Instead she gotthis.
They weren’t a big Greek family with long tables and aunts who pinched cheeks and uncles who argued over football. They weren’t Italian, with sauces simmering on the range on Sundays and everyone talking over each other until you couldn’t separate one voice from the next.
They were a collection of people who found each other by way of danger and loss and sheer survival—a melting pot of backgrounds and histories—and somehow, they’d built something more solid than most blood families ever managed. Something richer.
Her throat ached.
She had brothers, but they were spread out across the world now, each focused on their own lives. And she had thirteen months of silence that slowly hollowed her out from the inside. She hadn’t realized how empty it made her feel until she stepped into a room that was so completely full.
The tear came before she could stop it—just one, slipping traitorously down her face. She swiped at it quickly. The other women’s eyes were bright and wet, and Alyssa wasn’t even pretending to hold it together, so it seemed like safe cover. No one would notice if she blubbered a little.
She felt his stare before she looked over.
Angelo was watching her from across the room.
After everything she’d told him in the tech lab…things she hadn’t said out loud and kept locked up in a secure file as well as the tightest corner of her chest…she’d expected Angelo to walk straight into Con’s office before she finished her last sentence.
He was a SEAL. He was loyal to his chain of command, and he had obligations to his team. She’d known it when the words started pouring out of her mouth and she couldn’t make herself stop.
Which meant Con would know soon enough. And once he did, there was a good chance he’d decide she was too close to the situation to stay on the operation.
But he hadn’t moved.
Let me carry it with you now.
She was still turning that sentence over in her chest like a fragile bird she wasn’t sure how to hold. He’d taken care of her first. Before the obligations, before the chain of command, before all the reasons he should have walked straight to his commanding officer and laid everything on the table…he’d made sure she was okay.
He’d held her. Given her something to hold on to when the storm threatened to shake down all her walls.
The party around her shifted to a new gear when Sinner suggested midnight swimming pool volleyball and the room erupted all over again.
When Opal appeared at Ellory’s elbow and grabbed her by the wrist, she let out a surprised laugh. Before she knew what was happening, Opal began hauling her toward the hallway.
“I have a swimsuit you can borrow.”
Two minutes later, Ellory stood in Opal’s bathroom holding a bikini that was—she turned it over in her hands—not a lot of fabric.
After a beat of trepidation, she put it on.
It was a perfectly nice bikini. It fit. Technically.
But there was something about knowing Angelo was down the hall, his hands too much of a recent memory on her skin, that made her insides knot. For a moment, she stared in the mirror and drowned in the memory of his mouth moving over her lips, the column of her throat, the curve of her breast, working slowly down her body until she’d stopped being a coherent person entirely.
She dragged in a fortifying breath and walked out.
The pool area was loud and lit up, everyone in various stages of getting into the water. Some doing cannonballs, other performing dives like Olympians. Some were arguing over teams.
“Okay.” Angelo’s voice cut across the noise. “Who gave her that bikini?”
It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation and a caress all at the same time.
He was already moving toward her, peeling the T-shirt off his own back in one smooth, masculine motion, and before she fully processed it, he was pulling it down over her head and tugging the hem to the vicinity of her thighs.
“Angelo!”
He hovered close enough that she felt the rumble of his words as he spoke. “There’s no way you’re playing volleyball inthat thing.” He ran one finger in a deliberate arc along the curve of fabric covering her backside.
Her breath hitched, and for a heartbeat, she was trapped under his gaze, frozen with want.
