A Lot Like Perfect

The guys on Isaiah West’s SEAL team called him Elmer, like the glue, but it wasn’t because his feet were extra sticky. Unfortunately. That would have come in handy if he hoped to win the bet he’d just taken to walk the entire length of the wooden railing that edged the loft in the old barn he’d signed up to help renovate.

Isaiah jumped up on the cracked, peeling rail and eyed the dusty expanse of the barn floor a good fifteen plus feet below the outer edge of his black Converse. No problem. It wasn’t that far down. A bet was a bet, and compared to some other ones the guys on his SEAL team had thrown out, this one was pretty tame.

Isaiah refused to call any of them former SEALs. Or a former team. The five of them were no such thing, despite a discharge from the Navy that the brass might label honorable but still didn’t change the involuntary part.

“You’re not actually going to do it. Are you?” Tristan Marchande called up to him with faint amusement as if he couldn’t believe Isaiah would entertain such a notion when Marchande had been the one to issue the dare in the first place. As he usually did.

What, like Isaiah was scared? Piece of cake after walking the roofline of a four-story building to avoid an al-Qaeda welcoming party outside of Ghouta. He’d done that with two Colt M4A1’s slung across his back while wearing combat boots with knives stuck in each one. But not because Marchande had bet him. Because taking out insurgents in the Middle East had been his job for almost a decade.

And now it wasn’t.

Some days it was easier than others to accept. Today wasn’t looking so good.

“You see me doing it, don’t you?” Isaiah shot Marchande a look designed to shut him up but he had a feeling he’d only generated a good deal more amusement.

Which was fine. He didn’t mind providing entertainment for the team if it kept them all motivated, though the other guys he’d served with in Syria were off on their own renovation projects.

The five of them had volunteered to help expand the tiny town of Superstition Springs in an effort to stave off developers from leveling the place to build a shopping center. Caleb Hardy, the best SEAL Isaiah knew, had recently been elected mayor in a surprise victory, and the man needed firepower in his corner to make good on his campaign promises—namely that he’d get the town up and running as a tourist destination. Before that could happen, the residents, which the SEAL team now counted themselves as, had to turn it into a functioning town.

Being a SEAL had been in their blood, given them a reason to exist. Taking that away with an honorable discharge changed nothing other than the fact that they could no longer collect a paycheck from the Navy. Or participate in the ops currently underway in the Syrian theatre. It was a fair sentence for the crime of accidentally destroying the wrong village. But no less disheartening.

With that crimp in their strides, they’d limped from California to Superstition Springs, a town near Austin, Texas to figure out how to breathe again. Or maybe that was just him. The rest of the guys were handling being cut loose from their platoon a lot better than he was.

For their part, Isaiah and Tristan had gotten schoolhouse duty, or rather Hardy had assigned it to them without much discussion. This old barn needed to become an institution of learning inside of a month, but instead of working on installing the weather-proof exterior panels like he should be, Isaiah was busy testing out the quality of the loft railing. For a measly dollar.

He took a step and the rail teetered, nearly throwing him off balance. He flung up an arm to counter his weight. Shoved a shoulder down to lower his center of gravity. Perfect.

“If you fall, try to land on your head,” Marchande advised. “That’s the part with the most cushion.”

“Har, har,” Isaiah said without a drop of humor. If he fell, the pain would be no less than he deserved.

He took another step, compensating for the weaknesses in the railing’s construction. And the fact that it was probably a hundred years old. Two hundred if it had been an original part of the area back when Superstition Springs had been a mining town.

“Why are you letting Tristan egg you on?” Cassidy’s voice floated up to Isaiah from the vicinity of the barn’s double doorway, her dislike of his teammate coloring her question.

When had she gotten back from town?

He cut his eyes toward her without moving his head. Aria Nixon and Cassidy Calloway had both stepped inside the barn and stood watching him with arms crossed, clearly having heard more about the genesis of the bet than he’d like. The long-time residents he and Tristan had been paired with for this job had left for lunch a while back and obviously, Isaiah had lost track of time. Figured the better-looking half of their renovation crew would show up while he was mid-dare.

