Sam sat behind his big desk, a big, fat, shiny success symbol that went nicely with the big, fat, shiny success symbol that was his office, and contemplated this huge curveball life had thrown at him.
Ever since his eighteenth birthday, when no one had any legal power over him anymore, he’d gotten everything he wanted out of life. It hadn’t been easy, fuck no, especially becoming a SEAL, but by Christ, if he set his mind to it, if hard work and intelligence and perseverance could get it, it was his.
He’d never failed a mission he set for himself.
Except right now, when failure was staring him in the face. He’d rarely wanted anything in his life the way he wanted Nicole, but she’d slid right out of his grasp, and he didn’t have the faintest idea what it would take to get her back.
He was dying, here. Just sinking down into some black hole, with no clue to where a handhold would be.
Sam sank further into his extremely comfortable, $6,000 designer chair he’d been embarrassed to buy but the decorator had insisted on.
Fuck. He waswhining. Good thing Mike and Harry couldn’t see him now, because they’d knock all this self-pity right out of him.
But the thing was, in every mission he’d ever had, he knew exactly what it would take to get what he wanted. Hard work and willpower usually, things he was capable of in spades.
But Nicole wasn’t graduating BUD/S or surviving a firefight or founding a company. She was a woman, with a woman’s totally unfathomable heart, and Sam simply couldn’t see his way clear here. It was like being lost in a fog.
He second-guessed every move. Call, not call? Well, that was blown out of the water when he spent all morning punching out her home number.
That hadn’t worked well.
What would she want? What would help?
Send flowers? What kind? He’d read somewhere while waiting in a barbershop that roses were over. No one wanted roses, they showed that a man had no imagination. So, fuck, what else was there? He racked his brain for other flowers and all he came up with was daisies. Weren’t daisies associated with death?
Christ, he didn’t recognize himself. This wasn’t him. He was…dithering. Sam Reston, dithering. He didn’t do dither. He did action.
Only not tonight, he thought with a sigh. Showing up on her doorstep would just alienate her, not to mention the fact that her dad was really sick and Sam might disturb him if he was sleeping. Man, he’d never seen anyone look the way her dad did, ready to step over the threshold of death at any moment. Sam had seen death before, but usually it came in the form of a bullet, shattering a healthy young body.
No, if Nicole’s dad was sleeping, or had taken a turn for the worse, she wouldn’t appreciate his ringing her doorbell. If there was one thing that had been made realrealclear to him, pounded into his thick skull, it was that Nicole loved her father and had made him her top priority, and that wasn’t going to change.
It was a real pity that it only made him admire her even more.
Jesus. Maybe it would be a good idea to go back to Plan A, getting shit-faced with his brothers.
Yeah, that would?—
Sam froze. He had a bank of monitors on the short side of his L-shaped desk, one showing the corridor outside his door. It had gone blank about an hour and a half ago, and he’d made a mental note to have it fixed, toot sweet, as Nicole would say.
The monitor showed Nicole, right outside his door. Looking troubled and tired and unbearably beautiful. Long, slender hand outstretched, touching his door.
That’s right, honey, he thought, rising.Oh yeah. Knock on my door and walk straight into my arms and we can pick up where we left off.
She stood, clearly tempted, but then she turned around and he lost her. She’d gone into her own office.
Shit.
Well, she was here. He wasn’t going to have to wait till tomorrow to see her. Whatever was going on inside that complicated, beautiful head of hers, he’d find out in the next five minutes.
Sam shut down the office and walked across the hallway.
He was about to ring the bell next to the door when he stopped, frozen.
OhChrist.
He could hear a man’s deep rumble, though he couldn’t make out the words. Shit! Of all the scenarios he’d run through his head, the fact that she was seeing someone else simply hadn’t occurred to him. But if she was going out with someone else, then why the fuck had she accepted his invitation to dinner? Gone to bed with him?
He turned his head, good ear towards the door. Oh yeah. That was a man’s voice. Unmistakeable. He stood there, as if someone had encased him in cement, trying to process this thought. Nicole was with another man.
