by Lexi Whitlow
Mallory takes one step forward, still gripping me hard. There’s silence for an instant, and the whole world seems to slow down around us. In the brief moment that we don’t hear cameras snapping pictures, there’s an audible popping sound that seems to come from deep within Mal’s body. She steps forward, putting her hand out to the American reporter’s shoulder and almost knocking him down. Instead, her water breaks, crashing down all at once onto the reporter’s expensive, Italian leather shoes.
“It’s not fake,” she seethes. And then she turns to me, her face a mask of utter, serene calm, like she’s in a distant, faraway place in her mind. “Matthias. I think we should go to the hospital now.”
A dozen cameras flash all at the same time, and the bodyguards encircle us, moving us back toward Addy and Caryn’s transport line. The queen and her princess follow us, Caryn shouting angrily at the reporters to back off. As we approach the car, Addy comes to Mallory’s other shoulder and helps her into the car.
The four of us pile in together, Caryn up front. “Get us to the hospital now,” she says, tapping the driver on the shoulder.
We peel off down the empty Amsterdam street.
“That was a hell of a way to get the reporters to back off, Mal,” Addy says.
Between contractions, Mallory laughs, and she doesn’t stop laughing until we’re securely in our hospital room and I help her into the tub to begin bringing our son into the world. Time seems to slow down again, and I sit next to the big birthing tub, holding Mallory’s hand as she breathes, deeper and deeper, her mind and body further removed from the real world with each contraction. After a while, she starts moaning through each wave, her eyes closed in deep concentration.
After what seems like a full century, she looks at me, her eyes still far away. But when her gaze meets mine, we connect, and I understand her before she even speaks. So different than when we first met, but I guess that’s how love evolves. “It’s time,” she says, squeezing my hand.
I’m not a man who cries, nor have I ever been a man who gets emotional about much of anything. But it wasn’t so long ago that I didn’t have anything in my life—not even someone I could call my real friend. Now, I have Mallory. I have my sister. I have a family that I didn’t ever imagine, and I’m getting ready to have even more.
A year ago, my life was basically empty.
And now it’s full.
Tears come to my eyes, and my throat grows tight as I help Mallory out of the tub. The room is quiet and peaceful, far different than what Mal tells me of American hospitals. A single doctor and his nurse come in to tend to us, and Mal gets in position to deliver on the table, still breathing through contractions like the pain is barely a trickle. In the tub, she told me over and over that it hurt, but that the warm water took the pain away. I wouldn’t know it, but I’ve squeezed her hand, and she’s squeezed back the whole time.
But today, we’re here together.
An hour later, Mallory gives birth to our first child, a little boy. We name him Roman Elias. It’s a strong name, a name that has never been used in my family. Instead, it’s the beginning of ours.
When it’s quiet and the doctors are gone, Roman sleeps soundly on Mallory’s chest, his little hands opening and closing. The three of us doze together, wrapped in a bubble of our own creation. This is our family. This is everything.
When Addy and Caryn come to visit that night, Mallory hands Roman to me, and I hold him. His deep blue eyes pop open, and he looks right at me.
“I’m your papa. Little boy. Little love.”
Mal takes my hand when she hears me. “And he’ll have everything we didn’t.” She pauses. “Happy birthday, Matthias.”
“It’s the best one I’ve had in my life. And it always will be.”
The four of us chat until Mallory’s eyes grow heavy again.
When we go home the next day, we’re wrapped in the feeling of true, uncomplicated happiness for perhaps the first time in our lives.
Our lives are full, and our love is at its beginning.
* * *
Read on for a excerpt from A Perfect SEAL!
CHAPTER ONE
Three Years, Three Months Ago
“We’ll never get away with this. This is not going to work.”
“We’ve been through this. The other night, when we agreed.”
“We were—It was—”
“You were fucking phenomenal, Sunshine.” He winks at me and grabs me by the thigh. “And I’m not losing the best lay I’ve ever had.”
