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He pulled her along with him, keeping her on the damp sand where it was easier for her to walk. Checking his stride even more, Cal wanted to make the last part of the journey to his secret beach would not become such a battle for her. “SEAL training sorts out those who have mental toughness and heart and who don’t,” Cal told her. The breeze was warm and danced around them as they approached smooth stones covered with slippery green moss. Cal halted. “You’re mentally tough, too, Sky or you wouldn’t be here today, with me.” He leaned down and brushed a kiss across her smiling mouth, tasting the salt that was in the fresh air surrounding them.
Sky sighed, squeezing his large hand, feeling the monitored strength of Cal’s fingers around hers. “Well, today we don’t have to be anything but happy.” She looked at the expanse of tidal pools in among the smoothed rocks they had yet to traverse. On the other side of the cliff that rose to their left, she glimpsed a small beach hidden behind it.
“I think after yesterday,” Cal told her, releasing her from beneath his arm but holding her hand, “you need to rest. Maybe,” and he flashed her a slight smile, “more downtime with me.”
Groaning, Sky said, “Thank you. After last night and then meeting with Master Chief Butch Carpenter at the ST3 HQ this morning, I felt like my mind was turning into rubber.”
Laughing, Cal led her across the drying rocks, holding her hand and helping her to remain balanced. With the tide out, the mossy plants growing on the long, smooth boulders were dry enough so as not to be as slippery as they could become during high tide. “Butch likes you,” he said.
Laughter bubbled up Sky’s throat as she slid on her sandals to negotiate the rocks and tide pools nestled throughout there. “Butch is a piece of work. I mean, really, Cal, is that guy for real?”
“Oh yeah, he’s for real. Every pound of him.”
“He’s a powerful person. I never saw you guys become so quiet, respectful, or attentive as when he walked into the condo yesterday afternoon to have a barbecue with all of us.”
“No question he is our SEAL god,” Cal said drily. “Master Chiefs rule the SEAL universe and beyond. He kept our asses out of trouble in Afghanistan. Butch is one of the best in the business when it comes to planning an op. Our SEAL team was lucky to have him.”
Sky halted at a small tide pool; wonder mirrored on her face as she saw all kinds of small, colorful creatures beneath the clear, mirrored surface. “He scared the hell out of me when we visited your team HQ this morning.”
Cal laughed. “Yeah, he comes across as a hard ass, but nobody cares more than Butch. He liked you, Sky. Really.”
She squatted down by the pool, resting one hand on the spongy surface across the rock, the other at the edge of the pool for balance. “I couldn’t tell if he saw me as a bug to squash or what.” She pointed to the pool. “Cal? What is that? It looks so beautiful.”
Cal knelt beside her. “That’s an anemone that has opened. See the long white and pink arms slowly waving around?”
“Yes,” and she was mesmerized by the graceful movement of the translucent tentacles, which were so many she couldn’t count all of them.
“It’s trying to lure a fish into coming over,” Cal explained. He pointed to a tiny silver and black fish swimming around in the pool. “If that fish gets into the arms of the anemone, he’ll grab the fish, draw it down inside itself, into its mouth, and eat it.”
“So beautiful but deadly,” Sky said, giving him a quick look. “I’ll bet because you’ve swam so much in the oceans of the world, you know the creatures that live in it like the back of your hand?”
“Sort of,” Cal hedged. He picked up a rounded shell sitting on the bottom of the pool and placed it in the palm of his hand. “Watch this…”
Sky saw a creature suddenly pop out from beneath the huge shell. “Oh…”
“This is a hermit crab. They’re a soft-bodied crustacean and they go scuttling around in the tidal area searching for a shell home. When they find a shell that an occupant is no longer living in, they make it their home. When it outgrows the shell, they’ll abandon the old one and go in search of a larger shell to accommodate their new size.” Cal put the hermit crab back down in the tidal pool. “Another way to survive.” He saw the wonder on Sky’s face. She’d been born in Trenton, New Jersey, and to his knowledge, had never been taken to the Jersey shore to appreciate what nature had in store for those lucky enough to walk the sands along the Atlantic Ocean.
