by Tawny Weber
“Well, there’s not a whole lot of jobs in Bedford requiring a sniper.” He shrugged. “I’m trained to fight. To perform covert operations and carry out military strategies. Believe it or not, those skills aren’t big moneymakers in the civilian world.”
“But they are skills you love. Skills you’re proud of.” She lifted both hands in a classic WTF gesture. “So why are you throwing them away to pour drinks for drunks?”
Brody ground his teeth together to keep the cusswords from spewing out. Yeah. She was aces when it came to the well-aimed shot. This one didn’t hit his ego, though. It went straight for the gut.
What a deal. Giving up a life of excitement, adrenaline and power to schlep booze for drunks. Traveling the world to hole up in the town he’d spent most of his life trying to escape. But that was his problem. And he was willing to do it if it meant a life with Genna.
Why was she pushing this? Most women, outside the frog hogs as the guys called the SEAL groupies, wanted a guy who was around. Who was around for Friday night dates, holidays and more days in the month than he was gone.
Maybe she just didn’t get it.
“Look, this is a good thing. You should be happy,” he said, despite the fact that she appeared about as far from that as he’d ever seen her. “This means I’m sticking around. You get that, right? That I’m here, that we can be together. No deployment, no long missions, no part of my life locked up and labeled classified.”
Her eyes softened and some of the tension left her posture. For a second, he thought he had her. But Brody knew better than to relax.
“I want to be with you,” she said, her words soft and sweet to match her smile. She stepped forward, taking his hands in hers and lifting one to her cheek.
Brody wasn’t a mushy kind of guy. But that move, it slayed him. Especially when she was looking up at him as though he was her whole world and she was ready to love every second of it.
Then, with a quick brush of her lips over his knuckles, she released him and shook her head.
“You can’t do it, though. You can’t quit being who you are. You won’t be happy.”
“I’d be with you. That’d make me happy.” Happy enough, he promised himself. The two of them building on what they had. That’d be enough. He’d make it enough.
Her eyes so bright they lit up even the dim dust of the bar, Genna smiled. But there was a line between her brows that got deeper as her smile faded. Slowly, she shook her head.
“I want to be with you. So much. I love you,” she finally said. Her words sent a thrill through Brody. Not because they were some he’d rarely heard in his life. But because they came from her. And they meant everything.
“But you can’t put that on me. I can’t be the reason you leave the military. I can’t fill the hole it’s going to leave in your life.”
“I’m not leaving because of you.”
“But you’re not leaving because you want to.”
Brody scrubbed his hands over his face. God, this was stupid. Why the hell was she arguing with him? For a brief second, he missed the navy so much it hurt. For no other reason than in the navy, when someone issued an order or made a decision, everyone shut the hell up and accepted it.
“Look, I’ve made up my mind. I’m through. I can’t be a SEAL anymore. And if I can’t be a SEAL, I won’t serve.” He gestured to the bar. “This is a job. It’s honest work and will pay the bills until I figure out what I want to do.”
Honest work to pay the bills. It took Brody a moment to figure out why the words tasted so bitter. Then he remembered his father yelling them at his mother. Every argument they had over his drinking, his living at the bar, had ended with that statement.
Apparently they sounded just as good to Genna as they did to him.
“So this is it?” The wave of her hand was more a slap at the bar than an encompassing gesture. “Your future? Tending bar, holing up in that dingy apartment filled with ugly memories and despair?”
“Leon already rented out the dingy apartment. I figured I’d live with you.” Clearly not in a joking mood, she just hissed. So he shrugged and amended that to, “Or in the guesthouse behind my grandmother’s.”
Her glare was just as threatening as an AK-47, making it clear she wasn’t interested in smart-ass responses.
Okay, fine. She wanted the truth, she could find a way to deal with it.
“My future was being a navy SEAL. I worked my ass off for that, Genna. I trained for it, I lived it, I breathed it. I was it. And now I’m not.” Brody glared right back, hating that she was forcing him to say the words aloud. “So excuse me if I make the best of the lousy hand I’ve been dealt.”
She gave him a long look, then slowly nodded.
The vicious knots of tension gripping Brody’s gut eased a little. Good. Maybe now she’d let it go.
“You don’t have to take this deal. You have plenty of other options, including returning to duty.”
Why? He wanted to drop his head into his hands and give it a good shake. Why did he ever believe she’d take the easy path? The one that tidily avoided all that emotional crap.
“What in the hell do you know about it?”
“Blake and Alexia came to see me earlier,” she said. “I know your friend said the surgeon cleared you to go back to the navy. That the decision to leave the SEALs was yours.”
If she’d hauled an Uzi from under her skirt and shot him, he couldn’t have been more stunned.
Blake and Alexia had been in Bedford? Specifically to visit Genna, obviously. What the hell? Since when was it the lieutenant’s job to play retention officer? Why did he care? Didn’t he realize the team was better off this way? That any team was better off with a solid group of dependable men?
Brody didn’t let any of that show on his face, though.
Any sign of weakness, of surprise, and she’d never let it go.
“Landon was right. It’s my decision. And I decided to stay here.”