The priest has a blue folder in his hand and goes to stand at the pulpit. He looks at us both, impatient, possibly drunk. “Let’s get this bullshit over with,” he says, his voice as grizzled as he is. No courthouse for us. This shit is happening in a church.
My heart leaps. “Okay.”
He grabs my hand. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
CHAPTER TWO
Three Years, Six Months Ago
“Another,” I say. I nod to the bartender and slide my glass over to him. It’s not crowded in here yet, but it will be. My eye socket still hurts, and the stitches haven’t completely dissolved. The type of girl that comes in here won’t notice. Either that, or she won’t say anything.
The bartender delivers another whiskey and tries not to stare at my face.
That’s what I get for ending up with the family. If I were on my own, I might have more to show for it than a busted face and a stupid tattoo.
Just when I’m thinking about busting out of this stupid bar and finding a more appropriate use of my time, she walks in and sits down. She’s a spray of strawberry blond hair to my right, freckles on her arms, delicate wrists and light purple lacquered fingernails.
“Hit me,” she says to the bartender. “Whatever’s cheapest.” Her voice is raspy and low, and when she turns to me, her green eyes, sharp and intelligent, lock on mine. I take another sip of my whiskey and wonder at my luck. The girl sitting next to me is fucking stunning—and she’s wearing a silvery dress with a low-cut neckline and a high-cut skirt. Her skin is milky white, freckles that she was probably made fun of for across her neck and cheeks and shoulders. Her lips are a perfect, pink, cupid’s bow shape, her cheek-bones broad, a slight dimple in her chin.
“What are you looking at?” There’s a hard edge to her tone, but she laughs, throaty and deep. “You’re not the usual crowd in here, are you?” She lifts one perfectly manicured eyebrow and drinks the bartender’s cheap swill that passes for beer.
“You aren’t either,” I say. She’s the girl who’ll take my mind off of what I did this week, off of the fingers I broke, the faces I slit up for Cullen.
“Who says?”
“I say. You’re too pretty for this type of place. Not a tourist, not a New York native, either.”
“Then what am I?” Her deep voice sends a thrill through me. There’s a blush right over the tops of her cheeks, like she’s thinking about something she shouldn’t. Her eyes move over me, and she takes another sip of her beer.
“You’re the type of woman who should be coming home with me.”
“I think not—”
“Isn’t that what you came for? To land a good lay.”
The corners of her lips turn up into a smile, and she laughs. “And what makes you think you’re a good lay?”
“Every woman I’ve met in this damn place says so.”
Her blush intensifies. “You come here often for this kind of thing?”
“Often enough.”
“And these ladies—they say you’re good—”
“Excellent.”
“Excellent—”
“Only one way to find out,” I say, leaning in and brushing my hand against her cheek.
“Bartender—I’ll take the check.”
I grab her wrist and turn it over in my palm. Blue veins stand out against her creamy skin. I trace my finger over her wrist and into the flesh of her palm. She gasps.
I put a ten down on the ba
r and pull her up. “Only one way to find out, I said. You leave here with me now. Come back to my apartment. And I’ll show you what I’m about.”
She blushes deep red, the flush extending over her chest. “What if you’re a serial killer or something?”
I flash a grin at her. “Live dangerously.”
CHAPTER THREE
Present Day
“What fresh hell is this?” I look back and forth between Debbie and the other nurses I used to work with, back when I was a candy striper at Outer Banks hospital. They’re standing behind a card table set up in the residents’ locker room, and there’s a light blue cake on the middle of the table. My heart beats hard, and my hands start to sweat again. It’s only my second week back in town, and it’s my first day back at the hospital after three years with Doctors Without Borders. One year in Syria before shit got bad, and two years in the Ukraine.
My therapist said that what’s making me nervous is being back home, that it’s so different from what I went through while I was over there. But I know better. It’s being back on solid soil, for sure. But it’s also being back in the same life I lead when I knew him, back in the same town I escaped to, back in the same place I saw him last.
