Chapter 14

What’s the worst that can happen if you protect that flame from going out?

Cass’s voice reverberated in Tristan’s head for five solid hours as he tried to sleep that night. He still didn’t know how he’d managed to get out of that rock enclosure without falling at her feet and blathering his feelings all over her.

Because when she’d said she wanted to be with him, his heart nearly exploded on the spot. It would have been so easy to say, I want to be with you too.

But he didn’t. That wasn’t fair to anyone. If only…well, that was the other thing that kept him from drifting off into a head-clearing slumber. There wasn’t room for if onlys in Tristan’s life and he’d made his peace with that a long time ago. Or rather he thought he had.

Until Cass.

She made him want more. To be more. For her.

But all kinds of pain lay in store for you once you went down that path. When the person you loved not only didn’t love you back, she wished for nothing more than to be free and clear of you. An unexpected pregnancy would compound that exponentially, as he well knew since he’d been the accident that had ruined his parents’ green card marriage.

Of course, in this case, there was nothing unexpected about it. He’d be waiting around for the hammer to drop, practicing his best smile so he could pretend his heart wasn’t being ripped out of his chest as Cass let the door slam behind her as she waltzed out of his life.

That’s why he’d told her to give up on him. That’s why he’d left it with her at a solid no.

Somehow, his heart wasn’t getting the message. It ached so much that he resorted to physically rubbing at it as he lay there in the dark willing himself to stay in the bed and ignore the muscle twinges urging him to go find Cass right this minute, catch her up in a deep embrace and just accept everything she’d offered him.

Taking what he wanted would be selfish on his part, no matter how convinced she seemed that she wouldn’t eventually realize she could do better. She would. They always did.

This was just the first time Tristan hadn’t been perfectly content to let the woman in his life go. Usually it was easy. But he always, always, always started with the end in mind, already looking for the exit before the first kiss. With Cass, he’d done it all wrong, backward and inside out, probably because he’d meant to romance her into a job, not into his arms.

Look where that had gotten him. Halfway to being in love with Cass and still jobless.

When daylight finally seeped into the edges of the drawn curtains in his tiny hotel room, he gave up and rolled from the bed to pull on the pants he’d dropped to the floor the night before. Another big chunk out of his status quo. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d cared about what he wore. Ironing anything would take more energy than he had to spare.

Something rustled underneath his foot, and he glanced down to see the crumpled piece of paper with Serenity’s prediction written on it. Must have fallen out of his pocket at some point and he’d lost track of it.

Smoothing out the slip, he reread the words that he knew by heart.

You will experience a great shift in your love life if you are willing to put in the work. After much give and take over the last year, you must make emotional adjustments and surrender to the flow of life and death before you will find intimate love.

Well, he’d done all of that and had gotten a big fat zero. He’d accepted the fact he had to let his relationship with Cass die. It didn’t seem to have made a difference. All at once, he needed to understand why he’d done the work only to be in the same spot as he’d always been. No. Not the same. Worse. Because he was mad.

He finished getting dressed in yesterday’s clothes and slammed out of the hotel room, completely unconcerned that it was dawn and people were sleeping. They could join him in his purgatory for all he cared. He needed to find Serenity.

She answered the door of her top floor living quarters that would be called a loft if the building had been in a big city. The entire floor had been renovated from individual hotel rooms to one giant living space, but in keeping with the quirkiness that seemed part and parcel of the town, the conversion had taken on some weird life of its own with half-painted walls and doors that led nowhere.

Serenity smiled as if she’d been expecting a former SEAL to visit shortly after the crack of dawn and put her finger over her mouth to indicate Tristan should be quiet. “The girls are still asleep,” she whispered, meaning Havana and Aria who lived with her. “Let me fix us some coffee and we can talk in the lobby.”

Tristan’s mouth opened and then closed without any sound escaping because she’d already flown off to do as she’d mentioned and before he could gather his wits, she’d pressed a mug of steaming hot heaven into his hands. Sugar, no cream, exactly as he liked it and when had she memorized his coffee order for crying out loud?

Meekly, he followed her down the stairs to the first floor, a little befuddled as to how she’d diffused his temper with nothing more than a smile and coffee. Maybe that’s where he’d gone wrong—he’d fallen for Cass and all this time, Serenity was his soulmate.

“What’s on your mind, sailor?” Serenity asked as she settled into the uncomfortable couch in the lobby, sipping her own coffee.

“Not a sailor anymore,” he muttered and saying it out loud made his throat hurt. Talking with Cass about Syria had opened up wounds better left buried and forgotten. He’d made his peace with leaving the Navy too.

Except he hadn’t. Not really. And once he started thinking about the caprices of fate he’d been forced to endure, it suddenly wasn’t okay.

“My prediction was wrong,” he blurted out. “I did what it said and it didn’t work.”

