Читать книгу Navy Seal Promise - Amber Williams Leigh - Страница 13

CHAPTER FOUR

“SHE’S ASLEEP,” KYLE ANNOUNCED, hushed, as he returned to Harmony’s kitchen where she was doing the dishes. He reached back for his neck and tilted his head to work out a crick.

“How many stories did she ask for?” she smirked, knowing.

“A dozen,” he said. “She still likes Where the Wild Things Are. That was—”

“My favorite,” Harmony said, nodding. She turned to him, drying her hands. “You remember that?”

“Reading to you was always the better part of my day,” he told her.

Her lips seamed and pressed inward. She scanned his face before her attention seized on the hand massaging his neck. “You didn’t lie down with her, did you?”

“She asked me to.”

“Kyle. She sleeps in a daybed.”

“So?”

“So,” she said, “you’re six-four. I know SEALs are trained to sleep anywhere, but how did you even—”

“I was half off,” he admitted. “It’s all right. She was asleep in five minutes flat.”

“You’re a bona fide teddy bear.”

“I can accept that.” He nodded. “As long as I still get to shoot bad guys.”

She laughed. “Isn’t that what teddy bears do when children fall asleep? Defend them against the monsters in the closet?” Laying her hands on the back of one of the chairs surrounding the small round table between them, she asked, “Ready?”

“For?” he asked, blank.

“That trim,” she said.

“It’s late. You still wanna?”

She pulled out the chair. “Have a seat. I’ll get the shears.”

To Kyle, the ritual was more sentimental than anything. After the frag had torn through his lower body, he’d been in and out for weeks thanks to the powerful pain meds. His first lucid memory was waking up in a military hospital, disoriented. Then... Harmony. Harmony leaning close. Fingers skimming through his hair. It took him a moment or two to realize that she was giving him a trim and that she’d shaved his beard down to the fine black stubble he preferred off-duty.

When she saw his eyes open, she’d stopped. Said his name. Fighting against the sensation of cotton-mouth and the anxiety of not knowing where he was, he replied with, “Carrots.”

She’d gone misty-eyed. It occurred to him then that he hadn’t seen Harmony cry since she was in diapers. There was a wavering fear that she would break down and that seeing her do so might break him down, too.

She held it together, like a boss. “It’s good to have you back, K.Z.B.” And, after offering him a sip of water, she went back to trimming his hair, smiling.

She’d gone a long way toward holding him together over the agonizing months he spent recouping.

As she combed his hair now, he felt all the tension in his body slide toward extinction. As she raked wet fingers through to dampen his hair, her small nails teased his scalp. His eyes closed. Comb in one hand, shears in the other, she silently, meticulously went about the task of snipping the thick curls growing toward the nape of his neck.

He’d spent a week on the Hellraiser trying to lose himself amid wind and tide. He’d come home, a task that usually brought him necessary reprieve. But it wasn’t until now, he realized, that he’d felt truly relaxed since departing Little Creek.

Her hand rested on his head. “You’re not sleeping, are you?” she asked in a low voice that trickled down the back of his neck.

Kyle blinked. Had he been? “Why?”

“Your head started to bob.”

“Sorry.” He cleared his throat. He sounded groggy. “Long day, I guess.”

“We’ve kept you up.” She snipped strays one by one. He heard the drone of the buzzer. Using the hand on his head, she pushed his chin to his collarbone. “Let me get your neckline.”

She buzzed him down to his shirt collar, then walked around to his front. Bending to his level, she squinted at her progress.

Kyle studied her. Hers was a chameleon face. From one angle, it had the potential to be soft and feminine. From the other, it could be sharp, inflexible, even cold. All her life, she’d had a notorious mercurial habit of flying from one mood to the next. Her features reflected that well.

Unlike him, she’d never favored one parent or another. Aside from the warm honeycomb irises that had been imprinted by Briar, Harmony’s eyes were narrow and feline. By turn, they could make her look catty or uncompromising. Her red hair in particular proved her to be the perfect Savitt-Browning hybrid—a genetic toss-up between Cole’s dark brown and Briar’s ash-blond. She was athletically built. Tall and leggy. In fact, she’d out-inched her old man by the time she was legal. She’d never been curvy. She was more angular, and each one of those intriguing angles came with its own road hazard. Caution. Speed Bump. Sharp Turn Ahead.

Erring, his study fell upon her lips.

