Authors: Mary Margret Daughtridge

SEALed with a Ring (23 page)

"So you grabbed the dog out of his hands and marched in. You took shameless advantage of that situ ation, didn't you?"

"I figured as long as I kept hold of the dog, you would have to deal with me. You couldn't be 'too busy.'"

David put down food and water next to where Snake lay on his new dog bed in a corner of Lucas's kitchen. Snake turned his nose toward the food, and, with a sigh, turned it away. He was in too much pain to eat. David knew how that felt. "Where did you put the mor phine for this poor animal whose name isn't Snake?" he asked JJ.

"In the refrigerator. On the door, second shelf down. I put the syringes in there, too. They're in a plastic bag in the crisper drawer."

Between the mustard and the steak sauce, David lo cated the square-shouldered, brown glass container of morphine mixed in a flavored liquid. They'd had to go to a special compounding pharmacy to get it.

David carefully read the directions on the morphine bottle.
Give 1.0 ml by mouth every two to four hours
as needed for pain. Numbers slid around on him. Di
d it say point one milliliter or one milliliter? He looked at the little lines on the syringe. Cc's were the same as milliliters, right? Shouldn't that be cm? He knew this! Why wouldn't it come to him?

There was no rush. He took a deep breath and cen tered himself. All he had to do was think it though. A milliliter was one thousandth of a liter, and that would be point zero, zero, zero, zero one, so that would—No, it would be point zero, zero, zero one, which would mean he should fill the syringe to the first long line.

Frustration tightened his shoulders. He knew this! He rubbed his neck and widened his eyes to push back tears. He couldn't chance making a mistake. If he didn't give enough, the dog would be in pain—pain he couldn't tell anyone about. If he gave too much, he could kill the poor bastard.

He hated to feel stupid.
And
to see the looks of incom prehension on people's faces turn to irritation or pity or cunning when they realized he didn't know something a competent person should know. But he couldn't risk this creature's life to save his feelings, and JJ would have to find out sooner or later that she had married a man who might not be a SEAL much longer.

"JJ," he called, "do you know the metric system?"

"Sure." She paused in unloading the Chinese takeout they'd stopped to pick up on the way. It appeared he'd married a woman who didn't cook.

"Then I need you to come here and fill this syringe."

"What's the matter?" JJ crossed the kitchen to Snake's bed and knelt beside him.

"It's numbers. I can read them, but if I need to trans fer them from one application to another, I get confused. I make mistakes."

Reflexively, JJ took the morphine bottle, but didn't look at it. "Wait a minute. That doesn't make sense. How could you be a hospital corpsman if you can't read directions and then measure medication?"

He couldn't. That was the fear that hung over him all the time.

She sat back on her heels, comprehension darkening her green eyes. "You have a head injury. Of course you do—I mean I knew you had injuries to your head—"

"Brain injury."

"But you don't seem like other brain-injured people I've known."

He couldn't talk about it. Not with his inability to help even a dog right in front of him. "Measure the dog's morphine."

JJ read the bottle, then looked at the syringe. "Well, I see part of the problem. The directions say ml, but the syringe says cc."

She retrieved her phone from her purse. "Bronwyn, quick medical question. I've got to give medication to a dog… Yes, Snake… No, we haven't renamed him yet… Is a cc the same thing as an ml? Okay, I have this syringe that measures three cc's. Which line do I fill it to, to ar rive at one ml? The first long line. Got it. Thanks."

She lifted the syringe and pointed. "We fill it to this line."

Lucas speared a kung pao shrimp. They were eating at the kitchen table, open Chinese food containers in front of them. Serving a meal this way didn't look right to Lucas, but it was the way JJ had fixed it.

The atmosphere was strained. Young people didn't need an old man horning in on their fun. Lucas was having supper with the kids, and then he intended to make it clear that he had television to watch and did not wish to be disturbed. To make conversation, Lucas asked David, "How long is your leave?"

"I have to go back Friday."

"That soon? I guess you'll be coming home weekends."

"David and I have discussed it," JJ answered for him. "As much as he travels, he won't want to came here for hardly more than twenty-four hours—if you sub tract travel time. He's keeping his apartment in Virginia Beach, and he'll stay there until he has real leave."

Lucas frowned. "How often will that be?"

David forked up a green pepper. "Hard to say."

Lucas studied the tight, closed expression on JJ's face. The truth dawned. The boy wasn't going to come home but once in every blue moon. She'd known it all the time. Marrying someone who wouldn't be part of her life was deliberate.

"Will you be going to Virginia Beach to be with him, JJ?" he asked, just to make certain.

"I'm sure I will. Occasionally. But you know how often I have obligations on the weekends."

Damn, he should have known she had something up her sleeve. The story about meeting last year, meeting again and deciding he was someone she wanted to marry… Lucas should have known it was too easy and too convenient. He'd swallowed the tale because he had believed Dave re ally wanted JJ. Shoot, Dave had lit into him—like
he wa
s the bad guy—for offering to sweeten the deal. Lucas had admired him for championing JJ. He thought he'd gotten lucky. Lucas swallowed the bitter taste of disappointment. He'd only heard what he wanted to hear.

