Guarded Dreams

by L. J. Evans

  I rolled down the windows, waved my hand, and drove toward town. They didn’t know, but “later” was going to be tonight when I needed a place to crash my head. I didn’t have a choice about it, but for now, they could think I was gone.

  Chapter Three

  Eli

  I MET A GIRL

  “She turned around and

  it felt like the world turned upside down

  And the only thing I could say was "hey,"

  and I'm so glad she didn't walk away”

  —Performed by William Michael Morgan

  —Written by Hunt / Mcanally / Rosen

  We all watched in stunned silence as Ava did a remarkable move with her car in order to get out from in front of the truck and then drove off into the setting sunlight. The whole place felt quiet in a way that it hadn’t earlier. It felt like it was missing something. It wasn’t just the music that had disappeared with her phone. It was that Ava had brought something to life inside the place.

  “Well, hell, that’s disappointing,” Mac said.

  I kicked him under the table. “Don’t even think about it, dickwad.”

  “Too late. Anyway, she’s gone,” Truck said with a smile.

  “Last thing any of us needs to do is get in the middle of some goddamn fight between Abrams and his daughter. And we definitely don’t need him showing up here with her in any of our beds,” I said and cringed, knowing they wouldn’t let the “our" slide. And they didn’t.

  Truck grinned at me. “Visualizing it too, oh Captain my Captain?”

  Mac kicked me back under the table. “Even this priest couldn’t help but get his penis in a rise over her. Hell, you’d have to be dead not to respond to that.”

  “Again. Off limits.”

  “You can’t tell my dick how to behave, Captain Prude,” Mac continued to ride me.

  I wasn’t a captain, and I certainly hadn’t been one when they’d started calling me Captain Prude. It wasn’t that I didn’t like girls or sex. I’d had great sex in my four years at A&M, but it wasn’t with random chicks that I picked up in a bar every time we were allowed out of our cages like these two bozos.

  I wasn’t a relationship guy either, but I had a couple girls that seemed okay with being friends with benefits. It worked when we were all under a lot of pressure to perform academically and in the corps. Everyone needed to let off steam sometimes.

  “I’m going to take a run on the beach.”

  I left them drinking their beer and drooling over Ava in a way that was bugging the hell out of me for no reason that I could justify.

  I changed and headed down to the sand where I beat a track as far south as I could before I headed back. It helped me get my head refocused on how close I was to getting what I wanted and not on a girl with dual-colored eyes. The Coast Guard was so close to being a reality that I could almost feel the joy of signing the enlistment contract. One more summer cruise. Two more semesters. Months away. Almost close enough to be able to count it down in days.

  The humidity, even as the stars started coming out, was enough to have me dripping. We were used to it from doing runs in Galveston, but it never made it pretty. I stunk like I’d been out to sea for a week by the time I returned to find the assholes watching an old eighties flick, Goonies. Truck’s grandparents had owned a video store back when those were a thing, so he’d acquainted us with all the eighties and nineties classic movies during our time together in the dorms. If he wasn’t watching some old movie, he usually had the American History channel on.

  “Shit, I could smell you from the stairs, Els-worth,” Mac said when the door swung shut behind me.

  I shook my shirt out on him in response, and he jumped up, spilling his beer and screaming like a girl.

  I chuckled as I headed down to the master suite and the shower with the two showerheads. Those two showerheads brought my dumbass male body right back to what I’d tried to escape: thoughts of a bright-eyed brunette with a lithe body and a sexy-as-hell mouth.

  ♫ ♫ ♫

  I fell asleep somewhere around midnight with the French doors open and the sound of the ocean soothing me as it always did. There was no moon, and the house was far enough away from town and other residences that there was very little in the way of light pollution, so I could barely see my hand. It was like being below deck in the middle of a blackout.

  When I woke, it was still dark, and I wasn’t sure what had jerked me from my sleep with an unsteady heartbeat. Then, I heard a quiet curse that had me sitting all the way up. I heard another movement from out in the great room and was at the door and down the hall before I could really process it.

