Watch Point

by Cecilia Tan

  The first time I took a bullet, it felt like someone had hit me in the shoulder with a sledgehammer. That time I hadn’t had a moment to think. It had been pure reaction. Aiden had been attending a healthcare summit in Europe. The story that later emerged was that the gunman’s actual target was the executives of Novartis, but at the time all I knew was I saw a barrel pointed in the direction of the person I was supposed to protect. I went for the gun and my next thought was, Where the fuck did that sledgehammer come from?

  There on that Zurich street, a few moments went by before my brain processed the fact that the ringing in my ears was from the gunshot, and the reason my arm wasn’t working was a bullet and not Thor’s hammer. I grabbed my shoulder, but it didn’t register that the reason my shirt was wet was my own blood. The pain didn’t start until a minute or two later.

  This time isn’t like that. The pain is instantaneous, a burning sensation at the back of my jaw, which is confusing as fuck since the gun was in front of me, not behind. My first concern is still for Chase, though. I keep him behind me with my arms while I scan to make sure another threat isn’t about to appear. But Briggs has Aiden flattened, the weapon in control, and the cacophony of multiple people calling the police simultaneously on their cell phones bounces around in my ears.

  I feel Chase gripping me tightly from behind. “Take it easy, Eric,” he says.

  I reach up to soothe the burning spot by my ear and realize I’m bleeding profusely. Chase is lowering me to the ground. I can hear someone sobbing.

  It’s not him. “First aid,” he says, to himself, I think. “Stop the bleeding. That might be tricky.” Then to me: “Keep your head forward. I don’t want you to choke on the blood.”

  I nod in agreement. I think I know what’s happened. The bullet entered through my mouth and exited somewhere in the vicinity of my ear. There are a lot of important arteries there, and you can’t tourniquet your neck. I agree with his first-aid assessment. Tricky.

  I’m bleeding from the mouth, but I’m breathing.

  If I’m breathing, I’m alive.

  If I’m alive, I can say what I’ve been meaning to. “Chase.”

  “Don’t talk. Help is on the way.” He’s pressing a cloth against the exit wound on the side of my face while he keeps hold of me around the chest from behind.

  I don’t know if I’m going to get a chance to say this again. “Listen. I have to tell you something.”

  “You’re sorry? You told me that already,” he says through gritted teeth. My tough scout. “Apology accepted.”

  “No.” I breathe in too quickly and cough from inhaling my own blood. Each cough makes everything in my body hurt—my ankle, my shoulder, my lungs, my mouth. But I feel bathed in warmth when I say, “I love you.”

  His embrace tightens. “I need you to stay quiet. I need you to live through this, Eric.”

  “I love you,” I say again. I can’t say much else without risking another coughing fit. My consciousness is starting to fade. It feels like I’m falling asleep, going limp in his arms, and for a moment I dream we’re in the lean-to.

  “Eric!”

  I can’t answer. I can only pat his hand on my chest with my own.

  “If you want to hear me say it in return, you have to live—do you understand? You have to live through this. You have to. Can you hear me?”

  We’re in the lean-to. We’re safe under the snow, and the racket is the storm outside, and my toes are a little cold but that’s to be expected. I’m in his arms where I belong, and that’s all that matters.

  Time stamp: 0857 Sunday, Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital, Plymouth, Massachusetts

  I can see the clock on the wall reads almost nine, but I don’t know if that’s a.m. or p.m., and I feel a small jolt of panic, wondering if Mom got her morning medicine like she was supposed to or . . .

  The panic subsides as I realize I’m the one hospitalized. I’m strapped to a bed in a sitting position. My head is muzzy and my tongue feels furry and gross, but I can move it to feel something wadded inside my mouth.

  Hey, I’m alive.

  That’s as much excitement as I can take and I drift back to sleep, post-surgery anesthesia still swirling around in my system.

  The next time I open my eyes, I’m in a different room and I’m lying down. I can move my tongue more freely, and although I really want a drink of water, I decide life will be perfect if I can just move my hand enough to touch Chase on the hair. He’s asleep in a chair next to me, his face and arms on the bed, one hand on my leg. It takes some doing to move that arm, and I wonder if I’ve got any tendons left in my shoulder at all.

  My fingers land on the back of his neck, and he purrs but doesn’t wake up right away. When he does, he sits up suddenly and blinks.

  He grasps my hand. “I was having a dream we were at the cabin.”

  I nod, not sure if I can make my voice work or not. My whole throat is dry.

  “Here. They left me some ice chips for when you wake up.” He slips away from me, but only for a moment. His fingertips against my lips as he puts a piece of ice into my mouth are all I want.

  The ice is good, too, though. I try his name first. “Chase.”

  “Eric.” He lets himself smile, and the worry lines melt away. “You’re going to be okay.”

  I reach up to touch the bandage on the side of my face.

  “The bullet went right through your cheek. No major damage to your jaw. Pretty clean, they said.” He appraises my face coolly. “I asked the doctor to check if you had any wisdom teeth, though. You’re such a stupid motherfucker.” Angry tears redden his eyes, and I squeeze his hand.

