The SEAL's Rebel Librarian Read online

  He made it down the narrow hallway and into Colleen’s office without dislodging any of the pictures. She was waiting for him in the chair under the window and gave him a friendly smile as he closed the door and set his backpack on the floor, his helmet on top of it. For a second he looked at the backpack. He was being such a good boy, going to class, going to his therapist, on time, neatly dressed, doing all the things normal people did.

  What the fuck had happened to his life?

  “How are you, Jack?” she asked.

  Their conversations always started the same way, open-ended questions that left him feeling raw and exposed. “Fine.”

  Her smile never changed. He knew she was beautiful, tall, blonde, slender, with a bob that framed her face and blue eyes. Understated makeup. Acknowledging her femininity, but not playing it up. Which made him think of the librarian. Erin Kent. He remembered her from the Introduction to the Library class she taught for the college’s incoming veterans. Erin Kent, who, despite a connection very similar to the rush of adrenaline and testosterone from a combat high, turned him down three days earlier.

  Colleen was still watching him. When it came to waiting him out in silence, she always won. That wasn’t like him either. He’d thrown his body into every dangerous situation imaginable, expecting it to give out, but what ended up washing him out of the SEALs was nothing physical.

  A door slammed down the hall, and he jumped so high Colleen might have had to peel him off the ceiling. “Yeah, okay, fuck, I’m still jittery as hell, and yes, I still have the tremor.”

  Her gaze flicked to his hands. He held them out for her to see. The tremor, intermittent, came and went without his consent. It wasn’t bad now, a fine quiver running through both of his hands. It got worse when he was tired, and much worse when he was under severe stress.

  Which was why he was back in Lancaster, spending as much time as he could in the quiet, orderly, predictable college library, not on SEAL Team Nine. Not at Gray Wolfe, doing the job Keenan just left for an office job.

  What the hell was up with that, anyway?

  Colleen made a note on her notepad. “How are you sleeping?”

  “Same as the tremor,” he said. “Intermittently.”

  “How much are you sleeping?” she asked.

  “Five, maybe six hours.”

  “All at once?”

  Fuck. “No.”

  She looked at him, facial expression unchanging. Her unruffled demeanor was the only thing that kept him here, going through the motions. He expected clucking and cooing, and got a calm, steady presence. She somehow managed to make him feel like together they just might get him through this.

  “Maybe three hours a night. I catch a nap during the day.”

  “We’ve talked about clean sleep habits,” she reminded him.

  “I’m used to this,” he said. “I’m not a ten-to-six sleeper. I wasn’t before I joined the Navy and I sure as hell wasn’t afterwards.”

  “You’re a civilian now,” she said imperturbably. “Work, school, relationships all function on a fairly standard schedule. Routine sleep will also help with the tremors.”

  She just blurted things like that out into the air. The tremors. The shakes. The weakness, out there for everyone to see. He laced his fingers together to stop the shaking. He used to be magic with his hands, crazy coordinated, able to run and juggle at the same time. Other than snagging a Coke can out of midair last night, he dropped things, ran into things, knocked things off tables and ledges.

  “Your doctor can prescribe something to help you sleep.”

  “No drugs.”

  “There are non-habit-forming treatments available,” she continued.

  “No. Drugs.” He’d seen too many guys lost to prescription painkillers. He wasn’t going down that road.

  Silence.

  “I can’t go back into the field in any capacity if I’m taking drugs. They cloud your judgment.”

  Silence. He felt his face flush. Sat back. Smoothed his palms down his jeans to his knees. Blew out his breath. Looked at the window, the picture on the wall, the tiny table at his left hand for a cup of tea or cocoa. Jesus. It was like being in Grannie’s house, except smaller.

  He used to be able to sit still for hours. Not before he joined the Navy, then went through BUD/S. Before that he was a wild, out-of-control teenager, a constant source of despair and frustration for Rose, who’d all but raised him while their mother drank her days away. The Navy taught him control, taught him how to channel his energy, his emotions until he was a stone cold killing machine.

