Embattled SEAL (5 page)

Like the stretch of time now. He knew Cat was waiting on some kind of acknowledgement of what she’d told him but his brain was shorting out. He wasn’t ready to deal with their issues.

“Katey’s still putting up with Lucas’s foul mouth, huh?”

She didn’t respond for several long seconds and he knew he’d disappointed her again.

“Yes, she is. They got married several months ago. And Katey is pregnant.”

He forced his lips to smile, though his gut churned. “They’ll be great parents.”

“Hm, maybe,” she murmured. “I thought we were going to be great parents, too.”

If she’d leveled a shotgun on him and fired, she couldn’t have hurt him more than she did right then.

Cat had a right to be pissed. When he’d married her years ago she’d known being with the Teams took most of his focus. Missions had taken him away for months at a time. He’d been deployed to Iraq four times and Afghanistan twice, each time for six months or more. Then there were too many individual ops to even count. Though the deployments were hard Cat took care of everything like she’d been doing it all along. And she had, actually. She was literally a single parent. He hadn’t been at Dillon’s birth or Tate’s. Christmases had passed with barely a glance. If she hadn’t have sent him a box of treats every holiday he wouldn’t even have noticed them.

But even when he’d been physically home, mentally he hadn’t. In his mind he’d always been preparing for the next op. He was on the range with his rifle every day, rain or shine. Training in the gym every day. Keeping that fine combat ready edge took a lot of grueling work.

The only thing he’d been able to do well for his family was leave. And provide for them monetarily.

“You are a great parent,” he told her firmly.

She snorted in that derisive way she had. “Doesn’t feel like it sometimes.”

Harper couldn’t help her with this because he felt like a failure all the time.

“Anyway,” she sighed. “We’re going to sit out here for a while and enjoy the day. Then we’re going to go back up to the room to talk to the doctor and he’s going to change our lives with his incredible news. Sound okay to you?”

He nodded slightly, willing to go along with her fairy tale for a little while.

W
hen they arrived
back at his room Harper was more whipped than he wanted to let on, but he forced one foot in front of the other. The grumpy nurse came in and told them that the doctor had just been in looking for them. She hurried out of the room to try to find him.

Harper hiked himself onto the bed but didn’t recline. Even though it caused some pain through his chest, he sat up straight at the edge of the mattress. The clock on the wall ticked and he counted off the seconds as they waited. Cat paced the room, moving from one side of the cramped space to the other. He almost snapped at her to stop but he realized she needed the release as well. If he didn’t think he’d bang into things he would be pacing as well.

The door hissed open and his heart raced before he could settle it back.

“Mrs. Preston, Harper. I’m Dr. Coughlin. How are you feeling today?”

Harper almost cursed at the ridiculous question. How did he think he felt? “Like I’m going to peel my skin off if I don’t get some answers.”

The doctor laughed a little and Harper felt him move in front of him. “Well then, let’s see what’s going on behind these bandages.”

Harper held himself as still as he could as the doctor started to fiddle with the bandages over his eyes. He curled his fists into the mattress, attacked by a wave of trepidation. Before the feeling could completely register Cat had curled one of her hands over his own.

If he could have given her a look he would have. Instead he flipped his hand over and crushed hers within it.

The doctor took his sweet time removing all the wraps around his head. Harper couldn’t tell if he was doing it deliberately or not. The man murmured to the returning nurse and he felt the weight of the heaviest bandages leave his head.

“Now Harper, I’m going to remove the last layers slowly. Be patient, because we’re going to dim the room. We don’t want your eyes to hurt you more than they already will.”

He nodded slightly, jaw clamped, and fought off the choking impatience.

As the air of the room hit his skin for the first time in days Harper took a huge breath, in spite of the pain to his chest, and opened his eyes.

Pain immediately brought the tears. Tissues were pressed into his hands and he blotted at his streaming eyes, but they wouldn’t stop leaking.

“This is very normal after a trauma like you’ve had. Just give them a minute to acclimatize.”

Harper mopped his face but the tears kept coming. After a couple of long minutes they began to ease and he blinked his eyes open again. Everything was super blurry, but even through the blurriness he knew one thing.

The fairy tale was over.

He turned his head to the left, hoping that the first thing he would see would be Cat. And it was. She’d cut her hair since the last time he’d seen her and the dark strands curled around the back of her ears. Her face was red as if she were fighting tears silently.

But that information was drawn in from his left eye. His right, dominant eye was completely black.

The doctor must have sensed his discouragement because he launched into several tests that made him focus on the man. Harper did what he could but when the doctor requested he cover his left eye with his hand and to tell him what he was holding up, Harper couldn’t keep his mouth shut any longer.

“I don’t see a fucking thing. No color, no variations of gray, no blurriness, nothing. It’s a black screen.”

Cat’s hand tightened on his own as his voice got whisper quiet. She knew he was beyond pissed.

The doctor threw out platitudes about giving his eye time to recover and they could look at transplants but Harper shut down. He heard Cat’s calm voice asking about second opinions then the doctor’s affronted reply, and he almost smiled. His wife would do everything in her power to make things right, no matter who she offended. It was one of the many million things he loved about her, that mama-bear attitude. “I need you to step outside for a minute, please,” she told the doctor quietly.