  “I know. I know.” My voice wears down to a rasp, and he brings me more ice. When my mouth loosens up, I try talking again. I can only really get words out the non-swollen side of my face. “I never meant to lie to you.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You’re so stuck on honesty and keeping your promises that you thought it made sense to send me back to my father.” He looms over me, but it’s hard to feel anything but gratitude that he’s here and I’m alive to see him. My hand finds the controls for the bed, and I motorize myself into sitting upright.

  Now I can look him in the eye. “I wouldn’t have. I never would have forced you.” I want to say a mouthful, but I can only get these short sentences out. “Once it sank in. If we’d had a chance to talk about it.”

  He puts one hand on my thigh, gripping my fingers with the other. “If you’d just let me cool off on my own, we would have.”

  “I was afraid you’d die. In the snow.”

  “And instead you almost died in the snow.” He squeezes my fingers. “Do you remember anything about me rescuing you?”

  I shake my head. “Only nightmares.”

  “You were delirious. I was afraid you were still going to die. I took the boat to the mainland and called Briggs. I didn’t know who else to call.”

  “You handled the crick?” The Zodiac, I mean. Slipping into SEAL jargon. Proves I’m still a little out of it.

  “You taught me well, Eric,” he says, and he doesn’t sound angry at all.

  The wheels are turning in my head now, though, as I try to put all the pieces together. “How did you call Briggs? I’d locked your phone.”

  “There’s a hack. You don’t need to unlock the phone to ask Siri for the time, and when she brings up the clock, you can access the app store to buy more alarm tones, which makes the phone active. It usually only works for one phone call before Siri gets wise, but that was all I needed.” Without warning, he plasters himself against me in a half hug. “God, I’m glad you’re alive.”

  “I’m glad you’re . . . so fucking smart.” I’ve got one arm wrapped around him, and the pain I feel is entirely over the fact that I can’t hug him properly.

  “Yeah, well, if we’d both been a little smarter, maybe we’d still be on the island.” He kisses me on the forehead and sits back. “Or on our way to somewhere easy, breezy, and tropical.”
>
  “We still could.”

  He looks me in the eye. “All my life I dreamed about running away. You know what I learned from all this, though? Starting when I ran out of the cabin?”

  The lump in my throat has nothing to do with the bandage. “What?”

  “I learned I can’t run away from my problems. It just creates more problems.” He’s got circles under his eyes from lack of sleep, but he is gorgeous in his strength. “I had to find another way to win.”

  “Where’s Aiden?”

  “Rotting in jail until tomorrow. Super-high bail amount. Takes a while to raise that kind of cash. His liquid reserves are suspiciously low.” Chase examines his fingernails nonchalantly, then places a finger on my lips as if to hush me. “We’ll probably both need to take the stand against him if we’re going to make sure he goes to jail for a long time. He’ll no doubt resurrect that cockamamie story about you being a kidnapper.”

  He’s so fucking smart. They won’t be able to prove where the ransom money went, of course, given the anonymous nature of Bitcoin transfers and my other precautions. No matter what Aiden says now, it’ll appear he went to extremes to keep Chase and me apart.

  Nonetheless. “I was his employee,” I point out. “Suspicious.”

  “Which is how we met, of course,” Chase replies. “Briggs will testify, too. My lawyer thinks the fact that Dad tried to shoot you in front of several dozen witnesses is going to overshadow most other points.”

  He might be right. I take his hand in mine again. “So. No more running away.”

  Chase stands up, leans over, and plants a cautious kiss on my lips. “I understand we have millions of reasons to skip the country. I’m a cook. I can get work anywhere.”

  I squeeze his hand hard. “But you want to fight.”

  “I do.” His eyes are cool. “But you must have had somewhere you intended to go.”

  After collecting the ransom and handing him back to his father, he means. The truth is I put most of my planning into the abduction part of the operation, not my escape. Maybe part of me never expected it to succeed.

  I certainly never expected this. “I won’t go anywhere without you, now.”

  “You better not,” Chase says. “Because I love you.” He kisses me again, much harder than before, hard enough that I feel the bullet wound ache. It’s the best ache in the world.

  Time stamp: 1145, Wednesday, Pickerel Bay

  I exit the boat headfirst, entering the water unencumbered by gear. The only thing weighing on me is the question of my shoulder. The summer sun is scorching, but the water this far north is bracingly cold, even in July. I settle into my stroke rhythm, feet kicking, and it feels good. After months of physical therapy in a chlorine pool, being in the ocean feels great, the waves rocking me as I make for the island. Five hundred yards. This is a five-hundred-yard swim.

  The beach comes up before I know it, and I find myself running up the strip of sand, raising my arms in triumph—another thing I couldn’t do for months after they reconstructed my shoulder.

  Chase’s whoop reaches my ears from across the water and he guns the engine, speeding the Zodiac toward me. When he’s near, though, he turns about. “I want to try,” he shouts.

  “All right.” I dash back into the water and into the boat. “Five hundred yards in the ocean feels different than in a pool, though.”