“So... What? You’re just going to spend the rest of your life here at Slims, pouring drinks and hiding from life? You really are taking Brian’s place, aren’t you?”
Her implication was like a slap to the face. He wasn’t his old man. He wasn’t a bitter, angry asshole who loved his booze more than anything else in his life.
He was just a bitter, angry asshole.
“I don’t drink.” Brody almost rolled his eyes at that stupid statement. He was really hitting the bottom of the barrel on pathetic now.
“No? Why not?”
“My body is a military machine. A tool for Uncle Sam. You don’t take care of your tools, they don’t do the job they’re supposed to. Alcohol dulls the senses, it slows reaction times. I’m not messing up hours of intense training for a cheap buzz.”
His words trailed off as he realized he was speaking in the present tense. But his body wasn’t finely tuned anymore. And his mind was jacked-up trash.
That realization crashed down on him along with the full impact of how hard he’d worked, how long he’d striven to be the best, to finally be someone people admired. Gone.
All fucking gone.
Brody didn’t even realize he’d grabbed the whiskey bottle until the scent of Jim Beam hit him.
His eyes cut to Genna’s.
Instead of the appreciation and understanding he’d grown used to seeing in those warm blue depths, this time there was contempt.
His gaze cut away, focusing on the whiskey hitting a dingy glass.
“Well,” she said quietly. “I guess you have made your decision. You’re going to turn your back on a career you apparently loved. One you’re so good at, the president of the United States acknowledged you. One you’ve made such a difference in, the mayor of Bedford is throwing an event in your honor.”
Was she still harping on that? The entire team was up for the Silver Star, not just him. For the good and the bad, it was always the team. He wasn’t a hero. And he wasn’t a part of the team anymore.
“I told you from the beginning, I’m not doing that damned event. I’m not a windup toy sailor to be paraded back and forth for someone else’s ego.”
She threw both hands in the air, giving him an exasperated look.
“This isn’t about ego, Brody. It’s about you accepting your due. It’s about you being treated with the respect you deserve from a town that sucked at giving it to you before.”
Respect?
For what?
If they knew the truth, everyone in town would see that he was the same loser they’d always judged him to be. The only one under any illusions was Genna.
“I’m not a damned hero. I’m just a guy trying to make a life here so we can be together. You don’t want people to know you’re dating a badass, that’s your issue. If you don’t know who I am, if you can’t accept me for what I am, fine. But quit trying to make me into something I’m not to soothe your own ego.”
The look of shocked misery on her face made Brody want to throw himself on an IED. Crap. He shoved both hands through his hair, totally at a loss. He didn’t want to hurt Genna. But neither did he want to defend his decision. Because, as everyone in this room clearly knew, it was a lousy one. But he wasn’t changing his mind. He wasn’t fit to be a SEAL. And if he couldn’t be a SEAL, he wasn’t going to serve.
With that same sass he’d always admired, Genna took a deep breath and shook her head.
“The man I know, the man I’ve had a crush on since I was seventeen, the man I fell in love with? He’s a hero. He’s a badass with a miserable history. A man who overcame adversity, an abusive home and a knife in the gut to make something of himself. Something to be proud of. If that’s not a hero, I don’t know what is.”
She sniffed, took a shaky breath, then shook her head again as if she were trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong. “And now look at you. You’re what? Throwing it all away because you are having identity issues. It’s not because of me, Brody. Don’t you dare pin this on me.”
“Identity issues?” he sneered, wondering just how long she’d spent with Alexia. That shrink talk was apparently contagious.
“That’s what I’d call it,” she shot back. “You’re either the guy who turns his back on his past to be a big bad SEAL, a hero with no ties to anyone or anything. Or you’re the badass bad boy from the wrong side of town, the son of the drunk who lets the past limit his potential and shape his every decision.”
Holy crap. Brody shook his head, wondering if Alexia had dropped off a psych profile to go with her contagious talk.
“You’ve got it all figured out?” he mused, anger wrapped around him so tight he felt that he was suffocating. “And, what? If I’d returned to the SEALs, or even to the navy, you’d have stood by me? Like you’d give up your golden life here as the pampered princess or walked away from your happy new business to live on base. For me? Yeah. Right.”
For just a second, her chin trembled. Then she lifted it high and gave him an arch look.
“I guess we’ll never know, will we? But for the record, yes. I’d have stood by you, whatever your decision. If you talked to me, and were honest about what you wanted, I’d have done anything for you. Stay here, hand out fliers for this lousy bar. Or follow you all over the world, waiting while you defended our country. I’d even built my happy new business around the idea of being portable, of doing it from anywhere. So I could be with you.”
A single tear slid down her cheek, glistening in the dim light like a diamond.
“But then, you never asked. You decided to destroy your life instead.” With that and an ugly look at the glass in his hand, she turned on her heel and sashayed out.
Not stormed or stomped. Nope, not Genna. She knew exactly how to hit him where it hurt, so she took her time, hips swinging and head held high.
Wrapped in bitterness, he watched her go. She shoved the door open, letting a blinding beam of sunshine into the bar before it slammed closed with a bang that ricocheted through the room. Leaving him in the dark.
