The SEAL's Second Chance: An Alpha Ops Novella Read online

  Chapter Five

  “Looking fine, Coach,” Grace drawled as she walked out of seventh-period Algebra II. “Very fine.”

  “Thank you, Grace,” Charlie said noncommittally. It was the end of a very long day, complete with one student in tears in her office over her ongoing struggle with geometry, one player in tears in her office over a pre-prom breakup, a junior player having a borderline panic attack over applying to colleges, and lunchtime in a hastily called conference about a senior in Charlie’s homeroom accused of cyberbullying a freshman. Charlie had facepalmed, both mentally and physically, often enough that surely she was down to bare skin.

  She made a quick pit stop on the way back to her office. The bathroom was empty, the students clearing out as fast as they could to enjoy the spring afternoon. Charlie peered in the mirror as she washed her hands. Her lipstick was gone, but some mascara clung to her lashes, and color pinkened her cheeks and chin. But the appearance wasn’t just the surface of makeup. Something shone in her eyes, softened and brightened them, a lingering pleasure and a sense of anticipation. It wasn’t a familiar look, but eventually she placed it.

  She looked happy. That’s what happiness looked like—remembered good times and the expectation, even the promise, of more to come.

  As she stared at her reflection, the light dimmed in her eyes. Jamie might be hers for the moment, but he wasn’t hers forever. He was on leave, back for a special, one-time event honoring a coach who’d meant the world to him. That was all.

  However, not even a clear-eyed, rational assessment of the situation could completely dim the light in her eyes. Because tonight, as ridiculous as it was, Jamie was going shopping and having dinner with her. She was careful not to phrase it as “taking her” anywhere. She’d buy her own dress, pay for her own meal, the memory of her mother taking money from the revolving door of men in her life always in her thoughts. Charlie paid her own way as a point of pride. But Jamie would be with her.

  After collecting her papers to grade, the grade book she kept even though the district maintained them online, and her uneaten lunch, she walked down the empty hallways to the side door leading to the staff parking lot and headed west into town to make the climb up the Hill. The houses got bigger, were set further back from the street on vast, tree-studded lots, as she drove up the main road to the cul-de-sac, using her mental map of the basketball court’s location and the narrow sidewalk leading to the steps to guide her.

  It didn’t matter how old she was, or that she’d played on the team that won the European championship, or that she had a respectable position in the community. She’d never feel like she belonged on the Hill. Determined to face this particular fear, she parked, turned off the engine, got out of the car, and walked up to the front door to ring the bell.

  The door opened almost immediately, Jamie and his brother Ian peering out with identical, inquisitive gazes. Ian looked, and smelled, like he’d been run hard and put away wet then rolled around in the dust bunnies under the bed. Jamie was showered and dressed in a pair of jeans and a hastily pulled on polo with one side of the collar turned up. Water droplets clung to his hair, and the shirt was stuck to his broad shoulders, like he’d showered and dressed in thirty seconds flat.

  “Hi,” she said, twisting her fingers together to avoid straightening his collar.

  “Hey,” Jamie said, like she came to his house all the time. “Want to come in for a minute?”

  “No!” she said, then softened her tone. “No, thanks. I really just want to get this over with.”

  Ian’s eyebrow rose. Jamie grabbed keys and wallet from the table in the foyer and scuffed into sneakers.

  “We’re going shopping,” she explained to Ian.

  “For the banquet?” Ian asked, his gaze shifting from Charlie to Jamie. “You finally going to break down and buy a suit?”

  “Hell, no,” Jamie said. “She needs a dress.”

  Ian’s gaze shifted back to Jamie, obviously wondering why his brother was going along on a shopping trip for a dress for the girls’ basketball coach, obviously drawing conclusions Charlie didn’t want him drawing.

  “Shut up, Ian,” Jamie advised.

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “I can hear you thinking,” Jamie said as he finished lacing his sneakers. “Tell Mom not to hold dinner for me.”

  “What makes you think I’ll be around for dinner?”

  “Like you’re going to bake a frozen pizza rather than eat Mom’s pot roast,” Jamie scoffed. “Not to mention you’ve got all those D&D grids to go through.”

