Page 10 of Midnight Secrets

Oh, Godyes.Isabel had had to bite her lips to keep from saying that. She’d lied a little. The guysdidmake a lot of noise but she just lapped it up. Sometimes she sat in a chair close to the living room window that faced his house and listened to the rumble of deep male voices, closing her eyes and imagining she was home again, with Jack teasing their father, the twins, Teddy and Rob, chiming in.

Joe and his friends swore like the sailors they were. She heard more four-letter words in one evening than she normally did in a year. They were profane and funny and something else. There was affection there as they called each other names. It was absolutely unmistakable. Affection and fraternity. The kind of affection and fraternity that had existed among the Delvauxs.

The men were all close friends, a tight and unbreakable union, like her family had been.

And just like that, it took her. The room swirled and her head went light and her knees wobbled. She sat down heavily, still in her coat and boots, and bent her head low between her knees. In the very beginning, when thoughts of her family made her dizzy, she’d have to head as fast as she could to the bathroom, where she’d vomit the contents of her stomach together with her misery into the toilet bowl.

Maybe it was a mark of progress that she no longer vomited, but just felt dizzy. She sat, head bowed low, trying to ease out her breathing until the room stopped spinning. No tears, though. At times she thought she’d cried out all the tears her body could possibly hold. It had been months since she’d cried. Not because she didn’t want to but because tears wouldn’t come. The tears had dried up inside her, just like all the other emotions. Now she felt as dry and shriveled as a husk of corn. Most days she was surprised the wind didn’t just carry her away, she felt so insubstantial.

She wasn’t here. She was a ghost. She had already died only her body hadn’t noticed yet.

The only thing that told her she wasn’t actually dead were those flashes of heat when she was near Joe Harris. He seemed such a nice man, but she didn’t dare tell him he reminded her that she wasn’t dead.

It sounded so weird, so incredibly neurotic. Yes, she’d lost her family. But he’d been blown up. In battle. Her own physical injuries paled next to his. Her spirit had broken, not her bones. His spirit hadn’t broken at all.

Who knew if Joe would or even could understand that? He seemed so…straightforward. So sane. He’d probably had a Putting Joe Harris Back Together Program going the instant he woke up after the explosion. Yeah, that sounded like him. He probably had some kind of timetable for recovery, and was moving ahead with it, step-by-step.

Get wounded, do rehab, get better.

Whereas she was still mired back at step one. Lose family. She’d never really gotten beyond that in any way. Every night when her nightmares woke her up, she felt the pain of their deaths every bit as keenly as when she’d woken up in the hospital and the nurse had given her the news. She relived that, night after night after night, in some hellish endless loop, but was never able to remember anything else in the morning, only grief and horror and terror.

When the dizziness passed, Isabel stood, exhausted. She hung up her coat in the hallway and moved to the kitchen for a glass of water. Her feet were shuffling and she had to remember to pick them up, to walk normally. Every single thing she did had to be done like a child learning it all for the first time.

Except…except walking back home. That had been great. Arm in arm with Joe Harris she’d felt almost normal for the first time since the Massacre. He’d kept pace with her, moving as slowly as she did but making it seem perfectly normal. She had a feeling that if she’d crawled, he’d have crawled right alongside her.

Clearly, he could walk faster than that. Hell, he ran almost every morning. But coming back from the park, he’d kept step with her without making any kind of big deal about it. And it had felt just great. Arm linked with his, feeling him so big and warm and strong at her side, well…she’d felt strong too. Just a little. It wasn’t like the old days when she was fit and happy and energetic. Those days were over, maybe forever. These days she felt a hundred years old.

But she’d definitely felt better with him by her side. She didn’t need to watch her feet. He wouldn’t let her fall if she tripped. So for the first time in what felt like forever she’d walked with her head upright, seeing the street for the first time. Acutely aware of the big man by her side. Wishing they could walk together forever.

But that was crazy. He was just walking his nutso, next-door neighbor back home because she’d nearly been knocked over by a dog. Couldn’t even be trusted to take a short walk to a nearby park.

Oh, God she was sotiredof this! So tired of being a pale shadow of herself, so tired of not sleeping, so tired of feeling guilty because she hadn’t died together with her parents and her brothers and her aunts and uncles and cousins.

Yes, she should have said.I’d love to come over.Sit by his side while he played cards, listen to the male banter, laugh at their corny jokes. They’d probably watch their language around her but she didn’t care. Teddy had passed through a stage wherefuckwas a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb and an exclamation. He’d been so funny.

Isabel sat down and ducked her head back between her legs as the dizziness came back, together with a pounding headache.

She missed her family. So. Fucking.Much.

Would the pain ever go away?

Would it have helped if she’d accepted Joe’s invitation? Could she shed this dry husk of sadness that enveloped her, just for one evening? Go back to her old self?

No dizziness, no sudden crippling bouts of sadness, just a sense of play among strong, confident men.

She liked guys. Growing up with three brothers had given her a sense of ease around men. In college, it had been a game the girls played—finding new and inventive ways to describe the dumbness of the guys. They were fine for fucking but none of her friends stuck to one guy for long. One of her friends, when asked why she’d dumped the date du jour after only a couple of nights, simply rolled her eyes and said, “The Y chromosome.” And everyone laughed and understood.

Not Isabel. Granted, guys could be clueless most of the time but they never took offense and she loved their take on things. Her best friends in college had been two jocks who were smart as whips but who were having big problems passing the obligatory English exams. English profs objected to jocks almost on principle. So she coached them through the exams and they kept her car running and everyone was happy.

Could she have that with Joe and his friends?

Maybe if she reached out. But she hadn’t been attracted to her two jock buddies, not at all. Sex hadn’t been any part of the equation. Shewasattracted to Joe, so maybe that wasn’t a good idea.

Joe was hot. In every sense of the term. She hadn’t really understood it completely when her friends said that a guy was hot. Usually it meant he had money, or tons of charm or dressed well. Mostly, though, in her circles, it meant he had money. Money left her cold. The fact that a guy was rich wasn’t in any way a factor of attraction as far as she was concerned. She’d moved among the wealthy all her life and if there was one thing she knew, right down to the ground, it was that money did not make a person a better human being.

Joe didn’t seem to be rich but he was definitely hot. And by hot she meant he made her hot. Or at least that icy crust around her heart melted a little when she was near him, or thought of him.

But if grieving, semi-crazy Isabel Lawton thought Joe Harris was hot, then lots of other women did, too, guaranteed. And he was a former navy SEAL. Ever since she discovered that, she also discovered that SEALs were considered rock stars. The hottest of the hot. Women lusted after them, they were babe magnets. There were calendars of bare-chested SEALs and they sold like crazy. SEAL seemed to be synonymous with sex.

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