chapter Two
Jake thought about not stopping. He had orders. R and R. Vegas. Now. And they had come from the top. General Fielding had looked Jake in the eye and asked him,
“When was your last vacation, Lieutenant?”
Jake had to think about it. “December 2010. A week with my sister and her kids in Kalispell.”
The General had nodded. “You need sun. You need hot.” He thought for a moment. “Vegas. Go home and pack a bag. Do not stop for provisions. I don’t even want you helping the little old lady across the street. I want you in Sin City by sundown. We’ll see you in four days.”
“Yes, Sir,” Jake had replied, because he’d had no alternative. But he had no idea what he would do in Vegas. He wasn’t a gambling, strip-show-watching, buffet kind of guy. Three hours later he wished he’d thought to counter the General. To suggest that he hike Yosemite or fly down to Cabo San Lucas for a little scuba diving. Anything other than sitting in a hotel room for four days, watching HBO and ordering room service.
“And Lieutenant,” the General had called after him, “I’ll be checking in with you. I want to hear slot machines and highball glasses in the background.”
“Yes, Sir. Vegas.”
And then he had come upon a disabled vehicle and a stranded woman changing clothes on the side of the highway. His foot was on the brake even as the General’s orders were swirling around in his head.
She was young, tall, graceful.
She had hair the color of whiskey.
A body that was fine-tuned and would play some sweet melodies.
All good reasons to get back in his truck and floor it. As First Lieutenant, Jake commanded a group of thirteen elite men into combat, and he did so well—even now, after suffering their first loss—but for the life of him he could not get it right with romance. He figured it was the way his brain was reduced to mush when his blood filled with need. And was disgusted with himself that at the age of thirty he hadn’t outgrown the sophomoric problem.
And this woman did that to him. Faster than any other woman he’d encountered. She had him before a word was spoken. She had him at fifty paces. He’d drawn closer and she’d noticed him—too late. He was already well into her personal space and that startled her. Good. A woman, alone and in the middle of nowhere, should have better radar.
And then her lips parted. He felt the simple action spiral through his veins. Every part of him went on standby.
And then she spoke.
That fast, the spell was broken. The sexual tension the mere movement of her body
created was shattered by her words. Their tone—impatient, expectant, annoyed.
“It’s about time.”
Like he owed her something and was long overdue in paying up. Well, he was off duty, and maybe this time he’d remember that.
“Ah, sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean that. Not the way it sounded.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I could have used a little help a few years ago. This—“ she raised her arms to indicate the car, the flat, the desolate surroundings—“is an easy fix.”
“Well, then, I’ll leave you to it.” Jake heard the sting in his words and regretted it. He was usually more composed. Of course, he didn’t often walk around half-hard and with an ache in his balls. Because he never reacted to a woman as strongly as he did to her. And he found it damn irritating. Maybe the General was right and Jake really did need some time to play.
A frown rippled across her forehead. He’d troubled her with his response and Jake was glad to see it. She should be disturbed by the thought of being left alone to fend for herself. He waited, but she didn’t protest. He wondered, if he started moving back toward his truck, would she speak up then? But he couldn’t do it. That damn honor thing—born in his heart and reinforced by nearly a decade of training as a Marine.
“You’re going to let me walk away,” he realized.
“I’ve learned not to rely on anyone but myself. Life is less disappointing that way.”
He took the hit, but also heard the challenge in her voice. Jake could be the picture boy for strength. At six feet two inches and a hundred and ninety pounds in his skin, he was a presence. Sometimes formidable, most of the time reassuring, he liked to think. Mentally he was at the top of his game and had survived two tours through the Middle East, skinning through narrow channels in order to keep himself and his men alive. He seldom disappointed.
But she’d revealed a lot about herself with those few words. Jake felt them falling into place inside his own experience bank.
A woman with a past and she was determined to learn from it. Jake respected that. “No repeating the same mistake twice.”
“I wish,” she said. “But I was a slow learner.”
“Or an optimist.”
She tilted her head to one side and really looked at him. “The glass is always half-full, soldier?”
