“No. It’s a good idea. It makes sense. Especially since some of the insurance money will help, you know? But… I just love the house the way it is. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t change it.”
But it wasn’t up to him and that fact sat between, dense and impermeable.
“Well, I need to return a few calls from the detective, and then I’m going to come out and play,” May said as she stood up.
“Have you talked to the insurance company yet?”
She grimaced. “What do you think?”
He smiled and shook his head. “I think you’re going to put it off until the last second possible because that’s how much you hate talking to the insurance company.”
She raised her eyebrows and he laughed.
“I’ll do it for you if you want,” he told her, looking up from where he sat in front of her.
Just then, Naomi and Bex burst into the pool area with towels and drinks and all sorts of floaty things and stole Rook’s attention. May slipped away.
***
“Dad!”
Rook opened his eyes from where he’d been dozing on one of the loungers and looked up into his daughter’s face. The sun blinked in a halo around her head as she gently kicked at his foot.
“Your phone’s ringing.” She dropped his cell onto his chest and the resettled herself onto her own lounger, her kindle up hiding her face from the world.
Rook blinked in confusion. He couldn’t remember the last time that he’d snoozed through a phone call. He was usually more on top of it. But he hadn’t slept well last night. Despite the king-sized bed and the luxurious amenities of Moreau’s villa, having May sleeping in the next room had proved enough to keep Rook tossing and turning.
He’d fallen asleep on the lounger after breakfast. And now he was blinking at his phone. It was an unknown number.
“Rook.” He answered the call. Prospective clients were often trying to catch him on his cell and he tried not to miss the calls.
“Rook,” said a scratchy, familiar voice that made Rook’s blood freeze. “It’s, uh, it’s Tim. Tim Rather.”
Fully awake now, Rook rolled off the lounger and walked to the far edge of the pool. He was aware of the group at the other end. Talking and snacking and applying sunscreen. He didn’t want to be overheard. He paused for a minute before he hopped the fence and started down the sandy path to the ocean.
“Tim. Wow. It’s been a long time.”
“Yeah.” There was a long silence. There was no need for either of them to state the obvious. They hadn’t seen one another since the day the IED tore a hole in their lives. Tim’s injuries had been bad enough that he’d been airlifted to another base and that was the last Rook had ever seen him. Tim cleared his throat. “I’m living in your neck of the woods these days.”
“Really?”
“Just moved out to Queens. I’d been in the Boston area with my family but that… didn’t work out.”
Rook had heard some rumors about Tim. He’d lost his left leg in the blast and some of his fine motor skills. Anyone would take that pretty hard and Tim was no exception. His landing back in the good old US of A hadn’t been a soft one. “What brought you to Queens?”
“There’s a rehab clinic there, for amputees. It’s supposed to be world class. But, I don’t know. Maybe it’s working.”
That rang a bell for Rook. “Oh. Actually, I think my buddy from high school works there.”
“Yeah. That’s part of the reason why I’m calling. James Lake, right? He’s my main PT here. After a few sessions we figured out that we both knew you and he thought I should give you a call.” There was another long pause. “He thought you might like to hear from me.”
Rook’s stomach tightened. “He’s right. I’m glad to hear from you.” And he was, on some level. He liked hearing from Tim. A long time ago he’d been funny and gregarious and honest to a fault. He’d been Rook’s true friend. But on another level, any reminder of that terrible day was enough to make Rook want to hang up the phone and stuff cotton in his ears. His hand found its way, of its own accord, to the scars on his chest as he stared sightlessly out at the languid, turquoise ocean.
“How’s, uh, how’s your family and all? I heard you’re running a business now.”
“Yeah.” Rook answered. “My family’s good. Wife and I got a divorce not long after I got back. Maybe a year and a half after.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Sad to say I’m not.” Rook kicked at the sand and walked to the edge of the water, dipping his bare feet in. In the clear blue distance he watched two colorful fish flit around one another.
“You and May? I never would have thought you’d split up.”
Rook cleared his throat. “What about you? What’s going on these days?”
“Oh. Mostly just the PT. I’ve been dating a little bit.”
“Yeah? That’s great. You’re doing better than I am, then.”
The men laughed, not because the sad state of affairs was particularly funny, but more because they were obviously both relieved that talking to one another wasn’t awkward.
“Look,” Tim said, and Rook immediately recognized the tone of a man who was finally saying what he’d called to say. “I’m wondering if you’re gonna go to that reunion thing that Jon Royce is planning. I noticed that you hadn’t responded.”
“I noticed that you hadn’t responded either.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sure as hell not going and if I can, I’d like to convince you not to go either.”
“What?” Rook was surprised. “Why?”
“Look, Rook,” Tim said in a slow, measured sort of way that made Rook think that maybe Tim had had to practice this speech before he gave it. “Royce isn’t so bad… But the other three. I don’t know. There’s bad blood there. And I think they’ve got the way it all went down… I think they’ve got it twisted up in their heads.”
“What are you saying?”
There was another long pause. “I’m saying you might not be as welcome at the reunion as you think you are.”
