Authors: Mary Margret Daughtridge

SEALed with a Ring (30 page)

She kissed him carefully. The wrong touch could be agonizing when whatever was causing his pain started up.

He kissed her in return, already seeing a world she could only dimly imagine.

Stay
, her heart said.
Let me protect you and keep
you safe.

CMDR. KOEHLER TURNED DAVID'S HEAD FROM ONE SIDE to the other. He had him smile, frown, make chewing motions, purse his lips.

"Pretty good," he pronounced. "Looks like you have full use of the masseter—that's the muscle that flexes when you clinch your teeth—but you're a corpsman—you know that. Purse your lips again. Still not perfectly symmetrical, but it looks like you compensate well enough to keep your spit in. And it may continue to improve.

"Cosmetically, the result is good." He consulted the chart. "The other reason we revisioned was we thought a portion of the trigeminal nerve might have been entrapped by scar tissue and be causing the neuralgia you've been experiencing." He pressed all along the trigeminal nerve pathway. "How's the pain now?"

"Better. None at all the last week. Steadily diminish ing before that."

Koehler leaned against a cabinet. His dark, intelligent eyes narrowed. "Would you tell me?"

"Would I tell you what, sir?"

"Would you admit if the pain weren't improved? I know how you SEALs are. You deny pain anytime you think it will keep you from operating."

There wasn't much David could say to that. It was the truth. To become a SEAL, a man had to be willing to push past pain, past exhaustion, past being cold to the bone. He had to want to be a SEAL
more.

"So what do you really think?" Koehler asked. "Do you think you're ready to operate?"

David thought he'd been a little too positive earlier, so he tried for judicious now. "I've kept up my weight training, but it'll take a while to build up stamina. Otherwise, I'm good."

"How about the mild TBI? Your records say the symptoms resolved by eight weeks post-injury, but blast TBI symptoms can have delayed onset."

"Want me to recite the months of the year backwards?" David grinned, naming a common TBI screening task.

Koehler folded his lips in a grimace. He shook his head. "My gut tells me you're not fit for duty." He stud ied David's chart again. "No pain at all for the last week, you say? A week isn't very long. If you are getting bet ter I don't want you to do anything that could set you back. Okay, I can put you on LIMDU—"

Broken legs, arms, ribs, wounds put SEALs on limited duty all the time. Other SEALs understood how much the man wanted to operate and would help as much as they could.

But if he accepted limited duty, he had to accept that he couldn't operate in his present condition.

"Tell you what. Instead of LIMDU, just note you want to see me again in a few weeks. With two back-to back deployments, I've got leave saved up. How about I take that? I'll use it to get back in training. When you see me next, I'll be a hundred percent."

Koehler paused in the notes he was making. "What are you covering up?"

"Not a thing." David added his best gleam-in-the-eye smile. "I'm a newly married man. Spending time with my new wife will be all the therapy I need."

Chapter 43

JJ WAS LATER THAN SHE SHOULD BE WHEN SHE FINALLY got to Caruthers. After David left, she had sat on the sofa in the great room, strangely unable to move, not thinking of anything, watching the ragged gray clouds move over the gunmetal gray ocean. Without the sun coming in the sliders, she grew cold, and still she didn't move until Brinkley got up and nudged her hand, whining.

At Caruthers, cars ranged row on row through the lot, reflecting gray light from a dull gray sky, and not a customer was in sight. Rainy days were not good for the car business.

"You brought the pooch," Kelly called from her posi tion at the concierge desk.

"I couldn't stand the thought of leaving him by him self all day. Ham will be by to pick him up in a little while. Send him up to my office, will you?"

"Sure."

"Kelly, I noticed Red's car isn't here. Have you heard from him?"

"Uh, no."

The short answer wasn't like the normally chatty Kelly.

"Isn't he on today's rotation?"

"I don't know."

Another short answer. JJ became aware that through out the showroom, people had paused in their work.

"Is there anything I need to know about?" Although her assistant Katherine was tireless and efficient, Kelly often had a better reading on what was happening over all.

"I just had two phone calls in a row, that's all. They wanted to know what would happen to their warranty if Caruthers was sold."

A warning chill ran down JJ's spine. "What on earth made them ask that?"

"There's a rumor going around. A couple of people have told me they've heard it and asked me if it was true."

