The SEAL’s Secret Lover

by Anne Calhoun

  “Going to war over a woman is much more poetic,” Grannie pointed out.

  “But much less likely,” Marian said dryly.

  “I’m a romantic,” Grannie said. “I’ll stick with the fictional version.”

  Still quibbling, they drifted out of sight around a corner, leaving him alone with Rose.

  “So the Aegeans probably didn’t breach the walls with a hollow horse, either,” she said, looking around. “I’m a little disappointed.”

  She was standing by the towering walls reputed to belong to the Troy of Achilles and Patroclus, of Helen and Hector and Paris. Lines from the poem rose to the surface of Keenan’s mind, glorifying war, a warrior’s striving for victory, for justice, for patriotism. “No one wants to admit we go to war over things like trade. So we dress it up in patriotism and freedom, make it less ugly.”

  “Controlling trade routes to the Black Sea is far less memorable than love and an illicit affair between Paris and Helen.”

  “It’s smaller than I thought it would be,” he said after a long silence. Voicing the thought was easier with Rose by his side. “This inspired the most powerful epic poem in all of human history? I thought it would be … bigger.”

  She looked around. Bees buzzed in and out of the hive in a tree growing out of the grass on the earth above them. “The size makes that much more compelling. Think of these tiny passages crammed with the bodies of warriors, no matter how they got here. Fighting. Dying.” She looked at him, just inches away. “It’s extraordinarily intimate. War sounds so big, such a grand scale. Maybe it was when they fought on the beaches.” She shrugged. “Maybe it never happened. Maybe the scope presented in the poem contributes to the myth, which is a metaphor for the battles we fight inside. Love. Honor. Respect. A place, or people to call home.”

  He didn’t know what to say.

  “What are you thinking?” she said, a quizzical smile on her face. “And don’t feed me some line of bullshit. I’ve asked Jack that question. I know from bullshit.”

  “Have you ever heard of the dead-man-walking approach to combat?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s a trick for dealing with the terror. Even with the training we have, it still comes sometimes, so you just assume you’re dead. That you’re never going home. You have nothing to fear, because you’re already dead. You just … fight, push ahead with the mission, because you’ve got nothing left to lose.”

  She trailed her fingers along the earthen walls as they rounded a corner. “Is it effective?”

  “No one’s ever told me otherwise,” he said, amused by her emphasis on practicalities. They walked in silence for a while, looking between the walls and the blue sky overhead. He tried to imagine seeing only these walls, this sky, hunkered in a defensive position with other Trojans, then tried to imagine the view from the other side, huge swaths of sea and sky and beach. He tried to imagine what came next, but failed. “I’m thinking that whatever’s wrong with me has been wrong with men since we crawled out of the oceans,” he said finally. “Look at this place. Besieged and sacked and rebuilt, then sacked again. Then forgotten. What’s left are the stories people told about the battles, and some walls. All for a woman.”

  A smile curved her lips. “Are you saying you wouldn’t go to war for me? That my face won’t launch a thousand ships?”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. Fuck trade routes. In that moment, he understood every jealous-lover story, the volcanic passion and rage and possessiveness that would drive a man to launch a thousand ships to reclaim a woman. Suddenly, he felt like he could build a siege engine with his bare hands, rage down the walls.

  “Maybe there’s nothing wrong with you,” she said, studying him with an awareness that singed him. A bee landed on her elbow, and waddled up her arm. She watched it, unflinching, until it lifted in flight. “Maybe you are the way you are, and you just need to find your way home.”

  * * *

  At Grannie’s insistence Rose gamely climbed to the top of the replica of the wooden Trojan horse to wave at Keenan from four stories up. He stayed on the ground to take pictures with various cameras and cell phones, then aired out the Land Rover while they shopped.

  Rose emerged from the gift shop with a bag she tucked into her suitcase, stowed in the Land Rover’s rear compartment. “How long to Istanbul?” she asked.