Slow Down. No Crossing. Dead End.

She wet them. The lazy river of his blood began to eddy and flow. As she reached out to test the evenness of his ends, her outer thighs nudged against the inner seam of his, and she caught her lower lip between her teeth.

He felt taut again, but in a way which spoke of his six-month deployment and the lack of anything besides male companionship over that time. His thigh muscles flexed as something unfurled there, around his gut and the base of his spine.

Her teeth were slowly releasing her lip, letting it round gradually, red and wet. A strawberry ripe for the plucking.

No Thru Traffic. Wrong Way, Moron!

Kyle snatched himself out of the off-color reverie. Blink. It was Harmony’s face in front of his. Carrots. He’d read her to sleep with Little Golden Book stories as a kid. He’d watched her learn to walk.

He’d taught her to ride her bike, damn it. To swim. Soon the Little Golden Book readings had warped into E. B. White, Beverly Cleary, Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder. He’d even spent one sulky summer speed-reading through a tattered copy of Anne of Green Gables for her. And ever since, he’d called her “Carrots” in consequence.

He’d watched her grow into a skinny-legged teen, then a self-possessed adult. He’d watched her and Zaccoe collide headlong. When something unexpected and timeless had grown out of that collision, he’d watched their destinies entwine. He’d been happy for them.

He’d been the one to tell her Benji was KIA. He’d stood next to her on the tarmac as his brothers-in-arms carried the flag-draped casket off the angel flight.

He’d been the first person to learn she was pregnant while she bent over Benji’s face one last time in the visitation room at the funeral home. She had wept then, tears dripping off the end of her nose combined with long piercing cries that belonged in the wild to some poor felled animal with no chance of mercy.

He’d cradled her baby in the crook of his arm and wondered not for the last time why fate had left him alive and taken Benji.

A space of a lifetime passed between blinks. Kyle tried to reassert himself in that space, but all he got was disorientation akin to what he’d felt in the hospital upon waking after being blown up by that mother-humping frag...

“Kyle?” Harmony’s gaze had zeroed in on his. She stilled.

All trace of relaxation was lost. So taut was he from head to toe, he felt like a live, loose electric line, crackling and precarious.

Yellow lights were flashing behind his eyes. Danger Ahead, the signs read, one after the other. He tried to get the message across to his body. Half of it was log-jammed by panic. The other was need-bound and gluttonously wondering still what that strawberry would taste like if he leaned forward...and nibbled...

You sick bastard.

The words were in his head, but they sounded doubly like Gavin.

Unlocking the breath trapped in his lungs, he exhaled tumultuously. Her honey-crisp eyes were out of focus, but they were there, framed by thick black fringe he’d never noticed before. There was a tiny beauty mark trapped like a tear beneath her right eye. How had he missed that?

Invoke ninja smoke. “Thanks, I gotta go.” One sentence rear-ended the other as he stood, removing the towel she’d draped over his shoulders before the trim.

Harmony rose, too, and touched the collar of his shirt. “I didn’t nick you, did I?”

“No. You’re fine. I’m fine.” He nearly ran into the jamb of the doorway that led from her kitchen to her living room.

One forbidden mouth. Years of training, instinct and self-awareness in the toilet.

“You forgot your hat,” she pointed out, chasing him with it.

“Thanks.” He squashed it down over his new do. Don’t follow me, woman. If you know what’s good for you, you will not follow me.

“You’ll come back, right?” she asked from the door as he found the screen door of her porch.

Doubling back, he asked, “Come back?”

“For mac-and-cheese,” she reminded him. “Bea’ll be devastated if you don’t.”

“Ah, yeah. Rain check on that.” Because she waited, he realized how rude he was being. It wasn’t her fault he hadn’t been with a woman in so long his testosterone had gone loafing after her. Holding the screen wide, he leaned against the rising wind that wanted to rap it shut and trap him in her comely circle. “I owe you.”

“You’re back,” she said in answer. “A haircut and macaroni are small change compared to Bea’s Kyle home from battle.”

It snagged him, the thought of Bea dreaming her dreams and climbing up on his shoulders to touch the moon. “Tell her I’ll see her. Tomorrow night. You’ll need to get your shutters up.”

“You let me worry about the shutters,” she told him, “and get your butt over here for dinner. Deal?”

Kyle nodded. “You all right, Carrots? Out here alone?”

