Out of Uniform (Wingmen Warriors 14)

A chill settled over Jacob. She didn’t really want him, just somebody, anybody to shake her from the numbing sensation that had come from her messed-up life.

Talk about the proverbial bucket of cold water. If—when—he made love to her it wouldn’t be in the front seat of a truck, and it wouldn’t be because she was running from something.

He wanted her running to him.

“Dee, we have to stop.” With more than a little regret, he untwined her arms from around his neck. “We’re in a parking lot.”

And damned if that didn’t make him start looking over his shoulder again as he’d done during their drive into town. Luckily nobody appeared to be paying any attention to a truck with fogged windows.

She stiffened, then flung herself away against the seat. “I can’t believe I did that. Like you haven’t already got a thousand reasons to think all sorts of crazy things about me, I go adding more ammo to the impression.”

“I’m not thinking anything other than you needed to blow off some steam, and this isn’t the right way. It’s okay.” Well, it wasn’t, but it would be once he could suck in a few more breaths.

Her sigh rippled through the air before she nodded and smiled, a wry, wobbly grin that caressed his hand. “What a first kiss, huh?”

“What?”

“My first kiss. Even if I’ve been kissed a thousand times before, it’s not like I remember any of them. So this is it. My new first. Is that strange or what?”

“Or what.” A new chill seeped through Jacob, dousing his need more effectively than a dive into a snowbank.

Yes, he wanted her, and he couldn’t help but notice she might want him a little in return. But they had a problem.

He’d considered any number of reasons why he shouldn’t lunge across the truck cab and convince her to find the nearest bed—or even ask her out to dinner and a movie. She had a life out there somewhere. He had a mess of a life here.

But he hadn’t considered one fundamental reason to tread warily, if at all.

This woman beside him, a woman who signed into a motel as “Mrs. Smith,” a woman who’d given birth to a child, a woman who might well have a husband, this woman was for all intents and purposes—a virgin.

Chapter 7

H e hated that damned virtuous act of hers. Of anyone, he knew how she really acted in bed.

His foot pressed the accelerator, the SUV’s tires gripping for traction even with the four-wheel drive. He forced his focus back on the road as he neared the Lodge. He just needed to see her, find out what she was doing, be sure she wasn’t making it with some other guy.

Everybody should know what a slut she was. They should hear the truth about her, but he couldn’t tell them. He’d needed to be attentive, loving. Appearances mattered. What people thought of him mattered if he ever wanted to put his life back together again.

He turned off the highway onto the side road, hunting rifles rattling in the floorboards as he bumped and jostled toward the out-of-the-way restaurant. All he’d wanted was money and a way out of the ball-and-chain life he’d been stuck with.

So why didn’t he just leave? Loose ends. If it weren’t for their kid, he would have walked away from her a long time ago.

He couldn’t wait for luck to turn his way any longer. He needed to take fate into his own hands.

Dee stared out the truck window. She wanted to ask more about Jacob’s military world, a place where he felt comfortable, even if the gates and fences and airplanes roaring overhead left her feeling a bit claustrophobic. But Jacob was even more reticent than he’d been on the drive earlier.

Perhaps the icy roads simply demanded his full attention.

At first, she’d wondered if Jacob’s moodiness could be a by-product of her having thrown herself at him. What had she been thinking? Obviously she hadn’t been thinking of anything but soaking up the comfort of his strength.

Dee spun thoughts of him over and over as they drove along the gravel road toward Marge’s Diner. She could imagine him in a uniform. The mental picture was more than a little exciting, the brooding, twenty-first-century warrior. It seemed right somehow.

The same man running a motel for years on end…That image didn’t gel at all. Already she recognized his need for action, his inescapable manner of taking charge. It wasn’t frenzied, just even-paced, steady, as he took care of everything from filing a police report to making sure she remembered to eat.

Jacob slowed the truck, wheels crunching across the diner’s parking lot. Trucks and Suburbans dominated the unmarked spaces. A replica of a prairie schoolhouse sat perched by a lake. The candy-apple-red building splashed color onto the otherwise gray mountainous horizon. A pier spiked out of the frozen waters, providing a narrow wooden path above the sheet of ice.

Not at all what she’d expected.

She’d been looking for some fifties throwback diner with jukeboxes and counter service. Had she subconsciously substituted something from her own hometown into expectations for Jacob’s area? She reached into her mental recesses in hope of finding the face of her child….