Frustration tightened his shoulders. He knew this! He rubbed his neck and widened his eyes to push back tears. He couldn't chance making a mistake. If he didn't give enough, the dog would be in pain—pain he couldn't tell anyone about. If he gave too much, he could kill the poor bastard.
He hated to feel stupid. And to see the looks of incom prehension on people's faces turn to irritation or pity or cunning when they realized he didn't know something a competent person should know. But he couldn't risk this creature's life to save his feelings, and JJ would have to find out sooner or later that she had married a man who might not be a SEAL much longer.
"JJ," he called, "do you know the metric system?"
"Sure." She paused in unloading the Chinese takeout they'd stopped to pick up on the way. It appeared he'd married a woman who didn't cook.
"Then I need you to come here and fill this syringe."
"What's the matter?" JJ crossed the kitchen to Snake's bed and knelt beside him.
"It's numbers. I can read them, but if I need to trans fer them from one application to another, I get confused. I make mistakes."
Reflexively, JJ took the morphine bottle, but didn't look at it. "Wait a minute. That doesn't make sense. How could you be a hospital corpsman if you can't read directions and then measure medication?"
He couldn't. That was the fear that hung over him all the time.
She sat back on her heels, comprehension darkening her green eyes. "You have a head injury. Of course you do—I mean I knew you had injuries to your head—"
"Brain injury."
"But you don't seem like other brain-injured people I've known."
He couldn't talk about it. Not with his inability to help even a dog right in front of him. "Measure the dog's morphine."
JJ read the bottle, then looked at the syringe. "Well, I see part of the problem. The directions say ml, but the syringe says cc."
She retrieved her phone from her purse. "Bronwyn, quick medical question. I've got to give medication to a dog… Yes, Snake… No, we haven't renamed him yet… Is a cc the same thing as an ml? Okay, I have this syringe that measures three cc's. Which line do I fill it to, to ar rive at one ml? The first long line. Got it. Thanks."
She lifted the syringe and pointed. "We fill it to this line."
Lucas speared a kung pao shrimp. They were eating at the kitchen table, open Chinese food containers in front of them. Serving a meal this way didn't look right to Lucas, but it was the way JJ had fixed it.
The atmosphere was strained. Young people didn't need an old man horning in on their fun. Lucas was having supper with the kids, and then he intended to make it clear that he had television to watch and did not wish to be disturbed. To make conversation, Lucas asked David, "How long is your leave?"
"I have to go back Friday."
"That soon? I guess you'll be coming home weekends."
"David and I have discussed it," JJ answered for him. "As much as he travels, he won't want to came here for hardly more than twenty-four hours—if you sub tract travel time. He's keeping his apartment in Virginia Beach, and he'll stay there until he has real leave."
Lucas frowned. "How often will that be?"
David forked up a green pepper. "Hard to say."
Lucas studied the tight, closed expression on JJ's face. The truth dawned. The boy wasn't going to come home but once in every blue moon. She'd known it all the time. Marrying someone who wouldn't be part of her life was deliberate.
"Will you be going to Virginia Beach to be with him, JJ?" he asked, just to make certain.
"I'm sure I will. Occasionally. But you know how often I have obligations on the weekends."
Damn, he should have known she had something up her sleeve. The story about meeting last year, meeting again and deciding he was someone she wanted to marry… Lucas should have known it was too easy and too convenient. He'd swallowed the tale because he had believed Dave re ally wanted JJ. Shoot, Dave had lit into him—like he was the bad guy—for offering to sweeten the deal. Lucas had admired him for championing JJ. He thought he'd gotten lucky. Lucas swallowed the bitter taste of disappointment. He'd only heard what he wanted to hear.
She had figured out the way around him. JJ had fig ured out a way to be married and not change her life a single bit.
"If I'm going to keep him, we've got to give him another name," JJ told David as they unloaded the dishwasher. Lucas had excused himself and gone to his office—to watch TV, he said. The dog did look better. About thirty minutes after receiving the morphine, he had gotten very slowly to his feet and gone to his food bowl. Now he lay awake but relaxed, his eyes following them. "I just can not have a dog named 'Snake.'"
David took a stainless-steel fork and dried it. "Where do these go?"
"Drawer to the right of the dishwasher."
He opened the drawer and slid the fork in. "What's the matter with 'Snake'?"
JJ studied the dog, who lay on his side. Sometimes he looked more yellowish, sometimes more reddish. "I'm thinking… Dagmar."
"You cannot name him Dagmar."
"Why not?"
"It's a girl's name, that's why. It will make him neurotic. All the other dogs will laugh at him. He'll get into fights all the time. He'll probably grow up to be a psychopath."
"Well, what did you have in mind? Butch?"
"Not some girl's name."
"Vidalia."
"Chip."
"Telluride."
"Duke."
"Dakota."
