“Do you need an abacus?” she demanded when she couldn’t stand it anymore. I mean, really?
He shook his head. “Do people still use those?”
“A calculator then?”
“Look,” he said, rolling his eyes like she was the insane one. She was so close to whacking him upside the head that she had to recross her arms. “All I can say for sure is the number is more than you can count on your fingers and toes. But less than the population of Miami.”
“Gross!” She curled her lip.
“Hey!” he barked in affront. “I thought you said slut-shaming went out in the nineties.”
“Sorry.” She held up a hand. “You’re absolutely right. It’s not my place to judge. Just…” She wrinkled her nose. “Are you…um…up to date on all your shots?”
The look he gave her was withering. “I’m not a dog.”
“Well, that’s obviously not true,” she muttered. “You’re a horndog.” And then a thought occurred. “Or is it somethin’ else? Are you a…” She glanced around as if worried someone might be listening in before lowering her voice. “Are you a sex addict? Are you undergoin’ treatment? Is that why you—”
“I’m not a sex addict!” he whispered impatiently.
She turned her head and narrowed her eyes. “How can you be sure? Have you ever consulted a professional?”
He blew out a huge, windy sigh and she could tell he was hanging on to his patience by a thin, red hair. “I am not a sex addict,” he insisted. “Do I enjoy sex? Undoubtedly. But I don’t have to have it. In fact, there were times when I was away on long missions that I went months without it.”
“Whole months?” she stressed sarcastically. “Wow! I think the Catholic Church might want to sign you up for an honorary priesthood. Whole months!”
“And I know I don’t need shots ’cause the Navy tested us. And also because I’ve always been extremely careful,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “No glove, no love, as they say.”
“Who says that?”
“I don’t know!” His exasperation was showing. Join the club. “Everyone!”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so. And the reason I’ve had so many sexual partners is ’cause I’m a healthy thirty-four-year-old man with a healthy thirty-four-year-old man’s appetites who has refused to get into romantic entanglements. Which means I’m relegated to one-night stands and brief repeat performances with women who share my take on the whole sex-versus-relationship thing.”
When she didn’t respond, simply because she wasn’t sure how to respond—she was still trying to wrap her mind around Mr. Casanova here and whether she was shocked, offended, impressed, or what—he sighed and added, “You’re the first woman I’ve been friends with, Maddy. And I wanna keep you as a friend. The first thing I do in the mornings is check my email, and it’s the last thing I do at night. I look forward to our talks, our jokes, our end-of-day wrap-ups. Hell, I even like our arguments.”
Warmth spread in her belly like the hot toddies her daddy liked to sip at Christmastime. “Since when do we argue?”
“Uh, every time you try to convince me Silence of the Lambs should rank higher than Shawshank Redemption in a tally of the one hundred greatest movies of all time.”
“Excuse me,” she said, immediately distracted by the old disagreement. “But Silence of the Lambs won five Academy Awards. How many did Shawshank Redemption win?”
“It was nominated for seven.”
“Yes,” she allowed. “But how many did it win?”
“You cannot base the merits of a movie simply on the number of awards it—” He shook his head and karate chopped the air. “Never mind. My point is I like you, Maddy. I know I’m repeating myself, but I’m doing it because I don’t think you fully understand how huge it is for me to say that. I like you. So no matter how much I want you, no matter how much I dream about screwing your brains out”—That sounds good; let’s do that—“I refuse to do anything about it because I value your friendship more than I want another hot roll in the hay.”
She was missing something. The pieces were there, but she had yet to put the puzzle together. “I don’t understand. Why can’t we do both? Why can’t we be friends and screw each other’s brains out? Isn’t that how most—”
“’Cause you’re gonna want something more than that. You’re gonna want a relationship.” He said the word like it was foul. “And I’m not gonna give it to you. Ever. I’ll never be your boyfriend, much less anything more.”
Wow. And there it was. The truth. Finally.
You asked for it, her conscience reminded her.
Yes. Yes, she had. Which proved she was an idiot.
A hollow feeling opened up inside her, yawning and stretching, filling her up and emptying her out at the same time. Not wanting him to see how off balance she was, she said flippantly, “Well…when you put it that way, I guess I see your point.”
He blinked at her for a full five seconds. Then the tension in his shoulders relaxed. “So,” he said, “friends then?”
She pasted on a false smile. “Friends,” she agreed, extending her hand.
He looked down at her offering like it might be a turd floating in his cereal. But after a moment’s hesitation, he grasped her fingers in his warm palm.
The second he did, she understood his reluctance. Sparks, baby. Huge, massive, immediate sparks that ignited her blood and dizzied her brain. He quickly released her hand, and the skin on her palm tingled with phantom sensation.
“Good thing this friendship of ours is usually separated by the Gulf of Mexico, am I right?” he joked, once again leaning against the lighthouse, resuming his nonchalant stance, arms crossed, one knee bent.
“I guess so,” she managed even though she was reeling from his recent revelations.
Chapter 16
9:10 p.m.…
“So how are you doing, friend?” Bran stressed the last word.