Harper didn’t hear them leave. Thoughts of going through life lopsided, perpetually off balance crowded into his mind. Diego, a Marine at LNF, had lost his eye in an IED attack years ago and he still had balance issues.

How the fuck was he supposed to do his job?

Cat stepped in close, wedging herself between his knees. She cupped his face in her strong hands and forced him to look at her. “You need to breathe. This is not the end of the world. In spite of what you think, your fucking right eye is not your life.”

Harper dragged in a huge gulp of air, only then realizing he’d stilled as if readying for a shot, though his heart raced in panic. Nodding at her words, he forced his heartbeat to slow down. “What the hell am I going to do?”

In spite of the world falling around them, she smiled that beautiful, soul-shattering smile she had. “You’re going to move to a different position in your company with different tasks. Or you’re going to learn to shoot with your other eye. It’s that easy.”

Was it really though?

Cat tightened her hands on his face and leaned forward to press kisses to his cheeks. She paused at the corner of his right eye and pressed a lingering kiss there, then moved to wrap her arms around his neck in a fierce hug. “You’re still gorgeous and you’re still a bad-ass mother fucker,” she whispered into his ear. “That eye is such a small part of you.”

Harper wrapped his arms around her, so grateful that she’d managed to find him and be here. The news he had just received would have devastated him and he wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t been here to calm him as she always had. He would have punched someone or broken something. Hell, maybe both. His iron control only held so far. Cat was the only thing that kept him sane.

And when he thought about it rationally he knew she was right. Since he’d been out of the service his sniping skills had fallen to the wayside for the most part. Duncan used him more for personal protection and investigation than anything else. He used his size to be intimidating when he needed to, and his mind when it was more appropriate. It was just hard because he identified himself as a SEAL, as being a sniper. He had for years.

No, losing his vision wasn’t the end of the world. It just felt like it right now.

Cat pulled away and looked up at him. Even in the dim light he could see the determination flashing in her whiskey golden eyes. “We’ll get a second opinion.”

Harper nodded but he was distracted. Lifting his hand, he fingered her dark hair. It was so short in the back and cut at an edgy angle. “When did you cut it?”

She looked a little unsure but lifted her chin. “Several months ago.”

He blinked and turned his head a little to look her up and down. Still tall and willowy, just tall enough to reach his own chin, but she looked a little leaner. As if the time apart from him had been hard on her. Her big, eloquent eyes still dominated her angular face, and if they were any less beautiful she would have looked harsh.

The makeup she had worn today had smudged beneath her eyes, as if she’d been crying. He hadn’t heard her make a sound. Reaching up, he wiped the evidence away with his thumbs, then as naturally as breathing, he leaned down to press a kiss to her lips.

“You look stunning today.”

Cat froze and her breath stilled. Harper cupped her jaw and leaned into her, desperate to find that connection they’d had before. And it was there. When she leaned into him and moved her mouth they fell into the rhythm naturally. He realized that he felt nervous. If she pushed him away he wouldn’t blame her. Honestly, he didn’t know how she’d put up with him all these years, in and out of her life all the time. In his heart he knew he had always taken more than he gave and it made him feel ashamed.

Like he was doing now.

On that sobering thought he pulled back.

“You’re thinking too hard,” she admonished. “I can see it in your face. And you need to stop. It was just a kiss.”

But her kisses turned him on like nothing else in the world. Once she got a glimpse of the scrubs she would know too. It had been a long time since he’d held her, kissed her, loved her. His body knew that release was inches away. They just had a lot of issues.

Cat narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re still thinking too hard.”

He barked out a laugh. “Probably,” he admitted. “But it’s the way I am.”

She nodded and smiled. “But you don’t have to be.”

Harper wished he could rid himself of the anxiety that plagued him. Working out helped take the edge off, but he hadn’t been able to do that for a solid week now. Damn, had he really been in the hospital that long? He glanced around the room. There was a whiteboard across the way that gave the date and his nurses’ names. Yep. A week. His gaze fell to the rolling table beside his bed and the tattered brown teddy bear resting there.

“Your boss said the little girl you saved wanted you to have it while you were sick, but she expects to get it back.”

Emotion constricted his throat and he had to look away from Cat to clear it. Reaching out a finger, he stroked down the stuffed animal’s head. “She didn’t have to do that.”

“Chad seemed very surprised she had given it up.”

He nodded, his head throbbing from emotion and physical pain. He wanted to crawl into bed and drag Cat with him.

She seemed to sense as well that he had almost reached his limit, because she peeled the blankets back on the bed. “Why don’t you chill for a little bit? We’ll go over our options later. Want me to help you with the sling?”

Without argument he turned to let her release the Velcro strips, then shifted himself back to the mattress, dragging a spare pillow over his aching eyes. The lack of light immediately eased some of the tension in his head. “Can you hang out with me for a while?”

She stroked her hand down his arm and squeezed his fingers. “I will.”

Huffing out a breath, he tried to let everything go.