Page 55

The world tilted, and I gripped the armrests of my rocking chair at the sudden onslaught of vertigo. His whole team?

He’d never told me that.

But the way Emma and Lennon talked about it, it wasn’t a secret. Jeremiah and Liam knew. Lennon had only been here since the summer, and somehow she knew this huge thing about him and I, his fucking wife, was left in the dark.

“Lila?”

I looked up at the sound of Emma’s concerned voice and found her and Lennon staring at me.

“Are you okay?” Lennon asked hesitantly.

“When?” I croaked, but I already knew. Seb had been honorably discharged from the Navy a month before we’d met in Greece, so his last mission couldn’t have been more than a handful of months before that.

Emma tapped her chin. “Hm. About four years ago? Yeah, that was the year Blair was a mermaid.”

I felt sick.

Five months. That was all that stood between a life-shattering loss and our wedding day. And he’d never said a damn word.

In the weeks after Seb had left, I’d asked myself why over and over again. Why did he leave? What had I missed? I turned over every memory of us, looking for clues. But I couldn’t find the answer.

Because I’d been asking the wrong question.

I shouldn’t have asked why he left.

I should have asked why he married me in the first place.

21

SEB

“This is going to hurt,” Lila warned. She didn’t look upset about the prospect.

“That’s fine. You can kiss it and make it better,” I teased.

She said nothing. Didn’t even twitch an eyebrow. It was like I hadn’t spoken at all.

I tilted my head, studying her. She had been acting oddly since the moment the game had ended and she’d all but thrown me into the ATV and driven us straight to my cabin. Last night probably had something to do with it. No matter what we had said in the moment, of course it had shifted something between us. A small part of me had hoped she was ready for round three.

All right, a large part of me had hoped for that.

All of me, if I was being honest.

So all of me had been disappointed when she’d pushed me into the bathroom, grabbed the first aid kit from under the sink, and told me to lose my pants.

Now I was sitting on the toilet with Lila standing between my thighs. She’d already cleaned and bandaged my knee and the grass burn on my shin. All of it in silence. Until this is going to hurt, she hadn’t said a single word to me.

“It looks like there are some threads stuck in the blood,” she said, frowning as she studied my arm. “I’ll be careful, but it’s definitely going to hurt.”

I tried to catch her eye, but she wasn’t having it. “It’s all right. Do what you have to do.”

Nodding brusquely, she pinched the torn fabric at my elbow and carefully loosened it from the nasty scrape Holly had given me. She was right. It fucking hurt.

“Lift your arms,” she said, and I did. Even with me sitting on the toilet, she had to stretch onto her toes to get my shirt off.

Tossing my tattered shirt aside, she surveyed my bare torso, eyes darting from one scrape to the next, and her lips flattened into an unhappy line.

“I’m okay,” I said. “We play rough. Nothing’s broken.”