Jesus. “Your ex cheated with your best friend…?”
“What? No! God!” Shayla laughed. “Noooo. No, no, no, no, no! Two completely separate incidents! Sorry, sorry, sorry, Isodidn’t mean to imply that! Wow, and I’m supposed to be a professional communicator!”
But then there they were. At the spot where the maroon sedan had parked, and she fell immediately silent.
Because the car was gone.
“Fuck.”Pete quickly added, “Sorry.”
“The wordisin my vocabulary, Lieutenant, and it seems entirely appropriate. I mean,phooey!Fudge!” She shook her head. “Nope.Notthe same.”
He found himself laughing again, and she was smiling, too, but her smile was tinged with her concern. “We probably could’ve guessed that Dingo’s car wouldn’t still be here,” she continued. “I’m sorry if I wasted time and…somehow made it worse.”
“No,” Pete said. “It was worth the shot. And you definitely…aren’t…making any of it worse. Not even close. I appreciate your…friendship. Sincerely. But, I’m the one who’s taking up too much ofyourtime. We should get you home.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Petty Officer First Class Izzy Zanella looked around the tidy little living room of the bungalow that he’d helped his buddy Grunge—AKA Lieutenant Peter Greene—move into just a few short months ago.
It was surreal. Not just the fact that Grunge finally lived off-base in a real house with a yard and everything, but that he lived therewithhisteenaged daughter.
Thathad been the shocker—the fact that the SEAL officer had a fifteen-year-old daughter that he’d never so much as mentioned to Izzy. Or to anyone else, apparently.
At least not until that day, two months ago, when Grunge had asked Izzy out for lunch, which was as eyebrow-raisingly unusual as if Grunge had told Izzy he’d pick him up in a limo and give him a wrist corsage, too.
Still, Izzy’d gone and they’d sat outside at everyone’s favorite little Greek restaurant in downtown Coronado where Grunge had exploded his informational mortar round. “Lisa, my ex—well, we were never married, but…Anyway, she was killed in a car accident and now I’m getting custody of our daughter, Maddie.”
Whaaaa…?!
The first Izzy had heard of Grunge’s ex, Lisa, had been a few months earlier, in a passing conversation. The SEAL officer had referred to her only as a former girlfriend who’d been into musical theater. He’d definitely skipped the whole got-busy-and-had-a-baby-with-her part.
But Izzy managed to push away his indignant hurt—how do you not tell a close friend about something as enormous as the fact that you’ve got a daughter? You don’t, ergo he and Grunge were notclose,and probably far lessfriendsthan Izzy had thought, as well. But boo-hoo, he’d been mistaken. His poor widdle hurt feelings were nothing compared to Grunge’s—someone the lieutenant had once cared about, deeply enough to make a baby with, had beenkilled in a car accident.
So Izzy’d said, “Oh, man, Pete, I’m so sorry. How can I help?”
Turns out Grunge had wanted to borrow Ben, Izzy’s wife Eden’s teenaged brother—who was living with them full-time these days. Grunge wanted help in picking out a teenager-appropriate rental house.
He’d also hoped that Ben could become Maddie’s insta-friend, but as Ben had pointed out over the past months of trying, these things just couldn’t be forced. Apparently Maddie hadn’t warmed to Ben—or vice versa. And although Ben had gone above and beyond with his attempts to befriend the girl, she continued to shut him out.
Which brought them to here-and-now, with Maddie AWOL, and Grunge getting more silent and tight-lipped as each hour passed, until he’d announced that he was hiking over to the high school because he couldn’t just sit still any longer.
Izzy had volunteered to go with, but Grunge had asked him to stay and try to break the password on the shiny new laptop computer he’d bought for Maddie—to see if she’d left any clues behind. Clues like what, Izzy didn’t know, but he was pretty certain she hadn’t left behind a Word doc calledItinerary of Where I’ll Stay When I Run Away. Still, he’d done as Grunge asked by calling all of the various gearheads and hackers that he knew, both in the SEAL Teams and out.
No one was picking up, and he was about to go hands-on himself when his wife, Eden, showed up with two of her besties, Adam Wyndham and Lindsey Jenkins, in tow.
Izzy was pretty sure Eden’s intention had been to make a hostage trade—Adam and Lindsey for him—since she was on the verge of leaving town on a long-planned family trip and this was their last night together for a full week. She’d wanted him to come home with her. But once here, she got caught up in helping.
“Eden figured out the laptop’s password,” Adam now announced with his usual dramatic flamboyance—dude was an actor—as he danced into the living room from the little hallway that led to the bedrooms in the back of the house. “It’sFuckYou123, in something she calls camel-case. I don’t know how she knew that.” He spun to look at Eden. “How did you know to even guess that?”
She was right behind him, moving more staidly as she carried Maddie’s still-new laptop. Grunge had taken his daughter shopping because the desktop computer she’d shared with her mom back in Palm Springs had been packed up and put into storage with the rest of Lisa’s things, and they still hadn’t found the right box.
“Because she’s brilliant,” Izzy said, grinning at his wife.
“It wasn’t that hard.” Eden shrugged it off even as she smiled back at him. “It’s one of the most used passwords, right behindPassword123. But the best part is that Maddie left Facebook open, so now we’ve got access to her account.”
“Way to go, Eed!” Lindsey Jenkins spoke up from her place on the sofa, which she’d reclined so she could sit with her feet up. She looked like a beach ball with a head.
An adorable beach ball. She’d recently gotten her thick dark hair cut in a shorter style that she called “baby ready,” which added to the whole cute-little-pregnant-girl illusion.