  “I can’t believe I kept all those.”

  “And the die. And the figures.” Jamie coughed “geek” under his breath, and got a swat to the back of the head for his efforts.

  “Have fun,” Ian said.

  Charlie had been slowly backing away during this exchange. Jamie walked around to the other side of her car and waited while she clicked open the locks. “Did you have any trouble finding the house?”

  “Number one, everyone knows which house was owned by the founder of North Hills Railway. Number two, everyone knows where the mayor lives. Number three, your brother is a lieutenant with the police department and there was an unmarked police car sitting outside the house.”

  Jamie huffed out a laugh as he buckled his seat belt, then looked right at her. Suddenly catapulted back to the morning, she remembered that odd moment when her alarm went off. She’d been dreaming all right, dreaming of Jamie under the cottonwood tree, hot and hard inside her, hot and hard against her. It was so real, so vivid, like the park and the basketball court were the only places they existed, her own bedroom looked unfamiliar. It didn’t happen often anymore; a life on the road, waking up in hotel rooms and friends’ apartments all over Europe, taught her brain to remember where she was and supply that information as she woke up. One night with Jamie disoriented her that easily.

  “Ready when you are,” he said.

  She tried to put the car in reverse, remembered she hadn’t started it, turned the key, then successfully reversed out of the driveway. Jamie had his fingers tucked into the weather stripping at the top of the window. His other hand rested casually on his thigh.

  Apparently things weren’t going to be any different because they’d slept together.

  “What were you two up to?” she asked.

  “Mom wants us to clean out the eaves,” he answered. “She kept everything from our childhood. Every paper, every art project, every toy and game and book we ever owned is shoved into the eaves of that house. She decided, since I’m home for a month, that Ian could take some time off and we’d go through it all.”

  “But she was the one who kept it,” Charlie said, trying to wrap her mind around a mother who cherished kindergarten art projects and role-playing fantasy games and merge with traffic heading downtown at the same time.

  “Rule number one in the Hawthorn house is don’t argue with Mom.”

  “What’s rule number two?”

  “There is no rule number two,” Jamie said, stone cold serious.

  “I met her a few weeks ago, when the kids started planning the banquet,” Charlie offered. “She seemed nice.”

  “She’s very nice. She absorbed all of the good stuff from marrying a Marine turned cop, and brought her own brand of ladylike to it. Where are we headed?”

  “NoDo. There’s a couple of boutiques there I’ve had good luck with in the past.” Charlie turned onto the brick-paved streets and nabbed a parking spot. “What time is it?”

  “Just after five. Free parking,” Jamie said, and swung out of the car.

  The sidewalks weren’t very crowded yet, although a few couples and groups occupied the patio tables at the restaurants interspersed with the shops and boutiques. Charlie reached for the handle to The Kicky Goose only to find Jamie’s hand closing on the wrought iron bar before hers. He gave her a smile and opened the door.

  “Hi, Charlie!” Conscious of Jamie’s presence behind he
r, she gave Taylor a quick hug, then introduced Jamie. Taylor’s eyes lit with more than appreciation of a well-built male form. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need a dress.”

  “You always make it sound like you need a root canal,” Taylor said. “Or open heart surgery. It kills me. Kills me. Your body, and you wear workout clothes and the same schlumpy pants suits that hide your cute little fanny.”

  “I’m a ball player, not a model.” She added hastily, “And a teacher and a coach.”

  “If Tom Brady and David Beckham can be both, so can you,” Taylor purred, making Charlie laugh. “When do you need this dress?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?! As in tomorrow tomorrow? As in, twenty-four hours from now?”

  Jamie chuckled, presumably at Taylor’s flabbergasted tone. Charlie glared at him, and he wiped the smile off his face. “That’s so not funny,” he said.

  “It’s not funny at all,” Taylor said. “What’s it for?”

  “I need a dress for the banquet, and another one for the garden party tomorrow evening.”

  “So you need a dress in twenty-four hours, and a gown in forty-eight.”

  “A dress, not a gown.”

  “You’re arguing with me. She’s arguing with me,” she said to Jamie. “She’s got her figure hidden in that sad sack suit, and arguing with me.”

