by JoAnn Ross
“I didn’t win.”
“Burke didn’t win the Super Bowl last year, either,” Aiden volunteered from behind her. “But that doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t be proud of playing a damn good season.”
“That’s exactly what I told her,” Gloria said. “I always knew my girl was destined for great things. Attending that awards ceremony was one of the highpoints of my life. Second only to giving birth to my girl.” She shot a dismissive glance at Madison, who’d joined the checkout line. “All the girls at the salon had a party watching the show stream online. I was told everyone booed when that other makeup person won. Who needs another Tudor movie anyway?”
Jolene laughed, since it was exactly what she’d thought. “I love you, Mom.”
“Well, isn’t that handy, since I love you, too, daughter.” Gloria glanced over at Aiden. “You have a good evening, Aiden, and maybe we’ll see you on Thanksgiving if you have time to drop by the farm for a piece of my cranberry apple pie.”
She swept another quick glance over at Madison, whose twins were beginning to squirm and scream to get out of the cart. “Poor babies,” she said. “They’re probably hungry. Best you get them home real quick.”
Then she smiled at Aiden. “And, of course, we’ll make sure to save you some of Jolene’s famous celebrity chef’s cheesy corn and bacon. After all, a man can’t live on frozen dinners all the time.”
That said, ignoring the way Jolene rolled her eyes, she swept regally out of the store like the dowager countess leaving Downton Abbey.
“Mom,” Jolene complained as she pushed the cart across the parking lot to the car. “Stop trying to set me up with Aiden. Because it isn’t going to happen.”
“Fair’s fair,” Gloria said with a toss of her hair, looking like a woman who’d fear nothing. Like the woman Jolene had always known. “After all, the only reason we’re going to the Mannion farm for dinner is that you accepted in order to throw me together with Michael.”
Jolene wasn’t going to deny it. “Great,” she said dryly. “Maybe we can double date.”
Either her mother chose to ignore her sarcasm, or it flew right over her head. “Now, isn’t that something to think about?”
Jolene flatly refused to look back to see if Madison had managed to catch up with Aiden as they left the store. Even knowing that he wouldn’t be tempted to sleep with the married mother of two toddlers didn’t prevent an uncomfortable prick of jealousy. Especially since she remembered them being a couple for a week or two junior year.
Madison had told everyone that she’d broken up with him because he wanted her to do things she just wasn’t prepared to do. Jolene hadn’t believed that for a minute, since everyone knew she’d already slept with Thane, who’d been playing the field in those days. But if Aiden had been the one to call their short-lived high school romance off, he wasn’t talking. That was another problem with coming home. You couldn’t seem to escape high school.
Especially when she was with Aiden. Even when he’d stopped her for speeding, she’d been too aware of those neon blue eyes. And the mouth that had once had the power to shoot sparks straight from her lips to her breasts, then down to her parts that would begin to hum.
He was right. Whatever they’d had was still there. She’d thought at the time it had been love. Had desperately wanted it to be love. But just as he’d learned that life could be short—which had her wondering about if Aiden had ever killed anyone, or known anyone who’d been killed—she’d learned that while happily-ever-afters were wonderful to read about, if they weren’t impossible (Kylee and Mia, and Brianna and Seth, certainly looked as if they’d be forever), they were definitely elusive. And as ethereal as sea foam.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“YOU ARE SO TOAST,” Bodhi said as they watched the Miata leave the parking lot.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about that connection thing. It’s not just the sex stuff, which, from the vibes must be off the chart—”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Seriously? How could you resist that when you were seventeen?”
“There were reasons, okay? Complicated reasons.” And now there were new ones.
“She’s the real deal, isn’t she?”
“Hell, I don’t know.” Instead of taking the groceries straight home to put them in the freezer, he headed toward Cops and Coffee. The last thing he needed after seeing Jolene was more caffeine and sugar, but it beat picking up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. “It’s complicated.”
“Love’s complicated.”
Aidan gave him a side-eye. “Says the guy for whom two weeks was a long-term commitment.”
“I preferred to compartmentalize,” Bodhi said. “I saved the complications for work. In my personal life I preferred to just go with the flow.”
And he had. Until work and his personal life had come crashing together like a tsunami, and he’d gotten caught in a riptide.
“Is there anything you wish you’d said or done before...”
“I took that bullet that killed me?”
“Yeah.”
It occurred to Aiden that he wasn’t exactly the one to lecture Jolene about letting things go. But while he’d probably never be able to erase that night when they’d been ambushed and outgunned, he’d climbed out of the pit he’d been in and gotten himself on a path. Was it the path he’d planned? Hell, no. But, to be honest, while the Marines had taught him some much-needed discipline and the ability to plan ahead and execute that plan, he’d pretty much gone with the flow, same as Bodhi.
The judge had sent him off to the military, which wouldn’t have been his first choice back then. Then, after basic training, because apparently he had twenty-fifteen vision, they’d sent him to sniper school. Then on to Afghanistan. Again, definitely not his first choice. If someone had asked him to make a list of preferred assignments, Hawaii would’ve hit the top of the list, followed by California, then Florida. Bodhi had always joked that his mistake was hoping for a beachfront base, while not specifying that he’d prefer an ocean to go along with the miles of sand he’d landed in.
