Chapter 8
EIGHT
KAWEHI
The beach was a surprise to Kawehi. She’d been to Bellows Beach before, but never on a weekday. Looking over at Domenico as they easily passed through the gate she smiled. "It's so... empty."
He grinned back at her. "It's only open to the military on the weekdays."
"Wow... You'd think I’d know that, but I don't get to the beach all that often."
"That shouldn't surprise me," he chuckled, "but it does."
She reached out before she could stop herself and touched his arm. "Looks like we're surprising each other."
He nodded. "Looks like."
They pulled into the parking lot and found a spot near the front. "Not as surprised as my cousin was when you asked if she wanted to come."
He got out of the driver's side and got around to her side of the car when she was already stepping down.
"One of the guys in my platoon was standing nearby when I made the reservation.
Word spread through the group pretty quickly.
A bunch of them wanted to come by. I didn't want you to feel alone.
Even though I would have happily told them all to stay away. "
She shook her head and leaned in to give him a kiss on his cheek. "It'll be nice to meet the guys you work with. Although I'm not sure how many you're talking about."
"Hey, Pallas!"
Domenico sighed softly. "You're about to meet one of them right now. But I think we're only expecting... six to show up."
"Six." She murmured the word, but it didn't sound all that scary.
"Hey, Pallas. I got your reservation checked in and your key."
Kawehi looked at Dom. Key?
"Kawehi, this is Kid."
The young man that reached out his hand to her was just a smidge taller than Dom and he was already tall. "Hi."
She took his hand to shake it and he blushed a little across his pale cheeks. "Tyler Stephens, Miss. They call me Kid because so far I'm the youngest in the group."
Kawehi looked back at Dom. "Really? That seems a little cruel."
Kid spoke up. "Not really. They could have given me a worse name, so I'm grateful. I think Pallas was lucky that he was born with a great name of his own."
"Born with it? Pallas. So it's not just like someone calling me Phillips for my last name?"
"No, Miss, he-" Kid seemed to hesitate and looked at Domenico for permission which he gave with a shrug. "Pallas is the Titan god of war. So it was an easy choice. At least that's the word around the team."
"Team?" Kawehi was a little confused. "Isn't it called a platoon?"
She almost missed the look between the two men, but Dom wrapped an arm around her and gave her a quick kiss. "Let me grab the stuff from the back and we'll go walk to the beach.
She turned to look at Kid, but he was following Dom around to the back as well.
Shaking her head, she moved around to help get out the food that she'd seen in the trunk area when Domenico had come to pick her up and almost caught them in conversation.
It wasn't that she was trying to hear anything, she hadn't even expected much of anything going on so she just put it in the back of her mind.
"I can carry something."
"We've got it." Kid's answer was a little too quick, but she tried to shrug it off.
"Hey, Kid. Why don't you let some of the big boys help out with that. "
Dom smiled and shook his head. "Another two of our guys." He looked over her shoulder and she turned around to see who he was talking about.
"Guys, this is Kawehi Phillips."
One of the men jogged forward, holding out his hand. "Miss? You can call me Twinkie. Everyone else does."
"Twinkie?" She smiled and caught Kid's sigh of relief out of the corner of her eye. "That's a sweet name."
He lifted her hand to place a kiss across her knuckles. "I like your sense of humor."
"And I think Pallas wants you to keep your lips to yourself, Twinkie."
"That," Dom grinned, "is Riptide."
"Riptide," she mused as she took his hand, "sounds like a TV show my parents used to watch."
Riptide smiled. "Yeah. I've heard that, too. They had a red-hot helicopter in that show."
She tilted her head a little to the side. "Are you Aussie?"
Riptide covered his heart with his hand. "You're good. Yeah. My mum is Aussie. My dad American. Sometimes the accent bleeds through."
She grinned at him. "I've always liked the accent."
Twinkie gave Riptide a little shove. "Hey, remember she's here with Pallas."
Riptide looked at Domenico and the two men smiled at each other before Riptide replied to Twinkie. "He knows I'm not the unit horndog."
A car pulled into the parking lot and Kawehi's attention turned to look at it because she saw her cousin Maile in the passenger seat.
"Speak of the devil himself." Twinkie gave a low whistle that Domenico cut off with a look.
"Don't listen to him."
She was already making her way to the other car and didn't quite hear what Dom had said.
All four doors swung open at the same time and Kawehi realized that there were four people in the car. She'd only seen her cousin clearly.