David paused. She almost had him with that one. "Chuck," he countered.
"Beaufort."
"Buick."
"Impala."
"Pinto."
"Beowulf."
"Chase."
"Chase? Do you really want to give him a name like a hero in a romance novel would have?"
"Really?" he gave her a sexy smile. "They don't have names like David?"
"No. It has to be really testosterone heavy—with lots of hard consonants. Like the names you keep wanting to give this poor dog whose sex life is over."
David slowly dried a spoon. "Then I guess you won't like Snatch, either."
On the floor, the dog flicked his dark amber eyes from one to the other, as if he were suddenly interested.
"See," David latched onto the dog's apparent re sponse. "He likes it. It will help him maintain his self image now that he's you-know."
"Snatch?" JJ asked the dog. "Is that what you want your name to be?"
His long, tapered tail thumped the floor.
"Well, at least it isn't dangerous sounding, like Killer."
JJ entered her grandfather's kitchen the next morn ing more than a trifle out of sorts. Once again, she was dressed in clothes she didn't like. It was a good thing she'd been too busy with all the wedding prepara tion to clear out the closet here, or she'd have noth ing at all.
Once again, she promised herself she'd be all right as soon as she got to Caruthers. Although thinking of how yesterday had turned out—with a dog to care for, a husband who apparently needed to be entertained, and winding up back in her old bedroom—she wasn't sure she had problems Caruthers could fix.
Therefore, it didn't do her heart nearly as much good as it should have when she entered the kitchen to see her grandfather perched on one of the barstools at the counter, looking absolutely chipper.
David was manning the stove, very competently scrambling eggs in one skillet and turning home fries in another, while bacon hissed and popped in the micro wave. Without missing a beat, he listened with apparent enjoyment to the tale about a marlin-fishing tournament Lucas was regaling him with. The tournament must have happened before she was born. She couldn't remember Lucas ever going marlin fishing.
David chuckled in all the right places, maintaining an easy camaraderie and stirring the eggs gently over a low flame—which JJ knew was the correct way but never had the patience for.
"You want to know why JJ and I didn't get together before?" David was saying.
"She thought I couldn't be faithful."
"Can you?"
"Yes, sir."
"All right then."
That, apparently, in male-speak, was all there was to say about that.
David carefully lifted the potatoes with the spatula to check the underside for browning. "What happened to JJ's parents?"
"They went out on the Daddy Carbucks, my cabin cruiser." Lucas was silent a long time. "They didn't come back, and we couldn't raise them on the radio. The Coast Guard found my boat the next day, adrift, but no sign of either of them. A shrimp boat found my son's body. A while later, my daughter-in-law's washed up north of here."
"What happened?"
"Nobody knows why they took the boat out. They were in the midst of an ugly divorce, big custody fight. All we know for sure is that they both drowned. She had a skull fracture, but they said it didn't cause her death. Maybe he hit her. Maybe she went over the side and then hit her head and he went in after her—but the boat started to drift away from them. He couldn't get back to it, not while trying to swim with her."
Lucas took a contemplative sip of his coffee. "Or maybe it was a murder-suicide—we'll never know. Coroner ruled accidental death for both. They both had a lot of alcohol in their systems."
"How old was JJ?"
"Nine."
"She told me she had nightmares."
"That's right."
"About her parents?"
"That's what Beth, JJ's grandmother, thought. JJ couldn't tell us. She was better after Ham got her the dog."
JJ listened to the bare-bones account of her parents' death. She'd heard it many times before. Unfortunately, there weren't many additional facts to flesh the story out with. There was only the nightmare image of her parents in the water, caught in destructive currents of their own willfulness, drifting further and further from the boat.
Since she was nine, she had lived with and, with everything in her power, warded off the nightmarish mystery of her parents' disappearance. They had left eternally unanswered questions: Why had they gone out on the Daddy Carbucks that day? Why had they left the boat? Why hadn't they loved her enough? Understanding even the facts, much less the reasons behind them, would forever elude her.
Anyone could see that was the crux of her need for permanence and, above all, for never emotionally de pending on people who could for no reason do some thing stupid—maybe.
Of course, she recognized that the events that day had merely been the culmination of hundreds of abandon ments. Even before her parents died, she had decided she was safer and better off with Caruthers.
Chapter 36
"GOOD MORNING, GENTLEMEN," JJ SAID.
"Here you are!" David smiled like his welcome was a gift he'd made just for her. A few days ago she would have discounted his smile completely. Today? More like fifty percent. She was beginning to believe his assertion that he wanted her for herself.
"I was getting ready to call you," Lucas said. "I told Dave if we waited for you to cook, we'd get mighty hungry."
JJ forced the corners of her mouth to move at the joke gone stale long ago. Nobody expected men to be born with a skillet in their hands, and she doubted if Lucas had ever fixed anything more complicated than microwave popcorn.