Brody stared at the door for a long second.
Then, damning his entire life to hell, he tossed back the whiskey in a single gulp.
* * *
YOU’D THINK IF A steady diet of cookies and sex was incredible, bingeing on just cookies to get over not having the sex would at least be okay.
Instead, it was rotten, sucky and miserable.
Genna stared at the pink polka-dotted fuzziness of her socks, one crossed over the other on the coffee table strewn with cookie crumbs, candy wrappers and an empty box of tissues.
What a cliché. Could she be any more pathetic? At least she hadn’t given in to the urge to call friends to join her in the pity-fest.
Nope. This was not a side of herself she wanted to share. Or even admit.
As if on cue, her doorbell rang.
Genna sighed, shifting her feet off the coffee table and tucking them under her hip as she curled into a ball on the couch.
For three days, every time someone came to the door, she’d wiped her face, jumped up and run to see if it was Brody.
It never was.
Whoever it was this time, they’d go away.
“Genna? Can we talk?”
Unless they had their own key.
“I was worried about you.”
Too tired to even get mad, she shifted her head but didn’t lift it off the pillow.
“Not now, Dad.”
“Your mom plans to come over this afternoon.”
Genna sat up so fast her head spun. Blinking away the dizziness, she plastered on a cheerful look and brushed sugar off the knee of her sweatpants.
“I’m fine. Let Mom know you saw me and nothing is wrong. I was just taking a nap.”
Standing in front of her now, her father scanned the littered table and gave a contemplative nod.
“Yeah. Those sugar crashes get ugly without a nap.” Then, looking unsure for the first time Genna had ever seen, he offered a hesitant smile. “Or a hug from Dad?”
Her lips trembled and her eyes filled.
Before Genna could say yes or no, he was there. As he’d always been. With a hug and a strong shoulder. A solid wall she could depend on. Whether she wanted to or not.
He didn’t say a word, though. No lecture. No I told you so’s. Just a hug.
Genna burst into tears.
He let her cry it out, grabbing napkins when he saw the tissue box was empty. He patted her back. He made sympathetic murmurs. She heard his teeth grinding at one point. But he didn’t say a word.
Finally, whether because she was cried out or because she was worried keeping his opinion to himself was going to put her father into dentures, she pulled herself together.
“I yelled at Brody,” she said quietly.
“Did he deserve to be yelled at?”
Genna frowned, peering through swollen eyes at the man next to her. He looked like her father. He sounded like her father. He even smelled like him. But this was where her father would be offering up lectures and realigning her life to suit his vision.
Instead, he was watching her patiently. Waiting for her to respond.
Wow. Maybe they’d both grown up.
“I don’t know if he deserved what I yelled,” she confessed. “But I hated seeing him at Slims.”
“What the hell were you doing at Slims? More to the point, what the hell is he doing there?” There he was, her normal father. His anger made her smile.
“Brody’s working there.”
“Why? He’s got a job. He’s a SEAL.”
“He’s quitting.”
Genna waited.
But her father didn’t explode. He didn’t rant about losers and how he’d always been right. Instead he took a deep breath, which did nothing to clear away his frown, and nodded.
“That’s why you yelled at him.”
“Yep.”
She waited for the interrogation. She saw a million questions in his eyes. But he said nothing. He just waited, letting her call the s
hots.
She wasn’t sure she knew how. It was a little mind-boggling.
“You know, I’ve dreamed of him coming back for years,” she said. “I never thought it’d really happen. It was one of those ‘prince on a white steed sweeping in to save me from a life of blah’ things.”
“That’s a lot to put on someone,” her father said quietly. “As someone recently pointed out to me, we can’t expect others to fill the empty places in our lives. That’s something we have to figure out how to do on our own.”
“I didn’t have holes in my life,” she said automatically. At her father’s arch look, she sighed and shrugged. “Okay, so I wasn’t happy. But it’s not like I was sitting here stewing in misery, waiting for Brody to save me.”
“Why did you wait until he was back to stand up for yourself and the things you really wanted then?”
Because it wasn’t until she was with Brody again that she’d realized how much of herself she’d let go over the years. With him, she felt strong and clever and able to face any challenge. With him she felt safe. Like whatever happened, she could handle it.
Because he was her hero.
So instead of making him feel all those same things, she’d yelled at him, attacked his choices and all but called him a loser like his father. She’d tried to railroad him into doing what she thought was best, then had thrown a heavy dose of guilt on top of that just to make sure he got the message.
Her stomach churned. She swallowed hard to keep the cookies from making a reappearance.
Brody hadn’t pushed her into her decisions. He hadn’t nagged—granted, the idea of Brody Lane putting together enough words at one time to be considered nagging was strange. He’d just listened to her and let her figure it out for herself.
“I ruined everything,” she said quietly, staring at her hands as if the reasons were written there somewhere. “I figured I knew what was best for him, and I tried to force him to do it, despite his own feelings.”
“You had to get something from me besides your good looks,” he said with a sympathetic expression.
Genna gave a shaky smile. Then she sighed.
“What do I do?”
For a second, her father’s eyes lit with a controlling gleam. Then he banked it and shook his head.
