He made a promise he intends to keep

Harmony Savitt is off-limits for navy SEAL Kyle Bracken. Not only is she his best friend’s little sister, she’s also a single mother and the widow of a fellow SEAL killed in action. This soldier needs to keep his distance. But something between them has changed...

Despite the new complicated feelings he has for Harmony, when his family comes under attack, there’s no one Kyle trusts more than her to help him get answers. When that threat extends to her and her daughter, though, he vows to protect them...even if it means putting his own heart on the line.

Kyle swung the door open. “Inside.”

“No kiss this time?” Harmony asked, testing him. Her chin was high.

“That’s right.” He spoke quietly enough that it didn’t carry into the lobby when he said, “You want to know something I’m afraid of?”

“What’ve you got, superhero?”

“That whatever’s happened between us tonight wiped out everything that came before it. Is that what you want?” he asked.

“Are you kidding me?” For the first time, he saw the nerves behind her brave front. Her chin quavered even as she jabbed him with her finger. “Why do you think I didn’t say anything before? You think I want to lose my best friend?”

He didn’t reply.

She lifted her shoulders in a helpless shrug. “But I guess...at the end of the day...I’m not half as noble as you are.”

Dear Reader,

A hundred years ago, Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote, “No matter what life might hold for them, it could never alter that. Their happiness was in each other’s keeping.” Anne of Green Gables has clearly stayed with me.

When I set out to write the fifth book in my Fairhope series, I had no plan to draw on books I read as a young girl. I suppose it is no surprise, however, that irrepressible Harmony’s flaming red hair and her lifelong affection for noble Kyle drew subconscious parallels to a certain orphan from Avonlea and her dear friend Gilbert Blythe. By the second chapter, Kyle began to refer to his Harmony as “Carrots” and there may or may not be a reference to that infamous slate-breaking incident...

I’ve always had a soft spot for the friends-to-lovers romance. Harmony and Kyle take it a step further, because when your hero is a tried and true navy SEAL and your aviatrix heroine is an expert in aerobatics, matters like life and death are never far behind.

I have loved every moment of writing this series, mostly because I get to watch characters like Harmony and Kyle dream big, grow up and realize, like Anne, how close to home happiness truly is.

Happy reading!

Amber Leigh

Navy SEAL Promise

Amber Leigh Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

AMBER LEIGH WILLIAMSis a Harlequin romance writer who lives on the United States Gulf Coast. She lives for beach days, the smell of real books and spending time with her husband and their two young children. When she’s not keeping up with rambunctious little ones (and two large dogs), she can usually be found reading a good book or indulging her inner foodie. Amber is represented by the D4EO Literary Agency. Learn more at www.amberleighwilliams.com.

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For my moon child, brighter than the sun.

Read books, cover or no cover.

Gather seashells, whole or broken.

Make ripples on the pond.

Mostly, breathe fire, rebel baby, and

light up the world with who you are.

And for that person, my person—you know

exactly who you are. This SEAL belongs to you.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Extract

Copyright

PROLOGUE

HARMONY SAVITT LOVED nothing more than pulling Gs in her high-performance aircraft. She loved doing all the rash, death-defying maneuvers that made spectators gasp and her parents nauseated.

As a pilot, she was gutsy. A certified barnstormer. She’d graduated at the top of her class from the tip-of-the-sword aerobatics academy she’d moved out west to conquer.

She knew good and well that her parents back home in Alabama would’ve preferred that she’d never caught the flying bug. If she gave it all up now—maneuvers, air shows, flight in general—and returned to small-town life with her feet planted solidly on the ground, they’d only be too pleased.

However, they’d touted purpose and dreams from the moment they knew she was listening. They’d encouraged her to be who she was, what she was, without compromise. And so she had.

Regardless of all that, it wasn’t three minutes into the first show of the season in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, that she felt it—something she rarely felt behind the controls of her Pitts S2S. She pulled rapidly out of formation and radioed the tower that she was coming in hot.

She landed with a skip and a bounce, ripped off her flying helmet. Emergency personnel ran at her with hoses and med bags. “What is it? What happened?” they cried out. She nearly mowed them down as she ran for the first hangar, clawing the air and cursing with every step.

She rounded the structure, grabbed the wall and aimed for the cleanest patch of tarmac she could find.

Sick. Sick, sick, sick.

Where was Mom to hold her hair back now?

The personnel kept a respectful distance. By the time she was done, she’d ejected her entire breakfast. She’d also broken out into a fine cool sweat, and her limbs weren’t the least bit sturdy.

Sturdiness was her mien. She was never not sturdy. Whether it was pulling those happy Gs or rolling over in a barrel, she prided herself on a cast-iron stomach and rock-steady hands at the controls. Airsickness had never been a problem.

“Hey, winger. You sick?”

This from her mechanic. Harmony fell back into a crouch and leaned against the cool metal building at her back. Planes stormed overhead, tearing, roaring, whistling. In the distance, the sound of cheering echoed off the tarmac in a merry cacophony. And still her knees shook like the ground was quaking.

She lowered her head until her long fire-engine-red rope braid fell heavy against her stomach. “I don’t get sick, Danny,” she muttered. “Ever.”

Her mechanic snorted. “Those cookies you just tossed are bound to disagree with you. If you ain’t sick, you’re pregnant.” And he guffawed because the thought of balls-to-the-wall Harmony Savitt pregnant was...

Impossible.

It took a bit of time, but she got up. Unzipping the neck of her flight suit, she fanned herself and scurried back to her plane. She did a quick check to make sure the bumpy landing hadn’t jarred anything loose. The weakness chased her back to the hangar before she could even think about gearing up for the next phase of the show.

She hosed her face off and did her best to cleanse the taste from her mouth by drinking half a bottle of tepid water. When the backs of her eyes went fuzzy and her ears started in with a chorus of white noise, she had to sit down and put her head between her knees.

While she was there, she counted. She counted days. Then weeks.

“Hell in a handbasket,” she cursed. The nausea was fading, but the shakes remained. This time they weren’t just from weakness.

Something else Harmony Savitt didn’t get was scared. But the truth was all but written in front of her. Her long-held tenet of embracing the natural turbulence of life went up against denial—denial of what she’d most likely been carrying around with her in the cockpit of her S2S. Pulling 10 Gs. Slipping. Stalling. Spiraling.

“Shit.” She covered her mouth and made a dash for the port-a-john.

She was exhausted, bedraggled—on the verge of a breakdown, the kind other people had. Not her.

“Harm?”

Head low, she squinted. The voice was familiar. For a few seconds, she thought she’d conjured it out of some nausea-induced haze. The hand that came down on her shoulder was real, though. Hard and real.

“Carrots. You okay?”

Her heart lurched. Only one person in the world called her Carrots.

“Oh, God.” It came out on a wavering prayer. Prayer—another thing she rarely engaged in.

Turning her head, she rested her cheek on the back of Kyle Bracken’s hand and thanked the maker for summoning him here to this place so far from home where she had suddenly been feeling so wretchedly alone. Peering up, she felt a weak, relieved smile pull at the corners of her white-pressed lips.

They froze in place along with the rest of her. Sure, it was Kyle. Crystal-clear blue eyes like untouched lakes in Scandinavia. A face like a dream—sharp-cut and hard-boned, it was marked hither and thither by scars, old and new. It was always tan, the freckles peppered across his nose and cheekbones nearly faded by the same sun that had imprinted them there in youth. His cheekbones were high and wide. The only thing soft about him was the slight button nose he’d been graced with by his tiny, fierce mother.

It was a good face. She’d known it all her life, so she was aware, more than most, of the kindness behind it, as well as the inclination toward mischief. There was courage there in boatloads, integrity, too, and the propensity of a warrior living in stunning synchronicity with a heart forged from full-fledged gold.

Some of those new scars...they were reminders of his latest deployment where, less than a year ago, he’d been medevaced from deep conflict after a near-fatal run-in with a frag grenade.

None of it gave her pause. Not anymore. She’d abandoned the end of the flying season last summer when she heard he’d been injured and had sat for weeks at his bedside, trading shifts there with his mother, his father, his sister and his then-fiancée. You couldn’t keep a tried-and-true Navy SEAL down. She knew it because her big brother, Gavin, was a SEAL, as well. He and Kyle had survived BUD/S together, fighting through every wall to earn their Trident and their place in the good fight.

And they’d taken someone with them on their way to petty officer status. Someone who’d come to mean as much to Harmony as either of them. Someone she’d come to love, too, over the last few years.

Someone she suspected was jointly responsible for her fears and misplaced cookies.

Kyle offered her a ghost of a grin. When she was a girl, that smile had held the power to bring her to her knees. It wasn’t the expression, however, that made her go to them now.

It was the uniform. Full dress blues.

If Harmony knew anything about Kyle Bracken, it was that he didn’t flaunt his SEAL status. He rarely donned his uniform stateside unless it was required. T-shirt, jeans, ball cap—those were his go-to threads. Seeing him decked out in white cap and shiny medals struck another chord of fear in her, far worse than the last.

“What’re you doing here?” she asked. Though she knew. The sister and the girl of military men always knew.

The grip on her shoulder squeezed as the smile on his face tapered off. “Harm. I wish I could tell you I came for the show.”

She was holding her breath again. She reached up blindly and gripped his jacket. “Kyle. What are you doing here?” The words came through her teeth. They were clenched, near clattering.

Those eyes. They told her before his mouth could bring itself to move. Those Scandinavian lakes were as deep with sorrow as they were wide, and something broke inside her to see it. To know.

“It’s Benji,” he said. “I’m sorry, baby. He’s dead.”

CHAPTER ONE

Five Years Later

AN ILL WIND blew Kyle into his Alabama home port. As he docked his beloved one-man sloop, the Hellraiser, in its rightful slip, he felt change in the air.

By the pricking of my thumbs—

Looking south, far off south, he saw nothing but cerulean skies skidded with small white fat-bottomed clouds. It was June, however, and though temps were climbing fast into the blistering nineties, the breeze was high. Off the Hellraiser’s stern, the Stars and Stripes flapped raggedly, the line ticking a cadence off the metal flag pole.

—somethin’ wicked this way comes.

The dawn, too, heralded change for the shore of his coastal home, he remembered as he checked the bilge pump and turned all power off to the cabin. This had been his home away from home for the past week and a half, while he sailed from Virginia Beach near Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, down the Atlantic seaboard, around Florida’s jutting peninsula and its glittering green keys. Watching the day break like a fire-soaked phoenix on his restive swath of the Gulf of Mexico, he recalled the old adage: Red sky morning—sailor’s fair warning.

Kyle had hoped that that warning was for what lay behind, what had drawn him to the refuge of the sea to decompress from his latest conflict as a Navy SEAL.

At sea, he could breathe. He could disconnect from the chaos and violence of his chosen profession. He could clear his head and reinvigorate his soul.

It had been harsh, the last string of operations. Harsh enough to wake him every night in the bunk of his sloop. But the cradle-like motion of the sea had helped beat back the tightness in his chest. And up on deck, with the salty wind in his hair and his sea-legs beneath him, he had slowly been able to realign the molecules between head and heart.

Out at sea, he wasn’t Chief Petty Officer Kyle Bracken. He was just a sailor having his go at the age-old existential clash between man and nature.

