Chapter 8

The remainder of the night didn’t get any better. Everyone honored Tristan’s request to be left alone, which ended up being worse than the grilling he’d expected from Hardy in particular.

Alone, he had no buffer against recalling the way Cassidy—Cass—had felt in his arms, the way she kissed with abandon despite his certainty that they were completely incompatible. And they were. Mostly because she’d dusted her hands off afterward as if nothing remarkable had happened. Both times. How could she have been so unaffected?

Better question—why did it matter to him so much?

His terrible mood lasted well into the next day, probably because he’d shut himself up in his room. What reason did he have to leave it? The box of protein bars Mavis J had ordered for him on the sly would last a couple of days at least and he’d bet good money if he texted her, she’d deliver him a Coke or two as well. But he was a social creature by nature and the lack of interaction had started messing with his head.

All the more reason to stay isolated. Penance for totally screwing up his mission to romance Cass into giving him a job that he didn’t want and couldn’t remember why he’d been so bent on landing in the first place.

West banged on the door at dinnertime, calling out through the wood that Tristan needed to get his butt in gear because they were headed to Ruby’s to do after-party triage and they needed him to get up to speed since he’d missed everything.

Blearily, Tristan rolled from the bed where he’d been staring at the ceiling for—he glanced at his phone—four hours and threw on a green T-shirt that he vaguely recognized. Not because he relished the idea of the grilling he’d avoided thus far, but it had to happen sometime, and he might as well get it over with. Plus, there was a possibility that he might see Cass at the diner, and he couldn’t seem to squelch the little burst of anticipation that bloomed inside him at the thought.

When he opened the door, West recoiled in overly dramatic horror.

“What are you wearing?” He squinted at Tristan’s torso. “Is that a T-shirt? Do I need to take you to the hospital to be examined for a concussion?”

“Har, har. I own other clothes besides dress shirts,” he informed him crossly. “You’ve seen me in fatigues with my entire face covered in dirt.”

“Yeah. When you’re deployed. Never seen you in civilian clothes that weren’t ironed.”

Tristan glanced down at the shirt, which did indeed look like it had been shoved into the back of his drawer and left there to die. “Seems like it’s about time then.”

“Wanna fill me in before you get hit with the big guns?” West offered casually, but the glint in his gaze held pure sympathy. “Hardy is not happy you missed the party.”

“I’m not thrilled either quoi,” he levered back defensively, mostly because he knew what was coming. His buddy only got that look when he already had the next few steps in the discussion laid out in his mind. “Maybe you missed the part where we were trapped.”

West rolled his eyes. “Don’t insult me, man. The US Navy funneled about a million dollars of training into your body. You and I both know you could have busted that lock with one hand tied behind your back. What’s the real story?”

“Not my property,” Tristan informed him, though why he had to was the big mystery. “Besides, we’re done with the Navy. I don’t go around disintegrating doors in my spare time to keep in shape. Et tu?”

“Don’t push this back on me.” West ran a hand through his short, dark hair that served as a striking contrast to Tristan’s blond, something they’d capitalized on many times at dive bars in France during mandatory leave. “We’re talking about you. And your agenda. Spill it.”

That was the danger of having spent the last decade in the company of someone as intuitive as Isaiah West. He knew stuff. Somehow. Even stuff you didn’t want anyone to guess.

Which meant if he had any hope of throwing his longtime friend and teammate off the scent that had Cass’s name all over it, he had to steer this conversation very carefully. Or West would sniff out that something had happened of the intimate variety, which Tristan did not care to explain. Especially since he hadn’t worked out his baffling reaction to it yet.

“I needed to figure out how to get her off the hate train, okay?” he said which was mostly the truth. “Everyone saw how combative she was with me. I had to fix it.”

Except it wasn’t the truth and he hadn’t fixed it.

He’d wanted her to respond to him as a man. To get her into his arms exactly as he had, to melt her will until he could prove that he still had that je ne sais quoi that had always given him a sense of pride and no small amount of smug self-worth. His mom might not want anything to do with him, but he could dang well charm the blazes out of every other woman on the planet, right?

Apparently, there wasn’t anything special about him. Not where Cassidy Calloway was concerned. It was eating him alive.

Tension stiffened his fingers and he automatically reached for the flint he carried—used to carry. When he needed to keep his reflexes honed, he’d flip the hard rectangle between his knuckles. It served as a distraction too, on occasion. A blunt force weapon that once had gotten him out of a sticky situation with a surprise guest on a back road in Ghouta.

But he’d stopped carrying the flint on purpose. This was the first time he regretted it. With West still staring him down, he had to muddle through this quagmire as best he could without any props. “What better time to work that out than during forced incarceration? I did try to get us out though. No matter what you think. The fact that I couldn’t was a bonus.”

“Uh, huh.” West nodded and somehow managed to make a simple motion drip with sarcasm. “Did it work?”

“What? You mean did I figure out how to get her to stop hating me?” Not even close. “I don’t know, man. Why don’t you ask her?”

“Because you’re the one I care about.”