“Surprise!” Debbie shouts, throwing her hands up. The other residents halfheartedly repeat after her, but I don’t know any of them. And one or two of them probably noted the angry red blush creeping over my cheeks and decided it was best to play it low key. It is, after all, six o’clock in the morning, and I’m betting nobody is in the mood for cake. I’ll be glad when Natalie starts in the fall. But for now, I’m just as alone as I have been for the past three years.
Debbie looks frantically around at the other people in the room—ten residents, two interns, and a nurse whose name I can’t remember. She wields a cake spatula, nearly hitting one of the interns in the face. The intern steps back and crosses her arms, rolling her eyes skyward. “Anyone want cake?”
Jesus Christ, no one wants cake before it’s light outside, Debbie.
That’s what I want to say.
“Sure, Debs. Thank you so much.” I walk up to her like the gracious Southern girl I am and draw her into an embrace. Hugging her makes my nerves ease just a little bit, and I relax even more when the interns and residents go about their business, wandering to either side of the room to check their phones and change their scrubs.
“It’s so good to have you back, sweetheart,” Deb says, kissing me on the cheek and squeezing my shoulder. She hustles and gets me a piece of cake, which looks like it could be a leftover baby shower cake from the Be-Low Foods in Manteo. But it’s not really worth mentioning. I sit down next to Debbie at the card table and eat the cake. It’s stale, and the icing is hard. But Deb is comforting in the sea of anxiety swirling around me. She’s a ballast in the storm, someone who means home. Her light blue eyes fill with tears as we sit there in the middle of the locker room, doctors and nurses filing past us without a second glance.
“What happened to you, honey? Why didn’t you come back?” Deb puts her hand on mine, and the warmth feels like a shock. After three years away, changing teams of doctors from one month to the next, I’m not exactly used to being touched unexpectedly.
I choke down a piece of cake. It’s dry in my throat, scratchy. “It was my calling,” I manage to say, looking down and to the side. It seems as good a lie as any for why the preppy girl obsessed with making money would live in the Ukraine in an apartment with spotty electricity—and even spottier running water. “It was an experience I needed to have.” I shove another bite of cake in my mouth.
“I mean, why didn’t you come back here after you graduated from med school, honey? Not even to visit?”
“Plane tickets,” I say, nodding, as if that explains it all. “The trip left from New York. My mom came—”
“Okay, Summer. We need you here, and you’re here.” She squeezes my hand, and I’m transported back in time to when I was fourteen, and Debs was twenty-three, a new nurse at the hospital showing me how to empty bedpans and change linens. The memory is tinged with the guilt and regret that comes from years of hiding, of avoiding this place and all of its truths.
“Where do you need me today, Debs?” I stand and brush a few cake crumbs off of my green scrubs and pick a piece of icing from a stray curl of hair.
“Emergency. Fight from last night sent us some sorry looking assholes.”
“God, that’s still going on?” It was cool when I was seventeen, and knocking someone out with your fists seems like the worst possible idea. “Fine. I’ll go.” My hands shake a little as I put my coat on and drape the stethoscope around my neck.
It’ll get better. This is okay.
I chant the words to myself as I stroll down the hallway to the emergency room. I can be on call there and not waste my time sitting in the locker room, waiting for something to happen. I know the ropes just as well as anyone does around here.
A girl—or what looks like a girl—pops through the doors to the waiting room. Her dark eyes go wide when she sees me, and she flips her long, dark hair over her shoulder.
“You a new resident? Patient room one. We’ve got a cut that needs sutures. Dude’s got a nasty attitude.” Before I can get her name, she pulls me back to patient room one and pushes me inside. “I’ll bring him to you.” She nods to me before she walks out of the door. “Name’s Priya. Head resident. Glad to have you—Collington, right?”
I nod, and the swinging door to the patient room swings back and forth on its hinges, nearly hitting my in the face. My heart nearly leaps out of my chest, and I stumble backward toward the bed.
