“Didn’t figure.”
She sniffled, and he heard a shaky smile in her voice. “Nice driving, though.”
“Yeah, the Navy taught me a few things.”
She shifted in her seat and finally let go of the grab handle. “Before tonight, I guess I never really knew you were in the military.”
“Twelve years. Four as a rescue swimmer, eight as a SEAL.”
“The SEALs are the badasses, right?”
“We like to think so.” He smiled into the darkness. “But, yeah, we’re the best at what we do.”
She was silent for another beat. “Have you been out long?”
“A couple years now.”
“Why did you leave?”
He figured her questions were a coping mechanism, a way to take her mind off the fear-adrenaline cocktail currently overloading her system, but he wasn’t about to go into all the reasons he wished he hadn’t left or how much he missed the teams. Instead, he gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug, like it was all no big deal.
“My brothers needed me.” But that didn’t seem like enough of an explanation, so he added, “A few years ago, we were all in this bar. It was a holiday—I don’t remember which—and there we were, sitting in awkward silence, brooding into our drinks. We spent more time apart than together, only meeting up if we all happened to be stateside at the same time, and it was getting to the point that they felt like strangers to me.”
He winced at the memory. When it had dawned on him that he didn’t know his brothers anymore, he’d realized something had to change, because as a family, they were failing miserably.
“What did you do?” Sage asked.
“Out of the blue, Greer suggested we could go into the private eye business together.”
“Just like that?”
“Pretty much, yeah. We had never talked about doing anything like that before. I had planned to stay in the Navy for life and didn’t want to do anything else. But then I looked over at Jude. He had just come home from an up-close-and-personal with death in Afghanistan and several of his friends were missing, presumed prisoners of war. And it suddenly hit me—how close we’d come to having an empty seat and untouched beer at our table instead of our youngest brother.” He still remembered the moment of sheer terror that came with the realization, and how he’d swallowed it down with his beer and reassessed his priorities right then and there. “So when Reece offered the money to start Wilde Security, I agreed not to re-up in the Navy at the end of the year and to try my hand at private investigation. Because my brothers needed me to stay in DC.” And he’d needed to stay for them. They were all shaken by Jude’s close call and were desperate for the solidarity of family right then.
Problem was, his brothers didn’t need him anymore. Except for Greer, they were all married off now and living happily-ever-fucking-afters. Jude and his wife Libby had even recently announced they were expecting a baby this fall, which was just fucking weird. Not that he thought his youngest brother wouldn’t make an excellent father. If any of the Wildes were equipped for fatherhood, it was prankster Jude, who was still a kid at heart.
But shit, Vaughn wasn’t exactly good uncle material. He’d probably scare the kid back into its mother’s womb the first time he met it.
And now that the baby-making had started, he bet it wasn’t going to stop any time soon. Cam and Eva wanted kids, and it was only a matter of time until they decided to go for it. Reece and Shelby…who the hell knew with those two? They were completely unpredictable as a couple and crazy enough to try parenthood.
Apparently, Vaughn and Greer were the only sane ones left in the family.
“You’re lucky to have them,” Sage said softly, drawing his attention back to the conversation. “Your brothers, I mean. And your sisters-in-law. You’re lucky.”
“Yeah, I am,” he admitted, because as much as his constantly growing family sometimes annoyed the hell out of him, he wouldn’t want it any other way. He looked toward her voice, but since there was no moon, he only saw a vague outline of her face and body. “Libby’s pregnant.”
He wasn’t sure why he said it. Except that when Sage was living as Lark, she’d been one of Libby’s best friends, and he thought it was something she should know.
“Oh,” Sage whispered, and if he wasn’t mistaken, there was a note of wistfulness in her voice. Maybe even a faraway hint of sorrow. “I’m so happy for them. At their wedding, she mentioned they wanted to start a family as soon as possible.”
“The wedding.” He exhaled a short laugh. “Seems like years ago now. That blue dress Libby had you wear must’ve broken some decency laws. In all the best ways.”
“We were in Key West,” she said, and a smile seeped into her voice. “I don’t think they have decency laws.”
“You had every man in the place drooling all over themselves.”
“Including you, if I remember correctly.”
“I don’t drool.”