He loved his job. He loved his brothers-in-arms. He loved fighting the good fight. But even warriors needed a reprieve. Even the trained elite needed to unplug and get back to self. The little tropical cyclone he’d run into just off Cedar Key had been a welcome reception. A challenge. He’d turned the sloop’s bow right up underneath its cloudy, disordered skirt and sailed right through it.

It had been headed northeast, but the wind had now shifted, Kyle noted. He knew before his feet hit the dock of the marina, without switching on the weather radio. He had lived through enough summers on the Gulf to be able to sense the change in barometric pressure. Hell, he could practically taste it.

That damned storm was headed straight this way.

He spotted the man on the deck of the houseboat two slips down and whistled loudly. “’Ey, Nick!”

The white-headed gentleman turned. His face was leathered and bronzed, his beard bushy and white enough to rival Santa’s. He was wearing the same Hawaiian-print shirt as always, and the exact style of sunglasses that had died out sometime after the Kennedy assassination. “Hey, boy. Where the hell’ve you been?”

“Can’t say,” Kyle claimed, gripping the shiny silver rail on the Hellraiser’s port side. Nick had been calling Kyle “boy” since his first visit to the marina alongside his father at the age of seven. Kyle might have changed a good deal since their first meeting, but the salty seaman living on the houseboat had not.

Maybe he was Santa Claus.

“Still a person of mystery,” Nick grunted.

Kyle lifted a shoulder in answer.

“Saw your old man out and about...oh, Wednesday, I think it was,” Nick said, scratching his forehead.

“Yeah?” Kyle asked, lightening at the mention of his father.

“Gearing up for that big show this weekend up at that airfield of his. Reckon you heard about it.”

“Huh.” Big show. Airfield. Neither his father nor his mother had mentioned either in their weekly emails or the short phone calls they’d managed to grab with him over his last week of deployment. Though words like big show and James Bracken were no strangers to each other. And James did own an airfield, among a litany of other strange and wonderful things.

“Your folks know you’re in town?” Nick asked.

A grin managed to climb over the lower half of Kyle’s face. He hadn’t known when his vessel would bring him into port. That combined with the stormy run-in had kept him from contacting his parents.

Besides, he liked the element of surprise.

The far-off wail of a weather warning reached Kyle’s ears, and he straightened as Nick’s head swiveled in the direction of the houseboat’s wheelhouse. They both listened for a moment to the radio before Nick glanced back at Kyle, his caterpillar brows vee-ed. “What the sam hell did you bring home with you? Weatherman says that cyclone’s spun itself into a ripe-old tropical storm. Headed this way.”

The grin washed slowly from Kyle’s face as he picked up on the rest of the weather warning. It seemed the calm he’d sought in the waters that straddled Fort Morgan and Dauphin Island, the lull of the Eastern Shore and the bay that, to him, represented the flow and pace of what life should be, was about to be rudely disrupted. What had he brought with him?

Nick hocked loudly and spat a stream over the rail before he added, “Go on, boy. Tell your mama you’re here.” He raised his glasses and peered across the empty slip. “Or I will.”

Kyle gave a nod. “Yes, sir.” He began to gather his things from the Hellraiser’s cabin when Nick called to him again.

“It’s good to see you back.”

“Were you worried about me, Nick?” Kyle asked, teasing.

Nick’s laugh was a rusty tumble. Just the thing for a sailor as old and crusty as he. “Maybe.”

It was as heartfelt a sentiment as Kyle had ever heard the man utter. He nodded. “See you out at the airfield later?”

Nick barked. “Your crazy old man might’ve traded his sea legs for a pair of wings.” He stomped one rubber boot onto the deck of the houseboat. Kyle was surprised the ancient decking didn’t splinter under the abuse. “My place is right here.”

“Uh-huh. You might wanna shower,” Kyle suggested. He raised a brow at Nick’s questioning frown. “I can smell ya from here.”

That rusty laugh climbed into the air and followed Kyle belowdecks.

* * *

AFTER LONG ABSENCE, most sons brought their mothers roses.

What Kyle brought his he wrapped doubly in cotton swaths and stuffed carefully into the mid-leg pocket of his cargo pants. His motorcycle was housed under the awning next to his mother’s old bay cottage where he’d left it so many months ago, locked and chained and maintained no doubt by his father whose many professions included auto mechanic. He slung the travel bag over his shoulder and fired up the bike before speeding off along the shoreline.

It took minutes to reach the gravel lot just off South Mobile Street, Fairhope’s scenic highway. Kyle spotted the familiar sign for Flora. Adrian, his mother, had built her small business from the ground up to support herself and her young son after a disastrous first marriage. Kyle had spent many days after school behind the counter of the flower shop watching her work. If he was restless or naughty, she’d send him off to one of the neighboring small businesses owned by three women who had become aunts to him in everything but blood.

Attached to Flora on the bay side was Tavern of the Graces, owned by Olivia Leighton and her husband, Gerald, a bestselling author. Olivia had taught Kyle how to play pool and darts and how to woo chicks. Later, she’d taught him how to mix drinks and hold his liquor—not that his mother knew any of that. The now third-generation establishment was operated chiefly by Olivia and Gerald’s first son, William, these days.

Above Flora was the gleaming display windows of Belle Brides, bridal boutique and operating center of buzzy wedding coordinator and couturier, Roxie Strong. Kyle had tried to avoid Belle Brides as a kid. Most everything was off-limits there. However, Roxie always kept sweets behind the counter, which she used to her advantage whenever she needed stand-ins in lieu of mannequins.

Finally, beyond the shops and Flora’s greenhouse, there was the inn. The white antebellum structure was a real gem. Framed by gardens and supported by great columns, Hanna’s Inn was lovingly tended by Briar Savitt and her husband, Cole. They’d lived on the third floor for years and had only just expanded into a new wing.

Construction looked to be complete, Kyle noticed as he parked his motorcycle in front of Flora and took off his helmet. Leaning back on the seat, he removed his gloves one finger at a time. He wasn’t normally a fan of alteration, but the demand from the inn’s guest book had all but screamed expansion as far back as Kyle could remember. And the design was swell. He’d bet Briar was pleased as pie.

He always felt warm when he thought of the innkeeper. She’d often cooked for him, baked for him. Long before she married Cole and gained Gavin as a stepson, she’d let Kyle sleep in the linens she tended as religiously as the landscaping. He’d done homework at her kitchen table. He’d laughed himself silly chasing a giant Irish wolfhound named Rex across the kempt lawn—a lawn he’d regularly mowed as a teen to keep his Jeep full-up on gas.

He’d caught crab for supper from the traps tied off her dock, had learned to fish and swim there, had tied his first skiff there. It was also there he’d kissed a girl for the first time, hunkered down in the butterfly bushes. Amelia Blankenship. They were almost eleven. She wore pomegranate lip balm.

He’d slipped her the tongue, and she’d told his mother. He then spent two weeks sulking without video games as penance. But not two years later Amelia started cornering him behind the lockers at school looking for a French partner, and all was forgotten.

As Kyle shifted from the leather seat of his hog and planted his hard-soled riding boots in the gravel, he wondered if he’d be able to stick around long enough to catch the sunset from Hanna’s. There was nothing like the view from her sunporch at the day’s end.

He should know. He’d seen the sun set most everywhere.

The bells chimed over the door to Flora as he entered the shop, the sound as comforting as it was timeless. He stuffed his gloves in the riding helmet and tucked it against his side. The girl—well, woman—behind the checkout counter and the old-fashioned cash register was built like a willow branch. She had short-cropped raven-colored hair in a punk-ish sweep. There was a teensy diamond stud in the crease of her nose and several others creeping up the shell of her ear. She wore black makeup, black clothes. She always dressed in black, even in the thick of summer.

She was a carbon copy of his mother without the red hair neither of them had managed to inherit. Adrian’s freckles had faded out long ago, but they remained on Kyle’s sister, dark and splattered every which way across pale features. Still, the woman before him was so small even holding her as a child in arms, arms that had felt clumsy and reckless, Kyle had wondered that they could be so closely related.

He was eight when his mother married his biological father, James. And he was just shy of ten when the sibling he’d wished for with every fiber of his being was at last born. Not a brother like he’d wanted. But a sibling just the same.

When the door closed behind him, encasing him in the fresh, sweet-scented showroom, she didn’t look around. Her head bent over a large open book, she recited in a bored monotone, “Welcome to Flora, Fairhope’s finest florist. How may I assist you?”

“Damn,” Kyle muttered, backtracking. “This ain’t the cathouse.”

Mavis’s spine straightened. Her head whipped. Dark eyes pinned him to the spot, the muscles of her face momentarily slack in a rare show of surprise. “Kyle?” It wasn’t so much a question as a demand. “You’re home,” she stated, combing him.

“Just.”

“You didn’t call,” she said, accusing now. A well-worn scowl pulled at her insouciant mouth. “Typical of you to just show up and give everybody the shock of the month.” A fist came to rest against her hip. “Jackass.”

“Pipsqueak,” he threw back.

“Nimrod.”

“Tightwad.”

“Meathead.”

The corners of his lips moved. “Meathead?”

He watched hers waver. “Yeah. That’s what I said. Meathead.”

He couldn’t stop it. He broke into a fond grin. “Get over here.”

Mavis had never been one for public displays of affection. Despite that and the tough love she volleyed routinely back at him in spades, she moved toward him. When he wrapped her tight against his chest, she stood only slightly stiff in his embrace.

“Miss me?” he whispered, his cheek against her hair.

“Eh.”

A quiet laugh rumbled through him before he let her go.

She gave him another study. “At least you’re intact. Wilderness Man.”

Kyle skimmed his knuckles over the unruly beard. “Yeah, I could probably do with a shave, huh?”

“You’re going to need a bush-hog to rid yourself of that mess.” Eyes widening, she asked, aiming to tease, “Didn’t lose any more of the family jewels, I take it.”

He hissed through his teeth. “Can’t afford it. What’s left is here, standing right in front of you,” he added when she continued to eyeball him, waiting for a solid answer on the health front. She blinked, and the relief was gone, but the glimpse of emotion he gleaned made his stomach tighten just the same. “What about you? How’re you doing?”

“No complaints.” When his brows hitched and he scrutinized her much as she’d scrutinized him, she repeated, “I said no complaints.”

“Good,” he said after a second’s longer study. Mavis had been treated for epilepsy since she was a little kid. “And how’s business?”

“Fine,” she admitted.

“Mmm-hmm. Any, uh—” he fanned his fingers in the air “—sightings lately?”

She smirked, banding her arms over her chest. “You know that’s confidential.”

Mavis had an unusual job description and loose hours to go with it. When she wasn’t tied up doing paranormal investigation, she filled the needs of her parents and their various industries—Flora, Carlton Nurseries, Bracken Mechanics and his father’s latest and fondest project, a start-up company called Bracken-Savitt Aerial Application & Training. Or B.S., for short. “You’re being careful out there at least,” he said. “Right?”

“God, Kyle. It’s not like I chase zombies or supervillains or whatever it is you do.”

“Just ghosts and ghouls,” he asserted. He digressed. “Where’s Mom?”

“Greenhouse,” she told him. “You better have brought her something. Seeing you’s bound to knock her over.”

He flicked the end of her button nose. She dodged and swiped. Bringing her against his side, he pecked a quick kiss to her temple. “Plans for dinner?” he asked as he backtracked to the entry door.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” She crossed her eyes at him.

