SEALed With a Twist

by Kiersten Hallie Krum

  “How could I know that?”

  Grant seemed to consider that for a moment. “Good point. Trust me, doing you in the pool is a cakewalk to that.”

  “Such romance. Be still my beating heart. So glad ‘doing me’ will lack any strenuous effort on your part.”

  He bobbed her once so his hips slipped between her legs. With a stronger kick than the last one, her thighs were pushed up and around him so his cock rested right between the lips of her mons. Skye gasped, head coming up from his shoulder as her legs tightened around him. She was incapable of keeping from arching against him so the tip brushed her clit.

  “Holy cats,” she breathed.

  “You take a lot of effort, baby,” he said, satisfaction clear. The glow from the pool lights made his face look stark, but desire had pulled the skin taut over his cheekbones. “But you’re also completely worth it.”

  She felt that deep and clutched it close to keep her warm after she left Barefoot Bay. She wasn’t used to being worth anything to anyone except as a cog in the mighty Thornquist machine.

  She opened her mouth to say something trite and truth escaped her instead. “I don’t want to go back tomorrow.”

  “Can’t blame you for that.” They floated for another moment before he asked. “Want me with you?”

  She reared back. “Can you do that?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t see why not. Far as we can tell, instructions say you have to be there. Didn’t hear anything against you bringing a plus one. I’m not scheduled to go back to Coronado till Monday. Happy to spend my last day in Naples. If you want me there, that is.”

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “I want you there.”

  He kissed her to seal the deal. “Then that’s where I’ll be.”

  It was such a small thing, a moment of his life, and yet it meant so much to Skye. You want me there…that’s where I’ll be. Never in her life had Skye had a person she could rely on to be where and when she might need them. Grant rolled those words off easily because it was who he was. He cared for someone; he had their back.

  And Skye was pretty sure he cared about her a lot.

  He needs you.

  She heard Quinn’s words in her ear as she stared at the warrior she was wrapped around. How could he need her? He seemed so indomitable, even when he was being a surly bruiser. Maybe especially then.

  She suddenly realized he hadn’t been like that with her since the beach. He hadn’t been the same guy she’d met six months ago, but shades of that charmer had popped into view, before he’d scuttle that man back out of view. Yet he’d taken her back against Brandon without question, a stalwart wall behind her as her ex-fiancé lobbied shock after shock.

  Grant had given her so much in so short a time—had it really only been 24 hours since she’d met him again? And now he was going to go into her version of the lion’s den at her side. She couldn’t let him leave without at least trying to get at the source of what had changed him.

  Her hand came up to cradle his cheek. “Grant?”

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “Who’s Maverick?”

  He shoved her away so fast, she went under, gulping water into her mouth so she surfaced in a grip of a coughing fit as she sucked in air. Grant was already at the edge hauling himself out of the pool. She caught a glimpse of tight buttocks and muscular legs dusted with hair before he whipped a towel around his hips.

  He stacked his hands on his hips and stared at the villa as though it was about to attack him. Skye struck out for the shallow end, coughing more water from her lungs.

  “That was a shitty thing to do,” she managed after a few minutes.

  His head jerked once when she swore but otherwise, he continued to ignore her. Suddenly feeling acutely naked, and not only because she wasn’t wearing any clothes, Skye stroked back out into deeper water up to her neck. It was a paltry shield, but the only one she had at the moment given she was in no way getting out of the water and being even more vulnerable in front of him.

  “Quinn put you up to this?” Grant gritted out.

  “No. Not exactly,” she added when he turned that scalding glare on her. “She’s worried about you, her and Jasper. But Grant,” she called, taking a step toward him, going for broke. “They’re obviously not wrong to be.”

  She let him process that a bit. “You’ve been there for me all day. You’re going with me tomorrow. I don’t know what this is between us or how far you mean it to go, but we won’t get anywhere if you don’t let me in. You’ve taken so much from me in so short a time. That works both ways, honey. Give this to me now.”

