His eyes narrowed, and she could see him cover his annoyance. “Didn’t you mean what you said?”
How was she supposed to answer that? She looked away, feeling more vulnerable than she had ever felt in her life. For the last three years she had been doing her best to hide the emotions, protect her heart, and now it was about to be totally exposed. Don’t be a coward. She took a deep breath and looked back at Joe. “I meant it. But I didn’t mean to say it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She sighed. “It means I don’t know if I want you to do anything about it.” She reached over for her cold drink and turned the glass in her hands, watching the sweat bead on the outside. “It’s been a hard three years, Joe. I miss Nick, I don’t like being alone, and frankly I’ve been leaning heavily on you as a buffer.”
“You’re lonely.”
She nodded, willing to accept the obvious answer. “When you found me in the water, I wanted to wrap my arms around you, to hold on and never let go. Ever.” She smiled ruefully. “My emotions around you are going crazy at the moment, and I’m afraid it’s because I want someone to rescue me from what is going on in my life.”
She could see in his eyes that her answer had disappointed him. “You told me you loved me,” he said gently.
She bit her lip.
“The words are said. They can’t be ignored. If they were prompted because you need me, do you really think that is so bad?”
“Joe, you’ve never talked about getting married, having a family.” She saw him blink. Kids. He hadn’t thought about that, how important it would be to her. “If we start down the road to being more than friends, there is no way back. I spoke out of place, and it’s best if you simply forget I said it.”
He looked at her a very long time. “I don’t want to dismiss it.”
“Do you feel the same way?” It was hard to ask that question. Part of her wanted desperately to hear I love you back, yet part of her was petrified at the idea.
He looked at her steadily. “Kelly, I’ve been trying for months not to risk a good friendship by letting myself speculate.” He gave a slow smile. “But it doesn’t take much thought to know I would love to go out with you and find out just what might be possible.”
She blinked and wished he would tone down that smile a notch. She couldn’t think when he was looking at her that way. And she desperately needed to think. There were so many problems inherent in them being more than friends! Not the least of which was the probability she would walk away with a broken heart when it didn’t work out.
She wanted it to work out. She could be dating Joe if she said yes. It was so tempting just to ignore the uncertainty and agree. Jesus, why do I have to be noble about this right now? I want to say yes, and here I am trying to think of ways to talk Joe out of it! But he has to know what he’s getting into. He’s my friend; I owe him that. She took a deep breath. “You still think of me as Nick’s wife.”
“You are.”
She dismissed his immediate reply, was annoyed at it. “You know what I mean. It’s the first thing you think about me. You feel more guilt, more pity that I’m a widow, than anything else.” It felt awful to say those words, but she knew it was a factor. And though it pained her, it had to be put on the table.
“Kelly.” He paused as he chose his words. “I’ll always regret the fact Nick died and that you lost him. And yes, I am uncomfortably aware you are my best friend’s widow. But that is our past. I’m interested in what is in our future.”
“I told myself I wouldn’t get involved with an active duty SEAL again.”
“Understandable. There are numerous reasons to say no, to say let’s just stay friends.” He looked at her with an intensity she didn’t know how to handle. “But I don’t want us to do that. I want to find out if we can be more than friends.”
And if it doesn’t work out, do I lose our friendship? She was afraid to make the decision. “I don’t know, Joe.”
“Think about it. You know where I stand.” He got to his feet. “Lunch should be ready.”
Kelly was grateful for the pause, giving her time to think. He had just gone out on a limb, and she was going to have to be very careful with her answer.
* * *
Kelly stared at the clouds drifting by as Joe moved around in the galley getting their lunch. Anyone else would be leaping to say yes. How many ladies had she seen trying to get Joe’s attention, to convince him to date, through the years? For Joe to have responded as he did . . . He may have surprised her with his answer, but he was serious.
She was ready to move on, but it still felt disloyal to think about replacing Nick in her life.
“Kelly, if I die, are you going to pull back in your shell, make a saint out of me?”
Nick was stretched out on the blanket beside her, watching the night sky. They were looking for meteorites from the Pegasus shower. For a while the meteorites had been streaking across the sky one every twenty seconds. They had begun to thin out, had dwindled to one every ten minutes or so. Conversation in the quiet night had drifted through numerous topics.
Kelly, holding the binoculars in one hand, glanced down at him and grinned. “Don’t worry. You’re no saint. Not when you leave things that smell dead in the clothes hamper.”
Nick chuckled. “Joe’s the one making up the training schedule. Talk to him about his choice of locations.” He tugged her hand. “Seriously, would you let yourself become one of those Navy widows, constantly living in the past? I would hate that.”
“Why the question? Is there something I should know? Like why you’re wading through sewer tunnels for the fun of it?”
“Not that I could tell you, but no. We’ve probably been tapped to play the urban terrorists for the citywide drill later this summer. That’s Cougar’s guess anyway.”