“Don’t overdo it,” Maddy warned. She propped her back against the cool, black metal of the lighthouse’s facade and mimicked his stance by pressing one foot against the base. She covertly flattened a hand to her chest, hoping to push closed the black hole opening inside her and swallowing all the dreams—pipe dreams, apparently—she’d had for the past three months.
It didn’t work. Which forced her to fall back on her most tried-and-true method of self-preservation: humor. “I’m still tryin’ to get over my disappointment that you’re not goin’ to let me touch your pickle.”
He swallowed like the thought of her hands on him caused his throat to close up. Then he managed to play along. “Never refer to a man’s package as a pickle. It brings to mind a baby gherkin, and that’s not at all flattering.”
“Sausage then,” she countered.
A muscle started ticking in his jaw, and any humor he’d tried to portray drained from his face. Was she completely evil to take delight in torturing him? Probably. But she couldn’t stop herself. As he’d told one of the masked gunmen, Tit for tat, dicksmack. If she was going to be miserable because he had some ridiculous standing rule about relationships, if she was going to be denied the joy of what could be between them if only he weren’t such a confounding idiot, he needed to suffer a little too. Fair is fair.
“Don’t say sausage either,” he grumbled.
“Okay,” she agreed. “I’m willin’ to allow for kielbasa, but anything bigger than that and you’re just foolin’ yourself.”
“Maddy,” he groaned, adjusting his stance. When her eyes pinged down to the front of his shorts, she realized all this naming of his nether region had caused the area to perk up. And maybe kielbasa was the best comparison.
Oh! How she longed to find out for herself.
But he didn’t do relationships. And she didn’t do casual sex. So they’d reached an impasse. Or at least sh
e thought they had. Then an idea began to gestate. A scary, crazy, sort of…intriguing idea. With its birth, the emptiness inside her shrank.
“Fine,” she told Bran, her mind racing over possibilities. “No more talk of your man meat or the fact that I was lookin’ forward to—”
He lifted a hand. “Stop right there.”
“You’re no fun,” she declared.
“And you’re relentlessly wicked,” he countered.
“I’ll get you, my pretty,” she cackled, mimicking the Wicked Witch of the West. “And your little dog too!” Only, in her mind, she decided that dog was a euphemism for his pickle. His sausage. His kielbasa.
He grinned at her, having no idea of the devilish thoughts spinning through her brain. Then his expression turned serious. “How are you, Maddy? Really. How are you holding up? ’Cause I know you were just starting to get over the hijacking on your father’s yacht. Is this gonna set you back?”
Okay, so apparently fun time was over. She could have dodged the question and kept up the lark, but they’d never been anything but forthright with each other.
“Who knows?” She sighed. “I didn’t expect to experience such an aftershock three months ago. I thought I was okay and then bam! The nightmares and the cold sweats started. So…” She shrugged. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.”
“But for right now?”
“I’m okay.” When he lifted an eyebrow, she tossed her hands in the air. “What can I say? I feel like I woke up this mornin’, stepped in quicksand, then fought my way free only to have a two-ton anvil land on my head. I’m tired. The kind that can’t be fixed with sleep. The kind that’s bone deep. The kind that comes when you realize so many people are willin’ to do bad things for power or money or…or…whatever.”
He let his head fall back against the lighthouse. It made a soft bong-ing sound when it hit the metal. “It’s a cruel world.”
She glanced at his perfect profile. “Meanin’ a cruel world begets cruel men?”
“And cruel women.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Are you tryin’ to tell me somethin’?”
He snorted. “Babe, there isn’t a cruel bone in your whole body. Now, sarcastic bones? Ball-busting bones? You’re lousy with those.”
“I don’t know about that,” she admitted, turning to stare out at the dark waves. The moon kissed their peaks, making them shimmer in the light. Somewhere out there were the last two men who had tried to do wrong here tonight. “After the hijacking three months ago, I feel like a poisonous seed was planted inside me and now it’s grown into a bloodthirsty tree.” When he turned to her, she went on. “I wasn’t sorry to see those men killed tonight. And I was sorry when those last two got away. Surely that speaks of cruelty.”
“Nah. You’re just human. There’s a difference.”
“I’m not sure I see it.”
He pursed his lips as if trying to arrange his thoughts. Finally, he said, “A cruel person is violent to achieve some self-serving end or to satisfy some sadistic need to inflict pain on another. Resorting to violence to defend yourself or those who are depending on you to defend them, wishing to put a period on a man’s life to make sure he doesn’t put a period on yours, is simply human.”
The way he said it, with such conviction, suddenly reminded her of how he’d behaved toward the masked men during the second standoff. Baiting them almost as if he wanted them to give him a reason to pull his trigger.
“And which one are you?” she asked, absently picking at the splinter in the base of her thumb. “Cruel or simply human?”
“I’m both.”
The quick way he answered made her chin jerk back. Then, she thought about it. “I reckon all the men in your line of work…uh…previous line of work probably feel that way after a time.”
