I punched in my number all the while hoping I wouldn’t hear from him.
“Are you free for lunch today?” Ace asked.
“Probably not,” I said automatically. It wasn’t true; I didn’t know what I was doing for lunch, and my meeting with my editor shouldn’t last anywhere near that long. But I definitely didn’t want to see Ace for lunch. And I had to hope that if I delayed for long enough, he would leave town.
He wasn’t from Boston, after all. I clung to that knowledge, to the idea that he must just be passing through. After all, he knew I was from here, and we hadn’t exactly left things on the best note. Surely, he wouldn’t have come here looking for me, right? Nor would he randomly have chosen Boston as a place to set down roots after his tour of duty was finished.
What were the chances? One in a million. Or not really.
I peered up at his face, noting all the similarities between his features and Ava’s. Or rather, between Ava’s features and her father’s. They had the same nose, and there was a similar shape to their eyes. Her hair might be more like mine, a curly brown mess, and her skin might be just a hair lighter than mine. But overall, she was her father’s daughter. Noticeably.
If Ace stuck around in Boston, if we met up, if he came over to the tiny, cramped place that I shared with Ava, it was only a matter of time before he realized everything. Before he figured out all of my secrets. Secrets I had never planned on sharing with him, not when I knew his feelings on kids and commitment. The life I had with Ava, that wasn’t the sort of life that Ace Bradley wanted for himself.
He had to be just passing through.
“I have to go,” I blurted out, pushing past him, heading away down the asphalt toward the newspaper office. I didn’t think for a second that it would stop him. If he really wanted to have lunch with me, he’d have lunch with me.
This was Ace Bradley, after all. I had always been a sucker for a guy with charisma.
But hopefully, I could weasel out of lunch with him. Or maybe he’d forget he had ever run into me. Or maybe his phone would fall in the sewer as he made his way across the city.
I prayed to whatever gods might be out there that I wouldn’t have to actually sit down and face him, not ever. I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to do that. Not without telling him the truth.
I couldn’t tell him the truth.
I could only hope that he was just passing through.
2
Ace
I dug my fingers into my pocket, looking for my keys. For a moment, my fingers slid across the cool metal of a shell, the one I always carried in my pocket. I smiled to myself, lost in memories. Then, my fingers caught on the sharp edges of my house key, and I was jolted back to the present.
The apartment was nice enough, I supposed. In a good location. Easy walking distance to the T and the bus, plus easy enough to get to other places around the city. Stone, my roommate, was another former SEAL, and even though we hadn’t served on the same unit, he was good people. Or at least, we didn’t drive each other crazy. Although I’d only been in Boston for a few months, so it was hard to really tell.
I grinned and shook my head. “Lots of time left to drive one another crazy,” I muttered under my breath. I was actually surprised at how well things had been going between the two of us: we both had our routines, and we were both pretty anal about them. It was routines that kept a man alive in the military. If you forgot one little detail, if the slightest thing was out of place, that could doom the whole mission.
But our routines never seemed to clash. And living with someone else who was ex-military meant I knew his routines had a reason behind them. He wasn’t trying to be irritating.
I pushed my key into the building’s front lock, finding my mind drifting back to thoughts about Harper. I still couldn’t believe I had run into her, even though I knew she lived in Boston. It might not be as big a city as New York or LA, but Boston was still big enough that a person could disappear there. Not that I’d been actively looking for Harper or anything.
Oh, I’d wanted to see her, of course. She looked just as good now as she did all those years ago, too. Three years? Four years? To be honest, I didn’t really remember. Everything sort of blended together when you were out on active duty.
I remembered a lot about Harper, though. Her dark hair was curlier now than it had been, and her body was just a bit curvier. In a good way. In fact, I was pretty sure she was even sexier now than she had been back then. Not that there had been anything wrong with her body or her personality before.
I hadn’t slept with many people during my years of service, but there had been something about Harper that I’d just found myself drawn to from the moment I met her. She’d come over for about six months as an overseas journalist writing about the SEALs. We’d joked about her when we’d first learned that she was going to stay out there for that long. I don’t think anyone thought she was going to make it past the first week; our life over there was just too hard, and she was just some city kid from Boston.
But she’d surprised me. She was tough, and she really wanted to be there. In the couple interviews that she did, she always asked these questions that you had to wonder how she came up with them. Things that really got into the details of our life over there, as though she somehow knew more about it than she should.
We’d gotten close, and we’d ended up hooking up.
Now, running into her back in Boston, all this time later, that was just awesome. I wanted to pick up where we’d left off. Our time together had been brief, and it had been interrupted at the worst possible moment. We’d had that one great night, and that was it.
I was going to be in Boston for a while, though, and if she was still here, who knew what our relationship could evolve into.
Then again, I was mostly thinking about the sex when I was thinking about her. I was thinking of that smooth, coffee-colored skin and those round hips of hers. Of that cute little birthmark on her thigh, of how she’d shivered when I’d kissed it. I was thinking of her riding me, pushing her wild, dark hair back as it fell into her face.
I was thinking about sex, and that was probably just because I hadn’t had any in a very long time now.