During the meal of shark steak cooked on the grill, potato salad, and grilled squash, the men had carefully drawn her into their conversation. Forty-ish and burly, worldly-wise, yet kindly, Chief Lon Swales exuded a comfortable aura of rock-solid competence. He had rehabbed several houses himself as a sideline, and appreciated her work-in-progress farmhouse. When she explained she’d let Jax, desperate for more physical activity than running seven miles a day and swimming for a couple of hours, repair the storm damage to the garage roof and paint the three upstairs bedrooms, he nodded in sly approval. “You gotta understand how to manage these officers and keep ’em working.”
Jax’s friend Do-Lord, with his russet coloring, reminded Pickett of a fox—wiry, cunning, and very, very quick despite his slow-talking, country-boy ways. His questions about her work at the base were both knowledgeable and insightful. Pickett got the feeling that behind his good-ole-boy façade, he was secretly highly amused by finding Jax and Tyler at her house.
Pickett had wondered how Jax might be the same or different from other SEALs. Despite differences in physique and personality, in all three she sensed the same coiled and poised power, whose nature was to dominate any situation in which they found themselves. They granted Jax leadership of their group while clearly believing themselves his equal in every way.
The evening cooled rapidly once the sun slid behind the pines, but after dinner was done, nobody wanted to go inside.
The men seemed comfortable enough in T-shirts and shorts, but Pickett had retrieved sweatshirts for her and Tyler. She pulled her feet up to the seat of her rocker and stretched the oversized jersey over her folded legs.
“Cold?” Jax patted the seat of the swing where he sat sideways, one leg outstretched. “Come over here.”
Sitting with him would make a display of the intimacy of their relationship, something she didn’t want to do. The men had treated her with all the courtesy due her as their hostess, but though they had kept their interest casual, all evening Pickett had felt rampant curiosity coming in waves from the two friends. Now they weren’t bothering to disguise their watching.
Mindful of two pairs of very interested eyes, Pickett shook her head. “I’m all right.”
“No, you’re not. Come over here.” To enforce his demand Jax reached across the short distance separating the swing from the rocker in which she sat.
Jax wasn’t going to give up. He never gave up. If she refused again, it would only draw more attention. Oh well, what did their opinion really matter? They would be gone even sooner than Jax. Pickett capitulated just as Jax tugged on her hand with the result that she came out of the rocker faster than either one of them expected.
The swing bobbled, its chains jangling, while the chair rocked backward, then forward.
Despite his unsteady base, Jax pulled her from the path of the tipping chair. Laughing, he scooped her to him, and settled her between his legs. “Lean back.” He pulled her against his chest. “Sweetheart, they know.” He whispered against her neck. He was reading her mind again. He seemed to do that more and more.
Jax ran a hand along her bare calf. “You are chilly. Do you want to go in?” If that little demonstration didn’t make their physical relationship clear, nothing was going to. Pickett gave in to being surrounded by his strength and the heavenly warmth of his body. She gave in to the sensual rightness that always flooded her whenever their bodies were in contact. She gave in to being surrounded by his wonderful, masculine scent.
Jax threaded his fingers with hers then folded their arms together across her middle. She could tell he enjoyed, as she did, the feel of her breasts where they rested on his forearms.
The men’s shop talk, made unintelligible by acronyms and alphabets, flowed over her, their voices rumbling into the deepening twilight. Jax’s stomach shook from time to time at a witticism she didn’t understand, but she didn’t feel shut out. Instead the freedom with which they talked included her in the most fundamental way. Almost as if they accepted and approved of her and Jax as a unit. Two who could be treated as one. She and Jax were a unit. One.
And the two shall be made one flesh. The biblical phrase, which up to now she had thought was poetic hyperbole, jumped into her mind.
She was in love.
And this was not the heady stuff of infatuation, temporary as soap bubbles. This kind of love actually joined a man and woman together. The “till death do us part” kind of love.
Absolute black numbing fear squeezed her lungs. She was in love but Jax hadn’t changed. If she felt such ripping pain now when he hadn’t even left her for the first time, how would she feel when it happened again and again? How long before she resented him for the agony he caused her?