  He looked at his watch. “If they finish the mandatory shopping and restroom stops in the next half hour or so, we should be in Istanbul in time for dinner.”

  “They’re looking forward to crossing the Dardanelles,” Rose said. “Thanks for rearranging the schedule so efficiently.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Are you going to sightsee around Istanbul with us?” she asked softly.

  He hadn’t planned to. Rose and the Babes could handle a modern city; the buses and cabs were all easy to use, and most people spoke enough English to be of assistance. He’d planned to drop them at their hotel in the Beyoğlu district, leave Rose his contact information in case anything happened, and get back to his life.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Might as well see this through.”

  * * *

  The mood perked up on the drive to Istanbul. Between them, the Babes hammered out a schedule that included the Spice Market, the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sophia, and a cruise on the Bosphorus.

  “We’re staying in the nightlife center of Istanbul,” Grannie said. The wind on the Dardanelles flapped the pages of her guidebook. “Bay-og-lu. Is that how you say it?”

  “Bey-o-lu,” Keenan said, then repeated himself as he plucked Florence’s hat from the breeze before it flew off the side of the ferry. “The g is silent.”

  Florence crammed the hat on her head and tightened the chin strap, then repeated the word.

  “Where do you live?” Rose asked, as innocent as a nun. Her cheeks were slightly sunburned. He found himself wanting to press his lips to them, feel the heat.

  “Near the Galata Tower,” he said.

  “That’s just a few blocks from our hotel!” Grannie exclaimed, flipping pages in the guidebook. “That’s convenient.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, straight-faced. “Very convenient.”

  Rose simply smiled, and turned her face to the sun.

  * * *

  Back in the Land Rover, they crossed the Galata Bridge, then slowly made their way through traffic to the hotel’s entrance. “I can’t park here,” Keenan said. “I’ll unload your bags, then return the truck.”

  Rose’s phone started to ding. “Oh, thank goodness,” she said, shouldering her tote and reaching for her big suitcase. “I have cell service!”

  The Babes groaned. “Keenan, take that away from her,” Marian said.

  Rose clutched it to her chest. “You need to text me to know where to meet us for dinner tonight, right?”

  “Sure,” he said, bland as vanilla pudding.

  * * *

  He had every intention of meeting them for dinner, but when he got back to his apartment, his cell phone rang. When Rose’s text came through, he was on the phone with his team leader, going over the specifics to extract a hostage negotiator from a nasty little situation in Syria. The entire team was on standby, ready to fly out on thirty minutes’ notice.

  Can’t make it. Sorry.

  Work?

  Work.

  I understand.

  * * *

  When Rose trotted down the hotel’s steps at seven the next morning, cell phone in hand and GPS providing directions to a Starbucks only yards away where she could obtain her first grande caramel macchiato in nearly a week, the last person she expected to see across the paver-lined street was Keenan.

  But there he was. Dressed in jeans, a button-down, and a crew neck sweater. With his beard and sandy blond hair, he almost blended into the street. But that was the point of the SEALs. The quiet professionals. Right now Keenan looked very quiet, and very professional. Whatever kept him from a really excellent dinner t
he previous night still occupied ninety percent of his mind.

  “Can you read minds?” she asked lightly as she crossed the pavers to stand in front of him.

  “I figured you’d be on the hunt for fancy coffee.”

  “I thought about going for a run,” she said, feeling marginally guilty. They were moving at a brisk pace down the nearly empty İstiklal Avenue, sidestepping a street sweeper cleaning up the previous night’s trash.

  He shot her a mischievous look, but let it go. “What’s the plan for today?”

  “See everything. Pack. Thanks,” she said, and walked through the door he held for her. Just like that the pace of their feet became the pace of the conversation, equally brisk, superficial. She didn’t like it.

  Her phone rang, a colleague’s number flashing on the screen. It was a supplier, someone who probably didn’t know she was on vacation. Instinct compelled her to answer it, even if just to say she was on vacation and could he please call Hua Li?

  Keenan was sneaking a glance at her phone. “Stop that,” she said.