  “It’s hard to fathom,” Jamie agreed.

  “I’ll go to the mall,” Charlie said. “Watch me go to H&M.”

  “You most certainly will not,” Taylor retorted. “Lucky for you I like a challenge. And I like seeing you look absolutely fabulous.” She pointed at a rack along the floor-to-ceiling windows running the length of the shop. “Start there. That’s my summer party dress selection. I’ll pull gowns for you.”

  Twenty minutes later Charlie was in a tiny dressing room with half a dozen cocktail dresses and three gowns she called “long dresses” just because she was stubborn. And nervous about modeling in front of Jamie.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she said to herself as she slung her “schlumpy work suit” over the back of the chair and worked the first cocktail dress off the hanger. “He’s seen you naked now. There’s no reason to be embarrassed.”

  That’s what she told herself when she walked out of the room in a simple black sheath with red marks around her calves from her trouser socks. Jamie looked up from his phone; Taylor peered out from the back room where she was searching through the most recent arrivals for more gowns.

  “Nice,” Jamie said, his gaze warm, appreciative.

  She turned to face the three-way mirror. “This is good,” she said. “I can pair it with a blazer and wear it on recruiting trips.”

  “I didn’t pick that out for you, and don’t tell me you don’t have a basic black sheath already. You played for how many years in France and left without an LBD? What were you doing in Europe?”

  “Playing basketball,” she retorted, not even asking what an LBD was. “Winning championships. Not shopping.”

  “Europe was wasted on you,” Taylor said. She twitched at the side seam, pulling it tight across Charlie’s backside. “It’s too loose.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Actually,” Jamie said, eying her backside in a very possessive way.

  She shot him a glare. He held up his hands in surrender.

  “Try on something else. Anything else.”

  “Not the floral thing,” Charlie said. “I don’t do floral. At my height, I put on anything with flowers and I look like a Venus flytrap on steroids.”

  “You do not. The fuchsia dress, then.”

  “It’ll be too short,” Charlie warned.

  “It’ll be perfect,” Taylor said.

  Which is how she found herself in the dressing room, zipping herself into a bright, deep pink raw silk dress with a fitted strapless bodice and a flared skirt that would be way too short and she would hate because it was gaudy and would make her stand out in the crowd even more than her height did. So she didn’t even look at herself in the mirror, just shouldered open the swinging door and stormed over to the chair where Jamie was sprawled, gaze focused on his phone.

  “The zipper’s stuck,” she said, looming over Jamie.

  He looked up to where she held the bodice closed with clutching hands, then rose to his feet, crowding close to tug the zipper the rest of the way up.

  Charlie stared down at her breasts. “Where did those come from?”

  “Heaven,” Jamie said, peering over her shoulder.

  “It’s too tight. I can’t go to a school event like this. It’s—”

  Jamie set his hands on her waist and turned her to face the mirror, cutting her off mid-protest. The woman staring back looked like her, with smudged makeup and glowing skin. Her eyes seemed huge in her face, and while she knew objectively that her lips weren’t swollen, hadn’t been kissed in hours and hours, they were fuller, pinker. Jamie reached up and gently tugged her hair elastic loose so her bright gold and wheat strands tumbled around her shoulders.

  “Damn, Charlie,” he whispered.

  “Uh-huh,” Taylor said, popping out from behind a rack. “That’s what I’m talking about. Look. At. Your. Legs.”

  “They’re just my legs,” Charlie said, studying her legs in the three-way. The skirt was probably knee-length on a normal-sized human, but on Charlie the hem stopped closer to mid-thigh.

  Taylor turned for the shoe section. “Heels.”

  “I don’t wear heels.”

  “Size ten?”

  “And a half,” Charlie finished, “but I’m not wearing heels.”

  A minute later she was standing in front of the mirror in three-inch heels in a shiny patent leather a couple of shades darker than her pale skin. “You’ll need to get a mani-pedi.”

  “Where the hell am I going to find time to get a mani-pedi?”

  “Saturday morning. I’ll book you an appointment with my girl. Give me the rest of the cocktail dresses. You’re done.”

