Hard to Hold

by Stephanie Tyler

  And Jake had visited her every chance he’d gotten those first two weeks she’d been in the hospital. It was three hours away from base and he’d arrive at three in the morning or later, watch her for a bit while she slept and slip out before anyone noticed him. He watched her bruises fade and the machinery and tubes removed, saw all the signs of progress, including her deep, easy sleep.

  He saw the way she sometimes reached out for something with her hand, tighten a fist around empty air, and he’d tighten his own fist at his side and tell himself that this was all so fucking ridiculous. And then he’d been called away and spent the last month in the mountains of Afghanistan, gathering intel and getting shot on his way out of the country, which seemed to be his MO these days.

  He’d come in late last night, gotten stitched, thought about calling around and gathering some intel of his own about Isabelle and figured that she had to be back into the normal routine of her life.

  Before he’d left the States, he’d discovered that she was engaged.

  But she sat across from him now, her dark hair long and loose down her back. She looked beautiful and carefree, like she’d recently made the best decision of her life. And her left hand was bare.

  He’d never really been scared of anyone or anything in his life, but this woman, the possibilities she held out to him, shook him in a way he’d never been prepared for.

  “What do you have against doctors?” she asked.

  “They ask a lot of questions.”

  She stood up, dropped her empty coffee cup in the garbage can. “Why don’t you think about it.”

  He willed his beeper to go off, the phone to ring, a small war to break out—anything—and wondered why he suddenly needed saving from a woman.

  He couldn’t do this—not with her.

  She says she doesn’t remember anything.

  An odd sense of disappointment settled over him, even though there was no way to deny the palpable connection between them. If she didn’t know what had happened, she knew something had.

  Kissing her like that—touching her—had not been professional. He’d let his guard down completely. Like he hadn’t already learned how bad the consequences of doing something like that could be.

  “Are you used to getting what you want?” he asked.

  “Aren’t you?” She smiled before she walked out of his office, shutting the door quietly behind her.

  He didn’t even have time to wonder what the hell he was going to do now before his cell phone rang. He glanced at the number, flipped it open and said, “I’m fine.”

  “Shot is not fine,” Kenneth Waldron, the only man Jake ever thought of as Dad, shouted across the line.

  “Is that what your tarot cards told you?”

  “I don’t need any cards. I told you last month, something big is barreling down on you.”

  “Yeah, well, it missed me. Mostly.”

  “Jake …”

  “I’m fine,” Jake repeated, his hand automatically passing over his right side, still heavily bandaged. “Flesh wound. I’m just getting ready to run some drills.”

  “I wasn’t necessarily talking about gunfire, by the way. And put your brother on the phone.”

  He didn’t even bother to say, They’re not here. Instead, he waited a beat, and Nick and Chris burst through the door of his office, arguing as usual.

  Sometimes having a father who was psychic was a real drag. “Which one?”

  “Whichever one won’t lie to me!” his father roared.

  Jake looked between Chris and Nick and figured it was a draw. He tossed the phone to Chris while Nick took the rest of his coffee and drank it in one gulp.

  “He’s fine, Dad,” Chris said. “Why would I lie?” He paused to listen. “Well, yeah, you’ve got a point there.”

  Kenneth Waldron was known as Twist to his earliest friends, cher to his wife, who’d died twelve years earlier, and Dad to his three grown boys. At work, they called him Kenny to his face and Crazy behind his back, and tonight, during a meeting with his newest group of wannabe rock stars who spent more time pissing out the windows of moving cars and smashing bottles onstage than actually singing, the boys in the band began to call him Boss.

  “Your pitch is off. Stop holding back and open up your voice. And I want to hear you play the shit out of that bass!” he yelled over the din.

  He’d become some sort of legend in the music business, managing the most unmanageable of rock bands, taking them on when every other manager in town with a lick of sense dumped them on their asses and left them crying in the street. And he made them. Kept track of them. Fathered them and brought them to the top of their game.

  Everyone always wondered how he did it. Why he did it. Hell, it was the easiest thing going compared to what he’d reared. Was still rearing, as his three sons continued to raise hell and heaven and everything in between.

  He was young for the business, just turned forty-three, with a biological son who was twenty-six, and two adopted sons about the same age. He’d married Maggie when they were both just seventeen to escape his family, moved in with hers along the swamps of the Bayou, St. Charles Parish, and got her pregnant within the month. By then, he’d already been managing some local bands, and by nineteen, he and Maggie started their own company and signed with a city label to recruit the new talent.

  They’d moved to New York to be near the city when Christopher had been thirteen. Already six feet, six inches tall, he would put on another three quarters of an inch before he finally stopped growing. He’d been used to being homeschooled back in Louisiana, but in actuality, he’d been used to running wild and doing pretty much whatever he’d wanted. He’d grown up rock and roll, had the talent and the voice to forge his own career in music but had never seemed all that interested in that kind of life. Which was why he’d gotten suspended on his very first day of private school in New York for lighting up a cigarette in the middle of the cafeteria.

