Chapter 20
“How can you be so calm?” Erin knew how the words sounded, so she quickly added, “I don’t mean that as a jab, I just want to know how you do it. Because I’m a wreck, knowing there’s nothing we can do but wait.”
Which they had been doing, for a couple of hours now. Restlessly, on her part. Blaine was still where he’d been on the couch, so outwardly calm it had made her ask.
“Years of practice. Waiting for a mission. Waiting for a team to return. Waiting to hear if an operation was successful.”
She stopped her pacing to look at him. “I…never thought about it like that. I always worried about the time you were active, under fire. Not the downtime in between.”
“The worst was waiting to find out if your buddy or copilot had been found dead. Or injured. Then it became waiting to see if he was going to live.”
She shook her head slowly. She’d never been able to wrap her mind around that part of what he did, and so tended to shy away from just the idea. But now she asked, “How do you deal with that?”
“You find a distraction. For me it was reading. For some guys it was drinking. For some it was working out, or running a ten-mile circuit around the base. Others found something else to work on.”
She turned to look out the window where another man with that kind of experience had his head under the hood of her car.
“Which is why I have a trophy-winning sniper working on my car?”
“Exactly.”
She walked back over to the couch and sat.
She felt a sense of awkwardness she’d never felt around Blaine before.
She’d been angry with him, worried about him, and above all she’d loved him with her whole being, but she’d never felt awkward.
She never had to, because he always seemed to understand when something was gnawing at her.
And usually, after some effort, had her laughing about it eventually.
She missed that. More than she ever could have guessed she would.
She wondered if he ever missed that, too. Missed them. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer to that, so instead went with something she already knew the answer to.
“Do you really miss flying?”
He studied her for a moment, in that way she’d just been thinking about. Then with a half shrug, he said, “Flying itself, no. Because I still do it.”
A chill rocketed through her. She stared at him, feeling a rush of that old, horrible sensation. She’d thought it was over, that time of worrying about him. It was a moment before she could even speak.
“You’re still flying?”
“I just don’t get shot at anymore.” At her no doubt stunned expression he added, “I’m teaching now. The new kids, coming up.”
She swallowed, almost engulfed by a flood of relief that at least he wasn’t in combat any longer. She grabbed for the first thing she could find words for. “You say that like you don’t like it.”
Another shrug. “I kind of miss the high, the adrenaline rush when you’re under fire. It’s different, when you’re not in a combat situation.”
“Thank God,” she murmured under her breath. “How could you possibly want to go back to…that? Being shot at, people trying to kill you?”
For a long moment he just looked at her, with that thoughtful Blaine look she knew so well. When he finally spoke, what he asked seemed a total non sequitur to her.
“You want to go back to the accounting firm?”
She blinked. “What?”
“You know, go back to the steady, known paycheck, the income that doesn’t rely on your talent, your artistic eye, and whether you can convince a customer you’re the best one for the job.”
“No, of course not, but what does that—”
She cut herself off as she realized the analogy he was making.
“You want to do the work your heart’s in,” he said quietly. “And it took a lot of nerve to make the break to do it.”
She couldn’t deny that, although she was a little surprised he realized it. Which she shouldn’t have been. Apparently she had forgotten just how on the nose he could be when he put his mind to it.
“It’s not that much different,” he said.
“Except for the getting shot at part,” she couldn’t help pointing out.
“Point ceded,” he agreed. “But I always was more of an adrenaline junkie than you.”
“I got that the time you jumped off the garage roof onto that trampoline,” she said dryly.
“Hey, I was seven,” he said, suddenly grinning. It nearly took her breath away. As did the fact that they were actually managing to talk without sniping at each other.
But she couldn’t deny he’d made her think.
Hard. She’d never put what he did in that context before.
And if she set aside the risking your life part—which was a darned big ask—she could see the similarities.
She could have stayed with that accounting firm, endlessly, and it would have been steady work that she didn’t hate.
But she didn’t love it. Not the way she loved what she did now, not the way she loved letting her imagination—the same imagination that manufactured horrible ideas of what could happen to him—flow and come up with the perfect images for her clients, from logos to ad campaigns.
Not the way she loved looking at what she’d built, from a small thing she did in her spare time to full time work she could live on, albeit it required some penny-pinching.
And more help from Blaine than he was legally required to give. Because he loved Ethan, just as much as she did.
She should have made it easier for him to see more of their son. Or at least not have made it more difficult by insisting on not being there. She should have done a lot of things differently.
And then there was the big one she maybe shouldn’t have done at all.
“I’ve been the worst sort of ex, haven’t I?” she said quietly, hating that two letter descriptor of what she was now.
“No. I’ve seen worse. One of the guys in my unit doesn’t even know where his daughter is. Her mother vanished with her, cut him off completely.”
That made her stomach churn, but she was still amazed that he was giving her any credit at all.
She heard a car start up outside. She turned her head to look, expecting to see the Foxworth vehicle pulling out. “Do you suppose he has to go get even more parts? I can’t do that, Blaine, I can’t—”
She stopped when he laughed. Her head snapped back around. “That’s your car, not his. I’d say he got the job done.”
Erin looked out the window again, staring now. She hadn’t heard her car sound like that in…she didn’t know how long. Smooth. Powerful. No clanks, no pops, no misses.
She watched as Rafe closed the hood, then stood as if listening just as she was. Then he nodded in obvious—and well-earned—satisfaction.
“Do you know what happened? With him and his girlfriend?”
“All I know is he blamed himself for something bad happening, overseas. While he was deployed. Something that wasn’t really his fault, but he didn’t—maybe couldn’t—see it that way.”
“Something to do with her?”
“No. Something that made him feel he didn’t deserve her.”
She let out a weary sigh. “Sometimes nobody’s harder on us than ourselves.”
“I don’t know,” Blaine said, his tone a little too casual as he stood up. “Sometimes the ones we love can sure as hell do a number on us.”
He was out the front door and headed toward Rafe before she could react to the bull’s-eye he’d just struck.
She guessed the truce was over.
She felt her eyes begin to sting. Remembered all the tears she’d shed, from the time she’d gotten word that Blaine had been hurt, throughout his long, hard recovery, until the day she’d made that fateful decision.
The decision that had ended her life as she’d known it, and tossed her into the chaos of single parenthood.
And the furious, understandable emotions of her son.
That had stopped the tears, for a while. She hadn’t had the time or the energy.
But nothing had ever stopped the pain. That she’d been the one to walk away didn’t make it any easier to bear.
In many ways, it made it harder. Especially in one of those shouting matches with Ethan.
She knew how selfish she seemed, given it was Blaine who had gone through the agony, Blaine who had fought so hard to get back on his feet, Blaine who had never given up, and never would.
And in that moment she understood exactly how Rafe Crawford must have felt. Because she didn’t deserve Blaine.
And he deserved better than her.