He rolled his at her and pushed his way out into the heat. “I’m still waitin’ for directions to that cathouse.”

“Drive hard due west,” she called at his back. “When you hit the bay, hold your breath and keep going!”

He chuckled again when the door closed behind him. He followed the path through the silver sale buckets and past an impressive display of succulents planted between the slats of an Old West wagon wheel. Around the side of the building, a wheelbarrow overflowed with annuals and a pineapple-shaped fountain burbled just before the wide-parted doors of Flora’s greenhouse.

He heard the clomp of the stem cutter before he was even part of the way through. Inside, it was sweltering. The hanging plants and tables of vegetation soaked up the humidity. Kyle was already sweating under his cotton T-shirt when he rounded the corner and saw his mother chopping the stems off her latest delivery of fresh roses. The blade swung down, decisive under the guiding stroke of her hand. She worked by rote, quick, efficient in a red apron labeled with the Flora logo and thick work gloves to ward off any ill will from thorns.

He reached into the leg pocket of his cargoes and pulled out the wrapping with his offering inside. “Howdy.”

Adrian’s head rotated quickly, and she stopped.

It took her a moment. Kyle knew with the beard, and his hair grown out a good ways, that the resemblance between his father and himself was striking. He watched it sink in. Her hands fell away from the cutter, and her mouth parted. With her, the emotions bled through him easily and he let them, smile going soft. “Is this where you keep Dad’s testicles?” When she continued to gaze, slack with surprise, he went on. “Mav and I. We’ve always wondered.”

Her lips closed and her throat moved on a swallow. Though her eyes filled, she pulled in a breath and offered him a smile in return. “Why do you think I germinate the best bulbs in five counties?” The mist in her eyes grew until she blinked. She lifted her shoulders, taking him in. “Oh, my God, Kyle.”

“Hey,” he said, as her hands rose to her face and she lowered it into them. He crossed to her and spanned his arms around her. It was easy to hold her, much as it was once easy for her to hold him. When a silent sob tremored through her, he cradled her closer and rocked, side to side. He gave a small, cajoling laugh. “Mom. Hey, it’s okay.”

“Did something happen—to send you home early?”

“I’m fine. My rotation just ended.”

She pulled back slowly. Raising her hands to his face, she took a good conclusive look at him. Where Mavis had been satisfied with words, Adrian knew better. She looked deep, beyond the eyes, searching. “Something’s happened.”

He shrugged it off. “It’s over. I’m home.”

“You are. I’m happy. So happy.” Hugging him around the middle, she sighed. “Was your father in on this?”

“No.” Kyle chuckled. “No, he’s off the hook.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Not yet. I saw Nick at the marina. He said something about an air show.”

“It’s something B.S. put together,” Adrian said. “For charity. And, of course, advertising. He’s flying a vintage training plane from the ’50s. I’ve spent the better part of the day trying not to think about what happens when that man gets behind the yoke of an outmoded bucket.”

“He’s a good pilot.”

“He’s a show-off,” she said plainly.

“Can’t a guy be both?”

“Harmony’s there, too,” Adrian added.

“Harm.” Kyle warmed at the news. He’d known Harmony from the day she was born. He’d marveled over her—her growth, her can’t-touch-this attitude, her remarkable go-hard personality and the unquestioned strength that held those around her together. Being with Harmony was like finding a new penny somewhere unexpected, and not just because of her Zippo Flamethrower hair. “How’s she doing?”

Adrian’s smile wavered by a hair. Only a hair. “She likes being back in the air, and your father’s determined to make sure she stays there this time around.”

“Why wouldn’t she?” When Adrian’s eyes skimmed to his shoulder, he ducked his head to bring her attention back to his face. “B.S. isn’t in some kind of trouble already?” Thus far, none of his father’s ventures had failed. To hear the man tell it, the agricultural market had been ripe for new sprayers. “It’s been barely a year since they cut the ribbon.”

Adrian shook her head. “I couldn’t tell you everything. I don’t think even he’s told me all the nitpicky details, but there’ve been problems. Prospective clients slipping away. Contracts breaking up over mysterious circumstances. And the holes need plugging now to keep the belly of the business off the ground. Until then...” She lifted her brows, eyeing him from underneath them. “This needs to stay quiet. I’m not sure Harmony knows half of what I’m telling you.”

“She’s fifty percent of the business,” Kyle pointed out.

“Yes, but your dad told her from day one that this was a sure thing,” Adrian said. “She put her faith in his word, as well as her money, name and reputation. If B.S. goes under, it won’t be without a fight on your dad’s part. Or mine, for that matter.”

Kyle frowned over the wave of information.

Adrian crossed her arms over her chest. Mavis had looked much the same moments ago. “Did you sail home?”

“Always do.”

“On the Hellraiser.”

“What else?”

“Did you stay close to shore?”

“Mostly,” he claimed.

One of her brows twitched. “Please tell me you didn’t sail like an idiot through that storm.”

He hedged. “Huh.”

“Kyle Zachariah Bracken.”

They both were born Carltons. Adrian had been married to Radley Kennard at the time of Kyle’s birth. However, she’d wanted to give Kyle her name in lieu of her first husband’s. When James came back into their lives, solidifying the family unit, his mother had asked Kyle’s advice over what to do with their name.

He liked the idea of them staying Carltons, sharing what had been theirs together for so long. But he’d also finally gained a real father—one hell of a father—and he’d wanted to take his name. So, to James’s amusement and pride, Kyle and Adrian took up the name Bracken to please themselves as well as him. “In my defense,” Kyle said slowly, “it wasn’t a tropical storm at the time...”

“You sailed through a hurricane and didn’t have the decency to call your mother,” she surmised, unimpressed by her findings.

“Are you surprised?”

“Not in the least. But I still have that BB gun I took from your possession all those years ago.” Her lips pursed. “Don’t think I’m not above poppin’ you with it.”

Kyle finally extended what was in his hand. “Then now’s a good a time as any...”

Adrian took the bundle gingerly. “What’s this?”

“A surprise. Careful,” he added as she unrolled the cotton wrapping. “It’s not the cuddly type.”

Adrian carefully unveiled the offering. She cupped it in her hands with the cotton bunched between her skin and the thorns packed close along the stem. “Kyle,” she breathed, every trace of censure vanishing. “Where did you get this?”

“That’s...classified, Mom.” When she tutted at him, he said, “I did some research. It’s native to Madagascar. They say it migrated to the Middle East in ancient times as well as to small areas of India. They call it the Crown of Thorns.”

Adrian gazed at it in wonder. Kyle’s mother had seen most every flower under the sun. He loved nothing more than bringing home something exotic, something she hadn’t seen before. In his parents’ bedroom at The Farm, she kept a shadowbox full of treasures he’d found through his years of service. Bending her head low over the pink blossoms, she sniffed for fragrance. “It’s different. I like that. Is it dangerous?”

“Poisonous, from flower to stem. And it’d make a fair pincushion.”

It might as well have been a puppy, the way she lifted it to look from another angle. She beamed. “You did good. If you’re right about the poison, it’ll do well to keep your dad in line, too.”

Kyle swallowed. “I missed you, Mom.”

She gazed at him, the light in her flickering as she focused on what was behind the eyes once more. “Something did happen over there. But I missed you, too. And I’m glad you’re home.”

CHAPTER TWO

THE WARPLANE HANDLED like it was the 1940s and the war was on again. Harmony strapped into the cockpit of the old bird with the giddiness of a child and took to the sky, climbing high, the nose reaching for the blue, white-peppered expanse.

“No tricks today, ace,” the voice of her radioman advised. “Just do some nice fly-bys and get the people going.”

“You’re a buzzkill, James,” she called back. “I’m just stretching the lady’s legs.”

What legs! The engine had fire and pizzazz. It was bred for dogfighting and hell-for-leather maneuvers. The idea brought gooseflesh to Harmony’s skin as she banked, coming around.

The trim airfield spread out below her, a jutting green carpet. Two lines of exhibition planes were queued on either side of the runway. Hundreds of faces from the metal bleachers were turned up to the sky, watching the fighter live again. “Hold on to your hats,” Harmony warned, going low.

A curse blew through the headset of her flying helmet as she dipped over the bleachers and climbed again, gaining airspeed. “Well. Hats are in the wind,” James observed. “You nearly ripped the blouse off the congressman’s wife.”

“Then we’re certain to make the papers.” She banked again. “Relax. Are the good people smiling?”

“They’re verklempt. Nobody ever said you don’t put on a good show.”

“Just sit back and enjoy it, why don’t you?” she suggested. “Coming in again...”

Even she whooped as she made the next sweep. This was worth all the hassle they’d gone through to get the summer show off the ground. They’d haggled for weeks with FAA regulations. With well-trained pilots, they’d managed to rustle together all the right paperwork and get the all-clear from the powers that be.

God, it felt great to be in the cockpit. No way she would ever give it up again. There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t give to stay airborne.

Well, there was one thing she wouldn’t give. Harmony’s gaze strayed to the three-by-five photograph she’d taped to the control panel for luck. Her daughter smiled back at her over a ruffle-lined shoulder, curly-headed and coquettish. She was the reason Harmony couldn’t try any of her old barnstorming maneuvers, though the temptation sang. She was the reason Harmony heeded James’s warning and performed fly-bys instead of loops.

Gracie Bea, who’d lost one parent before she was born, was the general reason Harmony toed the line. Because no matter how trained she was, no matter how well-maintained the warbird might be, she couldn’t take risks. She took enough on a day-to-day basis. Aerial application wasn’t low-level aerobatics, but it still held its share of dangers.

Harmony liked being the pilot mama who taught her daughter not to slow down but to run and climb, whoop and holler. Yet she knew her limits, and she heeded them as she’d heeded few other limits in life, even gravity, because no child deserved to grow up an orphan.

It hurt enough that Bea would never know her father, Petty Officer Benjamin Zaccoe—Benji.

“Last pass,” Harmony informed James through the radio. “Ready down there?” A frown pulled at her lips when he didn’t answer. “James?” She was already going in for a dive. She pulled off the final fly-by and tapped her headset. “Tower, do you read?”

Communications must be down, she mused. Wheels down, she executed a safe, only somewhat flashy landing that brought the bird to a standstill in front of the rows of spectators who clambered to their feet and cheered her as she rose from the cockpit and waved. She’d dressed the part in a vintage flying helmet and sheep-lined leather jacket. As had been her trademark in flying days past, she wore her hair in a thick braid over one shoulder.

The warm reception brought her flight buzz to a satisfying conclusion. She stood on the wing of the fighter, gave a salute, and prepared to hop to the grass before she saw James approaching.

“Nice flying, ace.” He nodded, impressed.

She pulled off her helmet. “I lost comms.”

He reached out to grasp the wing’s edge. James was well over six feet tall and had aged well. Very well. His hair and beard were still thick, with some salt and pepper sprinkled through. His tan face only looked worn around the corners of his eyes where laughter had inscribed itself. “Sorry. It was me,” he admitted.

“Why?” she asked. “What happened?”

“I was distracted,” James told her. He turned toward the row of B.S. personnel on the ground. “You can blame that one over there.”

Harmony squinted. Well-worn T-shirt, cargo pants, battered baseball cap over hair that curled brown under the rim and bordered on unruliness. The beard was full enough to rival James’s, and the smile wove a wide path through it. Blue eyes winked at her from under the brim of the hat.

