“So,” Josh says. “You and this writer chick. You’re an item?”
Over the past year I’ve gotten to know my brothers fairly well. Liam is the serious one, the upstanding one. He would not interfere or even ask about my personal life—except if he thought it was a safety issue. On the other hand, Josh is more casual. He’s comfortable throwing out a question like that without any preliminaries.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he continues, kicking his boots up on the dash of the black SUV. “I’m not judging you. It’s more of a congratulations. She’s hot in a sexy librarian kind of way.”
I don’t say anything. I also don’t punch him in the face and crash the SUV into the Mediterranean Sea. So I’d say that I’m winning right now.
“That being said, I still don’t understand why you don’t get a little sister action going. The other one’s hot in a Cosmo cover model kind of way, and if you could get both of them into bed—”
“Is there a point to this?”
He grins. “I knew I could get you to talk.”
Out of the three brothers, I’m the most taciturn. “You want to talk about relationships? Do you also want to braid each other’s hair?”
“Listen, I know we were basically raised like feral wolf cubs, but this is a normal thing. Brothers talking about a girl they’re interested in while we go on a road trip.”
“A road trip? We’re going to confront a rogue military officer.”
He grins. “So it’s a good road trip.”
The road curves sharply, and I deftly steer to avoid sliding off the mountain. The road down the Amalfi coast is precarious, and even worse, one lane for much of the way. That means we get stuck behind a string of sputtering old Volvos and tour buses with no way to speed up.
The cars in front of us roll to a stop, and I’m guessing there was a fender bender ahead. “So if you want to talk about a girl you’re interested in, how about you go first?”
“A girl? A single girl?” He snorts. “I’m interested in lots of girls. No one in particular.”
“That’s not what Liam said when he got drunk that one time.”
Josh straightens. “When was that?”
“When Samantha left.” Liam was her guardian until she turned eighteen. Then she turned the tables by approaching him. Sexually. He was unable to move past his guilt at taking advantage of her and she walked away from him.
“God, he was a fucking disaster during that time.”
“Imagine if she hadn’t taken him back. We’d be stuck with that asshole.”
In addition to excess drinking and a complete lack of sleeping, he trained until he literally dropped from exhaustion. It was dangerous and depressing.
“What did he say?” Josh tries to keep his voice light, but I can tell he’s affected.
“Something about a girl you met a few years earlier. What did she do? Some kind of dancing. A burlesque dancer. Or maybe a stripper. Did you date a stripper?”
He speaks between gritted teeth. “She was a ballet dancer.”
“Oh, that’s right.” I smirk. “I knew I could get you to talk.”
The cars ahead of us begin to move again, and we pass by a truck driver arguing with the owner of a Toyota, both of them gesturing. They found a small turnoff by an abandoned gas station to have their disagreement.
“Fair’s fair,” he says, his tone still artificially light. “There was a girl. A ballerina. We had a fling. Her brother threatened to kill me. I plotted his demise. It was all very Shakespearean.”
“Have you actually read Shakespeare?”
He snorts. “She didn’t enjoy being used as a pawn by the US government.”
“God, none of us do.”
“She also blamed me for most of it. Which I deserved.”
“So she left your sorry ass.”
“Saw right through me. Somehow you’ve managed to fool a sexy librarian into thinking you’re worth a damn. She’s not even mad about being a pawn for the US government.”
“She will be if I don’t get this goddamn bounty lifted.” The bounty on her head is not an official order from the US government, of course. Like most of the things the lieutenant colonel does, it’s off the books. Plausibly deniable. Shadow operations.
“So does this lieutenant colonel want to fuck your ass or what?”
“Hell if I know. It’s a control thing with him.” At least he agreed to a meeting. Of course he did. How else could he make his demands? “He wants to own me.”
“And here I thought that was Liam’s job.”
My hands tighten on the steering wheel. “Was she the one?”
“You think that’s a real thing? Soul mates and all that shit?”
“I don’t know. Liam and Samantha seem pretty real.”
“The thing that gets me about soul mates is, if we all have them, then even evil bastards have them. Maybe our mom was really our dad’s soulmate. Maybe she was destined to be beaten and bruised because of some goddamn scroll written in time.”
I glance at him sideways. “Have you been smoking pot this morning?”
“I’m just saying. Soul mates aren’t only for the good people.”
“So you’re saying assholes like us have a chance?”
He snorts. “You might. As long as you don’t fuck it up with Holly Frank.”
I swallow around the knot in my throat. It’s hard to believe in hope when you’ve held on to despair for so long. It’s hard to imagine a happily ever after when all you’ve ever known is pain. Maybe my brother is right.
Maybe soul mates aren’t only for good people.
Maybe bastards like me get one, too.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Holly
The fisherman worked the nets for three long, hard decades. He heard the old wives’ tales about sirens and monsters, but he only believed in what he could catch. His face grew lined with the whipping of the wind. His knuckles turned into hard knots. And every sunrise found him on his boat.
One day he felt a hard yank on the nets, and he pulled them in. A large weight fought him, bigger than any fish he’d ever caught, and he worried about a dolphin with its fin trapped.
It took every ounce of muscle in his seasoned body, but when he finally pulled the haul onto the deck, it was not a fish or a dolphin. It was a woman. More specifically, a mermaid.
He approached her with the wonder of a child, but she was panicked, thrashing, tears in her large blue eyes. “Shhh,” he told her. “I won’t hurt you. Let me help.”
His large hands were deft as he cut into the knots and freed her.
“What’s your name?” he asked, but she crawled to the edge of the boat and threw herself into the water, disappearing in a flash of silver-purple scales.
The next day he went back to the same place and waited, no net in the water. For hours the sun beat down on a dry, empty deck and endless water. When he despaired of finding her again, he saw the same flash of silver and purple. She swam right up to the boat and put her hands on the helm. This time she had no fear, not of his muscles or his knife.
He approached her cautiously. “What’s your name?” he asked again.