PROLOGUE
~ FREYA HANSEN-ADLER ~
“Sun and sand every weekend. That’s my plan.”
Dax’s eyes—normally the darkest of browns—seem to flash with light as he speaks, and his wide grin flirts with me even though I’m sure it’s unintentional.
Dax, like all the military co-workers my husband invites over for barbeques, wouldn’t dare make a move on me.
I glance over at my husband Mason and feel that spark flicker between us that I would have thought might have disappeared after having a child with him. But it’s still there, strong as ever.
We just have a lot less free time to act on it.
As though she can hear my thoughts, my sweet Astrid toddles over to me and thumps on my knee, wanting to sit on my lap. She never likes it when people are over, and she has to compete for attention. She hasn’t figured out yet that, as far as Mason and I are concerned, she will always come first. I pull her up onto me and enjoy the familiar warmth of my precious daughter in my arms.
I’ll never take this for granted.
“Dax is a wannabe beach bum,” Mason tells me as he slides his hand along my shoulders, giving me a squeeze.
“I’ve picked up on that,” I reply, sending Dax an appraising look. Dax is the same rank as Mason, but younger than him by maybe a year or so, I’m guessing.
I’ve met a lot of the men Mason works with at the Pentagon. But not this one. Strange, I contemplate, because Mason has worked with Dax for two years.
I can’t help thinking it’s because this man is as single as a slice of American cheese.
Mason tries to keep the single ones away from me. And looking at Dax, there’s no question why.
Astrid then leaves the comfort of my lap to walk over to Dax and crawls up onto him as though she’s known him for longer than just two hours.
“Bounce, please,” she commands him, and he chuckles as he complies.
I smile at the sight of it.
He likes kids. My brain churns even more than it usually does. How could it not?
I look at a guy like Dax—young, cute, unattached, likes kids—and there’s only one thing on my mind:
I need to set him up with a single woman.
My husband hates this about me. At least he says he does. In truth, I think he gets a kick out of it. Still, he does try to keep me away from his single co-workers because to me, the idea of bringing a new couple together—launching them onto the glorious wave of romance—is just too tempting for me to resist.
I am a romance novelist, after all. My entire occupation revolves around creating happy endings. It’s the breath I take into my lungs, the passion that stirs my soul, and the fire that heats me when I feel the embrace of my own happily-ever-after every time Mason holds me close.
So, of course, I’d want to create that for a nice guy like Dax.
“I didn’t realize that Savannah was even on the ocean,” I say. “I could have sworn it was on a river.”
“Oh, it is on a river. And that’s where I’ll live. I already got an apartment with a short commute to Hunter.”
“Hunter?” I ask.
“Hunter Army Airfield. It’s where my battalion is. But Savannah is just a short drive to Tybee Island, depending on the traffic. And the surf there… it’s the kind of surf that gives a guy a reason to live.”
“Tybee Island?” The name seems to whittle free a seemingly inconsequential memory. “Didn’t your brother’s wife live there way back?” I direct the question to my husband, but he only shrugs. “And I think… umm… I could have sworn we knew someone else there. Who was it?”
I ask this part more to myself than to Mason. He doesn’t pay attention to people in the way that I do. In my writer’s brain, I tend to memorize everything about everyone, as though I might pluck some of their traits or features from my memory one day and use them for a character in a book.
Tybee Island. A memory forms, hazy at first, then slowly the details fill in like streaks of crayon in one of Astrid’s coloring books.