“Gavin—”
“It should’ve been Kyle’s,” he shot off. “I didn’t earn the thing. He did. The higher-ups looked at the paperwork and saw what they wanted to see. I didn’t get to the helo the night the RPG hit. He got me there. For some reason, they decided Purple Heart wasn’t enough so now I’ve got the Silver Star and guilt. I wouldn’t have walked away alive from that op if it hadn’t been for your brother, and he walked away with nothing.”
Mavis frowned. “He doesn’t care about medals any more than you do.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered, pressing his fingers over his eyes. “He’s out there still fighting for his country and his family and I’m not. But at least the higher-ups can sleep at night. I may be useless, but they know I’ve got a bunch of shiny souvenirs as company.”
Mavis hesitated only a moment. She pressed her hand to his wrist. After several seconds, his fingers folded, touching the tips of hers.
He heaved a quiet sigh before he asked, “How pissed at me are you? About tonight?”
Mavis thought about it—about everyone knowing. About the sheer amount of opinion she’d had to contend with. “Well,” she said, “you accomplished what you set out to accomplish from the beginning. It wasn’t great, the fallout or the way you went about it...”
“What can I say?” he said with a slight smirk. “I’m a man of action.”
“Why did you have to provoke him?” she wondered. “I can deal with everyone knowing about us. But why did you have to bait Kyle? If not for the fight, Mom at least would’ve walked away from the dinner unscathed.”
“Don’t you think it’s about time your parents and everybody else stopped worrying so much about what your grandmother says?” he asked.
“Yes,” she admitted. “But it’s complicated, especially for Mom. She managed to make a good life for herself. A great life. She wants Edith to acknowledge that.”
“Nobody should have that kind of power over somebody else’s life,” Gavin said.
Mavis took note of the bitterness in his voice. “Those who shape who we are aren’t easily set aside.”
“I don’t want that to make sense.”
“I know,” she said. She touched her brow to his shoulder.
His fingers wedged between hers as their palms slid into place. His lips pressed against the parting of her hair.
He might never come back... Harmony’s fears echoed endlessly in the caverns of Mavis’s head. She could deny it all she wanted, but they were fast becoming her own. She wanted him close. She’d wanted that for weeks, even when she wasn’t willing to admit it. Curiosity. Desire. Now...she could add near panic to the mix.
She could put the car back in gear, do a u-ie...take him home. Keep him close.
Or she could trust, in him and the promise he had made at the riverside.
Self-preservation wasn’t so much about getting hurt. It was concern that she might find that thing she’d never had outside of her family, and that Gavin, outside of the SEALs, had never had at all. A place, a person, that fit and the inexplicable fear that it could be taken away.
Nothing lasts forever. He’d stamped it on his body, as if he might forget.
“Is that Zelda’s Alfa Romeo?”
Through the windshield, Mavis saw the tail of a red car in the drive. “No. She keeps it in the garage.”
“Then whose is that?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” She sat up a little straighter. “Looks more like a Bentley.”
“A Bentley. You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure.” She frowned at him, suspicious at the drop in his tone. “You know someone with a red Bentley?”
“Only one.” He’d already shifted away from her. “Prometheus should go with you tonight.”
Thrown off guard, Mavis glanced back at the canine snoozing soundly on the back seat. “No. I don’t want you to be without him.”
“I’m fine,” Gavin said.
“It’s hard enough for me not to stay with you tonight,” she admitted, drawing his attention back. “But I’m not sure either of us is ready for that.”
“Don’t trust me to keep my mitts to myself?” he asked.
“I don’t trust myself not to keep mine off you,” she said. When his jaw loosened, she shrugged. “How’s that for a truth bomb?”
“Deadly.” He took his hand off the handle of the door. With it, he cupped her chin. “I’m gonna have to ask you to hold that thought.”
Mavis eyed the red Bentley. “It doesn’t look like I’ve got a choice.”
Gavin’s sigh blew across her face. She felt the tension fighting against the need—his and her own. “I’ll deal with this. Take the boy home. Let him get some rest there...”
She waited for him to say more. The tension was working its way through the duct tape and stitches. It nearly came to the surface, but he shut it in. Shut her out of whatever consequences the Bentley brought. “Don’t be a stranger,” she told him.
He let out a humorless laugh as he leaned for the door again. “I don’t know that you and I have ever been strangers, Frexy.”
So don’t start now. Mavis bit her tongue, hard, recalling that no matter how far she thought they might’ve come, there were pieces of Gavin she didn’t and might never know.
She tried not to touch her nose to the cotton of his shirt and breathe him in as he twisted around to give Prometheus a pat. She saw his ball cap on the console between them. “Here,” she said when he was done.
He donned it. “I’ll call you,” he said in an undertone, his face truly in shadow now.
She nodded without words as he opened the door. The scent of river filled the car in his absence and lingered when he closed it. She watched the streetlight shift across the line of his back. The night closed around his silhouette.
Mavis eyed the Bentley. It didn’t take much guesswork to assume who’d ridden in on that splashy horse. There was only one person who could wreak more havoc in a single night than the dysfunctional rift between Gavin and Kyle, or her dill pickle of a grandmother. As Mavis put the car in Drive, she couldn’t erase the unease that she had abandoned Gavin to his demons.