“What happened?” she asked simply and laid a soft, careworn hand on his.

The comfort she offered bled through him, loosening the strings in his chest that had been drawn tight since he’d first climbed out of the springs to see Cass sitting on that rock looking like a dream. One he couldn’t hold on to.

“Cass,” he mumbled. “Cassidy. She’s the one. I feel it in my bones, but it’s just…not coming together.”

Serenity patted his hand. “What about her scares you?”

Everything. He flinched as the word sprang to his lips, but he bit it back because really? “How do you know that anything does? Maybe the problem is all on her side.”

With an exaggerated sip of her coffee that couldn’t have been anything more than a tactic designed to make him squirm—which worked beautifully—Serenity glanced at him sideways. “Is it?”

“No.” His lungs deflated as he exhaled on a long sigh. “I mean, not anymore. I guess.”

“You don’t sound too sure, darling.” Serenity rearranged her long grey hair so she could lean closer without dipping it into her coffee cup. “The prediction isn’t meant to trip you up. It’s a guide. A positive one. But it’s also what you make of it. Throw it in the garbage can if it’s not working for you and figure out how to get the two of you to come together. If that’s what you want.”

“I do. I just don’t—” Deserve it. But that was a given. “You gave her a prediction too. About pregnancy. How am I supposed to navigate that?”

Serenity blinked. “I don’t usually talk about someone else’s prediction with a third party. But in your case, I’ll make an exception. She didn’t tell you the rest of it?”

Conveniently, no. “I didn’t realize there was more.”

“A lot more. Cassidy needs to feel secure. This is not rare among women, as you likely already know. I see very clearly that she’s battling something.” Serenity shut her eyes for a moment as if reaching into the bowels of the universe as they spoke. “Whatever it is, it causes her to feel precarious and alone. She needs someone to help her balance, to catch her when she falls.”

His stomach clenched as he envisioned Cass walking on a tightrope as she dealt with her disability. It must be pretty scary to not know if she was going to take one wrong step and splat on the ground. Had he done enough to bolster her confidence? Told her enough how brave and wonderful she was so she’d feel ready to move on?

Serenity caught his gaze and asked, “Did you give her the impression that you might not be the right man for that job?”

It was his turn to blink. “Well, yeah. Because my prediction is clear too. I’m supposed to surrender to the death of our relationship. At first, I thought that would be easy because that’s how I always do things. Nothing lasts. Better to give it a grand send-off than belabor the point. But it’s turning out to be harder than I expected. And then she…”

He trailed off as his throat burned unexpectedly. She’d put a stake in the ground. Boldly, with no fear. She’d told him she didn’t want another man and the second she’d said it, he wanted to be worthy of her. He wanted to stop letting go. He wanted to stop being scared that they’d both find out he wasn’t the better man.

But the risk was too big. Basically, he was caught between a rock and a hard place.

“Oh, sweetie.” Serenity squeezed his hand with a sad little frown. “That’s not what that means. You have to reset your thinking about the death in your past. All of the death, the losses, the people who aren’t in your life anymore. That’s the flow you must accept. But never let go of love. It’s more precious than diamonds. Let go of whatever is holding you back.”

Now he couldn’t swallow, and his mouth went desert dry. “You mean like my mom?”

The sordid details of his past had come out in the letters he’d written to Serenity while he’d still been overseas. It had been easy to talk about it through a pen when the person he was telling wasn’t sitting there face to face. Today? Not so easy.

Serenity scowled without managing to look too threatening. “That woman. She’s a coward and a piece of trash. But I’m glad she’s gone because she doesn’t deserve you.”

No, that was backward. He was the one who didn’t deserve a second chance, or she would have given him and his dad one.

But before he could explain that, Serenity nodded once. “Spend not one second more on that woman’s memory. You’re mine now. I’d kick her in the teeth if I saw her walking across the street.”

A laugh spurted across his parched lips in spite of it all, and something lightened inside. It was nice to be wanted with such ferocity after a lifetime of the opposite. “I’d pay to see that.”

“I’d do it for free.” She stroked his hand, cementing her role as his surrogate mom in that moment. “Sweetie, this is not hard. Tell Cassidy that you’re a giant ignoramus and you’re sorry you screwed this up. She’ll forgive you.”

He arched a brow even as he had to grin. “Ouch. Why are you so sure this is my fault?”

“You’re a man, aren’t you?” Serenity said with a wink. “It’s okay. All men are born with a missing logic gene when it comes to understanding how relationships work. That’s why I help with my predictions. Otherwise, the lot of you would be wandering around clueless.”

Obviously, she’d given the other guys on his team predictions of their own. He must be as big of an ignoramus as advertised because it never occurred to him to ask any of them. Now he couldn’t wait to find out what she’d done to steer Caleb and Isaiah in the right direction. They’d both made their relationships look so simple in comparison to the tangle his with Cass had become.

