SEALed With a Kiss: Even a Hero Needs Help Sometimes... (42 page)

Two hours later Pickett came into the office and flopped into a chair in a pretend swoon. "I finally convinced Tyler to at least fake a nap, if he wants to go to the fireworks."

Jax gave thanks for her inexhaustible flow of patience with Tyler, and felt the tension in his face ease. It was going to be okay. Corey was so right. Pickett was the one. She hadn't changed out of the prissy slacks and blazer she'd put on to go to the base, but it didn't seem to matter what she wore— the hum of desire was always there.

She was going to think his decision was sudden, but when he looked back, he could see that this moment had been inevitable from the start. All he had to do was find the right words to ask her to marry him.

Pickett rolled her eyes. "Tyler
may
stay down twenty minutes, so talk fast. What did Mancini say when you called him back?"

"Lauren can sue me for custody, and as things stand now, she'll probably win." Jax raised a hand to prevent Pickett's angry protest. "A judge would see that Tyler has spent a lot more time with her than me, and she can provide a more stable home."

Jax scrubbed at his hairline. "It won't matter that I think she's more than a little screwy, or that I believe she drinks too much to be trusted with a small child. She knows a lot of important people in Raleigh and they'll give her glowing character references."

"So your only option is to leave the SEALs." Jax didn't know what to make of Pickett's extremely neutral tone, but he was grateful for the perfect opening her incisive intelligence offered.

"There's another option. I could get married." He waited for her to pick up on the implications with her usual speed. His heart began to thud as she studied him silently.

"To whom?" she kept the same neutrality in her voice as before.

"To you."

Pickett's eyes widened. Her jaw dropped. She blinked slowly. Three times. He knew it was sudden, but she didn't have to look like he just suggested the impossible. The gentle reasoning, the coaxing he had planned, evaporated.

"For god's sake, what's so hard about that? You love Tyler. I would always know he was safe with you. And we're good together. Good? We're great. And not just in bed. We're a good team. Everything is better when I'm with you. Come on, Pickett, what do you say?"

"But you don't want to get married. You made it perfectly clear from the very first I wasn't to have any expectations."

"Don't tell me you didn't have any. You're not the kind of woman who has casual sex. The longer I've known you the more clear that has been."

"Not casual, no. But I never expected this to turn out to be real. It was like an interlude. I never thought someone like you would look at me. It was a fantasy come true."

"A fantasy. You went to bed with me to satisfy a
fantasy?'
Jax refused to ask himself why that hurt so much.

"It seemed like too perfect an opportunity to pass up. Anyway, I needed some experience. The thought that I might be desirable to you was pretty heady stuff."

He was damned if he'd let her see how
that
made him feel. He narrowed his eyes. Made his voice scathing. "So you needed a stud to bolster your confidence? And who better than a SEAL? You're no different from the groupies that hang around bars. I'm not even real to you."

"That is low. And unnecessary. And untrue." Pickett fought back her ire. Both of them being angry wouldn't help. Though he was too far away to touch, she reached out a hand. "And you are real to me. You were right the first time about me. I would never have gone to bed with you in the first place if I hadn't liked you and respected and trusted you. I even knew I'd probably fall a little bit in love with you." She didn't try to disguise her wistfulness. "But as long as I knew you were leaving, soon, it was safe."

"Have you fallen in love with me?"

"Yes. God help me. But I can't marry you."

"Why the hell not?"

How could she tell him when she wasn't sure she could explain it to herself? She wanted Jax and Tyler to be hers forever the way a drowning man wants air. She'd seen almost from the first that she could save him from losing Tyler—something he would regret for the rest of his life. She'd pulled herself back from the wish to manipulate the situation a thousand times.

But as much as she wanted to help Jax, as much as her heart broke for Jax and Tyler, she would be rescuing them. Sooner or later, her love would become a burden to Jax and she would resent him because marrying him would prevent her from ever having the kind of marriage and family she wanted.

And still she was tempted. He hadn't said anything about loving her, but he desired her. And he was right, even if all he wanted was a mother for Tyler, they made a good team. If he were the laughing man she saw throwing Tyler up in the air, companionably making a meal with her, pulling her to him in the middle of the night, providing in a thousand ways for her comfort and security ... What-might-have-been made a lump too thick to swallow.

But that was only part of who he was. He was also a SEAL and he'd made it clear he didn't want to change.

Pickett drew a deep breath.

"First of all because I don't believe that you really want to commit to building a marriage. But mostly, because you're a SEAL."

"You're wrong about commitment. But just for the sake of argument, are you saying if I'd walked up to you, said hey, I'm a SEAL and I'm looking for a permanent relationship, you would have turned me down? Well, duh, stupid question. That's exactly what's happening right now, isn't it?"