“For the money,” Isaiah deadpanned and took another step. A dollar was a dollar.

That was his standard answer but far from the truth.

The truth was, he couldn’t breathe sometimes. The crushing weight that had dropped on his chest after Syria never seemed to go away and the fresh air in Texas hadn’t helped as much as he’d hoped. How did he pick himself up from having unwittingly participated in a military strike against civilians, most, if not all, of whom had died? That had been the most horrific of the many, many things that had gone wrong in the little village of al-Sadidiq near the border of Lebanon.

And afterward, his job should have been to help everyone pick up and move on. Motivate the guys, encourage them and above all, keep the team a cohesive unit. That’s what he’d always done. Except for this last time. They’d been sent home before he could work his magic. Meanwhile, he’d developed these weird episodes that felt like an elephant sitting on his chest.

The only thing that ever helped Isaiah’s lungs remember how to function was doing things that got his blood pumping, like edging along a two-by-four fifteen feet above a dusty barn floor. The riskier the better. If someone had offered sky diving in a fifty-mile radius, he might have been off doing that but in a tiny town like Superstition Springs, he had to get his thrills where he could.

Aria’s red hair flashed in his peripheral vision as she moved farther into the empty barn to stand near Tristan. She usually wore it up in a sassy ponytail that showed off her cheekbones but today she had it down for some reason. An odd choice if she intended to do any dirty work around this barn.

After a harrowing few minutes of tracking the length of the railing from one side to the other, Isaiah jumped to a wooden beam on the floor of the hayloft, then scrambled down the ladder to hit the ground. Safe. For all the good it did.

“Pay up.” He shoved his palm in Marchande’s direction.

“Bravo, mon frère,” Tristan commented drily as he slapped a buck in Isaiah’s outstretched hand. “Always a pleasure to see you wind up in one piece after taking a stupid bet.”

“You’re the one who came up with it, Le Torch,” he reminded him with a smirk, purposefully using the other man’s nickname, which Marchande hated, but that’s what he got when he insisted on speaking French. Isaiah pocketed the dollar, which he instantly forgot about. “If you didn’t want to lose, you should have thought up something harder, like walking the ridge of the roof.”

Marchande eyed the soaring ceiling decorated for the occasion with cobwebs as if actually contemplating the idea. “How would you even get up there?”

“I saw a hatch leading out to the roof when I was in the loft. It’s way in the back,” Isaiah said, half hoping Tristan would take him up on the new stakes.

The roof wasn’t that high. And if he fell, he could possibly use any injuries as an excuse to get out of these renovations, which Hardy shouldn’t have given him responsibility for in the first place. Isaiah wasn’t planning to stick around Superstition Springs much longer. If creating a school out of this donated former horse-house was so critical, one of the other guys should be on it.

Of course, he’d have to tell Caleb he had one eye on the exit in order for the mayor to get the point. So far, there’d been too much going on for Isaiah to even contemplate that conversation. Soon, though. He’d lost his right to be a member of the team and that’s what he’d always done his whole life when things didn’t work out—leave.

“A secret passage?” Tristan perked up in a jiffy, always on the alert for escape routes, vantage points for recon, a place to plant a scope. Even thousands of miles from any credible threats, he was still a SEAL. Like they all were.

“Maybe we should get back to work,” Aria suggested lightly. “Havana asks about our progress every night and takes these copious notes when I tell her. She’s so anal about her spreadsheets it makes me shudder.”

Grinning to show there were no hard feelings about her segue, Isaiah offered, “Caleb said Havana adds nine things to his to do list once every hour.”

Aria rolled her eyes and happened to catch Isaiah’s gaze in hers on the way around. “At least nine. That woman can out-organize Martha Stewart.”

Havana was Hardy’s fiancée, but she was also Aria’s older sister. Havana was an urban planner by trade and she’d been hired by the new mayor to plan the town’s rebirth as a tourist destination with a new-age soul, or at least that was how she’d sold it to everyone. It was a huge project with lots of moving parts, and Hardy was counting on everyone—Isaiah included—to do their share.

“Hopefully she won’t go to prison while doing it though,” Isaiah offered with an eyebrow waggle, drawing a smile from Aria that did something amazing to her eyes.