  I was silent as I moved.

  What I found was a drunk Ava. She smelled, from across the room, like booze. She was standing on one foot while she held the other in her hand, rubbing her big toe. As I watched, she swayed and would have hit the wood floor if I hadn’t moved forward in a rush of movement.

  I caught her, and she seemed as surprised as I was. As surprised as we both had been when I’d had my hands on her waist before dinner. The smell of her, like citrus and ocean, hadn’t escaped me then or now. It was hidden at the moment, underneath the mask of booze, but it was still there, calling to me in a way that I hated and loved simultaneously.

  She giggled. Although, with her husky voice, it almost didn’t count as a giggle.

  “Thanks,” she said. She pushed off me, her hand searing my bare chest. I had to force my hands away from her as she sank down on the nearby coffee table.

  “You’re drunk.” It was a stupid statement. Obvious. And it sounded accusatory when I had no right to be. I didn’t know if I was upset that she had been out on her own, drunk, or if I was pissed that she was back and threatening everything that I held dear in my life.

  She looked up at me, and I swear I could still see the difference in her eye color, even in the dark.

  “And you’re in your boxers,” she said back.

  Shit. I was. And tonight, I’d put on a ridiculous pair that my mom had sent me as a joke. I needed to do laundry.

  “Are those Santa Claus-zes? Ses?” she asked with a slur and another chuckle.

  “Did you drive back here?”

  “No, Dad, I didn’t drive. I took a Lyft.”

  I sighed, running a hand through the little stubble on top of my head that was longer than I could wear next week when I was back on duty.

  “That’s hardly better, is it?” I asked. “Where the hell did you leave your car?”

  She slurred her response. “God, you really are going to make a great father someday.”

  It wasn’t the first time someone had said that to me, but it was the first time I didn’t know how to respond to it. A mix of emotions filled me from Ava saying it. I liked that I’d always had my head on straight. Focused. Living by the code of honor in the military before I ever became a true part of it. It was a way of honoring my dad. But a part of me ached at the thought of this free spirit seeing me as a father-like figure. Nothing was right about that. Not when my body was reacting to her like it was.

  In fact, it was a fight to keep my body’s reaction from becoming visible in a way that I’d never had to fight it since high school and Becky Anderson.

  She pushed herself up from the table and headed down the hall in a drunken walk. She bumped into walls and made so much noise that I was sure Mac and Truck were going to come out of their rooms ready to start a fight.

  “Where are you going?” I asked as I followed her.

  “To bed,” she said and entered the master suite.

  “Not in here, you’re not.”

  She was already on the bed, feet going under the sheet that was the only thing that I’d been using as a cover.

  “Mac and Truck are in the other rooms, right?”

  There was no need to confirm the obvious.

  She had her head on the pillow that I’d been using. The king-sized bed was huge, an
d yet, somehow, she’d landed in the exact spot that I’d been lying in.

  “Ava,” I said her name for the first time. It sounded strange. Throaty. Like a word I shouldn’t be saying.

  Her eyes popped back open at her name, or the way I’d said it, or both. Those damn eyes stared at me. I had to fight off every nerve in my body that was demanding I jump into the bed beside her. Not that I’d ever sleep with a girl who was drunk. Not that I had any intention of sleeping with her. But Jesus, it was hard to ignore her.

  I filled my head with visions of a contract on a table before me and a pen in my hand. That was what was real.

  “There’s plenty of room, Mr. Grumpy.”

  It sounded like an offer. An offer we both knew that I wasn’t going to accept. She patted the bed behind her as if to reemphasize her point.

  “You won’t even know I’m here,” she continued.

  There was no way in hell I was climbing into that bed. Just as there was no way in hell I wouldn’t know that she was there.

  When I moved toward the bed, her lips curled up in a sly smile as if she actually expected me to join her. I reached over her and grabbed another pillow.

