“Good luck with that.” Jack finished the rest of his beer. “If you hurt her, ever, you answer to me.”
“Like Rose isn’t perfectly capable of dismembering me on her own,” Keenan said. “Look, I totally respect that. Message received, loud and clear. Now leave it the fuck alone. She’s mine. I’m hers. It’s between us now.”
“Fine, fine.” Jack sighed, and signaled for the bartender. “Just bring me the bottle,” he said.
“That’ll definitely take the edge off whatever’s eating you,” Keenan said.
“She dumped me.”
“Wait, what? When?”
“Just after she kicked you all out of the hospital room. She said we had a good time together, but she’d checked everything off her list, and we should just end it now.”
“What list?” Keenan said, obviously struggling to keep up.
“She had a list of things she wanted to do after she got divorced. Buy a bike, go skydiving, start dating again.”
“That’s weird,” Keenan said. “She didn’t look like someone who wanted to end a relationship. While you were yelling at me and Rose, I was watching her. She didn’t have much color to begin with, but she went white when you started going off about keeping promises.”
Keeping promises …
The penny dropped with the impact of a five-hundred-pound bomb, shaking the ground under him. “She made a big deal out of not breaking her word to me,” he said. “Her ex called her a quitter, said she was breaking her word, going back on her vows. She said her word meant everything to her, and she’d never make another promise she couldn’t keep. She promised me this would be casual.”
“Was it?”
He thought about it, about the rush of her bike, about the wildly exuberant way she threw herself into the dive, about the heat of her mouth against his. “Not even. Not to me, anyway.”
“It wasn’t to her, either,” Keenan said, then added when Jack raised an eyebrow, “After a few weeks with your sister I know exactly what a determined woman looks like.”
Jack contemplated this for a minute.
“You look like yourself again,” Keenan said finally. “What happened?”
Erin happened. “Who knows? I got over it,” Jack said shortly. He’d been steady as a rock the last two days, pushing his body through SEAL workouts, finally feeling like himself again. “Maybe I just needed some time.”
“Time’s helpful,” Keenan said blandly. “You going to stay in school? Because Grey Wolfe still hasn’t replaced me.”
“I called them yesterday,” Jack said. “The job’s mine if I want it.”
“Great. Take over my lease, would you? It’s a great apartment, best location in all of Istanbul, and the neighbor’s cat is a real sweetheart. Comes over for double feedings, sits on your lap and purrs.”
Jack threw him an incredulous stare. “A cat? You were looking after a cat?”
“Don’t knock it,” Keenan said. “You’ll like having company when you get home. Keeps you from being too lonely.”
“Don’t push it,” Jack said. “Just because you’re in love … with my … I don’t want to think about it … doesn’t mean I’ve got to pair off.”
“Sure,” Keenan said in the tone of voice he used when their CO asked for the impossible in less than twenty-four hours. “You’re a lone wolf. I feel you.”
“Please don’t,” Jack said, his brain spinning up images of pairing off with Erin before he shot himself down. No way would she want the life he was after. She was all about commitments, keeping her word. She had a job, a life here … No. She had a wrecked motorcycle and a ten-year-old car and lived in a borrowed house because she thought all she could have was a life among someone else’s souvenirs.
But she could have so much more.
Fuck this. “Keep it,” he said to the bartender when he brought the bottle of whiskey to their end of the bar.
“Where are you going?” Keenan asked.
Jack slapped some bills on the bar to pay his tab, then shrugged into his jacket. “I’m going to convince Erin to break her word.”
*
He rode through Lancaster’s dark streets, listening to the roar of bike, idly racing a couple of kids off the line, slowing down almost immediately to turn into Erin’s neighborhood. He thought of her sitting in that house, looking around at the life she dreamed of living, the life she thought would never be hers. He thought of what he could offer her that might tempt her to break her word.