“And you won’t even tell me his name?”
She shook her head. “Nope.”
“Not fair.” I held up my phone. “You saw Zane’s dick and watched him jerk off, but I don’t even get your guy’s name?”
She leaned forward. “I’ll tell you all about him. I’ll even let you meet him, I promise. Just…give me some time to keep this to myself, first, okay? It’s new, and it’s weird, and it’s scary.”
“You really like him, don’t you?”
“I really do.”
“And this is from spending one night with him?”
“Sometimes you don’t need a lot of time with a person to know there’s a connection.” She lifted a black restaurant check folder. “Also, I totally paid the bill while you were going pee. Now let’s get out of here. You should show me the overlook where you gave Zane the world’s best blow job.”
“Only if you promise to let me pay the next time,” I said, trying to ignore the deeper elements of what she’d said.
“Nope.” She stood up and sauntered out, forcing me to follow her. “By the way, did I mention that the company I work for is looking for an H-R manager? I already put in a word for you. You can move to Seattle and we’ll be the Gruesome Twosome again.”
“Really?”
She nodded, taking out her phone, pulling up an email thread, and showing it to me; it was a conversation between her and the HR department head, wherein Claire talked me up and the department head sounded interested. It seemed I had a job waiting for me as long as I didn’t totally fuck up the interview. It would be a promotion of several degrees, meant more money, and a chance to be near Claire again.
I teared up. “Bitch, you made me cry.”
“I ended up at a department head lunch one day recently, totally by accident, and got talking to Thomas, and I guess I mentioned you at some point, and then two days later he emailed me asking if you’d be interested in the position. They haven’t really even started looking yet, so if I were you I’d send Thomas your résumé, like, today. You could have a job by the time your vacation is over.” She glanced at me sideways as we wandered on foot in the general direction of the Rainbird Trail; I sort of remembered where we’d gone last night, and if not, Google Maps would show me. “There is one other little tidbit of information, which may or may not interest you.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s only an hour and forty-five minutes by air from Seattle to Ketchikan, and my guy happens to be a pilot.”
My heart skipped a beat or ten. “Um. That’s neat, but just, you know, out of curiosity…why would that be a factor?”
Claire continued the nonchalant charade. “Oh, no reason. Except that you could then continue to see Zane, he of the epic penis and godlike cunnilingus skills. You could catch a ride up here with me on the weekends. We could double date, do that whole four people sharing a milkshake thing.”
“That would make the practice relationship real, though.”
She nodded. “There would be that. But face it, snickerdoodles, you’re already fighting the urge to think in those terms. I know this because I’m going through the same thing. This way, we could go through it together. We could stop each other from intentionally sabotaging our own relationships.”
“Why would we do that?” I asked. “And don’t call me snickerdoodles, either.”
“Because we’re a pair of big old scaredy-cats who are terrified of real intimacy due to the fact that we both have serious daddy issues.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yeah, that.”
She wasn’t wrong. About any of it.
“Do you have any idea how annoying it is that you’re right all the damn time?” I asked.
Claire nodded without a hint of irony. “I do. I annoy myself, sometimes. Being right all the time can be a serious burden.” She quirked an eyebrow at me. “We’ve all got our burdens to bear, after all. You’ve got those giant tits you have to lug around everywhere, and I’m almost never wrong.”
I snorted at her, but there was, of course, a kernel of truth to her words.
Chapter 8
Zane
I was scheduled to open the bar, so I was downstairs by ten thirty setting things up, getting the kitchen opened and taking the stools off the bar and tables, cutting garnish fruit, stocking the alcohol, and counting the register drawers. The place was busy the second I opened the doors, since it was a weekend during tourist season. It was a blessing, though, because it meant I had zero time to let my head run away from me…either the big head or the little one. I was slammed from the time I opened the doors until Brock floated in at three-thirty, a stupid grin on his face as he stared down at his phone.
He tucked a bar towel in the back pocket of his jeans and joined me behind the bar, checking the coolers and shelves to see what he had to restock before he took over for me. He’d put his phone away, but he still had the stupid grin on his face.
“What’s up your ass, sunshine?” I asked, setting a pair of beers on the service bar for Lucian to take to his table; Luce, it turned out, had offset his savings by waiting tables and tending bar during his travels, so he was an experienced and skilled addition to the bar.
Brock just winked at me. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
I grabbed a ticket as it printed from the service bar printer. “Bullshit. Only one things puts a grin like that on a man’s face, and that’s prime pussy.”
Brock left and returned with two cases of beer held on one shoulder and three bottles of liquor clenched in his other hand. “Yeah, well…a gentleman never kisses and tells.” He said this with a sly grin.
“That prime, huh?”
“Let’s just say it’s a good thing I’m tending bar instead of flying today, because I’m running on, like, maybe three hours of sleep.”
I snorted. “Pussy. Try staying awake for seventy-two hours, boots on the ground in enemy territory, completing a mission, and then having to swim six miles in full gear to reach the E-Z.”
“And you try performing death-defying aerial stunts in six cities in five days while flying yourself from venue to venue.”