This Bambi deer-in-the-headlights shit won’t cut it for the job I’ve taken on, so I press the uneasy feeling in my gut down and away. I’m back here. It was my choice. And this is just the first day. What could go wrong?
I fall into a rhythm as I prep the suture kit, getting the shit together I’ll need to patch up some idiot fighter. At least, I assume it’s a fighter. Besides stomach viruses, idiots who get beat up for a living are about all we see around here at this time of day.
The door opens behind me, and a rush of air comes into the room. I hear what must be Priya fumbling around with a wheelchair. “These fucking things,” she mutters. “I’m leaving you in good hands. It’s her first day, but she was in the field for three years. She can probably suture with one eye shut in the middle of a dust storm.” She directs her voice at me as I turn on the sink and wait for the water to get warm. “Doctor, we have a white male here, mid-thirties I’d guess, though he won’t tell me. Says he got into a bar fight but his blood alcohol is zero. I suspect it was quite a beat-down he took.”
The man groans in pain, that groan that signifies he’s on the cusp of passing out. I hear him try to get up, and Priya trying to calm him so that he falls back into his chair.
“Just a minute,” I mumble. “The nurse will be in shortly. Right, Priya?”
I turn around, and after that, everything happens in slow motion. The man in the chair looks at me and smirks, his eyes steely blue.
I fall back on the hospital bed as the nurse enters and wraps a blood pressure cuff around his huge, freckled bicep. I gulp, tasting salt and metal, and my heart pounds so loud I think that it might start echoing in the room.
“What—” I start, but the words won’t fully form, and Priya turns and stares at me over his chart.
“Mid-thirties male,” she repeats. “Laceration on the right arm, and another on his right cheek. Pretty nasty. Says it was a bar fight, but his blood alcohol level was—” She stops and looks between the two of us. “You two know each other or something?”
One corner of his lip turns up into a smile, making the gash on his cheek open slightly. “You could say that,” he says, his voice a growl, deep and gritty. He’s at once intimately familiar and totally foreign. His eyes are the same, but there are fine lines at the corners, and his smile isn’t quite as eager as it used to be. His reddish hair is croppe
d close so that I can see the scar on his scalp that the boss put there when he was trying to protect me. My stomach drops, and I wipe my palms against the green scrubs. I absently wonder if my makeup looks okay, and then I realize I’m not wearing any, and I blush, my cheeks growing uncontrollably hot. The nurse looks at me and raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything.
“I don’t—I haven’t seen him in three years—” The words leave my mouth all at once. “I thought you were in New York.”
“I was, and then I came here. Cost of living, that kind of thing. Also, I was looking for this girl...” He looks at me pointedly. “But I found out she was in Syria. Imagine my surprise. And I didn’t have a red cent for a plane ticket. Had to stay and work.”
Three years have left their mark. He looks older, but his muscles are broader and more defined, his presence even bigger than it once was. The white t-shirt he’s wearing stretches across his chest and biceps. Before, he only had one tattoo on his right forearm, the sword that signified his membership in the Irish mafia. Now, that’s covered. New tattoos run up the length of both arms.
As the nurse listens to his heart, Priya stares at me. Her eyes flick over to the man for a brief second. “You okay with him? I can get another resident—”
“Don’t bother,” he says, his grin growing wider. “I heard she was back in town. I knew she’d be coming to see me anyway.” The way he looks at me sends a chill through my body, and I suddenly remember why I agreed to what he offered. I stand up, and my knees instantly go weak. I knew I’d have to see him, but I had no damn idea it would be so soon.
“I’ll wait for Summer to respond,” Priya says, looking at me pointedly.
“It’s fine,” I say. “I’ve got this.”
“She’s been looking forward to seeing me,” he says. “She’s my—”
“Old friend. We’re old friends. I met him when I was in school.” I nearly bark the words out, and Ash smirks. Priya shrugs, but she looks back at me before she leaves.