The slant of her eyes narrowed further. “Locked and loaded.” And with a salute, she added, “Petty Officer, sir.”

“That’s Chief Petty Officer to you, ma’am.” Kyle touched the brim of his hat and backed down the steps when a laugh answered. It was a laugh timbered in brass like the tubes of the wind chimes she’d hung from the eaves of the porch tossing against the rising wind. It was a “crazy person” laugh. A “don’t give a damn” laugh. It was his favorite laugh in the world.

It was one of the myriad items he could add to the list of the sexy things he’d never noticed were sexy about Harmony. And that was bad. Real, real bad.

* * *

BRACKEN MECHANICS DIDN’T look like much, but the family business had been Kyle’s home away from home for most of his existence. In case the building itself didn’t draw enough attention, the vintage lineup of cars outside did. Shiny, waxed—they were just a few of his father’s many toys. But the garage itself was modest, a block structure made of rust-colored brick crowned only by the Bracken logo.

Kyle had learned everything there was to know about car engines, domestic and foreign, under its unpretentious roof. Long before training courses at Coronado, he’d learned how to maneuver in a stick shift versus an automatic, how to draw as much horsepower out of a car’s engine without overworking it and how to fix most motorized problems known to man.

When restless nights following deployment stalked him on land, there was one last vestige of peace to strike at. That was suiting up in a pair of coveralls and getting greasy beneath the hood of whatever the motley crew his father had long-employed was working on at the garage.

“Manifold’s cracked,” Murph “Hickory” Scott said, the words muffled somewhat by a wad of Copenhagen. He snorted, giving Kyle an earful of nasal congestion. He was Marines, retired, hard as hickory—true to his moniker—and still carried Vietnam with him behind the patch over his left eye. The shrapnel bugged him at the onset of rain, so today he was more ornery than usual. “Distributor cap, too.”

“Made in America.” Kyle leaned against the open hood, elbows down. “Parts’ll be easy to come by. It’s just cleaning her up. That’ll be the trick.”

Wayne “Pappy” Frye beamed at the thought. “Yes, sir. Needs everything down to seat cushions.” He didn’t look it, but Pappy was approaching eighty, a hobby-man who had taken the job alongside Hick in Bracken Mechanics’s early years, not because he needed revenue but because he worshipped cars. Like all Bracken employees, Pappy was as good as family. But as Kyle’s ex-fiancée’s grandfather, Pappy and Kyle had nearly been family by law.

Pappy kicked the treads of the old Trans Am. “Good tires.” He caught Kyle’s eye. “Have you heard about her mystery origins?”

“A lady of intrigue?” When Hick grunted and chewed, Kyle pushed up from his elbows to the heels of his hands in interest. “Don’t keep it to yourselves.”

Pappy and Hick exchanged glances. When the latter raised his brows, Pappy took it upon himself to illuminate Kyle on the subject. “Two days ago, Mavis came in early for some filing business and found this beaut waiting patiently outside. A Trans Am wasn’t on the roster, so she called your dad up to ask if he knew anything about it.”

“Did he?” Kyle asked.

“She said he was as surprised as she was,” Pappy elaborated, “but asked no further questions, insisting on seeing it for himself. Later that morning, we found him standing much as you are now having a look under the lady’s bonnet. I asked him if he knew whose car it was. He would only say it belonged to an old friend.”

“He’s got a good many of those,” Kyle speculated. His father had once worked the underbelly of the GTA circuit. Then after getting cleaned up, he’d worked for NASCAR, among other things, before returning home to Fairhope and building a respectful name for himself through small business.

“Yes, but this one seemed...sentimental,” Pappy continued. “We’re guessing this old friend isn’t an old rival at the poker tables.” He exchanged another look with Hick. “We were hoping you might settle the mystery. If he’s bound to tell anyone other than your mother, it’s you.”

Kyle pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes as he stood back from the car. He crossed his arms, feet spread. James wasn’t in the shop today; he was out at the airfield. Kyle might’ve liked to have been there if last night’s conversation hadn’t lingered. The walk after hadn’t quite done what it was supposed to, and, despite the brief clutch of tranquility he’d felt at Harmony and Bea’s, the odd turn of events there had made him doubly agitated.

He was barely fresh off a homecoming, but he needed to get his head right before he returned to The Farm or his family. Maybe most especially to Harmony and her strawberry-shaped mouth.

