It had been nice to see Beau spontaneously jumping to his feet to cheer on the navy rugby team that afternoon, to see him elatedly high-fiving the stranger sitting on the other side of him in the stands, so involved in the match that he let down what little hair he had. But seeing him lying there with Immy did something more than merely please Kyla the way seeing him at the game had.
For just a split second the past and the present somehow merged in her mind, making it seem as if Immy was the baby that was lost so long ago, as if Beau was the Beau she used to know—and love—lying there with their own baby. As if she was looking into the life she’d fantasized them having together when she’d realized she was pregnant. When she’d written that letter to him.
And it was a sight that got to her. Touched her. Drew her in.
It was a scene she had to fight not to want to be a part of. Fight to keep herself from crawling onto that couch beside him to curl up against him, too, to wrap her arm around him and that baby at the same time...
But no sooner did that thought pass through her mind than she shoved it away.
This was now, not then! she reminded herself in no uncertain terms.
This was Immy, not their lost baby!
And everything had changed. They had changed.
What they’d had that summer was just a fleeting teenage romance, and she needed not to lose sight of that. They weren’t teenagers anymore. The feelings from that summer were long, long gone.
Now, no matter how attractive he was, he was wound too tightly for her. He was too domineering. The strength and steadfastness she’d admired in him as a boy might as well have been on steroids in the grown-up Beau. He was too unwavering. He needed troops to command and she wasn’t enlisting.
In all of her growing up years, her parents hadn’t told her what to do as much as he had this week, and she didn’t take well to it. She couldn’t imagine a whole life of his schedules and insistent suggestions and trying to whip her into military shape. She couldn’t imagine living with Mr. Rules-And-Regulations and having to negotiate for knickknacks forever.
And she’d drive him crazy, too, she told herself. Sometimes she had projects for school or report cards or paperwork sitting out for days. The clutter and mess didn’t bother her, but she had only to look around his shipshape house to know he wouldn’t be able to stand it.
Plus she had Immy to think of now. And while Kyla might not have a clear vision of how to raise her, she did know that she didn’t want any part of it to look like marine boot camp—which she had no doubt was what any kids raised by Beau were in for.
Beau was Mr. Hospital Corners. Mr. Efficiency. Mr. By-The-Book. And she wanted not one iota of that for herself, or for Immy, either.
What he needed, Kyla insisted to herself, was one of the military-looking women she’d seen at the rugby match. Several of them had clearly cast him glances and checked his ring finger. A few of them had gone on stealing glimpses of him even after realizing he was with her.
And while she’d wanted to scratch their eyes out, now she told herself that a woman like that was what Beau needed—Mrs. Hospital Corners, Mrs. Efficiency, Mrs. By-The-Book. Someone who thrived on regimentation and scheduling and order as much as he did. It would be a match made in heaven.
But her? She was exactly wrong for him.
And he was exactly wrong for her.
But to see him like that...
With a baby...
To think that there once was a baby of their own—hers and his...
She couldn’t help having pangs.
But they were pangs she worked to squelch the same way she resisted noticing his biceps or his pecs or his massive thighs or his great derriere or how his eyes got that soft, sweet look in them sometimes when Immy nuzzled into his amazing chest...
No! They weren’t right for each other and that was all there was to it, she told herself.
“Oh. Hey.”
Beau noticed her just then and his whispered greeting broke into her thoughts, jolting her out of them.
“Hey,” she whispered back, finally moving from the doorway into the family room.
Of course she wouldn’t let herself crawl onto the sofa with him, but she couldn’t keep from going to stand beside the couch to glance down at the sleeping child. She couldn’t keep from putting a hand on Immy’s tiny rump and connecting herself just a little to the two of them lying there.
“I got her to take most of her bottle,” Beau whispered.
“And probably already rinsed it and put it in the dishwasher,” Kyla muttered to herself in a futile effort to keep in mind that they just weren’t right for each other.
Despite how low her voice was he heard it and said, “No, it’s over there on the mantel. I was hoping to get her to take more of it. I didn’t, though. And she was still fussy and I didn’t know whether to put her in her bed like that or not. Somehow we ended up like this and I don’t know why, but it was the magic bullet.”
Kyla didn’t find that difficult to believe, not when she was also fighting some envy of Immy’s position along with everything else.
“I guess I should probably just try to put her to bed now and hope she stays asleep, huh?” he said then.
“Unless you want to stay that way from now until the middle-of-the-night feeding.” Because Kyla couldn’t imagine that the baby would alter things if she didn’t have to—certainly in that position Kyla wouldn’t.
“Okay, here goes,” Beau said.
Kyla took her own hand away as he slid the hand that was on the infant’s back up enough to brace her head and neck, too, and replaced Kyla’s hand with his other one to hold Immy tightly to him as he got up from the sofa.
“How’d we do?” he asked, craning his head in an attempt to see Immy’s face.
“Still asleep,” Kyla answered. “I’ll go up with you and make sure the bed is clear so you can just put her down.”