“So, to hear you tell it, it’s as easy as deciding not to let my abandonment issues affect my relationship with Cass. Right?” he said wryly.

The universe might have saved him some trouble by just spelling it out like that instead of throwing out some cryptic weirdness. Because it didn’t sound so hard now that he’d internalized it like that.

“Oh, I wouldn’t call that easy.” She shook her head. “But it is in your control. You don’t have earn someone’s love or jump through a lot of hoops. So stop. And then start figuring out whether you want to be a father or not. The signs are very clear. If you make a go of it with Cassidy, that’s in your future.”

“I would never abandon my child,” he spat out savagely and it became truth in that instant. “Or its mother.”

“I know.” Serenity’s maternal smile turned the slightest bit crafty. “Isn’t it funny how fate works sometimes?”

***

The appointment with Caleb Hardy arrived before Tristan could figure out how to weasel out of it. So he manned up and stalked across the street to the mayor’s office. Showtime.

But the strangest thing happened when he walked in and saw Hardy sitting there behind his desk like a grownup. It struck him as odd to think of it like that when they’d served together for a decade doing Uncle Sam’s dirty work. Special ops was a lot of things, but not child’s play.

His military identity had been there and gone so quickly in the grand scheme of things and the rest of Tristan’s life yawned before him, undefined. Lonely.

Where had that come from? But it stuck and he couldn’t shake it loose.

That’s why Hardy seemed so grown up all at once. He’d taken on a real job, a civilian job with meat, and he’d asked Havana to marry him. They’d eventually start a family, apply for a mortgage maybe and sign up for a dental plan that covered braces.

That little squiggle in his stomach had a name and it wasn’t anything other than pure jealousy.

Cass’s question thundered through his mind. The worst that could happen if he tried to protect the flame from going out? Answer: he’d open his heart to a raging, all-consuming wildfire that would soon be impossible to extinguish and it wouldn’t work out like it had for Hardy.

“Thanks for coming by,” Hardy said and nodded to the seat front and center at the far edge of his desk. “We have a couple of loose ends to tie up.”

“Yeah.” Tristan slid into the chair because it didn’t matter how many months or years removed from the Navy they got, when Hardy said jump, he’d still jump. Forever. The man had earned his allegiance no matter what. “I’ve been trying to find a good way to tell you I don’t want to be the fire chief.”

Hardy tapped one finger in an erratic rhythm against his chair as he leaned back. “Why do I sense a silent ‘but’ tacked on to the end of that sentence?”

“Because I feel like I’m disappointing you. And myself,” he muttered, his gaze on the cheap linoleum flooring that Hardy had installed himself in his new office. “You need us to step up. You’ve said that a million times. And I love Serenity more than I could explain. This is her town and I want to make it right for her.”

That meant something to him. More than he’d realized. And after she’d so eloquently dismissed his birth mother, he couldn’t fail her. Serenity was the whole reason they’d come to Superstition Springs, after all, and why they’d all agreed to build up the town into a tourist’s destination with an infrastructure and working parts.

“That’s all I could ask for then.” Hardy lifted his chin. “I’m not going to force you into a job you don’t want. What would you like to do instead?”

“Really?” he asked cautiously. “You’d let me choose?”

Hardy stuck his hands out in a what-gives kind of gesture. “What do you think this is, a dictatorship? Of course you can choose. This is your life. Live it.”

“But then you won’t have a fire chief.”

Hardy scrubbed at the beard he’d let grow since the discharge, same as Tristan had let his hair grow. It was a statement about moving on. Now that they weren’t in the Navy, they could do whatever they wanted. Hardy had done a good job of living up to his statement. Tristan had not.

“And Superstition Springs wouldn’t have a mayor if I’d balked at the job thrust on me,” Hardy said with a shrug. “So I get it. I didn’t see myself as the guy in charge of a town any more than you see yourself as the one in charge of putting out fires. I know your specialty is starting them.”

That stuck in his gut sideways. His eyelids fluttered closed as he processed the irony of Hardy laying out the exact opposite argument for taking the job as the one he’d given Cass as the reason they couldn’t be together. Which one was really his wheelhouse?

“Here’s the thing,” Hardy continued, clearly oblivious to how he’d just upended the contents of Tristan’s soul. “You’re good at both. You understand how to control fire in a way that no one else does. You know how it thinks, how it breathes. Who better to be the guy with his finger on the pulse of it than you?”

Yeah. Who better? The blood rushed from his head as he let the point expand in his chest until it filled his lungs. Any second now, he expected to suddenly be gasping for oxygen, but it was like everything inside realigned so that this new paradigm fit exactly right.

I’m good at both.