Then, when he was about to leave the military and return to civilian life, he got an email from his former instructor from sniper school who’d ended up at the LAPD. They were looking for experienced snipers for their SWAT teams, and hey, since that was what he’d learned to do, why not?
He hadn’t enjoyed the police sniper gig because, in one way, it was like being back in the military, but there was a difference. In a war zone, you and your spotter could walk miles, searching out the enemy like a pair of lions stalking prey. Or could lie, concealed, for hours, even days, looking for a target. A goat herder taking a grenade out of a burlap bag as he approached a military unit, a guy planting an IED on a roadway. War was war, it sucked, but the plan was for you to take out the bad guys before they killed you. Or that team of Marines you were scouting for.
One man; one shot; one kill. But that single shot was taken a long distance away in order not to risk giving away your presence.
Being a police sniper turned out to be very different because his battleground was located within normal society. A neighborhood of tidy houses, outside a nightclub or, in the worst-case scenario—that thank the baby Jesus he’d never had to face—a school. The upside was that you could save a hostage, or a classroom of kindergartners. The downside was that after you’d taken the shot, killed another human in such an intimate way (because unlike in the military, a police sniper wanted to get as close as possible), once the threat was neutralized and you were debriefed, you were expected to act like a normal guy. Go back to your family if you had one (because snipers had one of the highest percentage of divorces), or stop by a rib joint for takeout on your way to your apartment, where you lived alone. Or, more often, to a cop bar, where even then you put off a vibe most of the other g
uys stayed clear of.
The details of the job, and the pressure it put on you, definitely wasn’t something you wanted to share with your wife and kids, or even your priest. Not that Aiden, whose time as an altar boy had been very short-lived, had attended church in years.
So, realizing that he was walking a very dangerous razor’s edge, he’d wandered through a few other assignments and squads, liking some better than others, and had been headed toward trying to help kids stay out of trouble when all hell broke loose, and his Marine sniper ability to hit a target at a thousand-plus yards hadn’t been worth squat in a street fight.
Although there’d been the mandatory requirement to talk to a police psychologist (after Internal Affairs had gotten through grilling him), Aiden didn’t want to share private feelings with someone who could never know where he was coming from. Who’d never killed anyone. Probably never seen anyone die. Especially someone who’d become as close as your own brothers.
“You’re doing it again,” Bodhi broke into his thoughts.
“What?”
“Wallowing in misplaced guilt. It wasn’t on you, bro. It was just my time. So, why don’t we talk about how you’re going nail that hot curvy redhead. Who, by the way, looks like she should be painted on the side of a WWII bomber.”
Aiden had never made the connection before, but Jolene did look like an old-time pinup girl. And not just because she was still dressing in those vintage clothes she wore in high school. Back then, she’d worn them to avoid having to wear the clothes wealthier parents had donated to the thrift shop. Clothes that had drawn such derision from mean girls like Madison, who’d felt the need to tell the other kids that they’d once owned them and tired of them.
He never told anyone, but that was the main reason he’d broken up with Madison. That and the fact that she’d kept pushing to have sex, and while he might not have been all that wise of the ways of the world, he’d recognized that she wasn’t above getting pregnant on purpose.
Which would’ve ended with him becoming a teenage father. Hell, ending up fighting terrorists in Afghanistan had been easier than he’d figured parenthood would be.
“If you want to talk about her, I’m here to listen,” Bodhi offered. “And by the way, if you do go to bed with her, you don’t have to worry. I know how to be discreet.”
“We’re not talking about her,” Aiden said. “And while I’ve never known you to have an ounce of anything resembling discretion, thanks for giving me some privacy in my personal life.” Not that he had much of one, other than making sure he at least dropped by his mother’s Thanksgiving dinner. He’d missed too many while in LA and although she’d never complained, he knew she’d prefer to have her entire family seated around the table.
“I can keep secrets,” Bodhi argued.
“Name one,” Aiden said as he pulled into the coffee shop parking lot.
“If I told, then I’d prove your point about my lack of discretion.”
Did he have to argue every damn thing? “I’m nearly as removed from my old life as you are. So, who am I going to tell?”
“Good point. Okay. But you might want to wait until after you get your caffeine and sugar hit to hear it.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
“Great.” Aiden opened the door. “Just effing great,” he said. It wasn’t often that he’d seen his partner serious. The fact that he was now looking as serious as he had when they went out on that last case wasn’t encouraging.
After getting a triple shot of espresso in a twenty-ounce cup and a glazed doughnut, they were back in the SUV.
Aiden took a long drink, felt the caffeine jolt his system and began to understand why AA meetings reportedly went through gallons of coffee. “So. Let’s hear your proof of discretion.”
“Okay... Here goes... I may or may not have been sleeping with the wife of the deputy chief of Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations.”
That had been Aiden and Bodhi’s unit. “The hell you were.”
