Navy Seal's Match. Amber Williams Leigh

he answered. “I haven’t seen a dog or a Titan.”

      Her arm rose to her head as if to shield her eyes from the sun. “Damn it,” she muttered. “It must’ve been herons. He always chases the herons.”

      Gavin scratched his unshaven chin. “Is, uh, this by chance your dog?”

      “Yeah. What about it?”

      “How’d you lose him?”

      “He wanders,” she said by way of excuse.

      “You’ve heard of leash laws,” he guessed.

      “He’s called Prometheus and he weighs nearly as much as I do. You think a leash is going to make a difference?”

      “He sounds like a legitimate beast,” Gavin mused. “At least you got the name right.”

      Her arms crossed and her weight shifted. “You used to have a dog. Boots. Wasn’t that his name?”

      Gavin’s hands folded. He clenched them against his thighs. “He wasn’t my dog.”

      “What do you mean? During your visit two years ago, Harmony said you couldn’t shut up about him.”

      “Boots belonged to the US government,” Gavin said. “Not me.”

      “Oh.” She said nothing more. Because, again, Mavis sensed things. Like the fact that Boots had been shot outside a checkpoint in Kabul. Almost exactly like Benji had years before.

      Don’t go to that place again, Gavin told himself. Once more, he focused on what was present. He picked Mavis as his focal point. A dark beacon. The kick-ass combat boots were followed up her slender ranks by black pants, or leggings. The heat index today was 102, which meant she either hadn’t checked today’s highs before leaving her bat cave or she was crazy.

      Crazy, he thought. Let’s go with crazy.

      There were white slashes in the fabric for venting at least. They went well with the punk look she’d owned since the tender age of sixteen. Or was it fourteen? By that point, he’d been in BUD/S, fighting to fulfill his dream of joining the SEAL teams.

      “What are you doing out here?” she wondered out loud.

      He spread his empty hands. “Reading the newspaper?”

      She answered with knowing silence, making him more aware of the tremor in his knees. Mavis probably also knew by now about that vase he’d broken in the hall upstairs at Hanna’s and the semi-argument he’d had with his father as a result.

      This isn’t working, he had told Cole as he stood by like a chump listening to the man and his wife clean up his mess. His third, in as many weeks.

      We’ll move things around, Cole had replied.

      Briar was quick to jump on the bandwagon. Sure, she’d said in her feather-soft voice. It’s my fault, really, for leaving the vase in your way.

      The fact that they’d worked their butts off to accommodate him did little to temper the hot-burning coals inside him. The coals had been there since the surgeons informed him that he would be legally blind for the rest of his life, effectively shutting down his military career—the only calling he’d ever known.

      It wasn’t fair to resent Cole or Briar. Yet with every valuable Briar had to sweep broken off the floor, those coals smoldered.

      “When was the last time you slept more than an hour at a time?”

      Gavin frowned at Mavis’s inquiry. Yeah, no. Not going down that road.

      “There are people,” she suggested.

      “People?” he chimed.

      “That you can talk to.”

      “I don’t want to talk to them,” he said quickly. He’d seen enough doctors. They were all in agreement that he was a head case who needed to be on the antianxiety meds that made him spin out of turn.

      He’d take his chances with the flashbacks.

      Gavin pushed himself up from the hammock, finally feeling steady enough. He crossed his arms and lowered his head, hiding the pink scars raked across his face by the winter’s RPG blast. He’d forgotten to use sunblock again, as instructed. What did it matter? The scars wouldn’t fade any more than the blindness. He started to walk away, then heard her drawn-out breath and stopped. “What would you know about it?” he ventured. “Ever had a flashback, Freckles? Night sweats? Hypertension brought on by stress?”

      “No,” she answered plainly.

      He gave a nod and began to walk toward the inn again.

      “But I know someone who has,” she said at his back.

      “I’m sure,” he replied, and kept walking.

      “Which is your good side?” she asked, following. “Your right or your left?”

      Why was she following? He’d never been one for glossing things over. Would he have to bite her head off to get her to stop chasing him with the same good intentions as everyone else? “I don’t have a good side,” he replied. When she only continued to follow, he elaborated, “The left’s worse. Why?”

      She didn’t answer, but he found her in his right periphery. A shadow. With a quick glance semi-close, he was better able to pick up on her dark hair, cut raggedly, longer in the front where it tickled her fine-arrowed chin and shorter in the back where it rode just above her hairline. He could see she was wearing a flowy sleeveless top, feminine even if it was black as brimstone. A hint of skin underneath turned him on to the dark cut of her bra.

      When in God’s name had Mavis started wearing flowy, see-through blouses? She was in her late twenties, but when Gavin could see twenty-twenty, he’d never known her hips to swing quite like they seemed to now.

      Gavin studiously turned his attention to other features, ones he knew. The freckles. They marked her for the distinct thing she was. They reminded him of the quiet girl he’d known—the freckled Wednesday Addams. The sarcastic teenager he’d never thought of as womanly.

      Her sharp-cut jaw still looked too much like her older brother’s.

      Kyle. Like Harmony, Gavin had found a Bracken bosom buddy in the early years in Fairhope. Kyle had joined him at BUD/S after a year of college. They’d earned their Tridents together.

      Kyle could boast just as many battle scars as Gavin. Most of his had come from walking into a frag grenade during his second deployment.

      Seeing Mavis’s big brother hung up in traction five years ago hadn’t settled well. Gavin hadn’t stayed long at his buddy’s bedside as a result. No, he’d pushed himself back into the fight with grim determination that smacked of vengeance.

      He should’ve slowed down, taken some time to decompress before going on the op months later that had ended abruptly with him carrying Zaccoe’s limp body from conflict.

      Benji’s blood. Gavin would never forget how it seeped warm through the back of his digi-camo. He’d never stop cursing how his hands had shaken in the armored vehicle on the way back to base, making his job as medic impossible.

      He’d lost that battle. He’d lost it hard, and, with it, a friend. Benji was gone, and he’d left Gavin’s sister a widow.

      Everything started to blur once more. The ringing in Gavin’s ears warned him of return flashbacks. He tried blinking to snap himself back to present, then remembered. You’re blind, asshole.

      He took a detour, hoping to lose Mavis so he could orient himself.

      “Where are you going?” she asked. The question floated to him. It got chopped by the blender in his brain. When he veered into the floral undercroft of a lengthy bougainvillea-wrapped awning, she tailed him. “Gavin?”

      He