Breaking Point

by Lindsey McKenna

  Gabe... What was she going to do about him? She couldn’t deny the worry over her contribution to the team. She didn’t want the SEALs thinking she was a useless appendage. And she desperately wanted Chief Hampton to value her contributions, whatever they might be. Snuggling her head into the hard, unyielding pillow, Bay felt herself truly beginning to relax.

  As her mind began shutting down, her last thoughts were of Gabe. Would he have kissed her out there? She’d felt his desire, seen it in his face. He wanted her as much as she wanted him.

  That was what was different. Bay had lived in an emotionless vacuum since her fiancé’s death. The shock must have worn off and she must be through the worst of the grief over Jack’s loss. She was no angel. Her body was turning traitor on her, no matter what she did to try and stop the longing for Gabe. There was a need to be loved once again being gently suspended in front of her.

  Right now Bay was being tempted and teased with the forbidden fruit of Gabe Griffin. She couldn’t blame him any more than she could blame herself. A relationship, as she well knew from experience, had no place in combat. Not at all.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “DO YOU THINK the guys are going to die laughing at my shooting of the SIG?” Bay asked Gabe as they sat on the floor of the planning room, oiling and cleaning their Win Mags. All day, Bay had been either dialing in and shooting the sniper rifle on the course or learning to shoot on the run with the SIG. The SEALs referred to this training as “rattle battle.” It was late afternoon and Gabe moved her inside from the intense heat and temperature, to clean her rifle.

  “When you start gunning and running, your job is to place every shot,” he told her. Gabe had spread a tarp out for them to sit on and disassemble their Win Mags. He’d gotten a few of the other SEALs to volunteer to help train Bay on the SIG pistol. They’d set up an obstacle course of sorts. Having been trained during SQT, Seal Qualification Training, a year-and-a-half-long course to become a SEAL after surviving BUD/s, they had to learn to shoot on the run. They had configured a smaller course on the edge of Bravo, but nonetheless it was equally challenging for Bay. Today, Gabe had been able to get a feel for her shooting discipline. And her keen ability to focus and keep it dialed in as a combat soldier.

  Bay took some of the local oil used by the Afghans on their rifles and applied it to the parts spread out before her crossed legs. Snipers used local oil because if the Taliban walked by their place of concealment, they wouldn’t smell anything out of the ordinary. If they smelled a U.S.–made oil, they would instantly knew there was a sniper nearby and start blazing away.

  “It was really embarrassing.”

  Hearing the anxiety in her voice, Gabe raised his head. Soft curls fell around Bay’s temples. She was already tanned from the Iraq sun, but sunlight at eight thousand feet on a mountaintop was more intense. Her nose was slightly red. “You should have seen me when we started the rattle battle training,” he told her wryly. “I was the one who couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.”

  Bay’s eyebrow raised. “Seriously?” At least she was hitting the target as she ran, firing off fifteen shots. She’d drop the empty mag out of the bottom of the pistol as she moved toward the next target, grabbing another full mag out of her H-gear pocket and slapping it up into the butt of her pistol. Bay had to run at least a couple of hundred feet between each of the targets the SEALs had set up for her. What was stressful were three of the SEALs were there to judge her shooting skills, off and on during the morning and early afternoon hours. They didn’t laugh at her, thank goodness. But their faces were unreadable. He smiled, starting to reassemble his sniper rifle. “Yeah, very seriously. It’s one thing to be lying or standing still and hit a target. It’s another to be running, out of breath, your chest heaving up and down, trying to draw an accurate bead on a target. Even though you get to stop at each target and fire, your hand is moving up and down in time with your ragged breathing. It makes hitting a target ten times tougher.” Gabe looked up, seeing the shadows in her blue eyes. His body instantly responded to her and he savagely tamped it down.

