Basic Training

“It’s not surprising. You almost died. You’ve been through several major surgeries. Months of rehabilitation. Your body’s still in the process of healing. You have a right to be tired.”

“It’s no excuse.” He turned to face her. He captured a caramel-colored tendril that blew across her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. “It’s no excuse for jumpin’ down your throat the way I did this afternoon.”

Her smile glinted in the moonlight like a fond memory. “You have many fine qualities, Travis. But patience has never been one of them. Your body needs time. Your spirit, too, from the sound of things.”

He nodded and pulled his hand away before sensations of silky hair and warm skin imprinted themselves on his fingertips. “I know Dad’s worried about me. Hell, half of Ashton’s worried. But I don’t know if I can do the vacation thing here. It feels like I’m hiding out, like I’m running from the fight.”

“Do you want to hire someone else to do your PT?”

“No. I don’t want to admit that I still need four more weeks of physical therapy, period.” A bit of the now-familiar frustration licked through his veins again. “My men are in a war zone right now. Hell. They’re not even my men anymore. I need to be there. I need to do my job. I’m letting them down.”

“Because you nearly lost your leg? Your life? I know you McCormicks live and breathe the military, but do you really have to be a superhero every waking moment?”

“You wouldn’t understand, T-bone. There’s never been something you wanted so bad for so long that that wanting becomes a part of you.”

With a sound that was almost a snicker, she turned away, leaving the shadows of the pier’s giant support pylons and heading along the beach, back toward their homes a half-mile away. Her dismissive sigh was a sobering reminder that he really knew how to spoil a mood these days. After grabbing his boots and socks, he followed her down near the water and watched her pick up a small stone. She drew back her right arm, waited for the right moment, and skipped the stone across the waves. Four, five, six hits. Nice.

“Hey, I see you’ve still got your throwing arm. Did you ever figure out how to hit a curve ball?”

Tess laughed and he felt a little less like the jerk he’d been earlier, a little more like the friend he’d been forever. She scooped up her sandals in her fingers and fell into step beside him. “I don’t play much hard-core softball anymore. The hospital has a team, but it’s pretty much for fun and not all that competitive. Not like what we played back in school.”

“So that’s a no?”

“Travis!” She swatted his arm and dashed ahead to pick up a relatively straight piece of driftwood, about three-feet long. She dropped her shoes, turned and lifted the skinny log up onto her shoulder like a baseball bat. “Okay, hotshot,” she dared him, “let’s see if you still have a curve ball before you start criticizing my game.”

He laughed. This was what he needed. Something normal. Something familiar. Something that didn’t depend on the state of his leg or his questionable ability to play the hero. “You want me to throw you a curve ball?”

The bat danced against her shoulder. “If you think you’ve still got it in you. Find a rock.”

He followed the nod of her head and picked up a palm-size rock. The little lady wanted to play, huh? Travis dropped his boots, spit on the rock and rubbed it smooth between his hands. “I led the baseball team to a state championship my junior year,” he reminded her.

“And I led the softball team my senior year.” She pointed the bat in his direction, tapped the sand, then put it back on her shoulder. “So far, you’re just a bunch of talk, McCormick. Let’s see some action.”

It didn’t take long to get into the spirit of a midnight game of stickball on the deserted beach. With his stronger right leg to brace himself, Travis reared back, went through the dramatic motion of an overhead pitch, then stopped his momentum to toss it underhand. Tess swung and missed, and the rock plopped into the sand behind her.

“What, are you afraid I’m going to actually hit the thing?” She tossed the rock back to him. “Now put it over the plate.”

Travis pitched. Tess swung. The smack of rock against wood startled them both into laughter. She jammed the rock into the sand just a few feet in front of her.

Travis snatched up the rock and moved in behind Tess. “You call that a swing?”

“You call that a pitch?” she countered.

“Like this, T-bone.” Travis grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her back against his chest. He tucked his chin against her temple and adjusted the bat over her shoulder. With one hand covering both of hers on the bat, he wrapped his free arm around her waist and turned her so that she was lined up with the imaginary plate. He tossed the rock into the air and swung the bat with her, making solid contact with the rock and driving it deep into Chesapeake Bay. He moved the makeshift bat back up into place and repositioned her, repeating the movement a second time. “You have to swing under it like this so you can drive the ball up instead of down into the ground.”

The sharp catch of Tess’s breathy sigh reached him over the rustle of waves on the beach. She went still in his arms, except for the curly tendrils of golden brown hair that blew against his cheek.

Travis froze. But he didn’t move his hand from the nip of her waist or move his face from the salty fresh dampness that clung to her hair. He didn’t want to move. Unless he moved closer.

