Joel grabbed her arm. “Hold on.”
“Why?”
“Wait. Are you serious?”
She glanced back at him and saw the confusion on his face. “I forgot about those,” he said. “But, that’s crazy. I don’t believe in that stuff.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Because it’s easier to forget and ignore than to accept what they mean.”
“I wasn’t thinking about what you said.”
Her voice softened. “It was a little stressful at the time.”
He leaned back against the counter. “You’re trying to say this is real? I mean, I have bad feelings about things sometimes, usually in battle or when things are about to go completely haywire. What’s the difference between that and what you do? Maybe it’s just normal intuition. How does it work for you?”
Feeling less defensive, she shrugged a little. His hand loosened, caressing her arm a little before he pulled away. “It’s not always the same every time. Sometimes I just get general impressions, feel that something bad is going to happen without any specific direction as to what or to whom. Other times I get specific impressions, like the time with Rosemary and the fish. It was weird, I didn’t have a clear idea, but I knew something bad would happen that was fish related even though it made no sense at the time. And then sometimes I get full images.” She thought of Lana folded over the toilet. That wasn’t her secret to tell, and she didn’t know if Lana knew about it yet. “I saw you the morning of the accident, grieving.” She paused for a moment, swallowing hard to get the lump out of her throat so she could finish. “I worried it would be for me.”
“This is just really a lot to take in.” Joel cupped her elbows and drew her closer, his gaze intent, searching. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. Do you believe me?” Her father hadn’t; he’d thought it was a fancy her mother encouraged. That had hurt. Having Joel think she was nuts would be just as bad, maybe worse.
“Why don’t you know who your stalker is then, if you can see all this about the future?”
She shrugged. “I never see anything for myself and I can’t see things just because I want to, or at least not very often. Sometimes if I meditate and think about a specific situation I can get something, but it doesn’t happen very often. My precognition is spotty and unreliable, but at least it’s not all bad news. Sometimes I see good things.”
His eyes narrowed. “You can’t see anything for yourself?”
Sage shook her head, letting him pull her closer until she was leaning against him. “No. Only things that affect others, and maybe indirectly affect me. I knew Dad was sick for at least two months before he told us. I asked him, but he kept denying it. I knew he was lying, though.” The pain of that rose in her mouth, tasting bitter.
Joel pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I’m sorry about that. It must have been hard. Lana said he didn’t tell them he was sick, either. Not until about the time he told you.”
Oddly, that helped ease a little of the bitterness that her father’s death and will had left behind. She breathed in deeply, inhaling Joel’s cologne, then nudged away from him. “We need to be going. Work waits for no man, or woman.”
She wondered if Joel really believed her, or if he was just saying he did to make her happy.
Joel was relieved when Sage agreed to accompany him back to Corpus Christi for Wade’s memorial. There was no casket, as Wade had requested cremation and for his ashes to be spread on the ocean—the ultimate return to the water.
Sage held on to Joel, smiled and greeted all of his friends, commanders, the dozens of people who stopped Joel to say hi and find out how things were going.
“Aren’t you tired yet?” Joel asked Sage when they stepped away from yet another group of Navy men he hadn’t seen in years.
“I’m fine.” She covered a yawn, though, belying her words. “I can go a little longer. They’re your friends. You need to see them, spend time with them.” They had only arrived in town a couple of hours before the funeral and hadn’t even checked into their hotel yet.
He needed these people, and was glad to catch up with some of the guys, to make arrangements to meet with a few who were planning a ski trip to Colorado that winter. Still, he’d never been big on crowds and no one could say this wasn’t a crowd. He’d much rather get Sage alone for a while.
“You might as well go,” Trudy said from behind him.
Joel turned and smiled at her. “I can’t go yet. I can’t quite seem to tear myself away, even though it’s painful to be here.” He wondered if he’d said that right—he’d never been good at finding the right words in an awkward situation.
“That goes for both of us,” Trudy said. She eyed Sage, whom she’d met briefly before the funeral. “I see things with your charge suddenly took a turn for the better.”
Sage smiled. “Finally. I’d done everything but smack him upside the head with the fact that I was interested in him.” She squeezed his hand. “Once he got the picture, things started clipping along fine.”
“He does tend to be thickheaded sometimes,” Trudy agreed. “He always thinks he’s right, even when he’s not.”
“Especially when he’s not,” Sage said.
“Hey, I’m standing right here.” Joel pulled Trudy in for a hug with his free arm, not releasing Sage from his side. She was the only thing keeping him afloat.
“Do you honestly think I could forget that?” Sage asked. Her lips curved into a tempting smile and the come-hither look in her eyes nearly undid him. After the incident with the cat, he had worried she had only turned to him out of pain and need that had nothing to do with him, or that he’d only given in because he was messed up about Wade’s death and wanted something to fill the corners of his mind, something to block the pain. Now having her beside him was like breathing, and he wondered how he had managed without her.
The look in her eyes had his blood pumping again, and he fought the urge to pull her in for a kiss.