If they only knew what she'd gone through to keep the dealership secure. "You told them not to worry, didn't you? Caruthers isn't being sold."

Kelly's eyes didn't quite meet JJ's. "I wasn't sure."

Her own people were doubtful about Caruthers' sta bility? "Well, it isn't. And you can tell anyone else who asks you heard it straight from me."

JJ didn't need to be a mind reader to guess the mean ing of the compliant smile that passed across Kelly's face. She didn't believe her boss. She was thinking, if the rumor was true, but the sale not ready to be an nounced yet, that's exactly what JJ
would
say.

JJ wasn't used to having her word doubted by her people. It hurt, but not as much as it would have a couple of weeks ago. Caruthers wasn't her whole life anymore.

The rumor needed to be scotched. The trouble was, she didn't see how. She'd just seen how little effect de nial had—even on a person like Kelly who had reason to trust her. But if there was one thing she didn't want, it was the appearance of not being willing to talk about it.

"Katherine," JJ said as soon as she arrived at her as sistant's desk. "Would you call all the department heads and ask them to meet with me in, say, a half-hour? And also, would you check the sales rotation and see where Red is supposed to be?"

"Red?" Ham appeared in the office doorway. "I can tell you where he is now. He's over at Dunning Ford. Saw that BMW of his turning in there as I was going by."

There were a dozen reasons Red might have gone to Dunning. One was that he was looking for another job. JJ made a mental note to have a chat with him soon.

She passed Brinkley's leash to Ham. "I appreciate you taking him for the day. Are you sure you don't mind?"

Typical of Ham, he didn't answer any question he wasn't interested in. Instead he asked, "Did your man get off okay?"

"Early this morning. He had a long drive."

In a most untypical gesture, Ham laid a leathery hand on JJ's shoulder. "Are you brokenhearted?"

Tears sprang to her eyes, surprising her.
Yes
. Embarrassed, she pushed them away with the flat of her fingers before they could fall. "No, of course not. I will miss him though."

Ham nodded. "Well." He flicked Brinkley's leash. "Come on, dawg."

JJ checked her phone messages to see if David had called. He hadn't.

Though she wasn't sure how much she was believed, the meeting with her managers relieved some of the strange, tense atmosphere around the dealership and halted the wary sideways looks. At least the future of Caruthers wasn't something that had to be whispered and speculated about. They knew they could come to her directly with questions and concerns.

The meeting also pinpointed the source of the story at least within Caruthers: Red, although they seemed to think he had gotten it from somewhere else.

She checked her messages again after the meeting. No calls from David, but one from one of the most so cial of Wilmington's social butterflies, Taylor Vaughan. JJ returned it while she walked back to her office.

"I was wondering when we were going to get to meet that new husband of yours," Taylor said as soon as they had gone through the ritual greeting phrases. It wasn't the first inquiry of its kind. The holiday season was gearing up. Invitations to parties arrived daily— all including a handwritten note to be sure to bring her new husband. Naturally people were curious, but JJ expected the curiosity to die down once the word got out that he was in the Navy and wouldn't often be available for socializing.

"His leave was up," JJ told Taylor. "He returned to his base in Virginia this morning."

"Will he be home for Christmas?"

JJ found herself departing from her prepared answer. "If he can," she hedged, knowing she was expressing more hope than likelihood. "You know how it is with the military."

"So you don't know when he'll be back? No one seems to have seen him. Are you sure he's real?" Taylor laughed gaily.

His face was suddenly there in her mind's eye. JJ chuckled. "Trust me. I have all the proof I need. He is very, very real."

After wringing from JJ a promise to bring him to her Christmas party if he was in town, Taylor hung up.

Kelly had clearly been eavesdropping from her coun ter in the center of the showroom, so JJ grinned at her as she closed the phone. "Can you believe that? She just asked me if I was sure David was real."

"When people ask me that, I tell them I've seen him with my own eyes."

"People have been asking if he's real?"

Kelly shrugged. "You know how people are. You did marry him out of the blue. They've got to talk about something."

Ham returned Brinkley at six. JJ kept the dog with her, where he was happy to lie under her desk while she worked on the books. December's early dark caused the lights across the fourteen-acre lot to come on. David didn't call.