  When he’d been dragged to the principal’s office, cursing anyone within earshot in Cajun French, Nick and Jake were already there. For what, Kenny couldn’t remember clearly, although it was most probably for skipping school, which the two of them had had a tendency to do on a regular basis. They’d both been on the verge of expulsion.

  Maggie had gone in to collect Chris and came home with the two other boys as well. They’d each gotten suspended for two weeks, because they’d all started fighting—with one another—right outside the principal’s office, for no other reason than there was nothing better to do. Or at least that was the explanation Jake gave to him later on that same afternoon, when Kenny had bandaged a cut on his neck and discovered an even bigger problem.

  To this day, Kenny couldn’t remember when the boys officially moved in, but it seemed as though after that first day they’d never left.

  It had seemed right, he mused as he lit another cigarette and waited for the band to get their shit together onstage. He’d corralled them in a strip joint earlier that afternoon, attempting to get drunk and stupid, and he’d dragged them out and babysat them until they were ready to go on.

  The band members thought they’d been caught because someone turned them in, but in reality, it was because Kenny had what the Cajuns called the sight. Chris had it too, something Maggie’s mother had pronounced immediately upon seeing Chris seconds after he was born with one blue eye and one green.

  What they dubbed the psychic Cajun bullshit drove Nick and Jake crazy, although Chris had pretty much refused to use his after Maggie died. And if anyone could fight a mental force of nature, it would be Chris.

  Kenny disappeared, both mentally and physically, from the boys for a year after Maggie’s death—there on the surface, with phone calls and brief visits in between his band’s tours, but grief had taken its toll on him. In that year, his already fragile and wild sons had gone out of control, and he hadn’t been sure if he could bring them back.

  Some days, he wasn’t sure if he ever had. And recently he’d bee
n up half the night, pacing holes in the floor and worrying about all three of them. Because something just wasn’t right.

  “I think you need to stop worrying about us now,” Chris had announced not that long ago over dinner, as Kenny fought not to ask about the cast on Nick’s leg, or the two on Jake’s forearms or the heavy bandage on the side of Chris’s neck.

  “I think you need to get a hobby,” Nick said, and Kenny had wisely not brought up the fact that Nick had spent the better part of an hour turning the answering machine into some kind of detonating time bomb because he’d been bored.

  “I think you need to get laid,” Jake told him, his gray eyes steady and serious. Kenny had laughed and silently agreed that Jake was probably right.

  But still, he worried. Worried when Nick caught a cold or his voice rasped more than usual, worried when he noticed that Jake wasn’t sleeping well or that Chris needed to eat more and smoke less.

  He wondered if they’d ever settle down, but as each year passed and they climbed to new heights of crazy rather than calming down with age, he’d begun to think that there weren’t women born yet who could handle his boys for longer than a night. If that.

  He’d talk to them more tomorrow night. For now, he lit another cigarette and prepared to storm the damned stage to get the current group of boys who stood in front of him under control.

  CHAPTER

  2

  When Isabelle had announced her intentions to go back with Médecins Sans Frontières after the first of the year, her mother, in conjunction with Uncle Cal, had come up with a different plan for her.

  For the last month, she’d tried the normalcy her mother had so desperately wanted, tried to reconnect with the man she was supposed to marry that following year and went to work in a big city hospital practicing her specialty. But more often than not, she was called down to stitch up people with small cuts who didn’t want scars to mar their outward appearance. And she’d discovered that she and Daniel were practically strangers—and probably always had been.

  She was being smothered. There was too much comfort, too much sympathy, too much of everything she never wanted, and she’d known she couldn’t spend the rest of her life like this.

  Uncle Cal brought an opportunity to her attention, a way to do the work she wanted and be in a protected environment, and so here she was, doing consultant work for the Department of Defense and actually working in the Naval Hospital. Uncle Cal had pulled more than a few strings to allow her to actually practice on base, and she was grateful for the change.

  She touched the side that still twinged when it rained or when she twisted wrong or worked too long without rest. The orthopedist she saw assured her that would fade, and until then she thought of the pain as more of a badge of honor. A mark of survival.

  They’d caught Rafe, her bodyguard and protector for months while she’d worked in the Congo and its outlying regions. He’d kept her safe, and then, without warning, he’d betrayed her. For money.

  Even so, Uncle Cal had managed to convince her mother that the Navy would provide Isabelle with the best kind of protection from further incidents. Even the FBI had told her she would be better off working for an organization that didn’t put her in the middle of such dangerous places.

  In the meantime, she was ringing in the first week of the New Year with a never-ending parade of Marines on a training mission. Except they seemed to be doing less training and more hurting themselves than anything. She was on call nearly twenty-four seven, reminding her of her residency—without the support staff.

  “Think I’ll be all right for BUD/S training next month, Doc?” A Marine named Al, who seemed much too young to see any kind of combat, looked up at her expectantly. Shrapnel had caught him across the forehead, and the gash had bled like crazy.

  “You’ve got to tell me what BUD/S is first,” she said.

  “BUD/S is the first part of training for SEALs,” Al explained. “It’s supposed to be the hardest thing a man can do.”

