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Sean frowned, and the concern was plain in his gaze. “What happened to you after your dad died?”
“My dad and I had lived with his parents my whole life already, so my grandparents raised me. I had it better than a lot of kids in that situation. I still had family.”
“Doesn’t mean it was easy, I bet,” he said, his voice gentle.
“No,” she said. “After that, it was seeing my granny struggle with her diabetes that made me wish even more that I had medical knowledge. And it wasn’t just her, either. Diabetes is basically an epidemic among native communities. Granny died from complications of it when I was fifteen. With her gone, I lost a lot of my connection to the tribe because Nana and Pap weren’t very able to get around and take me places, and my ancestry didn’t qualify me for official enrollment in the tribe anyway. All of that made high school interesting. It was hard sometimes to figure out who I was and who I wanted to be with my parents gone and my feet partly in two worlds. So I just buried my nose in books and put all my focus into doing well in school so I could get a ROTC scholarship for the nurse training program.”
Sean gave her a good, long look. “That’s a lot of loss for such a young person. No wonder you’re so damn strong.”
At once, Dani felt warmed by the praise and like such a fake, because, well… “I don’t feel so damn strong.”
“Nobody feels strong all the time, right? But the fact that they put one foot in front of the other and keep fuckin’ going is what matters. That’s strength personified.”
She blinked at his choice of words, and then she held up her left hand to show him the tattoo on her finger.
“What the shit?” he said, chuckling. “Oh. I thought you were flippin’ me off for a sec there.” He took her hand in his much bigger one. “K.F.G. Look at that. See? It’s in your very skin, D.”
“You’re a good guy, Sean,” was all Dani could say to that, because there was suddenly a lump in her throat. One that wasn’t so much about grief as it was about feeling seen for the first time in so long. Damn him.
He winked. “Don’t tell anyone.”
She smirked. “I won’t.”
“I’m glad you stayed, Daniela,” he said, piercing into her with those dark eyes.
“So am I.”
“Should we get some sleep?”
It was the first time she’d talked about any of this in years, and it had left her lighter but exhausted. “I guess we should.”
“‘kay.” He reached back and clicked off the lamp. “Night, D.”
Dani reveled at the deep rumble of his voice in the dark, at the connection of their hands as he laced their fingers together. “Night, Sean.”
It had been so long since she’d slept with another person that, for the longest time, she couldn’t drop off to sleep. Her brain held her there, suspended in the feeling, not, for once, of solitude, but of…togetherness. And Sean Riddick—of all people—had given that to her after so very long.
Dani waited for the feeling of shame to wash over her for so enjoying it, but it didn’t come.
And then she was able, finally, to fall asleep.
Chapter Fifteen
It started the way it always did, with the bells.
Sean hadn’t been asleep for more than fifteen minutes. He’d just racked out after a fourteen-hour shift when the constant buzzing went off and he was up again.
But that’s how it was when you were a Damage Controlman. There wasn’t anyone else, and it was your home that was burning down. Fire was one of the biggest threats sailors faced at sea, which made firefighting—just one of the controlmen’s jobs—among the most important.
The question was, what kind of fire waited for him? He wouldn’t know that until they were standing in front of the beast itself, heat blasting them in the face, smoke threatening to crawl down their throats. The haze of it already hung in the air.
In less than a minute he was in the DC Unit Locker Room and gearing up.
As the fire marshal, Senior Chief Ortez had already donned his bunker gear and protective equipment. “Tonight, Chief Riddick is our on-scene leader and Petty Officer Roberts our team leader. I’ll see you down there,” he said, heading out first to make an initial assessment.
“Did you feel it?” Emerson asked when the senior chief departed.
Sean frowned as everyone began recounting what they felt and what they’d been doing when they felt it. The long and short of it was that a big-ass shudder had rocked through the destroyer seconds before the bells sounded.
“Shit, seriously? I was out cold,” Sean said.
“Damn, Chief, you could sleep through World War III,” Westover said.
“Hey, it takes a lot of shut-eye to look this good,” Sean retorted, glad for the joking and camaraderie. Tension was clear on the faces of the new guys who had joined them only three weeks before. Of course, they’d been trained within an inch of their lives and had run countless drills, but you never knew how anyone would react until they were in front of the fire with flames shooting out at them. Even with all the training, you couldn’t fully know the heat of the real thing until you were in front of it, and you couldn’t know who might panic when the chips were down.
