Chapter Three
This oceanfront cottage—you couldn't call nine hundred square feet a house—was a splurge. An impulse buy after closing a huge deal with the Department of Defense a handful of years ago. My mother's house was already bought and paid for at that point, and she had a red VW Bug—her choice—and she'd ordered me to give myself something nice.
So I gave myself a beach cottage, even though I knew nothing about the Hamptons and surfing wasn't on my list of orthopedic surgeon-approved activities. In fact, I'd been flat-out forbidden from getting on a board again.
But it was a hobby acquired during my SEAL training on Coronado Island, and I wasn't entirely pleased with being told I couldn't do something.
It was that, coupled with my inability to sleep past sunrise, that had me up and rustling in the back shed for my longboard. The morning was young and the tide wasn't quite right for surfing, but I reasoned that I could at least paddle out. The beach was empty save for the joggers and dog walkers, and if I did nothing more than tread water and then head for the shore, no one would be the wiser.
The water was cold, colder than I'd expected for a humid August morning, but it was better than anything I'd felt in weeks. Like the stress and the shit were washed away, and all that remained was the lullaby of the ocean. Nothing seemed insurmountable out here, not even the list of issues and betrayals waiting for me on the other side of this weekend.
After finding a calm spot to watch the waves, I climbed up and straddled my board. The water was hypnotic, and if I didn't think too hard about my restrictions, this was almost as good as riding waves. I reached for my leg, feeling the lines and divots that ran from thigh to shin.
It only took two bullets to end my SEAL career. One from a machine gun pressed to the backside of my knee, and one from a rifle that left my tibial plateau in nineteen pieces. To say the mission had gone tits up would be an understatement, but there were silver linings. It ached every day, and it was really fucking ugly, but I'd survived and hadn't lost my leg. I'd deal with all the pain in the world to be alive.
Those silver linings were enough to minimize every restriction under the sun, and I slapped the water. "Fuck this shit," I announced, leaning forward to paddle into prime wave-catching position. "One ride won't kill me."
For several glorious minutes, that conviction held true. Everything was perfect…until it wasn't.
As the wave crested and I neared the shore, my front leg wobbled and slipped to the side. In attempting to recover, I overcompensated with my back leg. The pain was immediate, and I lost all control. I was thrown from the board, and plunged into the water. The board followed, pummeling me over and over as the wave crashed and churned toward the shore.
I swallowed more than my share of the sea before coming to the surface, but it was nothing in comparison to the fire pulsing through my leg. It wasn't the old familiar pain that I knew as clearly as my name and rank, but the fierce, searing twist of muscle and bone raging against metal. It was the type of pain that silenced my senses and narrowed my needs to escaping this torture. I'd been trained to ignore discomfort and physical limitations, but my worst, most grueling days in BUD/S were no match for this.
I dragged my sorry ass out of the ocean and flopped down on the sand, breathless and gagging and battered in both body and spirit.
I had to be reaching my lifetime maximum on shitty situations.
"Is everything okay here?"
I blinked at the sky several times before turning my head in the direction of the gentle voice. A woman's voice. There was no accent—New Yorker, Hamptons, or otherwise—but there was a kindness that my years of experience and business dealings told me couldn't be affected.
"Outstanding," I said. My jaw was locked and the word came out in broken grunts. It took a full minute to gather the energy to turn my head and face this woman.
Her eyes were full of sympathy—Ihatedthe shit out of sympathy—and she dropped the mesh seashell bag she was carrying to the sand. "I'm not too sure I believe that," she said. Her brows crinkled as she approached me. "You had a pretty epic fall out there, and I think your board took a few whacks at you in the process. I wouldn't be outstanding if I'd been through that."
I was a breath away from writhing into the fetal position right there on the sand, and I probably would've yelped and howled if it weren't for the pretty dark-haired girl beside me. It really would've been easier if a burly guy with a sweater of back hair and ill-fitting Speedo had been the one to find my pathetic carcass.
I sucked in a breath and blinked away as much pain as my mind would erase. "Just a muscle spasm," I said.
Her gaze winged between my eyes and the hold I had on my knee, back and forth, back and forth. Her lips thinned, and then she sighed, muttering something to herself as she dropped beside me. She held her palms out over my leg, and shot a questioning glance at me.
"I'll just take a look. If that's okay," she said. "I'm an acupuncturist."
"Oh," I said, not sure what I thought about any of this. I didn't enjoy beautiful women seeing me in this condition. And shewasbeautiful, but it wasn't as much about her appearance as her nature. I wouldn't go so far as to call it something like her aura, but she had a vibe that felt right. I knew all about sugar-coated shit, and this woman was anything but. "Acupuncture. Right."
"Have you tried it?" she asked. Her fingertips met my skin, and I was too wrapped up in my misery to process her touch as anything other than awful.
"No," I said, the word morphing into a long snarl as I fought through the pain.
She traced the thick, leathery surgical lines on my quad, the ones that marked the locations of the rods and screws that held me together. "How old?" she asked.
I was thirty-nine, but that wasn't what she was asking. "Fourteen years," I said.
She pressed her thumbs to the outside of my knee and the white-hot pain almost had me springing off the sand.
"A lot of pressure built up here," she murmured. "You need to release this, or it's going to get much worse."
"You don't fuckin' say," I muttered, gasping and groaning through each word.
