My Protector (Once a SEAL, Always a SEAL Book 5)

by Layla Valentine

  I retrieve my knife, step back to my starting position, and throw again. I’m pleased to see I haven’t lost this skill, although it’s one I haven’t practiced much in recent years. I’ve never had occasion to use it in real life. But it’s such a cool thing to be able to do that I simply don’t want to lose the ability.

  “What’s going on out here?”

  I turn around. Jenna is standing in the doorway watching me. “I thought you were sleeping,” I say.

  “Nobody could sleep with all the racket you’re making out here,” she says. “It sounds like you’re cutting down trees.”

  A part of me wants to call her out on the melodrama, but of course, that wouldn’t be helpful at all. I’m also considering lying to her about what I’ve been doing out here. Knife throwing is harmless when you’re just practicing against a tree, but I can see how it’s the kind of activity that would make her nervous and less eager to trust me. On the other hand, though, I do feel that honesty wherever possible is the way to proceed. I show her the knife in my hand. “I’ve been practicing my throwing,” I say.

  “Throwing?”

  “You know, knife throwing.” I mime throwing my knife at the tree, not actually letting it fly. “It’s a habit I picked up in the Navy.”

  “You were in the Navy?”

  Shit. I wasn’t going to tell her that. I don’t like to let my clients know too many personal details about me. But something in Jenna’s face has changed, softened, like that piece of information affects the way she sees me. Now she’s stepping off the porch onto the dirt and coming closer. “Show me,” she says.

  “Step back.” I guide her over to a spot where I can see her in my peripheral vision. Then I move in front of the tree, draw back, and throw the knife. Much to my relief, her presence doesn’t affect my aim. The knife flies true once again.

  Jenna raises her eyebrows. “That’s not bad.”

  “Just takes practice.” I retrieve the knife from the tree and wipe it down on the edge of my shirt.

  “You must have a lot of free time,” she says. “To be so good at it.”

  I’m annoyed. “I guess you could say that about anyone who develops a skill if you want to look at it that way. Concert pianists must have a lot of free time because they sit around playing the piano for hours every day. Bestselling authors must have a lot of free time because they spend hours coming up with stories. Olympic athletes—”

  “All right, all right,” she says, shaking her head. “I didn’t realize you were so touchy. Sorry.”

  I don’t know why I was so touchy. It’s not as if she’s wrong. Knife throwing wasn’t part of my standard training in the Navy or anything; it was something Shadow and I picked up in our spare time and practiced because we were bored. But boredom isn’t part of the picture I want her to have of me. I don’t know if that’s because it looks unprofessional, or if it’s just that I want her to see me as fascinating because of my stupid attraction to her.

  She’s eyeing the knife. “Let me try it,” she says.

  “What, throwing it?”

  “I bet I could do it,” she says.

  “It’s harder than it looks.”

  “Maybe I’m a natural. Just let me give it a try.”

  I shrug and hand over the knife.

  She looks surprised. “I didn’t think you’d actually give it to me. Aren’t you afraid I’m going to try to escape or something?”

  “What, with that little pig sticker?” I laugh. “No.”

  “Why not?” she says, and I swear, she sounds almost offended. It’s like she wants me to treat her like a flight risk.

  “Well, for one thing,” I say, “you can’t outrun me.” I gesture to her shoes, which are pointy-toed four-inch stilettos. I can’t understand how anyone even walks in those, much less could run through a forest. “You wouldn’t stand a chance unless you kicked off those shoes, and then the terrain out here would cut up your feet so fast that I’d catch you easily.”

  “Not if I wounded you first.” She holds up the knife. I understand that she’s posing the idea as an academic exercise rather than a threat. I don’t know if she’s going to use my answers to try to find a weak point in my guardianship, but I’m happy to demonstrate that there isn’t one.

  “Okay,” I tell her. “Wound me.”

  She hesitates, takes a step toward me, then hesitates again.

  “You can’t do it,” I say. “You’ve never hurt anyone in your life.”

