“Can we talk—seriously?” Pete asked. “About what really happens to us—to our friendship—if Maddie takes me up on my offer to move to Palm Springs?” Just say it. “Because I feel like we’re just getting started here, and…I don’t want this to end.”
She didn’t answer right away, which wasn’t all that good of a sign. She was choosing her words again, but she was still running her fingers through his hair, so it wasn’t all bad. “I’ve done long-distance,” she finally told him. “Carter traveled a lot, as a musician. That’s partly what split us up. It’s not easy.”
“The only easy day was yesterday.”
She smiled at him. “Hoo-yah!”
He nodded. “Hoo-yah.”
“You SEALs can be pretty freaking pompous.”
“Maybe,” he said, laughing, “but we’ve earned it. You should come see what BUD/S training looks like, up close.”
She looked startled. “Are you inviting me to visit you at work?”
Pete nodded, but then shrugged. “Assuming I’m not in Palm Springs.”
“Yes, that,” she said. “How does one day at a time sound?”
Pete nodded. “It sounds good,” he said, shifting off of her and carefully pulling himself free.
She made a little noise—a little murmur of dismay—and he had to smile as he quickly disposed of the condom he’d been wearing. “And that sounds even better,” he said as he came back to her and kissed her. Her lips, her throat, her breasts—he got distracted, but only temporarily, because he was a man on a mission.
Shayla shivered as he kept going, all the way to the soft insides of her thighs. He stopped there to say, “You know, the woman in your book—Loretta—she’s missing out. Jack’s magic penis means that he never has to go down on her.”
She laughed and propped herself up on her elbows. “Has to go down on her,” she repeated. “Not the best collection of words in the Giant Lexicon of Romantic Words. I have to go down on you, Jack told Loretta as he checked his to-do list of weekend chores. But first I have to clean the refrigerator, pick up the dry cleaning, and wash the dog.”
Pete smiled as she laughed. “You’re just saying it wrong,” he told her, and lifted his head. He met her gaze and just held it and held it and held it until she finally stopped laughing. And when he spoke, he didn’t have to work very hard to make his voice low and rough. “I have to go down on you. I have to. See?”
Shay’s laughter was now breathless. “I was definitely saying it wrong,” she agreed, and then sighed when he lowered his head and kissed her. “As far as the book goes…Jack and Loretta get there. Keep reading.”
“I will,” he murmured. “But I’m a little busy right now.”
One day at a time meant not worrying about tomorrow—about what the future might bring.
So Pete surrendered to right now—which was pretty fucking great.
Dingo picked a national chain over one of the more quirkily named mom-and-pop-type motels. The Ride On Inn. The Desert Flower. Nope. Not going to stop there. But the chain with its bored-to-death, minimum-wage-earning night clerk behind the front desk…?
“I’ll be right out,” he told Maddie as he parked by the doors. As he got out of his car, he patted his pocket to make sure he was still carrying the wad of bills they’d taken from Fiona’s room. He was holding it for Maddie, for safety’s sake. Right.
He had to hit a buzzer—and really lean on it—to get into the motel office due to the “night lock.”
A man finally appeared behind the desk—middle-aged, balding, puffy-faced—and looked hard through the glass at Dingo and then over at Maddie, who was visible in the car. Whoops, maybe it was a mistake parking there.
She was his adopted sister; they were traveling together to meet their dad. Yeah, that would work.
The lock finally clicked open, and Dingo went inside. The scent of industrial-strength insecticide didn’t quite cover the musty blend of ancient mildew and dust. God, working here would be a living hell.
He cleared his throat and prepared his smile. If the clerk had been a woman, he would’ve automatically gone Australian. But the accent didn’t always work with men—sometimes it did, but sometimes it really backfired. So Dingo stayed silent as he approached the desk, looking at the obviously cranky man with his swollen eyes, sagging jowls, and disheveled, barely there graying hair.
“How can I help you, mate?” The man’s voice was thick with a Down-Under accent that had to be real.
Didn’t it? Or…? Wait…
Dingo’s first coherent thought was that he was encountering himself, from some terrible and depressing future. Oh, God, he looked awful.
“Well, speak up! You woke me—best make it worth it. Come on!”
“Yes,” Dingo said, in standard Southern Californian. “Sorry, dude, it’s late, and you…remind me of someone. Is your name Rick, by any chance?” Okay, that was stupid, as Maddie would say. This man was definitely not him, from the future. That kind of technology didn’t exist. Still, morbidly curious, part of him wanted to know. “Or Richard…?”
The man sighed heavily. “You want a room, but you don’t have a credit card. Well, it’s your lucky day, we take debit cards, here at Bedbugs R Us.”
Okay, that wasn’t good. But since they only wanted to use the shower…“I have cash.”
“That we also take,” the man said. “With two forms of ID.”
“Two forms?” Dingo said. “I have a driver’s license, but…” Nothing else.
“Credit or debit card’ll do it.”
“Well, that’s stupid. If I had those I’d use them to pay, and I wouldn’t need a second ID,” Dingo pointed out.
“No, you’d still need your driver’s license,” the man said. “Can’t have criminals and ne’er-do-wells checking in.”
“Do I look like a criminal or a…?” Dingo stopped himself. Okay, stupid question, particularly smelling the way he did.
Future Dingo looked at him hard, then pointedly turned to look at Maddie, waiting out in the car. “How old’s your lovely little morsel out there, twelve or maybe thirteen?” He laughed. “Oh, I know, I know, she just looks young, right? Or wait, she’s your sister.”
Sis-tah. His accent was awesome, but then again, with another few decades of practice, Dingo’s would be, too.
He tried straight-up bribery. There was little he wouldn’t do for a quick fifty bucks. “Look, I’m sorry. Can we bend the rules? We’re not going to stay long—an hour, at most—”
“Hourly rental, eh? Fuck her and run?”
“Nope,” Dingo said. “Don’t want bedbugs, aren’t gonna—nope. We just want to use the shower.”
“Off-the-books hourly rate is five hundred, cash, the timer starts now.”
Dingo choked. “Five hundred…? An hour?”
“Take it or leave it.”
“Dude, come on. We just want to get cleaned up. We’ve been living in the car, and we’re meeting her father for breakfast—”
“God, you’re a terrible liar.”
“It’s the truth!”
The man smiled. “Clock’s ticking.”
“Five hundred dollars is insane,” Dingo said. “I’ll give you a hundred, and we’ll be done in a full hour, with the clock starting only when we walk into the room.”
The man laughed in his face. “Price just went up to six hundred, mate, with fifty-seven minutes left on the clock.”
“Fuck you!”
“Seven hundred.”