certain. Then, nearby, he spotted a shape huddled against a grayish-white headstone.
Mace turned off the truck’s engine and scrambled out. It had stopped raining, but it was windy and cloudy. The grass and the trees were wet.
Dani was … God, Dani.
She had spread an afghan out on the ground in front of the headstone and sat sideways against the stone. Her knees were drawn up to her chest, her arms around them, like the other night on the balcony. The left side of her body, her forehead even, leaned against the stone, like she couldn’t get close enough to it. Like she needed to be as close to Aaron as she could, and this was it, all that was left of him in the ground beneath her. It was a raw, gut-wrenching picture of grief that made his heart hurt, for her and for Aaron.
She didn’t move, even when Mace sank down to his knees beside her. Her hair was damp. So were her clothes. She was shaking. She must have been out here when it rained. It wasn’t that cold, but any kind of wind on wet clothes multiplied the cooling effect exponentially. Anyone who’d been through BUD/S learned that the hard way, in the cold, windy.
“Dani,” he said softly.
She turned her head at that. Her eyes were red and puffy, her face pale and sad, etched with grief. “Mace?”
“God, Dani.” He sat down, wrapped his arms around her and felt like he could breathe again for the first time in two days. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I was afraid I wasn’t ever going to find you.”
Her shirt was wet, her skin cold. She let him hold her, but she didn’t make any move to hold him. She looked like she couldn’t quite believe he was here. How fucking long had she been out here?
Not overnight, surely. The gates were locked when the sun went down. There must be a groundskeeper who checked and made sure everyone was out before locking up for the night.
He tightened his grip on her. Her head finally eased over onto his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. I just needed to be here with him.”
“The whole time you’ve been gone? You’ve been here?”
She nodded.
“You’re not hurt? Nobody hurt you?”
“No.”
“Sweetheart, you’re so cold. You sat here in the rain?”
“I needed to explain to him. I thought such awful things about him. I forgot all the good ones, like they never happened. I hate that I did that to him.”
“He wouldn’t blame you for that, Dani. He’d understand.”
Her eyes filled with tears. If Aaron had been standing here right now, Mace would have punched him.
He tried to calm down. “We have to get you warm and dry.”
She turned to face him with the biggest, saddest eyes he’d ever seen. “I’m not ready to leave him.”
“Just for now. You can come back. I’ll bring you back, if you want me to. You don’t have to do this all by yourself.”
Her bottom lip started trembling. She bit down on it, trying to stop it. “I thought when I found him, I would never be alone again. I thought he’d always be here with me.”
“You’re not alone. I’m here. I’m here for whatever you need.” And if what she needed was to mourn the man in the grave, he’d be with her while she did it. “But you’re cold. Your clothes are wet. So is your hair.”
This wasn’t a negotiation. He got to his feet, bent down, scooped her up and headed for his truck. It caught her by surprise. She looked like she couldn’t make sense of it.
“Have you slept at all in the last two days? Have you eaten?”
“I … I slept. A little bit. I kept dreaming and waking up.”
“Have you eaten?” he asked again.
“Uhh … I must have.”
He put her down on her feet so he could unlock his truck. “How long ago?”
“I’m not sure.”
He lifted her up and sat her inside, then dug into the glove box, thinking he might have a power bar. He didn’t. He tried the gym bag that he always kept under the seat. Still nothing to eat, but he had a t-shirt and a pair of running shorts.
“We need to get you out of those wet clothes.” He glanced around to make sure no one was nearby, then tugged her t-shirt over her head.
She wrapped her arms around herself, over her pale chest and a thin, white bra. He pulled his shirt over her head. When she didn’t make a move to help him, he stuck his hands under the shirt, found an arm and pushed it through one armhole, then did the same to the other.
He pulled the shirt down, then slid his hands beneath her hair at the back of her neck and pulled it out from beneath the neckline of the shirt. One way or another, he was going to take care of her. She might still be in love with a dead man, but he wasn’t here and Mace was.
He slipped an arm around her waist an
d lifted her off the seat long enough to undo her jeans and pull them off. He was about sit her back down on the seat when her arms went around him. She hid her face against his neck.
“I’m sorry I scared you. I’m okay.”
God, she’d scared him so badly. His fucking hands were shaking. His whole body was, maybe as much as hers. He couldn’t quite convince himself that he had her now and that she was safe.
He kissed her forehead. “Let’s get you in a hot shower, into your own clothes, get you something to eat — ”
“Mace, wait. I need to tell you something.”
“No. You don’t.”
He knew what that was going to be. She loved Aaron. He was the man she’d thought he was when she fell in love with him. Mace had proven it to her.
She didn’t have to say anything else.
“Shower, food, sleep,” he insisted, determined to take care of her, even if she didn’t want him.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Dani
“No,” she said more forcefully. She eased away from him and tried to make him look her in the eye. Out of the wind and her wet clothes, being held close, she was warming up. It was easier to think, and she had things she needed to say. “Give me a minute and listen.”
He looked so stern and sad, this good, strong, solid man. She’d worried him and hurt him, and she needed to fix this.
“I needed to be here to tell Aaron how sorry I was for all the awful things I thought about him over the last months, and because it felt like I had never mourned the person he really was. I’d been too hurt and angry to do that.”
“Right. I understand.”
“I don’t think you do. I also needed to be here to say goodbye to him.” She waited, wanting to make sure that was clear to him.
He went still and closed his eyes. “You don’t have to do that today.”
“No, but I wanted to do it today. Being here is hard. I’ve sat here for hours. It felt like a giant emotional purge, and I needed it. The last part was saying goodbye. You pulled me away before I could do that.”