  She looks down.

  “That isn’t anything to be ashamed of,” I tell her quietly.

  “I can’t even defend myself,” she says.

  I step closer to her and wait for her to meet my gaze so I can say the thing she needs to understand. “I am not here to hurt you.”

  She holds my gaze or a long time. For the first time, I think she might be starting to believe me.

  The moment passes. Jenna steps over to the tree. “How do I do this?” she asks.

  “Hold it by the handle,” I tell her. “No, the other way. Switch your grip.” I step over and reposition the knife in her hand. “Now, when you’re ready, throw it at the target.”

  She throws. It arcs neatly and buries itself in the dirt.

  “Okay, no,” I say, trying to hide a smile. “First of all, it’s going to flip in the air. You want to throw it into a flip, not try to make it go straight forward.” I pick up the knife and bring it back to her. This time I stand behind her, keeping a hand on hers and guiding it through the motion of the throw a few times. “When you release the knife, your finger should be pointing at the place you want it to go,” I say. I halt the practice swing and point my own index finger at the tree, keeping the rest of my hand wrapped around hers.

  Jenna nods. “I’ll try again.”

  I step away. She takes a deep breath, steadying herself, and then lets the knife fly.

  It doesn’t hit the target. It’s not even close. But it does sink into the tree with that satisfying thunk sound. Jenna jumps up and down and cheers. “I did it!”

  I give her a high five, though I’m inwardly wishing she’d stop jumping around in those shoes. That looks much more difficult and dangerous than knife throwing. As soon as I feel I can trust her alone in the cabin, I’m going to drive to Colebrook and get her some real shoes.

  Jenna throws the knife again and again until it’s too dark to continue, and I tell her we’d better go inside before the local wildlife starts poking around. She’s hit the target several times by then, and I can tell she’s feeling cheered up and energized by the activity. That’s a good thing to know about her: give her something to do, something she can master, and her mood lifts substantially. I want her to be happy while we’re here. And, also, I want to be the one who makes her happy. Even though I know that’s a desire I need to shut down.

  It’s hard, though, seeing the smile on her face and knowing I’m partly responsible for putting it there, not to feel encouraged about our situation.

  Chapter 7

  Joel

  “All right,” I say. I’m standing in the kitchen and holding open one of the cabinets to examine the food I put away just a few hours ago. “We have soup, or we have pasta.”

  “What kind of soup?” Jenna asks.

  “Tomato.”

  “Tomato? Why not chicken noodle?”

  “Because tomato was on sale,” I say drily. “Do you want it or not?”

  “Pasta,” she says. Then, she steps into the bathroom to wash the dirt off her hands.

  I put a pot on the stove and start heating up some water. I lay out two plastic bowls and pour some dry noodles into each of them to measure our servings, and then I add a pinch of salt to the water for flavor. Boiling pasta is easy, thank goodness—I am not much of a cook, and I don’t want to ruin our first meal here. It’s going to be hard, though, because there’s no sauce for the pasta. I don’t even have butter. I only have the salt to give it flavor.

  Jenna emerges from the bathroom. She’s
let her dark hair down. It cascades around her face and makes her look younger. And even hotter. She is also looking much more relaxed now that she’s not wearing those killer high-heels. “Do you need help with anything?” she asks.

  I indicate another cabinet with a jerk of my head. “There are cans of vegetables in there. Maybe pour some into a couple of bowls for us to eat with the pasta?”

  She opens the cabinet. “Corn?”

  “Corn’s fine.”

  We work together in easy silence for a few minutes. I’m stirring the pasta, and Jenna’s grinding the can opener and dividing the corn between two bowls, which she sets on the table. Without my having to ask, she finds cups and fills them with water from the jug in the fridge. By the time she’s finished, the pasta is, too. I carefully drain it and run hot water over it so the noodles won’t stick. Then I transfer the hot pasta into bowls and carrying them to the table. “Dinner is served,” I say.

  She sits down. “Well, this is…”

  “It’s nothing special,” I say.

