Alessandra rose on her toes and planted a kiss on his jaw.
“It’s great to see you, too.” She leaned back and her husband wrapped his arm around her waist as he drew her close against him. “I keep asking Tanner when you’re going to come and visit us.”
‘I will. Soon. I promise.”
“I’d love that. I can’t count how many times we go somewhere and Tanner talks about being there with you when you two were boys.”
“I hope he hasn’t told you anything that would ruin my pristine reputation.”
“Of course not,” Alessandra said, and they all laughed.
Tanner eased his wife into the booth. Chay took the seat across from them.
“So,” he said, “how was your trip down?”
“It was great,” Alessandra said. “We took a quick detour to El Sueño. You know. The Wilde ranch in Texas.” She leaned her head against her husband’s shoulder. “Turns out we might be doing some business with Jake.”
“Your stepbrother.”
“Half-brother. Yeah. He’s thinking about getting into breeding Appaloosas. The way we do.”
We, Chay thought. Amazing. So was the way Tanner was looking at his wife. They really were happy. Maybe Tanner had found the one woman in a million a guy could live with—assuming a guy wanted to live with a woman at all. Not that that would change his viewpoint, but if that was what Tanner wanted, good for him.
“So,” he said, “are you guys hungry?”
Alessandra nodded.
“We’re starved. According to my husband, the burgers here are the best in Northern California.”
“The passage of ti
me will screw up a man’s memory,” Chay said, laughing. “No, seriously, they’re good. Or, if you want something else, we can go to that Thai place just up the road. Or that little Italian place up the coast a few miles.”
“Honey?” Tanner said, looking at his wife. “Your choice.”
“I’m fine with whatever you guys want, but why don’t we wait and ask… Oh. Here she is now. Bianca? We’re talking about where to have dinner…Whoops. Sorry. You remember Chay, don’t you?”
Bianca Bellini Wilde, aka Bianca the Tigress, looked down at the man she absolutely, positively loathed, the man any woman with half a brain instantly recognized as a card-carrying male chauvinist, the man she had been assured she would not have to set eyes on because he was out of the country—deployed, in the language of her new brother-in-law—and asked herself what, exactly, she had done to deserve the punishment of having him turn up here.
And how had this trip—this much anticipated vacation—gone so wrong? First the calls to her cellphone in Texas. Ugly calls. Frightening, too, though she’d never admitted just how frightening to Alessandra or Tanner.
Now this. Lieutenant Chayton Olivieri, in the flesh. The man who had embarrassed her. Humiliated her.
Bianca set her jaw.
She’d been helpless in the face of those phone calls.
This was different.
The lieutenant wasn’t into scaring women. He was into dominating them. Too strong a word, maybe, but what else would you call a man who lived and breathed machismo, who couldn’t get through his head the simple fact that not all women were interested in the Neanderthal approach?
Her one satisfaction was that he was staring at her with the same look of shock she suspected was on her own face.
Good, Bianca thought with grim satisfaction.
She hadn’t seen him for months, but she hadn’t forgotten that he’d made her miserable every minute of every hour they’d been forced to spend in each other’s company.
Now it was her turn to return the favor.