  “Sorry. It’s the job.”

  “I know. Jack does it too,” she said.

  “You going to answer that?”

  He was there, right there beside her, a Navy SEAL in a Starbucks in Istanbul. Hers for the next twenty-four hours. “No,” she said, and swiped the call to voice mail.

  “One more day,” he said when they had their coffees.

  “One more day.”

  “And one more night.”

  His voice was low, rough, nearly inaudible in the coffee shop’s noisy morning crowd, but there was no mistaking his tone, the desire.

  “One more night,” she agreed. She’d figure out a way to explain it to Grannie. “Then I go home.”

  At the word home, regret flashed over his face before he smoothed it away. Her heart was twitching and thumping in her chest as emotions tumbled through her. One more magical vacation day, one more stolen night with her secret lover tumbled together with mounting regret and imminent loss. Underneath it all was a question she could no longer ignore.

  When would Keenan go home?

  * * *

  The day held an urban magic feel, where floors literally opened to reveal ancient Roman cisterns, and streets tapered into narrow alleys that had been inhabited for two thousand years. They started with the Hagia Sofia, marveling at the building’s Byzantine architecture and rich decorations, tracing the holes in thousand-year-old marble crosses worn through by countless pilgrims’ fingers. It was a short walk past the Hippodrome to the minarets, domes, and soaring arches of the Blue Mosque. They removed their shoes and covered their hair to step inside and stare at the intricate mosaics.

  “I can’t imagine the planning that went into building this,” Rose murmured to Keenan.

  A grin curved the corners of his mouth. “You could pull it off.”

  “I’d love the challenge,” she said, then looked around. “We’ve lost Grannie again.”

  They found her outside, helping a group of schoolgirls practice their English until their teacher gathered them up and brought them inside. Rose gathered her own chicks and followed Keenan to a dive of a restaurant. Keenan knew the family who ran the place, and the food was delicious, spicy and piping hot. Then they were off again, wandering through the Spice Market before boarding the boat for an hour-long cruise down the Bosphorus. The afternoon sun glinted off the modern buildings and picked out remnants of the city walls, hidden in the streets.

  “I can see why you live here,” Rose said. They stood elbow-to-elbow at the rail of the cruise boat, drifting by trees bursting with pink cherry blooms amid elaborate mansions and crowded row housing. The sky was an unreal shade of blue, the sun glinted in the spray tossed from the waves. Keenan looked at home with the wind in his face and the boat’s motion.

  He shrugged. “It’s convenient.”

  “Could you live anywhere?” she asked, testing, probing. Curious.

  He turned from examining the water to look at her. “This is a good location for work.”

  “Oh.” She watched a yacht cruise by, the occupants loftily ignoring everyone else around them. “But you could do other work.”

  “I have a fairly limited skill set,” Keenan said. “It’s a good skill set, don’t get me wrong, but there aren’t many uses for it in the civilian world.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she said, and turned to rest her elbows on the railing. “We’re hiring a Director of Security.”

  He did her the courtesy of maintaining a straight face. Jack had flat out laughed at her when she dropped that hint. “Keeping an office park secure?”

  “It’s a little more complex than that. We have storage facilities and pipelines all over the country,” she said, matter-of-fact. “Assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars, protected from the threat of domestic terrorism largely by being in the middle of nowhere. It’s not just protecting a cube farm full of office drones, although that would also be part of the job.”

  “Based in Lancaster?”

  “Lots of travel, but yes. Jack’s there, so you’d know someone,” she said somewhat disingenuously.

  “And you. And your grandmother, Marian, and Florence. Do I need a sponsor to join the Lancaster Garden Club?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, following his teasing line. “It’s a rigorous application process. They don’t let just anyone into the Lancaster Garden Club.”

  “What on earth are you saying, Rose?” Grannie asked, making her way along the railing to join them. “Anyone can join the Garden Club. We’d love to get more young people excited about gardening. Are you thinking about it?”