He nodded but felt a smile break through. “Yes, Ma’am.”
“Ivy,” she said. “If you’re going to rescue me, we should at least get it done on a first name basis.”
He accepted her hand, though he knew touch was a bad thing when his body was already running close to fever. Sure enough, her fingers slipped into his palm and the heat in his body kicked up several notches. Her hand was small and soft, but her grip was firm.
If truth was in a handshake, then she’d grown from her experiences, the good and the bad. He had a lot of respect for that. He’d come from a similar place.
“Jake,” he replied. He pulled his hand back. “You have a spare?”
She smiled into her next words, “Nope.” And he received them as they were intended—another challenge.
“That would be too easy,” he agreed.
“My life has never been that.”
“Driving without a spare is asking for trouble.”
“I loaned it to someone,” Ivy admitted. “Maybe you could get me a tow truck?” she suggested. “There’s no cell reception here, but there’s a small town about twenty miles back. Think of me as you’re passing through?”
He shook his head, the smile still hovering on his lips. “Too easy,” he returned, though the option had some appeal. Climbing back into his truck and leaving trouble behind was always an attractive option, but never his first choice. He’d also be following orders, something he was as good at doing as he was at giving them. “I come prepared,” he assured her.
“Boy Scout?”
“Never. And don’t forget it.” His eyes hooked on her face again. He could get lost in her eyes. They were big, brown and sparkled with humor. He slipped his gaze lower, dwelling on the full bow of her lips. What was it about red lipstick that went straight to his dick? “Stay here. Finish dressing--” he heard the timber of his voice grow deeper, stirred by his physical reaction to her, “or not. I’m going to pull my truck around front and hook us up.”
Surprise made her eyes flare and he changed his opinion of their color. They were fascinating. Mutable. And hazel. A mix of deep green, gold and brown that made him think of mountaintops and sun filtering through spring trees.
He made himself turn away, start walking. He palmed his fly and adjusted his growing problem, damned the friction of his jeans and the memory of her mouth, curved into that cheeky smile, and where it had taken him.
“You have a tow bar hidden in the bed of your truck?” she called after him.
He didn’t stop, didn’t turn around. He was a man of discipline—though he’d never had to chase after it so quickly. “No, but I’m a good Montana boy. I have a winch. It’s good enough in a pinch.”
Jake slid behind the wheel of his truck and took a moment to watch Ivy from a distance. She was tall, willowy, but with a core strength that would allow her to bend but not break. Jake guessed she came pretty close to it at some point—she’d revealed as much—and she’d had the opportunity to truly test her own resilience. Rising from that kind of challenge left a person with unshakable confidence. Jake had personal experience with that. He’d come back not once but twice from the edge. And after his latest mission, he felt like he was tap dancing on a tightrope.
That kind of confidence could quickly make a man foolish, he reminded himself.
He pushed the key into the ignition and pulled forward, moving around her compact vehicle and setting up in front, reversing until his bumper was just inches from hers. The winch would lift her car several inches from the blacktop and secure it to his one-ton, the back tires of her Patriot rolling along the pavement and absorbing half its load. They could easily make it back to civilization and then some.
She was waiting for him when he climbed out of the truck.
“What can I do?”
“Stand back and watch,” he suggested, already knowing Ivy was a doer. He noted again the running shoes and shorts that she’d slipped into and nodded at her feet.
“What were you going to do with those?”
“Run to a call box.”
“Good plan.”
“I’m good in a crisis.”
And the only way to get there was practice. “Where are you headed?”
“San Diego.”
“You in a hurry?”
“I have to be at work at seven.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a respiratory therapist,” she told him. “I have a lot of patients relying on me.”
He nodded. “So I’ll have you there by seven,” he promised. “It’ll be slow-going, though. Towing your car means fifty miles per hour and we’ll have to hook up with the Fifteen Freeway at the next interchange—all this bumping and grinding won’t be good for our connection.”
“Do you always talk in double-entendres?”
