by Trish Wylie
‘You said it was your dream.’
‘Dreams change.’
‘I know.’
She faltered. ‘Are you telling me they’re gone?’
He stilled a couple of feet away from her. ‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll be back. But it turns out they’re less frequent when I have a bigger problem to deal with.’
‘Feel free to not talk about that either.’
‘I’m over here trying to tell you I’m in love with you and you’d still prefer to fight with me? Okay.’ He shook his head and folded his arms. ‘What do you want to know? Should I start at the beginning? First nightmare was my dad having his heart attack. I couldn’t resuscitate him.’
‘You weren’t here when he died.’ Jo frowned. ‘Liv said he was on his own.’
‘He was.’ Daniel nodded. ‘He died a couple of hours after I left. I came home on leave to tell him I was staying in the Marines, he reminded me he’d agreed to give his consent on the proviso I would come back and join the family business. Didn’t mention he wanted me here ‘cos he was sick, but after an hour of yelling at me about loyalty, duty, responsibility and not reacting particularly well to the fact Uncle Sam had taught me not to flinch under fire, I thanked him for his support over the years and walked out.’
The information made her frown. ‘How does that make his death your fault?’
Pressing his mouth into a thin line, his shoulders dropped in a very visible hint of the weight he’d carried for so long. ‘You need more, here goes. Next up was Liv—I was standing in the station the night she walked in covered in blood. At the time I thought it was hers—she wouldn’t let me near her, said she was evidence. Brannigans watch over each other: my dad did it for Johnnie, Johnnie did it for Reid and so on till it was my turn with Liv. I figured she was tough, she knew what she was getting into—she didn’t need my help. I was wrong.’
Since Jo knew more about the events of that night than he did, she had to clear her throat before she could speak. ‘That wasn’t your fault any more than Aiden’s death was Liv’s.’
He ignored her. ‘The two more I was yelling about that night? Inches of space I needed to put pressure on an artery. Guy was trapped under a wall. He died.’
Her gaze immediately lowered to the hand he had scraped on a wall, the pieces falling into place. ‘They’re all the people you’ve lost or came close to losing. You torture yourself even though you know it wasn’t your fault.’
‘It’s my job to save lives—to be there when people need me. No matter how I try I keep messing that up.’
When her gaze lifted, for the first time Jo could see through the shadows in his eyes to the pain; the starkness of it almost breaking her in two. ‘You were there for me,’ she told him in a voice thick with emotion. ‘Doesn’t that count?’
‘Except I wasn’t, was I?’ His deep voice was rougher than she’d ever heard it before. ‘The one time you needed me to be there I let you down.’
Jo searched his eyes, frowning with confusion. ‘You threw yourself in front of a gun for me. I’ve never been as scared as I was when you did that. I tried to find the words to tell you but I couldn’t. If you’d died saving me, if I’d lost you …’
When he looked at her with enough yearning to take her breath away, she blinked. ‘Wait a minute … what did you say?’
He pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. ‘The one time you needed—’
‘No.’ She made a jumping motion with her forefinger. ‘Go back further …’ A sudden flare of hope made her heart falter and skip a beat. ‘Did you say you’re in love with me?’
The warmth in his eyes seemed to smooth the grimness from his face, making him look younger and unbelievably vulnerable. ‘Was beginning to wonder if you’d noticed …’
Jo’s faltering heart leapt, did handsprings and swelled to proportions that made it feel as if it couldn’t be contained in her chest. ‘If you’re in love with me, then why did you let me leave, you idiot?’ Realization dawned. ‘You were scared … of me?’ She took a step closer and looked deeper into his eyes, searching for answers, her voice filled with wonder when she found them. ‘No, not of me—of how you felt about me … But I asked if you wanted to tell me anything and—’
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other in a move she found impossibly endearing. ‘I’m not the kind of guy who’s gonna read you poetry or wear his heart on his sleeve. I think you know that by now. When it comes to how I feel the only way I can show it is by—’
‘Protecting the people you love and looking after them.’
‘Yes.’
