Mary Margret Daughtridge SEALed Bundle

by Mary Margret Daughtridge

How could she tell him when she wasn’t sure she could explain it to herself? She wanted Jax and Tyler to be hers forever the way a drowning man wants air. She’d seen almost from the first that she could save him from losing Tyler—something he would regret for the rest of his life. She’d pulled herself back from the wish to manipulate the situation a thousand times.

  But as much as she wanted to help Jax, as much as her heart broke for Jax and Tyler, she would be rescuing them. Sooner or later, her love would become a burden to Jax and she would resent him because marrying him would prevent her from ever having the kind of marriage and family she wanted.

  And still she was tempted. He hadn’t said anything about loving her, but he desired her. And he was right, even if all he wanted was a mother for Tyler, they made a good team. If he were the laughing man she saw throwing Tyler up in the air, companionably making a meal with her, pulling her to him in the middle of the night, providing in a thousand ways for her comfort and security … What-might-have-been made a lump too thick to swallow.

  But that was only part of who he was. He was also a SEAL and he’d made it clear he didn’t want to change.

  Pickett drew a deep breath.

  “First of all because I don’t believe that you really want to commit to building a marriage. But mostly, because you’re a SEAL.”

  “You’re wrong about commitment. But just for the sake of argument, are you saying if I’d walked up to you, said hey, I’m a SEAL and I’m looking for a permanent relationship, you would have turned me down? Well, duh, stupid question. That’s exactly what’s happening right now, isn’t it?”

  “Jax, please. I’ve hurt your feelings and I truly didn’t mean to. Try to understand. I know more than is good for anybody to know about the problems facing military marriages. Marriage is hard. Being in the military makes it harder. But take the separations, the emotional isolation, the fact that there will always be secrets, the fear of injury or death, and then multiply it by one hundred and you’ve got marriage to a SEAL.

  “As long as you’re a SEAL everything comes in second—a distant second. That’s just the way it is.”

  Picket dropped her head into her hands. “There’s too much to overcome. Just too much. I can’t do it.”

  “There are Navy marriages, even SEAL marriages that work.”

  “I know that.”

  “No guts, huh?”

  Pickett’s head came up. “That’s the way it seems to you?”

  “Yeah. You tell other people how to make a marriage work that you would never take a chance at. You keep your love life limited so that you will never have to try anything you might fail at. You look into the world and its real problems through your patients, but you make sure you never face any real problems yourself.” Jax made a disgusted sound. “Even a lover has got to go, if he’s not a fantasy anymore.” Jax’s face was stark, his crystalline eyes clouded, his mouth twisted in a bitter line. He went to the window and leaned against it, arms braced on the frame.

  His inner struggle could be measured in the taut delineation of muscle and tendon and the heaving of his chest. He shook his head and straightened but did not turn around.

  Pickett reached for him, wanting to touch his too-solid back before it became a wall, before he closed himself off to her utterly. “Jax, I’m so sorry. I know you’re feeling—”

  Jax whirled with a chopping movement so fast and so violent Pickett took an involuntary step back. “Don’t say it. Don’t try to tell me you know how I feel. You don’t have a goddamned clue how I feel.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Pickett watched Jax’s retreating back as he cut across the neighbor’s property toward the sound. A sick feeling pressed upward in her chest.

  Of all the consequences she had considered when she started the affair with Jax, the one she hadn’t allowed for was that he might get hurt.

  If only she hadn’t been so surprised when he mentioned marriage, she might have handled it better. Even if he only wanted to marry her so he could keep Tyler, he had still felt rejected.

  And as for the accusations he had thrown at her, maybe he was right. She didn’t live through her clients, but she did lack courage. The people who served their country made immense, heroic sacrifices, but so did those who loved them. It would take a hero to go into marriage with a SEAL knowing what she did, and she was no hero.

  She wished she could cry, but the unutterable loss she felt—a loss she couldn’t name—prevented even that.

  When the phone rang, Pickett considered letting the answering machine pick up but at the last moment answered it.