  Now he couldn’t even control his hands.

  “I thought you weren’t going back into the Navy.”

  “I’m not. But the same applies for contractor work. A friend of mine and I were supposed to go to work for a security company based in Istanbul.”

  “And?”

  “He did. I didn’t.”

  She made another note. “How are you, other than the tremors and not sleeping? Are you seeing anyone?”

  He should consider it a victory that Colleen broke first. He gave a short bark of laughter, and once again dodged the question. “I asked someone out and got turned down.”

  Colleen’s lips curved into a real smile. “It happens.”

  “Not to me.” He wasn’t bragging, simply stating fact. He’d perfected the “bad boy with a heart of gold” persona early in high school. Over a decade later, it was damn near foolproof.

  Her eyebrows flickered up, just a little. “Then it’s good for you to experience the occasional rejection, which is a normal occurrence for most people.”

  He felt himself smiling back, liking the banter. “Is this part of my therapy? Getting laid?”

  Normally he’d talk to a professional civilian female with far more respect, but anyone who treated cops for mental health issues had probably heard it all. She didn’t even blink. “Sexuality is a core component of an individual’s wellbeing,” she said. “It’s a basic human need, like eating or sleeping. I’m not concerned if you’re not sexually active unless it’s a change from your baseline behavior.”

  He laughed. “It’s a change.”

  “In what way?”

  “You treat cops, right?” he said, looking at his linked hands. “You know about badge bunnies. SEALs have groupies, too. I could walk into any bar in town and find someone to go home with. Hell, I could do that before I joined the Navy,” he said, remembering.

  She made a noncommittal noise. “It sounds like you have a pretty good relationship with your body.”

  “I do,” Jack said. “Or I did.”

  Colleen set her pen on her legal pad. “You’ve been seen by specialists who all agree there’s nothing physically wrong with your hand. Therefore, the tremor is in your mind, manifesting in your body.”

  “Yeah,” he said brusquely. She wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t heard a dozen times before, from Navy doctors, civilian doctors in Virginia Beach and in Lancaster. If there wasn’t a physical problem, there wasn’t a physical solution.

  “How active are you?”

  “What do you mean? I run. Work out.”

  “Do you push your body like you used to?”

  “No,” he said slowly, seeing where she was going. “I don’t.”

  “Maybe you should try a form of exposure therapy. Try trusting your body for a while and see what happens.”

  Silence fell again. Thinking about trusting his body reminded him of his visceral, blood-hot response to Erin. There was a clear-eyed awareness in her eyes, one that the shocking, dangerous connection sparking between them hadn’t put out. That, he thought, was a woman who would call bullshit on his stories. Maybe it was a good thing she’d turned him down.

  “That’s our time for today,” Colleen said. “I’ll see you next week.”

  “Yeah, okay. Thanks,” he said. He hoisted his backpack and walked out.

  It was raining again. He paused under the overhang and pulled out his phone
. A text from Rose, almost identical to Keenan’s but for the suggestion he come over for dinner later in the week. And another text from Keenan.

  Can librarians date students?

  Jack flipped up the collar of his jacket. Good question. She’s not my teacher and I’m not really a student.

  Enrolled in classes = student. Maybe ur not losing ur touch.

  Good point. He’d stop back tonight, see if that was the problem.

  Is she hot?

  Jack thought about this. Hot usually meant tight clothes, bright lipstick, shiny hair. Hot meant dancing in bars, drinking too much, coming on strong. It did not mean slacks and cardigans, shadowy glimpses of the curve of a breast when she reached for a book that was “foundational in the field of PTSD treatment research” so he could write a paper for a class he didn’t want to be in while living in a city he didn’t want to come home to, not just yet.

  How the fuck was he going to describe Erin Kent? He had literally nothing else to do besides write the psych paper, so he took some time and thought about it.

  Remember when Hawthorn was on that classic movie kick and made us watch all those Bogie and Bacall movies?