“Says the saint and moral conscience of the unit.”
“I’m no saint.” He took a hard bite of doughnut, cracking the sugar glaze all over the front seat. There was just enough rebel remaining in Aiden to resent that label. “Ask anyone in town and they’ll tell you I was Honeymoon Harbor’s sinner.”
“Was being the operative word. And it’s been my experience that reformed sinners make the most obnoxious saints.”
Aiden shot him a hard look. “I am not obnoxious.”
“You’re not that bad, I guess,” Bodhi allowed. “Though you can’t deny that you played strictly by the book.”
“That’s the whole idea of a book in the first place. Once you start sliding on the rules in order to make a bust, you land on a slippery slope and pretty soon you can turn into one of those rogue cops who give us all a bad name. And getting back to the topic of you and the DC’s wife, is the reason you didn’t tell me was because you couldn’t trust me not to turn you into IAD?”
Considering whom Bodhi had recklessly chosen to sleep with, that would’ve had Internal Affairs going straight to his superior. Who’d just happened to be the guy whose wife was playing around with Bodhi. Yeah, that would’ve gone well.
“I may have been a stickler for rules, but I never would’ve turned you in. But I would definitely have told you that you were a damn fool for thinking with the wrong head. Hell, stuff like that could cost you your job. Or worse yet, get you killed.”
A thought occurred to Aiden. One so outrageous, he brushed it off as impossible. “How did you meet her, anyway?”
“For some reason she’d noticed me at one of the press conferences where the DC was blowing his own horn about how his unit was working hand in hand with the feds to keep the homeland safe from terrorists. While we rank and file were required to stand there at attention.”
“Technically he had us standing at parade rest,” Aiden corrected. “Which isn’t relevant to this conversation. Please tell me you weren’t dumb enough to hit on her afterward in front of him?”
“Of course not. She sort of smiled in my direction, so it seemed the only polite thing to do was smile back, and I figured that was it... You know...a moment.”
“So, how did you get from this moment to sex?”
“About a week later, I was surfing one evening at Hermosa Beach. By the pier. She later told me that was a beach she liked to run on. Turned out she was a lawyer in Century City.”
“That’s a half an hour from the beach. Then, since the deputy chief lives in the Valley, which is, on a good traffic day—which doesn’t exist in LA—another hour home from Hermosa Beach. My bet is that she was stalking you.”
“Do you trust anyone?”
Aiden had to think about that for a moment. “My mom and dad. My brothers and sister. And Seth. And you, though it appears you did turn out to have a loose acquaintance with the truth.”
“If you’d asked, I would’ve told,” Bodhi said. “And yeah, her stalking me sort of occurred to me, too, since I hung out there a lot and would have definitely remembered seeing her. Anyway, I’d been working on aerials and was pretty much through for the day, when I came onto the beach and there she was.”
“Nice coincidence,” Aiden said dryly.
“Whatever.” Bodhi shrugged. “We talked a bit, then she asked me if I wanted to have a drink at the beach dive bar. Since, like you said, the DC lives in the Valley, and instead of that dark, proper gray lawyer suit she’d worn that day of the press conference, she was wearing short shorts, a tank top and running shoes, with her hair in a ponytail through the back of a Dodgers ball cap, so she didn’t stand out enough to ever be recognized. And hell, I was a regular around there anyway, so people were used to seeing me with a new woman.”
“It was still damn risky.”
“Yeah,” Bodhi allowed. “That was admit
tedly part of the appeal in the beginning. And you might be right about thinking with the wrong head, but hell, Aiden, you should’ve seen her legs. They were this amazing golden tan, not the sprayed-on Cheetos stuff, and they went on for a mile.”
“When was this?”
“It started about six weeks before we were sent out to do that gun deal. And ended when I took that bullet. And died... Sort of.”
“Six weeks? Wasn’t that a record for you?” Aiden had never known Bodhi to last past a second date.
“She was going to leave her husband.”
“I suspect that’s what most cheating spouses say.”
“No, I believed her. She told me things had been bad for a long time and had gotten physical. She texted me a picture of her with a black eye and bruises on her arms and shoulders. I wanted to go confront the bastard there and then, the hell with the fucking job, but she begged me to stay away because it would only make her situation worse.
“She was going to wait until the next morning when he went to work, then call the police and have the locks changed on the house.”
“And she sent you that when?” Aiden had always been a stickler for timelines and he was getting a bad gut feeling about this one.
“The night before we were sent out on that guns for drugs trade.”
“When we walked into an ambush.” Another coincidence. Aiden didn’t like coincidences. Hell, he didn’t believe in them. Except, he allowed, maybe Jolene coming back to Honeymoon Harbor so shortly after him. “And you were killed.” Fury, more ice-cold than hot, surged through his veins.
“Yeah. Like I said, sort of killed, since part of me seems to be still around. But that would be my take on it,” Bodhi said with apparently far less anger than Aiden was experiencing.
Maybe being dead gave you a more pragmatic view of life? Or maybe because you couldn’t do anything, the need for revenge wasn’t as strong?