Pickett didn’t know she was holding her breath until Jax jogged her to start her breathing again.
Pickett always tried to understand her mistakes, but she couldn’t imagine how she had let something so hopeless happen. As if her distress had communicated itself to him, Jax rocked her gently and dropped a kiss on her hair.
Tyler got up from the porch floor where he had been playing with his trucks and leaned against the swing.
“Did you want to cuddle too, sweetie?” Pickett held out her arms, grateful to escape her thoughts. The sweatshirt she’d dressed him in hung past his knees, and even with the sleeves rolled up, only the tips of his rather dirty fingers showed.
“I wish I had a picture of you dressed up in my sweatshirt,” she told him. “You make me think of the little Star Wars Sand People in their droopy, too-big robes. No, don’t trip yourself,” she cautioned as Tyler attempted to clamber into the swing, hampered by the enveloping sweatshirt. “Pull the sweatshirt up over your knees.”
With another of his secret smiles, Do-Lord came to the rescue. He picked the little boy up and gently placed him across her lap.
Pickett settled Tyler’s head against her breast, arms around him, Jax’s arms surrounding both of them. This was the child of her heart. Jax was the love of her life. How could they feel so much like a family and not be one?
“Daddy? You know when you were the Lion King?” Tyler’s piping voice inserted itself into the men’s talk.
Jax put down a foot to stop the motion of the swing. When he was what? Just two weeks ago he would have answered he had never been the Lion King, and Tyler would have retreated into silence. Now he said, “I’m not sure. Tell me some more.”
“You know.” Tyler struggled to sit up through the expedient of pushing an elbow against Pickett’s diaphragm.
“Be gentle, Tyler.” Jax grasped the bony little arms to set him upright. From roughhousing sessions Jax knew how sharp that elbow was. “Remember, I told you, you have to be very careful with Pickett. Now, what are you talking about?”
“In the picture, Daddy,” Tyler insisted, starting to get upset. “You were the Lion King. Who was Big Bird?”
“Pickett, over to you.” Tyler could go from light chop to twelve-foot waves in five seconds flat, normal in children his age, but it was hard for Jax to not demand Tyler shut up and get a hold of himself. Jax had no clue what Tyler was talking about and when Tyler got emotional, it was Pickett who was able to deal with him better.
“Did you see a picture of the Lion King and Big Bird together?” Pickett hazarded. “And that made you think of your daddy?”
“It wasn’t really the Lion King. It was my daddy playing dress up. And somebody else was playing Big Bird. I liked that picture. The Lion King is good and he looks after people.” Tyler pointed from Do-Lord to Lon. “But which one is Big Bird?”
In the deeper shadows beyond the glow from the window, Jax caught sight of Do-Lord grinning. “Don’t tell me you know what he’s talking about.”
“Maybe. Did you see the picture on the internet, Tyler?”
“At kindergarten. My teacher showed me.”
“If I can borrow a computer, I think I can show y’all what he means.”
In moments Do-Lord had the computer in Pickett
’s office-cum-dining-room booted up, and the boings of her horse-and-buggy dial-up connection sounding.
While everyone looked over his shoulder, Do-Lord tapped a few keys and in a moment the screen glowed with the official SEALs homepage. Some clicks of the mouse and a picture of two SEALs in a sniper hide appeared on the screen. Their heads and shoulders were draped in ghillie suits—special camouflage blankets woven with grass and leaves to blend into the browns and golds of the surrounding savannah. As in all media photographs, no identifying features were visible on either man.
“Is this what you meant, Tyler?” Do-Lord asked. “I ’bout busted a gut laughing when I saw it ’cause that guy standing up in the yellow ghillie suit looked just like Big Bird. He looks humongous ’cause he’s standing up—a stupid thing to do, by the way. The whole point of the ghillie is to disguise the man-silhouette—and the way he holds the binoculars looks like huge, round eyes over a beak.”
“That’s it!” Tyler hopped up and down. “That’s my daddy playing Lion King.”
