Page 29 of Forged By Sacrifice

“No one!” I said with force. “No one. I’m clean as a whistle and am going to stay that way.”

“I think Mindy from the DoD might not see it that way,” Eli smirked at me.

Mindy had been, perhaps, my one mistake. I hadn’t intended it to be anything more than the casual get-together that I’d had with all my other partners. But she’d been the one who had stuck for about a month. It wasn’t until we’d met up for our fourth Friday that I realized she already had wedding bells in mind. She was a civilian contractor I’d worked with, and she knew who my dad and my grandfather were. Knew that Dani was working for Guy. Knew that I was planning on working for him, too. She’d put three and three together and got five hundred million, somehow.

“Mindy has nothing to hold over me. Not one note.”

“Because you’re a jerk who doesn’t write notes?” Truck teased.

I winced again. I had been careful over the years with anything I put in writing. Even when I’d been in college, I’d written every essay with the idea that it might, someday, come to light when I was running for office. It was the same with pictures I took with people. I was very cognizant that they wouldn’t disappear and that, if I ever announced I was running, every a-hole who I’d ever been around would come running out of the anthill with their pictures of me.

Eli had never really given me a hard time about it. But Truck, the guys in my first unit, and the JSOC folks, like Nash and Darren, rode my ass every time I refused a group selfie when we were at a bar or drunk on the beach. Even when we’d had poker competitions on the USS George Washington, I’d carefully leaned back out of the picture when they were taken. Darren had told me I was like Michael J. Fox in the reruns of Family Ties, where he’d had a Ronald Reagan picture on the wall of his bedroom. And he was right. That had been me with presidents on my wall.

Ava said, “Don’t bang on his dreams, Truck. Here’s to Mac. I’m counting on you to fix our planet, create world peace, and solve the hunger problem, because I want our baby to live in that world.”

Everyone clinked glasses again, but Ava’s words settled into my heart. I had a niece and nephews from my two oldest sisters. I had cousins with kids. We were a big family. But not once had the thought of me handing over a world to those little ones hit me as hard as it did when Ava said those words. I’d wanted to make our world better. And now I had another, more important, reason to do that. For Baby Wyatt and all the other babies who might come our way.

I pulled the bag of marshmallows out, and everyone focused on toasting the little bits of heaven till they were the perfect color instead of being focused on me and my rose-colored wishes for our country. While the rest of them ate the marshmallows with chocolate and graham crackers, I ate them sugar for sugar, one after the other.

Georgie was watching me with a half-smile.

“Sweet tooth.” I shrugged. I’d already told her that once, but it felt like it needed repeating.

“I think you just mean a sugar tooth, because chocolate and graham crackers are certainly sweet, but the syrup you doused your French toast in and the marshmallows you’re pounding down are really just pure sugar,” she said.

“Remember that time we came back to his dorm room and found him pouring the box of sugar straight into his mouth?” Truck smirked at Eli.

“God, yes. Or how about the time we had to literally pull the third box of Captain Crunch out of his hands so he wouldn’t O.D. on the stuff,” Eli replied.

“This is quite a serious problem,” Georgie said to me, her smile easing into my soul and opening up all my nerve endings so I could feel the blood pounding through my veins way more than the sugar I’d inhaled. And I knew she was right. This was a serious problem, and it had nothing to do with sugar at all.

? ? ?

I was groggy from alcohol and lack of sleep the next day when my alarm went off. It was early, but I wanted to be on the way and out to sea before the day got later. Before the sight and smell of Georgie had me deciding to stay another day…and another day after that.

The temptation of her was growing.

I hit the shower and then packed the few things I had. When I got to the kitchen, Truck groaned at me from the couch where he’d been sleeping.

“What the hell time is it?” he asked.

“About five thirty.”

“And you’re up because?”

I was running. I couldn’t risk being around Georgie another day. She’d had this hypnotic pull on my soul since the first time I’d seen her standing above the crowd in her salon in New York.

If I stayed, I’d just want her more. Every moment I’d had with her since arriving in Rockport had my heart beating out a tune that talked of futures tangled together. It made me both a jackass and a chickenshit that I was choosing the life I’d always pictured for myself over that. Over the possibility of a future with someone I could love.

But if I wasn’t going to give up my career plans for Nash—who’d been my brother in blood—I wasn’t going to give them up for a woman I’d met three times in my life. I couldn’t cross that bridge, because if I gave it up, all the years I’d spent working on those dreams would have been for nothing. A waste.

“I’m leaving,” I told Truck.

“What? I just got here.”

I nodded. “Dani needs me.”

And I knew he wouldn’t argue with that. Truck understood siblings needing you. He’d do anything for his brother.

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