Maila’s sobs paused, and she looked up at me with a tearstained face. But it wasn’t with the innocent face of a five-year-old girl. It wasn’t even with the face of the woman who’d answered the door a few minutes ago before I’d destroyed her life.
She looked at me with grief and fear, but then her features twisted with anger. “You liar. You don’t get to promise you’re coming back. I hate you, Adam Trefor, I hate you.”
Before I could process the Maila Marie Nilsen storm that’d just slammed into me, she was off my lap and aiming for the stairs.
Her slender, bare foot hit the first step, and she paused only long enough to yell at us as a sob shook her slight frame. “Get out, both of you!”
I was on my feet to go after her when a hand hit my chest.
“Brother,” Zane quietly chided. “Maybe you should give her a little breathing room. Let her process this for a moment.”
We didn’t have a moment. We didn’t even have a few minutes. I sure as fuck was going after her. “Let Mrs. Jansen in. Tell her to call the other numbers. I want Emmy surrounded by people she can trust. She doesn’t deserve to be alone.” Not like this. Not orphaned and thrust into a world where she had no blood relatives left. It wasn’t lost on me that I was in the same boat, but this wasn’t about me. I could handle myself. I always had. This was about her.
For two seconds, Zane leveled me with a look that said exactly what he thought of my decisions, but then he stepped back.
If I hadn’t been lying to myself, shutting down every damn thing in my head so I could mission focus, I’d be staring at the naked truth.
It’d always been about her.
Thirteen years ago, I’d walked into this house and a little girl had smiled at me. I didn’t know then what that weighted heaviness in my chest was.
But I fucking knew now.
I took the stairs two at a time.
Maila
No. This wasn’t happening. No.
My brother.
My only brother.
With sobs stealing my breath and tears blinding me, I ran up the stairs.
I’d lost everything.
Everything.
Daddy, now Billy.
I didn’t even remember my own mother.
I had no one, no one, except a stray boy my brother had brought home, but he wasn’t a boy anymore. Adam Trefor hadn’t just grown into a man, he was a Navy SEAL. A cold, calculating, impenetrable SEAL who was going back to the very same place that had killed my brother, and I couldn’t breathe.
First Daddy, then Billy, and now Adam was going back to the same world full of war and danger that had killed every man I loved?
Why, why?
A fresh wave of tears mixed with anger, disbelief and so much grief that I couldn’t do this.
I wouldn’t.
I would not stand here another minute drowning in memories and wishing for a life I would never have again. I couldn’t wait for another visit from a uniformed man telling me Adam was dead, if I even got that, because who knew who Adam had listed as his next-of-kin. He didn’t have anyone.
Adam was just like me, or I was like him. What did it matter the order? It changed nothing. Adam had been where I was now for years already. Hell, maybe his whole life. Alcohol and hard living took his mama years ago, but she’d never been a mother to him.
Once, we’d all been a family. The Nilsens and a stray boy. Four souls brought together by life’s shitty circumstances but forged by need. My mama had been long gone, and Daddy was always halfway around the world on deployments or hiding in his study when he was home. It was always just me and Billy and whatever nanny we had at the time. I loved Billy more than words, and I knew he sacrificed his whole youth to take care of me the very best way a young boy could, but sometimes I was ashamed to admit, I’d felt like something was missing.
Maybe I had more love to give, maybe I was missing a mama I couldn’t remember, or maybe I just needed more love.
I was only five years old, I didn’t know.
But then Billy came home with a quiet boy with black hair and blue eyes that were so stark, they were almost haunted. He was so broken but so beautiful, I couldn’t help the smile that’d spread across my face. I knew that very instant that nothing would ever be the same again, and I’d been right.
Everything changed.
Suddenly, there was a teenager around who knew how to make grilled cheese sandwiches and put Band-Aids on my skinned knees, and who was so reserved but so very capable he’d acted more like an adult than a sixteen-year-old. But he also had just enough impressionable youth left that Daddy started coming out of his study to give all the advice he’d already given me and Billy another go around.
Adam was drawn in by Daddy’s attention, Billy and I loved having Daddy out of the study, and the next thing we knew, Billy’s room got a bunk bed and Adam stayed over anytime his mama wasn’t feeling good. Which was a lot. But I selfishly didn’t care.
Because the Nilsens became a family.
What’d always been me and Billy and a revolving door of nannies became me and Billy and Adam and a father who started sending the nanny home when he wasn’t on leave. What used to be me and my big brother and a man I called Daddy but hardly ever saw, became something so much more.
We became a four-person unit that laughed around the dinner table on holidays and shared milestone events. My heart had been full. So full that I didn’t want our happiness to end. I wanted it to last forever, and that forever started to look a whole lot like piercing blue eyes and dark, unruly hair as the boy Adam grew into the man Adam.
I couldn’t pinpoint the very moment I fell in love with Adam Trefor, but I knew one thing for sure.
I’d loved him from the second I’d first laid eyes on him.
I knew he saw me as a child, as the younger sister of his best friend. But I saw him as more, and I’d had a plan. Then Daddy died.
Now Billy was gone.
I couldn’t do this.
No escaping the sobs, no way out, my mind disconnected from my body, and suddenly my suitcase was on the unmade bed and I was ransacking drawers.
“Maila.”
I didn’t want to hear my name spoken with concern by not a Navy SEAL but the man I’d fallen hopelessly in love with. A man who’d held me so tight after Daddy had died that it’d felt like he loved me as much as I loved him.
“Maila.”
I didn’t want this.
I didn’t want to smell the distinct scent of military transport intermixed with a subtle, masculine cologne that was like cold wind and sharp angles, because no matter how many times I’d seen Adam smile, the starkness that never left his eyes was a part of every single thing about him.
I couldn’t do this.
I couldn’t breathe in my favorite musk that was mixed with starched uniform.
I couldn’t stand here and pretend I wasn’t losing everything.
So I hopelessly, frantically threw clothes into the suitcase.
“Stop.” The quiet command came a second before huge, muscular arms wrapped around me from behind. “Stop, Maila.”
I sucked in a sharp breath.
Before today, the last time Petty Officer First Class Adam Michael Trefor called me by my full name, his arms were around me. Except he hadn’t said my name. He’d breathed it on a hoarse whisper as he’d buried his face in my hair and surrounded me with his huge arms and unwavering strength.