Rook recoiled from the phone and ran his hand over his scars again, feeling like Tim had just opened them up anew. Fresh wounds.
“You mean to say they have some sort of grudge against me?”
“It seemed that way the last time I saw them. Rook, you’re the only one who got out of that explosion… intact. And that kind of trauma, it can twist the way a man can think. I think they’re just mad. And confused. I just don’t think you should go.”
“I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks for the call, Tim.”
“Yeah. You’re welcome. I’ll let you go, I guess.”
“All right.”
They clicked off the call and Rook shoved the phone into the netted pocket of his swimsuit and stared out at the ocean for a long time. He could feel the sun burning his shoulders and the back of his neck, but he couldn’t make himself move.
Finally, he turned and jogged back to the villa, bypassing all the merrymaking and heading straight into his room. He tossed his phone on the nightstand, sprayed on some sunscreen, and tugged on his running shoes.
Forty minutes later, he was circling back around the island and positively dripping with sweat. He kicked off his shoes at the edge of the villa and made his way back down to the beach. He went out about six feet deep and did three lengths between two rocks before something bopped him in the head. He surfaced to see a beach ball bobbing in the water next to him and May standing in the surf twenty feet away. She wore the sunglasses again, but not the sunhat, and her hair was wild around her pretty face. She wore a big shirt that went almost to her knees and he could see the halter tie of her swimsuit up at her neck.
“You done trying to commit suicide by excessive exercise yet? If so, some of us were thinking about barbecuing up some lunch.”
“You look about sixteen years old right now,” he called back to her as he treaded water and watched her.
She harumphed and put her hands on her hi
ps.
He ducked underwater and swam in, surfacing only when he was almost all the way to her. The two of them trudged out of the water, side by side. “What did you mean commit suicide with excessive exercise?” he asked, shaking his head to one side to get the water out of his ear.
She raised an eyebrow as they headed back up the path toward the villa. “I’ve known you a long time, Rook. I know when you’re trying to outrun your demons.” She paused and looked over at him. He wished she wasn’t wearing her sunglasses. “Who was on the phone earlier?”
“Tim Rather.”
“You’re kidding. Have you talked to him since…?”
“Nope. It was totally out of the blue.”
“Did it bother you to be reminded of it all, or was there something else as well?”
He shook his head at how perceptive she was, always had been. There was no hiding anything from her. “I guess I still feel some guilt. Like I got off easy in comparison to the other guys in my unit.”
“Easy?” she practically choked on the word. “Rook, I wouldn’t say a five-hour surgery, countless scars, and eight weeks of recovery would be considered easy by almost anyone’s standards.”
“Yeah.” It was best to just agree. Because there was no way to truly explain how he felt about this and it was a touchy subject between him and May. “There’s not countless scars. There’s a finite number.”
“Nine.”
He looked up at her in surprise. Her eyebrows came up over the top of her sunglasses as she shrugged.
“I used to count them. Back when… Yeah. There’s nine scars, even counting the big one.”
He looked down at his chest. From this vantage point, it looked like a mess of chest hair and tan skin and shiny pink scars and tattoos. She used to count his scars?
He cleared his throat. “What’s the group doing?”
“Swimming, shooting the shit. Atlas is gathering the courage to propose to Bex.”
“What?” Rook stopped stock-still, his toes buried in the sand. May continued on a few steps before she realized he’d stopped walking. She looked over her shoulder. “That’s news to me.”
“It’s just a hunch,” she replied. “I dunno. Something about his nervous energy.”
May had always been freaky accurate about these kinds of predictions. She was the kind of person who could walk into a room and know instantly who had feelings for who, who was related to who, and who was worth her time. She just had a sixth sense about it.
“Wow. I guess they’ve been together over a year now.”
“And living together the whole time.”
Atlas and Bex had started out as just friends, and roommates. It had taken about all of a month for them to fall ass over cart for one another.
“You think Moreau and Geo will be next?”
He followed May up the trail.
“Not sure. I’ll bet they have a kid before they tie the knot. The media circus around celebrity weddings is always such a big, stinking deal. They might try to avoid it.”
“Weddings don’t have to be a big deal. They could just do it in secret somewhere. Just the two of them.”
They got to the part of the trail that was a little slippery, sand over bare rock that led up to a set of stairs into the villa. Without thought, Rook put his hands on May’s waist and lifted her easily to the first step, the way he would have when they were still married. She stiffened in his hold and turned to him. With her on the step and him standing below, their faces were level. And about six inches apart.
He froze and so did she. Her hands were on his shoulders and his hands on her waist. His words hung between them. Words about a private wedding.
“Like ours,” she whispered.
And there was the memory, blooming, a storm cloud of bittersweet emotions.
***
Rook put the final pan on the dish rack to dry and looked around at the finally clean kitchen. Tiny, dingy, ancient, but clean. He still couldn’t believe this was his own house. His own apartment. With a girl. He lived with a girl.
A very stressed-out girl who was still talking on the phone in the other room, even though he’d taken an extra twenty minutes to give the kitchen a deep clean.
