by Karina Bliss
She was conscious of the warmth of his palm on her shoulder, conscious of a thaw between them. “I guess you’ve saved me from making an expensive mistake.” She added grudgingly, “It almost makes up for you being such a pain in the ass about this trustee business.”
Nate removed his hand. “Hey, make me suffer, I deserve it.” There was that note in his voice again, bitter as medicine.
Why does Steve haunt you, Nate? He wasn’t a man who confided easily, but she had a week to pry it out of him. “I won’t, but Jules may,” she cautioned as they left the store. They were meeting her in a cafe to sign the minicontract Jules had hastily put together after Claire’s phone call. “Lawyers dislike being given the runaround, too.”
Jules was already sitting at a table at the busy inner-city cafe when they arrived. It was covered with papers, and the debris of an early lunch. Giving her a wave, Claire pushed Nate in her direction. “Go make your peace while I order. Espresso, right?”
He approached the table slowly, unsure how to greet her. With a handshake? With a hug? Lee had been one of his closest friends, but his mate’s whirlwind courtship meant Nate had met Jules only once before his death.
At the time she’d simply represented yet another in a long line of Lee’s girlfriends and her cool reserve, combined with a noisy bar, hadn’t fostered a rapport. Later, when he’d quizzed Lee about “Miss Congeniality,” he’d said, “Watch it, Wyatt. You’re talking about my future wife.” Nate had cracked up. “You making a commitment is as delusional as Lady Gaga trying to give up makeup for Lent.”
“Much you know. I’m proposing after this deployment.”
None of the guys had taken him seriously and his unresponsiveness to their ribbing through the tour—like I’m giving you jackasses more ammo on my love life—only confirmed their view that their resident Romeo had got cold feet.
Dan found the engagement ring, packing up Lee’s personal effects, and brought it to the hospital where Nate sat with Ross in critical care. The three of them had stared at it for a long time.
“If we give it to her, it’ll only make things worse,” Ross croaked from the bed. “I say, we sell it and find a way to give the money to his family.”
“She is his family…or was meant to be,” Dan said. “Shit, I can’t believe we didn’t believe him. We’re idiots.” For a moment, they’d fallen silent, remembering their buddy. “I think it will be a comfort, a confirmation of how important she was to him. I say we give it to her.”
“I disagree,” Ross said. “It’s salt in the wound.” He turned his head on the pillow. “Nate, you’ve got the deciding vote.”
He’d already begun his withdrawal and shrugged. “It’s not like she can suffer any more, is it? And if it strikes her as too morbid she can always sell it.”
They gave her the ring. She’d blanched white, and then stared at them with stricken eyes. Even in his numbness, Nate was moved. There was no doubting her love for Lee. From that moment she’d been adopted by Lee’s circle. A natural loner, she’d resisted being taken into the fold, but she wasn’t given a choice. Another reason Nate had left the country. It was the only way to escape.
But he was glad she’d found somewhere to belong.
He reached the table, still undecided on a greeting. She made the decision for him by thrusting out her hand. “Hello, Jules.” He shook it, returning her polite smile. They could have been strangers meeting, instead of two people inextricably bound by a common tragedy. But his move to the States immediately after the memorial service meant they were strangers and God knows his indifference since had done nothing to endear him to her.
“Well, we haven’t seen you for a while, but you’re certainly making your presence felt now, aren’t you?” she said pleasantly as they took their seats.
“I’ve been ignoring your lawyer’s letters for what…over a year? Feel free to call me an asshole.”
She gave him an assessing look, then dropped her gaze to the papers in front of her. “As Claire’s lawyer, it’s important to retain an impartial professionalism.”
“Let’s step outside that magic circle a moment.”
Her gaze lifted. “You’re an asshole.”
“The facts point to it,” he agreed.
Jules waved reassurance to Claire, who was watching them anxiously from the line at the counter. “She’s wasted a hell of a lot of money over that period trying to get you to fulfill your role as trustee,” she said through a big smile. “You might want to think about reimbursing. I kept records.”
“I was going to ask about that.”
“Uh-huh.” She looked skeptical. “This better not be another way of messing her around.”
“All I want is a week to assess the risks. Steve was my best friend and it’s time I did right by his wife and son.”
“She said this was your idea?” Her tone less hostile, Jules waved the new contract.
“The final decision on selling the house has to be hers.”
“Okay then,” she said grudgingly, and handed him a pen. He resisted the urge to touch the rock on her finger, like some kind of talisman.
“How are you, Jules?” he said awkwardly. Last time he’d seen her, she’d been a frozen figure at the memorial service. She’d let him hug her then.
“Fine,” she said shortly. There was a brief silence. “You?”
“Fine,” he replied in kind.
Both of them looked instinctively toward Claire for rescue, noticed and pretended not to. God, this was uncomfortable. Nate thought he’d learned to talk to anybody working for Zander, but somehow small talk failed him.
Jules cleared her throat. “So,” she said. “Zander Freedman.”
It was so unexpected Nate laughed. “You’re kidding.”
She smiled sheepishly. “The crushes you have when you’re thirteen tend to stay with you.”