Goddamn. He shifted slightly when the image hit and made him taut in the loins again. Pivoting his thoughts in the opposite direction, he plugged back into the Trans Am. “What’s he planning to do with it?”

Hick sniffed. “He’s been coming in every night, asking me to meet him.”

“After hours? What for?” Kyle asked. His father rarely worked overtime at either the airfield or the garage. He liked going home to his wife, who, for him, reaffirmed the grind of life on the straight and narrow.

“Don’t know exactly,” Hick opined. He snorted unceremoniously. “At first I thought he’d want to start breaking down the engine. Mostly he just looks at it like some complex algebra problem he can’t solve.”

“Strange,” Pappy said.

Kyle agreed. James Bracken, a man never unsure of himself. “Why the hesitation?”

“We were hoping you’d know,” Pappy admitted.

Kyle walked around the car, studying its unpolished lines. Dents. Scratches. A paint job was the least of her worries. But she could ride again.

The license plate on the back bumper snagged Kyle’s attention. “MERCY,” he read out loud.

“Maybe it’s a gift from the gods,” Hick proposed. As both Kyle and Pappy frowned at him in turn, he gesticulated in a brusque motion toward the car, “As benediction for past crimes. Christ. He’s been on his best behavior for now on thirty years.”

Kyle fought a grin. “Are you waxing poetic on us, Hick?”

Hick scowled, uncomfortable. “Ah, to hell with ya’.”

Kyle chuckled. He’d grown to like Hick as much as Pappy. The man had battled PTSD for well on a decade after his time in the service, a fact which Kyle hadn’t known until after his recovery and several time-consuming talks working overtime in the garage alone with the man. Through the long hours, he and Hick had developed a quiet understanding of one another.

“Say you’re right, Hick...” Pappy shook his head at the unlikelihood of the scenario, but a smile worked at the creases of his mouth. With two fingers, he smoothed his Roosevelt ’stache. “...why a broken-down Trans Am? Why not a Cobra? Or a Ferrari?”

“Do I look like I commune with the righteous?” Hick muttered.

“So how ’bout asking him for us?” Pappy nudged Kyle. “I think I speak for every man here—and Mavis—when I say that we’d love to know who she came from and what Jim Boy plans to do with her when he’s done figuring her out.”

Kyle spared a glance for the sky through the open doors. A stiff breeze blew in steady drafts. It kicked up sand from ditches and spread it across the lot. The vintage cars would have to be moved inside within the next hour. “I’m sure he’d tell either of you if you ponied up and asked.”

The quick cacophony of knocking broke through the chatter. Kyle glanced back at the half-walled office. Mavis peered through one of its three-sixty windows and offered him a brisk come-hither motion. “’Scuse me,” he said to the men. Ducking his head through the door, he asked, “What’s up?”

Mavis cradled the phone between her shoulder and ear. Pulling her mouth away from the receiver, she covered it. “Customer complaint. Wants to talk to my superior.” She tuned in to the caller and uncovered the mouthpiece as her spine straightened. “Yes, he’s a man. What’s that got to do with anything?” Her mouth fell open. “Now listen. Just because I am a woman does not mean I can’t tell you that the service you received last week was quality and you wouldn’t find better anywhere south of Demopolis. This is your fourth service and your third complaint in two years, Mr. Lowman. That’s right; I remember. If you don’t like our work, then why haven’t you taken your Chevy to one of those dime-a-dozen, select-service auto chains they stick on every corner? And another thing—”

Kyle eased back against the door, smiling as his little sister chewed the chauvinist on the line down to size. He knew his father would’ve moved heaven and earth for her to give up her spooky line of work and take up the banner of executive assistant at Bracken Mechanics. She could be a bit of a rough diamond, but among her various talents she could boast an eidetic memory, a talent for negotiation and bargaining, and an excellent knack for reading people. She also knew as much about cars as Kyle. She’d refused their father’s many offers, however, and had stuck to part-time bookkeeping and payroll.

As Pappy approached the office door, Kyle nodded for him to join him. They split a stick of gum. Pappy took the only available seat in the office, kicking back with his heels on the desk.

Before Mavis finished talking Lowman down, Pappy’s head bobbed, and he snorted, startling himself out of a snatched nap. When he peered at Kyle and saw the raised brow, he reluctantly lowered his feet from the desk.

