Lon grinned. “If you’re going to get a sample from him, you’d better do it right now, while I’m here to hold him down.”
Davy frowned. “This is strictly voluntary. I’m not pressuring anybody. It’s a serious commitment that has nothing to do with the Navy.”
“That’s not what Lon meant.” Caleb halted in the act of pulling on his sport coat. “I hate needles. Won’t face one unless I absolutely have to. So yeah, you’d better stick me here and now, before I think about it.” Caleb unbuttoned the cuff of the sleeve he’d just buttoned and rolled up his sleeve.
Davy snapped on vinyl gloves. “I’ll do the blood draw now. Then you can fill out the paperwork. You know you have to pay for the test yourself?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Caleb took a seat and stretched his arm out on a table.
Davy snapped a tourniquet around Caleb’s bicep. Ropy veins stood out under the deep golden tan of his arms. Davy palpated a vein in his forearm. “You’re not going to faint on me are you?”
Caleb looked at the ceiling. “No. But I’m not going to watch, okay?”
“Because if you’re going to faint, it would be easier just to put you on the floor now.”
“Shut up, and get it the hell over with.”
“Do what he says.” Lon watched the proceedings with cool interest, arms crossed over his chest. “I had to threaten to write him up to get him to take his last set of vaccinations.”
“What are you doing?” Emmie asked, hoping to distract Caleb.
The men explained about Carmine, a SEAL recently diagnosed with leukemia.
“He’s getting chemo, which should buy him time,” Davy added, “but his only chance for a cure is a bone marrow transplant. All of his family have been tested, but no one in his family is a match.”
“So you don’t know whether you will match or not?”
“That’s right. It’s an odds thing. The more who volunteer to donate, the better the chances a match will be found. If not for Carmine, at least for someone. You doing okay?” he asked Caleb who had turned several shades paler under his tan.
“Do you have to be a SEAL to volunteer to be a marrow donor?”
“The samples will be sent to the National Donor Registry. Any healthy person between eighteen and fifty-five can donate.”
“All right. I’ll donate too.”
Davy smoothly withdrew the vial from Caleb’s vein and folded Caleb’s forearm up. “Don’t you need to think it over? This is a commitment. It’s not as serious as donating a kidney, in fact, for a healthy adult there’s little risk-but not no risk.”
“No time like the present.” One-handed, Emmie attempted to pull her blazer away from her shoulder and grunted in pain.
“Hey, I’ll help you-” Davy said.
“Sit still!” Caleb ordered Emmie. He threw down the cotton ball he’d been holding to the tiny puncture. “ I’ll help you with your jacket.”
In two steps he was by her side. He freed the jacket from her shoulder. “There. Now turn sideways and let your arm dangle behind you.” Rather than pushing the jacket down, he gently tugged on the cuff to free her arm.
Emmie knew her pale skin was revealing her blush to all. “It’s actually harder to get off than it is to get on.” She held out her arm. “You’ll have to roll up the blouse sleeve too,” she added apologetically.
The sensation of his warm fingers at her wrist, undoing the button, folding back the cuff, mesmerized her. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the sight of her bare forearm emerging under his long-fingered hands. With every roll of the cuff, his thumbs stroked the tender skin of her inner arm.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. His thumb lazily played across the crook of her elbow. “You don’t have to.”
“Um, sure,” Emmie had to wrench her mind away from his hands to remember what he was talking about- and devil that he was, he knew it! But his changeable hazel eyes, a gentle brown color right this minute, looked sincere. “I never realized that it was something just anybody could do. Needles don’t bother me. Now, if you were asking me to jump out of an airplane, that would be different.”
Caleb folded her sleeve one last turn past her elbow, but his hands didn’t leave her arm. “Nobody likes every part of what we do. Jax hates to jump.”
“ No! Really?” Emmie laughed in disbelief. “Did you know he made Pickett jump off a pier?”
Caleb’s mobile lips tucked sideways, causing Emmie to catalog yet another smile: the understatement-smile. “I heard about that.”
“She’s terrified of heights. She said that was when she knew she loved him.”
“Hey, Do- Lord!” Lon’s amused voice interrupted them. “If Davy’s going to do Emmie’s blood draw, you gotta let him get close to her.”
Chapter 9
Do- Lord rolled his truck to a stop in the driveway of Pickett’s mother’s house where the female half of the wedding party assembled to get dressed for the wedding.
“Uh- oh. Grace and Sarah Bea are already here,” Emmie said, looking at the cars parked there. “Fixing the cake took longer than I planned. Finding a minute out of their earshot to tell Pickett what we’ve done is going to be tricky.”
