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Surf had never been here before, most of his work as a SEAL and then with Prey led him to places in Africa or the Middle East, and his family certainly didn't have the money for international vacations when he was growing up. Most of the time, they barely had money for food and clothes. It hadn’t taken him long to learn to take any bills he found floating around the house so if no one fed him he could go and buy himself something before the money was spent on drugs or alcohol.
Now he was here in a beautiful country, displaying its autumnal glory with everything it had, to rescue the woman who had done the impossible and captured his heart. With a past like his, Surf hadn’t wanted to believe in happy endings. Love was a somewhat foreign concept to him, even though he’d seen his bosses all fall in love, along with most of the guys on his team.
But that was different.
They were different.
They hadn’t grown up on the streets, surrounded by gangs, drugs, alcohol, abuse, prostitution, and poverty.
They weren’t ruined like he was.
No one knew the truth about how bad things had gotten for him as a kid. His teammates knew he’d bounced back and forth between his mom and the foster system. They even knew there had been drug and alcohol addiction in his family. It was likely they could guess there had been some abuse, but there was no way they could guess just how terrible things had been, and there was no way he was going to tell them.
That was a secret he intended to take to his grave.
It wasn’t even something he wanted Lila to know, and he wanted a future with her and their baby.
As they drove through the quiet streets up in the mountains near Geneva, he tried to wrap his mind around who Lila had been and why she hadn’t told him. They’d been together for a month before he’d broken things off to try to keep her from winding up in the very position she now found herself in.
That was more than enough time for her to have dropped that bombshell.
Unlike his own past, being a child star was nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, it must have been an amazing way to grow up. Her family was cinema and TV royalty, four generations dominating the film industry. She’d been lighting up the screen since she was only a couple of months old, working well into her teens. She’d been talented, and once he found out who she was he actually remembered watching her in one of the TV series she’d starred in when he’d been lucky enough to spend the night at a friend’s house or while he was in the system, the only time he had access to a luxury such as a TV.
Lila had to be loaded, and she was used to movie stars and celebrities, mansions, fancy cars, and designer clothes. She’d traveled all over the world, flying first class and staying in five-star hotels. What was she doing with a man like him?
“Hard to believe that’s our girl,” Arrow said, leaning over Surf’s shoulder to glance at his phone where he had an episode of one of Lila’s shows playing.
“I … feel like I don’t know her anymore,” he admitted. His feelings for her hadn’t changed, and he was sure there was a reason she hadn’t told him who she was like he hadn’t told her everything about where he’d come from, and he wasn’t angry with her about it. It was just that he didn’t see how the former child star and the guy from the wrong side of the tracks could ever be together. They came from two different worlds.
“She’s still the same woman who thought she meant nothing to you but was determined that you deserved to know you were going to be a father,” Arrow said quietly.
“You mad she didn’t tell you?” Mouse asked from the front seat of their rental SUV.
“No,” he answered honestly. If he was it would make him a hypocrite. “Just confused. Why wouldn’t she want me to know? I mean, she grew up in front of the cameras, millions of adoring fans, and money to have everything she could ever want. Why wouldn’t you want people to know? She had talent. Could have made a lifetime career out of acting. Yet she lives in a small apartment in Manhattan and works as a 911 operator.”
“Sometimes things seem different on the outside looking in,” Brick said cryptically, and Surf had to wonder if they were just talking about Lila or something else as well.
“You think she wasn’t happy with her life?” he asked.
Brick shrugged. “What other reason would there be for walking away from it?”
“That why you left your old life behind?” Mouse asked Brick.
“Partly,” the man said tightly. Brick never spoke about his family or why he had chosen the military instead of following his father into politics, and they all knew better than to push.
Sometimes you couldn’t open up until the right person came along.
Was Lila the right person for him?
He had thought so up until he learned who she was, and he still wanted that life with her and their child. He just wasn’t sure that they would work out.
Was he setting himself up for major disappointment?
What if she decided she wanted to go back to her old life and take their baby with her? There was no way he could survive living in the limelight like that, and his job often required him to fly under the radar, a difficult thing to do if the paparazzi were splashing his face everywhere.
“You know what I think?” Domino asked.
“What?”