It also explained her attraction to Lee. She liked the wild ones. “If I’ve still got a job, I’ll get him to autograph a picture.”
“Has staying longer put your job under threat?”
“Keep your voice down.” Nate glanced at Claire; she was at the cashier. “He’s still learning to share his toys…he’ll come round.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Then I’ll pimp my services somewhere else.”
“Who’s pimping what?” Claire said behind him.
Jules didn’t miss a beat. “Nate is my pimp for Zander Freedman’s autograph,” she said. “Tell him to make the inscription tasteful,” she told Nate. “Something like, ‘Juliet Browne, you were the best I ever had.’” She proffered her pen. “Maybe you should write that down.”
“I think I can commit that one to memory.” For the first time Nate understood Lee’s attraction to this woman. He’d never know where he was with her.
Claire put down the tray. “Don’t tell her Zander hugged me,” she advised Nate. “She’ll never get over it.”
“Wait, you met him and haven’t told me? My God, our friendship is hanging by a thread. Unless that eclair’s for me?”
With an exaggerated sigh, Claire handed it over, along with another coffee. “Now I’m stuck with your oatmeal slice. Nate, I got you a sausage roll for Kiwi nostalgia.”
Instinctively his eyes met Jules’s. Lee had been a sausage-roll connoisseur, but maybe she hadn’t had time to discover that. Judging by the way she was biting her lip, she had. He spoke to mitigate the grief. “Did you know Lee’s sister used to post sausage rolls to Afghanistan?”
“No,” she rallied. “That’s impossible.”
“They’d arrive all vacuum packed. He could have sold them a dozen times over, but he never did—even his buddies only got one. The rest he inhaled. It was probably the oddest thing that got posted.”
Jules hesitated, and then reached in her handbag. “Speaking of posting…” She pulled out a colored envelope and slid it across the table. “I was too annoyed to send it,” she confessed. “But even though I’m not a superstitio
us person I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. Happy belated birthday.”
He accepted it because he didn’t want to hurt her, and then realized this was an opportunity. “Do you know how this birthday card tradition started?” he said.
“No, tell me.”
“I don’t have family,” he explained. “Our first tour everyone was getting mail except me. It didn’t bother me, I was used to it. But on my birthday I got a card from Claire and baby Lewis, from Ross’s brother, Dan’s sisters and parents, from Lee’s family. Most of these people I hadn’t even met.”
“Steve mentioned it in a phone call,” Claire said. “It wasn’t hard to coordinate.”
He looked at her, startled. “It was you? I always thought Steve had organized it.” He added softly, “Hey, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I still get cards,” he told Jules.
“Because you wrote back,” Claire said. “We were all surprised by that.”
“The guys told me I had to,” he admitted. “I didn’t know any different.” They all laughed.
He hadn’t replied last year and still got cards from everyone this one. Forcing himself to open Jules’s card, Nate read the standard message carefully, then smiled at his dead mate’s fiancee. “Thanks,” he said. And meant it.
* * *
“Okay, enough hedging,” Claire said. “Tell me something I don’t know about my husband.”
Reluctantly, Nate put down the report he’d said he wanted to finish.
It was late evening and he’d been reviewing all the quotes Claire had collected on the boat upgrade while she sat opposite on her laptop, tweaking the website for the new business.
“Nice design.” He bought time by glancing at the screen. Marketing wasn’t his area of expertise, but he appreciated how she’d integrated the theme colors—teal and navy—into the site. “It’s not active, though, is it?”
“It will be as soon as I’m sure of making the proposed launch date.”
He frowned. “You’re not even pretending to keep an open mind.”
“Or maybe I’m supremely confident you’ll come to support this project the way I do,” she countered. “Because of your open mind.”
Such a smart woman.
He looked down at the report. She’d negotiated some great deals, no question.
“If you’ve had second thoughts,” she said, “about talking about Steve…”
“Steve once committed credit-card fraud,” he said, feeling the first lash of memory and ignoring it. He’d decided he could manage this by being selective about the stories he recounted.
She blinked at him over her laptop, the screen light giving her face an angel’s glow. “I don’t believe it.”
“Shut that thing down and I’ll tell you.” He’d already suggested she get an early night—she’d been yawning ever since dinner—but although she kept saying, “Great idea,” she hadn’t moved.
“Blackmail,” she complained, but closed the lid and stretched in her chair, looking at him expectantly. It would take a while to go through the reports and assess Claire’s state of mind, so he’d said the incident in which Steve nearly got the unit killed needed to come chronologically. That was bullshit.
He couldn’t tell that story. If the ambush was a fire, that story involved sitting close enough to have your eyebrows singed. On the other hand, Claire wasn’t going to be a soft sell. Nate needed to work out how to present his mate in the best light, with the least collateral damage.
Why hadn’t Steve told the guys about his deal with Claire?
“First I knew of it was when I received a letter from some kid in Indonesia thanking me for becoming his Child Fund sponsor,” he began. “Steve admitted he’d stolen my credit-card details and signed me up.”
Another lash, through flesh to bone. Revisiting the good times only accentuated what he’d lost.
Claire’s eyes brightened with amusement. “Why would he do such a thing?”