  She doubted Jake would say that it was the hardest—not by a long shot—but she just nodded. “It sounds intense.”

  “Yeah—the first weeks are the worst, especially the part they call Hell Week. Once you pass that, you’re secure, but there’s still a lot more that goes into being a SEAL.”

  “And that’s what you want to do?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Al said, so earnestly she stifled a laugh.

  “You should be ready,” she said. “And I can make sure this doesn’t scar.”

  “S’okay if you can’t. Scars are fierce.”

  “Scars aren’t going to get you through BUD/S. You met any SEALs yet, Doc?” a Marine named Luke asked her. He’d already been in twice today. “There’s a group of them around this month. Just got back from a trip—they’re always good for morale.”

  “I’ve met a few,” she said. It had been twenty-four hours since she’d walked out of Jake’s office, and she’d been too busy to think much about their interaction.

  Today, she’d worn blue scrubs, her ID badge tied to a black string that hung around her neck and kept getting in the way. She’d pulled her hair back in a loose knot and she’d forgone makeup, but that didn’t seem to matter because she’d been asked out about fifteen times. Obviously, none of the Marines had a problem dating doctors.

  “You know they learn how to kill eighteen different ways with just their bare hands? Imagine what they can do with a weapon.” Luke was talking to Al now, revving the young man up with what Isabelle believed to be a cross between bullshit and fact, with the truth lying someplace in between. “Man, some of those guys are just legendary.”

  “You know anything about that guy Jake Hansen I keep hearing about?” Al asked.

  “Jake? He’s crazy. You’ll probably never meet him, Doc,” Luke told her. “He hates doctors. Usually gets one of the other guys to stitch him up or does it himself.”

  “Interesting,” she murmured.

  “See that file box? They say that entire thing is his.” Luke pointed to a scarred, khaki-colored, four drawer cabinet wedged into the corner of the infirmary.

  Isabelle had tried to open it earlier, but none of the keys the old doc had left behind fit the lock. “It sounds like you might need to fill me in, then—you know, in case he ever shows.”

  That was all she needed to say before the fish stories began, each man trying to outdo the other with what they knew about Jake.

  “They say that Jake went straight to BUD/S from boot camp. That never happens. I hear he joined the Navy when he was fifteen—best fake ID they’d ever seen, so they let him stay,” Al piped up.

  “He’s got to be the youngest guy to ever make the SEALs,” Luke said. “His BUD/S instructor was thrown out of the Navy for excessive torture during a SERE training session. Supposedly, he almost beat Jake to death, but he survived. Top in his class.”

  “SEALs are overrated. I could take him,” a Marine named Zeke on the periphery of the conversation, with a bandage around his head, called out, and that made Isabelle laugh out loud.

  “Supposedly, he’s got this really sick tat of an eagle on the back of his skull. Had to go all the way to Belize to get it.”

  “Sweet,” Al said, rubbed the back of his own head.

  “Hands down and stay still,” she said and he complied immediately. It felt good to have that command back in her tone.

  “He never sleeps. Ever. And, after one trip, he lost over half the blood in his body. He comes back to base and he’s on his feet after a few transfusions. For the rest of the week, he dragged around an IV pole and kept a Hep-Lock in his arm but he finished all his drills and made quals. The old doc didn’t appreciate that much,” Luke said.

  Isabelle had to fight to keep from rolling her eyes.

  “He sounds like a friggin’ machine. The man of steel,” Al said.

  “I hear he’s got to have it like three, four times a day. Sleeps with three women at once just to satisfy him,” Luke said, and tha
t was information she could’ve gone without knowing. She shot him a look but he just shrugged.

  “He’s definitely not the type to settle down and be domesticated,” one of the nurses, who’d come in to grab some antiseptic, agreed with an edge to her voice that made Isabelle bristle inwardly and wonder if that nurse had tried and failed herself.

  Isabelle didn’t have any desire to tame Jake Hansen. No, she wanted him wild as anything. She was sure that she was the woman who could handle him. She just wondered if he’d be able to reciprocate, and figured that now was as good a time as any to find out if he was strong enough for her.

  And then Zeke addressed his next comment right to her. “I’ve come to realize that most men who need this much hype never live up to it.”

  She had a strong feeling that didn’t apply to Jake, but she didn’t tell Zeke that. Instead, she eyed the old file cabinet and made a mental note to requisition a blowtorch and a pickax ASAP.

  “New doc’s been putting her hands in your drawers.”

  How Max, a captain with Naval Intelligence, managed to say shit like that with a straight face was beyond him, but Jake was still happy for the heads-up. It was one of the many reasons he’d planted the silent alarm inside the old filing cabinet in the first place.

  The old doc never looked in there, knowing that if a SEAL bothered to darken his doorstep it was because there was a bone sticking out somewhere and there wouldn’t be time to look through any file. The files in that cabinet were bogus, placed there years ago to satisfy the mass of curiosity seekers looking for the legend of Jake and his SEAL teammates or whatever shit they were feeding the young recruits this week.

  He hadn’t counted on them feeding it to young doctors too, but he guessed no one was immune to vast quantities of bullshit these days.