"No time for breakfast." Her mind was already on how she would juggle her schedule today. The bank's loan manager wanted yet another meeting, and Lucas had to see his cardiologist. "I'm glad I caught both of you together. I hate to dump dog care on Esperanza, but I don't see any other way." she informed them. "I don't think he'll be a lot of trouble. If he gets worse, she can call Ham—"
"Don't go bothering Ham or Esperanza," her grand father interrupted.
JJ's short fuse ignited. "Granddaddy, you know you cannot get him into a car by yourself!"
"Young lady, I reckon I can figure out how—" Lucas snapped back. Abruptly, he switched tracks and whipped out a salesman's smile. "But I knew you were going to say that, and I don't want you to worry. Dave and I have got it covered."
"Covered, how?"
"Now, now, we have it all worked out. He's going to hang around here, and maybe we'll ride around awhile. Esperanza can call us if she needs us. I thought I'd show him the marina, and then while we're out, we'll go to Topsail and pick up some clean clothes for him."
"If you don't mind letting me have a key to the cot tage," David inserted. "Tell me what you need, and I'll bring clothes for you too."
"We'll take the Rover—it's four-wheel drive—that way we can ride down to the inlet, if we want to," Lucas expanded his plans. "Wish we still had the Jeep. We'll stop and get some barbeque sandwiches."
JJ didn't know when she'd seen her grandfather so enthused. Too bad he'd chosen today of all days to want to do something besides sit in his office. "I hate to rain on your parade, but Lucas, what are you thinking? You have a doctor's appointment today."
Behind Lucas's back, David shook his head in warn ing. With hand gestures so clear it was like hearing every word, he signaled, "Leave him to me. I'll take care of everything." He added a mischievous grin and a thumbs-up.
Aloud he said, "Since we just simplified your day, you've got time to eat."
JJ goggled at him, unable to articulate her feelings. She had spent a restless night that these two men, both singly and combined, had been the cause of. She'd lain awake mulling over the fact that she now had not one, but two men who would disrupt her life at will. And now they were male bonding, planning joyrides, and getting ready to eat perfectly scrambled eggs.
She didn't know how the hell she had failed to fore see this. Not the part about the scrambled eggs, but that these two would like each other.
In each, a charm that drew both men and women overlaid a ruthless will. Unfettered by society's restric tions, they adhered to principles they had hammered out for themselves—which made them very reliable friends and very dangerous enemies. Even the age gap and their widely divergent lifestyles worked against her, since their differences buffered their tendency to compete with each other for dominance. They would still both try to dominate her.
She knew how much these men took. She didn't know how much thinner she could spread herself. Neither was the kind of man who could be controlled, but singly she could have managed them. Allied, she didn't have a chance. She watched every bit of leverage she had had circle the drain.
"The eggs are almost ready to take up," David said, taking her silence for consent to join them for break fast—which it probably was. "Have we got plates?"
"Ready," said Lucas. "I got out the breakfast china," he told JJ with pride. "Your grandmother isn't here, but it's what she'd say to do. Do you know which napkins go with it?"
Breakfast china? Lucas had never set a table in his life, that she knew of, and suddenly he wanted the "breakfast" china and coordinating cloth napkins. The plates he'd gotten out were part of a very old set. She had no idea what made them, in Lucas' mind, break fast china.
"Which ones, JJ?"
"Which plates are you using? The blue willow? This close to Thanksgiving, grandmother always liked to use the pumpkin napkins."
"Pumpkin."
"The orange-y brown ones."
He extracted three and piled the rest—the entire con tents of the drawer they usually resided in—on the end of the counter. She wondered fleetingly if he'd realized for himself the damask ones were inappropriate, or if he hadn't found them.
"And in the fall, she liked to use the oak leaf place mats," she told him.
"Placemats."
"Dining room sideboard, second drawer down."
JJ braced herself for her grandfather's impatient, "Well, get them," or for him to say the everyday ones were fine. Instead, with more jauntiness than she'd seen in a while, he made his way to the dining room.
"Don't forget the breakfast forks," David called out. He threw her a conspiratorial grin while keeping his voice smooth and innocent. There was a drawer full of stainless-steel flatware right at David's hip, as he very wel
l knew, having dried the flatware and put it away last night. Clearly amused by Lucas's need to set an elabo rate table David was adding elaborations of his own.
Again she was struck by how his brown eyes always seemed so clear and full of light.
Lucas laid down the placemats and returned to the sideboard where he opened the silverware drawer. In it, twenty-two dividers organized the accumulated silver of several generations of Caruthers and Jessups. Though if he were seated at a table, he would have unerringly picked up the right fork, no matter how complex the place setting, he stared into the drawer overwhelmed by choice. "JJ?"
SEALed with a Ring Page 23