‘The things I told you I didn’t want from you …’
His mouth tugged wryly. ‘Yes.’
‘So you were afraid to tell me you needed me because you didn’t think I felt the same way?’
He let out a long breath. ‘I’m always going to need you more than you need me.’
‘You are so competitive.’ Jo shook her head, the move immediately contradicted by the smile blossoming on her lips. She shrugged a shoulder a little self-consciously. ‘I know I may have given the impression I don’t need you but I thought you knew me better by now. I don’t need you to protect me from every bump in life. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t times … I’ve needed you for longer than. I guess I was so focused on other things … Maybe I never knew … but I do now …’
Daniel released a small smile. ‘You know you’ve been doing that a lot this last while.’
‘Losing the ability to speak?’ She puffed a soft burst of laughter. ‘Yeah, I’d noticed that. I blame you.’
‘Nothing new there, then.’
‘Oh, there’s something new,’ she whispered.
As if some kind of shutter had been lowered, her feelings showed clearly in her eyes for the first time. Daniel’s hunger for her entwined with a depth of tenderness that shook him to the very foundation of who he’d thought he was. The connection he felt to her in response to her need was a visceral tug. It drew him forward and pulled him in. He took his hands out of his pockets as he stepped forward.
She took a stuttered breath when he was close enough to drag a knuckle along the skin of her cheek, her hand shaking as it flattened on his chest, directly above his pounding heart. Her throat convulsed before she spoke. ‘You’re wrong to think I don’t need you, Danny. I needed you the day we met but I was too scared to admit it. What we have now was a dream too far out of my reach then, so I told myself I didn’t want it.’
He threaded his fingers into silky hair as he framed her face. ‘Your dream involved a guy who could feed you one of the worst lines you’d ever heard?’
Jo shook her head. ‘That’s not when we met.’
‘What?’
‘You think we met that fourth of July weekend. We didn’t. We met two months before that.’
Daniel frowned. ‘I’d have remembered.’
‘Would you?’ She lifted her brows and smiled tremulously. ‘I was no one then.’
‘You’ve never been no one,’ he said firmly.
‘I was invisible to most of the world; though in fairness that was partly my fault.’ She blinked and took a deep breath. ‘Make yourself invisible and you can fall between the cracks in the system. That worked for me for a long time. But you wouldn’t believe how badly you want to be seen when you’re homeless. The number of people who will walk past you without ever looking you in the eye …’ When her voice wavered she took another short breath. ‘Liv was the first. Then one day she was there with her partner talking to me when another squad car pulled up across the street and you got out.’
Daniel frantically searched his normally reliable memory as inky lashes lowered and she focused on the hand resting on his chest.
‘You started talking to Liv, exchanged a few jokes with her partner—’
‘Tell me I looked at you,’ he rasped.
Her gaze lifted, shimmering with deeply felt emotion. ‘Oh, you did something much worse. You looked straight int
o my eyes and smiled at me.’ She blinked back tears. ‘It was like … the sun coming out from behind a cloud or … stardust. I’d never seen anything like it before. When you took it away … when you left …’ She cleared her throat and shrugged. ‘For a second you had turned a graduate of the school of hard knocks into some starry-eyed, weak-at-the-knees daydreamer and I hated you for that. Because when you were gone and I wasn’t blinded by that infamous smile of yours I had to open my eyes again.’
Daniel hadn’t known it was possible to love someone the way he loved her. He wished he had been ready for her back then, that it hadn’t taken so long to see what was right in front of him. Most of all he wished he’d been brave enough to take a chance on what he could have missed if the people who loved them hadn’t banged their stubborn heads together. But if she’d fallen in love with him, unworthy as he was, he couldn’t be too far beyond redemption to turn things around.
‘Starry-eyed dreamers didn’t survive in the world I lived in then,’ she explained in her softest voice. ‘So I toughened up, got twice as hard and the next time you saw me you didn’t stand a chance.’
When the memory came to him, Daniel closed his eyes for a second. ‘Did you have a really dumb hat?’
She blinked at him. ‘What?’
