CHAPTER ONE

      Five Years Later

      AN ILL WIND blew Kyle into his Alabama home port. As he docked his beloved one-man sloop, the Hellraiser, in its rightful slip, he felt change in the air.

      By the pricking of my thumbs—

      Looking south, far off south, he saw nothing but cerulean skies skidded with small white fat-bottomed clouds. It was June, however, and though temps were climbing fast into the blistering nineties, the breeze was high. Off the Hellraiser’s stern, the Stars and Stripes flapped raggedly, the line ticking a cadence off the metal flag pole.

      —somethin’ wicked this way comes.

      The dawn, too, heralded change for the shore of his coastal home, he remembered as he checked the bilge pump and turned all power off to the cabin. This had been his home away from home for the past week and a half, while he sailed from Virginia Beach near Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, down the Atlantic seaboard, around Florida’s jutting peninsula and its glittering green keys. Watching the day break like a fire-soaked phoenix on his restive swath of the Gulf of Mexico, he recalled the old adage: Red sky morning—sailor’s fair warning.

      Kyle had hoped that that warning was for what lay behind, what had drawn him to the refuge of the sea to decompress from his latest conflict as a Navy SEAL.

      At sea, he could breathe. He could disconnect from the chaos and violence of his chosen profession. He could clear his head and reinvigorate his soul.

      It had been harsh, the last string of operations. Harsh enough to wake him every night in the bunk of his sloop. But the cradle-like motion of the sea had helped beat back the tightness in his chest. And up on deck, with the salty wind in his hair and his sea-legs beneath him, he had slowly been able to realign the molecules between head and heart.

      Out at sea, he wasn’t Chief Petty Officer Kyle Bracken. He was just a sailor having his go at the age-old existential clash between man and nature.

      He loved his job. He loved his brothers-in-arms. He loved fighting the good fight. But even warriors needed a reprieve. Even the trained elite needed to unplug and get back to self. The little tropical cyclone he’d run into just off Cedar Key had been a welcome reception. A challenge. He’d turned the sloop’s bow right up underneath its cloudy, disordered skirt and sailed right through it.

      It had been headed northeast, but the wind had now shifted, Kyle noted. He knew before his feet hit the dock of the marina, without switching on the weather radio. He had lived through enough summers on the Gulf to be able to sense the change in barometric pressure. Hell, he could practically taste it.

      That damned storm was headed straight this way.

      He spotted the man on the deck of the houseboat two slips down and whistled loudly. “’Ey, Nick!”

      The white-headed gentleman turned. His face was leathered and bronzed, his beard bushy and white enough to rival Santa’s. He was wearing the same Hawaiian-print shirt as always, and the exact style of sunglasses that had died out sometime after the Kennedy assassination. “Hey, boy. Where the hell’ve you been?”

      “Can’t say,” Kyle claimed, gripping the shiny silver rail on the Hellraiser’s port side. Nick had been calling Kyle “boy” since his first visit to the marina alongside his father at the age of seven. Kyle might have changed a good deal since their first meeting, but the salty seaman living on the houseboat had not.

      Maybe he was Santa Claus.

      “Still a person of mystery,” Nick grunted.

      Kyle lifted a shoulder in answer.

      “Saw your old man out and about...oh, Wednesday, I think it was,” Nick said, scratching his forehead.

      “Yeah?” Kyle asked, lightening at the mention of his father.

      “Gearing up for that big show this weekend up at that airfield of his. Reckon you heard about it.”

      “Huh.” Big show. Airfield. Neither his father nor his mother had mentioned either in their weekly emails or the short phone calls they’d managed to grab with him over his last week of deployment. Though words like big show and James Bracken were no strangers to each other. And James did own an airfield, among a litany of other strange and wonderful things.

      “Your folks know you’re in town?” Nick asked.

      A grin managed to climb over the lower half of Kyle’s face. He hadn’t known when his vessel would bring him into port. That combined with the stormy run-in had kept him from contacting his parents.

      Besides, he liked the element of surprise.

      The far-off wail of a weather warning reached Kyle’s ears, and he straightened as Nick’s head swiveled in the direction of the houseboat’s wheelhouse. They both listened for a moment to the radio before Nick glanced back at Kyle, his caterpillar brows vee-ed. “What the sam hell did you bring home with you? Weatherman says that cyclone’s spun itself into a ripe-old tropical storm. Headed this way.”

      The grin washed slowly from Kyle’s face as he picked up on the rest of the weather warning. It seemed the calm he’d sought in the waters that straddled Fort Morgan and Dauphin Island, the lull of the Eastern Shore and the bay that, to him, represented the flow and pace of what life should be, was about to be rudely disrupted. What had he brought with him?

      Nick hocked loudly and spat a stream over the rail before he added, “Go on, boy. Tell your mama you’re here.” He raised his glasses and peered across the empty slip. “Or I will.”

      Kyle gave a nod. “Yes, sir.” He began to gather his things from the Hellraiser’s cabin when Nick called to him again.

      “It’s good to see you back.”

      “Were you worried about me, Nick?” Kyle asked, teasing.

      Nick’s laugh was a rusty tumble. Just the thing for a sailor as old and crusty as he. “Maybe.”

      It was as heartfelt a sentiment as Kyle had ever heard the man utter. He nodded. “See you out at the airfield later?”

      Nick barked. “Your crazy old man might’ve traded his sea legs for a pair of wings.” He stomped one rubber boot onto the deck of the houseboat. Kyle was surprised the ancient decking didn’t splinter under the abuse. “My place is right here.”

      “Uh-huh. You might wanna shower,” Kyle suggested. He raised a brow at Nick’s questioning frown. “I can smell ya from here.”

      That rusty laugh climbed into the air and followed Kyle belowdecks.

      * * *

      AFTER LONG ABSENCE, most sons brought their mothers roses.

      What Kyle brought his he wrapped