“The man standing does look like Big Bird!” Pickett laughed. “You have a good imagination. And Tyler, you think the other man—” Pickett pointed to the man kneeling—“looks like a lion?”
“He’s supposed to look like long, dry grass,” Jax growled, feeling the need to bring the conversation back to the real world. Pickett might commend Tyler on his imagination, but the notion that Tyler thought he played dress-up irked him.
Of course a lion’s tawny coat was supposed to blend in with the savannah vegetation too, so maybe it wasn’t farfetched to see the other man as a lion.
“No. It’s a lion!” Tyler’s voice was shrill.
“I bet you liked seeing a picture of men doing what your daddy does,” Pickett soothed. “Is that why your teacher showed you this?”
“She was helping me,” the boy replied very earnestly. “See, I had to live with my gan-gan. My teacher asked me where my daddy was, and I said I didn’t know, I thought he got lost.”
Pickett knelt beside Tyler. “Was this after your mother died, Tyler?”
“Uh-huh. My gan-gan, my grandmother,” Tyler amended the baby-talk name, “said I had to live with her cause my mom—my mother was lost,” Tyler explained to his audience. “But I didn’t think my daddy was lost like when people die and get lost. He was just lost.”
Enjoying the adults’ full attention now, Tyler went into chatty mode. “And then my teacher said, ‘Your daddy’s not lost. He’s a SEAL. We can find out about it on the internet.’ And then she showed me this picture. And then she said, ‘I don’t know why your Uncle Sam needs him more than you do right this minute.’ And I didn’t know either.” Tyler lifted his shoulders at the impenetrability of adult logic. “I didn’t even know I had an uncle.”
“I don’t have to ask you if you’re getting laid,” Do-Lord chuckled when they returned to the porch. Together, Jax and Do-Lord pulled the rockers to the rail so they could prop up their feet.
It was the first chance they’d had to talk just between the two of them. Pickett had gone upstairs to put Tyler to bed, and Lon, as usual anticipating supply requirements, was in the kitchen making coffee. When they reconvened they would map out a strategy for blending Tyler into a naval officer’s life. Already he had scrapped his plan to leave Tyler at Pickett’s house while he found a larger apartment, located schools, and interviewed baby-sitters. It would be more convenient than dragging Tyler around, but no way was he leaving Tyler to think his father had gotten “lost” again. And tomorrow they would look at pictures together while Jax explained what the men in them were doing.
Do-Lord’s chair creaked as he settled into it and slid down on the end of his spine. “Yes, indeed. I can see you’ve accomplished union with the divine feminine.” He slapped the arm of his rocker. “Damn, I love to be right. Getting up close and personal with a vesica piscis was just what you needed.”
Jax pulled himself away from his contemplation of how to do his job now that it included Tyler, and focused on what Do-Lord was saying. All evening long he’d seen Do-Lord’s eyes twinkling with mischief every time he looked at Pickett and figured he’d come in for some teasing about her. And he’d be the first to admit he’d gotten damn lucky—in more ways than one—the day she walked up to him.
Grinning, Jax propped his bare feet next to Do-Lord’s on the porch rail. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I told you, your unconscious predicted it when you drew the vesica piscis.”
“You mean those circles you said looked like pussy?” Talking about women’s attributes was one thing. Talking about Pickett’s was something else. “You’re on thin ice, Do-Lord,” Jax warned softly.
“Hey, I’m not disrespecting Pickett. I’m talking about symbols. When people have a problem, the wisdom needed to solve it can be found in seeking their natural opposite. Your unconscious offered you a symbol to point you in the right direction.”
“So you’re just spouting more of your metaphysical bullshit.” Do-Lord saw connections other men missed—a faculty that made him a particularly valuable strategist when the team was operating. During downtime, he also liked to let his mind roam free, finding connections in all sorts of diverse things—a way of looking at the world, in which he frequently reminded Jax of Corey. Right now though, Jax wasn’t interested in hearing Do-Lord spout his arcane theories.
