Page 47 of Assigned

Chapter Twenty

Lucas

Istand on the driveway rubbing the base of my neck and watch as Riley drives away. I’m not getting it. I mean, sure, she’s pissed. Hella pissed, as a matter of fact. Even though she told me why, I still don’t understand. I was trying to help. I’ve seen how careful Riley is at home and restaurants with her meals and, after doing some research, I understood the minefield a barbeque might present for her. I also know how much she does not want to be fussed over. By doing a little advance work, I’d tried to remove those mines for her, help her navigate the barbeque and make it into a more successful mission for both of us.

Instead, it blew up in my face. Got it wrong again, Craiger. As per usual. Can’t even learn from my mistake, either, since I don’t understand why what I did was so damn wrong. What was I supposed to do? Nothing? The least a man can do is make sure there’s a roof over his wife’s head and food in her belly, and I want to do way more than the least for Riley. Plus, a SEAL doesn’t keep information from his team. We live as a team and die as a team.

I’m still standing there, looking at the empty road, when Graves pulls into the parking spot Riley pulled out of.

“What’s up, Lucas?” he asks as he gets out of his Ford Explorer with a bottle of wine and flowers in his hands. He looks where I’m looking, trying to figure out what I’m staring at, which is a whole lot of empty road.

I shrug and gesture with my head toward the backyard. “Team’s back there.”

Graves gives his shirt a little tug and nods. “On your six.”

I walk into the backyard in front of him.

Everyone is gathered around the table and the grill. Marge throws me some side-eye and looks over at Taya, who angles herself so her back is to me. Hayden looks up from putting silverware out on the table and shakes her head, her hair a pink-and-purple waterfall. Inara crosses her arms over her chest, muttering something under her breath that sounds suspiciously like “idiota.”

How am I an idiot? I made a point of educating myself and my team.

Bear, Stephens and Martinez all watch me. I walk back over to them while Graves walks over to the table and hands the bottle of wine to Marge and the bouquet to Hayden.

“Thank you,” Marge says. “How sweet.”

“My stepparents said I shouldn’t ever come to a party with my hands swinging free.”

“Well, it wasn’t necessary, but I appreciate it.” Marge pauses and looks over at Hayden, who hasn’t said anything, but has her nose buried in the bouquet. “Hayden, why don’t you put those in some water?”

“I’ll help,” Graves says, following Hayden into the house.

Bear follows them with his eyes, looking none too happy.

“Guess I screwed up again,” I say, partially to redirect an impending murder plot my teammate might be forming against Graves. Obviously, Hayden has been on dates. Overheard Marge and Lisa discussing one of them once. Being deployed so much, maybe Bear has never witnessed it. Not sure a member of our team dating his daughter would be appropriate. Not that Graves is a bad guy or anything.

“What’d you do this time?” Martinez asks, scratching his chest.

“Told Marge and Bear about the kind of diet Riley has to be on so she’d have food she could eat at the party.” I kick at the concrete patio. It’s hard enough for her to manage what to eat and when to eat it on a daily basis. Social events are harder and might not have any food she could consider eating.

Stephens cocks his head to one side. “Without telling her you were going to do that?”

I nod, still not seeing where the problem is.

Stephens loops an arm over my shoulders and says, “Let’s go have a talk.”

We walk away from the grill and sit down near the koi pond, away from everyone else. The fish dart in and out, surfacing now and then to grab some unlucky bug on the surface.

“Do you remember that day at Shaken and Stirred? Back in the early days when Taya and I were first paired up?” he asks, picking up a pebble and tossing it into the pond.

I watch the ripples radiate away in circles. I know exactly what day he’s talking about. “Hard to forget that day.”

It had been Martinez’s birthday and Marge had put together a little gathering. We were getting settled when Stephens’s ex-wife’s sister Brittney showed up and started talking shit about how Stephens’s brains had been turned to scrambled eggs. Before that, none of us had known that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury on our last mission. Well, Bear knew. Nobody else, though.

While it had been at least a little bit entertaining to see Taya and Marge have to be physically restrained from kicking Brittney’s worthless ass up one side of Shaken and Stirred and down the other, it hadn’t been much fun finding out that my teammate hadn’t trusted me with crucial information.

“Yup. Very hard to forget. I was still coming to terms with my diagnosis myself. I wasn’t ready to share it with anyone else, but it got shared for me. Without my permission.”

“Should have told us yourself. We’re a team. How am I supposed to support you if I don’t know what’s going on with you? What does it matter how we found out?” Until Graves, I had been the newest member of the team and always felt like the odd man out. Well, at least when it came to Bear, Stephens, and Lux. Luckily, I had Martinez. But not knowing about Jim’s health when Bear did had been a sore spot for me. Still is.

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