Never Mine: A Base Branch Novella (Titan World) Read online

  Ashlyn sat atop Jilly’s muscled shoulders. In his oldest daughter’s eyes and personal disposition, he saw himself; brown and stalwart. She had Amery’s hair, as did Aria, who propped atop her mother’s shoulders like her own personal mini-me. Every girl donned a laughing smile that both warmed his heart and chilled it.

  They’d been so happy, and he’d missed out on the contagious joy for the spraying bullets and battle cries of his enemies.

  “Can we, Daddy?” Ashlyn tugged on the hem of his coat. Her eye lit with hope. A fraction of the smile she boasted in the picture curved her precious mouth and restored his hope that they would see that level of joy again.

  He wanted to promise them the trip more than the world, but Jillian had kept her distance lately. Whether they were the sad reminders of all she’d lost or work really was that busy, the fact remained.

  “I’d like that, but we’ll have to see, girls.”

  Their disappointment deflated the room. Before it completely collapsed around them, he pulled open the coveted jewelry drawer. Curiosity instantaneously rebounded their moods.

  “Wow.” Ashlyn sighed.

  “I want that one and that one and that one and…” Aria went down the rows claiming each of them.

  “Not fair. If she can have more than one, I want more too.” Ashlyn reached into the drawer.

  “Wait.” He commanded a team of the most elite soldiers in the world but lost control of his girls quickly and often. “Aria, you may pick two things. Ashlyn, you may pick one thing, since you already have the bracelet your mom gave you. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.” Ashlyn snagged a costume necklace with chains that cascaded to a point.

  “Yes, sir.” Aria dove headfirst into the drawer. He had caught her ham hocks before she smashed her face on a thickly wrapped set of pink beads his wife had worn exactly one time. She’d chosen the flashy things to go with a white cocktail dress for a springtime rooftop party in downtown D.C. before Aria had been a concrete thought. Aria grabbed the matching bracelet.

  “Everyone happy now?” He righted Aria and eyed them both. The girls nodded. “Great. Let’s go see Jilly and Momma.”

  “Can we go visit Boo again?” Aria whined.

  “Boomer,” Ashlyn corrected.

  “We’re due for another visit, soon.” Callum needed to see Jillian for more than a sense of familial health. He needed to grow his surprise idea on her.

  Aria wiggled out of his arms. A clacking herd of tiny high heels thundered out of the room and down the hallway. He followed them, turning off the myriad of electronics and lights left in their wake, and fastened them both into the back of his shiny black pickup. They drove the quiet Washington streets. The girls only managed to ask a hundred questions each before they pulled down the gently winding path and parked.

  Jillian stood next to her own shiny black pickup. The damn truck brought a smile to his face. They’d argued their respective brand loyalty and merits until Amery had threatened to beat both vehicles with baseball bats if they didn’t stow it. Jilly promptly reminded Amery that she didn’t own a baseball bat, to which Amery told her bandage scissors and medical tape would work just fine.

  In the backseat, the girls squealed. Ashlyn’s seatbelt hit the wall. She wiggled out of her booster and lunged at Aria, making fast work of her sister’s five-point harness. Before he turned off the truck, both girls had bailed. He could see them one day not too long from now trying a tuck and roll from a moving vehicle just for the hell of it.

  “Jilly!” The girls’ screams filtered through the glass and metal, accentuating just how long it had been since they’d seen the woman who’d been a second mother to them. Hell, when Amery had deployed after having Ashlyn, Jilly had done it all and rejoiced in the time spent with his little girl and him. She’d been the annoying little sister he’d always wanted. He’d been the annoying big brother she’d never wanted. Amery always said she loved them both because he and Jilly were the same damn person. The only difference was he had a penis. To which Jilly would say, ‘I have a penis some nights.’

  Shit, he hadn’t realized how much he missed her.

  She stood at attention, which accentuated the way her white trench coat hugged her breasts, narrow waist, and full hips. The moment her eyes lit on the girls, Jillian’s thick lips spread across her straight teeth—except for her upper right canine. A surprised chuckle rumbled in his belly, thinking about how much hell he’d given her over the years about that cute little tooth.