“Not bullshit,” Do-Lord objected without heat. “Symbols operate the same way SEALs do. They’re powerful because they come from behind the lines of the conscious mind’s defenses. I just see the connection between your problem with Tyler and finding Pickett, is all. Man, you were getting ready to make one hell of a mistake with Tyler, and you were so focused on the straight-line solution, you weren’t listening to anyone’s warnings. It looks to me like when you met Pickett you got enlightened through union with the divine feminine.”
Do-Lord was right about that, in more ways than he knew. Pickett had enlightened him about Tyler. The knowledge that he might have missed his son, lost his connection to him for good, still grabbed his gut.
“So, have you test-driven her yet?” Do-Lord’s question jerked Jax from contemplation of the unthinkable. Test drive was SEAL-speak for making sure a woman understood the realities of marriage to a SEAL before she accepted a proposal.
“What? Hell no. I haven’t proposed, and I’ve made sure Pickett knows better than to expect me to. Try to focus, here. My life is complicated enough. I like Pickett a lot, and I’ve learned from her. When I get to Virginia, I intend to find a coach to help me with Tyler, like she has. But I’ve had one high-maintenance woman. One bad marriage damn near tanked my career. I try not to repeat my mistakes.”
“Mistake? Pickett’s not the same as Danielle.”
“I know that. But don’t think she’s not just as demanding in her own way.”
Do-Lord stopped rocking to stare at his friend. “What the hell is the matter with you? You love Pickett. She loves you.” Do-Lord shook his head in disgust. “Dude, you’re a fucking genius at assembling a team to achieve an objective. You know what people can do, better than they know themselves, but sometimes you’re blind as a bat when it comes to seeing what they are.”
TWENTY-NINE
Jax woke suddenly and completely. Moonlight lay in silvery patches across the easy chair and foot of the bed. He could hear the ticking of the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel, Pickett’s slow deep breathing. His body felt heavy and relaxed. It would feel good to pull Pickett’s soft warmth against himself, but he was too relaxed to do even that.
The moonlight at the foot of the bed seemed to shimmer, as if it was floating on the slight breeze coming in the window. After a while it looked like a man leaning against the tall bed post.
“Corey?”
Moonlight gleamed on white smile. “Yeah.”
He looked great. Healthy. He had filled out and even looked as if he had grown. Jax’s eyes quickly scanned the vulnerable joints. The swelling of elbo
ws and knees was gone. Corey had strong, straight limbs that flexed with ease. Even in the moonlight, Jax could see that color tinted the cheeks, rounded once again as they had been intended to be.
“You’re well.”
Corey nodded, smiling like a mischievous elf.
Jax’s mind was still trying to sort the possible from the impossible. “I don’t understand. If you got well, why did you die? Wait a minute. You’re dead, I mean, you did die, didn’t you?”
“Funniest thing about that.” Corey’s eyebrows lifted and his eyes grew wide behind his glasses, just as they always did when he got to the payoff of a practical joke. “It turns out after you die, you’re not dead.”
“That might be funny to you, you shit, but it wasn’t a joke to me. I didn’t believe you were really going to die. I knew how sick you were but you’d always pulled through before. You said, we always said, we would stick together. I needed you! How could you die?”
“I didn’t want to die, but it was …” Corey shook his head. “I can’t explain. But man, I’ve never left you.”
Images flashed through Jax’s memory. The quiet voice that said, Look behind you. Get out. Now. “That was you. You really were there?”
“Yeah. I’ve always been with you.”
“And you’re here now?” Jax had a sudden thought. “Am I awake?”
“You’re awake. Your mind is awake,” he clarified. “Your body is asleep.”
“Then am I dreaming, or is this really happening?”
“This is really happening. I needed to talk to you. Pickett’s the one, Jax. She’s perfect for you.”
“Glad you approve.” It was true, Jax was glad to know that Corey had seen Pickett. That Corey could see her value and agreed with Jax. It made something complete. “I wish she could meet you.”
Corey smiled wistfully. “I know. There’s someone … she’s … here …”
An image formed in Jax’s mind. Laughing elfish face surrounded by soft silvery brown curls. “I like her.”
Mary Margret Daughtridge SEALed Bundle Page 24