Jake (10 page)

              “Yes. August twenty-first,” he confirmed.

              “Of this year?”

              He laughed. “Getting cold feet?”

              “Hardly. You just gave me a brain freeze for a moment. Why the change in plans?”

              “A combination of things. But you’re right. I definitely don’t want my last breath to be full of regret.”

              He watched emotions chase across her face. Anticipation dampened by a somber cast before her thoughts formed on her lips.

              “I didn’t mean to call up bad memories for you,” she said. “I should have chosen my words more carefully.”

              “No. You’re right. We should live with more urgency. I just want to make sure that the decisions we make today don’t lead to regret later.” He turned a fork over with his fingers and studied the tines as he sifted through words for the ones that felt right. “I told you I lost a man my last tour. He was married. Had a few kids. But you know what? He
lived
life. The guy was always smiling. He had only one greeting. ‘Seize the day.’ And he lived it.”

              “Why were you ordered on R&R?”

              Jake glanced toward the ocean. Only the whitecaps were visible, like sheets undulating in the wind. “I needed it. I went back for Arturo,” he confided. “The gunfire was close and they were using hand held missile launchers, too. It made hearing each other almost impossible—caused static on our radios and forget trying to shout to each other. But I heard him. For one clear moment, with artillery flying and the discharge from automatic weapons shattering the air, there was a moment of nothing. And that’s when I heard him.” He paused, caught a breath of air, and continued. “No words. He wasn’t capable of any. But his last breath.

              “I couldn’t leave him there. His family needed closure, needed something to bury.” He shook his head. “And there was just no way I could leave his body out there, to become a symbol

of enemy taunting.             

              “I put him over my shoulder and ran a quarter mile to our transport. That was May eleventh. I’ve been in fast-forward ever since.” Until he saw her on the side of the road and then everything inside him came to a screeching halt. “My CO thought a break would do me good. The General agreed. I wasn’t happy about it. Not at first. But then I found you, half-naked on the side of the road, and realized that I’d struck gold.”

              “I wasn’t half-naked,” she protested, but her voice was mild. “I’m sorry you lost Arturo. You’re a brave man, Jake. And honorable.” Her fingers pleated the cocktail napkin her wine glass rested on as she dipped into her thoughts. “I’m sorry I’ve been pushing.”

              She lifted her eyes and met his gaze. Jake noticed the color in her cheeks and the way her teeth sawed her lower lip. It made him want to reach across the table and suck that lip into his mouth, kiss her deeply, make her cheeks flame with passion.

              “Especially since I agreed to Saturday night.” She shrugged. “I’m impatient. I don’t remember being this way since, well ever. You don’t even have to touch me. Sometimes it’s the way you look at me, or its standing close enough I can feel your warmth, breathe in your scent, and I want you. We’ll wait until Saturday. And we’ll have a normal date. We’ll do that dinner cruise—“

              “Whoa!” Jake pushed his menu aside and leaned across the table. “Hold up. You’ve got me where you want me.”

              “I know you told me I could take advantage of you,” she smiled, but her amusement fast turned sultry. “And I’d really like to do that, but it wouldn’t be right.”

              Jake’s head was spinning. Three hours. He was primed. He was ready. He wanted it. And so did she.

              “I was kidding.”

              “I know.”

              “I’m not now,” he wanted to make that clear.

              “I don’t want you to compromise your principals,” she explained.

              “We’re having sex tonight,” he told her, glancing at his watch. “In two hours and forty minutes. And it’ll be the best decision we’ve ever made.”

              She gazed at him, considering. “That’s a lot of confidence for a man who five minutes ago was worried sex would blow any chance we had of something deeper.”

              “I’m trusting your instincts,” he told her. “Women are much better at intuitive living.”

              Ivy’s eyebrows arched. “Where did you get that phrase?”

              He shrugged. “My sister may have used it a time or two.”

              “In relation to what?”

              “Whom,” he corrected. “Like I said, I wasn’t good about timing. At setting a foundation and building up. She told me I need to slow down and
feel
. Get a feel for the woman I’m with, for what she wants. So I’m doing that.”

              “Giving me what I want,” Ivy affirmed. “And taking time out of the equation.”

              He leaned across the table. “What do you think about time and us?”

              She met his gaze. “I think more about now, this minute, than I do tomorrow,” she admitted. “But I’m open to possibility.”