  Ashlyn and Aria crashed into Jilly’s trouser-covered legs, causing her to teeter on the skinny heels of her boots. Her infectious laugh, too often masked in sarcasm, jolted through his truck into his chest. He killed the engine, grabbed the girls’ coats, and climbed out.

  “Hey girls, be careful with her.” The cold smacked his face as he headed for the trio.

  Jillian’s smile faltered. She straightened from hugging the girls and patted them on their heads. The closer he moved, the farther she backed away. Her index finger pointed at him accusingly. “Your dad has your coats.”

  Interesting.

  Right after the accident, they’d spent nearly every waking, non-working hour together, consoling the girls and staying afloat. As time passed, her visits grew farther and farther apart and her excuses for not coming around multiplied.

  “It’s good to see you, Jilly.” The girls ran to his feet. He purposefully held Jillian’s gaze, measuring her reaction, while he helped each girl wiggle into her coat.

  “Yeah, well…” She shoved both hands into her pockets and shifted like the guilty party she was. “Work has been crazy.” Her shoulders bobbed. “Lots of workshops, but you know, it’s better that than people getting themselves blown to bits.”

  He let his hiked gaze fall to the girls and then rise back to hers. Lipstick chewed lips sank into her mouth for another round of biting. She sighed and then offered the girls her hands. “All right, girlies, you ready?”

  As was tradition, his daughters placed their little hands in Jillian’s and the ladies headed through the maze of graves to Amery’s headstone. Callum did as expected, hanging back—but not daring to lean on Jilly’s offensive brand of truck—to give them time. They called it girl talk, and honestly, he was afraid to know what they gabbed about.

  This time, though, it seemed like she used it as an excuse to run away from him. Maybe she ran toward Amery—her best friend, her family.

  One girl on either side of her, Jilly stood stiff and stilted as if she didn’t know how to act in her own body. Knowing her as long as he had, he’d never seen her act so unsure. She’d always been the type to run full tilt into a room of strangers, arms wide, ready for anything. She had ferreted out each of their life stories before she left with no more than a stiff drink and a laugh.

  Callum folded his arms against his chest. This was the first time he and the girls had been to the grave in two months. It was normal and right to move on. They didn’t need to visit his wife’s grave every day to remember her.

  This was the first time he didn’t want to visit. He wasn’t forgetting Amery. He thought about her, not as often as he used to, but he talked to her about big decisions in the girls’ lives. With each passing day and the finality of her death, his connection to her faded. Maybe it was just young love or rushed love, which tended to happen with a baby on the way. Maybe it was the time spent apart on missions, or perhaps, he was just a cold-hearted bastard.

  Ashlyn’s sobs reached through his musings. Callum straightened and found the more stalwart of his two children crumpled on the ground in front of her mother’s tombstone. He took one step but stalled. Jilly melted to the grass and pulled Ashlyn into her arms like she used to, as she should. Aria, not one for being left out, cranked out her own sobs and clung to Jilly’s white coat. The woman enfolded her into the knot of little limbs and frilly pink cotton and bound them together as a unit.

  She hugged them as fiercely as he’d ever seen. Moments later, her own sob lifte
d on the breeze and filleted him wide. The need to comfort his girls overwhelmed him.

  Whoa. Jillian wasn’t his girl. Then why’d he think his girls?

  He’d known Jilly for nearly eight years, and she fell under the umbrella of his aggressively protective nature. If she hadn’t beat him to the literal punch, he’d have dealt with her scumbag fiancé—what was it—three years ago. Until today, the stubborn woman never seemed to need a shoulder to cry on or arms to hold her together. So sure, she was one of his girls.

  Instinct carried him up the slight incline and past the all-too-familiar graves. He saluted Amery’s headstone and then knelt. His arms spread wide and secured three weeping bodies. Only Jillian’s met his chest and crotch.

  Christ. Here he was, in front of his wife’s grave, holding her best friend and his girls and noticing the way her lush, firm curves pressed against his junk.

