A Lot Like Perfect

And afterward, his job should have been to help everyone pick up and move on. Motivate the guys, encourage them and above all, keep the team a cohesive unit. That’s what he’d always done. Except for this last time. They’d been sent home before he could work his magic. Meanwhile, he’d developed these weird episodes that felt like an elephant sitting on his chest.

The only thing that ever helped Isaiah’s lungs remember how to function was doing things that got his blood pumping, like edging along a two-by-four fifteen feet above a dusty barn floor. The riskier the better. If someone had offered sky diving in a fifty mile radius, he might have been off doing that but in a tiny town like Superstition Springs, he had to get his thrills where he could.

Aria’s red hair flashed in his peripheral vision as she moved farther into the empty barn to stand near Tristan. She usually wore it up in a sassy ponytail that showed off her cheekbones but today she had it down for some reason. An odd choice if she inte

nded to do any dirty work around this barn.

After a harrowing few minutes of tracking the length of the railing from one side to the other, Isaiah jumped to a wooden beam on the floor of the hayloft, then scrambled down the ladder to hit the ground. Safe. For all the good it did.

“Pay up.” He shoved his palm in Marchande’s direction.

“Bravo, mon frère,” Tristan commented drily as he slapped a buck in Isaiah’s outstretched hand. “Always a pleasure to see you wind up in one piece after taking a stupid bet.”

“You’re the one who came up with it, Le Torch,” he reminded him with a smirk, purposefully using the other man’s nickname, which Marchande hated, but that’s what he got when he insisted on speaking French. Isaiah pocketed the dollar, which he instantly forgot about. “If you didn’t want to lose, you should have thought up something harder, like walking the ridge of the roof.”

Marchande eyed the soaring ceiling decorated for the occasion with cobwebs as if actually contemplating the idea. “How would you even get up there?”

“I saw a hatch leading out to the roof when I was in the loft. It’s way in the back,” Isaiah said, half hoping Tristan would take him up on the new stakes.

The roof wasn’t that high. And if he fell, he could possibly use any injuries as an excuse to get out of these renovations, which Hardy shouldn’t have given him responsibility for in the first place. Isaiah wasn’t planning to stick around Superstition Springs much longer. If creating a school out of this donated former horse-house was so critical, one of the other guys should be on it.

Of course, he’d have to tell Caleb he had one eye on the exit in order for the mayor to get the point. So far, there’d been too much going on for Isaiah to even contemplate that conversation. Soon, though. He’d lost his right to be a member of the team and that’s what he’d always done his whole life when things didn’t work out—leave.

“A secret passage?” Tristan perked up in a jiffy, always on the alert for escape routes, vantage points for recon, a place to plant a scope. Even thousands of miles from any credible threats, he was still a SEAL. Like they all were.

“Maybe we should get back to work,” Aria suggested lightly. “Havana asks about our progress every night and takes these copious notes when I tell her. She’s so anal about her spreadsheets it makes me shudder.”

Grinning to show there were no hard feelings about her segue, Isaiah offered, “Caleb said Havana adds nine things to his to do list once every hour.”

Aria rolled her eyes and happened to catch Isaiah’s gaze in hers on the way around. “At least nine. That woman can out-organize Martha Stewart.”

Havana was Hardy’s fiancée, but she was also Aria’s older sister. Havana was an urban planner by trade and she’d been hired by the new mayor to plan the town’s rebirth as a tourist destination with a new-age soul, or at least that was how she’d sold it to everyone. It was a huge project with lots of moving parts, and Hardy was counting on everyone—Isaiah included—to do their share.

“Hopefully she won’t go to prison while doing it though,” Isaiah offered with an eyebrow waggle, drawing a smile from Aria that did something amazing to her eyes.

Wow. How had he never noticed just how blue they were? She had fair skin to go with her red hair and she never wore makeup, so there was nothing to detract attention from the clear depths below her lashes. He got a little caught up in examining that until he realized she was watching him expectantly.

Because someone had said something. To him. And he’d missed it.

He cleared his throat, casting about wildly for a clue that did not materialize until Marchande elbowed him. “We’re getting back to work. You included. Put away the Elmer Show.”

“I’m always the Elmer Show,” Isaiah argued good-naturedly.

Or at least he had been. Keeping the guys entertained was one of many magic tricks in his arsenal designed to keep the team glued together. Sometimes he put on a spectacle so they forgot their troubles, sometimes he did nothing more than provide a sounding board or a comforting hand to a teammate’s shoulder.

He’d been doing a crap job since al-Sadidiq. The team had splintered then, mostly because he had, and that’s why he needed to extract himself without a lot of fanfare. His challenge lay in getting right with the writing on the wall—he’d lost his place and nothing could change that.

That was the part he struggled with. He’d followed Hardy to Superstition Springs because that’s what everyone else had done. The five of them had packed up and jumped into the SUV Hardy had bought to drive from California to Texas readily enough, so Isaiah had gone along too. They were a team. Had been for almost a decade. But he didn’t really feel like he belonged with them anymore.

Because he was broken. It was his due penance to leave. He didn’t deserve to stay with the community of brothers he desperately wanted but couldn’t help.

“What’s the Elmer show?” Cassidy asked with undisguised fascination, her gaze tracking Isaiah closely as if she didn’t want to miss it if he did something else noteworthy.

He shrugged and started to respond when Marchande cut him off with a laugh.

“He’s always goofing around,” Tristan explained with a wink that Cassidy shrugged off with an icy glare.

A shadow drifted over Tristan’s too-pretty face as he caught the malevolent vibe. Marchande had a way with the ladies that usually scored him a much better response than the cold shoulder being aimed in his direction by one Miss Calloway, but oddly, instead of backing off, he dug in. “We call him Elmer. Like Elmer Fudd. It’s just a funny name.”