Beau nodded at that and Kyla led the way, taking a receiving blanket out of the crib once they’d reached it.
“Should she be wrapped up?” she asked Beau as he came up to the crib alongside her.
He shrugged. “Let’s not rock the boat. I’ll put her down and you cover her with the blanket. If she wakes up I’ll try the burrito-wrap thing.”
Kyla waited for him to carefully put Immy in the crib. Then she covered her with the lightweight blanket and—since Immy had remained asleep through the transfer—they left the nursery.
They both breathed a sigh of relief when they reached the hallway and no sounds of crying followed them.
“Okay. Dinner,” Beau said, still whispering even though they were headed back down the stairs. They’d both had hot dogs at the stadium, but that had been midafternoon. “Want the shepherd’s pie or shall we order something in?”
When they’d gotten home they’d found a note on the counter from his sister Jani—who apparently had a key and had been there while they were out. The note said that she’d brought them the pie, a salad and some rolls for dinner—all in the refrigerator—and some ice cream in the freezer for dessert.
“I’m fine with what Jani brought,” Kyla said. “I don’t cook much, so it’s a treat to have what your family makes.”
“Definitely better than MREs.”
“MREs?”
“Meals Ready to Eat—the military’s version of a sack lunch in combat. Not what you eat if you have any other choice. I’ve had more than my fair share, so I’m happy to have the home-cooked stuff, too—that part of civilian life doesn’t take any adjusting to.”
In the kitchen once again they surveyed what Jani had left and slipped into the rhythm they’d developed for meal preparation—Beau doing anything that required two hands and Kyla doing whatever could be done with one.
They ended up sitting across from each other in the breakfast nook with two plates of meat-and-vegetable-laden shepherd’s pie, a green salad dressed with what Beau said was Jani’s special blend of oil, vinegar and herbs, and butt
ered bread.
“I thought the memorial service was nice today,” Beau said as they started to eat. “Your cousin and her husband had a lot of friends.”
“I didn’t realize how many. But it was nice. There were even some funny parts—I didn’t know they met by Rachel crashing into Eddie’s car.”
“A new Lamborghini five minutes off the dealer’s lot—it must have been love at first sight for him to be able to forgive her for that.”
“That’s what Rachel always did say. Now I know why.”
“From what I remember of the memorial service for my family after the plane crash there weren’t any upbeat stories. It was all pretty serious. But I was only a little kid, so I might have missed something.”
“Everybody kept saying how sad it was that Immy would never know Eddie or Rachel, but at least she isn’t old enough to go through the kind of grief you must have,” Kyla observed. During their summer together they’d talked very little about anything but the present, so there was much she didn’t know about him. Before that and after it, too.
“She’ll wonder about them and be glad to have those pictures everyone brought,” Beau said with the voice of experience. “Whoever thought to suggest that to everyone must have realized it—and that whatever your cousin and her husband had themselves went with the fire. But, yeah, otherwise I’d say never knowing them might be easier for Immy. After the plane crash even the youngest of us still remembered our parents and our lives at home, and we all went through some stuff early on that Immy won’t have to.”
“Your grandmother had her hands full—ten grieving kids...”
“She did. And H.J. and Margaret and Louie, too.”
Kyla knew Margaret and Louie were the housekeeper and groundskeeper-maintenance man hired decades ago by the Camdens. They had ended up helping to raise the Camden grandchildren and were now considered members of the family. Kyla had met Margaret when she stopped by the house.
“We’d spent plenty of time at GiGi’s, so we were at home there,” Beau went on, “but it still wasn’t where we’d all lived. And we’d all lost our parents. Death is kind of a weird concept when you’re a kid—or at least it was for me. I didn’t tell anybody, but it took a long time for me to stop thinking that my mom and dad weren’t still just going to walk in the door like they did after a vacation. It took me a long time to stop thinking that everything would go back to the way it was. And I think I was eleven or twelve before I stopped thinking here and there that I’d heard one of their voices or that I’d seen one of them in a crowd.”
And she could tell that he hadn’t told anyone. He’d just carried it around with him. The way he seemed to do with whatever he was going through now, transitioning from the military to civilian life.
“I think it’s probably better that Immy won’t have that kind of grief to deal with,” Kyla said. “You seemed okay by that summer we met, though. Happy.”
“I was,” he agreed. “Especially since I knew I was getting into Annapolis.”
“Was it everything you wanted it to be?”
“It was,” he admitted as if he wasn’t sure he should.
“Was it all military this and military that or were there wild parties and fooling around like at regular college?”
He laughed. “That’s what yours was like?”
“I couldn’t afford to live on campus—I went to UCLA, but I had to commute, so it was mostly just going back and forth for classes.”
“Well, mine was mostly military this and military that,” he answered her question. “It was a combination of education and preparation for the service. Socializing happens, but there’s really not much time for it and too much of it is a distraction. Standards are high and hard to meet—I pretty much stuck to what I was there for.”
“But you met a lot of people...” she said, wondering about the female people he might have met.
