Page 41 of Deadline

After killing an hour, she determined that she was calm enough to return to the beach and watch him undermine her and dazzle her children. Dressed in a pair of loose white cotton pants and a red tank top, she decided against changing into a swimsuit. She grabbed her hat and joined the party on the beach.

And it was a party. The battleship was splendid. Stef was christening it with a bottle of apple juice. Hunter, the first to notice her, shouted, “Hey, Mom! We named it after you.” Proudly he pointed to the name crookedly etched into the side of the ship.

She bent down to inspect the lettering that read, USS Amelia. “Did you print that all by yourself?”

Proudly, he bobbed his head.

She ran her fingers through his unruly mop of hair, now matted with saltwater and sand. “Thank you. I love it. That was very sweet of you.”

“Dawson said to.”

“Oh.” She looked up. He was silhouetted against the bright sunlight, so she couldn’t read his expression. “That was nice of him.”

“Can we go in the ocean now?”

“I’m not dressed for it. Stef?”

“On it.” Telling the boys she’d race them into the water, the three took off.

Grant plunged in, then called back, “Dawson, are you coming?”

“In a minute.”

“If you need to go to the bathroom, it’s okay if you tinkle in the ocean, just not in a swimming pool.”

He chuckled. “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Amelia retreated to the umbrella and sat down in one of the beach chairs. Dawson rescued his T-shirt from the maw of the dragon, shook sand from it, and pulled it on. It was a faded, threadbare thing with the neck and sleeves cut out, forming large armholes that extended halfway down his torso. As he walked slowly up the beach toward her, the thin cloth molded to his damp chest. So much for his nod toward propriety. His calves and feet were coated with sand.

When he reached the umbrella, he looked at the empty chair beside hers, then at the quilt, but decided against pushing his luck, or so she assumed, and sat down in the sand just outside the circle of shade.

She cut to the chase. “This morning before anyone else was up, I did a Google search on you.”

“Yeah?”

“It took a while for me to read everything. Impressive.”

“Thanks.”

“You didn’t tell me that you’d spent months in Afghanistan.”

“You didn’t ask.”

Up to that point she’d been watching the boys and Stef playing in the ocean with an inflatable dolphin. Now she looked at him. “Right. You’re the one who asks questions.”

He pulled his knees up and looped his arms around his shins. “Ask me anything.”

In spite of her ire, she was curious. “Some of your stories covered particular firefights. Were you actually there, in the thick of the fighting?”

“Not often. A few times. If the fighting was in a real hotbed, the military wouldn’t allow me in. I’d interview the troops when they came back.” He frowned thoughtfully. “The trouble with that war, most often you can’t predict where the fight is going to be. It can be the lobby of a hotel, an open highway, a heavily guarded checkpoint. The enemy isn’t always obvious, either.”

“But when you could, you placed yourself in harm’s way.”

“That’s where the stories were.”

She felt it only fair to acknowledge how good they were. “Your writing is very moving. You made the men and women you wrote about seem real to the reader.”

“I’m glad to hear that. They are real. Their stories deserved to be told.”