Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 71880 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 359(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71880 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 359(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
And we had lift-off.
“We grew up together.” He dumped the dough from the bowl onto the counter and continued kneading it. “Joel and Piper were best friends. Same classes and whatnot. When I got my license, Pop handed over the keys to his old truck and said it was mine—on the condition that I drove my sister places when she needed a ride. And more often than not, Joel was right next to her.”
All right. If I remembered correctly, Elliott was about four years older than his sister.
“And when did things turn into a love triangle?” I asked.
He snorted softly. “Christ.” Then he cleared his throat. “I guess after they graduated high school. I was home on leave from the Navy after a minor injury, and…Joel…” He exhaled a little laugh. “He put himself out there, I guess you can say. My sister’s always been in love with him, but he didn’t see it.”
“He saw you instead.”
He nodded once, focusing too intently on the dough. “We hooked up for a couple weeks before I went back in, and he was off to college. Didn’t see him again until fifteen years later.”
I let out a low whistle. A lot had happened in those fifteen years. I mean, I remembered Elliott when he’d been married to…I wanted to say Lizzie…?
“By then, he and Piper had drifted apart,” he went on. “Blake was a year old—her sperm donor of a father had split. I was on the brink of divorce. Joel was married to the Coast Guard, stationed in Jacksonville—but he was deployed outta San Diego a few months of the year. That’s how we ran into each other. No, wait.” He paused, stuck in a memory. “I was down visiting Piper—it was Blake’s first birthday. And Joel was in town helping his ma move.”
“Got it.” I went to get a few oven trays and parchment paper.
“It doesn’t matter,” he sighed. “We hooked up again. I thought—I don’t know. We wanted more, but the timing was shit. We kinda agreed to reconnect in a year, when I was done with my contracts and I’d divorced Lizzie. He was gonna transfer to a helicopter unit in San Diego too.”
Something told me that never happened.
“Do you remember the clusterfuck in Uzbekistan?” he asked.
I frowned, thinking back. “Was that the arms deal back in 2015?”
“We thought it was an arms deal,” he replied. “Mathis uncovered three goddamn factories and a whole network of operations—they were supplying weapons to every side of the war in Syria. My two months there turned into almost five.”
“Jesus,” I muttered. “River and I were in Bangladesh then, I think.”
“Sounds about right.”
“Okay, so what happened when you rotated back home?” ’Cause I was invested now, goddammit. I wanted my buddy to get his happy ending.
“I divorced Lizzie.” He shrugged. “I was getting ready to call Joel and, you know…”
I smiled. Check him out, all awkward and cute. It was a new side to the gruff, rough-around-the-edges Elliott Jones I knew.
“I didn’t call right away, because I still had one more contract with Tariq,” he said. Fuck, it hurt to hear Tariq’s name. “But I talked to Piper, and she was happy to let me know she and Joel had reconnected. They were friends again, and he was in the middle of his transfer—or he was about to transfer.”
“And she was still into him, I take it?”
He lifted a shoulder and began dividing the dough between the oven trays. “She didn’t say anything at the time, but… I can only assume. Because when I came home again, she told me they were dating.”
Fucking ouch.
“One year and three months,” he said. “He told me to call him up in about a year—and I guess those three extra months made all the difference. He’d moved on. He was suddenly Blake’s dad and Piper’s future husband.”
This wasn’t my brand of romance at all. What the fuck?
“You tell a horrible love story,” I told him.
He smirked wryly. “What part of us bein’ unable to stand each other made you think this was gonna be a rom-com?”
“Because you can’t quit starin’ at his ass.” I shrugged. “And you get all fussy and worried and shit.”
I’d fucking been there tonight, hadn’t I? I’d heard him through the comms. Emerson had picked up on it earlier too. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have put Elliott and Joel on the same team.
“Tell me you at least talked to him at some point,” I said. “Maybe there was a misunderstanding.”
“I tried.” He widened his eyes. “He did a complete 180 on me. I went down to visit—and to ask him what the fuck was going on—and he avoided me like the plague. The fuck was I supposed to do, beg him to explain why he’d chosen my sister over me? Christ, like I wasn’t already humiliated enough.”