Shooting For Love - A Standalone Novel (A Suspenseful Bad Boy Neighbor Romance Love Story) (Burbank Brothers, Book #2)

by Naomi Niles

  “Will you be deployed again?”

  Dylan nodded. “Once my leave is over, I go back to prepare for the deployment.”

  “What do you feel just before you leave?” I asked.

  “I don’t have time to concentrate,” Dylan said slowly. “It’s when I’m on the plane that I start getting nervous.”

  “So you haven’t got used to it?”

  “You get used to it,” Dylan explained. “But you never get rid of certain things … like the nerves and the fear. That will never leave you.”

  “When you first told me that you were planning to enlist, I thought you were joking,” I admitted. “I thought you were playing some sick joke on me. I think that I only really supported in that decision because I believed you wouldn’t really go through with it.”

  “I didn’t think I would get through training,” Dylan said. “And after I did, I just had to see it through.”

  “I’ll admit I was upset and hurt,” I said slowly. “But I also understood why you wanted to do it. You wanted to make your father proud.”

  Dylan smiled. “I never told you that.”

  I shrugged. “You didn’t have to.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dylan

  There was a quiet, calming stillness in the air. It clung to me like dew on fresh leaves. I glanced at Lizzie, wondering whether she felt it too. She was looking up at the sun. It was just a big ball of orange fire, half hidden behind silver-crusted clouds that seemed to give off their own ethereal glow.

  I realized that it had been eleven years since I’d marveled at the wonders that nature held. I hadn’t stopped to sit down and think in so long that I’d missed so much. My eyes fell back onto Lizzie. She was illuminated in warm, golden rays of sunshine that were getting duller as the minutes ticked away. I hadn’t been this comfortable in so long that I’d forgotten the sensation. It was like a caress, it made you feel safe and content, and contentment in my books had always been a cut above happiness.

  Happiness made you silly and excited and prone to making mistakes and rash decisions. Contentment was stillness.

  “Have you forgiven me?” I asked before my courage abandoned me.

  “Forgiven you?” Lizzie asked as she turned her gaze back to me. “For what?”

  “Leaving.”

  She looked at me for a long moment and I could see the memory in her eyes and the sadness it held for her. I wanted to reach out and touch her but I didn’t want to intrude on her thoughts. She reached up and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

  “Can I be honest?” she said at last and I felt my breath catch.

  I swallowed down my fear and nodded. “Of course.”

  “I thought I had forgiven you,” Lizzie started slowly. “But then I saw you for the first time in eleven years and I felt … something. Something I couldn’t quite place. It was only later that I realized what it was. I was resentful and I was still hurt. And when I realized that that was what I was feeling, I knew that I couldn’t have forgiven you … at least not completely. But I think a part of me has since then.”

  “And the other part?” I asked slowly.

  “I’m still working on that,” she said softly. “It was really hard after you left. And then …”

  “Yes?”

  “The letters stopped coming,” Lizzie said.

  I could hear the hurt in her voice. It was palpable and it hurt me in the process. I hated knowing how much pain I had caused her. She had deserved more than that. She had deserved something from me.

  “We never really broke up,” Lizzie went on. “We just drifted and then we stopped communicating and then … we lost contact completely. Even when I knew what was happening, I still couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it.”

  “It was my fault,” I said. “I should have tried to explain better, I should have done more than I did. It was just that the training was so much more intense that I would ever have imagined. I threw myself into the fray and I didn’t have time to look back.”

  She flinched at my last words and I reached for her hand. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to hurt you, I’m just trying to be honest with you.”

  “I know,” Lizzie replied. “I want you to be honest with me.”

  It was the first real conversation we had had in over a decade and we both knew it. This was not small talk or casual flirting; it wasn’t even the beginnings of a courtship. It was two people who had a massive history between them, it was two people trying to put their past behind them and find some closure in the present.

  “Once I passed my training, I was sent off on my first deployment,” I said.

  “I remember,” Lizzie nodded. “You sent me a letter telling me about it; June seventeenth was when you told me you would be leaving. It was one of the last letters you sent me.”

  “Afghanistan,” I said. “That was the first mission.”

  “It changed you,” Lizzie said before I could finish.

  “Yes,” I nodded. “It changed me, more than I could have thought. All the training in the world can’t prepare you for certain things. Everything was going according to plan and then suddenly … it wasn’t. We found ourselves in the middle of enemy fire and we had no choice but to defend ourselves. I killed three men that day.”

  I fell into silence as the memory of that day overtook me. I could still remember the first man. His eyes were wide with anger; his skin was burnished brown and covered in scars. He looked at me like I was the devil. I had panicked and the moment he took a step towards me I fired. I didn’t think and I didn’t aim: I just shot blindly.

  “The first man I shot,” I said after a moment. “He was unarmed. I looked, but I couldn’t find a weapon on him.”

  “Dylan,” Lizzie’s voice was soft as a whisper. She clutched my hand in both of hers and squeezed. “You didn’t know that.”

  “I was trained better,” I said. “I was scared and my fear took over.”