She had figured out the way around him. JJ had fig ured out a way to be married and not change her life a single bit.

"If I'm going to keep him, we've got to give him another name," JJ told David as they unloaded the dishwasher. Lucas had excused himself and gone to his office—to watch TV, he said. The dog did look better. About thirty minutes after receiving the morphine, he had gotten very slowly to his feet and gone to his food bowl. Now he lay awake but relaxed, his eyes following them. "I just can not have a dog named 'Snake.'"

David took a stainless-steel fork and dried it. "Where do these go?"

"Drawer to the right of the dishwasher."

He opened the drawer and slid the fork in. "What's the matter with 'Snake'?"

JJ studied the dog, who lay on his side. Sometimes he looked more yellowish, sometimes more reddish. "I'm thinking… Dagmar."

"You cannot name him Dagmar."

"Why not?"

"It's a girl's name, that's why. It will make him neurotic. All the other dogs will laugh at him. He'll get into fights all the time. He'll probably grow up to be a psychopath."

"Well, what did you have in mind? Butch?"

"Not some girl's name."

David paused. She almost had him with that one. "Chuck," he countered.

"Chase? Do you really want to give him a name like a hero in a romance novel would have?"

"Really?" he gave her a sexy smile. "They don't have names like David?"

"No. It has to be really testosterone heavy—with lots of hard consonants. Like the names you keep wanting to give this poor dog whose sex life is over."

David slowly dried a spoon. "Then I guess you won't like Snatch, either."

On the floor, the dog flicked his dark amber eyes from one to the other, as if he were suddenly interested.

"See," David latched onto the dog's apparent re sponse. "He likes it. It will help him maintain his self image now that he's you-know."

"Snatch?" JJ asked the dog. "Is that what you want your name to be?"

His long, tapered tail thumped the floor.

"Well, at least it isn't dangerous sounding, like Killer."

JJ entered her grandfather's kitchen the next morn ing more than a trifle out of sorts. Once again, she was dressed in clothes she didn't like. It was a good thing she'd been too busy with all the wedding prepara tion to clear out the closet here, or she'd have noth ing at all.

Once again, she promised herself she'd be all right as soon as she got to Caruthers. Although thinking of how yesterday had turned out—with a dog to care for, a husband who apparently needed to be entertained, and winding up back in her old bedroom—she wasn't sure she had problems Caruthers could fix.

Therefore, it didn't do her heart nearly as much good as it should have when she entered the kitchen to see her grandfather perched on one of the barstools at the counter, looking absolutely chipper.

David was manning the stove, very competently scrambling eggs in one skillet and turning home fries in another, while bacon hissed and popped in the micro wave. Without missing a beat, he listened with apparent enjoyment to the tale about a marlin-fishing tournament Lucas was regaling him with. The tournament must have happened before she was born. She couldn't remember Lucas ever going marlin fishing.

David chuckled in all the right places, maintaining an easy camaraderie and stirring the eggs gently over a low flame—which JJ knew was the correct way but never had the patience for.

"You want to know why JJ and I didn't get together before?" David was saying. "She thought I couldn't be faithful."

"Can you?"

"Yes, sir."

"All right then."

That, apparently, in male-speak, was all there was to say about that.

David carefully lifted the potatoes with the spatula to check the underside for browning. "What happened to JJ's parents?"

"They went out on the
Daddy Carbucks,
my cabin cruiser." Lucas was silent a long time. "They didn't come back, and we couldn't raise them on the radio. The Coast Guard found my boat the next day, adrift, but no sign of either of them. A shrimp boat found my son's body. A while later, my daughter-in-law's washed up north of here."

"What happened?"

"Nobody knows why they took the boat out. They were in the midst of an ugly divorce, big custody fight. All we know for sure is that they both drowned. She had a skull fracture, but they said it didn't cause her death. Maybe he hit her. Maybe she went over the side and then hit her head and he went in after her—but the boat started to drift away from them. He couldn't get back to it, not while trying to swim with her."

Lucas took a contemplative sip of his coffee. "Or maybe it was a murder-suicide—we'll never know. Coroner ruled accidental death for both. They both had a lot of alcohol in their systems."

"How old was JJ?"

"Nine."

"She told me she had nightmares."

"That's right."

"About her parents?"

"That's what Beth, JJ's grandmother, thought. JJ couldn't tell us. She was better after Ham got her the dog."

JJ listened to the bare-bones account of her parents' death. She'd heard it many times before. Unfortunately, there weren't many additional facts to flesh the story out with. There was only the nightmare image of her parents in the water, caught in destructive currents of their own willfulness, drifting further and further from the boat.

Since she was nine, she had lived with and, with everything in her power, warded off the nightmarish mystery of her parents' disappearance. They had left eternally unanswered questions: Why had they gone out on the
Daddy Carbucks
that day? Why had they left the boat? Why hadn't they loved her enough? Understanding even the facts, much less the reasons behind them, would forever elude her.

Anyone could see that was the crux of her need for permanence and, above all, for never emotionally de pending on people who could fo
r no reason
do some thing stupid—maybe.

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