Protecting His Pregnant Lover (Southern Soldiers of Fortune 1)

While he devoured his stack of pancakes, she nibbled on her first one, trying to work out exactly how he was able to leap so far ahead of her on this case in such a short time. “What were you doing last night?”

He looked up at her, mid-bite. “Reading through the data you compiled.”

She should have known. Olive took a sip from the mug of tea he’d set beside her plate earlier. “And that’s how you figured all this out?”

“That plus what I received from my SSoF team.” He shrugged and swallowed another bite of breakfast. Olive could only be impressed. Where he put all that food, she had no idea, since there wasn’t a spare ounce of fat on him. Just muscle. Sleek, smooth, sensational muscle.

Down girl.

Irritated with herself for falling into the smutty pool again, Olive took a huge bite of pancakes and stared down at her plate, speaking around the food in her mouth. “Do they contact you often?”

“At least once a day. More if they find something important about the case I need to know about.”

Olive swallowed, then sipped more tea. One thing was for certain. Levon Asher was an excellent pancake maker, on top of all his other talents. As the sugar slowly entered her system, her curiosity grew. “Do they call or text you or email?”

Levon raised a brow at her. “Are you always this nosy?” She started to answer, but he held up a hand, laughing. “Wait. No. I know the answer. Yes. You are. That’s something else I remember about you from all those study sessions. You were never content to just let things sit as they were. You always wanted to dig deeper, always had to understand how things work and why.”

Her lips compressed and her teeth ground together. Some people considered that curiosity a negative, but for Olive her persistent need to ask questions was a good thing, especially as a scientist and teacher. If you didn’t wonder about things, you never learned. Asking questions was her way of solving problems. But that Levon might see it as a nuisance stung, way more than she wanted to admit. Just when she thought they were turning over a new leaf, when she thought he might see her, the real her, and appreciate who she was. Ugh. She’d thought Levon was different, but maybe he was just like all the other men she’d dated. Intimidated by her big brains and eager to assert their testosterone-laden dominance over her. Well, if that was the case, he could just go and suck it.

She was about to tell him so when he stood to clear away his empty plate, his smile kind. “Please don’t take that the wrong way. Your intellect is one of the things I like most about you.” He gave her a slow once-over. “Among many other things. You, Olive Owen, are sexy as hell.”

Well then.

Maybe she hadn’t been so far off the mark after all.

To hide her ever-increasing blush at his frank perusal, she lowered her head and took more bites of her pancakes, eager to shift the spotlight off of her and her crazy, chaotic attraction to this man. “So, tell me more about this stakeout we’ll be doing later.”

“... you know what? If this is what an evil hideout looks like, then I want to join a gang,” Olive said as they pulled up outside the outdoor shopping mall on the edge of Harper’s Forge. Mid-afternoon sunshine streamed down on the brick and stone arcade in the middle of the place, surrounded by half-vacant storefronts. This was hardly the location she’d expected at all. From what he’d told her this morning at breakfast, she’d been expecting a scene straight out of a Tarantino movie, complete with sword-wielding villains and black-leather clad badasses. And while there was the usual crowd of harmless juvenile delinquents milling around the town’s gaming arcade, and a group of dark-clothed Goth kids sucking down enormous sodas, they were hardly the killer-gang material she’d envisioned. Still, as he pulled into a parking spot at the end of a long row of cars and cut the engine, she had to admit her pulse pounded a bit harder. Maybe from adrenaline or perhaps from all the syrup she’d eaten at breakfast, hard to tell which at this point.

“They might not look like much at first glance,” Levon said, squinting out the windshield at the crowd before them. “But trust me, you underestimating them is what they want. The less attention they draw to themselves, the harder they are to find and capture.”

“So, you really think the gang members are here today recruiting?” Olive still couldn’t see it, but had seen enough proof of Levon’s instincts to trust him. She leaned to get a better look around, memories of high school blending with the scene before her now. “Remember how all of the ‘bad crowd’, all of the neglected kids in and out of juvie, used to hang around here when we were in school? From what I’ve heard in the news and the gossip from my students, it’s only gotten worse since then. Even with half these places closed down, the number of mall rats has doubled.”

“Hmm.” Levon settled in with his paper cup of coffee they’d gotten at a drive-thru. “Never really hung with that crowd.”

Olive hadn’t either, but she had heard things, even back then. She adopted a similar slouchy pose to his, one elbow resting on the window sill while she held her cup of tea with her other hand. She had no idea how to act at a stakeout, other than what she’d seen in the movies, but she was determined to mirror him. If he trusted her enough to bring her this far, then she wouldn’t disappoint him. Not to mention he’d said the recon they were doing today was low-risk, and only “minimally dangerous”, so why not relax a bit?

Except her thudding heart had other ideas, excitement sizzling through her veins like lit gasoline. Of course, being this close to Levon in a confined space wasn’t helping either. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to stop noticing his long, strong fingers wrapped around his coffee cup, and flushed thinking how he’d used them on her, in her, her last night...

“What are your plans for the future?” Levon asked out of the blue, jarring her out of her erotic thoughts and making her choke on a swallow of tea.

“Uh, what?” she asked once she recovered, swiping her mouth with the sleeve of her sweater, then pushing her glasses up her nose. Seriously, she hadn’t expected him to go so deep so quickly... hearing herself think that, she blushed. “Why do I suddenly feel like I’m the one being staked out?”

“We haven’t really talked about it, Olive. And I think I have a right to know.” He turned to her, blue eyes piercing. Searching. For what? “You’re going to be a mom soon. Clearly you love teaching. But I can’t help thinking—you never left the town where we grew up. Hell, you never even left the high school.”

Her face burned hot beneath his stare and she fought to maintain eye contact with him. But she had nothing to be embarrassed about, damn it. “I did leave—I went to college. Then I came back. So what? Lots of people stay in their hometowns.” She couldn’t keep the challenge out of her voice. Was Levon really intimating she should be ashamed of her choices? Ashamed of her life? Well, screw him, if that was the case. “We can’t all run around the world like superheroes.”

He scowled, then snorted and turned away, staring back out at the arcade. “I didn’t mean it as an insult, Olive. I just…” He shrugged and shook his head. “I just always thought you were destined for more.”

“More? Like what?” She did her best to keep the sharpness from her tone and failed miserably, if the pointed look he gave her was any indication. Olive swallowed hard against the lump of hurt in her throat over his disappointment in her. She shouldn’t have been surprised. People were usually disappointed in her when it came to things outside of her smarts. She should be used to it by now. Except comi

ng from Levon, the rejection hurt. Badly. Maybe she wasn’t a rocket scientist. Maybe she hadn’t moved out of Harper’s Forge. But she had nothing to be ashamed of. She had made a good life for herself and would make a good life for their baby when it came, with or without him. She took a deep breath to ease the pressure constricting her ribcage, then said quietly, “It’s not my fault you had your lab partner built up in your head, Levon. What, did you expect me to go off and win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry? I bet you certainly didn’t expect me to wind up single and pregnant in the town where I grew up.”

Guilt flickered through his blue eyes, and she felt an odd sense of satisfaction at that. Good. Let him know he really stepped in it with that one.

Levon didn’t reply right away. He always liked to think things through, she remembered.

“Take your time.” She settled back into her seat. “I’m not going anywhere. Just make sure the next thing you say is exactly what you mean.”