Forged by Sacrifice Kindle rev 100519

by Evans, LJ

  He laughed—a full laugh this time—no half-laughs or snorts. And it seemed to fill the night around us. It felt like it could echo in a cavern with the boom of dragons. It felt like it could echo into my hidden away places if I wasn’t careful.

  Mac

  A GOOD NIGHT

  “Maybe it's the music or the red stain on your lips,

  I'm wondering when the right time is to go in for a kiss.”

  Performed by John Legend with Bloodpop

  Written by Legend / Diamond / Keen / Yatchenko

  When Georgie hadn’t been in the house or on the porch, I’d found my way down the shell path to the firepit that I’d helped Eli and Ava build the summer before. I’d found her sitting in one of the Adirondacks, a blanket she didn’t need wrapped around her knees and a book unopened on her lap. Her hair blended with the shadows. Dark. Mysterious. Dreamy.

  “Spying can hardly drop me to a five. It’s what I do for a living.”

  I shouldn’t have harassed her about saying I was a ten. Hel―heck, she was a ten, ten times over. A hundred. A gazillion. There wasn’t a rating system that went high enough. But it felt good to tease. To get under her skin just a little. She was crawling all over and under my skin.

  “You aren’t a spy,” she guffawed.

  True. I wasn’t exactly a spy. But I dealt with all the data that came back from them. I dealt with field reports, and black ops, and things that the average citizen would never want to know about. “Let’s just say I’m in the know.”

  “Because you spy on conversations that have nothing to do with you.” She wasn’t mad. She wasn’t even embarrassed; she was just giving me sh―a hard time.

  “I think that conversation was entirely about me and my best friend.”

  She just ignored me, pushing off the chair, leaving her blanket behind, and heading out toward the sand and the water that pulsed against it.

  “Where are you going?”

  She glanced back. “Why do you care?”

  I didn’t respond. I just pulled myself out of my chair and followed her.

  She headed toward the water, dragging her feet in the sand and writing something in the dampness. I watched as she wrote with her toes. Long toes on dancer-like feet that made it hard to look away from as they moved through the dark silt.

  When she reached the end of her sentence, she kept walking away from the house and down the beach. I eased up on what she’d written. It was a cliché. “Follow your dreams.”

  I tagged after her, jogging the first couple steps to catch up. Georgie had never seemed like a cliché kind of person, and this made me even more curious about her than I already was.

  “What dreams are you chasing?” I asked her.

  She looked over at me as if she’d known all along that I’d follow.

  “Why did you sail all the way from D.C. by yourself?” she parried.

  “I already said. Vacation. Between gigs.”

  “You didn’t have to sail here. You could have flown. So…why sail here by yourself?”

  I liked that she didn’t really let me get away with anything. Pushed.

  “I like sailing. No one could come with me that I could stand being on a boat with for two weeks.” It was the truth. Plus, as much as I liked being around people, I’d felt a need to reacquaint myself with the me I was trying to be. Reimagine my goals.

  “I’m sure there were plenty of your lady friends who would have accompanied you.”

  There it was. The question I’d been hoping and dreading would eventually come up between us. The fact that I was single. I wanted to know if she was single, or if she’d left some boyfriend behind. When I’d asked Ava while I was at the bar, she’d told me she didn’t know. That Georgie had had a boyfriend the last time they’d talked, but she wasn’t sure anymore, because it seemed like Georgie had put behind a lot more than just the salon and the city.

  “Truth is, the longest I’ve ever had a girlfriend was for a month. I’ve never been a keeper,” I finally responded to her question.

  “You’ve never been a keeper as in the girls don’t want to keep you, or you’ve never been a keeper as in you don’t want a relationship?”

  I looked down into her face, loving again the fact that she was barely shorter than me. That the look down into her face was barely a glance. Knowing that our bodies would fit together in a way not many people had ever fit me. Her eyes were shadowed. I couldn’t see much more than a hint of a reflection in the moonlight, but I could still feel the curiosity wafting off of her.

  “Maybe a little bit of both.”

  “And why have you never wanted to keep anyone?”

  I couldn’t help the small laugh that escaped me. “I wish Ava was here now to see you asking all these personal questions. No boundaries.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer that.”

  She pulled away from me to ease her feet into the water more, and my body missed the heat and tantalizing pull, like the ebb of the tide her body had had on mine.

  “It’s okay. I don’t mind. When I was younger, it felt ‘cool’ to have ladies falling all over me,” I told her. “Then, when I knew I was enlisting, I didn’t want to leave someone behind. I knew how hard it was on my mom and us kids to have Dad gone for months. I didn’t really want to do that to anyone, especially to someone who should have been out dating and partying and just being a twenty-something. Being free, you know?”

  She nodded, kicking up the water and watching as the water droplets joined their brothers and sisters back in the waves.

  “But you’ve been stationed in D.C. most of the time, right?”

  She knew a lot about me. More than I expected her to know. More than I knew about her. It seemed unfair that the scales were so heavily tipped in her knowledge of me versus the other way around.

  “Yep. Mostly D.C. But I spent some time on the USS George Washington and in Florida. Truth is, though, when you’re in the military, you never know where they’re going to send you next.”