With that simple statement, something packed in ice in Tristan’s chest cracked and he genuinely did not want to continue this conversation. At all. “Buy me a Christmas card and call it day, then. I’m starving. Let’s go so I can hear about this fête magnifique that I missed.”

West stepped back and let him exit the room, but his expression held all sorts of laden meaning that tried and convicted Tristan faster than any court of law could dream of. At least Tristan had managed to get out of that without blathering all over the place about his bruised emotions because that would have been messy indeed and taken a lot longer to get West off the subject.

When they strolled into the diner, the majority of the town had beaten them there. Not an unusual occurrence when that happened on a daily basis. Today, however, most folks had crowded around the corner booth where the former SEAL team usually sat. Also, not uncommon. This was the first time Tristan hadn’t already been ensconced in his favorite spot on the south side, though, and he’d always kind of thought he’d been the one who generated a lot of the traffic. Apparently, he wasn’t as charming on any front as he’d been telling himself.

West cut through the crowd, exchanging a few pleasantries with Lennie Ford, the mountainous, tattooed biker type who ran completely counter to the mold by owning an antique store and baking cookies for the scant few kids in town. Tristan nodded at the man who had always been kind to him and smiled at Mavis J, who always seemed to be attached to Lennie’s hip lately. They’d been a couple for years apparently, clearly devoted to each other but opting not to ever marry.

The crowd shifted and Cass’s face appeared in the opening between people. Sucker punch right to the gut. No, he’d not been prepared to see her again. Though he would have sworn otherwise. Had even agreed to accompany West in anticipation of it.

Through the gap, he let her wash over him, let her seep into all the corners of his soul as he re-experienced what it had felt like to be alive—which had happened the moment she’d kissed him. For whatever reason, she’d reawakened something inside that he’d thought was gone. And should be gone. Fire wasn’t his specialty anymore. Passion of that sort had only gotten him grief.

Not only was it not gone, he wanted more.

“Oh, good,” West commented, completely oblivious to Tristan’s internal epiphany, thankfully. “Cassidy is already here.”

That’s when Tristan realized Cass was sitting in the corner booth. She was the subject of interest that had caused the crowd around the booth. His booth. The same place West had set course toward. “You invited her too?”

“Yeah.” West shot him a slanted gaze that could only be described as cryptic. “You both missed the party and Aria and I thought it would be better if we sorted through everything at once. You can handle that, right?”

“Pourquoi pas?” he muttered.

“That’s not a French term I know,” West advised him. “So, I assume that means you’re done with this conversation.”

And then some. But West’s point stuck just under his skin, chafing at him as he recalled how much of an effort he’d made to stick to English for Cass’s sake. Because she’d asked him to. No one else ever had.

She caught sight of him through the crowd, her gaze locking onto his. A wave of energy bulleted down his spine that would have been impossible to describe, but he fully recognized. It was the same surge he’d felt every time she’d walked into a room but a million times stronger because he knew what was beyond it. He knew how her eyes turned into melted chocolate when he’d said something that pleased her. How her lips fit against his. The strength in her fingers as she gripped his shoulders and her bold, blunt personality that gave him no quarter on any front.

Tristan sensed the presence of the rest of his teammates at his back—no matter what else he’d tried to suppress, it would have been impossible to erase a decade of keeping each other alive through sheer determination and no small amount of extra-sensory perception. So he knew that both Hardy brothers and Rafferty had packed in behind him and West.

Caleb Hardy clapped him on the back as he steered them both through the crowd to the corner booth. “Almost didn’t recognize you in that getup.”

“It’s a T-shirt,” he muttered. “Not a Halloween costume.”

“Good thing. It might be too scary for the little kids. Ladies.” Caleb nodded to Aria and Cass as they reached their inevitable destination.

Before Tristan could come up with a comeback in any language, Hardy had already slid into the booth to the spot in the dead middle of the curve, the one he’d claimed long ago and no one else questioned. When they’d been in the Navy, he’d been the leader of their tight, efficient strike team and now that he was the mayor of Superstition Springs, nothing had changed except the locale. Well, that and the lack of bullets, which was nice too.

Aria and Cass had taken the seats that Rowe and Tristan usually claimed so there was a bit of a shuffle as four larger than average men and two women tried to fit into a booth that normally only seated the SEALs. The townsfolks who had taken an interest in the goings-on made for even more of a tangle.

Of course the fates ensured Tristan ended up squished in next to Cass. Her thigh pressed against his innocently, but intent didn’t seem to matter to the skin beneath his pants that burned at the contact.

Rafferty hung back, well out of the line of fire until the rest of them had figured out the seating arrangements and then he pulled a chair from an adjoining table, swung it around and sat on it astride. The same way he’d sat at tables for as long as Tristan had known him. Rafferty didn’t spend a lot of time gabbing about deep dark internal stuff, but everyone knew he didn’t like to be touched and a crowded booth probably appealed to him about as well as a root canal would.

“Havana working late?” West asked Hardy who nodded as Ember Nixon strolled over to take their orders.

