Her Loving Hero

by Caitlyn O'Leary

  “So, who, besides me, is not going to watch LuLu rub her sticky hands on the phone?” Aiden asked. “How about you Leeds, wanna play some pool?”

  “Dex is going to watch the nursery, cause Kenna’s pregnant.” Wyatt teased.

  Dex looked him over. “I would, but you took your time getting here, and you’ve been mighty quiet for the last couple of days.” Dex turned to Aiden. “Come on, let’s play pool and force Wyatt to talk.”

  “I’m that obvious?”

  “In a word. Yes.” Dex pushed up from the table.

  “I want in on that,” Dalton said as he pulled away from the group.

  Wyatt groaned.

  They were early enough that the pool table in the far corner wasn’t in use. “Who’s going to be good cop, and who’s going to be bad cop?” Dalton asked as he put quarters into the slot.

  “I’m bad cop,” Aiden grinned evilly.

  Wyatt groaned again. This was not going to go well, but he recovered quickly. “I want two good cops then.”

  “Fair enough,” Aiden agreed easily.

  “And your team has to lose a ball, because you’re a shark,” Wyatt said as he pointed at Aiden.

  “You’re a pussy,” Aiden said easily. “But I’ll let you break.”

  Wyatt downed two solids on his break and immediately missed an easy shot.

  “It’s okay,” Dalton consoled as he played good cop. “So, how’s it going at the youth center?”

  “I’ve been enjoying it.” Wyatt picked up the chalk and applied it to the tip of his cue as Dex took aim and dropped two striped balls into the side pocket.

  “How’s Emily?” Dex slipped in as he walked around the table to take another shot. The chalk smeared up the side of his pool stick. Aiden chuckled. Wyatt didn’t answer.

  “Who’s Emily?” Dalton asked. “Are you dating someone?”

  Aiden and Dex exchanged a glance that just pissed Wyatt off. How in the hell did they know about Emily, he hadn’t said a word. “Goddammit Dex, do you have all of us under surveillance?”

  Dex sighed, then he missed his shot.

  Served the asshole right.

  “I’m totally missing something. But is she nice? Are you serious?” Dalton asked. Yep, he was totally playing good cop.

  “No, he doesn’t have you under surveillance,” Aiden said calmly. “Leland Hoag asked Gray to check in on Emily. Lo and behold, there you were. What’s the deal Leeds?” Aiden’s eyes narrowed.

  How in the hell was he going to answer this?

  “You know I volunteered at the YMCA.” Wyatt met Aiden’s calm voice with one of his own.

  “You worked at the one near the border, three weeks after Emily Hoag started volunteering at the one in Lincoln Park, you transferred to that one. Don’t tell me that was a damn coincidence.”

  “Then there was the fact that you looked her up,” Dex said.

  Wyatt’s head whirled to look at Dex.

  Shit, he should have known that his mentor would have been able to see his cyber trail.

  “Is it a crime that I was worried about her? That I thought she might need a friend? It was fortuitous that we both were involved with the Y.”

  “Have you ever noticed that the more uncomfortable Wyatt gets with a situation he uses bigger words?” Aiden asked Dex.

  “It’s fortuitous that you noticed that,” Dex grinned. “So, Wyatt, why are you so uncomfortable if you were just trying to do a good deed?”

  “The more important question,” Dalton said thoughtfully, “is what are you doing with her. She’s fragile.”

  “She’s not,” Wyatt said immediately. “She’s one of the strongest people I’ve ever met. I would put her side-by-side with any of your women any day of the week.”

  Aiden bent down and sank the twelve ball. “Are you saying she’s your woman?” Aiden asked smoothly.

  “Not at all,” Wyatt denied. “She’s a friend. A good friend.” He watched as Aiden sank the cue ball and he collected it so he could line up his next shot. “Ah fuck, it’s complicated.”

  “Wyatt, I don’t care how strong she is, she wasn’t talking not so long ago. I was there on that truck in Saudi Arabia with her. It was bad. She needs…” Aiden’s voice trailed off.

  “She needs what, Aiden?” Wyatt demanded.