  “Taylor,” she said a bit desperately. “This dress is totally impractical. And if I wear heels, I’ll be taller than most of the men in the room.”

  “They can suck it up,” Taylor said heartlessly. “I don’t give a damn about male egos. That dress requires heels.”

  “Taylor.”

  “You can wear it to the banquet, too,” Taylor wheedled. “It’ll work for both. Flats and a little shrug to make it demure for the garden party. Oh!” She lunged for a rack sandwiched between purses and jewelry and came up with a handful of pewter gray that turned out to be a sweater that covered nothing but Charlie’s shoulders and arms to just below her elbows.

  She looked at Jamie. “-Help me out here.”

  “Hate to break this to you, sweetheart, but she’s right. Damn,” he said, but his eyes were heavy-lidded, unabashedly looking her over.

  “Of course I’m right.” Taylor rummaged in the shoe area and then dropped silver ballet flats on the floor at Charlie’s feet. Charlie opened her mouth, closed it, then slid her feet into the shoes. She risked a glance in the mirror, and almost didn’t recognize herself.

  “Perfect,” Taylor said with a fist pump. “Now you don’t have to buy a gown. This dress is practical.”

  “It’s practically purple.”

  “Shut up and put the heels back on.”

  A minute later she was in the nude heels, adjusting a gossamer gold wrap around her shoulders. “Just earrings,” Taylor said. “Anything around your neck will distract from your shoulders and collarbones. Earrings, and a messy blowout, and makeup. Pale lipstick, darker eyes. You can do makeup, right?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said desperately, eyeing Jamie self-consciously in the mirror. Even the guys she’d dated who respected her as an athlete sometimes balked at her wearing heels. But it wasn’t like she was going to the events with Jamie. “Taylor, I just don’t know about the heels. Do you have the flats in gold?”

  Jamie walked over to stand just behind
her right shoulder. Barefoot, they were the same height; in the heels she had three inches on him. He wove his fingers through hers, then lifted his chin, offering his mouth to her. Without thinking even the tiniest bit about moral turpitude clauses, or what would happen when his leave was up, she bent her head and kissed him, soft and hot.

  “You’re gorgeous,” he said, looking up into her eyes as he squeezed her hand. “The heels turn you into a goddess.”

  Only Jamie could make that sound authentic. “You win,” she said to Taylor.

  Taylor collected the accessories and started ringing up the purchases while Charlie changed back into her work suit. She brought out the fuchsia dress, and found Jamie standing by the counter.

  “What are you wearing?” Taylor said. “I can recommend a really good men’s shop on the next block, but it’ll cost you an arm and a leg for last-minute alterations.”

  “I’m good, thanks,” Jamie said, taking the slightest step back.

  Not settling for that, Taylor raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m wearing my uniform,” he said, almost apologetically.

  “Military?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Navy.”

  “Oh, the white ones? Okay, that’s a jacket you can wear over your dress,” Taylor said, turning to Charlie to present her with a receipt to sign. “It’ll be like something out of a fashion spread, or the cover of a romance novel!”

  Jamie turned a laugh into a cough.

  “That’s probably not allowed,” Charlie said, trying not to think about a uniform dress coat draped over her shoulders, warm from his body, his ribbons and medals weighing it down as she signed the receipt.

  “Service member’s discretion,” Jamie said, soft and warm, like all he could think about was her wearing his jacket.

  “Thanks, Taylor,” Charlie said.

  “My pleasure. If anyone asks, please mention the shop. Business has been slow lately.”

  “Count on it,” Charlie said as she accepted the hanging bag and two shopping bags. “I’ll do my red carpet thing, name-drop the shop every chance I get.”

  They stowed the bags in the back seat of Charlie’s car.

  “Dinner?” Jamie asked.

  She was on the verge of giving him an out when her stomach growled. Jamie’s eyes widened. Suddenly, the stupidity of saying no hit her. It was a gorgeous spring evening, in the city’s trendiest neighborhood. Great local restaurants rubbed shoulders with boutiques like Taylor’s. When she was a teen she and her friends had come here to buy an ice cream and sit on the round brick planters and watch people with enough money to enjoy the shops and restaurants walk by.