Wild Hearts (Novella) (5 page)

She turned away and fanned her dewy face. “It’s already humid, and it’s only the first week of June. And in the morning yet. Summer’s going to be a bitch.”

“Smooth change of subject, darlin’.”

“Coming from you, that’s a compliment. You’re a master, at least when I bring up certain subjects. Like making plans for the future.”

He took a bite of the cookie, the chocolate melting in his mouth. “You’ll raise a fortune with these.”

“Touché.” She gave him a contrite smile. “I must confess, I did bake them just for you. Not to woo you or anything, to be clear. I have other assets to offer ’sides my baking abilities.”

“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” Saxby could never understand “pretty white lies,” as the girls liked to call them, or the head games some people played when it came to courtship.

She patted his shoulder. “I didn’t want to embarrass you.”

He furrowed his eyebrows. “When have you ever embarrassed
me
?”

“Let’s see. Remember back in high school when we were at the diner and I was teasing you under the table?”

He searched for the memory and finally found it. “Well, darlin’, that didn’t embarrass me.”

“What about after I accidentally knocked my iced tea in your lap, when you jumped up and your hard-on was apparent to everyone in the place?”

Oh yeah, he’d forgotten about that part. He shrugged. “A teenage boy with a hard-on certainly wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.”

“And I believe you flushed something fierce when I told you I loved you the last time you were home on leave. And that I’m all right with the Cole cheatin’ gene as long as you don’t go sniffing around in our home territory.”

“You didn’t embarrass me; you surprised me.” And made him feel like a schmuck on behalf of his family. Yeah, the cheating gene went back generations. It was accepted: Marry a Cole and pretty much count on him cheating. His daddy used to haul him over to another parish and set him in a woman’s living room in front of her television while he went down the hallway for an hour or two. Now Saxby knew why the cartoons had been turned up so loud.

Years later, his daddy had given him a conspiratorial wink. “You’ll find that straying is in the blood,” he’d said. “Just be discreet.”

Saxby half suspected the men just used it as an excuse to cheat. Then again, he had yet to meet a woman who made him want to commit, so maybe it was real after all. A parade of women—he’d never call them floozies—and not a one had stirred his intellect or his heart. Other parts of him, but not the parts that really mattered.

He took a good look at M.L., whom he’d known his whole life. Nope, not her, either. He leaned back in the hammock, his hands tucked behind his head. “Darlin’, tell me why you would enter into the holy union of matrimony while giving your husband permission to have sex with other women.”

She carefully leaned down and placed a warm hand on either side of his face. “You really have to ask?”

He gave her a droll look. “I did, didn’t I?”

“You’re the best-looking, most interesting man in Cole, Louisiana. You’re smart and sexy and rich. Maybe the Cole men cheat, but they otherwise take real good care of their women.” She gestured back at the plantation house with the wraparound galleries on all three levels. Or maybe it was to include the land itself, with its oaks dripping with Spanish moss, stands of palms, and all the fancy plantings his mother had done over the
years. “I could live like this even if you did stray once in a while. As long as you wear a condom.”

“Hell, M.L., stop talking about me sticking my dick into any hole like you’re discussing which laundry detergent you’d use on my tighty whities.”

She gave him a smug look. “See, told you I’d embarrassed you. And you don’t wear tighty whities. Least I’ve only seen those dark boxer briefs on your amazing body.”

“You don’t embarrass me. You just”—he held back the word
disturb
—“astound me that you’d trade fidelity for a nice house and an ‘interesting’ man. Aren’t you worth more than that?”

“Sax, honey, don’t you know you’re the most eligible man in this parish and the next? Come on, don’t play that coy card with me. How many women have come by since you got back two weeks ago?”

It made him damned uncomfortable to be stuck with that label:
most eligible
. Like he was some product or reality TV show. “I don’t know. It’s not like I keep track.”

She leaned even closer, her mouth only a hair’s breadth from his. “Because there are so many. Or maybe you’re just being polite by not giving me a number. But no one’s gonna love you like I will.” She ran her fingers down his shirt all the way to the front of his shorts as she said, “They’re all thinking they’re gonna change you, make you keep that big hard cock of yours right where it belongs. I’m smarter than that.”

