A SEAL's Secret

Between training, taping and touring, she’d spent the last year with burlesque dancers, strippers and, for a memorable couple of weeks, drag queens. All the while she’d listened to them and her crew exchange salacious stories, share intimate encounters and dish naughty details.

She finally had something worth sharing, and the words wouldn’t come out.

Not for the first time she wondered what was wrong with her. Why couldn’t she just put it out there, the good, the bad and the ugly? Or in Mitch’s case, the incredible?

“I can’t believe you were so rude,” she said instead. “I’ve never interrupted you like that. I’m pretty sure this means you still owe me.”

Tessa grimaced but didn’t deny the claim.

“So you cut your flirting short,” she said instead, setting her own fruit and yogurt on the table. “It’s not as if anything between the two of you had a chance of going anywhere.”

“A kiss and a date,” Livi reminded her.

Tessa scowled.

“You’re not really going through with that, are you? It was a tie. There’s no way anyone can expect you to pay double when you essentially won.”

“Mitch didn’t lose,” Livi said, running her tongue over her bottom lip as she remembered him making that point.

“He didn’t win, though. So nobody has to pay.” Tessa threw her hands in the air and paced from one end of the living room to the other. Unlike Livi, she hadn’t changed out of her costume. Even dressed in colorless white, she contrasted clashingly with the soothing shades of lilac and pool-blue of the room.

“Nobody?” Livi ventured. “Or you?”

Tessa stopped mid-pace, her glare hot enough to melt glass.

“Okay, what’s the deal?” Livi demanded, straightening with her shoulders back and chin high. As if great posture would allow her to win the argument. “I’ve known you for eight years and in all that time I’ve seen you with hundreds, maybe thousands of men. You either seduce or freeze. You never get angry. So what’s your problem with Gabriel?”

Tessa kept glaring, but Livi could tell she had to work for it. Finally, the brunette rolled her eyes.

“Thousands?”

“Sure. I count all the men I’ve ever seen you with. Fans, dancers, waiters. That old man who lives in the apartment below you.” Livi waited a beat, then snapped her fingers and added, “The little boy who broke your window last year. What was his name?”

“Billy.” Tessa’s lips twitched. “I do not seduce eight-year-olds.”

“Of course you do. Not sexually.” Seeing that Tessa still hadn’t touched her bowl, Livi stole one of her strawberries. “But you pour on enough charm to get the guy—or little boy, in this case—to fall head over heels for you, making him so crazy he’ll do anything you want.”

Livi leaned forward to take a blueberry, but Tessa moved her bowl before Livi could reach it.

“What’s your point?” Tessa snapped.

“My point is I’ve never seen you argue with a guy. Especially not a good-looking, sexy, available one. But you were right up in Gabriel’s face. Why?”

Tessa’s face closed up. Something flashed in her eyes, a pain Livi had seen before. But no matter how often she’d offered to listen, no matter how good of a friend she tried to be, Tessa kept whatever had caused that pain locked away tight.

“Have you met Gabriel before?” Livi couldn’t help but ask.

“I know exactly what kind of guy he is. He’s military. He’s totally dedicated to one thing and one thing only. His career. Guys like that say they’ll be back. They make all sorts of promises. But they never keep them.” Tessa waved her hand through the air as if shooing away all those broken promises. “I know you think they’re hot, Livi. But they belong in the look-but-don’t-touch category. And more importantly, don’t be touched.”

Tessa gave her a questioning look.

“Oh, no. It doesn’t work that way.” Livi shook her head and wagged her finger at the same time. “You don’t want to tell me what your issue with Gabriel is—that’s your choice. But you don’t get to use those issues to keep me away from Mitch.”

Tessa opened her mouth. Livi leaned forward. She wondered if she’d finally find out what the hell her friend’s problem with military guys was. Then the brunette snapped her teeth shut and shrugged.

“You’re seriously going to date the guy?” Anger gone, leaving her looking empty for a moment, Tessa dropped onto the pale blue couch, shifting the watercolored pillows aside. “Livi, you know I’m not big on rules. Especially not rules made by people for their good and not your own.”

Livi puffed out her cheeks, knowing where this was going.

“But put aside the drama you know Pauline will create if she finds out a lowly sailor has had the gall to put his hands on her daughter, and think about her reasons for objecting.”

“Mitch isn’t just a sailor. He’s a SEAL,” Livi pointed out stubbornly. As if making it worse was going to help.

Tessa gave a look that echoed Livi’s thought.

“Livi, your mom is the last person I’d defend in almost any situation except this one. Here, she’s got a right to be biased, don’t you think?”

Livi dropped her gaze to her lap, watching her fingers as they combed through the knotted fringe of her amethyst throw.

She’d grown up fatherless. The word Unknown had been typed in the Father box on her birth certificate. As far as Pauline had been concerned, Livi might as well have been conceived at a sperm bank. Actually, for quite a few years Livi had wondered if she had been. But her mother had always refused to even tell her that much.

It hadn’t been until Roz had contacted her that Livi had found out anything about her father. Apparently Roz hadn’t even known she had a niece until a sailor who’d happened to know her brother stopped in her bar and started reminiscing. When he’d wondered what’d ever happened to Trent’s kid, Roz had gone ballistic, calling in favors and tapping sources until she’d found out.

She’d been the one to break it to Livi that her father had died during Hell Week of SEAL training. But that wasn’t why Pauline felt Navy guys should be castrated right after being sworn in. It was because Trent Evans had walked out on her when she was five months pregnant to chase his dream of being a SEAL, telling Pauline that a family would only hold him back.

He’d paid sporadic child support for the first couple of months of Livi’s life, but had been too focused on his goal of getting into SEAL training to bother to see her. By the time she was six months old, he’d achieved his dream of going to BUD/S, and lost his life.

Livi knew all of this secondhand. She didn’t know if her mother had loved her father. She wasn’t sure if they’d been together long, or what sort of relationship they’d had. She had no idea if it’d been hard on her to raise a child alone.