The image was still foggy. ‘It had ears.’
‘Floppy dog ears.’ She nodded as if he were insane to think anything else. ‘I had three but it was my favourite. They were winter ski-hats a store donated to charity.’
Daniel smiled indulgently as he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. ‘It was May.’
‘A person loses something like seventy per cent of their body heat through their head so I figured at night …’ She bit down on her lower lip. ‘You remember.’
‘I asked Liv about you.’ He wrapped an arm around her waist and drew her to him. ‘Thought you were under age … You looked about sixteen with those braids in.’
‘Nope, eighteen. I can’t believe you remember.’
Lowering his head, he breathed in lavender shampoo, a deep-seated sense of contentment washing over him. ‘You didn’t look like that next time I saw you …’
‘Liv took me for my first girly make-over.’
Nudging the tip of his nose into her fringe, he pressed a light kiss to her temple, his mouth moving against her skin as he confessed, ‘You deserved better than that line. You were right to cut me down the way you did.’
‘It was a really bad line,’ she agreed as she hooked a thumb into one of the belt loops of his jeans. ‘But you didn’t deserve my response, Danny. I started a five-and-a-half-year war between us when we could have been doing this …’
‘No,’ he disagreed. ‘You were eighteen. I was twenty-four. Six years made a bigger difference then. But even if it hadn’t we weren’t ready for this. While you were stepping out into the world and claiming a corner of it, I’d already started to retreat.’ Leaning back, he used a thumb beneath her chin to lift it and looked into her mesmerizing eyes. ‘I’m not gonna find talking about the nightmares easy, babe. But I’m willing to try. You’ll have to work with me on that and a couple of other things. Being less protective won’t be easy either and I know we’ll argue about that. I can be—’
‘Oh, I know. But so can I …’ She silenced him with a soft, all-too-brief kiss. ‘Still fell in love, didn’t we?’
‘You better be sure about that,’ he warned. ‘ ‘Cos once you say you’re mine, that’s it. We’re gonna have to work at this every day but—’
‘We will.’ Love glowed from her eyes, lighting her up like a beacon. ‘I love you, Danny. Even when I wanted to I couldn’t make it go away. I don’t want it to now. So if you need me to say it—yes, I’m yours.’ She sighed, her gaze lowering. ‘I can’t get out of Paris …’
‘I don’t want you to, babe.’ Daniel shook his head, his palm smoothing over her hair. ‘The last few days I’ve run over dozens of different ways we could have made this work if you loved me the way I love you. How long will you be gone?’
‘Three months.’ She grimaced.
‘Half a tour of duty …’ He smiled when she looked at him. ‘Way I see it, you going overseas is no different. You’d wait for me, right?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, then, look at it this way—we get more opportunities for phone sex and conjugal visits …’
‘I do fly home for Liv’s wedding next month,’ she pouted.
‘I reckon I can book some time off either side of that for a couple of long weekends in Paris.’ He lowered his head. ‘How hot do you think I can make you for me before I get there?’
‘Pretty hot.’ She smiled as her chin lifted. ‘If you pick the right words …’
‘I’ll buy a dictionary.’
‘Did I mention the reason I’m still here is because of an air traffic controller thing? Or ground crew … I forget now …’ she mumbled against his mouth.
‘Tell them I said thanks.’ He angled his head. ‘How long have we got?’
‘Two days …’
Her lips parted when he kissed her; the sweet taste of her breath caught on his tongue. His fingers slid deeper into her hair, palm cupping the back of her head as he deepened the kiss and the arm around her waist brought her closer. Perfect breasts crushed against his chest, fine-boned hands gripped a shoulder and the back of his neck. They could pack a lot into two days. It was sure as hell a challenge he was willing to accept. But before he did …
He leaned back and looked down at heavy-lidded eyes and kiss-swollen lips. ‘They’re at the window, aren’t they?’
Jo glanced sideways and chuckled. ‘Yes.’
‘Want to see how fast I can make them move?’ He grinned. ‘You stay here. I’ll be right back. Watch the window.’
