Page 39 of Her Forever SEAL

“I know.”

Sophia hung up the phone, and squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn’t stop seeing Bree that last time at the lacrosse game. They had to find her.

11

The mission was going well.

That was the problem.

Mason sat with his back against a concrete wall at the edge of a forward position and turned that thought over the way you turned over a rock to see what was living under it. The air was thick. Hot, even at this hour. The kind of heat that didn't bother him anymore in any practical sense but that his body registered as wrong, because he had been calibrated to Coronado's salt air and marine layer for over half his life, and everything else on the planet was a deviation.

He thought about the mission.

The aid worker, Hartley, had been located within eighteen hours of their deployment. Intelligence had come in clean and fast and specific. Location, guard rotation, entry points. They'd executed the extraction at 0200 local time, four days ago. Hartley was already home.

That should have been the end of it. Instead, they were staged here, waiting on additional extraction orders that had been pushed twice with no explanation.

Nothing had gone wrong. Nothing had snagged. Every piece of intelligence had checked out. Every timeline had held.

Mason had been doing this long enough to know that wasn't normal.

Intelligence was never this clean. Timelines slipped. Something always snagged. The mission that went perfectly from start to finish was a story you told later with a kind of disbelief, because it happened maybe twice in a career and it was a thing of legend.

This felt weird.

The call window came at 0300.

He moved away from the others and found a spot by the perimeter wall where he could talk quietly and still keep an eye on the approach. He dialed. She answered before the second ring.

“Hey.” Her voice ran through his body like warm honey.

“Hey.” He settled against the wall. “Did I wake you?”

“I was having the best dream, and it just got better.”

He smiled. The first real smile in six days.

“Wanna tell me about the dream?”

“Nah. Like I said, this is way better.”

“Tell me stories.”

Sophia’s soft chuckle stole his heart all over again.

“There once was a ten-year-old girl who had very strong opinions. About everything. It never occurred to her that going up against authority might not always be the best course of action.”

Mason settled against the wall even more. “I like her already.”

“I thought you might.”

“Did she have all of her ducks in a row?”

“Naturally. She was just supposed to write two pages about Earth's water cycle. Evaporation, condensation, precipitation, the whole diagram with the little arrows. She typed up six. Single spaced. She included a bibliography. Four sources, Mason. She's in fourth grade. She cited the NASA website, a children's science encyclopedia, a book about planetary geology that she checked out from the school library, and I really want you to hear this, a peer-reviewed journal article about subsurface ocean evidence on dwarf planets, because the assignment was called the water cycle and not Earth's water cycle.”

Mason chuckled. “She’s still stuck on Pluto?”

“Yep.”