But just as Elena straightened, a beach bunny strolled past and casually said, “I’mimpressed.” She sauntered on a few steps before smiling back over her shoulder and continuing down the beach.
Does she actually think I’m gonna follow her? Camden thought.Clearly, the Frog Hogs have migrated north from San Diego and are out in force tonight.
He rolled his eyes before he caught the briefly devastated look on Elena’s face. She covered it with a smile that came and went whiplash-quick. “I’m sure you get a lot of that.” She glanced down the beach toward the woman. Her hand wandered to the chain around her neck with its unmistakable wedding band looped through it. “Look, if you want to go after her or anything,” she shrugged as her words trailed off.
What the actual hell? “You think I’m into all the toothpicks running around here?”
Elena’s eyebrows arched and her eyes widened. “That’s mean.”
Camden held his palms out. “Hey, I’m not disrespecting skinny women. I’m just saying, that’s one thing I hate about L.A., about Hollywood. It takes a perfectly confident, beautiful woman, and whittles her down into a toothpick body—with a soul to match if she’s not careful. If she’s too hungry going after what she wants, it starves her even more.”
Elena nodded, but her frown stayed in place. “Even so, if you want, Tina and I can call a ride home. I don’t mind.”
“Why would Ieverdo that?” Camden ran the back of his finger down Elena’s bare shoulder to her elbow, enjoying her silky skin and the little shivers that ran behind his touch. “I just told you, I’m not attracted to women like her. Not just her body, but her attitude. We are clearly on a date and she—”
“We’re not on a date.” Elena turned and started walking toward Tina who had gotten a little too far ahead of them for comfort. She’d taken at least five steps before Camden snapped out of his shock and caught up.
“We aren’t? Why? Just because Tina’s along? I don’t—”
“We aren’t because we aren’t dating. We’re friends.” She shrugged. “That’s why I offered to find a ride home for Tina and me, if you wanted…” she gestured behind her and left the rest unsaid.
“First of all, I don’t want any of that.” Camden waved his hand dismissively. “Second, I want…” He trailed off before his words about wanting to pull her to him, kiss her until her toes curled and she begged for more got him into trouble.Damn it. I did tell her we’d do this under her terms, didn’t I?But, he’d expected or at least hoped that her terms would quickly change to his, which included getting naked together as soon as humanly possible.
“You want what?” Elena looked up at him, her hair softly glowing in the last light of the sunset.
Why lie?“Elena, I’d hoped that I’ve shown you I’d like to move on past friends sooner rather than later. This,” he swept his arm out, indicating her and Tina, “feels really good.”
Tina took that opportunity to look back at them and hold up something she’d found. “Mom! Camden! Look!” She sprinted back.
“We just got to California, Cam. I’m…” Elena’s hand found the chain with the ring again, and as she tugged on it, Camden felt as if she were pulling his heart out of his chest instead. “Give me time, okay?”
Tina showed off the sand dollar she’d found and Camden told her the myth of the star etched on its surface and the dove-shaped pieces rattling inside. He kept his voice happy, but he felt hollow as he spoke and he couldn’t help glancing time and again at the wedding band on the chain around Elena’s neck.
I’m fighting a ghost. That’s a tough job, even for the strongest SEAL.
Camden took Elena and Tina home. He lifted Tina up for one last hug and loved the way the little girl wrapped her arms around his neck as she thanked him for dinner and the magic trick. When Elena hugged him, he couldn’t help but feel the metal of the ring press into his solar plexus like an accusing finger.
* * *
Camden had a hell of a time falling asleep that night. When he did, he fell deeply, then sat bolt upright in bed when he heard a cell phone ringtone he hadn’t used in five years. He flailed around for the phone as cold sweat trickled down the back of his neck, thinking he was back in the dry desert heat on the night he got the call telling him his wife and baby were gone from the world.
Only a nightmare.
But his phone had dinged—an alert for new email from one of his teammates. He grabbed his secured laptop from his bedside table and opened it, wondering who the hell was up and working in the middle of the night. Smart money said Gina.
And the smart money was correct. Gina had forwarded a pic of a heavily-redacted page. From what wasn’t blacked out, Camden put together the message that one of the agents maybe wasn’t so foreign, was actually a US citizen, and that Roger already knew this person.
Camden smacked the back of his head against the headboard. Bennett knew roughly a bazillion people. Was it someone close to him, or a new acquaintance? How could they ever narrow it down?
He closed his laptop, punched his pillow, and lay back down. As Camden tossed and turned the rest of the night, images of his wife Susan’s face flashed through his mind. And then the tiny scrunched-up face of his newborn daughter Chloe as he held her in his arms just before his last deployment. If he’d known then it would be the last time he’d ever see her, he would’ve never put her down, would have gone AWOL instead, anything to stay and prevent the tragedy that he carried squarely on his shoulders. Guilt seized Camden and shook him in its teeth.
He realized he wasn’t fighting just one ghost, but three.
Six
Elena spent the next couple days settling into her job with the firm. Well, at least she tried her best to settle in. While the job in no way, shape, or form came close to being as terrible as the day-to-day she endured working at Earnest Deal’s meatpacking plant, it was difficult in completely different ways. Back at the plant, she knew who she was and where she stood. She’d had a scorecard and knew what to expect from whom and exactly how much she could dish back without running afoul of Deal or his thugs.
Brant and Phillips Promotions was a different story. New, complex social rules sometimes left her confused as to whether she’d been complimented or insulted. Part of the problem was that everyone acted as though they didn’t want to offend, and yet sometimes their gleaming, toothy smiles reminded her of kitchen knives lined up and waiting to be used. Even when she took her boss’s advice and baked a new batch of gluten-free, maple-sweetened blondies—which turned out as delicious as the ‘guilty’ cookies and disappeared twice as fast—she still felt like she’d done something wrong, even if no one came out and told her directly. Except, she’d gotten another anonymous note saying how great they were.