“’Ey, Carrots,” he greeted.

She nearly shuddered. “Kyle!” Hopping down to the grass, she got a running leap on him.

“Umphf!” he groaned under the impact, breaking into a low-rumbling laugh as he grabbed her up off the ground in a fierce hug.

Some hugs had the power to heal all manner of woes. Some were as vital as the bodies they brought together. Harmony tightened her hold around Kyle’s neck. For a moment—a small moment—she let all her anxiety bleed through to the surface where she never let it stray. Not when he was away. She couldn’t think about what he and her brother, Gavin, did. She couldn’t think about the risk of losing either of them where she’d already lost too much.

Ducking her head into Kyle’s shoulder, she felt her brow creasing and the muscles beneath quake with the effort to hold it back. Beating it under, she breathed deep and smelled sunshine, Zest soap and sea salt—smells that were so very Kyle.

He was back. It was her turn to feel verklempt.

“Talk about a hero’s reception,” he murmured.

Her lips curved. “Mmm-hmm.”

“Harm?”

“Hmm?” she mumbled. She felt a bit fuzzy-headed as she pulled back in his embrace. “Oh.” Loosening her grip, she let him set her on the grass. “Sorry. I just... I missed the hell out of you.”

All the fuzziness faded, and her focus sharpened, everything zeroing in on him. As a girl, she’d felt a magnetic pull toward him. He might’ve known her since she was a baby, but Harmony was a woman, damn it, and Kyle Bracken was a man, a soldier, that women noticed.

“You look the same,” he said.

She swore sometimes Kyle still saw her as his best buddy Gavin’s little sister. Did he look at her and see the four-year-old who’d wrecked her bicycle in earth-scorching fashion on the gravel outside his mother’s flower shop? Or the eighteen-year-old he’d tossed into a mud puddle in front of his navy friends? “Is that good?” she asked.

He reached up, touched her hair. Just a brush above the temple where some flyaway strays had pulled free of her braid. “Couldn’t be better.”

She ignored the missed breath and balled her hand into a fist. Throwing it into the rock slab of his shoulder, she knocked him back half a step and startled a short laugh out of him. “You don’t call. You don’t write. You just show up out of the blue to let us know you’re—” She stopped herself just short of saying alive. She licked her lips and shook her head. “You’re nearly as bad as my brother.”

“Ouch,” he said, his good humor fading by a fraction. He touched his shoulder. “You’ve been working on that jab.”

“I’m a mama now, K.Z.B.,” she reminded him. “Somebody’s got to step up their game. Since Benji can’t be here, and with you and Gavin gone more than half the time, I’m the only one left to teach Bea how to breathe fire.”

His face went solemn at the reminder of Benji, of Kyle’s own continual absence. She saw a spark of guilt there. Harmony hadn’t meant to hit him in the tenders. It was easy to forget he even had tender spots. He was built exactly as what he was—an elite fighter. He didn’t exactly wear his emotions on his sleeve. He wasn’t trained that way.

He just got back, she reminded herself. She knew better than most how long it took a soldier to settle after returning home—physically, emotionally, psychologically. And Kyle’s heart reached as wide as the warm Gulf waters. Switching gears quickly, she said, “Bea will be thrilled to bits when she sees you.”

“Not as much as me.”

“Are you staying at The Farm?” she asked, referring to the farmhouse and acres of horse pasture, fields and woods that belonged to Adrian and James. “You could come by. Though you probably want to settle in first.”

“I’ll stay at The Farm for a little while,” he acknowledged. “I’m not sure Mom would have it any other way. It’s not much of a walk from their place to yours.”

That was true. She lived on Bracken land in the mother-in-law suite. When Kyle’s grandfather, Van Carlton, passed away, he and James had built the cozy little house for his grandmother, Edith, while the Brackens moved their family of four into the farmhouse she had no longer wanted to keep up. The arrangement had lasted little more than three years before his grandmother moved to a retirement village in Florida.

When Harmony returned home after Benji’s death, she’d accepted the Brackens’ invitation to live in the empty suite. The arrangement worked for all parties. She couldn’t have very well brought a squalling newborn to the inn like her parents had wanted. They might like the idea of having their grandchild so close, but they also had an established business to run.

And Harmony liked the Bracken lands. She’d enjoyed raising Bea there with not much but honeybees and squirrels for company. The Farm was a rich place to raise a child. Bea had learned to ride in the last year. Adrian and James had even bought her her own pony. The Brackens themselves were generous landlords, understanding and unobtrusive. And it helped that Harmony’s business partner was only a hop, skip and a jump away. B.S. butted up against The Farm and Carlton Nurseries, meaning the commute to work wasn’t half bad either.

“Come by,” Harmony invited. “See Bea. I’ll make macaroni.”

Kyle hissed, reaching for his waistline. “You know my weakness for your macaroni. Just as you know a soldier’s got to watch his form.”

“A spoon or two won’t kill you,” she said, slugging him again in the stomach. Her knuckles did little more than ricochet off the abs underneath his T-shirt. The man was a machine. There were strong men. Ripped men. Then there were men like Kyle who were made of stronger stuff—concrete and rebar. “I’ll make it for Bea. You can gank a few bites off her plate if it makes you feel better. I’ll even throw in a free trim.” She motioned to his neckline. “You’re getting long in the back.” Overseas, he often let it grow out, but hair as thick as his didn’t last long at home without a trim, particularly in the summer.

He scrubbed those peeking brown curls. “It didn’t bother me ’til the humidity hit. Mavis could do it, but it’s a foolish man who asks her to take scissors to his head.”

“You’re afraid of Mavis,” Harmony noted. She shook her head. “I thought you big SEAL types were fearless.”

“Not entirely.”

“What else are you afraid of?” she asked experimentally.

He turned thoughtful. Again, his smile slipped. She wondered at the hitch before it vanished, and he responded. “Sharks.”

“It’s a good thing you’re home then,” she pointed out. She touched him, to assure herself again that he was really here. “You won’t find many of those inland.”

“I guess.” He looked over her head, saw the people watching and waiting. “I shouldn’t keep you. Your fans’ll want a piece of you, too.”

“Work, work,” she said, grinning.

He bent down, placing his lips against her cheek. “Amazing flying out there,” he told her, lingering. “I’m proud of ya.”

“The biplane’s next,” she told him, ignoring the little stir in her blood. It was little, after all. “You could tag along.”

He barked a laugh as he backed off, knowing her penchant for flat-hatting. “I live dangerously enough on your mac-and-cheese.”

“Ah, come on!” she chided.

“Not on your life, Carrots!” he shouted back. Lifting his chin to her, he disappeared into the throngs of spectators to join James, leaving her as spooled up as she had been in the cockpit of the old warplane.

* * *

DUSK FALLING ON The Farm was the essence of tranquility. As night approached, there was both a hush and a crescendo. Everything stilled. Even with the sun gone from the sky, the heat didn’t dwindle, but it banked, the air breathable once more. As the light faded, the sound of night bugs—crickets and cicadas—escalated. Amphibians struck up the tune, adding throaty backup vocals to the noise of the backcountry twang. Their combined pitch heightened to that of a diesel engine. After his time away, it was like a homecoming symphony from Mother Nature’s Philharmonic.

The mosquitos were out, but the farmhouse’s back porch screened them from feasting on flesh. Through the open window, Adrian and Mavis could be heard arguing lightly over the dish washing.

On the porch, James puffed a cigar. In his youth, he’d been a man of many vices. He was no longer controlled by substances. His weekend after-dinner Montecristos were his only remaining weakness. He tipped his head back, blowing rings into the air, looking every bit the striking, aging pirate. At fifty-four, he still cut an impressive figure, especially in the flickering light of Adrian’s tiki torches.

Kyle soaked it all in. The sweet scent of his father’s stogie. The familiar tumble of the land, rising and falling under wild grasses to the stable and pastures. A horse nickered in the distance. The animals’ slow-grazing silhouettes were fading against the inky backdrop of trees.

Some pockets of the world remained untouched. That certainty was what Kyle escaped to when the fighting was over. Change was inevitable. Cities moved forward. Small towns turned to progress. Backcountry places like this developed. People changed. Grandparents passed. Engagements broke. Teammates burned out or chose to leave the service to save their families. Some of them never saw the beauty of their final homecoming.

The Farm was rare. The way of life went on unceasing, the pace unbroken. It persisted and endured. Yet that shift in barometric pressure could be sensed here, too. The storm was gaining speed in the Gulf and hadn’t altered course. It would make a wet landing somewhere between Perdido and Pensacola. Home and business owners were already battening down in preparation for the first seasonal run-in with the tropics. Soon Kyle would help James and Adrian stable the horses, round up the litter of puppies spring had given them and board the windows.

The storm was small enough not to worry too much. The Farm would most likely remain unscathed. For now, Kyle drank an icy glass of tea and let his father smoke. “How bad is it?” he asked out of curiosity.

“What’s that?” James asked, turning his head from the view.

“The aviation industry,” Kyle indicated.

James took a final puff from his cigar, eyeing Kyle over the brown stump. Releasing a ragged stream of smoke, he leaned forward in his patio chair and stabbed it out in the tray at the center of the table. He’d take the tray out in the yard and dump it before going back inside, so the ashes didn’t get caught up in the breeze and dirty Adrian’s furnishings. Such courtesies between Kyle’s parents were simple and commonplace, performed with unspoken poignancy that was touching in the extreme. “It should be booming.”

“But it’s not,” Kyle surmised, daring his father to challenge the assumption.

James did a few more quick stabs with the Cuban before depositing it in the tray. Dragging a hand through his mop of hair, he settled back with a creak from the chair. “There’ve been some ruts in the road.”

“And?” Kyle posed the question again. “How bad is it?”

James folded his hands over his middle. “I’ve been a businessman for thirty years. I haven’t lost one entrepreneurship yet, and I’m not going to now.”

“No matter the cost?”

James hesitated. He glanced toward the window where Adrian and Mavis were talking. When he spoke again, his voice lowered to a murmur. “Those two are the chief reasons B.S. has to survive.”

Kyle frowned. “There’ll be collateral damage if it doesn’t,” he realized, trying to read James. It wasn’t easy. The man could bluff like a maverick and not just at the poker tables. “What did you mortgage? The cottage on the bay isn’t big enough. Was it the auto shop? Please tell me it wasn’t Flora or the nursery.”

“It wasn’t any of those,” James mused, no longer meeting his son’s eye. “It was a sure thing. Byron Strong went over the business plan. The best advisers on the coast took a look at the specs. The application market was ripe for new pilots. The only issue was lack of local training opportunities, but we fixed that with the teaching base of B.S.”

“So what’s the issue?”

“I don’t know, exactly. We’ve had two big contracts fall through based on minute technicalities. We’ve had farmers shy away after weeks of negotiation. Even advertising has had its windfalls.” James released an unsteady breath. “It was The Farm. I mortgaged The Farm to get B.S. off the ground.”

James might as well have pulled a WWE and hit Kyle over the head with his chair. For slow-winding seconds, he felt as if he were being choked out by one of his SEAL teammates.

Dragging oxygen into his lungs, he worked to clear the bright pinpoints in his head that told him blackout was imminent. Gripping the arms of his chair, Kyle stared at his father in something close to horror. “You...gambled The Farm?”