  He wavered. She could see it, was so attuned to him in this moment, the slightest flinch was an anthem to her. “Baby, come back into the water,” she pressed. “You’re safe here. You know that. Come back to me.”

  He studied her, the air thick with his intensity. Skye’s heartbeat thudding away with nervous heebie-jeebies as she fought to project soothing and comforting vibes. When he moved, it was abrupt but swift, that clean knife’s edge of a dive into the water that brought him right up in front of her. Without touching her, he crowded her back, using his formidable body to push her back through the pool. She slushed through the water before him until her shoulders hit the wall.

  He ducked his head to get in her face. “Maverick was my friend,” he said, in a low, dangerous tone that sent tingles of fear down her spine. She knew she couldn’t reveal that and reached for her old mantra.

  I am the cold, dark of winter. I am steel, hard and unbreakable.

  But the words failed to steady her. Because she wasn’t the cold, dark of winter. She was summer’s fierce heat, ferocious and feisty. She wasn’t hard and unbreakable. She bent and swayed beneath forces and stood resolute in their wake. She wasn’t steel; she was tawny leather, tanned and weathered and stronger for it.

  She was a woman.

  And her man was in need.

  She clasped her hands on either side of his neck. “Your friend. Was he a SEAL?”

  Grant nodded. His throat worked as though the words had to fight to come out. “A fuckin’ good one too. Weapons specialist. Deadly. Few better. Cool headed on the job. Loyal. First one off the helo behind Queen. Last one on before him too. Refused to get into the damn thing until Queen was on. Drove Queen crazy. He leads from the front, Jasper does. Won’t ask anything of any man he’s not willing to do himself. Christ, I love him even when I want to slug his mothering ass into next week.”

  “Why did you call him Maverick?”

  A ghost of a smile twisted the corners of his mouth. “He loved Top Gun. The movie. From when he was a kid. Whole reason he went into the Navy. Would’ve flown fighter jets, but he couldn’t stand the G force. You know those people who have a movie quote for every situation?”

  She didn’t, but that wasn’t the point here. “Yes.”

  “With Mav, every quote was from Top Gun. He had his call sign before he’d even hit BUD/S. That’s the first leg of SEAL training,” he explained to her puzzled look. “Stands for Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL.”

  “Sounds like a good teammate.”

  “He was an asshole.”

  His flat delivery meant it took a second for his words to register. When they did, Skye made a startled noise in her throat. “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, we were all sorry. He was a good teammate, few better, a fucking textbook SEAL, but out of uniform, a real asshole. Queen prefers to remember his good qualities, and they were there, but down deep he was an asshole. Always stirring up trouble. A practical joker, but the mean kind. Really put new recruits through the wringer, guys who’d proved themselves good men and better soldiers, but Maverick had to test every one of them. I got in more bar fights pulling his shit out of the fryer than you want to know. It’d been getting worse too, the last few months before he died, seemed like every time he was off base, there was a problem.

  “Jasper had been working for a while to keep from having to ground Mav, but even he could s
ee that this shit had become a fuckin’ hobby for him. We’d been trying to keep tabs on it, on him, make sure he had a wingman every time he went out to keep him from going too far. But then it started to bleed into his work. He was mouthing off to the wrong people and a few of his ‘jokes’ went too far. Once he even got into Jasper’s face, which is a distinct no-no, not only in the teams but the entire armed forces. You do not back talk your CO.

  “But I figured it was more of the same bullshit when I called Jasper out to that road house. Maverick in trouble again. A day ending in Y.”

  “But it wasn’t,” Skye guessed. “This time was different.”

  “Fuck.” He stepped back, breaking her hold on him. One hand rubbed the back of his neck as he stared off into the night, remembering. “Yeah, you could say that.”

  Skye took her cues from him and resisted the need to pull him back to the safety of her arms.

  But it wasn’t easy.

  “We’d only just gotten back from a mission,” he continued after a few minutes, geared up now to get to the end of the story.