Maybe he could leave after all. Disappearing with her now would be too easy, though, and he’d regret it later, so he reigned in his thoughts. “If you think I’m flawed, you should try to eat with Sage,” he said to Trudy. “She thinks tofu is an actual food item. And sprouts. She thinks they’re one of the four food groups or something.”
Trudy laughed. “You aren’t trying to civilize our Joel, are you?” she asked Sage.
Sage studied him thoughtfully. “I don’t know. I kind of like a little incivility in him. It’s odd, I’ve never found that to be an attractive trait before now. And a few sprouts from time to time don’t hurt anyone.”
Joel sent her a withering look.
“Are you a food wimp?” Trudy asked him. She turned back to Sage and asked in a stage whisper, “Is he picky? I never thought so, but maybe—”
“I’m not picky; I eat the sprouts, don’t I?” Joel ended that line of thought immediately. “If I were picky, I would have died trying to force myself to eat some of those MREs.”
“I’ve never tried them,” Sage said, tapping her chin. “But aren’t they supposed to be good for years?” She’d never even seen one of the military Meals Ready to Eat, but Joel had mentioned them before. When Trudy nodded, Sage shook her head, her disgust evident. “I can’t even imagine the preservatives. It’s got to be bad for you.”
Joel pulled her closer and brushed his lips over her cheek bone. “Definitely. You’re right; in comparison, a few sprouts aren’t so bad.”
In their hotel room an hour later Sage dug through her suitcase for something more comfortable to change into. Nightmares had made her restless the past few nights, dreams of Mr. Sunshine and of a faceless man chasing her. Add in the stress of another funeral and she needed a nap. She wondered if she could get Joel to join her. “How come you never talk about your past?” she asked.
She glanced up to see Joel looking a little stunned at the random question. “I talk about it.”
“No you don’t. You allude to your SEAL days or you talk
about your friends—if I drag it out of you. You don’t talk about you or what you’ve done, or how you grew up.” She had been trying not to push him on this, knowing it was difficult for him, but she wanted to know everything about him, to understand him better, and it was hard to do that when he didn’t give her the most basic information about his past.
“I can’t talk about what I did as a SEAL. A lot of it’s classified,” he said.
“I know that, but there’s a lot you could tell me. I learned more from listening to you talk with your buddies today than you’ve told me in the past six months. You can share things about yourself with me, even if they aren’t pretty. You know I’m not some sweet innocent, right?”
His brows lifted. “You can believe that if you want, but you’re definitely innocent. You have no idea what I’ve seen. What I’ve done.”
Sage nodded hurt that he thought so little of her. “You’re right, but just because I’ve never been to war it doesn’t mean I don’t have scars of my own. You don’t have to treat me like I’m made of tissue paper, Joel.” She grabbed her clothes and toiletry bag and headed for the bathroom.
“What are you doing?” he asked, ther was a note of worry in his voice.
“I’m going to change out of my dress. I need a nap before dinner and I’m not wrinkling this outfit. Do I need your permission for that, or am I too weak to think of it on my own?”
She thought she heard him hit something before she shut the bathroom door behind her. It made her smile.
Honest frustration. That was something she could get behind.
Once she was alone in the bathroom, however, she took a moment to release the tightly leashed emotions that had been thrumming through her that day. Being at Wade’s funeral had been a painful reminder of her dad’s service last spring.
She still remembered how hard it was to hold back at the services, to not admit she was his daughter. Standing in the background while Lana and Cami sat on the front row of mourners. Sage had taken a moment to set a flower on the casket before they lowered it into the ground, the only chance to pay homage to the man she had loved so much.
Harrison and Joel had been there with her: Harrison at her side, his arm around her waist and tears on both of their faces. This time it had been Joel she shared the moment with, each wrapped in their own thoughts. Did it remind him of his grandma, or was that so far in the past that it didn’t bother him much anymore?
And then there was the flash of shock at the reading of the will when she realized her mother hadn’t been the only time he’d cheated on his wife, and she suddenly had a much bigger family than she’d thought.
It wasn’t as though she had been raised to be a prude—her mother was a hippie in many ways—but Darla had always held marriage as something more, something you didn’t defile once you’d made the commitment—which was part of the reason she’d never married again after her divorce to Harrison’s father. Sage’s father, the man who was still in many ways her white knight, hadn’t worried about that commitment. If he could be cavalier about something that important, what else had she not known? What other secrets had he kept from them? And would they pop up again as the year progressed?
Could he possibly have loved her as much as he claimed if almost everything else she knew about him—him as a person, not his public side—was a lie?
Feeling cold, she hugged herself, looking in the mirror, wishing there was a way to get answers, and knowing—because she’d read them so many times—that the two letters he’d written to her, as he’d done for each of his daughters, were not enough and would never give her the closure she needed.
Sage thought of Joel in the next room and the way he’d been holding back pieces of himself like her dad had done. Oh, he wasn’t seeing someone else—there was no way he could hide that from her when they were together so much, but he kept secrets all the same. She’d seen the look in his eyes that said he wanted more, and the wariness that had made him keep his past to himself.