  “Is the stud still there?” Pickett’s sister Lyle asked without preamble. Lyle’s offbeat, irreverent style had been carefully honed in her role as the family rebel. Alike enough to understand without needing long explanations, they were different enough to be objective.

  “Don’t call him that.”

  “Why not? Is he a stud?”

  Pickett couldn’t believe how hearing Lyle’s voice lifted her. She mentally compared Jax with every other man she had met, remembered her visceral reaction to his overwhelming masculinity. She giggled. “Yes, he is.” Then she sobered. “But he doesn’t like it.”

  “He doesn’t like to be a stud? What is the matter with that man?”

  “We had an argument. He said I thought of him as studly.”

  “So what were you arguing about?”

  “He asked me to marry him.”

  “That’s awful! The nerve. That’s terrible. If that isn’t just like a heterosexual man! I hope you told him where to go. Nobody can say things like that to my baby sister and get away with it.”

  “Lyle, stop it.” Pickett was torn between laughing and crying.

  “Well, you know you can’t marry a man who is studly but doesn’t want to be. If it was the other way around maybe …”

  Pickett’s giggle turned into a sob. “I can’t marry him at all. And Lyle, I hurt his feelings … I handled it so badly.”

  Lyle listened to Pickett cry for a minute, then interrupted. “Pickett, stop crying.”

  Pickett felt in her pockets for a tissue, gave up, and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She swallowed a hiccup. “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to say things like that? That is such bad counseling technique.”

  “You’re the counselor, not me. But if you want to cry long distance, you call me up and pay for it. Besides, I’m an artist and artists can say anything—especially to a younger sister who is acting like an idiot.”

  “I’m not acting like an idiot!” Pickett hated how peevish she sounded. She hoped she only sounded that way because she had been crying. But maybe she was an idiot to expect any sympathy from Lyle.

  “Yes you are. I think any woman who doesn’t want to marry is showing extraordinary intelligence, but you’re crying because you’re in love with him but you’re not going to marry him. You’re an idiot.”

  “Who said I was in love with him?”

  “Mother.” Lyle let that sink in. “I called her after Sarah Bea called me. Sarah Bea said you had taken in another one of your strays, this time a man with a little boy. But she also said you always get the best of everything, so I thought I’d better call Mother. Mother said she thought y’all might be serious about each other, so she was telling everybody, including me, to leave the two of you alone.” Lyle huffed. “I don’t try to run your business like Sarah Bea and Grace do.”

  “In that case, why are you calling me now?”

  “Because Grace called me and she said he was a stud.”

  “Grace? Our uptight, perfectionist, exquisitely restrained sister? She said the word ‘stud?’”

  “Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? What’s going on, Pickett? Start talking.”

  It felt good to unburden. Pickett found herself going into detail about how far beyond her wildest dreams being desired by a man like Jax had been. About how gentle he was with her and Tyler despite his great strength. His intelligence, her respect fo
r him. Only to Lyle would she have said what she thought about sex before Jax and what she thought about it now.

  As she talked, Pickett came to see that Jax had given her his respect at every turn, treating her like his equal, a very different equal, true, but still someone on his level. Now she could put a name to the loss she felt. She had lost his respect. Nevertheless, she knew she had to be sensible. She loved him now, but how long would that love survive her resenting him because he would never be the man she wanted him to be? She had saved him and herself, not to mention Tyler, from a world of pain.

  “It would never be the kind of stable, dependable life I’ve always wanted,” she concluded.

  Lyle made a rude sound. “Since when did stability mean that much to you? If you had wanted stable you could have stayed in Goldsboro and gone to work for Mental Health. Instead you go off to a house that is just barely habitable, and you work at two jobs, either of which could blow away tomorrow.”

