“Running long then, my friend. You said it would only be a three-day turnaround.”
Jameson didn’t need Nico to do the math.
Now Friday, he’d been here two days too long.
“Just long enough to hire an estate company to clean out the house and sell it,” Nico reminded him. Again, unnecessarily.
Jameson grunted.
“I told you that was an unrealistic timeline when you gave me your itinerary,” he gloated. “You can’t outsource the sorting of your family history.”
He grunted again.
And Nico translated. “You saw her, didn’t you?”
He considered another grunt but used an actual word instead. “Yeah.”
“Dude!” His exasperation was evident, as was his disappointment.
“Can I ask the purpose of your call? Because there’s enough self-loathing to go around. I don’t need yours too.”
“Why and how?”
“It wasn’t by choice.” Unless you count the time he brought her a lobster roll.
Jameson heard a baby cry in the background, then the rustling of sheets as Nico murmured, “Go back to sleep, babe. I’ll get her,” to Amber.
Happily married, Nico had everything Jameson once hoped to.
A wife he loved and a few kids he cherished. A picket fence and a profession that afforded them a modest suburban home but with the best kitchen appliances a middle-class income could buy.
That’s what he and Chloe mapped out, that summer so long ago.
Then came reality in the form of a premature stop along the way.
“She bought my dad’s place.”
“The hardware store?” Baby babble came through the line, and Jameson knew he was holding the phone and his one-year-old at the same time.
“No. The fucking house.”
A pause. “How?”
“It was in foreclosure.”
“Thought you were giving him most of your dough over the years?”
“I was. Can’t find any trace of it. It’s a clusterfuck of unknowns.”
“Is it possible he spent it on strippers and blow?”
Jameson barked out a laugh, the sound rusty in the hushed calm of dawn. “Fuck, I hope so, but I doubt it. He was the loneliest man you’d ever meet after my mom died.”
“No, you’re the loneliest man I’ve ever met,” he pointed out. “Because of that hot blonde, I’ll remind you, so keep it in your pants. She’s got a bite.”
“What she has is my house. She bought it.”
Jameson looked toward the quiet carriage house. No insomnia for that one. Probably sleeping like an angel. “With an agenda I’ve yet to figure out.”
Silence while Nico digested that juicy tidbit.
“You told me you didn’t want the house anyway. You wanted to sell it ASAP so you could get back to Tampa ASAP and put East Hampton and that b-i-t-c-h behind you.”
Jameson snorted. “Don’t remember spelling out the word when describing my mortal enemy.”
“No, you used it in its full glory several times over the years and as recently as the day before you left. I just don’t want my baby’s first word to be . . . b-i-t-c-h. Amber would have my ass.”
“Cool. Her first word will be ass instead.”
“Oh, shit, did I just say ass?” He inadvertently cussed again. A common trait for a sailor, current or former.
“Shit’s a good one too. Better than ass or bitch.”
“Damn it!” Comically frustrated, another curse flowed, this one in the form of a sentence.
“Damn works too.” Walking back inside to refill his coffee, Jameson’s spirits were already lifting. “I could do this all day, buddy.”
The kitchen was spotless. The dishes were back in the cabinet and the ingredients back in the pantry, as orderly as they were before she baked. As if she were never there.
If the sear of her surprise kiss wasn’t still on his lips, he might believe he dreamed the whole sexy, tormenting scene.
“You sound upbeat considering you left Tampa with dread at the task ahead of you. The Hamptons must be treating you well. Me? I always hated the Atlantic. Too fuh, uh—eaking,” he corrected, before the mother of all curses came out. “Cold for me.”
“Such a delicate flower. A Navy SEAL who can only tolerate bath water. Not surprising Amber wears the pants in the family.”
“She lets me in them every now and then. If I load the dishwasher correctly. Here, eat some Cheerios, pumpkin,” he added, talking to the baby, not Jameson. “And why are you subjecting yourself to torture? Didn’t you learn anything in SERE school?”
SERE stood for survival, evasion, resistance, and escape, and to become a SEAL, you had to enroll then remain alive to pass. Training that made a stay at Guantanamo Bay during its heyday seem like a vacation.
Those tormenting days taught him to cope after Chloe. Not thrive, but at least survive.
They had not taught him how to evade, resist, or escape her.
“It’s under control, Nico.” But not really.
“You told her to fuck off and die, then? Because that’s all I heard for seven years straight when we were inside the wire. How she strung you along and did you wrong and broke your tender boy heart. And,” he continued, since Jameson seemed to have forgotten. “If you had to do it all over again, you’d still fuck her senseless but drop her like it was hot after she fell back in love with you.”
Outside the wire, they were all business. Mission centric.
Inside the wire, they bounced off the plywood walls with pent-up testosterone, waiting for their next op.
Special Forces, and Jameson in general, weren’t built to sit.
During that idle time, and with her betrayal still fresh, they sat around a bonfire reserved solely for Spec Ops, and drank bootleg moonshine. And somehow, before Jameson could stem the flow, he purged to Nico like he was sitting in a therapy session.
So, yeah, his buddy knew the whole sordid story, front to back.
“The fuck off part, I said,” Jameson admitted, walking back outside with a fresh cup of coffee. “But the die part seems a little harsh, even for me. There’s still time yet, though.”
“Time? As in, you’re in the presence of her long enough to have a conversation where you might say, hey, go step in front of a speeding train?”
He didn’t confirm, nor deny. Rule number one of any interrogation, and something he learned in SERE school. Remain silent.
“Aw, man. You’re falling for her again.” It wasn’t a question.
“Nope. Not at all.”
“Have you laid a hand on her? Sexually,” he clarified since Nico knew of his desire to wring her skinny neck.
A hand? “No. I did not lay a hand.”
“Something else, then? Tell me you didn’t put your dick in her? Because that’s a one-way ticket to Broken Heart City, population one.”
“My dick has not been in her.” But, goddamn, it wanted to be.
He might spend the rest of his life in the shower, jacking off to Chloe Morgan like she was the last woman on earth.
“Then why are you still there? Eric’s expecting you back to work next week. You’ve got plenty of vacation time seeing as you’re a workaholic with no social life, but he’s got you on the dive schedule Thursday. That’s five days from tomorrow to get your ass home.”