“Will you tell me about the tattoo on your chest now?” she asked.
He hesitated, but his voice was soft and open when he said, “What would you like to know?”
“Why a ship?” He’d never shown any interest in boating or the ocean when they’d been together.
“I worked on a fishing vessel for several years,” he said. “It’s sort of commemorative of that time.”
Giselle’s eyes jerked open, and she cut a look at him over her shoulder. Out of everything she’d learned about him over the last forty-eight hours, this was by far the most shocking. “Fishing vessel?” She searched her mind for some sort of reference. “Like that show, what’s it called? Deadliest…something?”
“Deadliest Catch. Sort of.” He pushed on her shoulder. “Relax.” When she sank back into the water, he said, “Most days it felt more like a mix of Deadliest Catch and The Perfect Storm, but that’s a good reference.”
She was having a really hard time picturing him in slickers, working like a slave in torrential rain. “When did you do that?”
“After you left, it took me a while, but I realized there was no reason to stay put.”
With sudden clarity, Giselle realized why he’d been putting off this talk. This was the painful stuff. This was what his life had been like after she and Ryker had gone off to live their dreams, leaving Troy alone to fend for himself.
“One of the guys at work had a brother on a boat in Alaska,” he said, “and he hooked me up.”
When he didn’t go on, she asked, “What’s that like? I mean, is it a day-trip thing? Or a few days at a time?”
“It depends—what you’re fishing for, what season you’re in, who you’re working for, how big the operation is. I needed to stay busy, so I took everything anyone threw my way, no matter how little it paid. Swore there was one year I didn’t touch dry land for more than an hour in nine months.”
Her heart felt heavy. Her eyes burned. He’d needed to stay busy to forget about her. To drown the pain. She knew, because she’d done the same. “Sounds…lonely.”
“It was good for me. Changed my body. Changed my mind. Gave me a work ethic, drive, stamina, business sense, a brotherhood. Honestly,” he sighed, his voice growing soft, “I think it saved my life.”
Giselle’s breath whooshed out like she’d been hit, and an ache developed at the center of her belly.
He picked up the shower nozzle and rinsed the shampoo from her hair. “Those were some dark years. There are periods I don’t even remember. I must have blocked them out. It’s strange to think back on them. I don’t recognize the person I was then—someone different from who I’d been before, different than I am now, almost…I don’t really know how to explain it.”
“Empty,” she said. “Like a shell. Going through the motions of life, meeting your obligations, but numb, because if you felt, the pain might take you under.”
He shut off the spray and fell silent for a moment. She knew he understood she was talking about her own experience, one that mirrored his. He must also have heard the guilt in her voice, because he said, “It’s not your fault, El. You may have walked away, but I pushed you to the door. And I’m a better man for the years between then and now. It wasn’t fun, I’d rather not do it again, but they were pivotal years I wouldn’t give back. That’s why I had the tattoo done, to remember the lessons I learned on those ships. Those were important for you too. Years that you devoted completely to your craft, to your career. And look how far you’ve come.”
But at what cost? What level of success was worth your happiness? Your health? Your sanity? Those were questions that she asked herself with increasing frequency over the last year. Questions she hadn’t been able to answer.
As he massaged conditioner into her hair, she asked about his other tattoo. “And the one on your hip, extending down your thigh?”
“The Terminator tat? That’s just for my love of machinery, gears, how things work.”
“Is that why you got into stunts?” she asked. He’d talked a lot about his work over the last two days, but never about how he’d gotten started.
“No. Stunts came as a fluke. I was deep into my fourth year of fishing, trolling the Pacific for Chinook salmon, when we had engine trouble and had to dock in Los Angeles for repairs. Jax was shooting a stunt at the harbor and needed help rigging a fall. Word spread, and they came to me. Asked if I wanted to give it a shot. I said, sure, what the hell else did I have to do?”
He rinsed the conditioner from her hair. “I spent a couple of days rigging various stages of different stunts for him, and he offered me a job with Renegades. I took it. That’s another one of those meant-to-be stories. Right place at the right time. If I had said no to rigging the stunt because I’d never done it before, I would have missed that opportunity. If I had gone back to what I knew, what was familiar and safe and gotten back on the boat instead of taking a chance on the job with Renegades, I’d still be gutting fish and breaking my back on the open ocean.”
He dropped a kiss to her shoulder and stood. “I’m going to start dinner.”
By the time her mouth dropped open to protest, he was at the door, then gone. And Giselle sat there, staring at the door with frustration mounting as she wondered just what the hell was—or was not—happening between them.
Troy chopped off the tops of three baby carrots, then flipped them around, but had to wipe sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand before he could cut the tips. He set the knife down and tossed the carrots into the bowl along with the snow peas, peppers, watercress, and ginger.
Troy w
iped his hands on a kitchen towel, then reached down and repositioned his erection.
“God damn,” he growled, turning toward the fridge for the steak. He didn’t know how in the hell he was going to sleep holding Giselle again tonight. “Stupid. You’re not going to sleep.” He unrolled the meat from pink butcher paper and dropped it on the cutting block, then grabbed a different knife. He was going to owe Rubi forever. She’d delivered on every promise—the house, the car, the food, the clothes, and the complete privacy. That woman was a magician, a spy, and a confidante all rolled into one fabulous human being.