He shrugged one large shoulder. “Maybe. But I was born that way, not made that way by good ol’ Uncle Sam.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I inherited my cruel streak from my father.” His eyes were lazy and half-lidded in the shadow of the lighthouse; nothing moved on him but the hair across his brow when a soft breeze decided to ruffle it. But she knew he was watching her reaction intently. “It’s stamped into my DNA,” he finished.
She swallowed, careful to keep her expression calm. After the hundreds of emails, she would have said she knew Bran. But she was beginning to realize she’d just scratched the surface of him. And right now he was showing her what lay underneath all the charm and wit and swagger.
Inherited my cruel streak from my father…
It could mean so many things.
“It’s funny,” he said, but there was no humor in his voice. “I have this wonderful life and all these friends who are more than friends, they’re family, ’cause I chose to become a SEAL. And I chose to become a SEAL because of him, that rotten, brutal bastard. So, it’s like he’s the alpha and omega of my life. Responsible for all the bad shit and all the good shit too.”
Maddy didn’t know what to do with her hands. If she kept picking at her splinter, she might dig a hole through her hand. And she didn’t dare reach for him. Not when his casual stance belied the tension running through him. She thought if she cocked an ear, she might hear the gentle hum of him, like he was a recently plucked piano wire. She settled on simply tucking her fingers back into her pockets.
“I thought you told me you became a SEAL because you worked on that fishin’ boat in high school and you fell in love with the ocean,” she said, then grimaced, wanting to grab all her words and shove them back into her mouth. Here he was, opening himself up, and she was…what? Nitpicking details?
Well done, Maddy, you dimwit. Jeez.
“I joined the Navy ’cause I loved the ocean,” he corrected. “I became a SEAL because of the meanness in me, the violence in me. It needed an outlet. And I figured if I had to be Donny Pallidino’s kid”—he bit off the name like uttering it aloud was offensive—“the least I could do was try to make something good come out of it.”
She couldn’t stand it anymore. “What…” She stopped, feeling like she was teetering on the precipice of something huge and dark and dangerous. And then she did what she’d been doing her whole life. She leaped. “What did he do to you, Bran?”
* * *
9:15 p.m.…
Sometimes you hafta let the blow fall by degrees…
Bran had heard that somewhere once. At the time, he thought it was good advice. But now, looking at Maddy, at her big, sympathetic eyes, he knew it was better to let the hammer come down all at once. One fatal blow that would obliterate any illusions she had about him.
Earlier, behind the gunpowder magazine house, she’d caught a glimpse. He saw it in her eyes. The fear. The burgeoning recognition of what was in him. Now it was time to pull back the curtain completely and show her the reality behind the Not-So-Great-and-Powerful Oz.
“Except for once, he didn’t do a damned thing to me,” he said. “My mother always made sure of that. But he beat the shit outta her on a fairly regular basis.”
“Oh, Bran.” Maddy’s hand landed on his arm. At first contact, a zing of electricity shot up his spine. Lightning strike from the clear blue sky. She’s got that right. “I…” She swallowed and shook her head. “I’m so sorry.”
He squeezed her fingers before gently removing her hand from his arm. He couldn’t think when she touched him. And he needed to think. He needed to make her understand why he was the way he was. Why he couldn’t give her what she wanted.
“It’s okay. No, really,” he assured her when she vigorously shook her head. “Like I said, my past brought me to my present. And my present is pretty spectacular. I have friends and a home and”—he looked at her—“friends,” he repeated.
And all those feelings he had for her that went beyond friendship and lust? Well, he’d just keep th
em to himself. Keep them locked away safe and sound where he could take them out and cherish them during those times he was alone and quiet. During those times when he allowed himself to think about, to dream about…what if?
She nodded her understanding, her expression sad. “Is that why you’ve kept women at arm’s length? Because you’re afraid of letting anyone close, afraid if you do you’ll become like your father?”
Afraid I’ll become like my father? Babe, I already am like my father.
“Don’t delude yourself, Maddy. I’ve kept women at arm’s length because that’s exactly where I want them.”
She searched his face, her gray eyes reflecting the moonlight bouncing off the waves. When she reached up to smooth a lock of hair back from his forehead, he stilled and held his breath. But her touch was featherlight. And then it was gone.
“And not wantin’ anything more…you don’t think that has something to do with what you think is stamped into your DNA?” Her voice was low and husky, perhaps a bit beseeching.
The truth is I was never even tempted. Not until you… “Unquestionably,” he said with determination, not sure who he was trying more to convince, himself or her.
“Oh, Bran.” Her hand landed on his forearm again, making him grit his teeth. “You are more than your father’s son. You have a huge heart and a loyal, steadfast character. That combination always wins the day.”
If only that were true.
But he knew better.
He knew it was possible for a man to have both dark and light living inside him. He knew that sometimes, no matter how he might wish it otherwise, the darkness overwhelmed the light. He knew because it happened every time he’d stepped onto a battlefield.
And there was one more thing he knew. The human heart, more than anything else, can be utterly, entirely deceitful.
Devil and the Deep (The Deep Six) Page 17