Could she coax him into sharing those pieces? Did he really think she couldn’t care about him, knowing he had dark pockets? That she wasn’t strong enough to deal with it? Because she did love him, more every day, and she didn’t know how she would cope when this was over and he was free to leave her. Would he walk away rather than open up to her?
One thing was for sure, she’d let her father dictate the rules for their relationship her whole life. She wasn’t going to let Joel do the same. If he felt half as much for her as she did for him, she would make him face it. She was tired of being pushed aside for her own good.
Joel had thought Sage was beautiful in her black dress at the funeral, but the soft flowing thing she put on for dinner with the skirt that didn’t quite reach her knees nearly made his jaw drop. Was she trying to drive him completely around the bend? And where did she get it from? He’d never seen her wear anything like it before
He’d expected her to be much more reserved around his friends—the terrified and somewhat prim woman he’d met six months earlier certainly would have been. Was her gregarious manner an act to please him, to impress his friends, or had he not seen her in enough social situations before now? Had that been because she was worried about her stalker, but she felt safe here, now?
The guys with their significant others—and Trudy—met at a local bar and grill for dinner and with the proliferation of drinks, the laughs and stories had grown ever wilder. And Sage shined like a beacon, always drawing his gaze without having to try.
Joel watched her, saw her reserve melt away in moments, helped along by the half a beer she’d been sipping on for three hours. That was his girl—she was no big drinker. But she laughed as readily as the guys, snuggled close to Joel, and her eyes sparkled with delight with each new thing she learned about him, about his former life.
Sitting so close to her, hip to hip in the booth, kept Joel on edge, and he enjoyed every minute of it.
Finally Sage covered her mouth with one of her strong, tiny hands and yawned. “Okay, I know you’re all night owls, but I’ve reached my limit.”
Dave’s eyes strayed to her glass. “You still haven’t finished a single drink.”
“Hey, this is practically a drunken revel for me.”
The guys laughed and one called her a teetotaler, which she brushed off as she gave Joel’s knee a squeeze. “I’d like to go back to the hotel. You can stay here and gab for a few more hours, if you’d like. I can take a cab.” But her eyes held promises and she had to know he wouldn’t let her go alone—even if her stalker was more than a thousand miles away.
Joel shook his head. “Not this time. I’ll come along.” He squeezed her shoulder—the one on the other side of her, since he’d had his arm around her for hours to ‘make room’ in the booth for everyone. His arm was nearly asleep, despite the fact that she was so much shorter than himself.
Sage slid out and took his hand and the guys around them started shooting them knowing looks.
“Watts needs to go with his girl,” Riley said. “Couldn’t possibly let her go alone.”
“You should have heard the way he cooed at her over the phone. It was so sweet. He’s gone all soft on us,” Greg added.
“You’re just jealous because you know he’s the toughest one in this room,” Sage said, putting a hand on Joel’s arm. “It sucks to lose your best man. But that just makes me lucky, and you not half as good as you were before.”
There was plenty of hooting and laughter from the others. Joel pulled Sage tight, thinking surely, no man was as lucky as he was. “And with that, we’ll take off. You all keep in touch.” He kissed Trudy on the forehead. “I’ll call you in the morning.”
“Okay.” She squeezed his hand.
The drive back across town seemed to take forever. Sage kept up a light dialogue, asking him about his SEAL buddies and what training was like. All the time her hand rested primly on his knee.
Joel let her enter the hotel room ahead of him, then whirled her around, p
ressed her up against the wall near the bathroom door and slid one hand on her waist, burying the other in her hair. “You’ve been doing your best to keep me on edge all day, haven’t you?”
Her fingers went to the buttons of his blue shirt, sliding the top one loose. “Is it working?”
“Better than you could ever imagine.” He leaned down, resting his forehead against her. “Baby, this between us, it’s not like other relationships I’ve had. This is special. You’re special, and I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then don’t.”
He groaned and buried his face in her wild brown hair, which she’d worn flowing around her face that night, teasing his skin as it brushed his hand and arm with every movement of her head. “You make it sound easy.”
She touched his jaw, pressed a kiss to his cheek, then said low, “It’s not as hard as you think. You’re sweet and thoughtful, yet your instincts are honed to take action, to react in a predetermined way. You’re stubborn and bossy, but you never smother me with it. Well,” she amended, “almost never. Follow your instincts and we’ll be okay. I keep telling you, Joel: I know you, I trust you, and I know we can make it work if it’s important to us. Give us a chance to be something more. Give me a chance to prove I can be more to you than a job, that this thing between us is important enough to open yourself up to the chance that we might fail.”
He lifted his head and met her gaze. “Honey, you’ve never been just a job.”
A smile bloomed on her face. “Good. You’ve never been just a body guard, either.” And she kissed him.
Joel didn’t know how he was going to be the man she needed, open up to her the way she wanted him to, but she was worth it. As he sank his hands into her wild mane of curls, he decided he’d work on that. Starting tomorrow.
SEALed With Love (DiCarlo Brides book 2) (The DiCarlo Brides) Page 15