“Like I’ve been trying to explain to you, it wasn’t a gamble.”

Kyle pushed up from the seat. He braced his hands on his hips and walked to the far side of the porch. There were potted plants in most every variety hanging from chains, stacked on shelves and pedestals...and he couldn’t breathe. “Son of a bitch,” he hissed.

“Kyle,” James said, climbing to his feet, too. “It’ll be all right. We won’t lose. I don’t lose. The Farm is your birthright. Nothing’s going to change that.”

“Mom let you do this?” Dark gathered on the porch with only the torches to make up the distance between him and his father. “She knew what you were doing?”

“Of course she knew,” James said, insulted by the insinuation that she might not. “I’m always up-front with your mother. You know this.”

“Did you sell her the same old line of bull—that it was a sure thing? That we’d all come out smelling like roses?”

In a weary motion, James dipped his hands into his pockets. “Son. You’re angry. I get that. But there are no lies between your mom and me. There’s no subterfuge. We couldn’t be what we are if there was. It’s the same with you. Haven’t I always given you the truth, straight up?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t like that in the beginning, was it?” Kyle asked. He was on the verge of furor and he went there. “All those years ago. You didn’t exactly tell her why you missed the first part of my life. Why you left her when she was seventeen, pregnant. She had to find out for herself what kind of man you were before us.”

James stared, stricken. They’d rarely spoken in heated terms. They’d never hurt one another. It had been their silent understanding from the moment James had come back into Kyle’s and Adrian’s lives, a way of making up for all those lost years.

But The Farm.

Some things were sacred.

Hurt worked in the creases of James’s face, looking for purchase. Yet he spoke levelly. “Have I ever done anything to make you question my loyalty or motives? You’re my life, Kyle. You, your mother, Mavis... You’re my whole life.”

“Then why didn’t Mav and I have a say in this?” Kyle asked. “You didn’t do this for us. You did this to satisfy your own need for thrills on a day-to-day basis, Howard Hughes.”

“I did this,” James said, placing each word with care, “for our home. Family-owned agriculture is dying. Farms like ours are breaking up and being put to auction. I needed to do something.”

“You did it for yourself,” Kyle maintained. Another thought struck him, and it brought on great big flame balls of ire. “And what about Harmony? How much does she have riding on this? She lives here, too, Dad—her and Bea. This is their home. She’s staked money, probably most of what she has to her name. Her name itself is stamped on the business. You lose B.S., what does that mean for her? You won’t be able to pay back all she bet.”

“No one’s going to take a loss,” James said, the first signs of frustration bleeding through. “No one.”

“How much have you told her? She’s your partner. Her training is your big ticket item. What does she know?”

A pronounced frown took hold of James’s tight features. “I don’t want her to worry.”

“But there’s no reason to worry, right?” Kyle said, tossing the assertion back at him. He shook his head. “You’re a piece of work.”

“Kyle,” James said as Kyle shoved through the screen door.

“I need a minute,” he said as he descended to the grass and kept walking. He had to walk. The fighter in him was taking shots, and it needed to stop before he could face either of his parents again. He felt betrayed by the one person in the world who shouldn’t have betrayed him. His father had thrown his so-called birthright against the wall like spaghetti.

If Kyle stayed, he’d say something he’d regret. Do something he’d regret.

He’d walk until the sting of his father’s actions numbed. Even if it meant walking all night. The Farm went on for miles.

CHAPTER THREE

SOMETIMES A GIRL needed to see the moon. Especially if that moon was a strawberry moon.

“Mama,” Bea moaned as she gazed at the rising moonscape through the paper tube of her makeshift glitter-dotted telescope. “It’s not right.”

“Not right?” Harmony said. She was on her knees in capri pants in the middle of the dusty path that led from the gate of the Brackens’ farmland to the mother-in-law suite. She peered at the horizon. Rising over the trees was a wondrous, dusky red full moon. “That’s it. Right there.”

“But it’s not a strawberry,” her four-year-old insisted, disappointment laden in her voice.

Harmony felt the urge to laugh. Bea’s seriousness kept the brevity from breaking the surface. Clearing her throat, she said in the practical tones her intuitive preschooler would appreciate most, “It’s only called a strawberry moon.”

“Why?” Bea asked, features squelched as she gazed, skeptical, at the impressive nightly specter.

Harmony pursed her lips. “Well, it’s red. Like a strawberry.”

“Tomatoes are red.”

“True.” Harmony nodded.

“And Mammy’s tulips. And puppy noses.”

“All valid points.” And Harmony did smile, because the thought of a Puppy-Nosed Moon was too amusing to resist. She loved Bea’s mind. She loved its precociousness and the great kaleidoscope of imagination that kept it from maturing too quickly. “But I think it’s called a strawberry moon because... You remember talking in day school about the first people who lived on this land, the Native Americans?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Well, those same Native Americans needed to know when their strawberries were ready for picking. So the moon would paint itself up like a strawberry to tell them.”

“Oooh.” Bea tilted her head, as if viewing the moon through a new lens. “It looks like blackberry juice.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” A heady breeze stirred the trees into a whispering frenzy. It brought the smell of salt far inland, an early herald of the storm. Shifting from one knee to another, Harmony drew the folds of her sweater close. Planes would be grounded for the next few days until the damn thing spun itself north to the Plains and petered there.

June brought pop-up thunderstorms. It was a fact of life in the low south, but that didn’t stop her from feeling restless. She’d been grounded too long before James came to her with the proposal for Bracken-Savitt Aerial Application & Training. Summer was prime running time for crop dusters with fields ripening toward harvest, and yet the seasonal weather was a nuisance and a half.

Bea shifted from one leg to another then back. Harmony picked up on the telltale impatience, identical to her own. “Have you seen enough of the moon tonight?”

“Can I have a bath?” Bea asked, swiping her small round palm over her brow. Blond curls clung, damp, to her temple. “I wanna bath.”

It took some effort not to roll her eyes and remind her daughter that she’d firmly refused bath time not two hours ago. Settling for a sigh, Harmony stood up and helped bring Bea to her feet. “Bath time sounds good.”

“With Mr. Bubble?” Bea asked, hopeful.

“With Mr. Bubble,” Harmony confirmed. Dusting the frilly skirt of Bea’s fairy outfit and the petticoat layers underneath, she took the lead to the house.

Bea’s head turned sharply at the sound of rustling in the high-climbing vegetation. “What’s that?”

“Probably an animal,” Harmony said, tugging Bea along and eyeing the bushes warily. A big animal. Creature sightings were everyday happenings on The Farm. Aside from the horses and dogs the Brackens raised, there were squirrels, raccoons, reptiles and insects in abundance.

The crashing in the undergrowth grew louder. Bea’s mouth dropped. “Mama,” she whispered. “What is that?”

“I don’t know.” She stepped halfway in front of Bea to protect her.

Bobcat?

No. Bigger.

Deer?

“It’s a bear,” Bea said, eyes as round as the moon.

“It’s not a bear,” Harmony said doubtfully. Then she frowned. Is it? All of a sudden, she found herself wishing for the hot-pink high-powered stun gun her father, a former police detective, had given her for her sixteenth birthday. In case of a break-in, she kept it in her top dresser drawer under the naughty lingerie she never wore.

Bea’s hand tightened on hers as branches snapped and tossed. Harmony licked her lips and tensed. Whatever it was would have to go through her...

A swath of moonlight fell on the T-shirt-clad figure, and she breathed again. Just a SEAL.

He turned to go up the path, then stopped when he saw them, frozen and watchful.

A very surly SEAL, Harmony observed.

“Hi,” he greeted shortly.

“Hi,” she returned. She nudged Bea. “See? Not a bear.”

Kyle tilted his head to the side to get a look at the girl hiding behind Harmony’s leg. “Hey there, little wing.”

Energy zipped from the bottom of Bea’s frame to the top. She gave a short squeal, tearing off from her hiding place. She launched herself at Kyle as he went into a crouch, arms spread wide.

“‘You’ll fly like a bee!’” he shouted. Then he tossed her, giggling and kicking, into the air. “‘Up to the honey tree, see?’”

“I see!” she shrieked. “Again! Higher!”

Kyle grunted, tossing her up toward the stars.

After the third toss, again Bea cried, “Again, again!” and Kyle eyed Harmony.

She shrugged. “You brought this on yourself,” she told him.

“Yeah, but you made it,” he countered. He threw Bea up one last time.

As she came back down, Bea latched on to him around the neck, much as Harmony had earlier in the day, and didn’t let go. Nuzzling her cheek against his, the smile in her voice was clear. “I missed you!”

Any trace of the sullenness Harmony had glimpsed when Kyle had trudged out of the thicket vanished quickly. He folded his arms over Bea’s back, letting one hand stray into her vivid curls. “Missed you, too, Gracie Bea.” Turning his lips into her cheek, he closed his eyes and rocked her from side to side.

Harmony tried not to melt too much over the pair. She failed. Bea’s pink high-top sneakers dangled free, four feet from the ground. Kyle’s hard muscly arms tightened around her, his hands splayed over her slender back, soothing. Those hands were made for fighting, for pumping rounds through an M-60 machine gun. They were calloused and rough. They could put a man down in seconds. Yet they cradled the child of his buddy and his best friend’s sister, and his expression was putty. Soft, soft putty.

What chance did a mama have?

Harmony sighed a little, sliding one hand slowly into the back pockets of her capris. She gave the pair another moment, two, before stepping forward. “Bea.” Touching her other hand to her daughter’s back, she let out a laugh. “Bea. Let him breathe, baby.”

“She’s fine,” Kyle assured Harmony, meeting her gaze through a tuft of downy hair that had blown across his face.

“She’s choking you.”

“Not since I joined the navy have I been so happy to be choked out,” he admitted.

Harmony patted the ringlets just beneath the hand Kyle used to crib Bea’s head to his shoulder. “What are you doing out here?”

He shuttered, giving a slight shake of his head. “Walking.”

“Walking?” She eyed the tree line he’d been blazing a trail through. Give the man a machete and he could pave the way to town. “You were fighting kudzu. We thought you were a predator.”

“Oh, yeah? And what are the two of you doing out?”

Bea’s head lifted finally. “Me and Mama found the strawberry.”

“Strawberry?”

“Strawberry moon,” Harmony said, gesturing toward the sky. “It’s tonight.”

“It is, huh?” Kyle asked, hitching Bea on to his hip. She pointed and he nodded sagely. “How about that, little wing? They hung a strawberry in the sky just for you.”

“I can’t eat it,” she said, crestfallen. “I love strawberries.”

“Don’t we know it?” Kyle set Bea on her feet. He crouched to her level. “When you lay your head on your pillow and dream, I bet you’ll be able to reach out and grab it.”

“How will I get all the way up there?” she asked, her dark wondrous stare seizing on his.

Harmony rubbed her lips together as Kyle eyed her briefly over Bea’s head. “You could climb up on my shoulders,” he offered.

“You’ll be there?”

“If you want me to be.” He dug his fingertips into her ribs. She shrieked. “Do you? Huh?”

Bea wriggled. “Yes, yes!” She snorted and squealed as he kept tickling. When he subsided, she settled down with a smile, rubbed the hair plastered to her brow again, and asked, “Will you come home with us?”

“It’s late,” Harmony pointed out. “Kyle probably wants to go back to the farmhouse and rest. He’s been gone a long time.”