  “She needs someone who will be there for the long haul. You’re only twenty-five. Are you ready to sign up for something like that?”

  “I told you, I’m her friend,” Wyatt said as he slammed his stick into the cue ball, hitting the eight ball into the side of the table barely stopping from sinking it into the corner pocket.

  “What does ‘complicated’ mean?”

  Wyatt sighed. He rested his fists on the side of the pool table. “I think I’m screwing things up. She’s not like anyone I’ve ever met before.”

  Dex gave him the side-eye. “You’ve changed.”

  “Thanks…I think.”

  “Seriously. Who you were two years ago, and who you are today? Two different men.”

  “It’s your shot,” Wyatt said to distract the conversation.

  “Hold up a minute, this is important. You really have changed. You know this man-whore thing was an aberration. You wanted a connection. It was never a matter of scoring notches on your bedpost,” Dalton said

  Wyatt felt the back of his neck heating. He really didn’t like this kind of psychoanalysis.

  “Thanks Dalton, I feel vindicated now that I have your seal of approval.”

  “Stuff it Leeds.” Aiden’s voice was filled with authority. “We all have your back. Never once have we not liked you.”

  “Sure doesn’t sound like it,” he mumbled.

  “Did you always like yourself?” Dex asked. “Do you like yourself better with Emily? If you ask any of the three of us, we will all say we like who we are better with our wives.”

  Holy Fuck.

  “I don’t think she’s ready,” Wyatt whispered. “She’s still having panic attacks.”

  “Have you ever talked to Hunter about Aliana?” Dalton asked.

  “Or you could ask Evie about her sister Chloe. They might have occasional setbacks, but these women are never down for the count.” Then Aiden’s look turned steely. “But make sure you’re ready for the duration. If you think for even a second she’s thinking more than friendship and you’re not thinking along those lines, do the right thing and cut her loose.”

  Aiden bent over and hit the stripe ball into the corner pocket, then he sank the eight ball. “Our game,” he said.

  Wyatt ended up at Cardiff well after dark. He had what he needed to build a campfire. There were others there near the volleyball nets and the bathrooms, but he hid out behind the rocks. The only other people anywhere near him were a couple huddled underneath a blanket and they were as intent as he was not to be noticed.

  The first time he’d smelled the ocean was when the Navy had sent him to California. He and a bunch of other newly minted SEALs had gone to the beach, built a bonfire and gotten drunk off their asses. The memory was surrounded by the smell of woodsmoke and sea air. Wyatt scraped all of these scents together like precious gems. Always trying to drown out the odor of antiseptic, sickness and air freshener that filled his childhood home and forever lingered in the back of his mind.

  I miss you Mom.

  He stared into the fire until sparks snapped and brought him back to the present. He smiled as he thought of Emily. It was always a treat to find out what scented lotion she was wearing, his favorite was the vanilla. She had no idea how much that turned him on.

  Wyatt threw another log on the fire, thinking about what his teammates had said. Like he really needed to crawl into Emily’s head. He might not have been there in person that night in Saudi Arabia, but he’d had a front row seat when he’d heard her anguish over the receiver.

  Dalton pissed him off too. Wyatt picked up a handful of sand and started to sift it through his fingers but ended up flinging it sideways. He knew his frie
nd was trying to be helpful, but he came off pretty damn condescending.

  “Talk to Hunter about Aliana,” he’d said.

  Like Wyatt didn’t have two functioning brain cells to rub together. He hadn’t thrown in Dalton’s face that he’d already talked to Aliana three months before meeting Emily, when he’d been dealing with the fallout with some vicious bullying at the ‘Y’. Wyatt had gone up to East L.A. and met with Hunter’s then fiancée at the school where she was Vice Principal. She had been very open in her past trauma with bullies throughout school and her resulting despair.

  Then two weeks later he was hearing Emily’s screams coming through his link as his team members were killing the men who were raping her and getting her to safety.

  Wyatt blinked hard. He didn’t try to tell himself that it was the smoke. He knew why his eyes were watering.