Kelly scanned the sky again. “I decided a long time ago that your job was at least safer than a police officer’s. You are a whole lot better trained and you’ve got fifteen other guys covering your back. If something happens, I’ll deal with it, but I’m not borrowing trouble by wondering about it. I’ve watched the other wives, seen them torn apart by worry when you guys get paged, and I’m not going to do that. So I really don’t know how I would react if something happened. Get mad at you probably.”
“You would.” He shifted the jacket folded under his head. “I’ve never figured out how you do that—simply decide not to worry. I worry about you being a lifeguard.”
“Do you? Why?”
“The crowds. Your having to deal with more and more parties that get out of control at the beach, guys that don’t have any respect for your job.”
“Did you or did you not teach me how to put even you on the ground?” Kelly protested.
“You’re too much of a lady to get mean early, take the other guy by surprise.”
“If I had to I could. Besides, you know there would just happen to be a SEAL or a SEAL trainee on the beach to help me out. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that you put the word out. Compliments of you, I’ve now even got SEAL groupies on my beach, asking me to make introductions.”
“The guys have been impressed too. Cougar likes Alisha so much he’s taking her home to meet his mom.”
“Matchmaking is serious business, and Cougar definitely needs to settle down.”
“He’s young,” Nick replied.
“That he is. He can certainly swim. I clocked him to Point Loma and wondered if my stopwatch was broken.”
“He’ll settle down once he’s been shot at a few times,” Nick said matter-of-factly.
Kelly reached over and squeezed his hand. She didn’t have to ask to know the date of the first mission when Nick had come under live fire. He had returned after twelve days away, and he had been different. More intense in his training, a little more quiet. Much more focused on her. His confidence when he walked out the door for a page after that was the confidence of a warrior already proven and comfortable with what he could do
. It was one case where she wished he could tell her what had happened.
It wasn’t fair to tell Joe yes if she was saying it for the wrong reasons.
She didn’t want to be lonely anymore. She had been married, had tasted being single, and she knew how badly she was handling being single. The lack of interaction with someone left her dull. In dozens of ways being married had been the best thing for her. She didn’t have ambitions to make her mark in a career; instead she wanted a home, husband, and children. She hated the fact she had delayed having children with Nick, that she had let caution rob her of that joy. She wanted children.
And when she thought about those things, there was one definite name that came to mind. Joe. But did he want those same things in his future?
Joe, what am I supposed to say?
If she said no and he didn’t ask her again . . .
* * *
“You really like to throw my life into chaos, don’t you?”
Joe had to smile at Kelly’s comment. It came out of the blue and she sounded truly annoyed. He fed Misha another part of the sugar cookie he was eating for dessert and watched Kelly finish her peach. She was stretched out on her back on the bench cushions, having finished lunch. He had been wondering how long her silence would last. “Because I said I wanted us to date?”
She nodded. “Do you have any idea what our friends would think?”
“Sure. They’d ask how come I waited this long.”
She snorted. “Right. Everyone at church would be talking about us.”
He tucked another cushion behind his back, glad they had such a gorgeous day to be out on the water. He had a feeling this was not going to be a short conversation. “Your friends want to see you happy,” he corrected gently. “It wouldn’t be gossip; it would be genuine interest.”
“They feel sorry for me.”
“Some of them do. You represent what they fear most.” As the first military widow in a decade in a church full of military families, there was no way for her to escape that pressure. He knew how isolated she felt at church, a nomad between couples and friends who increasingly didn’t know how to relate and the much younger singles who had never been married. He had watched friends drift away, and he had hurt for her.
“If it didn’t work out—I don’t think I could stand the pity.”
He couldn’t promise her the future. He knew this idea was risky. “Do they have to know?”
“What?”
“We don’t have to tell people right away.” It would be hard to pull off, but they could do it for a while if it would help Kelly be more comfortable with the idea of dating him.
“If we’re dating, I don’t want to be sneaking around pretending we’re not. The ladies are too thick around you. They need to be swatted off—I don’t share.”
He laughed at the image of a mosquito storm that didn’t exist. “Kelly, when was the last time I went on a date?”
“Five months ago. You took Boomer’s cousin from the naval personnel department to the symphony.”
His annoyance was sudden and intense. “I bought the two tickets so I could take you, remember? You said you didn’t want to go. In fact, as I recall, you turned me down so fast you didn’t even bother to give me an explanation.”
Emotions flickered across her face he wasn’t expecting, and he softened his voice. “Do you want to tell me now what you didn’t tell me then?”
She swallowed and didn’t look over at him. “It was the anniversary of Nick getting pinned with his Trident. I went out to Sunset Park, found our favorite place, and cried my eyes out.”
Joe dropped his gaze to the napkin he had just shredded, wishing he could take back months of simmering irritation with her over that memory. He realized now he had been flirting with asking her to be more than a friend for some months. He looked up. “I’m sorry.”