Wow. How had he never noticed just how blue they were? She had fair skin to go with her red hair and she never wore makeup, so there was nothing to detract attention from the clear depths below her lashes. He got a little caught up in examining that until he realized she was watching him expectantly.

Because someone had said something. To him. And he’d missed it.

He cleared his throat, casting about wildly for a clue that did not materialize until Marchande elbowed him. “We’re getting back to work. You included. Put away the Elmer Show.”

“I’m always the Elmer Show,” Isaiah argued good-naturedly.

Or at least he had been. Keeping the guys entertained was one of many magic tricks in his arsenal designed to keep the team glued together. Sometimes he put on a spectacle so they forgot their troubles, sometimes he did nothing more than provide a sounding board or a comforting hand to a teammate’s shoulder.

He’d been doing a crap job since al-Sadidiq. The team had splintered then, mostly because he had, and that’s why he needed to extract himself without a lot of fanfare. His challenge lay in getting right with the writing on the wall—he’d lost his place and nothing could change that.

That was the part he struggled with. He’d followed Hardy to Superstition Springs because that’s what everyone else had done. The five of them had packed up and jumped into the SUV Hardy had bought to drive from California to Texas readily enough, so Isaiah had gone along too. They were a team. Had been for almost a decade. But he didn’t really feel like he belonged with them anymore.

Because he was broken. It was his due penance to leave. He didn’t deserve to stay with the community of brothers he desperately wanted but couldn’t help.

“What’s the Elmer show?” Cassidy asked with undisguised fascination, her gaze tracking Isaiah closely as if she didn’t want to miss it if he did something else noteworthy.

He shrugged and started to respond when Marchande cut him off with a laugh.

“He’s always goofing around,” Tristan explained with a wink that Cassidy shrugged off with an icy glare.

A shadow drifted over Tristan’s too-pretty face as he caught the malevolent vibe. Marchande had a way with the ladies that usually scored him a much better response than the cold shoulder being aimed in his direction by one Miss Calloway, but oddly, instead of backing off, he dug in. “We call him Elmer. Like Elmer Fudd. It’s just a funny name.”

Isaiah kept from recoiling, but just barely. He was Elmer like the glue, not like the lame cartoon character who couldn’t shoot rabbits. But if Marchande had deviated from the script, that could only mean one thing—he’d noticed Isaiah was broken.

That was bad. He and Isaiah went way back, had covered each other in some nasty cesspools of the world, and they were more than friends. They were brothers of the heart. All five of them were. How much worse was it to fail not just yourself, but your brothers too?

“Only because I am funny,” he reminded Tristan without letting on how deep the slight had dug into a tender place inside. Better to brush it off until he could figure out how to manage this new twist. If the others had figured out that Isaiah was useless, it sped up his get-out-of-dodge timetable. “And not funny-looking, like your hairdo.”

Marchande sneered at Isaiah’s reference to his man-bun. He’d grown out his hair in the eight months since they’d been discharged and the guys liked to razz him about it, Isaiah included, because come on. The man’s sleek blond hair was held together in a topknot with a ponytail thingy like the kind that chicks used.

“Really? Tell us a joke,” Cassidy said, her fascinated gaze still lingering on him as she rearranged her caramel-colored hair behind her shoulders. She was a pretty woman but in a generic sort of way. Of course, it would be hard for her to stand out next to a bright streak of a woman like Aria Nixon.

“Jokes later,” Marchande insisted a little too sharply.

“Jokes are better in the moment,” Isaiah muttered but shut up only because Hardy had asked him and Marchande to do this job. He needed to take the suggestion and do it. At least for right now, until he figured out how to tell Caleb that not only was Isaiah not capable of keeping the team together, he was taking the first chink out of it by leaving.

Isaiah got to work and hammered some stuff while working side by side with Cassidy, who always seemed to gravitate toward him for some reason. Mostly he just tried not to pass out from lack of air. Sure his panic attacks were a defense mechanism, a gift from Syria. The Navy shrinks back in California had laid all that out for him nice and clear in case he’d been confused about why his chest got tight all the time even when he’d just been watching TV or walking on the beach near the base.