“Sure,” he said, giving her nothing with that answer.
So she went a little further and said, “Girls?”
“A few—but there are a lot more men than women at USNA and in the Marines.”
“Anyone special?”
“No,” he said without having to think about it—something that pleased her. Until he said, “I did get pressured into taking my roommate’s sister to the Ring Dance because that’s a big deal and my friends wouldn’t let me go stag.”
“The Ring Dance? What’s that? You put on some kind of headgear and dance rings around tanks?”
He laughed. “Uh...no. The Ring Dance is all pomp and circumstance and ceremony—before it gets to the dancing and cutting loose. It’s more formal than a prom—even fancier gowns for the women, dress whites for midshipmen—”
“Midshipmen?”
“That’s what students are called—fourth class midshipmen are freshman, third class are sophomores, second class are juniors, first class is senior year. The Ring Dance is when second class midshipmen formally receive their class rings—an original design for every year since 1869. At the Ring Dance chaplains mix water from the seven seas, the rings are dipped in it and then presented as the symbol that you’re wedded to the navy. There aren’t any tanks involved.”
“And you went with your roommate’s sister?”
“Yeah. I’d hung out with her sometimes when she came to visit Trey—”
“Hung out, not dated?”
“No, just hung out. She was dying to go to the dance, though—it’s a huge social event and Trey’s family lived in Maryland, so Tracy knew all about it. Trey said it would be like a dream come true for her—”
“Just to go to the dance...not to go with you...” Kyla said, her tone laced with doubt because she couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t have been the real appeal.
Beau laughed again. “Just to go to the dance. Trey came from a long line of marines and going to the Ring Dance was as close to anything military that Tracy wanted to get.”
“So you didn’t date her after the dance, either?”
“I didn’t.”
“And then you went into the Marines,” Kyla said. “Was there much opportunity for dating then?”
He laughed once more but stared pointedly at her as he finished a mouthful of meat and gravy. Then he said, “We’re doing a dating history here? Is that something you really want to hear about?”
Kyla shrugged. As much as she didn’t want to hear about him being with anyone else, she was still too curious not to punish herself with the information. “It’s just that it occurred to me that—in the whole spectrum of things—we weren’t together for long. And we were kids. You’ve lived a lot since then and for all I know...” She almost said for all I know you met the love of your life, but she didn’t want to know if that was true, so instead she said, “...you could have been married and divorced. Two or three times.”
“Along with three deployments to the Middle East? That might have set some kind of record. But no, I’ve never been married or divorced.”
“But I’m not the last girl you were with.” The words came out before she’d thought about them and after hearing them, she wished she hadn’t said them.
But she had and she got an answer.
“No, you’re not the last girl I was with,” he said with a sort of kindness in his voice as if to cushion the blow. “I don’t suppose I was your one and only, either, but I’m not sure I want to know that.”
Kyla didn’t know why she was so driven to pursue a subject that was painful for her, but she was. So she said, “Was there something so serious that you don’t want to talk about it? Did you fall head over heels for a lady marine and lose her?”
“I lost people in combat who were important to me, but not romantically. There are some rules about who an officer can...get involved with, and I had an across-the-board don’t-mix-business-and-pleasure policy. I was never with a woman in the service. Well, when I was in the service, anyway...”
It was frustrating that he still wasn’t giving her any actual information a
nd that spurred her to challenge him. “So I was your one and only?”
His smile was sheepish. And indulgent. “In some ways,” he said under his breath before he finally gave her what she was trolling for. “There was a British war correspondent for a while—we met on base and I spent leaves and liberties with her when we could arrange it—once in London, she showed me around.”
That sounded sophisticated and cosmopolitan to Kyla, causing not only a rush of jealousy but also a low feeling of being terribly pedestrian and unworldly.
But things got better when Beau said, “Her name was Mary and we both knew that we were just passing time together. I was hardly in a situation to build a relationship and she was all about her career and following whatever story was juiciest. I was stationed in Helmand, in Afghanistan, at Camp Dwyer then and that was a hot spot, so she came through there pretty often. But eventually I went out into the field and when I came back to base—she just wasn’t there anymore. She hadn’t even left me a note saying goodbye. I had to ask around to find out where she’d gone and I never heard from her again.”
“It doesn’t sound like that bothered you too much,” Kyla said, wondering if he was just hiding it behind that marine stoicism.
But he merely shook his head. “It was a nice diversion when I had some downtime, but that was all. It wasn’t going anywhere long-term.”
“Did anything?”
He shook his head. “Wedded to the navy, remember? There was a nurse I spent some time with after taking shrapnel in the shoulder—I was sidelined a few months to have surgery to repair the damage. She was good company—a little aid and comfort to recover. But I had a job to do over there and that was where my energies went.”
“What about since you’ve been back?”
“Oh, well, yeah. I have been married and divorced two or three times since then...”
Kyla kicked him under the table for his sarcasm.
Her Baby and Her Beau Page 10