  “Lyle, marriage is different. If coming to Snead’s Ferry didn’t work out, I could always do something else. You know how much I hate the attitude some people have that if the marriage doesn’t work out they can always get a divorce. When I get married I intend it to be forever.” Pickett pulled the clip from her hair and ran her fingers through it. “How can I enter into a marriage with a SEAL, knowing that the odds are overwhelmingly against it succeeding? They have a ninety-five percent divorce rate. Ninety-five percent! I’d have to be either a fool or a hero to take on something like that—and I’m neither.”

  Lyle let out a huge sigh. “Mother would swear she didn’t put any pressure on her children to achieve, but we’ve all got issues around making the grade, and succeeding. In your own way you’re as much a perfectionist as Grace is. You believe you know all the rules for making a marriage, and now nothing will do for you but a perfect one.” Lyle was silent a minute while she gathered her thoughts. “Pickett, I think you’re asking the wrong question. If you don’t love him, that’s one thing. But if you do love him, if you love that little boy and want to be his mother, then is it really about succeeding or failing?”

  “What is the right question?”

  “Is this marriage something you can put your heart into?”

  After talking a while about the gallery in South-port that had shown some interest in Lyle’s paintings, Pickett heard Tyler getting up from his nap and racing to the bathroom downstairs as he always did upon waking up, Lucy clattering behind him. Pickett said good-bye, and was hanging up when she caught sight of Jax coming around the house, a wet Hobo Joe beside him. From the looks of Jax’s wet shorts, they had both been swimming. He rinsed the big dog then allowed him to play at biting the water as it came from the nozzle for a few minutes before turning the hose on himself.

  The weather had finally begun to feel like autumn in the last few days, and although it was still warm in the middle of the day, by sunset it was getting chilly. Pickett felt sympathetic shivers chase over her, when Jax, having rinsed his hair, shook the water out of his eyes and stuck the hose down the front of his shorts.

  Didn’t he experience discomfort or did he feel it and ignore it? He felt pleasure—that was for sure. He was such an intensely physical man and approached sex with an exuberant carnality, making explicit the delight he drew from her body’s every texture and taste and smell. And he always gave her his body for her pleasure with the same generosity.

  Pickett’ face grew warm at the thought of some of the things that he could get her to do.

  The questions Lyle had raised rumbled through her mind like wheels on cobblestones. Was she looking for a marriage that fit all the right criteria so that she wouldn’t have to put her heart into it? How much had she focused on the fact that it couldn’t last because she was simply afraid of failure?

  THIRTY-THREE

  Pickett was watching him. Jax didn’t need to look for her face at the kitchen window to be sure, but he did—just for the extra pleasure of finding her. Who would have thought the situational awareness that had been trained into him would pay off in this feeling of connection so intense he always knew where she was and sometimes, like now, what she was thinking?

  He grinned. He knew that intent, almost studious look. She was thinking about sex. But something else too.

  Well, if she was thinking about sex, maybe he hadn’t messed up too bad. He had sure gone about asking her to marry him in the most half-assed kind of way. The swim in the sound had helped him get his head back together.

  The tide had been out and he’d had to wade through the warm, shallow water almost a hundred yards to find water deep enough to swim in. He moved the hose deeper down his shorts. He’d stumbled into quicksand in a couple of places and the slurry of fine sand and water guaranteed grit would make it into every fold and crevice.

  It had bothered him some—okay, a lot—to find out Pickett thought he was such a bad relationship risk that she would never have looked at him if she’d thought he was serious about her. But hey, Corey was the only person who had ever wanted him just because he was himself. It didn’t matter. He wanted her for Tyler.

  And for himself.

  He liked the way she touched him. He liked sleeping on sheets that smelled like her. He even liked that she was always thinking of things for him to fix, and she didn’t hesitate to keep him in line.

  When she was all tidy in her prim little professional outfits, he liked planning how he would mess her up as soon as she got home.

  He could live with the fact that she gave her love everywhere, impartially. After all, he was benefiting too. But he didn’t like the thought of her going on to some other man. Uh-uh. That was not going to happen.