Lucian collected his drinks from me. “How about you two quit measuring dicks and get to work?” He took his drinks and moved back into the bar to deliver them without a backward glance.
Brock and I glanced at each other and chuckled.
“And Lucian schools us both,” Brock said.
I started stacking pint glasses, rocks glasses, and shot glasses into the washer. “For real, though,” I said. “You’re floating around with a goofy-ass grin on your face. Must’ve been pretty damn good.”
Brock shrugged while shaking up cosmopolitans for a gaggle of giggling blonde tourists. “Zane, brother, there are no words. I died and went to heaven…six times in one night.”
I stared at my younger brother with renewed respect. “Well, damn, son. That’s the way it’s done, I’d say.”
The group of thirty-something blondes he was mixing drinks for had overheard us and were whispering loudly to each other while staring between Brock and I.
Brock nudged me and leaned close. “I’m seeing her again next weekend.”
“Really?”
“Really.” He shot me a look. “And you know, you’ve been rocking a pretty dumbass grin yourself most of the day. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
“I have not,” I groused.
Lucian set four glasses on the bar and filled them with ice and Coke. “Have too.” He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and pulled up a grainy, blurry photo of me he’d obviously taken on the sly and, yes, I was sporting a grin exactly as described: big and goofy. “Exhibit A.” And then he was gone, having done his damage; typical Luce, dropping a bomb and sauntering off.
“The asshole took a picture?” I snapped, staring after my second-youngest brother.
Brock just snickered. “You mentioned something about a relationship between goofy grins and prime pussy?”
“Yeah, well…she’s way more than just prime pussy, so show some respect, you little bastard.” I grumbled.
“Hey, you don’t have to explain that to me. Those were your words, not mine.”
“Shut up,” I growled, and pulled a handful of limes out of a refrigerator and set about slicing them…a little too vigorously, possibly.
“Awww, did poor widdle Zaney-wainey get his feewings hurted?” Brock mocked from across the bar. “Methinks the lad doth protest too much.”
I stopped slicing and turned to fix an evil-eye glare at Brock. “Hold your hand up against the wall,” I told him.
“What? Why? What are you gonna do?”
“Just do it, asshole.”
Brock held his hand against the wall at the end of the bar, fingers spread wide, back of his knuckles against the wood. I flipped the knife in the air and caught it by the back of the blade, hesitated in the name of dramatic pause, and then whipped the knife at my brother’s hand. The blade flipped end over end and buried itself point-first in the wood between his middle and ring fingers, handle quivering.
“Remember that I can do that the next time you feel like mocking me, dickhead,” I snarled.
Brock slid his hand away from the knife and yanked it out of the wall, staring at it like he’d never seen a knife thrown before. “You could have hit my hand, jackass.”
I took it from him, washed it, and went back to slicing limes, ignoring the smattering of applause, stares, whistles, and whispers my little display had gotten. “Oh, please. I could do that from twice the distance in the dark with a hatchet.”
“Bullshit.”
I frowned at Brock. “What do you mean, bullshit? My unit and three others held knife-throwing competitions every year, and I won every time. Got to the point that they’d only let me compete with a handicap, meaning kitchen knives and hand axes and shit instead of actual properly-weighted throwing knives like everyone else got.”
Brock shrugged. “Huh. Never knew you could do that.” He scooped the lime slices from the cutting board onto the tray.
“There’s a lot of shit I can do that you don’t know about.”
“Like getting offended too easily?” He suggested, pouring a pint of beer for a customer.
“Like beat your scrawny, pretty-boy ass if you don’t shut the hell up,” I snarled.
Brock just laughed. “Case in point.” He shook his head as he handed off the beer and made change for a $10. “You’re crankier and tetchier than usual, even for you.”
“Jesus, you dork, who even uses words like ‘tetchy’?
“I do, Crankshaft.”
“Crankshaft?” I asked, staring at him.
“You know, the comic strip about—”
“I fucking know what Crankshaft is, cock-waffle.”
“Yeah, well, you’re acting more curmudgeonly than Crankshaft. Which is at serious odds with the idiot grin you were floating around with all morning.”
I glanced at the time on the register screen; 3:55 p.m. “I gotta go. Got shit to do.”
“Classic avoidance technique, brother.”
“I’m not avoiding anything, I just—I’m supposed to call Mara at four. And if you say a damn word, I’ll castrate you in your sleep.”
“The nurse from the wedding? You’re…calling her…on the phone?”
“No, you dick-turd, I’m gonna stand on the roof and shout.”
“Dick-turd?” He paused in the act of pulling a pour-spout from an empty bottle of Jameson and stuffing it into a fresh one.
“Yes. Dick-turd.” I washed my hands and then collected the tips from the tip jar by the register. “Ass-muffin. Douche-canoe. Shit-goblin. Scab-eating shit-sucker. Walking moose knuckle. Sheep-fucker. I got more—should I keep going?”
“Please, no. You’re offending my delicate sensibilities with your crude, barbarian epithets. I might faint.” He delivered this dripping with monotone sarcasm. “Where do you even come up with this stuff, anyway?”
