any man.
“Fine. I wake up at four and hit the snooze button twice before I finally have to jump out of bed and hurry through my shower. Once I get to the bakery I am almost awake. I have a cup of coffee and start making the pastries we need for the morning. Staci gets there about the same time as I do and the first fifteen minutes are eerily quiet until we both wake up and then we start talking.”
“What do you talk about?”
“Anything, everything and nothing. You know? We just talk and then the day speeds by and when it’s six we close up and head home.”
“That’s a long day,” he said.
“Yes, but I like it. We’re closed on Sunday and Monday and I always wake up at four and can’t go back to sleep. It’s so frustrating.”
He chuckled, and for a moment she forgot the past and the baggage they both had. She felt as though she was on a date, and she relaxed for the first time in more than five years.
“I hate that.”
“Does it happen to you?” she asked.
He shook his head and she had to laugh. It figured. He was the kind of man who was too regimented ever to have that kind of sleeping issue. He probably ordered his body to exercise and it did it.
But he wasn’t a machine, no matter how much he might seem so on the surface. She knew that he was a man and he wanted—no, needed—something from her. Some sign that there was more to life than what he’d known, and she was so afraid to go down this path with him.
But she wasn’t about to let herself chicken out.
4
JAY DIDN’T BELIEVE in luck. He’d seen too many guys with four-leaf-clover tattoos leaving in body bags to think that there was anything in this world that could influence his fate. He’d kind of always known he made his own luck and sitting across from Alysse on the beach with the waves crashing on the shore...well, it was about as lucky as he’d ever felt.
Tonight he’d realized how little he knew Alysse and that had maybe been why he’d left. Perhaps that panicked sweat he’d woken up in the last morning he’d been in Vegas had had nothing to do with her large family and the expectations she had for him, and everything to do with the fact that he didn’t really know her outside of that king-size bed they’d shared.
He wanted to believe that. Truly, he did. But at the end of the day he’d taken one look at the sweetly sleeping woman and known deep in his soul he was going to hurt her. So he’d done it the quickest way possible. Got it over with and got out.
But then that damned IED had changed his life. And now he was back trying to carve something from the past that he should never have given up. It wasn’t as simple as reliving what they’d had because they couldn’t go back. He wanted to know if he could have the life he’d never experienced with her.
“So tell me about your near miss,” she said in a careful tone.
Alysse was the prettiest girl he’d ever known. He’d seen beautiful women before but there was something about her that had drawn him from the moment their eyes had met. And sitting across from her now, he was still enamored with her. She had mellowed toward him during dinner, though he knew he was still on the hot seat and she’d walk away from him without looking back.
“There’s not much to tell. The logistics of it won’t matter to you. Just know that I was lying in the sand, sun in my eyes and for a minute I thought I was dying. In that instant it came to me that I had no one. It sharpened all of my desires and all of my ideas of what life was about.”
She reached over and rubbed her hand down his arm, taking his fingers in her grasp and squeezing them gently. “I’m sorry you were alone.”
He nodded and looked away. Even though the sun had started to set, he’d kept his sunglasses on so she couldn’t read his emotions or see the fear he knew was in his eyes. She was too good for him, he thought, the way she was upset about him being alone even though he’d tossed her aside.
“It’s my own fault.”
“Yes, it is,” she said. “So you almost died and thought you needed someone to mourn you?”
“Nah. I almost died and I thought, Really, man, this is all you want out of life?” Faced with his own mortality, he’d acknowledged he wanted more than what he had. Yet he wasn’t too sure what he’d do with more if he got it.
The one thing he was sure of was that Alysse was the key to understanding that. She truly was the only woman he’d spent more than one night with. But he wasn’t about to tell her that. She was looking skeptical enough about his entire proposition.