  Last night, he’d lain awake for a long time trying to figure out why the hell he’d reached out and cupped Bay’s cheek. It was a stupid, hormone-driven mistake. Sex and desire had no place out on the battlefield. And it wasn’t that Bay was teasing or flirting with him. She wasn’t. That made it tougher to ignore her as a woman. As a SEAL, he was taught control. Well, now he had to apply it to Bay.

  “Do you think the guys are laughing at my attempts out there today?”

  “No, because you were as good as they were, or better, on their first day of rattle battle. Stop worrying, Bay. You’ll integrate into our team over time. You gave a good accounting of yourself out at the village. Other missions are being planned right now because of what you found out through the elder’s wife. Feel good about that.”

  She finished oiling her piece and wiped her hands on a rag near her boot. “I’m a worrywart,” she admitted. “I’m too competitive, maybe.” Her heart opened as she saw him smile briefly. When Gabe allowed her to see how he really felt, a rush of excitement flowed through Bay. She couldn’t explain the feeling and hadn’t ever felt this way about any man, not even with Jack. She floundered over how to deal with it. Not that she hadn’t liked Gabe’s unexpected touch last night. He sensed her need. His sensitivity toward her was startling. Unexpected.

  Gabe brought his rifle up, moving a fresh dry cloth across the fiberglass stock, careful to keep the barrel up and not pointed anywhere it could potentially do harm to someone. The weapon had already been cleared and safed, but he never took any chances. You simply did not aim a rifle barrel at anyone except with the intent to shoot him. “You have the makings of a SEAL,” he told her. “We’re all alpha guys who live to compete. We have the mind-set of always being a winner, not a loser. You need that drive in order to survive what we do.”

  “That and some serious mental toughness,” Bay murmured. Her hands flew surely over the Win Mag as she quickly reassembled it. It felt good to have this rifle back in her life. She’d grown up with her father’s rifle. It was now displayed on a wall at home, no longer used. She moved her fingers lovingly down the barrel, good memories rising to the surface. Her father’s rifle had a wooden stock. The military type had fiberglass stock, making it lighter to carry.

  Gabe eased to his feet and fitted the rifle into the canvas case and pressed the Velcro closed on it. “Mental toughness is something you either have or don’t have. SEAL training brought all of us to that point and helped us recognize what we had. In my class of BUD/s, we started out with two hundred and ten guys. Hell Week sifted a lot of them out. Only thirteen graduated.” He set the rifle on the planning table and stood watching her assemble the rifle. Her fingers were long, spare and graceful. There was concentration on her face as she knew which piece fit first, middle or last. And she was fast. As fast as he was. There was no question she was friends with the Win Mag.

  Gabe felt his heart pound briefly in his chest. Did Bay know her blue eyes were startlingly beautiful? He remembered his mother, Grace, collected blue delft plates. Bay’s eyes were exactly the same color. A man could drown his soul in them, he grimly decided.

  “Wow, only thirteen graduated?” Bay said. “Now, that’s a training course to kill a horse.” She smiled as she stood up. Picking up the new desert-camouflaged sheath that was specially padded for the weapon, she brought it over to the table where he stood. Setting it on the surface, Bay gently slid her rifle into the fabric case and closed the Velcro on it so no dust could enter into it.

  “BUD/s never killed anyone. Some guys broke arms and legs, or they picked up a bacterial infection from the polluted San Diego Bay, but no deaths.” He watched Bay push tendrils away from her cheek, her grace always evident. Gabe absorbed the moment like a greedy beggar. He stopped himself from wondering a lot more about Bay’s touch, those healing
hands of hers slowly exploring every inch of his body. Looking down at his watch, he said, “Chow time. We’ve got a mission briefing in an hour, so let’s get over there and get back here in time for it.”

  Bay picked up the sniper rifle, resting it across her left shoulder. “I want to take my rifle back to my tent first.”

  Gabe picked up his Win Mag, also settling it on his shoulder. “Rock it out.”

