If she’d had control, she wouldn’t have hurt him. But she had hurt him, in the most fundamental way. She’d participated, teased, wanted. She’d given him every cue to touch her, to take her, to anchor her in something real, and when he reached for her, she’d recoiled. Not because she didn’t want him. Because she’d been terrified of being known.
She’d told herself it was trauma, professionalism, timing. But underneath, it was shame, old, ancestral, the kind carried in silence through generations.
The ancestors had never spoken to her, yet she felt their judgment. Maybe they had always sensed her incompleteness, her inability to rise to the lofty goal of medicine woman because she lacked character or courage.
Bear’s absence, his quiet rejection, hurt worse than she’d expected. He didn’t want to be in the same room with her, operate beside her, or even speak to her. He wouldn’t have meant it cruelly, but that only made it worse. She had been a fool, weak, reckless, out of control.
No matter the pain, she’d made the right decision.
Men like Bear were built from steadiness and faith, and she was all volatility and fault lines. He carried silence like a vow, and she carried noise like a shield.
She didn’t deserve a man like that.
The thought steadied her for a heartbeat, then hollowed her out completely. She pressed her palm against the metal table, forcing herself upright, the practiced rhythm of command settling over the wreckage of what she’d just felt. Duty would be her penance. Work, her absolution.
She walked out of the briefing room alone, drove to the airfield where the planes waited in darkness. The air was cooler here, the smell of jet fuel and sea salt wrapping around her like memory.
She set her pack down, fingers trembling before she clenched them into stillness. The hum of engines filled the space, low and constant.
She’d pushed him away because she’d been afraid—afraid of being seen, of being chosen, of being loved by someone who might actually see the parts of her she’d buried to survive.
Now he was gone, and the hollow he left burned through her like heat rising off metal.
If control was supposed to protect her, it had failed.
Bailee drew a breath, steady, careful, and forced herself back into armor.
She would move forward. She would be precise. She would bury this like every other weakness.
But the silence, his, and the ancestors’, followed her out onto the tarmac.
Petty Officer Cormac Kavanaugh couldn’t help the grin that tugged at his mouth.
Coronado wasn’t really an island, but it sure looked like one. A narrow ribbon of sand called the Silver Strand tethered it to the mainland, eight miles of beach and asphalt barely keeping paradise from drifting out to sea. The Navy ruled here. This was the West Coast’s amphibious heart, home to the Naval Special Warfare Command, the SEALs, the Expeditionary Warfare units, and enough salt and discipline to grind down every dreamer who thought he could hack it.
To the north sat North Island Naval Air Station, jets screaming off the deck, the sky pulsing with sound.
Outside the gates, though, it looked like another world entirely. Tourists wandered Orange Avenue in bright shirts and sandals, clutching ice cream cones, oblivious to the grinder hidden just beyond the wire. Shops, surf shacks, and seafood joints lined the road. At the far end, the Hotel del Coronado shimmered in sunlight, white clapboard, red roof, the kind of place that collected movie stars and presidents instead of recruits and sand fleas.
Cormac leaned back against the seat and grinned. He always said he was born under a lucky star. He’d skated through high school, through fights, through half the bad decisions a Southie boy could make. Hell, even when Nico had caught him boosting a car, the biggest break of his life had been that his own brother wore the badge. You get one chance, Mac. One. He’d taken it and never looked back. He searched for the hardest, grittiest, toughest thing he could do.
He found it from a Navy recruiter on Career Day in high school.
From sixteen to eighteen, he’d worked his ass off at every one of the BUD/S requirements until he exceeded them, while Nico thought he was wasting time. Got up early, snuck out after shifts at the garage, cutting through alleys to the Y so he could use the pool. The only person who knew was his twin sister, Penelope, or Pia, short for pain-in-the-ass. She covered for him as much as she could, but half the time he got home past midnight and caught hell for it, Nico convinced he was back to trouble. He was, but only with chlorine in his hair and a stopwatch on the deck.
Eight weeks at Great Lakes had stripped off some of the Boston, but not all of it. The Navy had taught him to stand straight, speak less, and salute like he meant it, but the grin had survived. BUD/S Prep had tried to drown the core of him in a pool, but he’d held his breath longer than they expected.
Boot camp had shaved him bald and stripped the posturing from most men. Him? The bone structure did the heavy lifting. He’d still drawn attention in every bar on liberty weekends, bartenders rolling their eyes, girls asking what part of Ireland he was from, him answering with a grin and a lie.
He ran a hand over his scalp now, feeling the prick of stubble against his palm, and muttered, “Let’s do it.” The grin slid into place, the one that got him out of more fights than into them. The same grin that made the ladies swoon and the bouncers groan.
Boston bars, Southie sidewalks, even a few Sunday Masses. He’d learned early that charm could smooth the edges off trouble. Trouble like him.
But Coronado wasn’t Boston. No cobblestones, no graffiti, no half-collapsed row houses. The streets here gleamed, the air itself smelled of order, and somewhere past those gates waited the only kind of trouble that could finally make him honest.
He wasn’t here to find himself. He was here to prove himself.
He killed the engine of the rental, grabbed his bag, and squared his shoulders. The sign over the entrance read: Basic Underwater Demolition / SEAL Training Command.
