Chapter 28 #2
“Can I tell you I love you now that I’m not under duress anymore?” she teased, trying to lighten his mood. “Then you’ll know I wasn’t just saying it because we were in a life-or-death situation.”
Vince bent and kissed her lightly on the mouth. “I already know. But, hell yes. You can tell me you love me any time you want. I’ll never get tired of hearing it.”
There was no mistaking the adoration on his face, and Lace ate it up.
“Okay. I love you,” Lace declared, then… “Hmmm.” She tapped her bottom lip with one finger.
That got a lip-twitch out of Vince. “What?” he asked.
“How many times do you think I can say I love you between here and home?”
Vince smiled.
Even if it was just a little one, Lace felt like she’d scored a victory.
His pondering didn’t take long. “I don’t know how many, but I guess we’re about to find out.”
“Four hundred and sixty-three,” Lace chortled as they pulled into the driveway.
“You did not count them,” Vince snorted in disbelief.
Lace laughed. “You’re right. I didn’t,” she admitted, but added proudly, “I did the math, though. You see, ‘I love you’ takes two seconds to say, and we traveled for fifteen and a half minutes. Hence, four hundred and sixty-three times I must have said it.”
Vince actually laughed. “I’m impressed you didn’t trip up on your chant. When I repeat something over and over, it always starts to sound like gibberish.”
“Loving you will never be gibberish to me,” she responded a bit sappily. But she was allowed. Almost being lost at sea after a murder attempt gave her an automatic pass to blubber and be goofy.
Vince choked up as well.
“Let’s get you inside, and into the shower,” he managed to rasp out, and before she could even move, he was out his door, at hers, and carrying her into the house.
“I am pretty salt-crusted,” she admitted, but she also recalled her main objective. “Will you join me under the spray where we can talk about what’s bothering you?”
“Who says we’ll be talking in the shower?” He waggled his brows provocatively, but the playfulness didn’t reach his eyes.
Lace placed a hand over his heart. “Me,” she told him solemnly. “There’s something on your mind, and I think it will be good for you to say it out loud.”
He brought her into the bathroom, and slowly lowered her to the floor, looking up at the ceiling for a moment.
“I, uh, actually have an appointment with a therapist next week, compliments of Trask, to dig into things. That should help sort my head out,” he told her.
“Good. But… If you want to fill me in anyway, I’m a good listener,” Lace urged. “I won’t push,” she reassured him.
She quickly stripped out of her blankets and stood naked, turning on the shower to warm it up.
Vince slowly pealed out of his wet things, nervously shifting from foot to foot until he clearly came to a decision.
“No. I should tell you,” he said. “It’s nothing horrendous. Nothing that gives me nightmares. It’s just…” He began again. “The reason I left the Navy was…contentious for me.”
They got into the tiled stall where Lace wrapped her arms around Vince’s naked body and held him tightly.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it. Really,” she assured him.
“No. I do,” he rebutted. “I don’t want there to be anything unspoken between us that might change your mind about who I am.”
Lace scoffed. “I know who you are, Vince. And nothing you can say will alter my opinion. You’re my hero, my love, and the man I want to spend the rest of my life with.”
Oops. Maybe she should have kept that to herself.
Vince actually grinned. “Lace Heiger. Was that a proposal?” he quipped. “You want to marry me?”
She leaned in and gave his chest a sharp nip with her teeth.
He yelped. “Hey. What was that for?”
“For not just saying yes,” she huffed. “Here are the words that should have come out of your mouth. Of course we’ll spend the rest of our lives together, Lace.”
Vince gazed down at her with what looked suspiciously like tears in his eyes. “We will. Together. Forever, Lace,” he stated gruffly. “That’s a promise.”
He ended the emotional moment with a dramatic roll of his eyes. “Now can I speak?”
“The floor is yours,” Lace told him diplomatically.
Vince closed his lids and took a deep breath, but seemed more settled.
“It was a couple months before I was due to re-up,” he told her. “We were in South America. I can’t say where. That’s confidential.”
Lace nodded her head against him, her cheek leaning on his chest, listening to his heart beat strongly.
“It was supposed to be a simple operation for our SEAL team. I was in charge. A quick in and out was all it would take. We were to gather intel at an insurgent’s camp, then bring proof of smuggling routes back to our captain.
I was told that the target site would be empty for a small window of time: another team would be keeping the tangoes engaged a few miles up the coast while we did our job. ”
Vince shuddered. “It was bad intel. The minute we approached the camp, I felt that something was off. Instead of walking right in as we’d been ordered, I sent in scouts. It only took a few minutes for them to ascertain that a large group of militants were still there,” he spat.
“We’d spent days in the planning. All of it based on what our captain had told me.
And all of it was total bullshit,” Vince bit out.
“He wanted that intel in his hands to further his career, and he didn’t care who was collateral damage.
” Vince gave a bitter laugh. “He had no backup plan for us. There was no other SEAL team engaging the enemy off site. That bastard figured once we were there, we’d just get the job done, regardless. ”
Vince drew a hand frustratedly over his wet head. “If I’d given that order; if we’d gone in, my team would have been decimated. I’m sure of it. But I called it off, instead.”
“And that was bad, why?” Lace asked quietly.
“Because that asshole captain…” he snorted, segueing for a moment.
“It seems we have a thing about rogue captains, don’t we?
” he posed rhetorically before continuing.
“Anyway, the prick had destroyed the original orders he’d given, and made it look like I was grandstanding; going in of my own volition to gain some fucked-up kind of glory.
He also managed to skew what had happened in the aftermath, making it appear like he was the one who ordered our team to retreat when he ‘found out’ what I was up to. ”
Lace reared back, anger bubbling up inside her. “That’s total bullshit. Didn’t it all come out in an inquiry?”
“Non-definitive,” Vince grunted. “Even though my guys backed me up, they’d never heard our orders directly from the captain, which meant they were going on what I had told them. They believed me, but in the end, it came down to my word against the captain’s.”
Vince took a moment to regroup. “When all was said and done, since nothing could be proven against me one-hundred percent because of the support I got from my men, I wasn’t court-martialed. But I was written up, and stripped of my command.”
Argh. Lace’s blood boiled.
“What happened to the captain?” she questioned with hardness in her voice.
Vince growled. “He went to some cocktail party that night that was being thrown for the local brass. As far as I know, he told his story over and over to a bunch of bureaucratic pricks, and got the kudos he’d wanted. Because he’s still fucking in charge of the teams.”
Lace was intensely angry on Vince’s behalf.
“So you…?” Lace led, having trouble forming words.
“So I left,” he stated baldly. “After some well-placed words in a few ears I trusted, so the captain couldn’t fuck anyone over again,” he breathed. “My reenlistment papers came up a little over a month after the incident, and I didn’t sign. I got out.”
“And your guys?” she asked gently. “Your team?”
“They were all pretty disillusioned at that point. Not with me. Thank Christ they still believed me. But they were jaded with the chain of command. I heard from one of them just last week. They’re all transitioning out when their time is up.”
“Oh, Vince. I’m so sorry,” Lace cried. “None of you deserved that. Especially not you, after twenty years in.”
Vince leaned down and kissed her. Deeply.
“You know what, Lace? I’m working to get over it. There are a lot of things in life we don’t deserve,” he continued raspily.
His eyes darted to her port.
“But we learn how to deal with them. Then we move on.”