  * * *

  AT THE CHOW HALL, they sat opposite each other at the end of a long table. Air Force PJs, parajumpers who were CCTs, communication’s experts, were a couple of seats down from where they ate. Gabe pointed out the CTTs often went out with a SEAL team on a direct action mission where they expected combat. These Air Force guys were experts at calling in close air support or B-52s to drop bombs on the enemy. It allowed SEALs to focus on what they did best. Not that they didn’t have communications skills—they did—but the CCTs were considered the best the military had to offer.

  “I’m finding I’m eating like a horse,” Bay confided, shaking her head. Her tray was piled high with meat and carbs, just like Gabe’s.

  “You were active in Iraq,” he said. “Did you eat like that over there?”

  “No, but I was equally active.”

  “You’re training, too,” Gabe said with a grin, appreciating her confused look.

  “I trained with the Army Special Forces, too.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s because I’m not at sea level, but at eight thousand feet?”

  “Altitude does extract a lot more energy out of you,” he agreed, tasting the spaghetti sauce with his meatball. “Have you lost weight yet?” He couldn’t tell one way or another with all the equipment and the loose-fitting cammies she wore.

  “I think I have. I know I’m guzzling water like a camel. A lot more here than in Iraq.”

  Gabe swirled the pasta around his fork. “Extra water rations is something you always want to pack on a mission. We drink and eat constantly. Some guys carry Gatorade plus water. There’s never such a thing as having too much of it when we’re out there.”

  “No-brainer,” Bay said. She hesitated and then decided to get personal with Gabe. Maybe it would help her understand why she was so drawn to him. “You know about my family background. What about yours? What was your childhood like, Gabe?”

  His mouth pulled in at one corner. “The opposite of yours.”

  She heard the carefully closeted pain in his voice. “What do you mean?”

  Ordinarily, Gabe never spoke about his growing-up years to anyone. The care and warmth in Bay’s eyes and voice broke through that barrier. “I was an only kid,” he quietly admitted, cutting up the two other large meatballs on his tray. “My father was a redneck.” He glanced up to see her reaction. Gabe knew hill people preferred being called hill people, not hillbillies, rednecks or yokels, as the lowlanders often called them.

  “Hill people?” Bay asked.

  “No, he wasn’t hill people. He grew up north of Butler, Pennsylvania, where I was born. Lots of hill people around, though, but I’m making a division here between them and being a redneck.”

  She finished the spaghetti and took a piece of toasted bread slathered with butter and garlic. “Where I come from, a redneck is sort of a step down from the codes of conduct hill people live by.” She shrugged. “Sometimes they’re very coarse. And rude. They’re good ole boys and not necessarily responsible toward family or the greater circle of people in their community.” She frowned. “Was your father like that?”

  Gabe wiped his mouth with a napkin and laid it aside. “My father was an alcoholic, which didn’t help things, Bay. From the time I could remember, my mom and he were always fighting. As a kid, I was scared he was going to hit her.

  Bay’s heart went out to him. She could imagine him as a young boy hearing the parents screaming at each other. “I’m so sorry....”

  Gabe pushed the fork around in the spaghetti, losing some of his appetite. There was just something special about Bay that made him want to confide everything to her. Damn. Yet Gabe fought it because he didn’t want her to see him differently than she did right now. He had her respect. And he didn’t want to lose his reputation with her by talking about his sordid past.

  “Your poor mother, Grace,” she whispered. “How did she take it?”

  “Not well. My father was a closet drinker because, I guess when he married her, she didn’t know about it.”

  “Was he able to hold down a job?”

  “No. He was a construction worker and lost his job because he was caught drinking. It was several months before he landed another job, but not having his paycheck really put us in the hole financially. My mother had to work twelve-hour shifts at the V.A. hospital to try and make up some of the difference.”

  “How old were you when this happened?”

  “Six.”

  “And he was verbally abusive to her?”

  Gabe grimaced. “Yes, but she wouldn’t take it and fought back. He was at home all day, babysitting me when I wasn’t at school. He’d drink. By the time I got let off the bus, he was angry and stalking around the house, looking for a fight.”