“I’ll tell Jax, just in case.”
Emmie turned to face Do-Lord, ignoring the pain twisting her upper body brought. “Thank you. I couldn’t have done it, even with two good arms. Once y’all were done, no one would ever guess the cake had been… altered.”
Now that the mission was accomplished, Emmie showed a playful mischievous side of her personality, and although she didn’t have much accent, her speech was peppered with southern colloquialisms. “You and Lon and Davy saved the day. But you know, y’all mustn’t breathe a word to anyone.”
“Don’t worry. Not being able to talk about what we do is a fact of life for a SEAL.”
“Pickett told me. She said most of the time you can’t say where you’ve been or what you did there. It must make you feel out of sync with the rest of the world.” Her wide eyes grew thoughtful. “It’s a hard way to live.”
What she said was true. SEALs tended to be insular, to socialize only with each other, for that reason. Only another SEAL could understand things they couldn’t put into words. Lately, with his terrible secret weighing upon him, a secret even another SEAL wouldn’t understand, he had felt out of sync even with them. The real world, the world of operations, was harsh and unforgiving. Any man who wasn’t one hundred percent on board with a mission endangered them all, and other SEALs were likely to be harsh in dealing with him. Hell, he agreed with them. He knew how they would feel about his lapse because it was how he felt.
The real world was a world closed to women. He’d enjoyed this afternoon with her. He’d enjoyed the respite of a couple of hours with her in a world outside the real one. She wasn’t unattractive. He once read that to people unable to perceive magic, fairies appeared as plai
n, colorless, negligible creatures. Some would say that was Emmie.
Not him. He liked the way her looks were composed of the simplest ingredients-magic that required no adornment. White skin so perfect it didn’t look real, wide blue eyes the color of honesty, and hair that sometimes wasn’t a color at all. It seemed to be made of skeins of light. He liked to watch thoughts flicker across her face. He was on the point of asking her what she was thinking when she sighed. “Well, I’d better go in. Someone has seen your truck by now.”
“Are you going to be okay?” He unhooked her seat belt and swung her knees around. He didn’t know why he asked that. Yes, he did. Turning Precious Cargo over was sometimes hard. Not usually, but sometimes under extreme conditions people showed how special, extraordinary, and courageous they were, and it could be hard to yield responsibility for caring for them.
He could get her in and out of a car without jolting or jarring her shoulder, but he didn’t trust anyone else would. She accepted his help now without comment. When he spread his hands around her tiny waist, she no longer tensed; instead, she leaned into him. He didn’t want to let her go once her feet touched the ground, he wanted to pull her closer.
He didn’t like the complexity of his reactions to this woman. He needed to get clear and stay clear about his objectives. Sure, it was a plus that he found her attractive. He wouldn’t have to fake his interest, not at all. He sank his fingers deeper into her soft-firm flesh and rubbed his thumbs across the feminine curve of her stomach. But he had to remember at all times he was on a mission, a private mission that had been too long coming.
He wondered if it was too soon to kiss her. She accepted his right to touch her, a right he was willing to bet she accorded few others. He could tip her head up, and he didn’t think she would stop him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a curtain on an upstairs window move. Reluctantly, he dropped his hands from her waist. Not now. He would wait until she showed him she wanted it.
Unless she took too long. He wanted the signs to be unmistakable that they belonged together and he had admittance to the family circle when she introduced him to Teague Calhoun.
“Where on earth have you been?” On the second floor landing, Pickett leaned over the polished balustrade of her mother’s two-story colonial. The same terry bathrobe Emmie remembered from their college days was clasped at the throat with one hand, but her golden curls were drawn up in a knot, both artless and sophisticated, and her makeup had been applied by a master. Emmie’s breath caught to see her friend looking as beautiful on the outside as Emmie already knew she was on the inside. “Grace is about to have a cow. You didn’t answer your cell phone. What happened to you?”
Still stunned by her friend’s beauty, her heart overflowed with love. Bemused by the thought that Do-Lord had been about to kiss her there in the driveway and confused because he hadn’t, her mind went blank. Emmie never had been able to lie worth a damn.
“We drove around for a while, then Emmie showed me how to get to the country club,” Do-Lord answered, placing a comradely hand on her shoulder. Now, why hadn’t she thought to say that? It was even the truth, if you didn’t count the parts that were left out. “Jax knew where we were. Haven’t you talked to him?”
Pickett’s peachy skin took on a coral tinge, then her eyes lit with her ever-ready humor. ‘We, um, we didn’t talk about Emmie.”