Texas was supposed to make it better. It hadn’t. Because Isaiah was the problem, not the locale. If Caleb hadn’t given him this barn project, he’d already be working on his exit strategy, but he respected Hardy more than he needed to breathe.

The townspeople who’d voted for him clearly loved Caleb Hardy. Everyone did. He was as honest and forthright as they came, the kind of guy who was first in line to do the right thing. If you ever got confused about which choice to make, you could always ask What would Caleb do? And that was usually the best answer.

What Hardy would do in this moment, if he was here, was get on Isaiah’s case for not figuring out how to help him get the guys in order. As the mayor, Hardy had a lot of empty official town positions to fill and some SEALs at loose ends who need new marching orders—Marchande, for instance, who’d been tapped to shape the new fire department but couldn’t see his way clear to agree yet.

Instead of jumping into the role that Isaiah had always filled—either helping the team stay unified or gluing someone back together after a tough day—he was trying to figure out how to cut himself loose. To give up the team he loved but couldn’t stay with.

He couldn’t keep spinning these plates forever. He had a feeling they were all about to start crashing to the ground.

That night, Isaiah went up to the rooftop patio of the old hotel where he and the other guys had taken rooms. On his second day in the old mining town, he’d accidentally found the stairs to the roof behind a multicolored door at the end of the hall. It stuck a little, but with a good dose of curiosity and elbow grease, it had sprung open to reveal a dark passage leading upward, full of spiders and other unknowns.

Once his pulse had started tripping with excitement over the find, of course he’d had to see where the staircase led—to the roof, naturally, where a patio of sorts spread out the entire perimeter of the hotel. Dead leaves and a stray branch or two littered the mostly barren expanse. It hadn’t been used in a long time, if ever. Isaiah could easily imagine it becoming one of those places swanky hotels in big cities boasted, with lights strung across poles and a mahogany bar in the corner that served frou-frou concoctions to scantily clad women.

But he’d have to tell someone about it for that to happen. No one else seemed to know it existed, or at least he’d never encountered anyone else, and he wasn’t in hurry to share it.

Isaiah spread out the old blanket he’d stashed in the corner under a weathered board with bent, rusted nails lining the edge, then stretched out to practice his breathing.

He’d spent more than a few nights up here, staring at the swirl of black and starlight when he couldn’t sleep. Which was most of the time lately. His brain was constantly on blend mode, chopping through images of the kids that had died in al-Sadidiq. That was one of the hardest things about that op gone wrong. Innocent lives had been taken. Isaiah had helped make that happen. Accidentally, sure. It would be nice if that qualification mattered.

Creak. He snapped his head toward the door, just in time to see Serenity Force ease it closed on squeaky hinges, her long gray hair easily discernible in the weak moonlight as she joined him on the roof.

So much for solitude. He didn’t mind though. Serenity was cool. She’d regularly penned letters to the team while they’d been overseas, somehow becoming more than a pen pal and morphing into a surrogate mom, first to Hardy and then eventually the rest of them. None of the five of them had family to speak of, so Serenity had filled a gap and then some. When Hardy had announced he was driving to Superstition Springs to help Serenity fight the imminent destruction of the town she loved, Isaiah had been the first one lined up at the door, ready to leave on a moment’s notice.

Meeting Serenity in person had strengthened the bonds formed via letter. And she’d given the SEALs a place to land after Syria, which he appreciated more than he’d ever be able to say.

Which didn’t mean he shouldn’t try. He patted the blanket to indicate she was welcome. “Come to check out my tree fort? You’re the only girl allowed.”

Serenity laughed but he could tell his comment pleased her. “Aren’t you a sweet boy. How did you find this place?”

He shrugged as she eased down onto the blanket, her knees popping at the joints in a reminder that she was nearly twice his age. Or so he’d surmised without asking because that would be rude. But it wasn’t a stretch to assume that she was at least old enough to be his birth mother, not that he’d know anything about her, age or otherwise, since he’d been thrust into the foster system as a baby. Looking for the exit had long been his way of coping with a bad situation, and he had a lot of practice at leaving. What kind of insanity was it to have hoped he’d eventually find a place he could stay when history had taught him that moving on was his lot in life?