Sky stood up and pulled her small digital camera out of the pocket of her shorts. She had never taken a liking to capturing photos on her cell phone. “I’m going to take some pictures.” She grinned. “Then, once we get home, I’ll try my hand with pastel chalks and capture all of this. It’s so colorful!”
Cal watched her turn into a curious child in that moment. Every day, he glimpsed another facet of Sky. She was excited now, and he was grateful she trusted him enough to be herself around him after so much had happened to her. The breeze lifted strands of her hair. The awe in her expression was priceless to Cal. He liked watching Sky make discoveries, liked being able to share what he knew about the ocean with her.
Sky loved to swim. One of the surprises Cal had for her was to teach her to scuba dive during their honeymoon. He’d already rented a dive boat and he was going to take her out to the famous kelp beds off La Jolla. There, Cal would swim with her, showing her the underwater beauty, he was sure would amaze her even more. He’d find them lobster for a meal that he’d make for her that evening. His heart opened fiercely with the love he held for her. Sky didn’t know it, but another wedding gift he’d bought her was a Canon underwater camera so she could photograph while they scuba dived. He knew she’d be thrilled.
“Your drawings are getting better with each one that you create,” Cal told her, watching as she stood and moved around the pool to get some other shots.
“Oh, I’m such an amateur,” she protested. “But I do love to draw. It relaxes me.”
He stood and backed away so she could easily maneuver around the pool and take more close-up photographs. “Where did the love of art show up in your life?”
“Marielle Zimmerman, my foster mother, was an art teacher. She taught the middle grades, and one day she came home with her student’s art project. I was so taken by their work.” Sky slid the camera back into her pocket, pushed strands off her brow and looked up at Cal. “I didn’t know I liked art, but Marielle began to tutor me.” She sighed. “She was so good to me, Cal. I’m just so sorry Vlad murdered my foster parents. To this day, I think about and miss them so much.” She touched her heart and frowned, her voice growing wispy. “Jack introduced me to flying the helicopter. I think he sensed I needed to get into the air, away from everything. When he took me up in the helicopter he flew for the Trenton police department, I felt truly free for the first time in my life.”
Cal saw the grief and loss of her foster parents in her eyes. He reached out, caressing her cheek. “That time spent with them showed you love and hope, Sky. They gave you gifts money can’t buy. It was the most important time in your life.” And Cal knew it on levels he couldn’t explain. Those two stellar human beings had opened their home and their hearts to Sky. Unfortunately, the Zimmermans had also taken Vlad Alexandrov into their home. He had been their foster son since he was nine years old.
Yerik Alexandrov, Vlad’s father, was in a fight to take over the Russian Mafia in New York City back then. He’d wanted to protect his only son from being killed during the take-over. He’d gotten Vlad into the state foster program with lies and fraud. Vlad had landed on Jack and Marielle’s doorstep, and they’d taken in the young boy with open arms, without question, giving him only their love. They never realized that the boy who appeared so sweet and innocent looking on the outside was bad seed, a sadistic, brutal killer. Cal often wondered at the shock Jack and Marielle must have experienced when Vlad, at age seventeen, pulled a gun and shot them. It was a tragedy for them and for Sky, who had witnessed their murders.
“I like your art,” Cal murmured, pulling Sky into his arms, wanting her to stop thinking about the past, about another loss in her life. Cal gave her a teasing look. “Want to see my secret beach? A place where I would bring my wet suit, my tanks, and wade into the ocean and then swim out there when I was a SEAL,” and he pointed out toward the ocean where the kelp beds sat.
Sky nodded, leaning against his strong body. Cal’s flesh was sun warm, slightly damp with sweat, feeling so steady and calm to her. “I don’t see kelp beds,” she said, shading her eyes, looking out at the restless ocean.