  Skye wanted to cut him off, tell him it didn’t matter, but he needed this. Needed to get it out to someone who hadn’t been there, who didn’t need to write a report or process their own feelings on the event. Who had no investment in anyone or anything but him; whose only priority was him.

  Who was perilously close to falling in love with all that was Grant Sisti.

  “I hadn’t slept in nearly two days,” he went on, unaware of her self-revelation. “I never did learn to sleep on transports. Engines are too damn loud. I wanted to go home and sit in my hot tub and drink beer until I passed out. But Maverick was raring to go and Queen was in worse shape than me. No way he could babysit the fucker.

  “I went with him to the road house. Place called the Range where we go a lot to unwind. Patrick Swayze would give the place a second look and then probably decide it was too seedy. There we were, Maverick and Beau, another team member, and me on a two for one night with a bunch of bikers and their women holding up the bar. Not that it mattered. Mav only had one beer. Didn’t need it. Started slinging shit at the Lords of Mayhem bikers and it went FUBAR fast.”

  “Ah, FUBAR?” Skye asked, loathe to interrupt him now he was on a roll, but mildly confused by the acronym.

  “Fucked up beyond all recognition. Beau had already hooked up and peeled off, so no help there. I saw shit start to go south when Mav decided to hit on a biker’s old lady. Had to wake up Jasper, tag him in. By the time he got there, the action had moved out to the back lot. Maverick and a biker named Wrench were circling each other, going at it. Jasper managed to treat with their sergeant at arms and keep the fight friendly, calling it at the first one to hit the ground. Mav got a good punch in, knocking Wrench down. We thought it was over.

  “Then the biker came up with a knife.”

  “Oh no.”

  At her whispers, Grant’s attention zeroed back in on Skye as though he’d forgotten she was there, caught up in reliving his own personal nightmare. “It’s not a pretty story, lovely,” he warned.

  “I can handle it,” she said. “I can handle you.” She hoped she’d sounded much more confident than she felt, but it seemed enough for Grant to continue.

  “We knew, Jasper and I, the second that asshole came up with the knife, we knew Maverick would go off the chain. He’d been holding back because, unless the guy had a black belt, he was no match for a trained SEAL, and even if he did, there’d really be no contest. But adding a weapon to the mix?” He shook his head. “Mav took him down and hard. Popped his shoulder and was seconds from crushing his windpipe when we got to him. We got them apart. I told Mav that was enough and Jasper ordered him to apologize and, after he did, ordered him to barracks. It’d gone too far. There was no way we could keep him on the teams in that condition. We were lucky to get out of this without bodies on the ground.

  “But Mav had us all snowed. He looked at Jasper and then me and there was nothing, nothing in his eyes. They were empty. The man I knew was gone. He told me I was right, that it was enough. Then he pulled a gun from the waistband of another biker, shot Wrench in the head, and offed himself right in front of us.

  “Oh my God.” She knew it was coming, knew Grant’s friend was dead and he’d warned the means of it was horrible, but somehow, she didn’t expect that. “Oh Grant, I’m so sorry, honey.”

  He shrugged off her sincerity. “Now you have it. You can report back to Quinn and Jasper that I told you the whole grisly story.”

  In a rush, he was back against her, pressing her into the side of the pool. “But what about the parts they don’t know Skye? What about how I washed pieces of my friend’s skull out of my hair that night. I was that close to him. How I burned the clothes I had on that night because of all the blood. I’ve killed men in combat, stepped over the dead to rescue the living, seen and done things that would send you screaming into a psych ward. But I can’t forget the sight of my friend shooting his brains out.

  “And that’s because I’m not even fucking sorry he’s dead.”

  Cautious, very, very carefully, Skye pressed her hands onto the front of his shoulders. “It’s all right, Grant,” she said in as calm a voice as she could manage while her insides splintered apart with shock and grief.