  She turned and headed back the way we’d come, still playing in the water as we went.

  “Your boyfriend care that you’ve come on vacation to this strip of paradise without him?”

  Her turn to laugh—the light laugh that she’d had earlier. “You could have just asked, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’”

  I waited for a few seconds, and when she didn’t answer, I shrugged and asked, “Do you?”

  “Nope. Sold him at the same time I sold the salon.”

  I snorted. “Sold him?”

  She smiled up at me but was trying not to. Now that we’d turned toward the moonlight, instead of away from it, I could see her face better, and her white teeth had come down on her full lower lip to try to stop the smile. Sexy. Like all of her.

  “Traded him in?” she offered, as if I would like that term better.

  “Dumped him. You dumped him. Poor guy.”

  “Let’s just say it was a mutual decision.”

  “Stupid. How come us males are so stupid?”

  “Says the guy who just admitted to never having dated someone for longer than a month.”

  “True. But when I do decide to go all in, I’ll be just that—all in.”

  “You’ll go from never having dated to dating one woman and marrying her?”

  “I didn’t exactly say marry, but what’s wrong with that?”

  “How will you know she’s the right one? If you’ve never tested out a relationship, how would you know the one you pick is the one for forever?” she asked.

  “Instinct.”

  She gave a little disbelieving shake of her head.

  “Don’t you trust your own instincts?” I asked. “For example, what made you decide the boyfriend needed to be dumped and not kept?”

  “Instincts are just another one of the senses. And senses can often lead you awry.”

  “Says who?”

 
“Says me and Descartes.”

  “This Descartes was not a military man, I take it?”

  “Philosopher and scientist,” she told me. “But what has that to do with anything?”

  “When you serve…probably if your life is on the line in any job―police, military, whatever―you have to listen to your gut. It can save your life.”

  “That’s training, not instinct.”

  “I kind of believe it’s both. But this Descartes guy…why didn’t he believe in using your senses?”

  Her hand went to her ponytail, smoothing the wind-blown tendrils away from her face.

  “He theorized that just the fact that we dream is proof enough that we can’t trust our senses to determine reality from imagination, because we sense things in our dreams that feel incredibly real but aren’t. So, any time our senses are telling us something, we should, at the very least, be wary of them until we can test them to be true.”

  Her little speech quieted me. It spoke to a level of education that I’d been judgmental enough not to have expected in a hairdresser. Sure, she had to have been savvy to run a successful salon in New York City, but I hadn’t expected a degree in philosophy. Not that I knew what her degree was in, but I hadn’t expected this kind of discussion.

  I was ashamed. Because I was routinely frustrated by people judging me for my brawn versus my brains. For seeing a uniform and thinking that it meant I was just some meathead with a gun who screamed, “Don’t go quietly into the night.” Yet, I’d done the same with her. Judged her by her occupation and the spiked purple hair she’d had when I first met her. Judged her by the row of earrings that went up her earlobe.

  I was quiet for so long that I’d almost forgotten that she was still beside me.

  “Too deep?” she asked with a slight curl of humor in her voice.

  We’d made it back to the firepit. She picked up her blanket, book, and an empty glass before we continued along the path to the house.

  “No. Not at all. I just was surprised. And ashamed.”

  She stopped and turned so suddenly that I almost ran into her. “Ashamed?”

  “For judging the book by its cover when I hate that people do it with me,” I told her.

  “Oh.”

  We stared into the darkness of each other’s faces for a moment. I wished that it was daylight, and I could have seen better what was going on inside her eyes. I was hoping they were full of desire. That she felt the way our bodies were talking to each other just as much as I did.

  She turned and kept going.

  “What did you major in?” I asked.

  “Pre-law.”

  She kept dealing me more surprises. A three-of-a-kind hand that had come out of nowhere.

  “What made you decide to go to cosmetology school instead of finishing the law degree?”

  We’d reached the porch and climbed the stairs.

  When she turned on the light in the beach house, it made me squint and hold a hand to my eyes as if the sun had come out from behind the clouds. She was standing there in the summer dress she’d had on earlier, feet bare, ponytail tousled by the breeze and the salty water. She was spectacular. Unforgettable. Like Audrey Hepburn and Gal Gadot rolled into one.

  “I think we’ll have to save some of those questions for another night.”

  I smiled at her. “Sorry. Nature of the job again. All questions, all the time.”

  She took me in from head to toe and then back again. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For judging you just like you judged me.”

  “Well, to be fair, I am a ten.” I smiled at her, lightening our mood and the air that heaved between us as deep as the sea.

  She snorted. “Goodnight, Mac-Macauley.”

  And she left me, going into the bedroom I normally slept in. The one that had my bag in it. But I knew I wouldn’t be asking for it tonight. Tonight, I’d sleep in my skivvies and dream of a woman with eyes that were never the same color and hair as dark as night—and all the questions I still had to ask.

  When I got back to my room, I saw that there were messages on my phone.

  BRAT: Hey, before I forget again, I found us a roommate.

  BRAT: Are you ignoring me?

  BRAT: SQUIRTER!