“Long flights to insertion with not much to do except find new and ever more creative ways of insulting each other,” I said.
“Well I’ll give you an A for creativity, that’s for sure.”
I laughed, counting the bills and sorting them. “Seriously, we’d do that for hours. Those are tame compared to some of the shit we’d come up with. Your ears would shrivel off your proper little head if you heard what we’d come up with after six or eight hours in the back of a C-130. The goal was always to be as vile and offensive as possible.”
“Go. Call your woman. We got this.”
“She’s not my woman. We’re just…practice dating.”
Brock stared at me for a long moment. “There’s so much to unpack from that statement I don’t even know where to start.”
“So don’t start. Just let it go.”
He shrugged, hands raised in surrender. “Okay, okay. But you realize I’m gonna psychoanalyze you later, right?”
I waved and stuffed the cash into my pocket. “Yeah, yeah, egghead. I’ll see you later.”
I jogged upstairs and changed into clean jeans, a plain black polo, my combat boots, and my leather jacket. I hesitated for a moment, and then stuffed a few condoms in my back pocket, just because it never hurts to be prepared, especially considering the intense physical chemistry between Mara and I.
Xavier was gone on his bike so I was left on foot, a situation I’d have to rectify posthaste if I was gonna live here another eight months, minimum. To be honest, I could see myself being here in Ketchikan for a little longer. I was enjoying being around my brothers, being back at home, living a little boring civilian life for once. I’d been in the Navy for ten years, the bulk of that as a SEAL and my life had been anything but normal, so this was new and kind of weird and I was enjoying it.
I slipped downstairs and outside, then started walking toward the dock where I knew Mara’s friend Claire’s cruise ship was docked. I dialed Mara.
She answered on the third ring. “Hey you.”
“Hey. Have fun with Claire?” I heard noise and voices in the background, which definitely put her at the cruise ship docks.
“Yeah, it was a fun day. We hiked more of the Rainbird, took a Duck tour, had some lunch.”
“Funny, I grew up here and I’ve never done one of the Duck tours.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve lived in San Francisco for half my life and I’ve never been to Alcatraz or the Muir Woods. When you live somewhere, you don’t tend to do the touristy stuff.”
“True,” I said. “So are you at the docks? Want to meet somewhere?”
“Yeah, I am. I just dropped Claire off, actually. Do you have your brother’s bike?”
“Nope, he’s got it, so I’m on foot. I was just thinking I should buy a truck or something. This walking everywhere is bullshit.”
“Aren’t you a soldier? I thought you’d be used to marching.”
I laughed. “I was in the Navy, not the Army. And as a SEAL, we don’t do a lot of unnecessary walking. It’s not an efficient way to infiltrate, for the most part.”
“Infiltrate what?”
“Eh, whatever the mission target was. Way behind enemy lines, onto a boat in the middle of the ocean, behind compound walls. It varied.”
“So how do you infiltrate, then?” She asked.
“Well, again, it depends on the mission. If we were hitting a drug lord’s shipment way out in the middle of the ocean, we’d jump out of a helicopter and swim to it, or if the boat was big enough we’d even do a HALO insertion.”
“What’s a HALO insertion?” she asked, and then spoke before I could answer. “And where are you, anyway?”
“I’m close to you. Just stay where you are, I’ll find you.”
“Okay. So HALO insertion. Go.”
I was close to the docks by then, so I started scanning the crowd, wishing I had Bast’s extra four inches of height to see over the crowd. Finally I spotted her on the boardwalk near one of the gargantuan cruise ships. She was faci
ng away from me, so I crept up behind her.
“Well,” I started, “HALO stands for High Altitude Low Opening. It’s just a really complicated way to skydive, basically. It means we jump at thirty thousand feet and dive to anywhere from four thousand to two thousand feet A-G-L.”
“And A-G-L is what?”
“Above ground level.” I was close now, I kept my voice down so she wouldn’t hear me, though the crowd was thick enough there was little chance of that anyway. “So we’d free-fall for several minutes and reach something like a hundred miles per hour, easily.”
“And why do these HALO jumps?”
“Because at thirty thousand AGL, the aircraft isn’t visible from the ground with the naked eye, so the target won’t be able to see us coming. In a regular fun jump, you go at fourteen thousand AGL, and you open pretty high up, so you have a lot of time floating down. That’s fine when it’s for fun, but when you’re inserting for a military operation, you don’t want the bad guys to see you coming, right? So you free-fall hard and fast and open at the last possible second, so there’s as minimal a chance of being spotted as possible.”
“Oh, I guess that makes sense.” Her voice lowered. “And what other kind of…insertions did you do?”
“All kinds,” I said. “My favorite insertion method was to just sneak in nice and slow…”
I cut the connection, stuffed the phone in my pocket, and closed the last few feet between us. Mara was still facing away, obviously cottoning on to the fact that I’d hung up or that the connection had been lost. She pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at the screen.
“Zane?” Her head pivoted, scanning the crowd around her.
Badd Ass (Badd Brothers Book 2) Page 10