He merely raised his eyebrows at her blunt assessment of his cock. Well, nice of her to say, he supposed. “You’re serious about just letting me go off and screw other women?”

“As long as you come home to me every night. So, you’ll think about it?”

“That I will.” Because it baffled him; not because he’d consider it for one second.

She planted a kiss on him, leaving a film of sticky lipstick behind. “Let’s go to dinner tonight. You can take me to the Grand Plantation and give me your answer.”

Sax resisted the urge to wipe off the residue, which would make him look like a five-year-old trying to get rid of cooties. He glanced at his watch, the one with the bullet scrape at the edge. “You’re gonna give me approximately eight hours to decide on my future?”

“A girl can’t wait around forever.” She sat up, making him balance himself with
the sudden movement. “I’ve been waiting around for years already, while you went off and played American hero. I’m sorry about what happened over there in Mexico, but I’m glad you’re back. It’s a good offer, Sax. A woman waiting at home for you, keeping things pretty, cooking your meals, and making you very satisfied.” She winked. “You may not even want to stray. You did prove that you’ve got staying power, after all.”

“How’s that?”

“You stayed in the SEALs, put your life on the line, went through a whole buncha grueling stuff. If you can commit to that, sugar, you surely have it in you to commit to a woman.” She kissed the tip of her finger and touched it to his nose.

As he watched her flounce up the walkway, her statement walloped him upside the head. He could make a commitment. Then again, look how that had turned out in the end.

Mary Lou traded a greeting with his cousin Chad, who was coming down the concrete walk in his wheelchair. Chad spun around after she passed and enjoyed the view for a few seconds before doing another fancy spin and continuing on toward Sax.

His father had installed the concrete walk before Chad came home from the hospital at Camp Lejeune. Chad, a lance corporal in the Marines, was the reason Saxby couldn’t get too upset about losing his job with the SEALs. Chad had lost both his legs courtesy of a roadside bomb.

Saxby offered a hand clasp when Chad rolled up to the hammock. “Hey, cuz, how’s it going?”

“It’d be much better if I had chicks like that coming over all the time bearing food and boobs,” Chad said, nodding back to where M.L. had gone. Chad had the Cole looks, though he’d never embraced the easy charm. Which probably gave him the best chance for fidelity.

Saxby leaned back against the edge of the hammock, keeping his balance. “It’s not as pleasant as you’d think. Yeah, they’re happy to give you both the baked cookie and the other kind of cookie, but they all want something in return. Like marriage.”

“Even knowing the Cole reputation?”

“Yep, even with that. So, how’s the job going?”

“Turns out I’m good at welding.” Chad made a motion that flexed impressive
biceps. The guy could lift himself off the chair to the ground, pass up the chair two steps, and walk up the steps with his hands to get back in.

“Do you enjoy it?” Saxby could remember putting in hours welding, assembling, and doing QA at the family’s grill business. Cole Grills not only had some of the most kick-ass grills out there, they also employed a hundred and fifty people in town. For a while, Saxby had gotten so good at cooking on the wood-fire grills at family and company cookouts, he’d considered opening a restaurant. Then he’d caved and gone off to college.

Chad shrugged. “I’m happy to have the job, and the pay is good. Working for family isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“Daddy and Granddad are fair bosses. I heard you’re doing a good job. You’re an inspiration to a lot of people, you know.”

Chad scoffed. “Me?”

“Yeah. You’re a hero for going over there and putting your ass on the line for your country.” Knox and Julian were right. Being injured had elevated Chad to military hero/god status in town. And hell, the guy deserved it. “You could have crawled into a bottle and whined about how unfair life is. But you came home and worked like a crazy man modifying your house, busted your ass off doing PT. Learned how to maneuver that chair like an Olympic athlete. And you stayed positive.”

Chad ran his hand through his short hair. “I have to be honest. I crawled into a bottle for a while, but I fell out of my chair once and was too damned drunk to get back up. I felt as helpless as I had in those months after the explosion, and I swore I wasn’t going to feel that way again. I sobered up before I ever got back to town. Considering your career crashed and burned in a different way, the same could be said for you. You’re not sitting around whining. And you can’t even tell people what really happened. At least I’ve got a story to tell.”