“A long time,” Bea echoed.

“What’s a few months to buddies like us?” Kyle suggested.

Bea placed her hands on his cheeks. Rubbing her palms over the soft texture of his beard, she said, “We could watch Stuffins.”

“Stuffins,” Kyle repeated, clueless.

“Doc McStuffins,” Harmony elaborated. “Disney. She’s allowed to watch one episode before bed. I’m sure Kyle would rather finish his walk and go home.”

“Actually,” he said, “Stuffins sounds perfect.”

“Really?” Harmony asked as Bea cheered his decision-making skills.

“Really. If you don’t mind.” He smirked. “Mama.”

Harmony rolled her eyes as Bea sounded off with a chorus of pleases. “I don’t have mac-and-cheese. Tonight’s leftovers.”

“Chitlins and dumplin’s,” Bea informed him very matter-of-factly.

“Chicken and dumplings, baby,” Harmony said when Kyle’s brow peaked. To him she added, “I don’t feed her pig intestines. I swear.”

“They’re not so bad.” When Harmony and Bea’s noses wrinkled in sync, Kyle grinned in a wicked sort of way that resonated from the past. “Come on. You’d try them once.”

“Only if you wolf that big strawberry down first,” Harmony suggested.

Kyle frowned at the moon. They both knew he was allergic to the fruit. It’d always puzzled Harmony—someone as strong as him, felled by a berry. “Did, ah, these leftovers come from your mom, by chance?”

Harmony ran her tongue over her teeth. He was allergic to strawberries. But unlike her mother—the culinary goddess of the south—she was allergic to cooking. “Yes. But I mashed the taters.”

“With the raw bits left in?”

“How else would they stick to your ribs?”

Bea tugged on his hand, and Kyle followed her, rising to his feet and swinging their linked fingers as he fell into step with Harmony. “Now, that sounds like a treat.”

“You didn’t eat with your family?” Harmony asked as they began to walk down the lane to the suite.

“I did,” he admitted. “Mom made her glazed Andouille-stuffed pork because she knows that’s all I think about when I’m away. But when I’m really tired of MREs, I’ve been known to think about Briar’s chicken and dumplings.”

“Anything else?”

“Your freaking macaroni and cheese,” he noted. “Though it is bound to kill me eventually.”

She smoothed her lips together, pleased to make the cut.

“And if your mother’s thinking about making a blackberry pie or her coq au vin anytime soon...”

“I’ll be sure to bring leftovers home for you.” Harmony picked up the hint.

He sent her a sly sideways smile. “Thanks.”

Bea skipped ahead, buzzing with excitement. The wind swept up her hair as it tossed through the alley of trees arcing like an awning over the narrow pathway. Honeysuckle blossoms tumbled down, a soft white rain. The sweet fragrance teased up memories of summers long ago. Summers when life was still simple, rich and undefined. “I envy her,” Harmony mused as she watched her daughter caper toward the lights of the white-framed house. Kyle turned to question her. She explained, “She gets to grow up at The Farm. Could childhood be any better?”

A frown toggled Kyle’s mouth, and he looked at the ground as they kicked honeysuckle blossoms up under their feet. “No.”

“I was so jealous of Gavin when we were kids,” she pointed out. “All those weekends he got to come here and run wild with you.”

“You came with him,” he remembered.

“Not as much as I wanted to.” They walked on, quiet together. Almost at the point of lollygagging. The night was one of those lulling complacent ones, tepid and inky, luring people outdoors like a crooking finger. “And, anyway, you boys reveled in leaving me behind.”

“Not true.” When she arched a brow, he digressed. “Not entirely true. Not on my part.”

She smiled at bit over the admission. “Have you seen him? Gavin? He hasn’t called in a while. I know he’s all right. Dad tells me. He gets emails. I know y’all are on separate teams and you take turns on the hopper, but I was hoping, in the crossover, you might’ve seen one another.”

“I haven’t seen him,” Kyle said shortly, that frown pulling at his mouth again.

Harmony licked her lips. “I know the new job in DC has kept him tied up when he’s stateside. Still, it’d be nice to have him visit.”

A line burrowed between Kyle’s brows. “Job?”

“He didn’t tell you?” Harmony crossed her arms, oddly chilled. She knew things hadn’t been the same between Kyle and Gavin since Benji’s death. Their business was their own, and, when it came to the details of service, they kept it that way. Harmony understood even as she bristled at the not knowing what had gone amiss between her brother and the friend he’d once claimed was like a brother to him.

“No, he didn’t,” Kyle stated. The frown deepened. “Harm, when was the last time you talked to him?”

“A while.”

“What’s a while?”

She thought about it. “Must be six months now. Maybe seven.”

“Seven...” He trailed off, perturbed. “Did he visit then?”

“No. He rarely does.” At Kyle’s curse, she added quickly, “There’s been the job. And I know he has a life. From the sound of it, there might have been a girl at one point...” When Kyle only shook his head, she trailed off.

“So you spoke on the phone,” he surmised. “What about?”

She crawled back into her memory. The conversation had been brief, stilted. Yawning absences did that to the tightest of siblings. “He talked about work. He asked after Bea, made sure Dad was telling him the truth and all’s well with him and Mom and the inn...”

“Nothing else?” Kyle asked.

What was he waiting for her to say? She took herself back over the conversation with Gavin but couldn’t think of anything more. “Don’t think so. Why?” she asked. Though nothing changed on the surface, she could all but hear the hum of Kyle’s indignation building. “Do you know something I don’t?”

He seemed to hesitate. His outer shell was as good as a bullet casing. He kept tight to that casing. “He should be here.”

“If you’re here,” she calculated, “then isn’t his team rotating to active?”

“The team is,” he said and nothing more.

Harmony was growing irritated, too. “He’s my brother. If you know something, tell me.”

“It’s not my place,” he said shortly. “He should be the one talking to you about this. When was the last he came home?”

Harmony sighed. “I don’t know. Last summer sometime.”

“For how long?”

“He stayed overnight at the inn and left the next evening. Mom and Dad both wanted him to stay longer. We all did.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“He said he had training.”

“You believe that?”

She rolled her eyes heavenward, tired of the third degree. “I don’t know.”

“He visits once a year and is hardly around for twenty-four hours when he does. That’s bullshit, Harmony. I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it.”

“Maybe it’s hard for him to be here,” Harmony suggested. “You ever think of that?”

“Why should it be?” Kyle asked, finally turning his face to hers. There was anger there, and he opened up just enough for her to see the genuine mystification behind it.

“Because it’s a reminder,” Harmony replied. “The town, the inn, The Farm... They’re all reminders of Benji. Because Bea... She’s all that’s left of her father. She looks like him. She acts like him. God, Kyle, look at her. She even walks like him. Sometimes it’s difficult to process. Even for me.”

Kyle shrugged. “I’m here. Right?”

She measured the breadth of his stance, the realness of him.

“Why shouldn’t Gavin be?” he challenged. When she kept walking, his voice gentled. “Bea’s his niece. Flesh and blood. That’s no simple matter.”

Harmony licked her lips. “No. It’s not. But since Benji died, Gavin’s driven straight back into that big tough lone wolf mentality. He always had it, deep down. But then Benji...” She shrugged. “You know he was there, don’t you? The night Benji was killed? When Benji was shot. He was there when he—” she licked her lips again and made herself say it “—when he bled out. He carried him out on his back.”

Kyle nodded, eyes forward.

“It’s hard to say,” Harmony noted, “still. It’s hard to think about. It never won’t be. But to have been there...” She let out a shaky breath. “I don’t know how he carries that around with him. And part of me doesn’t blame him for being the lone wolf. I don’t even blame him for not being here. Because maybe that’s his way of coping.”

Kyle fell into thoughtful silence. The surly bent of his mouth was back.

Harmony had the absurd notion to feather her fingertips across it to soften it once more. She rolled her eyes, moving her shoulders back to loosen them. “We do appreciate it.” When he turned to her, she added, “You being here. You always show up, hard times or no. That’s big. Don’t think I don’t notice.”

He searched, eyes roving from one of hers to the next. His mouth curved at the end. Acknowledgment. Gratitude.

On the wind, a honeysuckle blossom skittered across her face. It danced into her hair and tangled. She reached up to pry it loose.

Kyle beat her to it, tugging it free.

“Thanks,” she said, tossing her hair back.

Methodical, he used ginger fingers to extract the long green stem where the nectar lived. He pinched off the petals, discarded them. “You know what honeysuckle makes me think of?”

“No,” she admitted, watching how he handled the fragile parts of the minuscule flower with infinite care.

“Springtime at Hanna’s. I knew it was spring when the honeysuckle vines burst on the trellises. You could smell them a block away.”

“I used to hide there,” she said. “Whenever I did something I shouldn’t have.”

“A frequent occurrence,” he remembered, smiling at her sideways.

“Yes,” she said with a nod. “Poor Mom. I gave her more hell than she deserved.”

“Growing up’ll do that to you.” Holding the stem up, he offered her the small bead of nectar dripping from the end in a motion that was as natural as the wordless shift from spring to summertime.

Harmony tipped her head back without thinking, accepting. It felt natural, sure. But she was very aware of his eyes on her face and the momentary brush with his laser focus. And she felt hot.

She frowned. She could blame it on June or the tropics. But she’d had these brushes with him since she was a girl. A girl with a crush so boundless and hopeless, it had nearly cracked her in two.

Before Benji, before womanhood, there had been only Kyle. Her daughter wasn’t the only young’un who’d ever been enamored with K.Z.B.

Turning her eyes to his, she closed her mouth around the drop. It was barely enough to taste. When his gaze held hers, she swallowed because her pulse began to work in double time. His beard drew her attention. “You need a shave.”

As she walked on, she breathed carefully. She was burning hot beneath the skin. It’d stopped being a problem for so long, she’d forgotten how difficult it was to cool. Go big or go home had always been her go-to phrase. It was typically her body’s response to everything, as well.

Sometimes that was nothing short of hell.

Kyle was still off-limits. Military. She could not under any circumstances love another military man like she’d loved Benjamin Zaccoe. And, frankly, she’d thought she was done with this hot mess she’d developed for Kyle. Before she’d moved out West and thrown herself into school and piloting.

It had helped that Benji had been stationed at Coronado by that point and had visited often. It helped seeing him fresh out of BUD/S. A new Benji. Hard-bodied, disciplined, with that cheeky grin peeking through, a hint of the troublemaker she’d known back home where he’d cracked jokes about her gangly build and ginger mane.

It had helped that, without Gavin around to police things between them, Benji saw her in a new light, too. No longer the petulant tagalong but an adult. You’re a frigging force of nature, he’d sized her up after watching her train without an instructor for the first time. You know that?

The only thing that had threatened to slow down the snowball of their relationship was Gavin and Kyle’s opinion on the subject. Benji had come away from a few days with them on the Gulf with bruises and five stitches in his forehead. He’d come away smiling, nonetheless, with cautious blessings from his bosom buddies.

It had helped that Kyle had been involved in a serious relationship as well, one that had gone as far as the potential of marriage. Laurel Frye had been the bane of Harmony’s existence from the moment she started tagging along behind Kyle, too. The whole fairy-tale romance had started in early high school. Kyle had been smitten with Laurel, which had made the whole affair worse for Harmony.

