He wasn’t choosy about women, either.
Well, not true.
He was into eye candy. Nothing wrong with that. And he liked women who were fun to be with. Uncomplicated. Undemanding. He wasn’t the kind who signed on for more than a couple of nights, maybe a couple of weeks, max.
There wasn’t room in his life for a woman who wanted more, not just because of the demands of his career but because he wasn’t into anything more involved than that.
And he sure as hell wasn’t into women who were always testing a man. No matter how good a woman looked, if she was confrontational, argumentative, if she was a constant challenge or, to put it bluntly, a constant pain in the ass, why would he want to be with her?
Chay took a long pull at his bottle of ale.
A smart dude avoided babes like that.
Easy enough, because no matter how hot they looked, the warning signs were easy to read and once Chay read them, he stayed away.
Hell, he stayed away in general.
Here tonight. Gone tomorrow. That was his motto. The same motto lots of guys in the units lived by. The motto his best friend, his blood brother, Tanner Akecheta, had lived by…
Until six months ago.
Tanner had not only fallen for a women, gone into a relationship, he’d gotten married. Amazing. Even more amazing, Tanner was happy.
If he was happy, then Chay was, too.
As far as he could tell, Tanner’s wife, Alessandra, seemed like the right woman for him—once you got past the fact that it was hard to see how there could ever be a right woman for a man. Tanner kept urging him to take some time off, head up to their ranch in the Dakotas, spend some time riding, fishing, hunting, just hanging out.
Tanner had met his wife on a mission. He’d rescued her from kidnappers in a Central American hellhole called San Escobal. Chay had been the COM Op in charge, communicating with Tanner via satphone, coordinating their rescue. He’d worked from an office at Camp Condor, meaning he’d ended up spending time with Alessandra’s family.
With her sister, Bianca.
Chay took a long, cooling swig of ale.
One thing was certain.
Tanner’s wife and her sister couldn’t possibly share much more than their last name. Last names, to be accurate. They were both Bellini-Wildes and man, when it came to not getting that two-name thing right with the sister, you were in deep shit.
Fact was, you were in deep shit with her most of the time.
The
good news? She was hot. To look at, anyway, because the bad news was that she had all the warmth of an ice cube, plus she was a pain in the ass. A world-class pain in the ass.
The brunette took a quick glance over her shoulder, held a couple of seconds’ worth of eye contact, flashed a smile, then went back to talking and laughing with her girlfriends.
Chay drank some more ale.
Another few minutes, he’d make a move.
Jesus, the sister. What a piece of work.
Bianca Wilde. Bianca Bellini Wilde, if you didn’t want her to rip you a new one, but forget that.
It made more sense to think of her as Bianca the Tigress.
Talk about confrontational women…
She’d turned up at Camp Condor, marched right into his space and tried to take over. At first he’d thought it was because her old man was a four-star and she figured that gave her special rights, but in no time at all he’d realized her attitude had nothing to do with that.