  “I was so sick and tired of his shit. And I hated that. I hated that about myself. I’m a licensed psychiatrist. I had a practice and I was good at it. Few of my patients were soldiers recovering from service. PTSD and other things.” He snorted with disgust. “We toss that label around so easily, one bad moment and some well-meaning shrink defines you by some letters, like back in the 90s when every kid and his brother had ADD. Only I was the well-meaning shrink. After that, I figured I got to them too late. If I wanted to make a real difference, I had to be with the men. Experience the trauma by their side so I could help them deal before it got to the point that they pointed a gun at themselves or someone else.

  “I didn’t move soon enough on Maverick because I was so fucking tired of his bullshit antics even before he began to spiral. We’re tight, the guys on my team. We experience shit together no one else can understand, so we hang off-duty too. There was never a break with Mav, and I was sick to death of it.

  “I failed him. And another man died because of that failure. Even if he was a shithole biker, he didn’t deserve that. And I haven’t been able to look any of my guys in the face since. We’ve been grounded for months, first because of the investigation into Mav’s death and then because Queen shipped out for here and we were breaking in a new CO. Plus, headquarters ordered full psych evals on the entire team before we’d be cleared for active duty. First mission we were assigned happened right as I was leaving to come here for the wedding. Boys are out there without me, and I’ll tell you, I’m fucking relieved.

  “Now you’ve got it all, babe. I’m a failed shrink who can’t handle the fact he’s relieved his teammate committed suicide because the guy was so fucking whacked, it made it too hard to care what happened to him. And I haven’t been able to do my job since because I’m pissed at my best friend for bailing on me and I can’t trust myself to do right by my guys anymore. That’s the man you got in your bed, baby. Bet you really want him there now.”

  She wanted to wrap him up and weep on his behalf. She wanted to rage and scream for all he’d been through. But that wasn’t what her man needed. From the sound of it, he’d been beating himself up about this tragedy long enough.

  Now he needed a swift kick in the ass. “I’ll thank you not to tell me who I want to…bang. Or not as the case may be. Don’t assign your faulty assumptions on me,” Skye retorted with asperity.

  He reared back.

  Good. He needed something to shock him out of the pity party it looked like he’d been wallowing in for far too long by her take.

  “Did you not hear anything I said?”

  “I heard all of it. Everything. And it sounds to me like you need a good smack upside the he
ad.”

  “Skye,” he growled.

  “Grant,” she replied in kind. She took a moment to take him in and dial back her frustration. “Maybe you’re too close to see it. But from where I’m standing, what you did was amazing. You’re amazing.

  “Shut up.”

  Aggravated, she smacked both his shoulders. “Don’t tell me to shut up, Grant Sisti,” she snapped. “You left a lucrative practice to put yourself through brutal training so that you could stand side by side on the front lines with the best trained soldiers in the world on the chance that they might run into a bad day that sets them in a downward spiral so that you can pull them out before they fall too far. No one does that, sweetie, unless they have a conviction, a mission that makes it so they can do nothing less. And that’s amazing.

  “I’m no doctor and I for sure don’t have your experience. Obviously. But if I had to guess, I’d say there’s one thing you neglected to factor in when you got your noble on and decided to join up and put yourself at risk in order to be there for these men in peril.

  “You forgot to see you yourself are now a victim of that trauma too. You can know all the clinical terms, you can spot all the signs you want, you can even diagnose yourself all you like, but the fact is that you’ve been traumatized too, and you have got to give yourself a break for that.”

  “I’m glad he’s dead. That isn’t noble, that’s sociopathic!”

  “You’re not glad he’s dead. You’re just happy you aren’t. You were right next to him, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said through thin lips.

  “He almost took you with him, didn’t he?”

  “Less than an inch and he would’ve had me.”

  “You’re pissed at your dead friend, baby. For a lot of reasons. You need to let that go, because you’re no use to the rest of your boys until you forgive yourself for that. You didn’t fail Maverick. No way. I think he was trying to tell you that at the end. He’d had enough, and nothing you could do or say was going to change that. But you continue to fail yourself and the rest of your team every second you let yourself bear the brunt of having the bad taste to be alive.