  “It was your first mission and your first real fight,” Lizzie said. “If you hadn’t killed him, he would have found a way to kill you.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “That’s what I realized once the dust had settled and I was alone in my tent. It doesn’t matter what the justifications are, it doesn’t matter if he’s the enemy, and it doesn’t matter if I was acting in self-defense. I killed a man; I took his life like I had a right to. I couldn’t wrap my head around that. I couldn’t understand that.”

  Lizzie looked at me with those sad, blue eyes of hers and I knew instinctively that she understood what I was saying. She had always been a pacifist. She had always been the girl to stop a fight, to make peace, to swallow her own pride simply to avoid an unpleasant situation.

  “I know,” she said and I felt better instantly. “And it’s ok to feel like that.”

  “You’re the only one who’s ever said that to me,” I said with a small smile. “I’ve tried explaining that to a few people and it doesn’t matter who they are. They’ve always tried to explain away my feelings. I just wanted them to understand those feelings.”

  “I do.”

  “I wish I had spoken to you then like I’m speaking to you now,” I said with a sigh that went ten years deep. “But at the time, I couldn’t talk to anyone. I retreated into myself and I didn’t resurface for a long time.”

  “You send me a letter a few months into your deployment,” Lizzie recalled. “Do you remember it?”

  I searched my head but it came up blank. “No I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I still have that letter,” she admitted. “I cried the first time I read it … not because there was anything definitive about us in it. You didn’t mention that you needed time or you wanted to take a break from us. You just spoke about your first combat mission and I could tell from the way you wrote that … that you had lost yourself.”

  “What did I say in the letter?”

  “It was this one line in particular,” Lizzie said. “You wrote ‘I’m tired, Li
zzie, my body aches but it’s bearable compared with the ache in my conscience, my soul. I don’t know why I’m here ... not just in this war-torn place but also in this world.’ I memorized that line because I knew there was a secret hidden in it somewhere. You were confused and you were alone and I knew I couldn’t help you. So when the letters stopped coming, I guess I wasn’t surprised.”

  “I didn’t know what to say anymore,” I admitted. “Bastrop seemed like another life. I felt as though I wasn’t a part of it anymore. I felt that if I came back, I would taint it somehow, I would ruin everything beautiful about it: including you. I’m not trying to justify anything, I’m not trying to pretend like I stopped writing for some noble reason. The truth is I was confused and alone and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I just …”

  “It’s ok Dylan,” Lizzie said squeezing my hand. “You were so young, we both were. We weren’t supposed to know the best way to deal with things.”

  “I know,” I replied. “I just wish it had been different. I wish I had never stopped writing to you, I wish I had never given you cause to question my love for you. I wish I had chosen differently.”

  “Don’t do that, Dylan,” Lizzie said immediately. “Don’t look back. It’ll only drive you crazy; trust me I know. I did it during the worst moments of my marriage and it only made things worse. Things happened and there’s no way to change it, so why go through the torture of thinking up all the alternate possibilities? There’s no alternate. These are our lives.”

  She had always been wise beyond her years; it just reinforced how much I had missed her and how quickly she was able to talk me off the ledge. I remembered that she had been through things too. She had lived a life while I had been away and that had taught her things that had nothing to do with me.

  “What made you marry Paul?” I asked.

  She smiled. “You already asked me that question.”

  “I didn’t believe your answer,” I replied.

  She looked down and I knew I was right. “He left for college,” Lizzie said. “And he moved back into town six years later. He seemed different at first; he chased after me pretty persistently and in the end I decided to give in.”

  “But why?”

  She sighed. “Because you weren’t there, Dylan,” she said and I detected that little note of bitterness in her tone. “And I realized at last that I couldn’t sit around waiting for you. I realized that five years ago.”

  “Five years,” I repeated and then it hit me. “I visited my parents five years ago.”

  Lizzie nodded. “You were in town,” she said. “For two whole weeks, as I recall, and I didn’t hear a word from you at any point. And that was when it hit me: I was wasting my life away because I was holding on to the fairy tale we had lived in high school. And I knew I needed to stop.”

  I stared at her in shock, in surprise, in regret, but I knew that she was right: there was nothing I could do to change what had happened all those years ago.

  “I was in town five years ago,” I nodded. “And I didn’t contact you.”

  “No you didn’t,” she said, the bitterness had disappeared from her tone.

  “Would you believe me if I told you that I debated contacting you a hundred times a day?” I asked.

  She looked at me. “I suppose I could believe that now.”

  “It’s true,” I said sincerely. “I thought about you every second that I was in Bastrop … but I just didn’t think it was fair to contact you. I hated how I had just stopped writing, how I had disappeared into my world without so much as an explanation or a goodbye. I didn’t think it was fair to bring all that up again … to disrupt your life with my baggage. I thought you were better off without me.”

  “Why?” Lizzie demanded.

  “Because, like you said, war changed me,” I said trying to avoid making my explanations sound like excuses. “I didn’t want you to have to deal with my emotional baggage.”