“Emmie, you’re finally here.” Grace, also in a bathrobe (only hers was silky pale blue with white piping on the man-tailored collar and cuffs) appeared from one of the bedrooms to stand beside Pickett. Her hair and makeup were also perfect, but then Grace always looked perfect. “Trish has already finished everyone else’s hair and makeup.” She lifted her wrist to check the diamond encrusted watch she wore. Grace was well-named. Unmarred by any trace of jerky impatience, the gesture was fluid and elegant, and unmistakably chiding.
An apology was clearly expected, but Emmie would choke on the words if she tried. She wasn’t sorry. Furthermore, it was Grace’s blind spot that had necessitated her actions. After they had finished with the cake, they’d been further delayed while Emmie sought out the country club’s chef. A plate of gluten-free food would appear at Pickett’s place at the reception.
Do- Lord’s fingers tightened on Emmie’s shoulder in a soft squeeze. “Let me be the one to apologize,” he urged her, as if he didn’t know hell would freeze over before the words passed her lips. Only she could see his eyes dancing with devil lights. To Grace he said, “We were enjoying ourselves and didn’t think about the time.”
He brushed a kiss across her temple-the second time he’d kissed her like that, and she knew no more what to think than the first time. “Go get beautiful. I’ll see you later.”
“You haven’t said a word since you walked in the door,” Pickett whispered as she herded Emmie ahead of her sisters toward their mother’s master suite. They had commandeered the humongous dressing area as the only space large enough to hold them all. “What’s going on?” “Tell you later,” Emmie whispered back as the Sessoms “girls,” Grace, Sarah Bea, and Lyle, crowded in behind her.
Pickett’s mother had been examining the back of her hair when they entered. She laid the hand mirror down. “I see you’ve located my prodigal, adopted daughter. All my girls together, and the Baby is getting married. Do you realize this is the last time we’ll be together like this?”
There was one of those little silences, no longer than an inhale, in which whole pages of things go unsaid. Whether accidentally or deliberately, Mary Cole Sessoms had omitted her unmarried daughter, Lyle, from consideration.
Lyle had never officially come out to her family. It was one of those things everyone knew and no one talked about. Lyle was next in age to Pickett, and maybe because so many years separated them from their older sisters, Grace and Sarah Bea, she and Pickett were closer to each other. As a result, in private (and with Emmie) Lyle and Pickett had discussed Lyle’s lifestyle. Pickett had urged Lyle more than once to assert her right to be who she was. Lyle, though, chose to live in New York City rather than face sticky moments-like this one- over and over.
Emmie with her insider-outsider point of view could tell that everyone did love Lyle as she was, and in their own way, showed their acceptance. They politely inquired about Lyle’s significant others, and had Lyle been involved with anyone at present, would have invited her to be part of this wedding. On the other hand, no one saw Lyle’s relationships as cause for celebration. Whenever Emmie was invited to a family party, the inviter always added, “And isn’t there a nice boy you’d like to bring with you?” Nobody asked Lyle whether she wanted to bring a nice girl.
Pickett got that I’m taking over now
look in her eyes. Uh-oh. When Pickett looked like that, she was getting ready to set people straight. Emmie had seen it enough times to read it easily, but she wasn’t sure how often her family had. As she’d told Caleb, Pickett didn’t assert herself around her family. When she disagreed, she subtly moved away from them.
“Don’t y’all wish,” she asked brightly, “same-sex unions were legal in North Carolina, and we could all come together like this for Lyle?”
Emmie didn’t think Pickett’s relatives wished anything of the kind. Their denomination was not so vocally anti-gay as some, but conservatism in the area ran deep. They had come to terms with the fact that Lyle would never marry, and to the community, they presented a united front of support. That might be as far as they could go.
“I wish,” said Mary Cole in the tone of someone settling an argument, “for all my daughters to be happy. It isn’t possible to treat all one’s children the same. Each child is different and has different needs.”
“Then trust me. I’m happy the way I am! I don’t want to get married to anyone. Pickett’s starry-eyed right this minute-she doesn’t know what she’s getting into.”
“Yes, I do,” objected Pickett.
As one, all her sisters and her mother turned to her. “ No, you don’t,” they said in unison.
Everyone laughed longer and harder than the moment called for. Laughed until they had to grab tissues. Mary Cole cautiously dabbed under her eyes then looked up to catch Pickett’s laughing but slightly affronted expression. “Oh honey, we’re not doubting your competence.
Sealed with a promise Page 10