"Oh, thank god you're already here." Her cousin stepped out and then reached in to snatch out her beach bag. "I'll take that, thank you."
Her 'thank you' was more than a little chilly and Kawehi looked at the other men getting out of the car. The driver went straight to Domenico and the two had a few words as the men from the backseat moved around to greet her. "Miss? I'm Clay Jessop. The others call me Hoss."
"That's like a horse," the next man winked at her, "but he's smarter than one. I'm Chicago, on account that I'm from the Windy City."
"I'm Kawehi Phillips, I'm-"
"Pallas' woman." Chicago gave her a wink. "We know."
Kawehi wasn't sure what to make of his words or what to say about them. That's probably what it looked like to the others, and she was okay with that. She just wasn't sure what her cousin would say about it.
"See, Cuz? I told you he was basically your boyfriend."
Well, that answered her question.
"I'm all for him, and even these guys are sweet, but that asshole who drove? I'd like to kick him in the nuts."
Kawehi wanted to drop her face into her hands, but when she looked over at Dom, she saw the equally hard look on the other man's face. She leaned closer to her cousin. "I'm sure that whatever he said or did, it was just a misunderstanding."
"Oh there was no misunderstanding. He said I was just another typical woman." Maile's air quotes around 'typical woman' left little to Kawehi's imagination. "He's an ass!"
Kawehi looked back at Dom, worried that this was just going to ruin the whole day, but she saw the other man move first. He walked over to her, forcefully ignoring Maile at first. "Cameron Cox, Miss. You can call me Axl."
"Cox," Maile almost snorted with laughter, "more like dick."
"Maile!" Kawehi was horrified at her cousin's words, but the men surrounding them were laughing out loud. Even Dom's mouth had turned up in a smile.
"Wow. It's like she saw right through him!" That was from Chicago. "This is going to be fun."
"All right." Dom sighed and gestured for the others to come to the back and pick up something to carry.
Kawehi was about to go and help, but Maile snagged her wrist and held her there.
Axl turned to look at her cousin and Kawehi wondered what had gone on in the car because while the two of them looked at each other as if they wanted to fight, there was another kind of energy under it all. The kind that made Kawehi's cheeks burn with a different kind of heat.
"I didn't say that you were a typical woman," his words sounded like he was growling them out of his chest, "I said you were girlie."
Maile turned toward her, eyes wide and staring. "See?"
Kawehi looked at Axl and prayed for patience. "When you say 'girlie,'" she smiled at him, hoping to diffuse the situation, "is that a bad thing? A criticism?"
Axl recoiled as if she'd smacked him on the arm.
"Hardly. I don't know what's crawled up your cousin's butt, but I wasn't complaining.
She looked good and her bag... Well, shit.
It was heavy enough that I was wondering what she was carrying in it.
A frying pan or a bazooka. She said she'd brought stuff to wash up after the beach.
I guessed she'd brought half of CVS with her, and I told her she was too girlie for me to understand. "
Maile looked at her with a stiff-necked nod. "See?"
Kawehi wanted to get out from between the two before one or both of them combusted. "Axl?"
Maile gaped at her when she said the other man's name.
"Yes, Miss?"
"Call me Kawehi, please. Axl," she began again, "if my cousin leaps to another conclusion today, feel free to dunk her in the water so she gets to use the products she brought with her."
Axl's smile looked a little menacing, but she didn't think he'd hurt Maile, not for a moment.
"Sounds good to me, Kawehi."
"Cuz? Are you crazy? You're going to let him man-handle me?"
Maile's voice was loud enough to turn heads from their group and a couple crossing the street from the registration office.
Still, Kawehi didn't believe her cousin's bluster.
Maile had always been like this with guys she liked.
She was too quick to jump to conclusions about simple phrases and thought that she was being judged.
She only really cared when she liked someone and wanted to impress them.
Taking a quick look at Maile's outfit explained much of the 'girlie' designation.
She had her bikini on and a rainbow colored coverup over her swimsuit.
The skirt came down to mid-thigh and swished around her legs like a wave spilling onto the sand.
She'd dressed to impress and wasn't sure how to interpret Axl's words.
Axl seemed like a guy who women gravitated toward because of his build and rough looks, but he didn't have the pretty words to back it up. In conjunction with Maile's own instincts to jump to conclusions, the two of them were likely to go together like lava and the ocean. Hissing steam.
This could be interesting or combustible in the wrong way.