CHAPTER FOUR

      “SHE’S ASLEEP,” KYLE ANNOUNCED, hushed, as he returned to Harmony’s kitchen where she was doing the dishes. He reached back for his neck and tilted his head to work out a crick.

      “How many stories did she ask for?” she smirked, knowing.

      “A dozen,” he said. “She still likes Where the Wild Things Are. That was—”

      “My favorite,” Harmony said, nodding. She turned to him, drying her hands. “You remember that?”

      “Reading to you was always the better part of my day,” he told her.

      Her lips seamed and pressed inward. She scanned his face before her attention seized on the hand massaging his neck. “You didn’t lie down with her, did you?”

      “She asked me to.”

      “Kyle. She sleeps in a daybed.”

      “So?”

      “So,” she said, “you’re six-four. I know SEALs are trained to sleep anywhere, but how did you even—”

      “I was half off,” he admitted. “It’s all right. She was asleep in five minutes flat.”

      “You’re a bona fide teddy bear.”

      “I can accept that.” He nodded. “As long as I still get to shoot bad guys.”

      She laughed. “Isn’t that what teddy bears do when children fall asleep? Defend them against the monsters in the closet?” Laying her hands on the back of one of the chairs surrounding the small round table between them, she asked, “Ready?”

      “For?” he asked, blank.

      “That trim,” she said.

      “It’s late. You still wanna?”

      She pulled out the chair. “Have a seat. I’ll get the shears.”

      To Kyle, the ritual was more sentimental than anything. After the frag had torn through his lower body, he’d been in and out for weeks thanks to the powerful pain meds. His first lucid memory was waking up in a military hospital, disoriented. Then... Harmony. Harmony leaning close. Fingers skimming through his hair. It took him a moment or two to realize that she was giving him a trim and that she’d shaved his beard down to the fine black stubble he preferred off-duty.

      When she saw his eyes open, she’d stopped. Said his name. Fighting against the sensation of cotton-mouth and the anxiety of not knowing where he was, he replied with, “Carrots.”

      She’d gone misty-eyed. It occurred to him then that he hadn’t seen Harmony cry since she was in diapers. There was a wavering fear that she would break down and that seeing her do so might break him down, too.

      She held it together, like a boss. “It’s good to have you back, K.Z.B.” And, after offering him a sip of water, she went back to trimming his hair, smiling.

      She’d gone a long way toward holding him together over the agonizing months he spent recouping.

      As she combed his hair now, he felt all the tension in his body slide toward extinction. As she raked wet fingers through to dampen his hair, her small nails teased his scalp. His eyes closed. Comb in one hand, shears in the other, she silently, meticulously went about the task of snipping the thick curls growing toward the nape of his neck.

      He’d spent a week on the Hellraiser trying to lose himself amid wind and tide. He’d come home, a task that usually brought him necessary reprieve. But it wasn’t until now, he realized, that he’d felt truly relaxed since departing Little Creek.

      Her hand rested on his head. “You’re not sleeping, are you?” she asked in a low voice that trickled down the back of his neck.

      Kyle blinked. Had he been? “Why?”

      “Your head started to bob.”

      “Sorry.” He cleared his throat. He sounded groggy. “Long day, I guess.”

      “We’ve kept you up.” She snipped strays one by one. He heard the drone of the buzzer. Using the hand on his head, she pushed his chin to his collarbone. “Let me get your neckline.”

      She buzzed him down to his shirt collar, then walked around to his front. Bending to his level, she squinted at her progress.

      Kyle studied her. Hers was a chameleon face. From one angle, it had the potential to be soft and feminine. From the other, it could be sharp, inflexible, even cold. All her life, she’d had a notorious mercurial habit of flying from one mood to the next. Her features reflected that well.

      Unlike him, she’d never favored one parent or another. Aside from the warm honeycomb irises that had been imprinted by Briar, Harmony’s eyes were narrow and feline. By turn, they could make her look catty or uncompromising. Her red hair in particular proved her to be the perfect Savitt-Browning hybrid—a genetic toss-up between Cole’s dark brown and Briar’s ash-blond. She was athletically built. Tall and leggy. In fact, she’d out-inched her old man by the time she was legal. She’d never been curvy. She was more angular, and each one of those intriguing angles came with its own road hazard. Caution. Speed Bump. Sharp Turn Ahead.

      Erring, his study fell upon her lips.

      Slow Down. No Crossing. Dead End.

      She wet them. The lazy river of his blood began to eddy and flow. As she reached out to test the evenness of his ends, her outer thighs nudged against the inner seam of his, and she caught her lower lip between her teeth.

      He felt taut again, but in a way which spoke of his six-month deployment and the lack of anything besides male companionship over that time. His thigh muscles flexed as something unfurled there, around his gut and the base of his spine.

      Her teeth were slowly releasing her lip, letting it round gradually, red and wet. A strawberry ripe for the plucking.

      No Thru Traffic. Wrong Way, Moron!

      Kyle snatched himself out of the off-color reverie. Blink. It was Harmony’s face in front of his. Carrots. He’d read her to sleep with Little Golden Book stories as a kid. He’d watched her learn to walk.

      He’d taught her to ride her bike, damn it. To swim. Soon the Little Golden Book readings had warped into E. B. White, Beverly Cleary, Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder. He’d even spent one sulky summer speed-reading through a tattered copy of Anne of Green Gables for her. And ever since, he’d called her “Carrots” in consequence.

      He’d watched her grow into a skinny-legged teen, then a self-possessed adult. He’d watched her and Zaccoe collide headlong. When something unexpected and timeless had grown out of that collision, he’d watched their destinies entwine. He’d been happy for them.

      He’d been the one to tell her Benji was KIA. He’d stood next to her on the tarmac as his brothers-in-arms carried the flag-draped casket off the angel flight.

      He’d been the first person to learn she was pregnant while she bent over Benji’s face one last time in the visitation room at the funeral home. She had wept then, tears dripping off the end of her nose combined with long piercing cries that belonged in the wild to some poor felled animal with no chance of mercy.