“Goddammit!”
Everyone in the room turned toward him, and he cursed again, silently this time. Greer’s eyes narrowed in warning. Reece made a low grumbling sound in his throat. The twins both struggled to maintain their professional faces.
“Sorry.” He scrambled to find a plausible excuse for his outburst, but all he came up with was a pathetic, “Saw a big-ass spider. Hate those things.”
Greer waved a dismissive hand. “Go on,” he said to the client, who appeared even more contemptuous now than before.
Jude pushed away from the wall and made himself pay attention to the man. He couldn’t screw this up or his brothers would murder him. So no more fantasies about Aruba or…her. He smiled at Burke, turning his internal charm-o-meter up from stun to devastate. “Yes, please, Mr. Burke, go on. I apologize for the interruption.”
Burke opened the briefcase on his lap and produced a slim folder, handing it to Greer. “I’m sure this is not necessary, but my client insists we hire one of you to protect his daughter. I have the file right here.”
Pushing aside a stack of papers to make room, Greer opened the folder. On top lay a dossier with a photograph of a woman clipped to it.
A blond woman.
With square, black-framed glasses.
She stared out from the photo, all cool confidence with her hair twisted up on top of her head and her eyes level on the camera, so different from the last time Jude had seen her. Eight years ago, her face had been splotchy and smeared with lines of mascara from the tears streaming down her cheeks. Her hair had been falling out of its clip. Her lips had quivered as she approached him at the bar. He’d fully expected her to slap him and had steeled himself against it, but the pain in her brown eyes as she dropped his engagement ring into his beer had been far more effective than a slap.
Those eyes had haunted him for years.
Jude moved closer to the desk to get a better look and experienced a dizzying sense of déjà vu. No fucking way. It couldn’t be her. It couldn’t be…
“What’s her name?” Greer asked.
“Elizabeth Pruitt,” Burke said at the same time Jude whispered, “Libby.”
Burke’s head snapped around so fast he must have given himself whiplash. “Do you know her?”
Greer arched a brow, but Jude ignored them both and picked up her photo. The last eight years had been kind to her. Very kind. Even his Aruban fantasy version of her hadn’t done her justice. He traced the elegant line of her cheek, remembered doing the same as they lay tangled together on the living room floor of her college apartment with the sun streaming through the open window…
“Jude!” Greer’s sharp voice brought him back to the present, and he forced his gaze away from the photo. “You know her?”
“Used to.” He set the photo back on the desk, but it took a lot more effort to let the damn thing go than it should have. “Not anymore.”
At that moment, the door opened, and in walked a barge of man that Jude never thought he’d see again. Time had been kind to Colonel Elliot Pruitt, too. Save for the receding hairline that he covered by shaving his head bald, Libby’s father hadn’t changed. He was still imposing as hell. The gleam of the florescent lights off his scalp only highlighted the fact that at fifty-five, he was still nearly seven feet of solid muscle.
“Mr. Pruitt,” Burke said with a tight smile. “I thought we agreed I would handle this—”
“No, I requested you inform me when you would be meeting with these men,” Pruitt said.
“I thought it would be better if we handled this as quickly and quietly as possible.”
Pruitt shook his head. “This is too important for me to handle by proxy. Now will you excuse us?”
The lawyer snapped his briefcase shut with definitive clicks and stood. “I feel as if I have to go on record as saying both Libby and I think this is a vast overreaction.”
“Noted,” Pruitt said. “You’re dismissed.”
Aiming a scowl at the colonel’s back, Burke yanked open the door and left the small room.
Pruitt crossed to stand in front of Jude. The man’s dark blue eyes took in Jude’s faded jeans, beat-up Nikes, and USMC hooded sweatshirt in one long, assessing sweep. “Lieutenant Wilde.”
“Colonel.” Jude resisted the instinct to salute. As an Officer Candidate struggling through OCS, he’d looked up to this man who had been one of his instructors at the time. Now all he felt toward Elliot Pruitt was an abyss of resentment, and he’d be damned before he showed the colonel one ounce of respect. “Didn’t ever expect to see you again.”
“Unfortunately, it was unavoidable in this situation.”