She nodded, her focus still on the furled sails overhead, and frowned slightly. “Every anniversary, the loss just gets sharper. I should have told you. But frankly—” she turned her head to glance over at him—“I haven’t been telling anybody about those kind of secrets.”
He narrowed his gaze slightly, studying her eyes. “That’s dangerous.”
“I know.” She sighed and looked back toward the sky. “Grief is a funny beast; it has tentacles all over the place.”
“Where else does it show up?”
“Old movies. Some sunrises. Last month it was fireworks at a baseball game.”
Joe began to wonder just what else he had missed. She was having crying jags he had no idea about. He had figured out Thursday morning that she had managed to snow him and hide an insomnia problem. That glimpse of her life when he packed for her had been enlightening. What else was going wrong that he had been oblivious to?
“Did you and Nick ever talk about what it would be like if he died?” He had avoided asking her that question in the past. His own emotions concerning Nick’s death were complex, tinged as they were with his own grief, frustration, helplessness, and guilt.
“We talked about death occasionally,” she finally replied.
Her tone of voice suggested it was a private memory. Joe accepted that and changed the subject. “If we did date, could you handle the fact I’m on an operational team?”
She fluttered her hand. “I worry now, Joe.”
“I know you do. Is it too big an obstacle?”
He knew how much he was asking her to accept. While Nick had borne the weight of being one of the members of an operational platoon, Joe bore the weight of leading that platoon: Fifteen men depended on him. The stress on Kelly would be greater. He didn’t leave his work at the office; that leadership weighed on him twenty-four hours a day. He was often quiet, distant, repeatedly thinking through plans and contingencies for missions the men had not yet even been briefed on. She had accepted that as his friend, but since Nick’s death—he knew the worry that shadowed her eyes every time his pager went off.
“You’ll be an active SEAL as long as you physically can do the job. I know that.”
It wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear, but it was apparently all she was going to say.
“Joe, what if something goes wrong? What if we have a big fight or something? I don’t want to lose your friendship.”
“Worried about my temper?”
“You have the handle Bear for a reason,” she pointed out. “But no, you growl more than explode. I was thinking more about your stubbornness.”
“My stubbornness? You could teach lessons in tenacity.”
“Exactly. We’re going to clash. And hurt feelings can quickly destroy a friendship.”
“Don’t borrow trouble. You’ve been my friend for six years. I’m going to protect that at all costs.”
“It’s still risky.”
He wished he could take away this worry. She’d developed that trait in the last few years rather than praying about a problem, and he wished he’d spotted it earlier before the worry had become ingrained. “Relax. I bet you didn’t do all this introspection when Nick asked you out the first time.”
“I was sixteen, and I had no idea what I was getting into.”
“Then why don’t you half close your eyes and just enjoy it again? Dating isn’t going to destroy our friendship.”
“Joe.” She met his eyes and swallowed hard. “I’m not looking to replace Nick.”
He was puzzled by her remark. “Good, because in many ways we are as different as night and day.”
“Exactly. But I just want to warn you that it’s going to take me a while to realize how many ways I may be doing it subconsciously.”
He felt the hit from that answer. He had known he would be competing with the memory of his friend, but he didn’t have to like it. He knew better than anyone just how short he fell in that one-on-one comparison. Nick had been a good husband, a solid SEAL, and a Christian since his teens—he would be a hard act to follow. “Kelly, you’ll do that comparison with anyone you date. It’s not unique to goi
ng out with me. The best way to deal with it is to accept it will happen and move on.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“The only way you’re going to hurt me at the moment is if you turn me down.”
She considered it for a long time. “Then I guess I’ve really got only one question.”
“What’s that?”
She smiled. “What do you want to do for our first date?”
Fourteen
* * *
Dinner and a movie. Tonight. Joe glanced at his watch and smiled. Kelly thought by limiting how much time he had to plan their first date, it would limit what he could arrange. He had seen that smile on her face, and her excuse that she was busy tomorrow evening had been pretty lame.
He was determined to make it a memorable first date. She had forgotten what a SEAL could do in three hours. He nudged Misha aside; the dog had joined him in the front of the Jeep after they dropped off Kelly. He picked up his cell phone and dialed a number from memory.
His second-in-command answered on the first ring. Boomer had a baseball game on TV; Joe could hear it in the background.
“Boomer, buddy, I need a favor.”
“Name it.”
“I need to borrow your car.” A Jeep did not fit what he wanted to arrange for tonight.
The silence covered two seconds before Boomer laughed. “Sure. Who’s the lucky lady?”
Joe smiled. “I’m taking the fifth. Can I swing over and trade vehicles? Say in about an hour?”
“Not a problem. We’re not going anywhere tonight.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it. Is your wife around? I need to talk to her a minute.”
“She’s in the kitchen, hold on.” Joe heard him muffle the phone. “Christi, can you get the phone? Bear needs to talk to you.”
“Coming!”
Joe heard another extension pick up. “Hi, Joe.” Christi sounded breathless.
“Sorry to interrupt—”