"Jax, please. I've hurt your feelings and I truly didn't mean to. Try to understand. I know more than is good for anybody to know about the problems facing military marriages. Marriage is hard. Being in the military makes it harder. But take the separations, the emotional isolation, the fact that there will always be secrets, the fear of injury or death, and then multiply it by one hundred and you've got marriage to a SEAL.

"As long as you're a SEAL everything comes in second—a distant second. That's just the way it is."

Picket dropped her head into her hands. "There's too much to overcome. Just too much. I can't do it."

"There are Navy marriages, even SEAL marriages that work."

"I know that."

"No guts, huh?"

Pickett's head came up. "That's the way it seems to you?"

"Yeah. You tell other people how to make a marriage work that you would never take a chance at. You keep your love life limited so that you will never have to try anything you might fail at. You look into the world and its real problems through your patients, but you make sure you never face any real problems yourself." Jax made a disgusted sound. "Even a lover has got to go, if he's not a fantasy anymore." Jax's face was stark, his crystalline eyes clouded, his mouth twisted in a bitter line. He went to the window and leaned against it, arms braced on the frame.

His inner struggle could be measured in the taut delineation of muscle and tendon and the heaving of his chest. He shook his head and straightened but did not turn around.

Pickett reached for him, wanting to touch his too-solid back before it became a wall, before he closed himself off to her utterly. "Jax, I'm so sorry. I know you're feeling—"

Jax whirled with a chopping movement so fast and so violent Pickett took an involuntary step back. "Don't say it. Don't try to tell me you know how I feel. You don't have a goddamned clue how I feel."

Pickett watched Jax's retreating back as he cut across the neighbor's property toward the sound. A sick feeling pressed upward in her chest.

Of all the consequences she had considered when she started the affair with Jax, the one she hadn't allowed for was that
he
might get hurt.

If only she hadn't been so surprised when he mentioned marriage, she might have handled it better. Even if he only wanted to marry her so he could keep Tyler, he had still felt rejected.

And as for the accusations he had thrown at her, maybe he was right. She didn't live through her clients, but she did lack courage. The people who served their country made immense, heroic sacrifices, but so did those who loved them. It would take a hero to go into marriage with a SEAL knowing what she did, and she was no hero.

She wished she could cry, but the unutterable loss she felt—a loss she couldn't name— prevented even that.

When the phone rang, Pickett considered letting the answering machine pick up but at the last moment answered it.

"Is the stud still there?" Pickett's sister Lyle asked without preamble. Lyle's offbeat, irreverent style had been carefully honed in her role as the family rebel. Alike enough to understand without needing long explanations, they were different enough to be objective.

"Don't call him that."

"Why not?
Is
he a stud?"

Pickett couldn't believe how hearing Lyle's voice lifted her. She mentally compared Jax with every other man she had met, remembered her visceral reaction to his overwhelming masculinity. She giggled. "Yes, he is." Then she sobered. "But he doesn't like it."

"He doesn't like to be a stud? What
is
the matter with that man?"

"We had an argument. He said I thought of him as studly."

"So what were you arguing about?"

"He asked me to marry him."

"That's awful! The nerve. That's terrible. If that isn't just like a heterosexual man! I hope you told him where to go. Nobody can say things like that to my baby sister and get away with it."

"Lyle, stop it." Pickett was torn between laughing and crying.

"Well, you know you can't marry a man who is studly but doesn't want to be. If it was the other way around maybe ..."

Pickett's giggle turned into a sob. "I can't marry him at all. And Lyle, I hurt his feelings ... I handled it so badly."

Lyle listened to Pickett cry for a minute, then interrupted. "Pickett, stop crying."

Pickett felt in her pockets for a tissue, gave up, and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She swallowed a hiccup. "Don't you know you're not supposed to say things like that? That is such bad counseling technique."

"You're the counselor, not me. But if you want to cry long distance, you call me up and pay for it. Besides, I'm an artist and artists can say anything—especially to a younger sister who is acting like an idiot."

"I'm not acting like an idiot!" Pickett hated how peevish she sounded. She hoped she only sounded that way because she had been crying. But maybe she was an idiot to expect any sympathy from Lyle.

"Yes you are. I think any woman who doesn't want to marry is showing extraordinary intelligence, but you're crying because you're in love with him but you're
not
going to marry him. You're an idiot."

"Who said I was in love with him?"

"Mother." Lyle let that sink in. "I called her after Sarah Bea called me. Sarah Bea said you had taken in another one of your strays, this time a man with a little boy. But she also said you always get the best of everything, so I thought I'd better call Mother. Mother said she thought y'all might be serious about each other, so she was telling everybody, including me, to leave the two of you alone." Lyle huffed. "I don't try to run your business like Sarah Bea and Grace do."