* * *
“SHE’S GONE.”
Gavin turned away from the pinpricks of red taillights fading fast in the distance and probed the inkiness of the porch. The light near the door wasn’t on, meaning Zelda must have gone to Errol’s for the night. He’d known someone was lurking there. He didn’t have to smell the luxurious Parisian perfume to know the culprit.
He kept his mouth shut as he moved to the door. The streetlights had probably revealed what had gone on in the cab as Mavis lingered. Gavin could only assume what his mother knew. So he assumed the worst and took the lone key out of his pocket. Feeling around, he found the dead bolt and slid it out of place without much trouble.
The door creaked open and Tiffany said, “You certainly know your way around the place.”
“I live here,” he stated.
“Yes,” she said, still nothing more than a ghost in the dark. “With the old lady.”
“Careful tossing words like old around,” he advised. “They might stick to you.”
Tiffany chuckled. It was a small sound, a familiar one.
The laugh of a parent should’ve been comforting. This wasn’t. Not because it was cruel, or callous. Because it was without humor. Gavin couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard Tiffany laugh, raw—from the gut. He wondered if he knew what her real laugh sounded like.
He moved over the threshold. She spoke again, closer. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
He blocked the way. His body against one side of the door casing and his hand on the other, arm and body barring entry into Zelda’s place of Zen. A place that had become sacred to him. “It’s not my house.”
“You have a key,�
�� she indicated. “What? Has she banned visitors of the female variety?”
“The only thing Zelda bans is bad karma and energy.” With a flick of his wrist, he flipped the switch next to the jamb for the porch light.
Tiffany turned her eyes from the glare. Gavin studied her. The hair was a little shorter. The heels were, too. Nevertheless, she cut an impressive figure, carved by a sundress scooped lower than the average woman her age would’ve dared. She liked to think she was anything but average, which explained the Bentley. The diamonds around her neck. The chain of fools she’d left throughout the years. The endless string of lawsuits she’d set off.
Zelda would take one look at Tiffany’s aura and cry, “Begone!” The image amused Gavin so much he was moved enough to smile almost.
She spread the fingers of one hand, sending the gold bangles on her wrist flashing. “So we’re going to stand here like this?”
“Not necessarily,” he said thoughtfully. “You could leave.”
“You want me to go.”
He leaned further against the jamb. She wouldn’t leave, he knew. Not until she was satisfied. Crossing his arms, he said, “You wanna waste time on questions we both know the answers to?”
She sucked air through her nostrils. A warning sign, if he’d been interested in warning signs. He wasn’t. “Where’s what’s-his-name?” he asked, wondering how far he could still push her. “The investor guy with the jet? Did he dump you?”
“I left him,” she said tightly.
“Figures,” he said. “He might’ve been decent.”
“When it comes to men, there’s no such thing as decent. You know that.”
He scratched his chin. “Yeah, as a species, we’re deplorable. Your PI says hi, by the way.” At her scoff, he smirked. “You must’ve been desperate. You couldn’t have trawled for anything greener in the Gulf.”
“Well, once my sources informed me you were back here, I had to act fast.”
“Why’s that?” he asked. And here they came to the point.
“I pity you,” she told him. With a tilt of her head, she moved a hair closer to the dividing threshold. “You always come back looking for something you’ll never find.” Her hand lifted to the other side of the jamb he was holding. “It’s sweet and sad at the same time.”
He waited. He wanted her to say it and be done with it. Her reasons had always been the same. They’d always been a hair too close to the truth.
“Gavin, you know Fairhope is no place for somebody like you,” she summarized.
She tried to sound kind. The faux softness fell on him like a rough quilt. He fought to brush it off. “You would know,” he said, the words grating from the bottom.
After a moment, she nodded. “Yes. We’re the same, you and I.”
He shook his head automatically before he stopped himself, readjusted. Pressing back from the jamb, he stood apart from her.
“I learned a while ago that I could never make a life here,” she pointed out. “Your father, the innkeeper—they had me ostracized. I can hardly think about it now without...”
Gavin rolled his eyes. “Listen, Meryl, it’s been a long day. As much as I’d like to watch your next great performance, why don’t you go ahead and thank the Academy so we can call it a night, eh?”
“Don’t be callous like him.”
He groaned, shifting his weight in impatience. “Pot, kettle.”
“You’re a bully,” she said heatedly. “Just like him.”
“Say what you will about me,” Gavin said. His spine had grown rigid. “As for him, you have no right.”
“I have plenty of right,” she said. “Ten years of abuse gave me that right.”
He leaned toward her again, homing in on her hard features. “The man never laid a hand on you. Everybody knows now that he’s not the kind of person you made him out to be during the divorce. But you? You are the kind of mother who’d put her kid on the stand and lie to put a man of good standing away.”
“You don’t remember what it was like,” she claimed. “You were little.”