  Ur crushing on Bogie?

  Jack leaned against the metal pillar holding up the small awning. There was the Keenan he remembered.

  You got a problem with that?

  Not at all.

  She’s like Bacall. Not hot. All woman.

  He sent the text, then got in Rose’s BMW and drove over to Grannie’s. Using his spare opener, he opened the garage door to find her sensible Toyota Camry missing, giving him an unimpeded view of his dust cover-shrouded bike. For a long minute he stared at it, listening to his body.

  Yes. This was exactly where he should start.

  He swept the cover off the Ducati 1099, neglected over a long winter. At first he’d made excuses—the winter weather, a wet spring—but Colleen’s advice was sound. The bike needed an oil change and a quick tune-up, both things he could do in Grannie’s garage. All he needed was a new filter. Since everyone he knew in town had turned him down for lunch, he’d swing over to the dealership and pick up what he needed to maintain the bike. He snagged his helmet from a shelf, swung his leg over the seat, turned the key, and roared down the driveway, into the rain.

  Other drivers on the road looked at him pityingly through their closed windows, but Jack barely noticed the cold, let alone the rain. Being wet, hungry, and exhausted was the norm for him; it was almost harder to be warm, dry, and adequately fed. He was supposed to want to be warm, dry, and adequately fed. Instead he wanted to be living by his wits in the shadowy world of covert operations, and he couldn’t, because of the fucking tremor. Which, interestingly enough, didn’t happen when he was on the bike.

  But it might. It was unpredictable.

  Despite his upturned collar tucked under his helmet, rain trickled between the sheepskin and his neck, and his jeans were soaked through by the time he parked at the dealership. One of the salesmen was waiting with the door open after he’d pushed the bike onto its kickstand.

  “Not many people ride in weather like this,” he said as Jack strode through.

  The showroom was empty. “No other ride,” Jack said with a smile.

  “Panigale 1099? Nice.”

  “Thanks,” Jack said. “She’s plenty fast.”

  “I’d like to see that,” the salesman said. “You should bring her down to the track.”

  “You guys still run an open track night?” Jack said.

  “We do. Next Thursday. Bring her by.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Jack said, then tipped his head. “Parts department still through there? I need a filter.”

  “They’ll hook you up, man,” the guy said.

  He squelched down the linoleum hall to the parts counter and asked for oil and a filter. While he was waiting, he let the noises filter into his brain—the alternative rock station, the sound of an air-powered socket wrench in the shop, the phone ringing, the sound of a woman’s voice coming from the showroom.

  A woman’s familiar voice.

  He paid for his oil and filters, then walked back down the hallway. Sure enough, Erin Kent stood by a salesman, studying a bike.

  Jack caught a glimpse of himself in the rain-streaked showroom window. The damp air and his helmet had plastered his hair to his forehead. His eyes were dark hollows in their sockets, his head lowered. The jacket and jeans added to his bulk. He looked like a big, broken brute. And there was Erin, dressed in another pair of wide-legged slacks that set off her slim hips, a deep green turtleneck sweater caressing the strong line of her jaw. It was the first time he’d seen her in good light. Her eyes were set wide in her face, and she studied the salesman intently as he spoke.

  It was a good thing she turned him down. No way would a woman who looked like that have anything to do with a guy like him.

  “It’s a lot of bike,” the salesman was saying. “I hear what you’re saying about not wanting to buy a starter bike, but if you buy too much bike—”

  “You’ll learn how to ride it,” Jack finished.

  Erin looked up, those already impossible eyes widening.

  It was none of his fucking business. She’d turned him down for a drink. She could probably hold her own with the salesman, who was just trying to do the right thing and succeeding only in looking like a gigantic dick. But he crossed the floor anyway to stand beside Erin, the salesman, and a Ducati 696.

  “That’s what I thought,” Erin said.

  “We take trade-ins,” the salesman said a little desperately. “You can bring that Rebel back, and we’ll give you a good price toward a Duc, if that’s what you want.”

