Free Rev It Up by Julie Ann Walker Page B

he whispered.
    Um, okay, so that wasn’t what she expected. If he’d suddenly grown whiskers and claimed to be the Easter Bunny, she didn’t think she’d be any more shocked. “Jake, that wasn’t your fault. You did what you thought—”
    “It was my fault,” he insisted, running a hand over his face and shaking his head.
    “No,” she assured him. “That’s ridiculous.” She knew a little of what’d transpired on that wind-swept mountain. Her brother had given her the basics after Steven’s funeral. And as much as she’d prayed for the day when she’d see Jake the Snake brought low, she never wanted it to happen this way, with guilt and blame tearing him apart. “It was a vote. Fair and square. Steven made his own decisions that day,” she insisted, hoping her tone convinced him, because she was having a really tough time resisting the urge to reach across the small distance separating their lawn chairs to lay a hand of comfort on his muscular shoulder. She knew from experience, once she started touching Jake, it was almost impossible to stop. “Steven was a grown man who—”
    He lifted his eyes to her face then. And they were so green, so tormented. “Did Boss ever tell you about the Marine barracks bombing?”
    “Uh…no,” she shook her head, surprised and disoriented by the lightning-fast change of topic. “He…he never said anything about it.”
    He nodded and went back to folding and refolding the beer label he’d finally managed to pull from the sweating bottle. Then he glanced up and made yet another visual pass around the courtyard. Yes, he may claim there was no cause for worry, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still on high alert.
    She supposed there was some comfort in that. Of course, the small relief she garnered from knowing he would hop-to at a moment’s notice quickly dissolved when the silence between them stretched until it was a sharp, tangible thing.
    When she couldn’t stand it a second longer, she cleared her throat and quietly asked, “Were you guys…um, were you stationed there when it happened?”
    She remembered watching the footage of the horrendous event on the news. The scenes of carnage and destruction had been enough to have even the most stalwart constitutions running for the nearest toilet. At the time, she’d been beside herself with worry, wondering if her brother and all the men she’d come to think of as family were lying somewhere in that smoldering rubble.
    Then Frank had called, joking around like usual, never breathing a word about the bombing, and she’d assumed Bravo Platoon was stationed elsewhere in Afghanistan.
    “Do you, um, do you mind if we turn our chairs around?” Jake suddenly blurted, catching her off-guard yet again.
    What the heck? This conversation felt more like a verbal scavenger hunt, one where she was missing the clues.
    “Uh, sure, I guess” she said, pushing up from her Adirondack chair and watching in confusion as he hastily turned it, along with his own, away from the fire.
    “I want my eyes to adjust to the dark, and I also want to keep watch on that corner,” he explained with a jerk of his chin toward the corner in question.
    O- kay . Her pulse, which hadn’t been steady all night, tripped over itself.
    “What’s over there?” she breathed, trying to see something in all that pervasive blackness.
    “Nothing that I can see, and that’s the whole problem.”
    Huh?
    “Okay,” he said, retaking his seat and grabbing his beer, “where was I?”
    She wasn’t sure anymore. Her head was spinning.
    “Oh, you asked if we were stationed there when the barrack’s bombing occurred, and the quick and simple answer is yes.”
    She dropped down into her seat as a wave of dizziness and nausea overcame her. The realization of how close she’d come to losing them all trumped every other thought.
    So close. Too close…
    “We were housed down the block from the marines. You see, SEALs and jarheads tend not to mix