  She would want children. More kids would be good. Maybe a little girl. He could picture her round and ripe with his child. The thought was amazingly erotic. And thanks to his dad, he had money. She wouldn’t have to live on a lieutenant’s salary.

  His proposal had been too sudden. Pickett liked to think things over. So he’d give her a little time. Then a romantic dinner, some wine, a little mood music, show her a ring. He could make this work.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Waiting for the fireworks to begin, Pickett stood on the fantail of the pier watching the last lavender glow of daylight turn to bright indigo behind the cottages on the shore.

  She’d braced herself for an evening of terse sentences and stiff silences while they fulfilled their promise to Tyler, but Jax was acting remarkably cheerful for a man whose proposal had been turned down. He didn’t act like his heart was broken.

  Which meant she’d done the right thing to refuse him, didn’t it? Whether she was in his life or out of it didn’t really make much difference to him. He looked at ease as he listened politely to the elderly man who had buttonholed him. He stood still without looking stiff. No shifting his weight on his sandaled feet, no random shoving hands in his jeans pockets. He was just absolutely present.

  She, on the other hand, was growing edgier with every passing minute. Like a cut lip she couldn’t keep her tongue away from, her mind raced over reasons why she couldn’t marry him.

  With restless fingers she pulled the scarf out that she had tucked into her light denim jacket, and folded it into a bandeau to keep her hair from blowing into her eyes.

  She wished she could refold her thoughts and tie them up differently, but there was no way to do that. There was only an echoing hollowness she’d have to learn to live with. The bottom line was always the same. She couldn’t marry Jax while wanting him to change.

  It was the smell that told Pickett something was wrong.

  The ocean breeze had died with the setting sun, and a land breeze was just beginning to push the air almost straight down the pier.

  She turned from adjusting Tyler’s jacket and raised her head to sniff the land breeze. Sort of sweet, sort of sulfur, slight odor of decay … cooking gas.

  Restaurant was too fancy a word for the four orange vinyl booths and lunch counter that took up one wal
l of the bait shop. She supposed they had cooking gas there, but it seemed unlikely that the smell would carry nine hundred and fifty feet to the end of the pier.

  The breeze died, and now she could only smell whiffs of beer, cigarette smoke, and the caramel corn the children were sharing. Underneath was the always-present pier-smell of fish bait and treated wood, long pickled in salt air.

  It smelled like what it was: a crowd on a pier, but the feeling of cold fingers stroking her spine from the inside got stronger.

  Jax, with his almost uncanny sense of where she was and what was going on with her, reached out a hand and drew her to him without pausing in the conversation he had struck up with an elderly man. The man was ranting to Jax about a loggerhead turtle nest near his beach cottage. He was irritated because he had to walk around the yellow tape that the turtle conservation group had placed around it.

  Briefly comforted by Jax’s scent, Pickett snuggled closer to his warmth as the breeze picked up again, but then there it was again. Gas. It just didn’t make sense to smell gas where there wasn’t any.

  Jax felt her stiffen and cocked an eyebrow at her, but his wry smile said he had misinterpreted the cause of her unease. He knew well her opinion of people who were drawn to the uncrowded simplicity of the Outer Banks’ pristine beaches and then complained because they missed all the conveniences of New Jersey. The man showed no signs of winding down. Pickett waited for a break in his monologue and when none appeared, she shoved out a stop hand.

  The man stopped his harangue, more in surprise at her temerity than courtesy. Pickett would take what she could get.

  “Excuse us.” She pulled on Jax’s sleeve. “I want to leave. Something is wrong.”

  Jax’s eyes met hers in a moment’s hard assessment. Then—she wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t been looking right at him—he went from being a laid back young man, politely letting an older man bore him, to being someone else. Someone she’d glimpsed once before when he’d come in from the hurricane still enrapt with the wildness of the storm. His shoulders suddenly looked broader. His weight moved to the balls of his feet and he scanned the crowd in one swift efficient sweep, noting the position of every single person. Without seeming to stop scanning, he swept up Tyler as he ran by chasing another little boy about his size.