I felt that grin in my soul…if my vagina could be considered my soul.
Because holy shit, was the man’s smile potent.
“I really shouldn’t be giving away any of her milk, either,” he pointed out. “Yet you saw me do that, didn’t you?”
With that, he gestured toward the large man behind me, and I skittered sideways and hurried out of the door.
And when I took my first bite of the cinnamon twist and moaned, I tempted a look at him over my shoulder.
He was staring at me.
I gave him a thumb’s up with the cup of milk he’d given me, and his lips twitched.
I walked out of the bakery with my insides shivering.
I also told myself that I wasn’t going to stay at my father’s place until he got there.
I wouldn’t.
***
I did.
Three hours later, I was sitting in the compound, on my father’s porch, acting like I was there for a nice chat with my mom and dad when in fact I was there because I wanted another glimpse of him.
“How was work yesterday?” my mother asked, startling me out of my contemplation of the driveway.
I looked over at her and smiled.
“It was okay,” I admitted. “Though, there are a lot of staff out with the flu right now. If I make it through this flu season without it, it’ll be a miracle.”
Dad grunted on his chair beside me and stood up, walking inside without a word.
“What?” I asked my mom.
“His knee is bothering him again. Probably have a storm coming in…so he says.”
My lips twitched.
My father had sustained quite a bit of damage in his time as a soldier. The scarring all over his body was enough to prove it.
When the weather took a drastic change, it was more than likely his body would start aching to let him know it was coming. Sometimes, he said, he would know the forecast better than the weatherman.
“I heard there’s a cold front blowing through tomorrow afternoon,” I admitted. “It’s supposed to drop forty degrees in about three hours.”
“Great,” my mother muttered. “Your brother’s driving in from Fort Hood. That’s exactly what I want to hear.”
I giggled. “That’s usually the way of it. How long does he get to stay?”
“A night,” Dad said as he came back out. “He’s doing something in Louisiana that he wasn’t at liberty to talk about, he says. He got permission to stop at our house for the night, and then in the morning he’ll continue with the trip to wherever in Louisiana he’s going.”
“Are we sure it’s even Louisiana?” I teased.
Dad grunted out a reply and sat back down, a frosted mug of beer in his hand.
A bike pulled into the compound, and I felt my nerves start to quiver.
Everything inside me was more than aware that the bike hadn’t been coming to the compound long. If he had, he would’ve kept right on rolling inside, instead, he had to stop at the gate and input a temporary code. The rest of us had little tags on our vehicles. When we got close, the gate would sense the tags and automatically open for us.
“He’s late,” my father muttered.
I bit my lip and looked at the time.
“It’s because of all that.” I gestured toward the boxes of pastries. “Though, I wish I would’ve been able to keep more of those muffins. And the twists.”
I’d made the mistake of walking into the center earlier where quite a few of the men had been in a meeting—my dad being one of them. Needless to say, I had only cookies left, and that had been because I’d guarded that box with my life so I could share them with my mother.
The bike pulled up to the center’s front, but with a quick look around, he came to see us instead of walking inside the center.
“Hope I didn’t interrupt,” Slate muttered, his eyes flicking to mine, then to my father’s, followed shortly by my mother’s.
“No,” Max muttered. “Take a seat for a second and let me finish my beer. We try not to take alcohol into the center. It sometimes scares the women and children. Though we don’t have any inhabitants right now.”
Slate nodded and went to the only available seat left on the porch, the one directly next to me, and took a seat.
“Anyway, Harleigh. To answer your question.” Dad opened his mouth and yawned. “I was able to find out it’s some training exercise that’s supposed to simulate a real attack on our US borders. They’re going down to the swamps of Louisiana. There’s a survivalist compound that they were able to acquire for a few weeks. They’re supposed to be blending into the surrounding towns and not scaring the shit out of people while they perform this mission. Your brother’s going in as a civilian.”
That’s when I burst out laughing.