“I opened a door,” he said easily. “Hope it’s okay to hang out up here.”

As the owner of the hotel, it would be perfectly within her rights to tell him this area was off limits.

“Of course,” she insisted immediately. “This is your home for as long as you choose to stay. I love that you’ve created a place for yourself.”

Had he really though? What kind of place could he have where he wasn’t providing the glue for his team as they battled bad people on a daily basis?

“It’s more of an escape,” he admitted without really figuring out why he’d told her that much. But Serenity might be the closest thing to a mom that he’d ever have in his life. If he couldn’t be real with her, then who could he talk to?

“You need an escape?” she prodded gently, which turned to ice in his stomach as he scrambled to explain.

“Not from you! Or the hotel. It’s wonderful, very nice. I appreciate that you’ve taken us all in, which you didn’t have to do—”

“Isaiah West, you settle down now,” she interrupted but the smile in her voice was wide enough for him to easily hear despite not facing her. “I know you boys have had a time of it. That’s the only reason I didn’t send you on your way when you showed up here out of the blue, looking to get in the middle of my spat with Havana.”

Serenity was Aria and Havana’s aunt, having taken in the girls when they were young, after their parents died. They had a third sister, Ember, who had just recently dropped back into town after an extended absence, or at least that was how Isaiah had pieced it all together without prying. The little boy Ember had in tow might be a part of the puzzle, but the kid was quiet and kept his head down on the rare occasions when he crossed paths with Isaiah. It wasn’t a stretch to assume that the five male strangers in his great-aunt’s hotel weren’t the sort a seven-year-old knew how to speak to.

“I figure it must have been a pretty big surprise to have five SEALs dropped on you,” he said wryly. “We could have called first.”

Except, if they’d called Serenity, she might have told them not to come and Isaiah would have been last guy to risk that. He’d needed somewhere to go after being discharged, naturally. Leaving California had seemed like the obvious choice.

“Your hearts were in the right place, sweetie. It’s my fault for pouring out my troubles about this town into my letters. But look what happened as a result. Caleb and Havana got the development company to give us six months to turn the town around,” she said with a mix of awe and no small amount of gratitude.

Caleb and Havana had started out on opposite sides of the deal, but soon started making goofy eyes at each other until they were so tightly involved the only solution seemed to be combining forces. They were a formidable team, working tirelessly to get infrastructure in place so the town could become a tourist destination. If they didn’t, the development company would start offering residents huge piles of cash to relocate and folks who loved the town, like Serenity, would be forced out.

“The schoolhouse is coming along. Cassidy is really excited about her plans to form a charter school once it’s done,” he commented. She never stopped talking about it, which he assumed equaled excitement.

“The first of many great additions to our town.” Serenity’s voice glowed with so much pride that he didn’t have the heart to correct her. It was her town, sure. But not his. “I’m so thrilled you boys showed up. You were meant to come here. Didn’t I predict that?”

Isaiah traced the little dipper with his eyes as a stall tactic before responding because he wasn’t entirely sure he believed in all that jazz. So he’d kind of dismissed the concept when Serenity had doled out some hokey prophecy in a letter a few months back. But he knew she believed in her predictions. And her connection with the universe wasn’t something he could easily reject while in her presence, not unless he wanted to be disrespectful.

“I don’t remember it that way,” he said instead. “I thought the prediction was about how I’m going to meet the future Mrs. West, not about coming to Superstition Springs.”

Future Mrs. West. It felt wrong on his tongue, too weighty and just…not something he could believe in. Now, he’d seen some pretty crazy stuff in Syria—idols and revered goats and such. But mysticism had never really resonated with him anyway and finding love was literally the last thing on his mind, then or now.

A guy with one foot constantly out the door didn’t lead a woman to believe that commitment was anywhere in his vocabulary.

She shook her head with a little tsk and repeated the words she’d penned to him. “You must slow down a bit to find love. Seek a romantic retreat to heal and nurture your soul while connecting spiritually with a like-minded soul that shares your need for depth. What is that but a perfect description of this town? Here you are, stargazing. Slowing down. Connecting. All of these things will help you heal.”