As he turned and jogged towards the house, Jo looked at the window and laughed. Biting down on her lip, she gently swung her skirt while she waited for him to come back. She’d never been so happy. Danny loved her. He. Loved. Her. How could she have been so afraid of something so wonderful? Everything was so clear to her now, as if a veil of fear had been removed from her eyes. She should have viewed love the same way she viewed life and the moments of fun she was so addicted to. Grabbing hold of the good things and holding on tight made the tough stuff easier to take. Together they could face anything, even if it was the weaknesses within themselves. Her pulse sang loudly with a mixture of love, lust and joyous laughter when he returned and finally Jo could hear what it was saying. It had been singing to him all along. Two words, repeated over and over again in elated recognition.
It’s you: he was her guy.
‘Miss me?’
‘Yes,’ she answered without hesitation.
‘Just so you know. If I ever thought I’d be doing this, I didn’t picture it with an audience.’ He took a deep, satisfied breath and smiled. ‘But since one of them brought you into my life and the rest of them kept you here until I was ready for you, it seems kinda appropriate.’
Jo smiled back at him. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘This.’
She gasped as he lowered to one knee. ‘Danny, you don’t have to do that.’
His brows lifted. ‘You think I’m letting you go to Paris without everyone knowing you’re mine?’
‘I’m coming back.’
‘And when you do we plan on spending the rest of our lives together, right?’
‘Yes.’
He waved the small box in his hand. ‘That’s usually what one of these says to the world.’
‘You bought a ring?’ Her eyes widened.
‘Do you think you could shut up for a minute?’
She pressed her lips together. ‘Mmm-hmm.’
When he spoke again his deep rough voice was laced with heartfelt sincerity. ‘Jorja Elizabeth Dawson. You’ve been an adopted member of this family for a long time. I want to make it official by giving you my name. I love you, Jo. Will you …’ he smiled his infamous smile ‘… marr
y me?’
Jo tried loosening her throat to speak.
‘This is traditionally where you give me an answer,’ he hinted heavily.
When she nodded frantically in reply, it shook the word loose. ‘Yes.’ She framed his gorgeous face with her hands and leaned down to kiss him.
‘Yes, yes, yes.’
Large hands lifted to her waist, squeezing tight as he pushed to his feet and her arms moved to circle his neck. It felt as if they couldn’t hold on to each other tight enough, even when he crushed her to him and lifted her off her feet. After swinging her feet from side to side, he set her down and opened the box. ‘For the record, I did look at rings when I was running through ways of making this work. Did it while wearing tactical gear, so didn’t take any flack from the rest of the team. Then I remembered this.’ He took the ring out and reached for her hand. ‘You can thank Grandma Brannigan and the fact I was her favourite grandson after I rescued her cat from a tree when I was seven. Might need to get it resized but …’ He stared at her finger as it slipped into place. ‘Maybe not …’
Jo smiled at the winking sapphire, the same blue as his eyes when they darkened and she knew he wanted her. ‘It fits.’
‘Guess you were meant to have it, then, weren’t you?’
She beamed when he looked at her.
‘You ready to go back in? Sooner we finish lunch, the more time we can spend in bed before you leave.’
‘I’m a course ahead of you,’ she pointed out smugly as their fingers threaded together. ‘Eat fast.’
A suspicious silence met them in the hall as Danny took her coat and hung it on the rack. It was just as quiet in the dining room when they stepped into it hand in hand. When Danny looked down at her from the corner of his eye she grinned. Who did their family think they were kidding? It was only as they approached the table emotion started to get the better of her. When he reached for her chair, his mother broke the silence.
‘Everyone move round. Give Jo her place beside Danny.’
Long fingers squeezed hers as everyone moved and he led her around the table. She’d watched it happen with Johnnie’s wife and when Liv brought Blake home, but Jo had never thought one day the gesture would be made for her. It was almost too much. Suddenly she belonged in a way she never had anywhere else. Sitting by the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with, she looked at the faces of the people she loved as they acted as if nothing unusual had happened.