  “Which is why I want to try it,” he says, leaning into the wind.

  I use the laser range finder to determine when we’re five hundred yards out again, in roughly the same patch of water as when I’d done it. We switch places and I take the tiller. “I’m going to trail you,” I tell him. “Just in case.” A shark could appear. He could get a cramp. Sometimes people panic for no real reason when they’re in open water. I can’t stop these thoughts from going through my head, but I can be ready to react if any of these things actually happen.

  “Yes, sir,” he says with a wink and dives off the Zodiac into the water. My heart starts to hammer as he takes a long time to come up, but when his head breaks the surface, he’s much further away than I expect. I hadn’t realized he’d become such a strong swimmer. I guess all that time hanging around in the pool while I was doing my rehab has paid off. He came with me to every session.

  He made me remember what it’s like when someone has your back. Maybe that’s why I didn’t just put my shoulder back together in rehab. I put my head back together.

  I nudge the engine to pace him, a safe distance to one side. We’re more than halfway there, but I can see he’s slowing. He raises his head more often to see how far there is to go. He pauses to tread water.

  “You didn’t tell me there was a current,” he shouts breathlessly.

  “I told you the open ocean is different from a pool!” The movement of the tide can make it like a treadmill, lengthening the distance.

  He takes a few deep breaths and then resumes his swim.

  When he’s within a hundred yards, I start shouting encouragement. He’s so tired he can barely lift his arms and he’s switched to a breaststroke, trying to time each stroke to match the rhythm of the waves, to go with the water instead of against it. He’s the most beautiful thing alive.

  “You’re almost there, Chase. Come on, you can do it.”

  I can feel how much he wants it, how much he wants to reach that beach and feel that triumph. But he’s exhausted. I want to leap into the water and help him, but there’s no way to do that unless he really gets in trouble. My heart is banging as if I’m the one clawing my way across the surface of the sea. Come on, Chase. You can do it. You gorgeous creature.

  The cliff of the island looms as we near the beach, and he raises his head, feeling the shift in the water as the waves start to roll. He strokes and strokes and strokes and suddenly catches one at the right moment, and it carries him forward and deposits him far up the firm-packed sand. He lies there, unmoving, like a gift from Poseidon.

  I beach the Zodiac moments later, hastily loop a line around a scrub tree, and then run toward him. As I near, I see he’s panting, smiling, but too exhausted to move his limbs. I find myself pressed against his wet skin, suckling the salty sensitive spots on the back of his neck and wanting him beyond all reason.

  It’s a simple thing to strip two Speedos and even simpler to bury my tongue between his cheeks, adding wet to wet. And then it isn’t my tongue I’m burying, but my cock. At last he lets loose the triumphant cry I’ve been waiting to hear. This is everything I can imagine wanting. All the meticulous planning in the world could ensure food and shelter and water, the elements of survival, but there was no way to plan for the filling of the hole in my heart. The hole that was torn when my father died, enlarged when my team was blown apart (not by a bomb but by the Navy itself), and made a crater by my mother’s passing. It takes a love the size of the ocean to fill it, and that’s what we have.

  That’s what we have.

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  I have several people to thank for the existence of this book, some of whom I’m not even sure I remember. I blame the open bar. We were at a publishing party at the RWA National convention in San Diego, on a rooftop deck overlooking the water. The waitstaff had been plying us with some kind of strong cocktail all night. This party also had enough chocolate-covered strawberries to fill the hold of a battleship. Several romance writers including Elizabeth Hoyt, Rebecca Zanetti, and a few of the publisher’s staff were making a valiant attempt at eating as many as we could. (Or maybe that was just me doing that . . .) At any rate, the evening was glorious, and the conversation turned to the romance genre. Someone asked, Hey, what’s the hot thing these days? And one piped up with Navy SEALs. Navy SEALs are the hottest thing right now. (In San Diego especially.) Billionaires, said someone else. Billionaires are still dominating the market. (Pun intended.) A third chimed in with, Abductions. Abduction and dark romance is the new hot thing. And I jokingly said, Oh yeah? I could write a romance where a Navy SEAL abducts a billionaire. Or maybe his hot son . . . And Elizabeth Hoyt seized my arm and said, Oooh, I’d read that.

  I woke up the next morning two hours before my alarm with the entire book plotted out in my head. Eric started talking to me right away and narrated the opening chapter almost exactly as you see it here. Funny how inspiration works, isn’t it? So thank you, Elizabeth—you woke this sweet, angst-ridden SEAL in my head and inspired him to tell his story. And thank you to Sarah Lyons for being persistent with the invitation to Riptide’s charity bundle, which undoubtedly kept my subconscious simmering. I love it when a plan comes together.

  Thank you to my beta readers, Mark Treble, Lenalena, Priscilla Yuen, and Julie Cox. You helped Eric make sense to himself as well as the rest of the world.

  Lastly, thank you to the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. Eric’s wilderness camping experience is lifted wholesale from “Survival Weekend” at Camp Hoover with my troop. First badge I ever earned was the camping badge, and all that stuff about birch bark and building lean-tos is completely true.