“We’d been talking about him being married so young. I was pretty feral then—a hard-ass who mocked what he couldn’t understand. I’d said something on the lines of, ‘Who needs a dependent? I’d hate someone leaning on me, tying me down and cramping my style.’”
She was still smiling, but the expression was fixed.
Closing the report, Nate sat back. If he focused on orchestrating Claire’s reactions, his own became bearable. “When I asked him what he hell he was doing forging my signature on a World Vision application, Steve said I needed to lose the chip on my shoulder and understand that mine wasn’t the only sad story in the world. That he and the other guys relied on me for their lives and I needed to start caring about someone other than myself. I lost my temper, told him to keep his preachiness for the little wife who I was sure obeyed his every command.”
“What.”
“I’d only met you once,” he reminded her. Yeah, if he concentrated on Claire, it became easier. “We were both on our best behavior.”
She snorted. “I don’t remember you being on your best behavior. You checked me out, informed Steve I had a nice ass, kept choking back cusswords and spent the whole evening ignoring me.”
“I didn’t know how to talk to a pretty woman I wasn’t trying to hit on,” he admitted. “I watched, though…how Steve treated you, how you treated him. Waiting for one of you to slip up on the lovey-dovey respectful-partnership scam.” He shrugged. “As I said—feral.”
“So that’s why you were staring?”
“Well, that, and as I’ve already mentioned, your ass,” he said. “At least until your husband told me to quit.” How had they wandered so far off track? “You have to remember, I had very basic socialization skills for the civilized world.”
Nate looked out through the patio doors to the night and refocused. Once, normal life had been as far away to him as the few lights twinkling across the estuary. He swallowed hard. “Without Steve, I’d never dreamed of applying to the SAS. For me, the army was a cheap way of learning a trade. But I found I liked it…. The camaraderie, the professionalism, the structure.” For the first time in his life, he’d had security.
“I assumed you and Steve met at selection.”
“No, six months before. We were in separate units brought in to make up numbers for an SAS training exercise.” He cleared his throat. This was getting hard again. “The pair of us had been captured, trussed up and tossed in the back of a truck. As we were jolting to base, your husband said, ‘I’m going to be SAS one day.’” Nate desperately wanted to stop, but Claire was captured now, leaning forward with a riveted expression.
“Of course, I said not to talk crazy,” Nate continued. “SAS troopers were gods, we were mere foot soldiers. Steve said, ‘You’re just afraid of failing.’ That pissed me off. I pointed out that I stood more chance of success than he did, I was a better tracker, a better shot…. One of my foster dads was a keen hunter. ‘The next selection’s in six months,’ he said. ‘My troop-mate Ross’s old neighbor is ex-SAS. He says he’ll give us a training program.’”
“And you all passed.”
Nate shook his head. “The golden boy failed. Lee reapplied next intake, alongside Dan. By then we could tell them that selection was a walk in the park compared to the training cycle.” It killed him reliving these poignant memories, but he forced himself to continue. “I didn’t have the habit of study and Steve’s extra tutorials were the only thing that got me through.”
“Steve always said he’d have failed if you hadn’t sorted out his fear of heights on his initial parachute jump.” She added curiously, “What did you do?”
A reluctant smile broke through. “A simple technique, heavily reliant on the element of surprise.”
She studied his grin, then comprehension dawned. “You pushed him?”
“I had help. Ross distracted the instructor.”
“That’s terrible!” But she was trying not to laugh. Every smile Nate won was a victory for Steve. “What d
id my husband do after you landed? Hit you?”
“Hell, no…I had to duck a kiss, he was so grateful. Steve would have been kicked off the course if he hadn’t jumped and returned to the regulars.” And he’d still be alive.
He stood, unable to sit still. But there was nowhere to go. He put the report on the table.
“So you cured his acrophobia,” Claire marveled. She hadn’t made a similar connection.
Nate forced himself to sit down again. “Let’s just say his fear of heights paled in comparison to his fear of being pushed.”
He waited until she’d stopped laughing before he added gruffly, “The army gave me an education, but Steve gave me a role model. When I met him, I only knew who I didn’t want to be. Suddenly I was around men who’d learned how to govern their tempers, who had principles and goals. Who saw honor as a way of life and not something you won on a battlefield.”
The knife in his gut turned sharply, eviscerating him from the inside out. He’d thought he’d become one of them. “Drink?” Nate bought himself a recovery minute by going into the kitchen.
“Thanks.”
Tough it out, he told himself as he filled the kettle, she needs this. “Seeing how you and Steve treated each other, I started seeing relationships differently.” He barely registered what he was saying now, random thoughts spilling into words while he struggled for composure.
Hand trembling slightly, he flicked the outlet switch. “I started wanting more than one-night stands.” Returning to the living room, Nate resettled on the couch, well away from the overhead light above the dining table. “But making a relationship work didn’t come naturally.”
“Bree got over you eventually.” Claire rose and turned up the thermostat on the convection heater, then curled up at the other end of the couch, pulling a mohair throw over her legs. “Nate, I always wondered…. Did the fact that Steve and I were going through a bad patch for a couple of years scare you off matrimony? Is that why you got cold feet?”