High school sweethearts were rarely lasting. It had seemed that Kyle and Laurel would be one of those rare exceptions...until his first tour and the frag grenade that had torn through his left leg. Laurel wasn’t the only one who’d wanted him to quit the teams after. Harmony had gone so far as to reason with him not to re-up. But Laurel’s voice had been louder. And when he did go back close to a year later, her voice was the one that had grown embittered.

Kyle and Laurel’s relationship hit the skids shortly after. By that point, Benji was dead, and it was clear that Harmony was going to have to raise a baby alone.

Not alone, Kyle had assured her. By phone. By email. He was right. A single parent she might be, but she hadn’t been alone like she thought she’d be. Not even in the delivery room. Kyle had returned just in time for the early labor. He’d driven her to the hospital, sat with her in the delivery room until her mother was there to relieve him. And he hadn’t just checked in through the years as Gavin had. There had been FaceTime between him and Bea. For the little girl, he’d been an example of what a man should be. Not a father. He couldn’t replace Benji and had no intention to. He’d been, as always, a friend. Harmony hoped she and Bea had returned the gesture in kind.

Because that’s what they were. Friends. That was what they would remain, she was sure as she mounted the small steps to the little screened porch and held the door open for him. He entered the house that smelled like dumplings and Briar Savitt’s peach pie, Bea slung comfortably over his shoulder. As he brushed past Harmony, he even turned his head and winked.

Steady, she told her insides when they started to quake. Steady as she goes, girl.

We are not wrecking through this flight path again.

CHAPTER FOUR

“SHE’S ASLEEP,” KYLE ANNOUNCED, hushed, as he returned to Harmony’s kitchen where she was doing the dishes. He reached back for his neck and tilted his head to work out a crick.

“How many stories did she ask for?” she smirked, knowing.

“A dozen,” he said. “She still likes Where the Wild Things Are. That was—”

“My favorite,” Harmony said, nodding. She turned to him, drying her hands. “You remember that?”

“Reading to you was always the better part of my day,” he told her.

Her lips seamed and pressed inward. She scanned his face before her attention seized on the hand massaging his neck. “You didn’t lie down with her, did you?”

“She asked me to.”

“Kyle. She sleeps in a daybed.”

“So?”

“So,” she said, “you’re six-four. I know SEALs are trained to sleep anywhere, but how did you even—”

“I was half off,” he admitted. “It’s all right. She was asleep in five minutes flat.”

“You’re a bona fide teddy bear.”

“I can accept that.” He nodded. “As long as I still get to shoot bad guys.”

She laughed. “Isn’t that what teddy bears do when children fall asleep? Defend them against the monsters in the closet?” Laying her hands on the back of one of the chairs surrounding the small round table between them, she asked, “Ready?”

“For?” he asked, blank.

“That trim,” she said.

“It’s late. You still wanna?”

She pulled out the chair. “Have a seat. I’ll get the shears.”

To Kyle, the ritual was more sentimental than anything. After the frag had torn through his lower body, he’d been in and out for weeks thanks to the powerful pain meds. His first lucid memory was waking up in a military hospital, disoriented. Then... Harmony. Harmony leaning close. Fingers skimming through his hair. It took him a moment or two to realize that she was giving him a trim and that she’d shaved his beard down to the fine black stubble he preferred off-duty.

When she saw his eyes open, she’d stopped. Said his name. Fighting against the sensation of cotton-mouth and the anxiety of not knowing where he was, he replied with, “Carrots.”

She’d gone misty-eyed. It occurred to him then that he hadn’t seen Harmony cry since she was in diapers. There was a wavering fear that she would break down and that seeing her do so might break him down, too.

She held it together, like a boss. “It’s good to have you back, K.Z.B.” And, after offering him a sip of water, she went back to trimming his hair, smiling.

She’d gone a long way toward holding him together over the agonizing months he spent recouping.

As she combed his hair now, he felt all the tension in his body slide toward extinction. As she raked wet fingers through to dampen his hair, her small nails teased his scalp. His eyes closed. Comb in one hand, shears in the other, she silently, meticulously went about the task of snipping the thick curls growing toward the nape of his neck.

He’d spent a week on the Hellraiser trying to lose himself amid wind and tide. He’d come home, a task that usually brought him necessary reprieve. But it wasn’t until now, he realized, that he’d felt truly relaxed since departing Little Creek.

Her hand rested on his head. “You’re not sleeping, are you?” she asked in a low voice that trickled down the back of his neck.

Kyle blinked. Had he been? “Why?”

“Your head started to bob.”

“Sorry.” He cleared his throat. He sounded groggy. “Long day, I guess.”

“We’ve kept you up.” She snipped strays one by one. He heard the drone of the buzzer. Using the hand on his head, she pushed his chin to his collarbone. “Let me get your neckline.”

She buzzed him down to his shirt collar, then walked around to his front. Bending to his level, she squinted at her progress.

Kyle studied her. Hers was a chameleon face. From one angle, it had the potential to be soft and feminine. From the other, it could be sharp, inflexible, even cold. All her life, she’d had a notorious mercurial habit of flying from one mood to the next. Her features reflected that well.

Unlike him, she’d never favored one parent or another. Aside from the warm honeycomb irises that had been imprinted by Briar, Harmony’s eyes were narrow and feline. By turn, they could make her look catty or uncompromising. Her red hair in particular proved her to be the perfect Savitt-Browning hybrid—a genetic toss-up between Cole’s dark brown and Briar’s ash-blond. She was athletically built. Tall and leggy. In fact, she’d out-inched her old man by the time she was legal. She’d never been curvy. She was more angular, and each one of those intriguing angles came with its own road hazard. Caution. Speed Bump. Sharp Turn Ahead.

Erring, his study fell upon her lips.

Slow Down. No Crossing. Dead End.

She wet them. The lazy river of his blood began to eddy and flow. As she reached out to test the evenness of his ends, her outer thighs nudged against the inner seam of his, and she caught her lower lip between her teeth.

He felt taut again, but in a way which spoke of his six-month deployment and the lack of anything besides male companionship over that time. His thigh muscles flexed as something unfurled there, around his gut and the base of his spine.

Her teeth were slowly releasing her lip, letting it round gradually, red and wet. A strawberry ripe for the plucking.

No Thru Traffic. Wrong Way, Moron!

Kyle snatched himself out of the off-color reverie. Blink. It was Harmony’s face in front of his. Carrots. He’d read her to sleep with Little Golden Book stories as a kid. He’d watched her learn to walk.

He’d taught her to ride her bike, damn it. To swim. Soon the Little Golden Book readings had warped into E. B. White, Beverly Cleary, Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder. He’d even spent one sulky summer speed-reading through a tattered copy of Anne of Green Gables for her. And ever since, he’d called her “Carrots” in consequence.

He’d watched her grow into a skinny-legged teen, then a self-possessed adult. He’d watched her and Zaccoe collide headlong. When something unexpected and timeless had grown out of that collision, he’d watched their destinies entwine. He’d been happy for them.

He’d been the one to tell her Benji was KIA. He’d stood next to her on the tarmac as his brothers-in-arms carried the flag-draped casket off the angel flight.

He’d been the first person to learn she was pregnant while she bent over Benji’s face one last time in the visitation room at the funeral home. She had wept then, tears dripping off the end of her nose combined with long piercing cries that belonged in the wild to some poor felled animal with no chance of mercy.

He’d cradled her baby in the crook of his arm and wondered not for the last time why fate had left him alive and taken Benji.

A space of a lifetime passed between blinks. Kyle tried to reassert himself in that space, but all he got was disorientation akin to what he’d felt in the hospital upon waking after being blown up by that mother-humping frag...

“Kyle?” Harmony’s gaze had zeroed in on his. She stilled.

All trace of relaxation was lost. So taut was he from head to toe, he felt like a live, loose electric line, crackling and precarious.

Yellow lights were flashing behind his eyes. Danger Ahead, the signs read, one after the other. He tried to get the message across to his body. Half of it was log-jammed by panic. The other was need-bound and gluttonously wondering still what that strawberry would taste like if he leaned forward...and nibbled...

You sick bastard.

The words were in his head, but they sounded doubly like Gavin.

Unlocking the breath trapped in his lungs, he exhaled tumultuously. Her honey-crisp eyes were out of focus, but they were there, framed by thick black fringe he’d never noticed before. There was a tiny beauty mark trapped like a tear beneath her right eye. How had he missed that?

Invoke ninja smoke. “Thanks, I gotta go.” One sentence rear-ended the other as he stood, removing the towel she’d draped over his shoulders before the trim.

Harmony rose, too, and touched the collar of his shirt. “I didn’t nick you, did I?”

“No. You’re fine. I’m fine.” He nearly ran into the jamb of the doorway that led from her kitchen to her living room.

One forbidden mouth. Years of training, instinct and self-awareness in the toilet.

“You forgot your hat,” she pointed out, chasing him with it.

“Thanks.” He squashed it down over his new do. Don’t follow me, woman. If you know what’s good for you, you will not follow me.

“You’ll come back, right?” she asked from the door as he found the screen door of her porch.

Doubling back, he asked, “Come back?”

“For mac-and-cheese,” she reminded him. “Bea’ll be devastated if you don’t.”

“Ah, yeah. Rain check on that.” Because she waited, he realized how rude he was being. It wasn’t her fault he hadn’t been with a woman in so long his testosterone had gone loafing after her. Holding the screen wide, he leaned against the rising wind that wanted to rap it shut and trap him in her comely circle. “I owe you.”

“You’re back,” she said in answer. “A haircut and macaroni are small change compared to Bea’s Kyle home from battle.”

It snagged him, the thought of Bea dreaming her dreams and climbing up on his shoulders to touch the moon. “Tell her I’ll see her. Tomorrow night. You’ll need to get your shutters up.”

“You let me worry about the shutters,” she told him, “and get your butt over here for dinner. Deal?”

Kyle nodded. “You all right, Carrots? Out here alone?”

The slant of her eyes narrowed further. “Locked and loaded.” And with a salute, she added, “Petty Officer, sir.”

“That’s Chief Petty Officer to you, ma’am.” Kyle touched the brim of his hat and backed down the steps when a laugh answered. It was a laugh timbered in brass like the tubes of the wind chimes she’d hung from the eaves of the porch tossing against the rising wind. It was a “crazy person” laugh. A “don’t give a damn” laugh. It was his favorite laugh in the world.

It was one of the myriad items he could add to the list of the sexy things he’d never noticed were sexy about Harmony. And that was bad. Real, real bad.

* * *

BRACKEN MECHANICS DIDN’T look like much, but the family business had been Kyle’s home away from home for most of his existence. In case the building itself didn’t draw enough attention, the vintage lineup of cars outside did. Shiny, waxed—they were just a few of his father’s many toys. But the garage itself was modest, a block structure made of rust-colored brick crowned only by the Bracken logo.

Kyle had learned everything there was to know about car engines, domestic and foreign, under its unpretentious roof. Long before training courses at Coronado, he’d learned how to maneuver in a stick shift versus an automatic, how to draw as much horsepower out of a car’s engine without overworking it and how to fix most motorized problems known to man.

When restless nights following deployment stalked him on land, there was one last vestige of peace to strike at. That was suiting up in a pair of coveralls and getting greasy beneath the hood of whatever the motley crew his father had long-employed was working on at the garage.

