LITMIR.BIZ

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past limit his potential and shape his every decision.”

      Holy crap. Brody shook his head, wondering if Alexia had dropped off a psych profile to go with her contagious talk.

      “You’ve got it all figured out?” he mused, anger wrapped around him so tight he felt that he was suffocating. “And, what? If I’d returned to the SEALs, or even to the navy, you’d have stood by me? Like you’d give up your golden life here as the pampered princess or walked away from your happy new business to live on base. For me? Yeah. Right.”

      For just a second, her chin trembled. Then she lifted it high and gave him an arch look.

      “I guess we’ll never know, will we? But for the record, yes. I’d have stood by you, whatever your decision. If you talked to me, and were honest about what you wanted, I’d have done anything for you. Stay here, hand out fliers for this lousy bar. Or follow you all over the world, waiting while you defended our country. I’d even built my happy new business around the idea of being portable, of doing it from anywhere. So I could be with you.”

      A single tear slid down her cheek, glistening in the dim light like a diamond.

      “But then, you never asked. You decided to destroy your life instead.” With that and an ugly look at the glass in his hand, she turned on her heel and sashayed out.

      Not stormed or stomped. Nope, not Genna. She knew exactly how to hit him where it hurt, so she took her time, hips swinging and head held high.

      Wrapped in bitterness, he watched her go. She shoved the door open, letting a blinding beam of sunshine into the bar before it slammed closed with a bang that ricocheted through the room. Leaving him in the dark.

      Brody stared at the door for a long second.

      Then, damning his entire life to hell, he tossed back the whiskey in a single gulp.

      * * *

      YOU’D THINK IF A steady diet of cookies and sex was incredible, bingeing on just cookies to get over not having the sex would at least be okay.

      Instead, it was rotten, sucky and miserable.

      Genna stared at the pink polka-dotted fuzziness of her socks, one crossed over the other on the coffee table strewn with cookie crumbs, candy wrappers and an empty box of tissues.

      What a cliché. Could she be any more pathetic? At least she hadn’t given in to the urge to call friends to join her in the pity-fest.

      Nope. This was not a side of herself she wanted to share. Or even admit.

      As if on cue, her doorbell rang.

      Genna sighed, shifting her feet off the coffee table and tucking them under her hip as she curled into a ball on the couch.

      For three days, every time someone came to the door, she’d wiped her face, jumped up and run to see if it was Brody.

      It never was.

      Whoever it was this time, they’d go away.

      “Genna? Can we talk?”

      Unless they had their own key.

      “I was worried about you.”

      Too tired to even get mad, she shifted her head but didn’t lift it off the pillow.

      “Not now, Dad.”

      “Your mom plans to come over this afternoon.”

      Genna sat up so fast her head spun. Blinking away the dizziness, she plastered on a cheerful look and brushed sugar off the knee of her sweatpants.

      “I’m fine. Let Mom know you saw me and nothing is wrong. I was just taking a nap.”

      Standing in front of her now, her father scanned the littered table and gave a contemplative nod.

      “Yeah. Those sugar crashes get ugly without a nap.” Then, looking unsure for the first time Genna had ever seen, he offered a hesitant smile. “Or a hug from Dad?”

      Her lips trembled and her eyes filled.

      Before Genna could say yes or no, he was there. As he’d always been. With a hug and a strong shoulder. A solid wall she could depend on. Whether she wanted to or not.

      He didn’t say a word, though. No lecture. No I told you so’s. Just a hug.

      Genna burst into tears.

      He let her cry it out, grabbing napkins when he saw the tissue box was empty. He patted her back. He made sympathetic murmurs. She heard his teeth grinding at one point. But he didn’t say a word.

      Finally, whether because she was cried out or because she was worried keeping his opinion to himself was going to put her father into dentures, she pulled herself together.

      “I yelled at Brody,” she said quietly.

      “Did he deserve to be yelled at?”

      Genna frowned, peering through swollen eyes at the man next to her. He looked like her father. He sounded like her father. He even smelled like him. But this was where her father would be offering up lectures and realigning her life to suit his vision.

      Instead, he was watching her patiently. Waiting for her to respond.

      Wow. Maybe they’d both grown up.

      “I don’t know if he deserved what I yelled,” she confessed. “But I hated seeing him at Slims.”

      “What the hell were you doing at Slims? More to the point, what the hell is he doing there?” There he was, her normal father. His anger made her smile.

      “Brody’s working there.”

      “Why? He’s got a job. He’s a SEAL.”

      “He’s quitting.”

      Genna waited.

      But her father didn’t explode. He didn’t rant about losers and how he’d always been right. Instead he took a deep breath, which did nothing to clear away his frown, and nodded.

      “That’s why you yelled at him.”

      “Yep.”

      She waited for the interrogation. She saw a million questions in his eyes. But he said nothing. He just waited, letting her call the shots.

      She wasn’t sure she knew how. It was a little mind-boggling.

      “You know, I’ve dreamed of him coming back for years,” she said. “I never thought it’d really happen. It was one of those ‘prince on a white steed sweeping in to save me from a life of blah’ things.”

      “That’s a lot to put on someone,” her father said quietly. “As someone recently pointed out to me, we can’t expect others to fill the empty places in our lives. That’s something we have to figure out how to do on our own.”

      “I didn’t have holes in my life,” she said automatically. At her father’s arch look, she sighed and shrugged. “Okay, so I wasn’t happy. But it’s not like I was sitting here stewing in misery, waiting for Brody to save me.”

      “Why did you wait until he was back to stand up for yourself and the things you really wanted then?”

      Because it wasn’t until she was with Brody again that she’d realized how much of herself she’d let go over the years. With him, she felt strong and clever and able to face any challenge. With him she felt safe. Like whatever happened, she could handle it.

      Because he was her hero.

      So instead of making him feel all those same things, she’d yelled at him, attacked his choices and all but called him a loser like his father. She’d tried to railroad him into doing what she thought was best, then had thrown a heavy dose of guilt on top of that just to make sure he got the message.

      Her stomach churned. She swallowed hard to keep the cookies from making a reappearance.

      Brody

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