"Brinkley," she said at last, rewrapping a half-eaten deli sandwich and stuffing it back in its white bag, "put ting off going home isn't going to work, is it? No matter how late we stay here, he still won't be back when we get there."

Brinkley gave her a very patient look and yawned.

"Yes, you're right," she told him. "I know how I get attached. I should have known this would happen. I could call him." In fact she had punched in the numbers several times but stopped before hitting
send
.

She wanted to hear his voice and to know if he was all right. She wanted to tell him about her day. He would listen and then make some insightful remark or find the humor in a situation that had gotten steadily less funny as the day went on. If nothing else, he would tell her she couldn't do any more tonight.

She wanted to feel his warm, strong body and see his laughing brown eyes. She wanted him. When had she wanted something that wasn't directly tied to Caruthers? "The only thing is, he never once indicated to me that he wanted me in his life. Wanted me, yes. Wanted me to be part of his life, no."

Brinkley got to his feet a little stiffly. The problem was beyond the scope of dog duties. Feeling the need to do something, he laid his big, square head on JJ's thigh.

JJ gently pulled the amber velvety ears. "He's lived up to his part of the bargain. I promised him he would be free to go back to his life without needing to be con cerned about me."

JJ swiveled her chair to gaze through the window overlooking the back of the Caruthers lot. Everything was shiny from the rain: the cars row on row, the as phalt. All she had ever wanted was Caruthers, and now it was all she had.

Back at the cottage, JJ moved Brinkley's bed into her bedroom. She opened the drapes after she had the lights turned out. The rain seemed to have tapered off to a light mist. She lay on her side looking out the sliders, trying not to notice that the other side of the bed was empty.

At last, knowing she was setting a terrible precedent, she patted the mattress. "Come here, Brinkley."

Chapter 44

IT HELPED TO HAVE A SENIOR CHIEF LOOKING AFTER YOU. True to his word, on Monday, Lon had David's leave ap proved, everything signed and ready to go. David would have liked to throw everything in the car and get out of Virginia Beach fast.

Instead, he methodically thought through what he would need.

He couldn't overcome years of packing in order and with care. He was a SEAL. Forgetting equipment was not tolerated. Mishandling equipment was not tolerated. And at the end of ops, packing gear that needed to be cleaned wasn't tolerated. Sometimes he thought half a SEAL's life was about packing.

He didn't have a lot of clothes except for jeans and work shirts, which simplified some of his choices. He packed his one old dress shirt and the two new ones he had bought for the wedding. JJ and her grandfather required a certain amount of dressing up. His one old blazer that was starting to look old. Dress shoes.

His hand hesitated over running shoes. He hadn't run since his last surgery. Before his doubts could take hold, he snatched up the shoes. He
would
be able to run. The pain was going to get better. He just needed time. He had the leave. He had time.

He gazed around his apartment, momentarily con fused, having lost track of where he was. He calmed and centered himself as he had been taught. Emotions wouldn't help. Sticking with his training. Doing things in the right order. That's the way you managed moments when the shit hit the fan. Besides, stress made his dif ficulty focusing worse.

He carefully put the fear back behind its compartment door. What he had to do, what he was
going to do, wa
s get back in training.

He packed his wet suit. The proximity of the Gulf Stream kept the ocean off Topsail far warmer than Virginia Beach. And he needed his surfboard. His small set of weights, he left. He would join a gym.

Laptop, iPod. Time to stop being lazy about emails. He needed the practice typing. And reading. He could download remedial math and spelling. The big thing was to learn to catch mistakes. He didn't focus on what would happen if he didn't succeed.

He finished loading the car and realized he didn't know if he'd forgotten anything or not.

He should have made a checklist.

He'd never needed one before for this kind of packing.

His eyes got hot, but he fought the tears back. Nor did he give in to the urge to break something. He didn't allow the too-familiar protest that this was
not
his life. He wanted
his life back. He wasn't going to whine abou
t the hand he had been dealt. Instead, he was going to do something about it.

He centered himself. All right, he needed a checklist now. From now on, he would make one.

His BlackBerry! He'd forgotten it.

He took the stairs up to his apartment two at a time.

His new BlackBerry lay on the dresser. It had a couple

of dozen new apps he needed to learn to use. And wasn't that a kick in the teeth? He was of the generation born as the Internet was. He had never had to
learn
to use an electronic piece of equipment before.