  “I am,” she said, her gaze on Keenan’s face.

  “I thought you kill cacti.”

  “I can learn,” she said, holding his gaze. “With the right people at my side, I can learn anything.”

  Chapter Eight

  He took her to dinner, a nice dinner at a nice restaurant in the shadow of the Galata Tower, because the Babes said the “young people” should enjoy themselves on Rose’s last night in Istanbul. He sensed Grannie’s hand in that, felt embarrassed for a moment, then realized that anyone who watched Rose all but raise Jack Powell couldn’t be shocked by much.

  Even at the end of a long day of shepherding the Babes through what he thought was the coolest city on earth, and he’d been in enough to be able to make that distinction with authority, Rose looked more relaxed than she had when he first saw her, gripping her mobile like it was the only thing between her and a long fall off a steep cliff. She traced the rim of her wine glass and smiled at him. Held her hand over it when he offered to pour more. Smiled at him with an emotion he simply didn’t recognize, one that took him ages to identify, until something primitive, probably left over from a time before memory, when he was a babe in arms surfaced into his consciousness.

  It was tenderness. Not maternal cooing, or feigned sympathy and fussing, but Rose’s unique awareness of him as a man, her strength, her vulnerability, all melding into a single look cast across the white linen tablecloth, lit by candlelight and the spring sunset. He just didn’t know how to respond to it. Nothing about him was tender, soft, kind. There had never been any need for that, much less any room for it, in his life. He’d never had it. Didn’t know how to respond to it. His ignorance frustrated him, leaving him right back where he’d started, in Istanbul, but it went further back than that, to the choices he’d made at seventeen, to a future he couldn’t imagine, let alone live. To break the spell, he looked at his watch.

  “Do you have somewhere to be?” Rose asked, curious, not irritated.

  “I’ve got to feed my neighbor’s cat,” he admitted. “She’s working late tonight. The cat’s basically a stray she’s adopted.”

  “How very domestic of you,” she said with a smile. “What’s his name?”

  “Asra calls him Edjer, which means ‘dragon.’ I call him Motherfucker,” he said. Then, over her laughter, he added, “He’s a st
reet-smart tom who wins all the fights with the other neighborhood cats and scratches me when I feed him.”

  Her smile broadened. “That’s the perfect excuse to invite me back to your place. To meet your neighbor’s evil cat.”

  He was in trouble. So much trouble. He should just end this now, get out while the getting was good, while he still had his uncertainty. They’d made no promises, shared nothing more than a few days and his bed. It was simple. I really should get some sleep. I might get a call. “Better than asking if you want to see my etchings?”

  “Much better, given that I don’t know what etchings are.”

  “Come back to my place.”

  “I have to be back by five a.m.,” she said, snagging her purse. “That will give me time to shower and pack before our cab takes us to the airport.”

  The sound that came out of his chest sounded like a chuckle, but really it was all the air leaving his lungs, because that was the exact moment he knew he was falling in love with her. With Jack Powell’s sister, sexily pragmatic, or pragmatically sexy. In charge. Living on another continent.

  Her hand in his, he led her through brick-paved streets lined with brightly painted townhouses converted into apartments, up the stairs to his top-floor unit. A kitchen lined the wall by the door, and a bed, unmade, sat near the window. A tiny table with two chairs occupied what little space remained between the kitchen and the bed.

  The bed.

  Tonight was different. Tonight wasn’t in an anonymous hotel room, but in what passed for his home. Light from the full moon poured through the French door that opened to his balcony, falling in a wide strip across the scarred wood floors and the bed. He crossed the room, opened the door, and made a soft ch-ch-ch sound. With a rough mrowr, Edjer aka Motherfucker, mostly black with a white chest and stripe up his nose, leapt agilely from the wicker baker’s rack on Asra’s balcony to the railing of his, and from there to his floor. He shook some dry cat food into a bowl, and was rewarded with a hiss and a swipe. “You’re welcome, Motherfucker,” he muttered, Rose’s soft laugh masking the words.