chapterone
Nick
Here’s the thing about being a Navy SEAL: you’re trained to expect the worst in any situation.
Statistically speaking, the best-case scenario never fucking happens. The weather conditions suck. The resources you were promised are insufficient. The bad guys are either smarter or better equipped than the intel let on. Sometimes they’re stupid, but just plain lucky. The point is, shit always goes sideways.
It’s just the nature of the work. It’s the nature of the world.
So you plan for every contingency, and even then, you try to be flexible enough so that when none of those work out, you can make decisions on the move and still somehow snag a win, not always, but often enough.
Planning for the worst has kept me alive this long, so I figure it works.
Which is why, as I sit here in Aces, a bar in the small town of Saddle Creek, nursing a Shiner Bock, waiting to meet Cassie Guidry for the first time in person, I keep my expectations low.
She’s the kid sister of my best friend and fellow member of my SEAL team, Remy Guidry.
She’s also the woman I’m in love with.
Yeah, you heard me right.
Kid sister of my best friend. (A guy who, for the record, could absolutely kill me with his bare hands.) And I’m meeting her for the first time tonight.
It’s complicated.
Long story short: she started sending me emails and care packages a couple of years ago when she found out I didn’t have any family stateside. At the time, she was dating Tripp Dushane, aka Reginald Douche Canoe, Esquire. That didn’t stop me from slowly falling head over ass for this chick.
Hell, if knowing she has two older brothers who are both SEALs and who could both kill me with their bare hands wasn’t a deterrent, then some pansy-ass lawyer boyfriend wouldn’t keep me from falling for her.
Then, Reginald Douche Canoe cheated on her and broke her heart, and here we are.
Okay, so it’s not that complicated and the short version wasn’t that short.
The point is, she’s single now and I’m taking my shot.
So when Remy said he was going home to Saddle Creek, Texas, for his leave, I tagged along, knowing it was my chance to meet her in person.
She lives and works in Austin, a couple of hours east of here, but I know she’d come home to see Remy while he was in town.
So here we sit in Aces waiting for her to show up, planning for shit to go wrong, and hoping desperately that it doesn’t. And, yeah, I’m a little nervous about whether not she’ll live up to my expectations.
I know what she looks like. I’ve seen countless pictures of her, a couple that Remy has shown me, way more from stalking her on social media. She’s fucking gorgeous. Not that it would have mattered to me. I fell in love with her via emails and DMs.
Neither Remy nor I are the kind of guys who need to talk just to fill the silence, so as we wait for his sister to show up, we’re both scrolling through our phones.
I surreptitiously pull up some of the emails Cassie and I have exchanged over the years and reread them.
Like I haven’t been rereading them all the damn time since I found out she was single.
From:[emailprotected]
To:[emailprotected]
Re: Introduction
Cassie,
Thanks for the emails you’ve been sending. Like I said, it’s just nice to hear a voice from home.