  Her eyes were hooded and I couldn’t quite read the expression behind them. She had gotten better at masking her emotions and I wondered if she employed that mask her everyone or just me. “I appreciate the thought,” she said at last. “And I understand it too; I just wish you had left that decision up to me.”

  “You know what? I wish I had too,” I admitted.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Lizzie said after a small pause. “We’re not kids anymore, we’re adults who have our own lives now. And in a few weeks you’re going back to yours.”

  “Yes, I am going back,” I agreed. “But I don’t know if that is my life anymore.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I feel like I’ve served my time,” I said. “I think it’s time for me to retire.”

  “Retire?” Lizzie repeated. “Really?”

  “The last couple of years, I’ve had this idea of opening up a center for war vets,” I tried to explain. “Sort of like a rehabilitation program that would focus on getting them prepared to re-join society.”

  Lizzie raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Dylan,” she said. “That’s a wonderful idea.”

  “You think so?”

  “I do,” she nodded enthusiastically. “I really do. We need more centers like that across this country. We make such a big fuss about all the heroes who fight for us overseas but we don’t give much thought to what happens to them once they come back.”

  I smiled, thrilled with her approval and her excitement at the idea. “I’m glad you think so,” I said. “Hopefully it will work.”

  “It will work,” Lizzie said with certainty.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I know you,” she replied simply. “You enlisted when you were eighteen and you went through the toughest training program in the world to become a Navy SEAL. You can do anything you set your mind to, and I’m not just saying that. I have proof.”

  I laughed. “You’ve always made me feel ten feet all.”

  Lizzie smiled. “You always gave me the ammunition I needed,” she said. “And if you ever need some real help, I’d be happy to pitch in.”

  “Really?”

  “Anything you need,” Lizzie nodded. “Nurse, cook … even a beer wench if you need it.”

  I laughed. “Nope, definitely not,” I said immediately. “Every man who laid eyes on you would lose his mind and hit on you and then I’d have to get involved. It wouldn’t do to have a rehabilitation for war vets and then have the owner beat them all up.”

  Lizzie laughed. “It would make quite the headline though.”

  I pulled her close and we laughed together, as the conversation gently tilted back into carelessness. She smelled amazing and I couldn’t help but lean in to bask in her scent. When I pulled back I realized she was looking straight at me, her eyes were impossibly large and impossibly beautiful. I felt as though I was hypnotized.

  “Lizzie,” I whispered slowly as I cupped her face in my hand. “I’ve missed you so much.” Then I leaned in and kissed her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Elizabeth

  It felt amazing to sit there, nestled against Dylan’s chest with the sun setting slowly in front of us. It was as though the sky was our theater and the sun was putting on a show just for us. I could almost believe that we were the only two people on earth and quite apart from feeling lonely, all I felt was a sense of peace and fulfilment.

  It felt amazing to open up to him, to hear him open up with me. It made me realize that we hadn’t just been lovers, we had been best friends, and after being starved of that friendship for eleven years, it was impossible to turn away from it now.

  “Lizzie,” he whispered to me, as his hand reached up and gently cupped the side of my face. His blue eyes were soft and tranquil, but they held passion. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  He leaned in and I knew he was going to kiss me. I didn’t even think to stop it, I had anticipated this moment all evening. Despite that, it still felt like a first kiss and I could feel the anticipation course throug
h me. He kissed me as though he were scared to break me. He kissed me like I was the most precious thing in the world. He kissed me like I was the only woman in the world.

  It was so easy to fall into him again, and when he was holding me like that, it was impossible to believe that we’d lived separate lives for the last decade. Those years became something like an elusive dream that I couldn’t quite hold on to and I found what little resolve I had left slip away into the sunset.

  Dylan pushed me down gently onto the grass as his body came over mine. It felt like déjà vu, as though we had lived this moment in the past, but there were things that I knew were different. He was different. His body had changed. His stomach was flat and lined with a ridge of muscles that seemed to go on forever. His arms were powerfully defined and twice the size they had been in school.

  But it was more than just his physicality that had changed. He was more confident, more experienced, he was sure of himself in a way that had been absent before. He explored my body as though we were strangers and I was a mystery to him. He looked at me as though I was an enigma that he needed to decode.

  The first time we’d had sex, I had been fifteen, and Dylan was close upon his sixteenth birthday. We had already been together two years, but we had decided to wait a little longer. It hadn’t been planned, it had happened out of nowhere, a bolt of light in the dark that took us both by surprise. I had been in my room crying because my parents had just informed me that they were getting a divorce. Dylan and called earlier, and when I hadn’t answered, he had come over right away to make sure everything was all right.

  “Lizzie,” he had said, his voice going soft with worry. “Don’t cry …”

  “They’re giving up,” I wept. “Dad moved out last night.”

  He didn’t say a word. He just sat there, holding me until my tears had dried. “We’re not a family anymore,” I told him with my head on his shoulder.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You and I are a family; that will never change.”

  I was the one who kissed him. I kissed him because I realized he was right. I kissed him because I realized that he was the one I called whenever something went wrong, whenever something went right, whenever something happened at all. He was the one I called for first, above my own parents sometimes. He was like an extension of myself. He was my family.