Protecting Melissa (Holiday Cove 4)

“Shit!” He smacked himself in the face with the palm of his hand. “Damn it, I’m such an idiot. I didn’t even think about that.”

I smiled sadly. “Hey, don’t beat yourself up, okay? You’re new to this.”

He shook his head. “I should have known that, though.”

I tugged on his arm and he dropped it back around my shoulders. “It’s okay, Chase. Really.”

A heavy silence fell between us as we each wandered off into our own thoughts. My mind opened like a scrapbook of memories, each clip like a scene from a moment in time. The day that Henry and I met, when we got engaged, moving into the mansion, finding out about Jackson, and then Jackson’s birth. Each one flashed like a bright snapshot. Then they turned darker, a creeping edge of grey coming into focus. The first time Henry threw something across the room in a tirade, the three am screaming matches in the kitchen, the first time he hit me and shoved me to the ground.

They stopped on one moment, the moment he found me in the pantry after I’d overheard him planning the hit to take my life.

That was the last time I saw him. Our last conversation. The way I would remember him.

A cold hearted, power hungry monster.

The two images battled in my mind , and my emotions swung from horror, shock, grief, and relief. I didn’t know how to think. How to feel. It was so unexpected and so out of nowhere—it was hard to process. My heart broke and bled for Jackson. But then a second later, all I could think was Thank God, the nightmare’s over.

I shook my head, wanting all of the conflicting voices to go silent.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Chase asked.

“I don’t know what to say. It’s like someone ripped my heart out and put it in a blender. If I say I’m relieved, that I can finally go home and not be afraid anymore, that would make me a horrible monster. But at the same time, it’s hard to mourn someone who wanted to kill me or take my child away.”

“I understand. I don’t imagine there is one way to feel about this. It reminds me, at least in some small way, about how it feels to take a life as a soldier. In some ways, you’re relieved that you and the rest of your fellow soldiers are safe from danger. Sometimes it’s even this celebrated thing, like when a well-known terrorist is taken out. But there’s always a part of you that thinks about the fact that whoever you killed has a family somewhere. They are someone’s son, brother, husband, maybe even a father, and you know your actions just broke someone else’s heart.” Chase paused and shook his head, gathering his own thoughts. “Eventually, it all becomes too much to take.”

“Is that why you got out then?”

“Yes and no. I never really recovered after losing Stephen. That was the friend I mentioned. Without him, it wasn’t the same. I stayed in another year but I knew I couldn’t keep going.”

I rubbed my hand up his arm. Wishing to bring him some sliver of comfort. “Thanks for sharing that with me.”

He smiled at me. “Of course. You will have to be sworn to secrecy though. Knowing that sometimes SEALs cry is classified intel.”

“Your secret is safe with me.” I glanced down at myself. “Well, us, technically.”

Chase drew in a breath at the reminder. “No one else I would trust more.”

Somewhere a few feet away a vibration sounded. Chase dove to get the phone and I pushed off the floor and went to the kitchen to get something to clean up my mess. I wasn’t about to make Chase do it. That would be humiliating.

From the kitchen, I could hear Chase answer the phone. When I walked back into the living room with a rag and a bottle of cleaner, Chase clicked the call onto speaker mode. “Yes, we just saw it on the news here.”

“You did?” Matt asked, clearly surprised. “Where are you?”

“I guess there’s no reason to keep it a secret now,” Chase said, glancing at me for confirmation. I shrugged and lowered to the floor to clean the spot. “We’re on a little island near Manzanilla.”

“Oh, clever. Well, the news is all over the place here. I mean blasted all over the internet, the news, and I’m sure every newspaper tomorrow morning will have this story splashed across the front.”

Chase raked a hand through his grown out hair. He needed a haircut about as badly as Jackson did. “We didn’t really get the complete story…can you tell us?” He looked at me. “Wait, Matt, hold up.”

“What?” I asked, finishing the cleanup.

“Is this okay? Do you want to hear this right now? I can take it outside.”