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He snapped his mouth shut, then opened it just as fast. “It was a friend thing.”
“It looked friendly all right,” I rolled my eyes and started to push past him, heading to my car. “If you’ll excuse me, this box is heavy.”
It wasn’t, but he didn’t need to know that.
“Anyway, did you care about me at all? Or what about your safety? Do you care that you getting hurt would break me?” he snapped at my back.
I froze, then turned to look at him.
“Do I care about you at all?” I laughed. “No. I don’t think I do. You were able to end us so easily, without a single ounce of discussion about your choice, and you expect something different from me? At least I was in the right, here. I have no boyfriend. I don’t need to share my life with strangers and people I once knew. So no, I don’t care about you anymore, Quinn. You saw to that.”
Two days later, I was on a bus heading to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, fresh out of bootcamp, with an anger burning deep inside of me that would continue to overwhelm me for a long time to come.
And everything about Dallas and Quinn Carter was in my rearview mirror.
If I was a bird, I’d fly into a ceiling fan.
—Shayne to Quinn
SHAYNE
2 and a half years later
The knowledge that he was now an officer in the Marines was what changed my career path.
The old saying, “Anything you can do (I can do better)” stuck with me over the years.
But he would not be better than me.
I would make sure that I was his equal.
Which was why I went the Army warrant officer route, and decided to fly.
Rotary wing aviator warrant officer.
That was the official title.
It took a long time to accomplish it.
I had to pass a lot of tests. Complete WOCS—warrant officer candidate school. WOFT—warrant officer flight training—came next. SERE—survival evasion resistance escape was after. And finally, secret security clearance.
It was a very long, drawn out process, but in the end, I’d made the jump.
And. I. Loved. It.
I had no clue that my love of flight would help fix a hole in my heart the size of Quinn.
And though I still thought about him often, I now had a second love of my life.
It was on my first night back after a six-month stint in Afghanistan that I saw him.
The odds of us meeting in the middle of a backwater bar in remote New Jersey were few and far between.
It was apparent that he was working, or here in an official capacity.
He was dressed in his Marine Corps dress blues, speaking with another man beside him, when he finally noticed me across the bar.
I turned away the moment his eyes met mine, my heart thundering.