“Not getting any sleep at home?” Kyle wondered.

Pappy yawned until his jaw popped. “Ah, it’s the great-grands. They’ve been staying with us for a few weeks. You forget how noisy the parent life is.” Shifting on the chair, he opened a newspaper on the desktop, wetting his fingertips to flick through the pages to the auto section. “Laurel’s getting a divorce, you know.”

Caught off guard, Kyle frowned at the man. “No. Really?”

“Yep,” Pappy said with a grim nod. “Stress got to her. Joey’s hours. He kept taking extra shifts, especially when the last couple of babies came along. Twins.”

“Twins,” Kyle said, trying to digest it. “Holy shit.”

“Laurel quit her job at the school to take care of the brood. She loves those babies, but she never could get a break. In the end, she and Joey realized they couldn’t get back to one another. Pressure broke them.”

“She okay?” Kyle asked, shifting against the jamb. It was odd, talking about his ex in this manner.

“Ah, she’ll be all right,” Pappy wagered. “She’s working again, teaching summer school. It’s been good for Alva, having all that time alone with the children. And Laurel’s starting to stand up straight again now that some of the burden has been lifted.”

“I reckon so,” Kyle muttered. “Especially with... How many kids did you say?”

“Four.”

Kyle might’ve choked. “Four?”

Pappy chuckled at his reaction. “Yes, sir. Her and Joey managed to turn out four in four years.”

It sounded like a lot. Still, Kyle didn’t know quite how to take the news of the divorce. It wasn’t long after their long-term relationship had gone belly-up that Laurel had taken up with Joe Louth, a local firefighter. It hadn’t been long after that that the two announced plans to marry. Laurel had always been vocal about her desire for traditional family life, down to the kids—a whole baseball team’s worth. Before Joe, before BUD/S, she and Kyle had talked about making that a reality.

The damn frag changed a lot of things.

It wasn’t a surprise to him that Laurel had moved on to make her dream of marriage and kids a reality. Nor was it a surprise that she’d grown weary of Joey’s firefighting hours. She’d barely lasted through Kyle’s first deployment.

Mavis finally hung up the phone. Pappy chuckled at her smug expression. “Ah, honey, ain’t no mistake. Hearing you take J. T. Lowman down a few pegs cheers me up somethin’ fierce.”

“It wasn’t the worst part of my day,” she admitted, shredding the complaint report methodically down the middle. “Sorry, bro. Guess I didn’t need you after all.”

Kyle held up a hand. “You lullabied Pappy into an afternoon siesta and saved me a hassle. Good work.” He pushed off the jamb and walked back into the garage.

It was beginning to feel crowded with Hick and a few of the other boys rounding up the show cars and parking them bumper to bumper in the empty service stations. Kyle smiled when one of them tested the motor of his father’s old Mustang, revving it so the deep-throated growl of high-performance ponies galloped up the walls in a chill-inducing charge. A few of the boys leaned out of the cars to whistle appreciatively. Kyle applauded. He’d fallen in love with the noise early, much as he’d fallen in love with the laugh of a strident redheaded girl.

The last had always been platonic. Decidedly platonic. He’d never wanted to kiss Harmony. Never thought about kissing her. Never thought overtly about any particular part of her body. Especially not her mouth in all the colorful imaginative ways he had over the last sixteen hours...

He didn’t want this. Any of it. It threatened to take one of the most important relationships in his life and rend it in half. What had seemed ironclad yesterday was now on the verge of being crushed beneath the heel of his boot—like some intricate origami bird. Sure, it looked sturdy, but how well would it hold up under the flat side of his shit-kickers?

Kyle had to lock it down. If it meant retreating to all the training techniques he’d learned through the years, so be it. The white-winged crane that was him and Harmony and, partially, Bea’s connection was crucial to each of them. And, damn it, no bad mission, questionable homecoming or lack of female companionship was going to undermine it.

He found himself facing the Trans Am again, this time from the back. The word MERCY caught his eye once more.

Something crawled down the back of his neck. A feeling he didn’t like. It was usually his chief indicator that something was about to go terribly wrong on a mission. The Spidey sense had saved his life more than a time or two overseas as well as the lives of his teammates.

As much as he’d like to give the engine another look, he sidestepped the car, giving it a wide berth. No, he didn’t know where or who it had come from. At this point, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

It smelled like trouble in Goodyear tires and a double coat of dust.