3

      The Present

      “YOU BLOW MY MIND, DUDE. We’ve been on this aircraft carrier for what? All of a day and you’re already making trouble?”

      “Trouble? Dude, that wasn’t trouble. Believe me, I know the difference.” Petty Officer First Class Brody Lane, call sign Bad Ass, dropped to his rack with a grin, folding his hands behind his head and crossing his booted ankles.

      “Farm Boy said some wet-behind-the-ears recruit threatened to kick your ass.” Masters gestured to their teammate who’d returned from the poker game a few minutes before Brody.

      Their SEAL team had hitched a ride on a navy aircraft carrier on their way back from a training mission. And while they weren’t treated as dignitaries as they crossed the Atlantic, they were given a ten-man berthing area to use instead of having to bunk with the rest of the sailors.

      “What’d you do, tell everyone between mess deck and our berth?”

      Carter just smiled. Gossiping like an old lady clearly didn’t faze him. With that fresh face of his, it was hard to believe he was a SEAL. Hell, it was hard to believe he was even old enough to serve, let alone two years older than Brody’s twenty-nine.

      “It was getting interesting, with the recruit mouthing off. And Bad Ass just sitting there counting his winnings. I thought the kid was gonna dive across the table. Then Bad Ass stood up and the wuss realized he was in serious danger of getting his ass handed to him.”

      “He was a NUB, Farm Boy. He didn’t know any better.” Brody had been a NUB, or new useless body, once. Fresh out of boot camp and on his first tour, thinking he was ready to take on anything. Anyone.

      That kind of thinking had been forcefully adjusted pretty fast.

      “Why are you playing with recruits?” Masters asked.

      “I’d already cleaned out the officers,” Brody admitted with a grin.

      “Trouble,” Masters muttered again, but he was laughing as he said it.

      “We don’t reach port till morning. What was I supposed to do? Sit in here like a good boy reading a book?” And the crew was providing Brody with a fat wad of poker winnings.

      Masters snickered, then angled the book to one side. “I wasn’t reading a book. I’m writing home.”

      Brody gave a jerk of his shoulder to show it was all the same to him. Truth be told, in his ten years of service he’d read a lot more books than he’d written letters home.

      “You settle it or are we gonna be getting company?”

      “It’s done. He just didn’t like losing.” Too bad, since Brody liked winning. Not enough to cheat, though. He didn’t need to. He was damned good. Something he made a point of being, with anything he cared about. Thankfully, that list was pretty short, so he wasn’t spreading himself too thin.

      “Mail call.”

      “You get demoted to mailman?” Brody grinned at Lieutenant Blake Landon. As officers went, the guy was all G.I. As friends went, Blake was aces.

      “Nah, I came to make sure you weren’t hiding a body.”

      “Did you have to tell everybody?” Brody gave Carter an exasperated look.

      “I heard one of the seamen talking about a hosing some booter got in a poker game and how he was schooled by some visiting badass.”

      “And used mail delivery as an excuse to come by to make sure I didn’t do more than pull rank?” Brody guessed.

      “Maybe I just wanted to see your pretty face,” Blake shot back, dumping a handful of letters on Brody’s cot. “Or find out if you’d lost a bet and had to find yourself some pen pals. You’re not known for your communication skills, pal.”

      “Snipers don’t have to do a whole lot of socializing.”

      “Good thing. ’Cause you suck at it.”

      True. Probably another reason that Brody almost never got mail. He didn’t do relationships. Oh, the occasional weekend fling or a few dates, but no woman had been able to hold his interest longer than a leave lasted. Definitely not long enough to reach the letter-sending stage. Sure, his gramma sent a letter and cookies every month, something that still made him squirm a little. But nobody else wrote. Hell, everyone else he knew was navy. His team here on the ship, or his platoon back in Coronado.

      He snatched up the letters, all four of them, and glanced at the package. Yep, cookies from Irene. He tossed her letter on top of the box to read later and thumbed through the others. His brow creased. They all had Bedford return addresses. Two he recognized.

      “Letters from home?”

      Brody lifted the two while frowning at the third. “Guys I used to run with. I didn’t know they could write.”

      “And that one?” Blake asked, poking his finger toward the last, the one with the flowing feminine writing. “Girlfriend?”

      “From Bedford?” Brody’s laugh held no humor. “Hardly.”

      No need to say more than that. Once, on a drunken bender, Brody had shared the details of his first hitch in the navy with Blake. Since the lieutenant had about the same love for his hometown and the people there, he’d gotten it.

      Blake, ever the Boy Scout, didn’t push the uncomfortable subject. Instead, he thumped his knuckles on the box he’d delivered.

      “You bringing the cookies to Friday’s poker game?” he asked, referring to their monthly game whenever they were on base in Coronado.

      “Without a doubt,” Brody confirmed. Irene’s snickerdoodles were worth a buck apiece; her macadamia white chocolate anted up for five. And her fudge brownies? Those babies were pure gold.

      Blake handed the other guys their much bigger bundles of mail and, after warning Brody to stay out of trouble, left them to enjoy their letters from home.

      And Brody to stare at his.

      The only woman who’d ever written him was his grandmother.

      Not because he avoided women. But letter writing was nowhere on the list of things he did with them. Nope, they were a sweeter treat than the box full of cookies sitting on Brody’s pillow. And they lasted about as long, too.

      While Masters and Carter ripped through their mail, Brody looked at the envelope again.

      Curiosity fought intuition. He wanted to know what woman’d be writing to him. But he had a strong feeling that opening that letter was gonna end up on his already-too-long