“She went to Austin to talk to an attorney about filing for the town’s incorporation,” Hardy answered and smiled at Ember, who would be his sister-in-law as soon as he and Havana tied the knot. Aria would too.

Instant family. Instant acceptance. It sounded almost nice the more Tristan thought about it and coupled with the sweet burn of Cass’s thigh against his, he wasn’t handling the complexities well of what should be a simple dinner.

Ember leaned one slim hip on Rafferty’s chair, order pad in hand. The stunning redhead apparently hadn’t gotten the memo about how much distance you gave rattlesnakes, enraged grizzlies and Hudson Rafferty. Tristan was too busy worrying about the lack of distance between him and Cass to clue her in.

“Missed you last night,” Ember said to Tristan with a wink. “I saved you a dance. Silly me. Your dance card was already full I guess.”

That was the kind of easy banter that Tristan was totally used to with a woman, especially one that he had no interest in personally and had one hundred percent assurance that she felt the same about him.

“There was a distinct lack of dancing in the shelter, I can assure you,” he told her and the fascinated onlookers at large, all of whom were hanging on every word. Because of course everyone was curious. His feud with Cass wasn’t a secret, not when they’d both stormed out of public establishments on more than one occasion. “We just hung out and hoped that someone would find us eventually. Nothing to see here.”

“Right,” Cass threw in quickly, nodding up a storm. “We split a Milky Way and talked. Hudson rescued us. End of story.”

“That’s disappointing,” Aria said flatly, earning a side-eyed glance from Cass, who then seemed to catch herself and quickly looked away. “At least tell us that you buried the hatchet. Preferably someplace beside each other’s backs.”

“We’re good,” she muttered. “Good enough. At least we both agree that we’re sorry we missed the party. Tell us about it.”

Impressive segue. Why she thought her brain had trouble making connections was beyond him. Clearly, she didn’t want anyone questioning her too closely about the events that had happened in the shelter either, but likely for an entirely different reason than his—she was probably trying to forget her momentary lapse in judgment while he was trying to remember every last detail so he could savor it. Odds were good there wouldn’t be a repeat, which wasn’t sitting well with him.

“We might have found a doctor,” Hardy announced with his typical enthusiasm. “She’s great, well qualified and best of all, wants to start a clinic from scratch, God love her.”

“She’s pretty friendly too, right Rowe? And cute,” Aria said with a suggestive lilt as she elbowed Hardy’s younger brother who winced and then managed a small smile that seemed more pained than amused.

You wouldn’t necessarily notice Rowe Hardy in a crowd, and if you did, you wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a lineup. At least that used to be true. It was really hard to miss the jagged scar lining the left side of his face. Tristan’s handiwork. The building he’d vaporized in al-Sadidiq had come down faster than he’d anticipated. Low-grade Syrian building codes got the brunt of the blame, but it was really it was his fault and the stark reminder across his teammate’s face turned his stomach even on a good day.

Usually he tried to ignore it, same as Rowe did. They were both champs at pretending nothing bad had happened in al-Sadidiq but in reality, Tristan replayed the events in his head often. The village in Syria had been the sight of a grievous error that had led to destruction of the wrong target. Bad intel. Didn’t matter. The negative press had created such a PR nightmare for the Pentagon that they’d eventually kicked all five of them out. Honorable discharge, a distinction Tristan appreciated because it meant he could still hold his head up.

“She was friendly with everyone,” West corrected with his head pointedly turned toward Rowe, so the younger Hardy brother knew he was being spoken to. “Not just Rowe.”

“Dr. Kingston danced with me once. Don’t make a federal case out of it,” Rowe scratched out in his rumbly voice that had also taken a hit when a chunk of the crumbling building had landed on him. He’d lost the hearing in his left ear too, but West spent a lot of time making sure Rowe didn’t miss out on the conversation, so everyone pretty much went on and didn’t make a big deal out of it.

Except Tristan was having a hard time pretending tonight for some reason. Rowe had been their intel guy, nicknamed The Ghost because you just didn’t see him. Made him le meilleur at his job…until Tristan had messed up and given Rowe more distinctive qualities than a circus clown.

Was that why Rowe hadn’t wanted to chat up the cute doctor? He was uncomfortable with the physical limitations he’d been dealt?

Tristan sank down a little in his seat. His fault, if so. Punaise, he never thought about this stuff. For a reason. What was wrong with him?

The scene with Cass in the shelter had scraped him raw, that’s what, and he hadn’t fully cauterized the wounds yet. Or at all. Being forced into close confines with her while she acted like he didn’t exist cut him deeper than he’d like to admit.

The problem was that he had no mechanism to burn off this attraction that he’d developed for her. Developed? Like it hadn’t always been there? That was a laugh. Last night had just blasted it wide open, showing him that he had better deal with it one way or another before something permanently broke inside him.

“Bet she would have danced with Tristan more than once,” Ember said with a playful swipe at his shoulder that made Cass stiffen. “Maybe it’s a good thing you weren’t there. We might have had to start making the ladies take numbers and stand in a queue to get that honor.”

All at once, Cass bolted from the booth. “Excuse me. I have to…go.”

And then she vanished into the crowd.