  “Sleep good, drunkard, because tomorrow your sweet little ass is out of here.”

  I saw surprise register in her eyes before I turned away. I grabbed my phone and my water from the nightstand and headed down the hall to the couch.

  It was still more comfortable than my bunk on board the TS Kennedy would be. It was long enough for my tall frame, and with the French doors open, it provided me just about the comfort I’d had in the master bedroom.

  Sleep evaded me, though. The thought that she’d been out on the town, alone and drunk, wouldn’t leave me. The possibilities of what could have happened to her in that state drove me nuts. The fact that she was here, in the house with the three of us, drove me nuts. My heart clenched at the thought of Abrams showing up with her in the bed…drunk.

  Shit. She really needed to leave.

  Eventually, when my phone finally showed four a.m., I just gave up. I slunk back into the bedroom. Ava was curled up in the exact place I’d left her, sheet wrapped in her hand, brilliant eyes shut, dark hair tumbling over the pillow and her face. Lying there, quiet, seemed contradictory to her nature. It seemed as odd as catching a hummingbird at rest instead of a flutter of wings you couldn’t even see.

  I shook myself out of my reverie and turned to the dresser. I quietly pulled out a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, grabbed my tennis shoes from the floor, and headed back out to the main room.

  I dressed in the kitchen and pulled out a mixing bowl, filling it with half the box of Frosted Mini-Wheats that I’d bought at the store. My brain was still on Ava in ways I couldn’t prevent.

  Why was she here? Escaping a future she didn’t want, she’d said. But we didn’t live in the 1800s. It wasn’t like her father was setting her up to marry some fifty-year-old duke or anything. It was the twenty-first century. She could be anything she wanted. Unless he refused to pay for her college, and even then, she could find ways to pay for it herself.

  I shook my head, trying to clear out the thoughts of her, and drifted down to the garage where I started setting up for our morning of painting. We’d have to mask off a lot of the windows and doors. It would probably be easier to do a side at a time. I figured we might be able to get through one side a day. Especially if I started as early as this.

  It was six before Truck joined me. Our early hours as cadets were hard to shake. He handed me a cup of coffee. I nodded my thanks, and he looked at the work I’d already done in turning the house a deep teal color that reflected the ocean.

  “You got a big start. What put the burr in your butt this morning?” he asked.

  “Ava.” It still seemed strange to hear her name on my lips. Wrong and right and everything in between.

  “Man, she twisted your dick up hard.”

  I realized he still had no clue that she was inside, in the bed I’d chosen, threatening all of our careers by simply being there.

  I punched him hard on the shoulder, and he cussed at me.

  “Dude, she’s laying in my bed.”

  And hell, that sounded equally right and wrong.

  Truck’s smile increased to the size of the whole fricking state.

  “Dude, Captain Prude stuck his dick in?”

  “Asswipe, she came back drunk as a skunk. I slept on the couch. I’m surprised neither of you douchebags heard her come in.”

  “I might have had one too many myself,” he admitted with a shrug as he rubbed his shoulder.

  I’d already filled the spray gun twice by the time Mac saw fit to join us, and the backside of the house, top and bottom, was almost done by the time we caught sight of Ava. She was showered with her wet hair pulled up in a nest of a bun atop her head. She was wearing nothing but a red and white polka-dotted bikini. The three of us stood there, staring like the goons we were, as she came down the steps in her flip-flops with a beach chair, a towel, and a mesh bag in her hand.

  She stopped by me first, her scent wafting over me again. She looked at the house, and I tried to ignore every thought I was having about her nearly naked body.

  I forced myself to envision my contract. Signing the contract.

  “Nice job, boys.” The deep quality to her voice kept catching me off guard. It crept down my spine, continuing to call my nerves to attention.

  “I’m off to the beach. You know what John Kennedy said about it, right?”

  We all continued to watch her without comment. “’We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, we are going back from whence we came.’ So I guess I’m off to join my past with my future.”

