Page 9 of Forged By Sacrifice

“Why did you sail all the way from D.C. by yourself?” she parried.

“I already said. Vacation. Between gigs.”

“You didn’t have to sail here. You could have flown. So…why sail here by yourself?”

I liked that she didn’t really let me get away with anything. Pushed.

“I like sailing. No one could come with me that I could stand being on a boat with for two weeks.” It was the truth. Plus, as much as I liked being around people, I’d felt a need to reacquaint myself with the me I was trying to be. Reimagine my goals.

“I’m sure there were plenty of your lady friends who would have accompanied you.”

There it was. The question I’d been hoping and dreading would eventually come up between us. The fact that I was single. I wanted to know if she was single, or if she’d left some boyfriend behind. When I’d asked Ava while I was at the bar, she’d told me she didn’t know. That Georgie had had a boyfriend the last time they’d talked, but she wasn’t sure anymore, because it seemed like Georgie had put behind a lot more than just the salon and the city.

“Truth is, the longest I’ve ever had a girlfriend was for a month. I’ve never been a keeper,” I finally responded to her question.

“You’ve never been a keeper as in the girls don’t want to keep you, or you’ve never been a keeper as in you don’t want a relationship?”

I looked down into her face, loving again the fact that she was barely shorter than me. That the look down into her face was barely a glance. Knowing that our bodies would fit together in a way not many people had ever fit me. Her eyes were shadowed. I couldn’t see much more than a hint of a reflection in the moonlight, but I could still feel the curiosity wafting off of her.

“Maybe a little bit of both.”

“And why have you never wanted to keep anyone?”

I couldn’t help the small laugh that escaped me. “I wish Ava was here now to see you asking all these personal questions. No boundaries.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer that.”

She pulled away from me to ease her feet into the water more, and my body missed the heat and tantalizing pull, like the ebb of the tide her body had had on mine.

“It’s okay. I don’t mind. When I was younger, it felt ‘cool’ to have ladies falling all over me,” I told her. “Then, when I knew I was enlisting, I didn’t want to leave someone behind. I knew how hard it was on my mom and us kids to have Dad gone for months. I didn’t really want to do that to anyone, especially to someone who should have been out dating and partying and just being a twenty-something. Being free, you know?”

She nodded, kicking up the water and watching as the water droplets joined their brothers and sisters back in the waves.

“But you’ve been stationed in D.C. most of the time, right?”

She knew a lot about me. More than I expected her to know. More than I knew about her. It seemed unfair that the scales were so heavily tipped in her knowledge of me versus the other way around.

“Yep. Mostly D.C. But I spent some time on the USS George Washington and in Florida. Truth is, though, when you’re in the military, you never know where they’re going to send you next.”

She turned and headed back the way we’d come, still playing in the water as we went.

“Your boyfriend care that you’ve come on vacation to this strip of paradise without him?”

Her turn to laugh—the light laugh that she’d had earlier. “You could have just asked, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’”

I waited for a few seconds, and when she didn’t answer, I shrugged and asked, “Do you?”

“Nope. Sold him at the same time I sold the salon.”

I snorted. “Sold him?”

She smiled up at me but was trying not to. Now that we’d turned toward the moonlight, instead of away from it, I could see her face better, and her white teeth had come down on her full lower lip to try to stop the smile. Sexy. Like all of her.

“Traded him in?” she offered, as if I would like that term better.

“Dumped him. You dumped him. Poor guy.”

“Let’s just say it was a mutual decision.”

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