  Bay cringed. “Sounds like a really bad drunk.” She watched him nod and saw the darkness in the his eyes. “He took it out on you?”

  “Yes.”

  Bay drew in a deep breath. “That’s awful. Did your mother find out?”

  “Finally. But it was years later.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her?”

  “Because my father threatened to beat me senseless if I said anything to her. I’d already got a taste of his hand and fist, and I knew he’d make good on the threat.”

  Bay’s heart crumpled with pain for Gabe. She sat there trying to digest all of it. “Yet he took you hunting, taught you to track....”

  “He liked escaping into the woods and getting back into nature. I think that was his Cherokee side. He was always happy when we were going to hunt in the woods on a weekend. We’d stay out for two days, camping, hunting or fishing. I really liked those times with him. He was happy out there and so was I. He never drank when he was out in the woods. Just at home and on the job.”

  He was a child torn in two by his father’s dark moods, Bay thought. “You said the other day when you were ten years old, your father died?”

  “Yeah, not a stellar year for me. Or for my mother. Or him.” His mouth flattened, his appetite gone. Gabe put the tray aside and picked up his coffee cup, wrapping his large hands around it. Just the tender look Bay gave him pushed him to tell her the rest of the story. “Everything came to a head when I was ten. My father lost another job because he was found drinking at a power company that was being built nearby. My mother had the night shift at the hospital. I’d just come home from school. My father had been drinking all day and my mother woke up early and caught him with a bottle. Things escalated and my father lost his temper and slapped my mother. She called the cops and filed assault charges against him.”

  Gabe took a deep breath. “It was the cops who started asking me questions. I tried to lie, because I was afraid my father would kill me when he got out of jail. But my mother read me right. My father had taken his leather strap to me that morning. My mother had been asleep at the time. The one cop was very nice and I guess I trusted him over the fear of telling the truth. When my mother lifted up my T-shirt and saw the red welts across my back, she about lost it.”

  “Oh, God, Gabe, that’s terrible. I didn’t realize...” Bay reached out to touch his hands wrapped tightly around the mug. And then, when she realized what she was doing, she quickly pulled her hand back. Seeing the sorrow in his eyes, Bay felt badly for him. She had never meant to stir up this kind of sadness for him. “What happened next?” she asked, her voice soft.

  “My father was taken to jail. Two days later, he got into a fight wit
h some of the guys in jail and was killed.” His voice went flat. “It shook us up. We never expected that. But my father had an uncontrollable temper and even though my Mom felt guilty about sending him to jail, I didn’t. I felt relief, if you want to know the truth. I never told her how I felt and I think I should at some point. Maybe when I get rotated back to the States, we’ll sit down over coffee and have a talk that’s been a long time in coming. It was just too painful for me to talk about until recently.”

  “She thought that your father’s dying took him out of your life?”

  “Yeah,” Gabe said, shaking his head. “She doesn’t know to this day how many years my father made a punching bag out of me. If I tell her, she’ll probably feel guilt. And I don’t want to pile more on than what she’s got already. I’m still not sure I’ll do it or not.” Stunned that he’d told her everything, Gabe looked at his watch. He was blathering like a fool and he needed to put a stop to it. “It’s time to go.”

  Nodding, Bay gave him a strained smile and eased off the bench.

  On the way back to the SEAL headquarters, the evening cooling rapidly, Bay walked at his side. Gabe had become withdrawn. “I feel badly for stirring up a hornet’s nest for you,” she admitted, catching his gaze. “I’m truly sorry, Gabe.” Opening her hands, Bay added gently, “I guess my curiosity about you, what made you the man you are today, got the better of me. I sincerely did not mean to make you rehash all that suffering and pain.” If they had been any place else, Bay would have thrown her arms around him and just held him. While Gabe told her the story, she could see the frightened ten-year-old little boy in the recesses of his eyes. Yes, holding was what Gabe needed. He still needed it, Bay realized.