The SEAL's Second Chance: An Alpha Ops Novella (3 page)

He froze, his hand hanging in midair as his eyes widened. “Hey,” he said, the ball bouncing away from him. “Hi. Uh, sorry. I didn’t know it was it you.”

“It’s me,” she said, trying not to stare at his body as the ball rolled to a stop at her feet. His hair glimmered with the soft brown of a fawn’s pelt when the court’s light caught it. He was tanned, twin stripes of sunglasses along his temples and around his eyes. She was used to athletes in peak condition, had dated professional tennis players, basketball players, soccer players, rugby players, and for a few months, an Olympic show jumper who had thighs she’d never forget, but Jamie was different. Jamie’s body wasn’t athletic. It was the hard musculature of a man who knew that life was no ordinary game.

After one quick glance at his ball, now in her territory, he put his hands on his hips and looked around. “It hasn’t changed much,” he said.

“There’s a neighborhood association working to revitalize without giving up too much to gentrification,” she said in return. “It hasn’t gotten much traction, but Eve Webber … you remember Eve? Caleb’s sister? She’s leading the charge.”

“I remember Eve,” he said, one corner of his mouth twitching up.

No surprise there. Everyone remembered Eve Webber. A man’s creases to go with the boy’s dimples, she thought absently. She’d forgotten his dimples. He still had the direct stare. Growing up a son of a cop meant he looked you right in the eyes, used words like “sir” and “ma’am” with ease, answered up, but this was different. This look had a man’s knowledge and a Navy SEAL’s experience behind it, and she wasn’t sure what to do. With anyone else she’d claim a basket and shoot away her restlessness. All she could do now was stare, tongue-tied.

“You play down here much?” he asked.

“No.” She shook her head, defensive despite the reasonable question. Kids from the Hill had their own park, complete with a playground, a sand box, a tennis court, and a basketball court, all tucked under spreading elm trees, or so she’d seen after she went to a cocktail party for the booster club held in one of the houses that backed to the playground. She’d never been up on the Hill as a kid. She had no business up there. Jamie had his cop-father’s go-anywhere attitude. Taking the steps down the Hill two at a time to the court was easy for him.

“It’s been too cold,” she added in explanation, the drop back a decade to high school made her ache, a phantom pain left over from wanting so hard it hurt. Wanting her mother to sober up and keep a job. Wanting to get out of Lancaster. Wanting to win a spot on the team, a starter’s spot, a game, a championship, a scholarship anywhere because basketball was her way out. Wanting Jamie, knowing she could never, ever have him.

“That never stopped you before,” he said.

She’d played outside when the windchill was below zero, bad for the ball but needing to be anywhere but at home. “I’ve got access to a gym now,” she said, and was every conversation going to be like this, a minefield of memories?

He must have seen the pain on her face, because he walked right up to her, bent over, and bounced his ball from immobile to dribbling, then got right in her space, his smile doing nothing to dial back his intensity. “Don’t let me stop you,” he said.

Damn him.
Damn him,
because his voice held just the right amount of challenge and amusement to hook her like a fish. She was dribbling before she knew it, walking onto the court before she told her muscles to move.

Closer to the basket Jamie fired off a jump shot, too hard, the arc more of a straight line than the sweet curve needed to swish through the hoop. The ball chunked off the rim, setting the chains rattling. Jamie took two quick steps and rebounded it, then kissed it off the backboard for two.

She followed him with an easy layup, caught the ball when he politely bounced it her way. He smelled exactly the same, the scent of his sweat as familiar as her own. They were being oddly careful, avoiding contact, each waiting for the other to shoot. It was awkward, strange.

“How about a game of one-on-one?” he asked.

She sank a sweet three, remembering what they used to play for. “You sure about that? Because your game looks rusty.”

“I’m sure,” he said, refusing to be baited as he slapped her ball back to her with one hand and aimed a skyhook at the basket with the other.

In answer she tapped her ball toward the corner of the court, where it came to rest in the grass under a budding elm tree, and took up position at half-court, her hands on her hips. She’d been greedily eyeing him for a while now, but this was a frank assessment of an opponent. He was tight, playing through some level of pain in his shoulders and back, favoring his left knee.