  “You don’t cook much?”

  “Never had the free time,” I say. She grins. “I don’t know. Food’s food, right?”

  “Is that what they teach in the Navy?”

  “No, what they teach in the Navy is that you’d better just eat what you’re served, Swabbie, because there isn’t anything else.”

  Jenna laughs.

  “Sorry there isn’t any sauce,” I say, forking up a bite of pasta.

  Jenna shrugs. “Maybe I can figure something out next time. Do we have herbs?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “There are some spices and things in that cabinet.”

  “That should work,” she says. “I’ve been cooking with my dad ever since I was a kid. He’s a lot better than me, but he did teach me some tricks, and I know how to spice up pasta. Let me cook it next time?”

  “Okay,” I say, encouraged by the fact that she’s referring to next time. She seems to have accepted that she’ll be here with me for the duration. Maybe that means we can start to trust each other. As soon as I can be sure she won’t take off on me, I’ll be able to go into town and pick up some sensible clothes for her. She can’t keep running around the woods in a business suit and heels.

  “So,” Jenna says, “you were in the Navy. How did that happen?”

  “What do you mean, how did it happen?” I ask. “I enlisted.”

  “Why did you enlist?”

  I frown. I was afraid this would happen when I let slip that I had been in the Navy. Now, she’s going to use that little piece of information to try to find out more about me. That’s the last thing I want. In this line of work, things go wrong all the time. I’ve certainly learned that the hard way. We can’t become friends. But it’s clearly in her nature to be friendly, to try and get to know me better. And God, this is so difficult because the non-professional side of me wants nothing more than to let her.

  But I can’t. I have to keep myself distanced from her. It’s too dangerous. I can’t afford to be so attached that I fall apart if something goes wrong. What happened to that gas station owner still plagues me, all these years later, and we weren’t even friends. I already feel more for Jenna than I ever did for him. Imagine if we were to get closer and then, God forbid, something terrible were to happen? I would be devastated.

  “I don’t talk about my time in the Navy,” I say.

  Jenna raises her eyebrows. “Okay, okay. No need to be snippy. I was only asking because my dad was in the Army, and I thought it might give us something to talk about.”

  “The Army and the Navy are two different branches of the military,” I say.

  “I know that,” she says with an edge in her voice. “I was just trying to make conversation.”

  I get up and go to the stove to serve myself more pasta. “Do you want another bowl?”

  I’m expecting her to say no—after all, she hasn’t been shy about letting me know that she doesn’t like the pasta—but to my surprise, she nods. I guess she’s hungry from the stress of the day, or maybe from the exertion of throwing the knife—or from walking around in those godforsaken shoes. I retrieve her bowl from the table, fill it, and hand it over. She adds a generous measure of salt to her pasta and stirs it around before digging in.

  “It’s really not bad like this,” she says. “I’m not saying I could get used to flavorless food or anything, but the salt helps. And it is good pasta. Bow ties are my favorite.”

  I got the bow ties because they were on sale, but I don’t say so. “I like them too,” I say because it’s the truth.

  Dinner takes us deep into the evening, and by the time we’re washing up, it’s pitch black outside. I can hear the shuffling through the underbrush of wild animals outside. Jenna jumps at the howl of what is probably a coyote. I know we’re safe inside the cabin, but my hand goes to the hilt of my knife anyway. It would be hard to take out a coyote during the day, and the dark will only make things harder. I know how to spot the reflection of their eyes in the moonlight. And, of course, I know how to throw the knife well enough to take them out as long as they’re standing still, but they’re unlikely to do that.

  “Are we okay in here?” Jenna asks. “Does that door lock?”

  “It’s locked,” I assure her. “We’re fine.”

  “I wish I had pajamas,” she says. A big sigh follows her declaration, and I make a mental note to pick up pajamas for her when I go to town—there was no way to get her suitcase at the airport. And besides, there was no telling where Boetsch might try to lay hands on her. That’s why I had to take the extra measure of buying an airline ticket and going through security: I wanted to meet her at the gate before anyone else could find her.