Oh, man. He was in worse shape than he’d thought. This was not normal. If he was in this position with any other woman, he’d be nuzzling her neck right now. He’d be tossing the bat and pulling her down into the sand. He’d slide his hands beneath her shirt and unzip her shorts.

But Travis stood there, holding his breath.

This was Tess! A year off his game couldn’t have short-circuited every instinct in him, could it? Hot, needy urges careened through his body, but his brain couldn’t make any sense of them. This was so completely not the feeling he usually got hanging out with her. Yet the evidence was right there, nestled against his crotch and stirring things that were better left alone.

Tess Bartlett had a rockin’ ass to go along with those tits.

And he wanted them. He wanted her.

Bad.

3

“I’M AFRAID I’m gonna have to cancel our trip out to Longbow Island this week,” Hal McCormick’s chest-deep sigh revealed the depth of his disappointment.

Travis paused outside the kitchen, leaning on his cane as he eavesdropped on his father’s telephone conversation. Cancel? His father loved fishing.

“That’s not it,” Hal continued. “From what I hear, the striped bass are biting in the rock piles along the shore. We could catch our limit and have plenty to throw back…. Nope, that’s not the problem either. There’s a line of storms due in mid-week, but everything looks great right now.”

Was he hearing things right? Only the threat of severe weather kept his father on dry land these days. As a family, they’d always loved outdoor sports, but since the death of Travis’s mother nearly a decade ago, spending time on the water—preferably with a fishing rod in his hand—had become a way of life for his father.

After developing a heart condition, forced retirement from his position as a brigadier general in the USMC’s Quartermaster Corps had left widower Hal McCormick with two obsessions. One was his three children, and the other his fishing boat, which seemed to grow larger and newer with each passing year.

Travis tilted his head to spy out the sliding glass doors that faced the presently tranquil waters of Chesapeake Bay. Not a cloud in sight this afternoon. What was his dad up to? Frowning, Travis leaned back toward the archway to the kitchen. He had a bad feeling about this.

“There’s nothing wrong with the trawler, either,” Hal continued. “I would have loved you and the missus to come visit us but, well, it’s Travis. Personally, I’m just grateful he’s alive after that explosion. But he’s having a hard time with his recovery. It’s mental as much as physical if you ask me. You know how hard it is to keep a Marine down when his buddies are in the line of fire. You and I were the same way. A couple decades ago, at any rate.” Hal laughed as guilty bile pooled in the pit of Travis’s stomach. “Trav won’t even consider retirement from Special Ops. If he’s not careful, he’ll permanently cripple himself doing too much too soon. I need to be here to keep an eye on him.”

Well, didn’t that make him feel like he was about five years old again? Apparently, Travis wasn’t the only McCormick whose life had been altered by the accident.

“Ethan and J.C. helped me get him home, but Ethan has to report back to Quantico to prep for his class on Monday.” Travis had thought getting big brother out of the way would mellow out the elevated level of concern around here. Instead, it sounded as if his father was dialing his stress up another notch. “No, Caitlin and her husband couldn’t make it,” Hal went on. “She’s so close to term on her pregnancy, Walter, that I can’t ask her to leave Alexandria to take care of her brother. Maybe if she wasn’t in her ninth month.”

Travis shook his head, cursing silently. He was thirty-three. A grown man. A Marine captain. Not a child. And certainly not a wash-out who needed his daddy or anyone else to babysit him.

He could add guilt to the layers of frustration already weighing him down. Yeah, he had issues. But they were his problems to deal with, not his family’s. His life might have been put on hold for a year. but they weren’t going to suffer the same fate—not on his account.

Travis silently leaned the cane against the wall outside the kitchen. If the Velcro on the brace binding his left leg from thigh to ankle wouldn’t have made such a noise, he would have removed it as well to make the illusion complete. As it was, he tugged the frayed edge of his cut-off denim shorts over the top of the brace, fixed a grin on his face to counter the ache in his bones, and strolled into the kitchen to raid the leftovers from last night’s party.

“What, am I dying?” Travis teased, unwrapping a tray of cookies on the counter and studying them as though choosing between chocolate chip or ginger snap was the biggest challenge he had to face that day. “You aren’t seriously giving up a fishing trip for me, are you?”

Hal covered the receiver with his palm. “You’ve come home for a reason, son. I’m not about to abandon my duty. Walter understands.”

The sweet, spicy cookie he munched on suddenly tasted like sawdust.

Walter. As in General Walter Craddock. One of his father’s military cronies. Travis’s older brother, Ethan, had once reported to Craddock at the DOD—Department of Defense—at the Pentagon. He was one of the chiefs overseeing personnel assignments. An officer whose recommendation—or lack thereof—could make or break Travis’s chances of returning to Special Ops.

Not a man he wanted to appear weak in front of.

Travis swallowed the lump of sawdust and gestured for the phone. “Let me talk to him.”