The Dangerous Jacob Wilde

“Twenty minutes,” he said, and he turned her toward the stairs, gave her a gentle swat on the backside and told his heart to slow down or he’d never make it through the night.

She was halfway up the stairs when he called after her.

“Addison?”

She turned and looked at him.

“So you’re not, you know, homesick for New York?”

Addison swept the tip of her tongue over suddenly dry lips.

“No. I’m not homesick at all. I—I like it here, Jacob. Much, much more than I’d thought I would.”

He stared at her. She stared at him.

Tell me you love me and you want me to stay, she thought.

Tell her you love her and you want her to stay, he thought.

“You’ll like Dallas, too,” he said.

“What?”

“That’s where we’re going for dinner.”

“Dallas is a two-hour drive!”

He grinned. “Not when I’m behind the wheel, remember?”

She wore the black dress. The black heels.

He thought about stripping the dress off her so that she was wearing just the heels and the thong and matching scrap of a bra he figured she’d be wearing underneath.

Then he told himself to behave.

He was taking her to a restaurant he hadn’t been to in years, and he could have her all to himself when they got home.

He wore his new jeans, a new black T-shirt with a leather jacket over it—she’d admired it at the store that morning and he’d bought it, more for her than for him. He even polished his boots for the occasion.

And he had on his black eye patch.

Under it, in the socket where his eye had once been, he wore a silicone thing called a conformer.

Eventually, he’d have an artificial eye made to put in its place.

He’d been putting that off, or maybe not putting it off so much as not being ready to deal with looking in the mirror and seeing something designed to make him look more like the man he’d once been when he wasn’t that man …

Hell.

Why tiptoe through that mental morass? The simple fact was, it was time to get the eye made, and he would do it.

He drove fast, but the time would have raced by even if he hadn’t because they talked all the way to the city.

There was so much to learn about each other. So many things they had in common, even if with a slight twist.

He loved football. The Dallas Cowboys.

“Such a surprise,” she said with wide-eyed innocence, and laughed when he tossed the words back at her a minute later, after she said she loved football, too, but for her, it was the New York Jets.