“Manifold’s cracked,” Murph “Hickory” Scott said, the words muffled somewhat by a wad of Copenhagen. He snorted, giving Kyle an earful of nasal congestion. He was Marines, retired, hard as hickory—true to his moniker—and still carried Vietnam with him behind the patch over his left eye. The shrapnel bugged him at the onset of rain, so today he was more ornery than usual. “Distributor cap, too.”

“Made in America.” Kyle leaned against the open hood, elbows down. “Parts’ll be easy to come by. It’s just cleaning her up. That’ll be the trick.”

Wayne “Pappy” Frye beamed at the thought. “Yes, sir. Needs everything down to seat cushions.” He didn’t look it, but Pappy was approaching eighty, a hobby-man who had taken the job alongside Hick in Bracken Mechanics’s early years, not because he needed revenue but because he worshipped cars. Like all Bracken employees, Pappy was as good as family. But as Kyle’s ex-fiancée’s grandfather, Pappy and Kyle had nearly been family by law.

Pappy kicked the treads of the old Trans Am. “Good tires.” He caught Kyle’s eye. “Have you heard about her mystery origins?”

“A lady of intrigue?” When Hick grunted and chewed, Kyle pushed up from his elbows to the heels of his hands in interest. “Don’t keep it to yourselves.”

Pappy and Hick exchanged glances. When the latter raised his brows, Pappy took it upon himself to illuminate Kyle on the subject. “Two days ago, Mavis came in early for some filing business and found this beaut waiting patiently outside. A Trans Am wasn’t on the roster, so she called your dad up to ask if he knew anything about it.”

“Did he?” Kyle asked.

“She said he was as surprised as she was,” Pappy elaborated, “but asked no further questions, insisting on seeing it for himself. Later that morning, we found him standing much as you are now having a look under the lady’s bonnet. I asked him if he knew whose car it was. He would only say it belonged to an old friend.”

“He’s got a good many of those,” Kyle speculated. His father had once worked the underbelly of the GTA circuit. Then after getting cleaned up, he’d worked for NASCAR, among other things, before returning home to Fairhope and building a respectful name for himself through small business.

“Yes, but this one seemed...sentimental,” Pappy continued. “We’re guessing this old friend isn’t an old rival at the poker tables.” He exchanged another look with Hick. “We were hoping you might settle the mystery. If he’s bound to tell anyone other than your mother, it’s you.”

Kyle pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes as he stood back from the car. He crossed his arms, feet spread. James wasn’t in the shop today; he was out at the airfield. Kyle might’ve liked to have been there if last night’s conversation hadn’t lingered. The walk after hadn’t quite done what it was supposed to, and, despite the brief clutch of tranquility he’d felt at Harmony and Bea’s, the odd turn of events there had made him doubly agitated.

He was barely fresh off a homecoming, but he needed to get his head right before he returned to The Farm or his family. Maybe most especially to Harmony and her strawberry-shaped mouth.

Goddamn. He shifted slightly when the image hit and made him taut in the loins again. Pivoting his thoughts in the opposite direction, he plugged back into the Trans Am. “What’s he planning to do with it?”

Hick sniffed. “He’s been coming in every night, asking me to meet him.”

“After hours? What for?” Kyle asked. His father rarely worked overtime at either the airfield or the garage. He liked going home to his wife, who, for him, reaffirmed the grind of life on the straight and narrow.

“Don’t know exactly,” Hick opined. He snorted unceremoniously. “At first I thought he’d want to start breaking down the engine. Mostly he just looks at it like some complex algebra problem he can’t solve.”

“Strange,” Pappy said.

Kyle agreed. James Bracken, a man never unsure of himself. “Why the hesitation?”

“We were hoping you’d know,” Pappy admitted.

Kyle walked around the car, studying its unpolished lines. Dents. Scratches. A paint job was the least of her worries. But she could ride again.

The license plate on the back bumper snagged Kyle’s attention. “MERCY,” he read out loud.

“Maybe it’s a gift from the gods,” Hick proposed. As both Kyle and Pappy frowned at him in turn, he gesticulated in a brusque motion toward the car, “As benediction for past crimes. Christ. He’s been on his best behavior for now on thirty years.”

Kyle fought a grin. “Are you waxing poetic on us, Hick?”

Hick scowled, uncomfortable. “Ah, to hell with ya’.”

Kyle chuckled. He’d grown to like Hick as much as Pappy. The man had battled PTSD for well on a decade after his time in the service, a fact which Kyle hadn’t known until after his recovery and several time-consuming talks working overtime in the garage alone with the man. Through the long hours, he and Hick had developed a quiet understanding of one another.

“Say you’re right, Hick...” Pappy shook his head at the unlikelihood of the scenario, but a smile worked at the creases of his mouth. With two fingers, he smoothed his Roosevelt ’stache. “...why a broken-down Trans Am? Why not a Cobra? Or a Ferrari?”

“Do I look like I commune with the righteous?” Hick muttered.

“So how ’bout asking him for us?” Pappy nudged Kyle. “I think I speak for every man here—and Mavis—when I say that we’d love to know who she came from and what Jim Boy plans to do with her when he’s done figuring her out.”

Kyle spared a glance for the sky through the open doors. A stiff breeze blew in steady drafts. It kicked up sand from ditches and spread it across the lot. The vintage cars would have to be moved inside within the next hour. “I’m sure he’d tell either of you if you ponied up and asked.”

The quick cacophony of knocking broke through the chatter. Kyle glanced back at the half-walled office. Mavis peered through one of its three-sixty windows and offered him a brisk come-hither motion. “’Scuse me,” he said to the men. Ducking his head through the door, he asked, “What’s up?”

Mavis cradled the phone between her shoulder and ear. Pulling her mouth away from the receiver, she covered it. “Customer complaint. Wants to talk to my superior.” She tuned in to the caller and uncovered the mouthpiece as her spine straightened. “Yes, he’s a man. What’s that got to do with anything?” Her mouth fell open. “Now listen. Just because I am a woman does not mean I can’t tell you that the service you received last week was quality and you wouldn’t find better anywhere south of Demopolis. This is your fourth service and your third complaint in two years, Mr. Lowman. That’s right; I remember. If you don’t like our work, then why haven’t you taken your Chevy to one of those dime-a-dozen, select-service auto chains they stick on every corner? And another thing—”

Kyle eased back against the door, smiling as his little sister chewed the chauvinist on the line down to size. He knew his father would’ve moved heaven and earth for her to give up her spooky line of work and take up the banner of executive assistant at Bracken Mechanics. She could be a bit of a rough diamond, but among her various talents she could boast an eidetic memory, a talent for negotiation and bargaining, and an excellent knack for reading people. She also knew as much about cars as Kyle. She’d refused their father’s many offers, however, and had stuck to part-time bookkeeping and payroll.

As Pappy approached the office door, Kyle nodded for him to join him. They split a stick of gum. Pappy took the only available seat in the office, kicking back with his heels on the desk.

Before Mavis finished talking Lowman down, Pappy’s head bobbed, and he snorted, startling himself out of a snatched nap. When he peered at Kyle and saw the raised brow, he reluctantly lowered his feet from the desk.

“Not getting any sleep at home?” Kyle wondered.

Pappy yawned until his jaw popped. “Ah, it’s the great-grands. They’ve been staying with us for a few weeks. You forget how noisy the parent life is.” Shifting on the chair, he opened a newspaper on the desktop, wetting his fingertips to flick through the pages to the auto section. “Laurel’s getting a divorce, you know.”

Caught off guard, Kyle frowned at the man. “No. Really?”

“Yep,” Pappy said with a grim nod. “Stress got to her. Joey’s hours. He kept taking extra shifts, especially when the last couple of babies came along. Twins.”

“Twins,” Kyle said, trying to digest it. “Holy shit.”

“Laurel quit her job at the school to take care of the brood. She loves those babies, but she never could get a break. In the end, she and Joey realized they couldn’t get back to one another. Pressure broke them.”

“She okay?” Kyle asked, shifting against the jamb. It was odd, talking about his ex in this manner.

“Ah, she’ll be all right,” Pappy wagered. “She’s working again, teaching summer school. It’s been good for Alva, having all that time alone with the children. And Laurel’s starting to stand up straight again now that some of the burden has been lifted.”

“I reckon so,” Kyle muttered. “Especially with... How many kids did you say?”

“Four.”

Kyle might’ve choked. “Four?”

Pappy chuckled at his reaction. “Yes, sir. Her and Joey managed to turn out four in four years.”

It sounded like a lot. Still, Kyle didn’t know quite how to take the news of the divorce. It wasn’t long after their long-term relationship had gone belly-up that Laurel had taken up with Joe Louth, a local firefighter. It hadn’t been long after that that the two announced plans to marry. Laurel had always been vocal about her desire for traditional family life, down to the kids—a whole baseball team’s worth. Before Joe, before BUD/S, she and Kyle had talked about making that a reality.

The damn frag changed a lot of things.

It wasn’t a surprise to him that Laurel had moved on to make her dream of marriage and kids a reality. Nor was it a surprise that she’d grown weary of Joey’s firefighting hours. She’d barely lasted through Kyle’s first deployment.

Mavis finally hung up the phone. Pappy chuckled at her smug expression. “Ah, honey, ain’t no mistake. Hearing you take J. T. Lowman down a few pegs cheers me up somethin’ fierce.”

“It wasn’t the worst part of my day,” she admitted, shredding the complaint report methodically down the middle. “Sorry, bro. Guess I didn’t need you after all.”

Kyle held up a hand. “You lullabied Pappy into an afternoon siesta and saved me a hassle. Good work.” He pushed off the jamb and walked back into the garage.

It was beginning to feel crowded with Hick and a few of the other boys rounding up the show cars and parking them bumper to bumper in the empty service stations. Kyle smiled when one of them tested the motor of his father’s old Mustang, revving it so the deep-throated growl of high-performance ponies galloped up the walls in a chill-inducing charge. A few of the boys leaned out of the cars to whistle appreciatively. Kyle applauded. He’d fallen in love with the noise early, much as he’d fallen in love with the laugh of a strident redheaded girl.

The last had always been platonic. Decidedly platonic. He’d never wanted to kiss Harmony. Never thought about kissing her. Never thought overtly about any particular part of her body. Especially not her mouth in all the colorful imaginative ways he had over the last sixteen hours...

He didn’t want this. Any of it. It threatened to take one of the most important relationships in his life and rend it in half. What had seemed ironclad yesterday was now on the verge of being crushed beneath the heel of his boot—like some intricate origami bird. Sure, it looked sturdy, but how well would it hold up under the flat side of his shit-kickers?

Kyle had to lock it down. If it meant retreating to all the training techniques he’d learned through the years, so be it. The white-winged crane that was him and Harmony and, partially, Bea’s connection was crucial to each of them. And, damn it, no bad mission, questionable homecoming or lack of female companionship was going to undermine it.

He found himself facing the Trans Am again, this time from the back. The word MERCY caught his eye once more.

Something crawled down the back of his neck. A feeling he didn’t like. It was usually his chief indicator that something was about to go terribly wrong on a mission. The Spidey sense had saved his life more than a time or two overseas as well as the lives of his teammates.

As much as he’d like to give the engine another look, he sidestepped the car, giving it a wide berth. No, he didn’t know where or who it had come from. At this point, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

It smelled like trouble in Goodyear tires and a double coat of dust.

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