He didn’t bother to pretend she was wrong about his need to get better, though the fact that it was becoming common knowledge made him a little squicky. Clearly she’d sensed that on her own, but it was a little easier to take from her rather than from Marchande earlier. Not that he believed either of them had done much more than witness for themselves that he was broken. Didn’t take a genius to sniff that one out when he’d failed to get anyone on board with Hardy’s quest to start filling official town positions.

It shouldn’t have been that hard to talk Marchande into a role with the yet to be formed fire department. The guy’s middle name might as well be fire. Yet…here they were with no one on the roster.

But there was no reason to be dismissive toward her belief in the supernatural. He could still spell diplomacy. “Maybe the prediction is talking about connecting with my teammates. We’re tight, after all. That’s just as likely to be what you’re sensing as a female being involved.”

The look she gave him was priceless. “Well, if you’re saying you’re gay, I’ll love you just the same. That’s not what you’re saying, though. Is it?”

“Um, no.” Wow, that had been an unforeseen deviation. “What I meant was, the guys are my family. We depend on each other. They’re the ones who’ve had my back since day one and that’s not going to stop.”

The lump in his throat grew too big to swallow. The guys had depended on him and he’d failed them. They all had scars from Syria, mostly inside. Except for Caleb’s brother, Rowe, who’d had months of physical therapy after half a building fell on him and still had trouble hearing out of his left ear. Isaiah hadn’t helped any of them get back up after falling down.

The ticking clock got louder in his head. After the barn was finished, he should go.

“Sweetie…” Serenity took his hand, squeezing it gently. “It’s great to have friends. Especially the kind that you share such a bond with. But if they were the ones who were meant to help you heal, wouldn’t they be sitting out here in the dark watching the stars with you?”

Oh, man. His lungs froze as her insight hit him hard. He’d come up here on this roof to be alone and never once had he considered cluing in the guys about its existence. Because Isaiah was the one pulling away. On purpose.

“Maybe you’re my soul mate,” he said with a forced laugh and was only half kidding. If he spent a lot of time with Serenity, then he didn’t have to worry about any of that mumbo-jumbo. Especially the slowing down part.

Slowing down wasn’t on his radar. That was not how he’d get his breathing right, no matter what Serenity thought she saw beyond the veil. Only leaving worked. Or rather, he didn’t have a lot of hope that he’d ever find a place that would fix what was broken, but the longer he stayed here, the more disappointed everyone would be that he couldn’t be Elmer anymore.

He was glue that couldn’t figure out how to stick. The irony was killing him.

“My predictions aren’t that specific,” she said in all seriousness. “But I do sense that you’ve met the one already. Though I’m pretty sure it’s not me.”

The one. It sounded so mystical and wondrous. And not something Isaiah deserved. If it wasn’t Serenity, who then? There weren’t a whole lot of eligible women in town, so he needed to figure it out fast so he could stay far away from this woman. How could he jet if he was busy going gaga over a woman? The prediction had it wrong, all the way around. Not happening.

Though he couldn’t deny that he ached down in his bones for the kind of soul-deep connection running rampant throughout that prediction. It was like Serenity had cracked him open and in one shot spied everything he longed for but couldn’t have. His own mother hadn’t wanted him. But the Navy had. And then Caleb Hardy, Tristan Marchande, Hudson Rafferty and Rowe Hardy had adopted him as one of their own. As a thank you, he’d failed them all.

“I’ll take that under advisement,” he said mildly. “But you’ll forgive me if I don’t run right out and propose to someone.”

“Oh, no. You definitely shouldn’t do that. This is a process. You need to do it slowly. Weren’t you listening?”

Serenity was so serious about all of this that it gave him pause. “I’m sorry, I was. Slow. Got it.”

Now he somehow had to navigate the next few weeks until he left without hurting Serenity’s feelings. Preferably by completing a schoolhouse for Hardy’s build-a-town project while not falling prey to the suggestive lure of glancing around just in case there really was someone the universe had selected to fix everything that hurt inside him. That was as likely as Isaiah taking a breath that didn’t burn all the way down.