  When he’d first decided to enter Em’s life, it was because he’d known that her mother had left to go back to Oman and Emily was making her first tentative steps back into society. The situation resonated with him, she said she didn’t feel abandoned, but really? Anyway, he figured she could use someone watching her six.

  It was easy enough to start volunteering up at Lincoln Park. He didn’t feel guilty in the slightest that he had been keeping a cyber-eye out on her. He’d looped her in with the three others he was watching out for. Then he met her in person. Support and comradery, that was all he intended to provide for her, then he spent an hour in her presence.

  He’d known he’d been lying to himself when he’d said it would only be friendship. She was so encouraging and compassionate with the kids. Couple that with the glimpses of smartass, strength and intelligence and he was a goner. Emily was everything he never knew he wanted in a woman.

  From the get-go he’d been eager to plumb her depths. She fascinated him. He had to go slow, but other than the fact she never invited him into her home, he felt closer to her than anybody else in the world. She’d gutted him when she’d been in pain and angry. She was the last person on this earth that he would ever want to hurt, yet he had.

  He had to fix this. He blinked again. Damned smoke.

  4

  “Emily, you don’t have to get everything done today. I wasn’t expecting all of the shelves to be stocked until Friday.”

  Emily looked up at Kim in confusion, then looked down at the pile of empty boxes around her feet. “Oh, I guess I got carried away.”

  “That’s been happening a lot this week. Wanna talk about it?”

  Emily stepped down from the short ladder she had used to reach some of the higher shelves. She loved this bookshop, it was the ‘go-to’ place in San Diego for all types of books, and wonder of wonders, it was solvent. She wiped her hands on her jeans, then picked up one of the empty boxes.

  “Let me start breaking these down, then I’ll come up front and we can talk.”

  “Those can wait,” Kim said kindly.

  “You know they can’t. They’re cluttering up the aisles. Just give me twenty minutes, and I’ll get them in the cardboard recycling area out back.”

  “No, just rest them near the door.”

  “I’m a big girl. It’s one p.m. on a Thursday in the glitzy part of town. I can certainly take these out back,” Emily said with a grin. What’s more, she felt confident about it too.

  Score one for Team Hoag!

  Emily took her time using the big Exact-O blade cutting the boxes down. She might be getting better at handling a moment out back by herself, but she knew she wasn’t the most coordinated girl on the planet so she was going to be extra careful so she didn’t cut off her thumb. Before she picked up the last box, Wyatt softly called her name.

  “Hey, don’t sneak up on me like that,” she protested. “I could have ended up cutting myself.”

  He smiled his Wyatt smile. “I waited until you were between boxes. I didn’t want to have to take you to the hospital.”

  “Oh yeah, you know how clumsy I am, don’t you?” she said with a resigned smile. “You know everything.”

  He pulled the blade out of her hand and easily cut the box down flat in a third of the time it would have taken her. He eyed the pile.

  “Where do these go?”

  “Out back, near the dumpster.”

  “You weren’t going to take them there, were you?” he asked.

  “I was.”

  Take that, she thought as she lifted her chin and stared him in the eye. She was doing fine without him.

  He looked at her then nodded. “I see,” he said slowly. “But since I’m here today, instead of taking multiple trips, how about you let me take it out. Might as well use me since I’ve proven I have more brawn then brains.”

  “Well, when you put it like that.” Emily struggled not to smile.

  Bad girl. You’re supposed to be mad at him.

  She held the door for him as he took the flattened boxes out to the pile behind the store. She felt herself blush when she noticed how his muscles bulged as he pushed the pile into a semblance of order.

  Emily had spent the last five days really thinking about how she’d left Wyatt’s house. He’d tried to stop her. It hadn’t worked. She had the Uber App on her phone. Another score for Team Hoag.

  One of the things she’d realized over the weekend is that part of the reason she’d left wasn’t just because he hadn’t opened up to her, it was because she was uneasy with some of the feelings he was arousing in her, so she’d ended up running away like a little girl. Heck, any one of the girls at the youth center would have handled things better.

  “Emily, if you keep biting your lip like that, you’ll make it bleed.”