Saxby shook his head. “Losing my career and my status isn’t the same as losing my legs. Complaining would feel like an insult to you and every guy who got sent home in a wheelchair, a cast, or a pine box.”

Chad gave a long, slow nod. “I hear you. How about you? You enjoying being one of the top dogs at the company?”

“I don’t know.” Saxby had gone to college and pulled a 4.0, just as he’d done all through high school. It was expected in the Cole household. During college, 9/11 had happened. Then one of the local boys had gotten killed in Kabul. All the while Saxby had focused on college studies and partying, trying to push all of the tragedy into a box. He was days away from getting his degree so he could step into a cushy job in the offices. Then he’d had … well, he’d call it a breakdown of sorts. Because the box had opened, and everything inside it had exploded like a roadside bomb.

Life had come too easy, and some deep part of him resented that. Or maybe he just didn’t feel like he deserved it. Saxby had never delved that deeply into his psyche to figure out which it was. He knew only that he couldn’t stay in his comfy little life any longer. He needed to do something that mattered. So he’d gone from having everything handed to him to joining the Navy with a SEAL contract.

For the first time, he’d had to work his ass off, just like everyone else in BUD/S. He had no privileges, no status. He did get care packages that the other guys envied and teased him about: boxes of Zapp’s Spicy Cajun Crawtators potato chips, a Mardi Gras cake, coffee with chicory in it. The guys stopped teasing when he shared his bounty. Especially when his sisters started sending them care packages, too.

But that was it as far as spoiling went. Everything else was hard as hell. Not balancing-on-hammocks hard. Not assembling-stainless-steel-grills hard. Ass-kicking, near-drowning, the cold surf washing up over your face, getting screamed at, slogging through mud, running ten miles in a day, hard. And it felt good. When he graduated, one of the fifteen percent of his class who’d survived, he’d earned it.

“I went to college for four years to step into this job,” Saxby said. “I told myself I deserved it. But I’m not sure I believe it, because it doesn’t feel the same as when I graduated BUD/S or when the team completed a mission.”

Chad was one of the few Cole men who understood. He nodded. “There’s nothing like being out there, making a difference. It’s hard to be on the sidelines.” He gestured to his chair. “I’m lucky to be alive, but I’m just not ready to be done, ya know?”

Saxby’s fingers tightened around the ropes of the hammock so hard that his knuckles ached. “That’s exactly how I feel.”

“But from what you’ve alluded to, returning to combat is as much out for you as it
is for me. Even when I get my prosthetics.”

Sax hadn’t told anyone about Chase Justiss’s offer. No need, when he had zero intention of signing on. He pushed off from the hammock. “Want to hit the weights?”

Chad spun his chair around on the grass as easily as he did on asphalt. “Sounds good.”

They went into the gym on the property, a small but proper setup. Saxby tried to think about what he was going to say to Mary Lou that night. Nothing more than “No way in hell” came to mind. And yet it should appeal to him. She was a pretty woman with a fun personality. His mind kept straying to the years ahead of him, mirroring his father’s management style: Friendly but strict. All business during work hours but your best friend outside the factory. And what about his husband style? Dividing his time and attention, being the good provider and father but not much more?

For a while, things looked exciting. One of the networks had approached them about doing one of those family-business reality shows. Ultimately, his father had declined. Too disruptive. Too intrusive. No doubt it would put a crimp on his straying.

Sax was still in the gym an hour after Chad had finished and headed to the showers. His abs burned, his biceps ached. And it felt good. He grabbed a bottle of water as he headed out to his ’Vette. Instead of getting in, he walked right past it. Then he started to run. Down the drive. Up the road that ran along the Mississippi River. Past the chemical facility. On into town. His legs felt as though they’d disintegrate. His muscles burned, and he was drenched. Yet he couldn’t stop running, like on those long sprints through the desert heat wearing sixty pounds of gear. Except that no one was forcing him to do this.

No one but a voice deep inside that sounded like a BUD/S instructor: