Page 49 of Red Hunt

“Goofy?”

Carter pointed at Scott with his beer. “Scott here’s always goofing off, so he’s earning his nickname daily.”

Bert laughed a deep belly laugh. “You military guys are all the same. Well, Scotty here’s had an eye on my niece ever since he recognized girls were…girls. But my Niki wouldn’t give him the time of day…not back then, and as he painfully experienced earlier, that hasn’t changed.”

He chuckled, then patted Goofy on the head as if he was five years old. “I’m still rooting for you, boy.”

Bert went back to his bar.

So that was the backstory Goofy didn’t care to elaborate earlier. He’d asked a lot of questions on how I’d met Niki and why she was so friendly with me, but he refused to tell us their story. Teenage crush. With a ton of crap still between them.

Carter looked at Goofy, who looked down at his lap. “So, Niki?”

Goofy raised his eyes back up and shrugged, his signature grin back on his face.

“Looks like Boss is not the only one with girl troubles…am I right…Max?” Peaches said and gave Goofy a bruising tap on the back while he stared at me.

Fuck. I focused on my beer as if my life depended on it. I’d made it my mission to not think about Milli today. At least not too much. I’d quenched the urge to call her, let alone show up on her doorstep again. I just hoped she was okay. Not overdoing things. Taking care of herself. Oh, who was I kidding? I’d been obsessing about her all day, and no matter how hard I tried, she was never far from my mind.

“What’s going on?” Carter asked.

“Max has gotten himself a girl…” Goofy said in a silly singsongy voice that earned him a scathing look and a thinly veiled threat through my raised fist. If he wouldn’t shut up, I would shut him up.

Carter’s eyebrows shot up, and he turned to me. “You have?”

I stopped myself from peeling the label off my bottle. As much as I wanted to, this wouldn’t go away, and if I showed any kind of weakness, the boys would harass me endlessly. “She had an accident.”

Carter nodded. “So, you met her through your EMT gig?”

I shook my head. “Milli had an accident up at the lodge. She has a bum leg, and she’s all alone, so—”

“Max is taking very good care of her,” Goofy pitched in, and my eyes shot to him. If he wasn’t going to shut up right this minute, he would regret getting up in the morning.

“She’s this tiny woman, scared of her own shadow, though kinda spunky, as well,” Peaches chimed in, and my eyes shot to him. How would he know? I looked from him to Goofy and back. Had they been spying on her?

“Why am I hearing this only now?” Carter looked at me, waiting. It wasn’t like SOG had been a full-time gig until now. But I hadn’t realized just how caught up I’d been in my own drama these last few days.

“There’s not much to tell. I’m taking things slowly; she’s…different.” Hell. I didn’t even know if I would take things anywhere, or if she wanted me to take things anywhere. We’d just met a couple of days ago. Though, the way I couldn’t stop thinking of her, maybe I should see where this was going.

Carter scratched his head, then took a sip of his beer. “Peaches, how about you?”

Goofy grinned and earned himself an elbow to the ribs after he mouthed, “Deputy Sheriff” in Carter’s direction. I hid my grin behind my bottle, glad I wasn’t the only one fixating on a woman.

27

MAX

The door to the Oaktree opened, and I looked up.

My mind took a couple of seconds to make the connection from the three men clad in T-shirts and jeans that entered the bar to the badass Navy SEALs I once knew. I’d worked with a lot of different teams, but only a couple of deployments or missions or teams had stuck with me far more than I’d expected. The Navy SEALs unit I was attached to in Iraq, and especially the team I’d been embedded with, was one of those. Oh, boy. “I’ll be damned.”

Blake did a double-take, then he chuckled and stopped right in front of me after I’d stumbled to my feet.

“If this isn’t my favorite PJ in the entire world,” Blake said.

“Well, somebody gotta help you bumbling frogmen out,” I said.

His crushing hug left me breathless, and his bruising slap on the back reminded me of how tough those bastards had been and apparently still were.

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