  “Do you want to watch something?” I ask. I’m making an effort to distract her from everything she doesn’t have.

  She turns and stares at me. “What do you mean, watch something? There’s no TV here.”

  In response, I cross the room to the wall opposite the bed and open a cabinet mounted there to reveal an old TV set, a VCR, and a row of VHS tapes. I’ve used this place as a safe house before, and these items have been here for years, growing more and more ancient and irrelevant. I blow a layer of dust off the top of the VHS tapes and step back to show Jenna what’s available.

  She stares. “Is that a VCR?”

  “I know,” I say. “It’s old-school. But it’s what there is. Want to watch something?”

  She stoops to look at the tapes. “These are all westerns.”

  “I know,” I say. “Sorry about that.”

  “No, I love westerns,” she says, sounding enthused. “Dad and I watched them all the time when I was growing up.” She hesitates. “When am I going to be able to see him?”

  “Soon,” I say.

  “Soon like when?”

  “As soon as possible.” I can’t afford to be specific, not when I don’t honestly know the answer to her question. I try to divert her from this complicated and potentially dangerous topic by turning her attention back to the tapes. “Pick something out,” I say. “Any one you want.”

  She grabs one without even pausing to examine the selection. “This one’s my favorite,” she says.

  “You’ve seen it before?” I can’t help but feel surprised at how readily she’s taking to the old movies. I’m not surprised to hear that Fred Shears enjoyed westerns—he seems like the type—but that his daughter liked them too? That is a surprise. I look at Jenna’s buttoned-up, stiff-collared blouse, the neatly folded pantyhose and suit jacket lying on a chair beside the bed. She seems too uptight for movies like this; I would have expected her to like foreign films with subtitles.

  “I’ve seen it thousands of times,” she says. “Dad and I used to take turns picking what movie we would watch, and during the entire year I was nine, this was the only one I ever chose. He must have been so tired of it, but he never said anything. We would recite the lines along with the actors and even act out some of the gunfights.”


  “Wow,” I say. I don’t have a lot of memories of my own father. He died when I was thirteen, executed by a mobster. Dad cared for us, of course, but he also cared a lot about gambling. In the end, he couldn’t stay away from the tables even when his money ran out. He ended up borrowing a sum that he never managed to repay. I consider myself lucky the mob didn’t come after my mother and me. But after Dad’s death, they left us alone.

  That’s why I got into this business in the first place—to stop the same thing from happening to other families. To stop other kids from losing their parents the way I did. It strikes me that that’s the very thing I’m doing now. I’m trying to keep Jenna from losing her father in exactly the same way I lost mine.

  And as she shares her memories of growing up with him, I can’t help wondering what it would have been like to have a father who was more of a presence in my childhood. Of course, I did have him for several years. But even then, he was often out gambling. We certainly didn’t have regular movie nights. What kind of person would I have been if he’d taken the time to expose me to his cinematic tastes, the way Jenna’s father did with her? Would I have an interest in an unexpected genre of film? There’s so much I could have gotten from him if I had only had the chance.

  I watch Jenna stare at the screen, taking in the film she watched so many times with her dad. I’m struck by how open and vulnerable she looks. Almost like a teenager instead of a twenty-something businesswoman. If she feels this much better about her situation just by watching a movie that reminds her of her dad, imagine how much better she’ll feel when the two of them are able to be reunited. I make myself a promise to redouble my efforts to make that possible. And in the meantime, I’m very glad we have a library of westerns to keep her happy and feeling connected with her old life.

  Except that, no, I’m not supposed to want that at all. I’m supposed to be encouraging her to cut ties with her old life, to let go of the person she used to be and embrace someone new. And I guess it’s fine if that new person likes westerns—lots of people like westerns—but in the early days of an identity change, it’s always a bad idea to cling to something formative from your childhood like this. It’s going to make it harder for her to step into a new identity when the time comes. She needs to be focusing on shedding everything from her past.