  I shuddered at the family nickname, but payback was hell.

  ME: Jeez, Gooberpants, hold your panties in place. I didn’t have my phone with me at the beach.

  BRAT: Likely story. Who was she?

  Who was she? A stunning brunette with a white streak in her hair that I wanted to know all about.

  ME: There’s no “she.” Please tell me the roommate isn’t another tree-hugger.

  BRAT: That is absolutely not a politically correct statement. We have so much work to do if you really want to run for office.

  ME: God. You’re right. Please tell me it’s not another person who won’t let us use the good kind of toilet paper without a ten-day lecture on sewer systems.

  BRAT: Done. Definitely not that. She seems smart. Wore brown leather that made her dark hair and brown eyes stand out. You know our “environmentalist” would never have worn real leather. Or even pleather.

  ME: When does she move in?

  BRAT: Up in the air. Maybe end of July.

  I wasn’t sure I had the energy to deal with another new roommate. I liked people, liked interacting with them, but sometimes it was nice to have a place you could go back to without having a stranger hanging over your shoulder.

  Although, to be fair, some of our roommates had become part of our family.

  I wondered what my family would think of Georgie. Of her energy and sass. My sisters would love that she called me out on sh―stuff. My mom would love that I brought anyone home. My dad would probably run a background check on her. Or maybe that would be Granddad. I guess I needed to think that way these days myself. If I wanted to make a run for office, it would mean having a partner who was an asset, not a deficit. That seemed like such a cold way of choosing the right someone to be at my side, especially when I really believed what I’d told Georgie on the beach. I wanted to find the person who my heart and soul told me was the one. My heart was skittering around my chest tonight, wondering if maybe the one had come careening back into my life now for a reason.

  Georgie

  CAN I HAVE A KISS?

  “Excuse me for this,

  I just want a kiss.

  I just want to know what it feels like to touch,

  Something so pure.”

  Performed by Kelly Clarkson

  Written by Baker / Clarkson / Messer

  I smelled bacon and cinnamon when I woke the next morning. I wasn’t sure how Ava and Eli kept up the hours they did with both of them working days and nights. Ava was at the bar around the clock, and Eli joined her there every night after his job with the emergency preparedness consulting firm. The bar was closed on Wednesdays during the off-season, but during the summer, when the tourists were bringing in the core of their business, it was open seven days a week.

  It wasn’t a life I wanted. Even at the salon, which had been open six days, I’d only worked five. I needed time away. Ava said that it was because it wasn’t my passion, and she was probably right. The salon had simply been a must. A way of surviving.

  What I was passionate about was the law. Facts. Justice.

  When Grandma had taken me in after Dad had gone to jail, she’d encouraged my goals the only way she could have: with love and work at the salon. She’d shown me that getting my cosmetology license and working through high school and college was a way I could get my degree without being buried in a lifetime of debt. And it had worked while I got my bachelor’s. It had worked until Grandma died, and I was suddenly shouldered with a lease I couldn’t break. I’d had to put off my dreams until the lease was up.

  Until now.

  But I’d never regret it because my grandmother had given me everythi
ng. A childhood filled with hide-and-seek between hair-washing stations and tickles between clients. A childhood filled with love and laughter. My dad loved me—just not as much as he loved money. My mom loved me, but she had a life in Russia without me. Both my parents loved me in their own way, but it was from afar. Grandma had loved me up close.

  My phone vibrated, bringing me out of my memories of Grandma. I groaned internally at my stepbrother’s text.

  MALIK: Raisa says you found an apartment in D.C.

  ME: Yep.

  MALIK: And?

  ME: And what?

  MALIK: You’re impossible to text with.

  ME: This is not news.

  MALIK: And where is it? Will we get an address so we know how to get a hold of you? Can I come visit?

  ME: It’s near the college. Raisa already has the address. And you won’t want to stay there any more than you wanted to stay at my apartment in NYC.

  MALIK: Fine.

  Of my two siblings, Malik was always easy to rile up and the first one to pout. Raisa was fiery like our mother, whereas Malik was more of a spoiled, rich-kid heir.

  ME: Don’t be sore.

  MALIK: Sore?

  ME: Hurt.

  MALIK: I just want to see you.

  ME: Then come to D.C. and put a hotel on your Black American Express Card.

  MALIK: Now you are sore.

  ME: **laughing emoji**

  MALIK: Why is this funny?

  ME: I don’t want the price that would come with having one of your dad’s credit cards.

  Malik didn’t respond.

  ME: Hey. I was teasing.

  No response. Typical Malik. If he didn’t get his way, or felt slighted, you wouldn’t hear from him for weeks. Now I’d have to send Raisa a message and get her to smooth things over.

  Raisa and I got each other better than Malik and I ever had. Maybe because I understood wanting a dream the way Raisa wanted hers. She was majoring in bio and chemical engineering at Stanford so she could find a way to solve the world’s energy problems. She had bigger goals than I ever had. I wasn’t sure what Malik’s goals were besides spending money. I wasn’t sure why he wanted to stay with me instead of a fancy hotel with fancy foods and fancy people, anyway. It was more his style.