  Callum focused on Aria's scrunched, red face and the deep sobs that wracked Jillian’s frame. He didn’t rock or soothe them; he just held them together, held them to him, and found solace in their warm, living bodies.

  Jilly’s fingers sank into his forearms, clinging through the material. Soon, the hands slid to the backs of his hands and hugged them against his daughters’ heads. Her face burrowed into the crook of his arm for a blissfully long moment that stopped his heart and scrambled his brains. Too soon, she straightened and tamed her tears. She planted fat kisses on the girls’ heads who still wept in her arms.

  “Girls,” Jilly whispered. They ignored her attempts to soothe and shush them, too far gone into their misery.

  There was only one thing to do when the girls were too far gone in any emotion to pay attention. He sang, or rather barked, a cadence song from his days in BUDS.

  “A hostage situation,

  It started in Iran.

  And then the bloody Russians,

  Invade Afghanistan.”

  Aria’s head perked. “HEY!” She’d added the punctuation with more gusto before, but he’d take it.

  “Men at war-oooooor,

  Men at war-oooooor,” Ashlyn chimed.

  “Late at night when your sleeping, UDTs come a creeping,” he continued.

  “All around-ooooound, A creeping all around, HEY!” They both joined in and continued to the next verse without him. Each line grew more boisterous than the last until they became a graveyard spectacle.

  When they hit the line about the enemy finding their leader dead, Jillian jabbed him in the ribs. She tossed a glare over her shoulder. “And you gave me grief about saying blown to bits?”

  “Somebody has to give you a hard time.” Probably not the best choice of words but old habits and all. Usually, when he delivered the line, he added a suggestive brow waggle. This time, since his hard time was wedged against her ass and they were atop his wife’s dirt-covered coffin, he kept his eyebrows still.

  Jilly freed his chanting girls. He stood and offered her a hand up. Like always, she stood on her own two feet. Unlike always, she took a large step back.

  Her heel caught the edge of Amery’s tombstone. Both her arms flew back, and she careened backward over the granite slab and toward the ground. Aria and Ashlyn screamed. He lunged and caught Jillian around the waist. His hands fit too damn well in the sloping crook.

  She scrambled off the side of the slab and out of his arms like he was a straight-up perv. And wasn’t he?

  “Are you okay, Jilly Billy?” Ashlyn ran to her side.

  “Daddy catched me from falling too.” Aria hiked a thumb at her chest.

  “Caught,” he corrected.

  “Yeah, he caughted me.” Her prideful smile was too big for him to bother with correcting her again.

  “Come on, girls.” Jilly reached for their hands and rushed toward the trucks. “I’ll buckle you in tight.”

  “Are we going to the beach now?” Aria stared up at her with wide eyes. “Daddy said we could go to the beach. You, me, Ashy, and him.”

  From a yard back, he couldn't see Jillian’s face. He didn’t need to when it was evident her rigid posture returned. When she reached the truck, her boot heels struck the asphalt with deafening blows, even at his distance. He hung back and watched as she buckled Ashlyn into the rear passenger side and hugged her tightly enough that it seemed like a goodbye.

  She scooped Aria into her arms, rounded the tailgate—away from where he stood at the grill—and repeated the ritual. He walked on the silent feet he used for murder and blocked her retreat with his frame.

  Jillian turned and jumped as if she weren’t a highly trained and combat-proven soldier. “God, Callum. Make some noise, would you?”

  “Nope.” He grinned. “It’ll get me 86’d.”

  “Daddy, what does 86’d mean?” Ashlyn asked.

  “It means you don’t need to know.” He lifted his gaze to his daughter for one second, and Jilly slipped under his arm and dipped around the open door. He winked at his girls, closed them in the warmth, and followed the woman he thought he knew but was beginning to understand less and less.

  “What’s your deal, Jilly?” he barked.

  “My deal?” Her long loose hair fanned wide as she spun in a short angry tornado. “I thought your new gig was safer.”

  “It is. I’m not leaving the girls, but I can’t lose my touch.”

  She backed toward her door.

