Page 25 of Her Faithful Protector

“You were all talk, but I can count on one hand the times that I saw you go pick up a woman at the bar. Yeah, the women who were interested in having a SEAL on their scorecard definitely came onto you and all the rest of us, but I never saw you leave with any of them, no matter how hard they tried. But the next day you’d be all braggadocios. Nope, didn’t compute at all.”

Thank God for the camouflage paint; otherwise, Kane could have seen the flush turning his face red. Yep, he sure screwed the pooch on that.

How many other teammates did I fail to con?

“So, back to my original question. Tell me about Camilla.”

“She was too good for me, that’s who she was. I wanted to marry her, but we were too young. I met her when she was sixteen and a half and I was seventeen. We were the quintessential high school sweethearts, if you can believe that.”

“What else?”

Kane kept his gaze forward, not missing anything. Nic forced himself to do the same, excising all visual memories of Cami from his brain so he could concentrate on the here and now.

“I already knew that I was going to join the Navy as an enlisted man. Follow in Dad’s footsteps. I wanted to be a SEAL, learn things from the ground up before I applied to be an officer.”

“Like we all don’t know that,” Kane smirked.

Nic went to adjust his rifle again, then stopped. It was a habit he had when he was uncomfortable, and a damn stupid one to have on a mission.

Keep it together.

“So how did joining the Navy pertain to you and Camilla?”

Nic climbed over a dead tree trunk, using a vine for support. “It was the one and only thing her parents and I ever agreed on—Cami needed to go to college, not become a Navy wife, following me around to each assignment.”

“You knew you were going to be in Coronado or Little Creek, what was the problem? She could have attended college there.”

“She was being scouted by schools like Yale, Harvard, and MIT. Full rides. I couldn’t get in the way of that. She was adamant that she could go to a school in Virginia or California, but it wasn’t the same thing.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“You don’t understand. She was – no, scratch that. She is brilliant. She planned to get a degree in Pure Mathematics.”

“Are you shitting me? I work with some of the best programmers on the planet and hardly any of them get that degree.”

“Her mother has a Ph.D. in Physics, her dad has a Ph.D. in Archaeology. She comes by it naturally.”

They stopped as they saw Ezio hold up his fist ahead of them.

“Got something,” Zed whispered through their receivers.

They all waited to see what Zed would say next. “This is where they camped. I have a body. It’s not one of the students.”

“Anything else?” Max whispered the question.

“Negative.”

“Proceed with caution. We don’t know if they left any surprises,” Max said. “Kane, has there been any info that’s come in yet about who we’re dealing with?”

“Negative,” Kane answered.

Kane was plugged into so many receivers, it was amazing that he had the bandwidth to question him, Nic thought as he rounded another stump. Seriously, that man was the king of multi-tasking.

A minute later they came upon the muddy clearing that marked where the group had camped for the night. The Jeeps had cut across through the light foliage into the clearing and then circled the area. It was clear that people had slept in the dirt.

“Found a Ding Dong wrapper,” Leo called out.

“I got me an empty snack pack size of Doritos.” Asher held up his prize.