  Her hand flew up to her mouth. Her lip was stinging. She blushed as he stood two steps below her on the loading dock. They were eye-to-eye.

  “I asked Halindra where you’ve been, she said you went over to the center in Temecula. I hate this shit. I miss you. What can I do to make this right?”

  He didn’t say anything else, he just stared at her. He had stubble on his chin. Usually he was clean-shaven, but the scruff looked good on him. She sighed deeply.

  I’m in trouble. Deep, deep trouble.

  Emily bit her lip. She watched transfixed as Wyatt lifted his hand and slowly, ever so slowly, and brushed his thumb over her lower lip, releasing it from the grip of her teeth.

  “Please Em, give me a second chance,” he begged.

  She trembled. Could she do this?

  “Can you be honest with me?” she asked him.

  “How honest?” His voice was a gruff whisper. His eyes shot golden fire.

  Was he asking what she thought he was? No, he couldn’t be.

  “I want you to tell me about yourself. I want you to share. Like I have. I want us to really be friends,” she whispered.

  “You want us to be-” He stopped. “You want us to have a connection.”

  She nodded. “That’s right. A real connection. Not just me being the one sharing. I need us to come at this as equals or it will never work.”

  He looked down at her hand. She saw him. She felt him almost willing her to reach out and take hold of his. How could she resist? When she did, he looked up at her and smiled.

  “I want this to work too,” he said quietly. “I need you to be my friend.”

  Something settled in her chest. She couldn’t handle anything more, no matter how attracted she was to him. But she felt the same way he did. She needed him. Oh, how she needed him.

  Emily looked at herself in the mirror. It was the most skin she had shown in, well, ever. Kim had taken her shopping, and the sleeveless yellow sundress just called out to her. After years of living in the Middle East, it still seemed odd wearing something like this. She picked up the little white sweater and put it on over it.

  When her mobile phone rang, she picked it up, thinking it was going to be Wyatt telling her he had to cancel. It wouldn’t be the first time that some kind of thing at base came up that forced him to rearrange their plans.
When she heard the familiar clicking on the phone, she realized it was a call coming in from Oman.

  She sat down on her bed.

  She smiled. “Hi Mom, what are you doing calling at four in the morning?” Emily asked before the caller identified herself. “I wasn’t expecting your call until tomorrow.”

  “Strike one,” her sister Carly said.

  “Carly, what are you doing calling? You never call me. You’re going through teenage angst, remember,” Emily teased.

  Since Emily’s assault, her sister Carly had only been able to talk to her on the phone when their mother forced her to. Their conversations were so awkward that Emily had cried the first three times she had gotten off the phone with her middle sister.

  Emily’s therapist had finally come up with a solution. She suggested that Emily just tease Carly about it and pretend that Carly was going through a teenage phase. She said that when they were finally face-to-face that they could then really talk things through.

  When Emily started to do that, Carly was able to stay on the phone longer, and the conversations had begun to get easier.

  “Yeah, well I needed some advice from my big sis.”

  Emily grinned as tears welled up. Carly hadn’t called her ‘Big Sis’ in six months.

  “Anything. I’m always up for giving my opinion, here it is. Listen to Mom and try to keep Dad out of the loop. Does that help?”

  Carly didn’t laugh. Uh-oh.

  “There’s problems going on over here. Nobody knows yet. But there are. Dad’s trying not to let on. Even Mom’s out of the loop.”

  “What do you mean problems?”

  “I’ve heard talk at the American School. Some of the kids who work at the Embassy say their parents are talking about how the trouble in Yemen is going to spill over to us here in Muscat.”

  Emily thought about the capital of Oman that was a good twelve hundred kilometers from the Yemen border. It made no sense that problems from Yemen could spread that far.

  “How is that even possible? Muscat is too far away, it would hit Dhofar, way before then.” Emily stood up from the bed and started pacing. “Anyway, it makes no sense. Oman is one of the few countries taking in the displaced Yemenis, and the Sultanate of Oman has been bending over backwards to get all the different factions in Yemen to talk and maybe come to some sort of accord.”