He sighed and went to lean on the doorjamb of their bedroom. After two years of sneaking in and out of May’s bedroom window, he could barely believe that the two of them shared a bed.
She was splayed out across that bed on her stomach, the phone to her ear and furiously taking notes on her notepad. “No, Ma. I don’t care if he’s related to Bev. He’s not related to me and he’s not invited to the wedding, okay?”
God. They were still quibbling over wedding guests. He wished vehemently that May would just let him take over some of the logistics. She needed a break. But she wouldn’t let up on her tight hold of the wedding planning.
She maintained that since they’d moved in together, he’d been the one with the full-time job, so she was the one who was going to throw him a hell of a wedding. At first it had confused him, because she wasn’t a princess-ish kind of girl. He hadn’t thought a big wedding would be her thing. And then he’d realized that she’d been doing it for him. She wanted to throw him a huge, classic celebration. As confident as she was, somewhere in the back of her mind, she was worried he’d regret marrying her and she wanted a huge, fun wedding to dazzle him.
He sighed. If only she could see inside his head, she’d see exactly how much he loved her. How little she ever had to worry that he wouldn’t want her. He’d want her forever. Wedding or not.
She was too stressed. He could see it in the lines at the back of her neck. He couldn’t just stand there and watch her worry herself into a frazzle.
He pushed off the doorjamb and laid himself out on the bed, halfway on top of her. She trailed off in the middle of what she was saying as his lips found her neck. May grinned and playfully shoved him away.
“Well, that might work, Ma, except for the Normans don’t speak to the Steinhauers, remember? Which leads me all the way back to my original point of wanting to cut this damn guest list in half!”
He resumed kissing on her neck and she caught her lip between her teeth and swallowed a moan.
He plucked the phone from her hands. “Mrs. Jones? Hi. Yes. Can May call you back in the morning? She’s tired, but she won’t say so and I want to make sure she gets a good night’s sleep. All right. Yes. You too. Bye bye.”
He hung up the phone and tossed it onto the nightstand.
“Bye bye?” she teased him, one eyebrow up and her temple balancing on one fist.
“I have to be polite to her. She’s going to be my mother-in-law in like three weeks.”
May buried her face in the comforter. “Three weeks and we don’t even have the guest list nailed down. Who’s idea was it to get married so fast?!”
“Mine,” he answered immediately. And then thought for a second. “And your dad’s. It was the only way we could get him to keep from blowing my brains out with his shotgun, remember?”
She laughed, muffled, into the comforter and he traced a hand down her back.
“You have to breathe, May. Big breaths. Stress isn’t good for the baby.”
She rolled onto her side. “I know,” she whispered, tears filling her eyes. Their hands met in a clasp over top of her small baby bump. She’d just started showing a few weeks ago, right before graduation.
He’d never in a million years forget the day they’d found out she was pregnant. She’d climbed through his window and woken him up in the middle of the night with an unused pregnancy test. If I can’t sleep, neither will you, she’d told him.
He’d snuck her down the hall to the bathroom and they’d climbed into the dry bathtub to hold each other while they waited.
Fear, shock, elation, world-tipping love, he’d experienced a tidal wave of all of it the moment they’d stared at that pink plus sign. She’d slept the night in his arms and they’d both gotten grounded.
He’d gone ou
t and gotten a job at the mechanic the very next day. He’d worked part time until he’d graduated and now that summer had started he was working almost every single hour he could. But it still wasn’t enough.
In the back of his mind, he’d started mulling over a new idea for how to support his family. She wasn’t going to like it one bit and leaving her would damn near kill him. But it was what his father had done for his family, and it was honorable. Without a college degree, Rook couldn’t see another way.
But that was a conversation for another time. For now, all he had to do was calm down May. The soon-to-be mother of his child. His soon-to-be wife.
He snuggled into her and traced his hands through her silky hair. “May, the wedding really seems like it’s stressing you out.”
“It is. But I also really, really want it. I know that doesn’t make sense. But I just feel like it has to be perfect or we’re gonna be cursed or something.”
He laughed. “I think the truth is that no matter what happens it’s gonna be perfect. It’ll be perfect because it’ll be you and me. You know?”
“That’s something only a man would say.”
He laughed again. And then a thought struck him. “May, what if there was a way that you and I could have this big, perfect wedding but we could also elope and take the pressure off.”
“What?” She looked up at him and he snuggled her even closer.
“Hear me out. I turn eighteen next week. And you turn the week after that. How about the day you turn eighteen, we just go to city hall and make it legal. We don’t even have to tell anyone. And that way, it’s much easier to make it perfect. It’ll just be the two of us. Way fewer factors. And we can still have the big wedding but it won’t matter quite so much if everything is immaculately planned because we’ll already be married.”
He was really liking the idea the more he thought about it. He picked up her left hand and kissed the gold ring with the tiny chip of a diamond he’d put there a few weeks ago. “May, will you elope with me?”
***
Back in the present, fifteen years later, he held May in his arms and looked deeply into her eyes.
“It was the perfect wedding day,” she admitted.
Rook Security Complete Series Page 107