  Jack felt a little sorry for the guy. He was trying to do the right thing by steering Erin towards a slower, safer first bike. But more and more women were riding motorcycles; the last thing this guy needed was his shop getting a reputation for being condescending to female riders. “Give us a minute,” he said to the salesman.

  The guy vanished like he’d been vaporized.

  “It’s a great bike,” Jack said. “I used to own one.”

  “Before the Panigale?” Erin asked with a look at his bike, sitting outside in the rain.

  She’d done her research, knew her bikes. “Yeah,” he said. “I bought that one a couple of years ago.” After a particularly exciting mission in Afghanistan, when he questioned neither his body nor his nerve. “Needs an oil change,” he added, in case he thought he was stalking her.

  “I want this bike,” she said. Defiant. Like she wasn’t going to get it. He looked at it. It was a sweet, sexy sportbike, bright red, a year old but with fewer than two hundred miles on it. He flipped the price tag over. The price was good.

  “Ducs are worse than drugs,” he said, startling a laugh out of her. “What do you own now?”

  “I don’t,” she said, slightly defensive, as if it were a personal failing that she didn’t own a Ducati. “I’ve taken the motorcycle beginners course. That’s it.”

  “This is a smaller bike,” he said. “Low frame and you’re tall for a woman, so you can probably get your feet flat on the ground. It’s nimble. Quick. It’s going to be a hell of a lot more responsive than whatever you rode in the training course.”

  “A Suzuki,” she said. “I know all of that.”

  “You can get something sportier, not a cruiser.”

  “I don’t like the looks of those,” she said, a stubborn tilt to her chin.

  “Okay, so here’s the worst part. You start riding, you’re going to lay it down. Once a week at least for a while, maybe more depending on weather, gravel, potholes, idiots who don’t see you coming. On a slower ride like the Rebel over there,” he said, nodding at basic model obviously traded in, “you’re going to lay it down less.”

  “But I’m still going to lay it down,” she said. “You do, right?”

  “Fact of life when you ride.”

  “This is the bike I want to lay down,” she
said.

  He had to laugh. She looked mutinous, determined as all hell. “You’re going to scratch the paint. That pretty, shiny, flawless Ducati red paint is going to look like someone took sandpaper and claws to it.”

  “My sandpaper, my claws,” she said. “On my bike.”

  He shrugged. “Go for it.”

  She looked at the salesman, loitering cautiously beside the reception desk. “I want to put down a deposit, to hold it for a couple of days, and come back when it’s not raining so I can give it a test drive.”

  “Great,” the salesman said, obviously thinking Erin-the-Librarian would sleep on it and change her mind. “No problem. We just hold your check and tear it up if you decide not to … uh … not to…”

  Erin stood at the desk to write out the check. Jack, now loitering without a clear reason, watched her elegant handwriting. Erin Kent. No other name on the account, no ring, but all that meant was that they hadn’t gotten to the point of merging financials.

  He held the door open for her. The only car parked in front of the showroom was a Honda Civic, dark green, gray cloth seats, obviously high miles because the door still unlocked with a key, not a clicker. Keys in hand, she stood watching the rain stream from the under the shallow metal awning.

  “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For helping me make the decision.”

  “I owed you,” he said. “For last night.”

  “I was doing my job,” she said.

  “Yeah, about that. I’m sorry. I didn’t think about the librarian slash student thing.”

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  “It probably happens all the time.”

  At that she laughed, throwing her head back. “No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”

  “Kids these days,” he said, shaking his head in mock-consternation. “I don’t understand this generation.”

  “Based on the used condoms I occasionally find in the study rooms, a lack of sex drive isn’t this generation’s problem. It’s that I … I used to be married.” She held up her left hand, bare of a wedding ring, and rubbed her thumb over the base of her ring finger, an unconscious gesture he often saw from married men. “Very few people hit on librarians, and no one hits on a married one.”