He pocketed the BlackBerry. He glanced around to make sure nothing else had been overlooked. He opened a drawer at random and saw the shoe box. He had al ready given JJ the only valuable thing in it. Still, taking it might be a good idea. He tucked it under his arm.

He took U.S. 17 south. I-95 would be faster, but so what. There was no need to rush anywhere. Nowhere he had to be for twenty-nine days.

He'd always been content to live in the present, never having been able to see far into the future. If he couldn't be a SEAL, he had no future at all.

For much of its length, U.S. 17 was a two-lane blacktop. It strung together tiny coastal plain towns, skirted flat open fields where behemoth cotton-pickers toiled, and tunneled for miles through pine forests. Long bridges crossed one wide black-water river after another. He had driven through North Carolina numerous times. After graduating B/UDS, SEAL basic training, his com bat medic training had taken place at the Joint Special Operations Medical Training Center at Fort Bragg. SEALs sometimes had training exercises with Marine Spec Ops at Camp LeJeune.

But he'd never before driven through North Carolina thinking he might be going home.

He told himself he should call JJ from the time U.S. 17 passed near Elizabeth City. He didn't know what to say. He didn't know how glad JJ would be to see him. It would be too easy for her to tell him "No" on the phone. It would be harder to turn him away face to face.

One mile added invisibly to the next. He was at Jacksonville, North Carolina, watching signs for Camp LeJeune, when he decided showing up at the Topsail cot tage wouldn't be his best strategy.

The critical period would be the time between when she saw he had turned up after she thought she was rid of him, and when he brought it to her attention that she was happy to see him. She'd have a hard time giving him the boot in front of other people. He drove past the Route 210 turnoff that would have taken him to the island and continued on to Wilmington.

"JJ," Kelly said, calling from the concierge desk. "There's a man here asking to see you."

JJ stood and straightened the neckline of her white eyelet blouse. She debated only a second before she took the suit jacket from its hanger. The suit was a fine merino wool in deep purple—her power color. She'd put it on for her appointment at the bank this morning. She had needed all the power she could get.

She'd called the bank Friday, hoping to assure them of the rumor's falsity before they heard the rumor else where. Floor-plan lenders took seriously having their borrowers be entirely above board. With the whole in dustry in a credit crunch, if a firm lost their lender, they weren't likely to find another one.

Unfortunately, the chilly tone of this morning's meet ing made it clear that while she got points by asking for the meeting, she hadn't acted quickly enough. The rumors had already reached the bank. They had talked about reassessing the degree of risk. They could, if they assigned her to a higher risk category, raise her interest, or they could reduce her line of credit. Either would be a serious setback to the gains Caruthers had made. Either one could effectively put Caruthers out of business.

She could only assert that the rumors were not true and that she planned to operate Caruthers for many years.

Even after the bank meeting, she had been called to the front desk four times to reassure customers.

"You stay here and be good," she told Brinkley as she shut her office door. It was almost five. The coordina tor from the rescue organization would be by to pick up Brinkley soon. She was going to miss him, but she couldn't ask him to stay alone all the hours she was gone or continue bringing him to work with her.

She was halfway down the stairs when she recog nized the set of broad shoulders of the man leaning over the concierge desk. Hot bright joy expanded to the point of pain in her chest. "David?"

The last piece she needed fell into place. She loved him.

He turned at the sound of his name. For one half second, naked supplication shone from his eyes. And then his teeth flashed white. When she was on the sec ond step to the bottom, he lifted her in his hard, strong arms and swung her around.

She buried her nose between his neck and shirt collar, inhaling deeply of his comforting scent. Everything was okay now, not because she was some child who believed a place or another person would fix her world and keep it safe. Everything was okay now just because it was
.

"Love bears all things, hopes all things, believes all
things, endures all things." Words she had learned a
s a child, heard read at dozens of weddings, blossomed with meaning.

The piece that was missing from her life was her heart, and she had found it when she had irrevocably given it away.

Needing affirmation of his physical presence, she found his lips with hungry joy.

A long, loud wolf-whistle brought JJ back to aware ness that she was standing in the middle of the Caruthers showroom floor.

David released her, a tender light in his eyes.

"I was a little scared you wouldn't be glad to see me. I guess I shouldn't have worried, huh?"

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