  None of us responded. We were confused by her words and floored by her body and her confidence. It wasn’t like we hadn’t seen a sexy woman in a bikini before. It wasn’t like we hadn’t seen sexy women in our bedrooms completely naked, but there was something about Ava that dumbfounded us all.

  Maybe it was her lack of discomfort at her almost nakedness, or her sureness in her own skin, or maybe the fact that she was stunning and completely off limits.

  When none of us had responded, she just shook her head and headed down the cracked shell path to the dunes and the dock just behind the house.

  Truck was the one to find his voice first. “I think it’s time to call it a day and hit the beach.”

  Mac grinned.

  “Hell, yeah.”

  They handed me their equipment and took off into the house. I sighed, cleaning up our mess, Ava’s words ringing in my head. I was tied to the sea, just like she’d said. It was my past and my future, too. Twelve years of hard work wasn’t going to be thrown away because of one intriguing nineteen-year-old.

  I was still cleaning up when Mac and Truck had the nerve to walk by me in their own swim trunks with beach towels and a cooler in hand.

  “Hey, assholes, thanks for leaving me with the cleaning.”

  “Hey, shrunken penis, thanks for signing us up to paint the goddamn house at all,” Mac hollered back with a smirk that I wanted to wipe off his face.

  An hour later, I had showered and changed into a clean pair of jeans. I was on the deck outside the master bedroom. I could hear faint laughter coming from the dock and the private beach that belonged to the Abrams property.

  It was calling to me. In jealousy as much as desire. What were they saying that was making her laugh? Not that it seemed like she needed much to make her laugh. But Mac and Truck weren’t exactly a comedy team. They were all stupid male charm.

  Anger flitted through me. At them. At her for even being here. As if to prove my point, my phone buzzed. It was my mom and, thankfully, not Professor Abrams. I just let it go to voicemail because I didn’t want Mom to hear in my voice all the things that were in my head.

  My thoughts turned to what would happen if it really was Professor Abrams calling. I’d have to tell him she was
here. I didn’t have another choice. If I lied, he could end my future.

  Still, I heard Ava’s voice in my head about escaping a future that wasn’t hers. I understood wanting a future that you desired. I understood putting that first. She wasn’t exactly underage. If she didn’t want her dad to know where she was, what business of it was mine?

  Regardless, I knew I’d tell him she was there. I had to make her see that it was best for everyone if she left.

  I changed into a pair of my own swim trunks, made sandwiches in the kitchen for everyone, and then headed down to the beach. The three of them had beers in hand when I got there. Ava was sitting on top of a rock, her beach chair abandoned to Truck. Mac was juggling a football in one hand and his beer in the other.

  “Dad! You decided to join us,” Ava called out.

  This got both the guys’ attentions as they looked in panic up toward the path as if they expected Professor Abrams to actually be standing there—which was exactly my point. None of us would survive if he showed up. When they saw it was me, they both smirked their approval of Ava’s nickname.

  “Dad, did you make us lunch?” Mac asked with a smile.

  “Dude, you shouldn’t have,” Truck said.

  As they both reached for the sandwiches, I pushed them off. “Buzz off, bugs. These are all mine.”

  Ava’s laugh rang around me. “You really going to eat eight sandwiches?”

  I shrugged and then smiled at her before offering her the stack when I should be starving her so she’d leave. Instead, I was goddamn feeding her. “Ham or turkey?”

  “I’m not picky,” she responded. I hated that response. I wanted her to be extremely picky, but I just plucked one off the top and handed it to her before handing two to each of the other morons on the beach.

  After we’d eaten in silence again, Mac, Truck and I hit the sand, tossing the football around while I tried to figure out what to say that would make her leave. Mac was showing off both his muscles and his prowess with the pigskin. If it was for Ava’s benefit, it was useless. She had her head in a notebook, pencil in hand, scribbling inside. She’d pause occasionally, sticking the pencil in her mouth while looking out at the ocean, and then go back at it with an eraser and then the tip again.