He checked the ball to her, she bounced it back, and settled low while he dribbled, using his body to protect the ball. Moving at half speed, she reached around a couple of times, reminding him to get lower, when he pulled up and got off a jump shot that clanged off the rim. She reached for the rebound, spun, and dribbled to the midcourt line.

“Nice,” he said. “Still got your crossover?”

“It’s a little rusty,” she said, and started driving to the basket. Her crossover was just fine, thanks, but he wasn’t playing hard enough to warrant throwing down for him, and she didn’t want to give him her best game. Not so soon. Not yet.

The game went back and forth for a few minutes as they tested each other. With each bump of his shoulder to her collarbone, her back to his chest as she inched her way down the court, the tension grew between them, the hot sweet burn of temptation. That part was familiar. She’d always wanted Jamie. Always. But their bodies were different, his harder, filled out to a man’s size and strength, hers aware of the upside of sex when before she’d only seen the downside, the weakness, the danger. Before she’d wanted, aroused without really knowing what it would mean to have. Now she knew exactly how rare the desire between them was.

He stopped, breathing hard. “That’s ten,” he said.

“Was it?” she replied, avoiding his gaze. “I wasn’t keeping score.”

He flashed her a smile, breathing hard. “Just a friendly game? That’s something we’ve never done.”

All the
nevers
hung in the air for a moment before she opted for the safe answer. “We used to go at it pretty hard,” she said, then wished she’d thought about her answer, or the court would open up and swallow her whole.

“You played harder than any of the guys on the team,” he said, then lifted the hem of his shirt and wiped the sweat from his face.

It was a standard athlete move, one she’d done a thousand times without thinking about it But Jamie’s torso, pectorals angling into an eight-pack split by a line of hair leading from his navel into his shorts, made her mouth go dry. He’d been in good shape in high school, played with his shirt off during those spring nights. Now he was spectacular.

She wanted. She wanted with the desperation of the girl she’d been, and with the knowledge and passion of the woman she’d become.

“How long are you in town?” she asked, anything to break the tension.

He stopped and looked at her, his hair sweat-dampened at temples and nape, all his cowlicks standing up. “I’m on day four of a thirty,” he said.

Twenty-six days. She could have twenty-six days with Jamie Hawthorn. It might be enough to take what she’d wanted and never let herself have all those years ago, answer the question that haunted her in the middle of the night. Did she make the right decision when she walked away from Jamie?

“Just like old times,” he said, dimpling at her again.

“Not exactly,” she said before she could talk herself out of it. One game he’d bet her a kiss if he won. She’d let him win, let him kiss her, then challenged him to a rematch. He’d lost, and in the crestfallen look on his face, she knew he wasn’t playing just for the chance to kiss her. He saw her as a worthy competitor, not as a girl from the East Side, with a mother as easy as a swinging door and no future. It wasn’t about getting in her pants.

So she’d kissed him anyway.

His smile softened, widened into something that should have been knowing but instead held a hint of wariness. “Not exactly,” he repeated. “I figured you’d forgotten about that.”

Never. That was the thing about
nevers
. You remembered that you broke them, or you remembered that you didn’t, that you’d clung to your word like a toddler with his binky … and regretted it. That spring with Jamie was characterized by all the
nevers
she’d clung to, afraid of getting pregnant and screwing up her one chance to get out of Lancaster.

She knew she’d never let herself have sex any time, let alone for the first time, on the patchy grass in City Park, so she’d met him there, never anywhere else, only there, and all she’d let herself do was kiss him, tree bark digging into her back, his hands pulling the elastic from her hair, on her face, her throat, her breasts, her hips, but never inside her clothing. She’d never gotten into a car with him, or let him come over to her house, and she’d certainly never climbed the dark, steep staircase disappearing into the trees on the Hill.

Most importantly, she’d never let herself fall in love with him. Even then she knew sex and love could be disconnected; she saw it happen to her mom three or four times a year. But the only thing worse than getting knocked up by Jamie Hawthorn was falling in love with him.

“I didn’t,” she said, her mouth dry. “I didn’t forget.”