  “You still didn’t answer my question,” he reminded.

  “I don’t have a deal. I’m cold and tired.”

  “You’re acting like you don’t know me—like we haven’t laughed the hours away over a bag of potato chips and a beer, like I haven’t carried your drunk ass in from my back lawn and held your hair back when you puked on my carpet, like—”

  “I get it.” When she got angry, her upper lip curled into a sneer, revealing her little crooked tooth.

  “Whether you’re acting weird as shit or not, I know you. I’ve never known you to shirk from confrontation. So nut up.” Again, maybe not the best choice of words. He hated how different things were now that Amery was gone. Things he’d said to her a thousand times before never seemed crude or inappropriate until today.

  “You told the girls we’d go to the beach together?”

  “I told them we’d see. Besides, what’s the big deal if we did? Amery wouldn’t want us to never go to the beach again because she’s dead.”

  “Us? You and me? You don’t see anything wrong with that?”

  “Just because Amery is gone, I’m not going to get weird on you, Jilly.” He hoped, at least.

  She braced both hands on her hips and puffed out her chest. He’d said something wrong, and he didn’t have a damn clue what it was or how to make it better.

  “The girls would love to see you more. They need stability. We need you in our lives like…”

  “Like before?” One severe brown brow arched.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I need…” Her lips pressed together, rubbing off the last of her lipstick.

  “What do you need, Jilly?”

  Her anger fell away. Hollow eyes welled with sadness. “I need distance.”

  “From the girls?”

  “No.” Her head shook.

  “From what, then?”

  “From you.”

  He knew the words were coming. They still hurt like a motherfucking knife to the guts. “Why?”

  “Have you gone through Amery’s things?”

  He should have kept his mouth shut. Jillian had gone through everything with the girls, boxed up what they wanted to keep, donated a lot, and boxed up things that he needed to go through. He hid the boxes at the back of the closet and went on about his life.

  “I’ll text you with my new schedule. I’ve signed on with a private outfit for some trial runs.”

  “You retired from the Navy?” he croaked.

  “You’re not Navy anymore, Base Branch.” She used the name of his employer like a curse word.

  “Yeah, but I told you before I did it.�
��

  Jillian opened the door. “You wouldn’t have approved.” She climbed into the cab, slammed the door, and left him all alone with his dead wife and precious girls.

  3

  Four months later…

  Jillian squeezed her wide hips through a long ago abandoned cook chimney. If Callum were here, his big hands could press her ass cheeks together and wedge her into the space, which was exactly why she was here and he wasn’t. Rock and dirt scraped her cheek as she dropped the ten or so feet into the old adobe section of the aggregate complex. Damn dirt floor didn’t give and the impact stung all the way to her brain stem. She gritted and rolled toward the corner. The barrel of her AR-15 scanned under an old cot. No tangos.

  “In position,” she whispered in the comms link.

  “Let’s move,” Colby Winters ordered in her ear.

  She crouched at the door and counted down. Three. Two. One.

  Rocco’s we’re-here-to-fuck-up-your-night explosion shook the building. Bits of dirt and debris rained from above. Lights flickered. Jillian blinked a chunk from her eyelashes and reached for the solid wood door, ready to move down the hallway to point B.

  A blast of heat enveloped her and tore the door from its rusty hinges. Red and black clouds tossed her into the far wall as if she weighed less than Amery did. The impact thieved her breath. Garbled voices hollered into the earpiece, but she couldn’t hear them over the sharp ringing of her eardrums. Talk about permanent hearing loss, which wouldn’t matter if she died today.

  Jillian’s heart rate spiked. Now, she knew what it took to clear her mind of Callum and the girls. All she could think about was not dying. Distance from Callum’s sculpted arms and the memory of how amazing they felt wrapped around her had been the goal. Death had not.

  Another blast shook the foundation. This time, farther away.

  “Fuck,” she growled.

  Again, noise cracked in her comms.

  “Can’t hear shit except the ringing, but I’m alive.” She shoved the door off and scrambled to her feet. Dust fogged the doorway.