That’s why he’d shut down everything about Syria into a little corner of his mind—because he’d failed at the second half of his job. He hadn’t controlled the destruction his fire had caused, and Rowe had gotten hurt. It was Tristan’s fault that his teammate had endured months of rehab, yet still wasn’t quite whole, and he’d buried his guilt and shame over it along with his passion for life, for love and everything else.

It was time to put his stake in the ground and grow up. Find his passion again. And her name was Cassidy Calloway.

“Give me until tomorrow,” Tristan said and Hardy nodded instantly. “I have a couple of things I need to straighten out before I accept the job.”

Not before he decided. Before he accepted. Likely Hardy had caught that because he’d already figured all of this out before Tristan had, but luckily, the mayor wasn’t the kind of guy to rub it in his face.

When he left the mayor’s office, he beelined it back over to the hotel where he hoped to find Rowe, but the man didn’t answer his door. Because he was partially deaf now thanks to Tristan, there was always the possibility Rowe hadn’t heard his knock. He pounded on the door a few more times until he attracted the attention of Rowe’s neighbor.

The door creaked open and Judd Nixon stuck his head through the crack, eying Tristan with curiosity. Ember’s little boy. They’d conversed a couple of times but not enough to say they were friendly. Judd mostly kept to himself.

“Mr. Rowe is at the clinic,” he said in his small seven-year-old voice that had way too much color to it for his age. The poor kid probably didn’t have any friends here in this podunk town since there were few other children his age.

Cass was trying to fix with that with the school, by doing her part to make this a place people wouldn’t hesitate to move to. What had Tristan done? Waffled around about his own failings and generally acted like a pain in the butt.

“Thanks,” he told Judd. “I’ll track him down.”

The old clinic lay sandwiched between the hotel and the old art studio on the end. Faded paint covering the exterior might have once been blue but it was more of a gray now. The door still worked fine though and when Tristan stepped over the threshold, the two people inside jumped apart with so much haste that he got the distinct impression he’d interrupted something.

“Hey,” he called out to Rowe and then smiled at the woman. “Dr. Kingston. Nice to see you again.”

“Hi, yes,” she said, clearly flustered but her smile came easily. “We were just working through what renovations might be necessary.”

Yeah, they’d been working through something all right but if drywall had come up even once, he’d eat his shoes. “Great. I came to talk to Rowe. Do you mind if I steal him for a moment?”

“I’m standing right here,” Rowe said in his rumbly voice that hadn’t sounded like that last year, his head cocked at an angle that would allow him to hear out of his right ear. “I don’t need India’s permission to take a five-minute break.”

The doctor’s expression blanked, and she turned to survey the back wall, noting something on her clipboard that probably had a lot of four-letter words on it, but whatever the dynamic going on between Rowe and India, it wasn’t Tristan’s concern right now. Rowe joined him outside, shading his eyes from the midday sun. Now that they were here, Tristan had no idea how to start the conversation.

But then, he’d spent the last year avoiding anything that might be incendiary, so the time for treading lightly had passed.

“I’m sorry,” he said simply and put his hand on Rowe’s shoulder. “About what happened. I screwed up and you paid the price.”

Not so hard after all.

But Rowe flinched and shook his head. “What are you talking about? Syria? How was it your fault that I went back into the building past the stability point?”

“Because it was my job,” he countered. “I should have called you back, but I didn’t. I thought it would hold for a few more minutes. The building materials weren’t as familiar to me as I thought. It’s my fault you’re…not the same.”

The look Rowe shot him had a hundred things laced through it, none of them easy to interpret. “I’m partially deaf. It’s not a dirty word.”

Yeah, but that didn’t mean Tristan knew how to talk about it. How Rowe felt about being different than he used to be. “You being able to accept it isn’t the same as forgiving me for it.”

“Is that why you brought it up after all this time?” The scar that bisected the left side of his face twisted as his lips curved up in a half smile. “I forgive you. I’ve never held it against you in the first place.”

That had been too easy and alternately, the hardest thing he’d ever done. There was no way Tristan deserved that kind of absolution. But what was he supposed to do, tell Rowe that he wasn’t allowed to forgive him when Tristan had been the one to mention it?

Rowe didn’t even bother to let Tristan stew in his own misery. He just stuck his hand out for Tristan to shake and stood there until he did it. The other man’s grip was firm and genuine, and everything inside the box with Rowe Hardy’s name on it, the one Tristan had carried around back in the deepest part of his soul, emptied.

“Now, if you could just get India off the subject…” Rowe scowled and jerked his head toward the clinic. “She’s a piece of work, that one.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Tristan said automatically and then reconsidered. “Maybe I’ll have Cass talk to her instead. Woman to woman.”

“Forget I said anything. I can fight my own battles.”

Rowe took off to presumably do exactly that, leaving Tristan to his own battle, the last one of the day. The hardest. Cassidy.