“I remember everything,” he told her. “I remember him coming in late off a narcotics case, you meeting him at the door. I remember you slapping him across the face, screaming because he’d missed another dinner. You chastised him constantly for trying to save the world and be a hero, leaving you alone.”
“You did the same,” she said. “You abandoned me. You went off to godforsaken places so you could kill people in the name of God and country. Just another thug with a gun.”
“I found purpose, Mom,” he said. “I found a calling. Something better, I think, than sitting on what was left of the Howard family fortune and casting stones at people who don’t deserve it because nothing else makes you happy.”
“And look where it’s led you,” she said, her voice rising. “Look at you, Gavin! You can’t see. You’ve lost your so-called calling. You couldn’t make it on your own so you ran back to your father. Have you found purpose here, Gavin, or just a handful of people obligated to lead you from point A to point B?”
Gavin stared.
“It’s worse now,” she went on. “You’re a veteran. You’ve got issues. Vets like you make people nervous. There’s just no telling what might set you off, what you’re capable of. It’s why you need to come to your senses and get out of this town. It’ll get to you, just like it got me. It’ll chase you off, like a coyote or worse. You’ll wind up in a lineup.”
Gavin shook his head again. Despite the night sweats and flashbacks keeping him edgy enough to confront the reality that PTSD would never not be a part of him, he wasn’t hostile or trigger-happy. “What are you suggesting?” he wanted to know.
“Come with me,” she said, gently. More gently than he knew her capable of being. “I have a place. It’s in St. Augustine. Remember that trip we took to St. Augustine? You loved the Atlantic. Those were good times between you and me. It can be like that again. Even if you can’t hold down a job, I can take care of you. We can be a family again.”
He felt the space between his brows seam tight. “You’ve ruined every relationship I’ve ever had. You tried to put space between me and Dad, me and Briar, Harmony. The Brackens. Every girl I dated in high school and college. Do you think that’s what family does to one another?”
“I wanted to protect you,” she said. “I didn’t want you to get hurt, as I’ve been.”
“The mama bear protecting her cub. That’s your excuse? I’ve spent the last decade looking over my shoulder for the PIs you hired so you’d know there was nobody close enough to me to piss you off. Because if Tiffany Howard isn’t happy, nobody is. Am I right, Jezebel?”
Her eyes had narrowed to slits. “You know,” she said, “maybe Benji’s father was right about you.”
Taken aback, Gavin stood straighter. “What about Benji’s father?”
“After the funeral,” she said. “At that little wake you and the rest of the SEALs had in his name. From what I hear, Benji’s old man drank enough beers, then started pointing fingers in your direction. He called you out for making Benji re-up. He wanted to get married, settle down. ‘A SEAL never backs down from a fight.’ That’s what you said, or something along those lines. So Benji reenlisted and wound up getting himself killed right after the wedding. Now his daughter has no daddy. What did his father call you, exactly? A warmonger?”
Gavin felt sick, all right. And blind. Blinder than he’d felt since learning to cope with his shoddy vision. He cursed inwardly as his stomach tightened into a fist and his emotions began to hammer... He swallowed, tasted bile on the back of his tongue. “How do you know about that?”
“I told you,” she said, quietly. “I have my sources.”
“Go,” he told her plainly. “I want you gone.”
“You can’t get rid of me completely,” she pointed out. “Unless, o
f course, you think about picking up your gun again.”
The jamb was under his fist again. The wood bit into the callouses. “You’re sick and warped, a hell of a lot more than I am.”
“You’d like to think so, wouldn’t you?” Tiffany challenged.
“He said go.”
The voice came out of the dark. Gavin peered over Tiffany’s head. Mavis materialized in black, Prometheus at her side. “No,” she said as Tiffany opened her mouth to argue. “You’ve said enough. Now you’re going to come away from there quietly so Prometheus and I can walk you to your car.”
Tiffany’s silence could have been misconstrued as shock. However, Gavin could hear the busy whir of her personal scanner trying to get a read. “I know you,” Tiffany said. “You’re the Brackens’ youngest.”
Mavis wisely chose not to answer. When Prometheus nudged her knee, she merely reached down to him.
Tiffany turned back to Gavin. He could see enough to recognize the incisive gleam on her face. He shook his head in warning. But what good had his threats ever been?
Hitching her bag onto her shoulder, she moved away from the door, as she had been told. As she descended from the porch, Gavin followed, closing the door to Zelda’s behind him.
Mavis led the way across the lawn in long strides.
Tiffany waited until they were halfway to the Bentley before speaking. “You’d be better off letting him go.”
“Excuse me?” Mavis said.
“He’ll disappoint you,” Tiffany explained. “It’s what he does.”
“Haven’t you talked yourself out already?” Mavis wondered.
“He didn’t leave all of those women he saw through the years because of me,” Tiffany told her. “I might’ve interfered once or twice. But there were others he left on his own. He was always the one to go. Don’t think because you’re close to the place he can’t seem to leave behind that he won’t leave you. Even if he doesn’t burden you in the short run, he’ll eventually abandon you like he did them.”
Gavin jumped the gun and reached the driver’s-side door of the Bentley first. He opened it wide. “Get in,” he said.
Navy SEAL's Match Page 18