“You started it,” he reminded her. He lay down on the pavement and got to work under
her car, securing the grappling-type hooks to the frame. When he surfaced she was standing over him.
“Thank you, for the tow and the ride. But isn’t San Diego a little out of your way?”
“I live in San Diego.”
“But you were headed east,” she pointed out.
He shrugged. “A detour.” And remarkably more appealing than four days in Vegas.
“It’s a little more than that.”
“I wasn’t looking forward to Vegas,” he admitted. He stood and didn’t mind at all that he was in her personal space. This close, his skin flushed with heat. His heartbeat kicked into staccato. He watched her lips part a little breathlessly before she spoke.
“Why not?” Her voice was heavy with skepticism. “Isn’t that every soldier’s hot spot?”
“There you go again,” he said. “Talking like that.”
He laughed when her cheeks filled with color.
“I just meant in terms of destination.”
She tried to look down her nose at him, but he was a good six inches taller than her.
“Exactly.” But he let her off the hook. “My ‘hot spot’ is the complete opposite of Vegas and other similar places. I don’t take a lot of time off, but when I do I prefer to spend it away from civilization.”
“So why Vegas?”
“It was an order,” he admitted reluctantly. He stepped back, leaned against the roof of her car, and watched her face adjust to that news. Surprise made her wide lips open and pause on the edge of laughter.
“You were ordered to go to Vegas?”
“Exactly. Four days of R and R.”
The laughter came then, full and throaty and Jake felt that ache build again, pull along his shaft. God, she played him and she wasn’t even aware of it.
“You say that like it’s a prison sentence. Four days of show girls and all-you-can-eat—isn’t that a soldier’s dream come true?”
“Not this soldier,” he assured her.
“So you’re looking for an excuse to turn around?”
“I was told not to help little old ladies.” The General had said nothing about young, gorgeous, sin in every line of her body woman.
“I’m not old.”
“Exactly,” he agreed. “I think I might squeak through.”
“You’re disobeying a direct order,” Ivy said.
“It’s complicated.” He felt and heard the tightness in his voice. His throat ached every time he thought about Arturo, the one he lost. His first. God willing, his last.
“You can’t go back,” the General had reminded him. “You can’t change the outcome for
one. You remember you made the world better for many. You remember that sometimes there are sacrifices. McAllister’s life and death were meaningful. That’s what we all want. You let him rest with that.”
And Jake believed that. If it came down to losing his own life, that’s exactly the way he wanted it. It’s the way they all wanted it—for their lives to add up to greater than one.
Still, Jake had lost a man. A good man. A man with a wife and two children. It’d been three months since the fire shower, the missiles exploding and shaking the earth, hard and close and knocking them to their knees, but the memory had only begun to fade around the edges. They had reached their target—an Israeli operative and two U.S. contractors—and brought them to safety. The human cost—two shot, but none left behind enemy lines.
“The first loss is always the toughest. But I’ll tell you this, son, the fact that you’ve been doing this for eight years now, with two tours through the Middle East and forays into Benghazi and Uganda—scuttling into enemy territory, rife with booby traps and land mines—and you just now suffered a casualty tells me a lot about the kind of leader you are. Born into it, you were.”
And that might be true.
“I’m capable of higher order thinking,” Ivy said now. When Jake refocused on the present he noticed that her face had softened, and not with the warmth of attraction. She had changed, in response to Jake’s shift in mood. He felt the tension in his shoulders and knew he’d worn his feelings. “And I have a good ear.”
You’d think his shift into the past would wipe out his state of semi-arousal. Not so. But in addition to responding to her on a physical level, he felt pulled to her softness in spirit.
“I’ve made my confessions,” Jake said. He tried to make his words easy but they sounded anything but.
Ivy shrugged. “I have, too,” she returned, “but talk is good for the soul.”
Jake had done his time with the resident shrink. It was a requirement of every field officer who lost a man in battle. And the truth was, it had been good for him. Still, Ivy was getting too close, too fast. Jake didn’t let anyone even tiptoe into that area and here she was driving a bus through it.
“If you have a soul,” Jake returned.