Before she could say something she’d regret, she turned her back on him and walked across the court to pick up her ball. It had rolled to a stop between two thick roots anchoring a big elm tree. She bent over and grabbed it, straightened, turned.

Right into Jamie’s chest.

They were about the same height. He had maybe an inch on her, five eleven to her five ten, but he had a new, neat little trick of making himself seem bigger than he was because she caught her breath. Once again she was reminded of all the ways they’d been playing at being adults when they were just kids, and how they were all grown up now.

Then he bent his head and kissed her. For a long moment she froze, caught by the soft, hot pressure of his mouth on hers like a fish hooked out of the water. Then she dropped the ball, fisted her hand in his shirt, and pulled him close. She opened her mouth under his, felt the slippery hot touch of his tongue to hers, suggestive and tempting. His hands came up to cup her jaw as he backed her up a step, then another, until her back hit the rough bark of the elm and there was nowhere else for her to go but into him.

He stepped into her body, notching his thigh between hers, his hips shifting so she could feel how hard he was in the loose basketball shorts. He worked the fingers of one hand into the elastic holding her hair in the ponytail, tightened them, and pulled her head back to expose her throat. The difference between kissing then and kissing now was like the difference between buying a loaf of Wonder Bread at the Safeway where her mother worked and buying a baguette from Maison Kayser in the Rue Monge. Then he’d kissed with a boy’s desire and eagerness. Now he kissed with a man’s experience, closing his teeth over her jaw, the delicate curve of her ear, her pounding pulse, all the while holding her still for him.

Her hands went to his hips, her fingers tightening reflexively before one slid up his back to his shoulders and the other slid down to cup his ass and squeeze. It was all hard muscle, and as she curled her fingers into the cleft between his buttocks, he groaned and ground up against her.

Then he stepped away, putting space between them. “That hasn’t changed,” he said, breathing hard.

“Did you think it had?”

He shot her a look, half smile, half grimace, and adjusted his cock in his shorts. “Actually, I thought it hadn’t.”

“But you wanted to be sure.”

“If anything, it’s worse.”

“Yeah,” she said, ripping out her elastic and redoing her ponytail, just to have something to do with her hands. “You’re probably … you know…”

“Horny after a deployment?”

“Something like that.”

He shook his head, slow and sure. “It’s not that. That’s easy to take care of. This”—he gestured between them with a hand that she suddenly, irrationally, wanted to feel on her naked skin—“has been going on for over a decade, and it isn’t going away.”

“Just because we feel it doesn’t mean we have to act on it,” she said.

“That’s the best reason to act on it,” he countered.

“I can’t,” she said. Her to-do list whirled in her brain. She needed to buy a dress for the reception at the Garden Club, and another, more formal one for the banquet. She needed to demonstrate appropriate spring behavior to her students, not spring fever. The last thing she needed to do was get involved with Jamie again. He was leaving in twenty-six days, and if she’d learned anything from a decade of shuttling between European teams, dating athletes, it was that long-distance relationships didn’t work. In the end, he’d leave. She couldn’t afford to have Jamie Hawthorn break her heart.

She bent over and picked up her ball, and used the movement to put more distance between them. “See you around, Hawthorn,” she said.

“Count on it, Stannard.” His low laughter followed her into the night.

Chapter Three

The school corridor buzzed with the energy of over a hundred high school kids released from their classes to attend an optional assembly. Charlie tucked her clipboard to her hip as she moved with the flow of students past the lunchroom toward the gym. The normal between-class chatter was a notch faster and higher. She paused by a circle of students in the science hallway to snag one of her star juniors, Grace Allen, her boyfriend, Bryce, and her best friend, Olivia, a six-foot-two-inch girl with no athletic ability whatsoever. Olivia was taller than ninety percent of the girls playing basketball in the state, and literally couldn’t dribble a basketball. Charlie could have wept when she first saw her; she hadn’t seen such bad hand-eye coordination outside of the basketball fundamentals class she taught at the Y on weekends. Grace, four inches shorter, firmly muscled, and maintaining a solid-B average, had a shot at a scholarship to a lower-ranked Division I school, if she could keep her grades and her game up through her senior year.