Chapter Nine

              “Tell me more about your childhood,” Jake invited.

              “The way to my heart is through my psyche, Dr. Freud?”

              “We have two hours to learn the most important things about each other,” he corrected. “Enough’s been said that I think our childhoods rank significantly in shaping who we are today.”

              “So you start then.”

              He nodded. “Ok. I have an older sister named Jenna. Our parents were older than the norm, back then anyway—thirty-three and thirty-seven when I was born. My father was a contractor. I don’t have any meaningful memories of him. Some feelings—like being excited when he was due home. Anticipating adventures, so I’m pretty sure he was an active dad when he was around.”

              “What happened?”

              “He was killed in an overseas bombing. He was one of the early contractors who traveled to Saudi Arabia to aid in the emerging. I was four years old.”

              “I never knew my father,” Ivy admitted. “I have no memories of him, good or bad. I

guess I always thought of him as selfish. He left us. He had to know our mother was a drunk, that she couldn’t keep a job.” She felt herself falling back into memory. “She told us he went back to Mexico, where he was born. Holly thinks this part is true. My sister is two years older than me and has a few memories. But the way our mother remembered it, our father was supposed to return. Three months tops. Holly says he was as good as gone the minute he walked out the door.”

              “Why does she say that?”

              “They fought a lot, our parents. It wasn’t the first time our father walked out.”

              “Where is Holly now?”

              “Vegas.”

              “She’s the reason we found each other.”

              “I visit two weekends every month,” Ivy said. “I don’t miss it. Ever,” she underscored.

              “Ok.”

              “Those weekends are usually my only days off.” She sifted a hand through her hair. She’d let it out of the ponytail clip earlier and the wind off the ocean was sweeping it across her eyes. “She needs me right now.”

              “Then you never miss a visit,” he agreed.

              A frown pleated the skin between her eyebrows. “Has it really been two years since you’ve seen your sister?”

              “Two years and two months,” he confirmed. “I need to be better about it. My nephews are growing up fast.”

              “How old are they?”

              “Ten and seven.” He ran a hand over his face and Ivy recognized it as a habit he indulged in to rub away tension. “I spoke to my sister last night,” he confided. “She and my brother-in-law have been going through a rough patch. Looks like they’re not going to make it.”

              “She needs you right now.”

              He nodded. “That’s one of the trips I mentioned. I thought I’d go at Thanksgiving. It will be their first holiday with the family split up and they’ll really need a distraction.”

              Ivy thought about that. Jake was a compassionate man. Another quality that went into the positive column. She was beginning to wonder if he had any bad traits. She wasn’t sure if being too eager in relationships counted.

              “Do you have plans for Thanksgiving?”

              “I thought I did.” She explained about the upcoming conference and how important it was to Holly. She didn’t go into her sister’s injuries, not yet. “That takes place over Thanksgiving week.”

              He nodded. “Do you ski?”

              “As in snow?”

              He nodded. “Downhill or cross-country. My sister lives in Montana and there’s bound to be a lot of snow at Thanksgiving.” He arched his eyebrows and let his sentence trail off as a

question.

              “You’re asking me to come to Montana with you?”

              “You said you have the time off.”

              “Four days,” she said.

              “Any chance you could stretch that into a week?”

              “I don’t know.” She was slow to answer, reluctant to commit to something that was a long way off. “It’s hard to think about snow and turkey in the middle of August.”

              “It’s hard to think about us in the snow and eating turkey,” he called it out, but his tone was thoughtful and not at all condemning.

              “It’s scary,” she admitted, and added, only to herself, that she was afraid to want it. She knew that she did, and that the want could easily turn into a need as had her physical feelings for Jake.

              “Ok, so for now we’ll leave it open.” He picked up his longneck and drank from it, eyeing Ivy over the bottle. “Our appetizer is here.”

              The waiter set a platter on the table between them and the savory scent of lobster unfurled in ribbons of steam which Ivy was fast to inhale. She closed her eyes and let the seasonings of the sea tempt her.

              “That smells heavenly.”

              “Damn,” she heard him whisper and slowly opened her eyes. Jake was watching her and

she noticed that his skin had deepened in color.

              “Do you always respond with all of your senses?”

              “I like to enjoy experiences,” she said.

              “I’ll give you something to enjoy,” he promised.

              She allowed her gaze to remain locked with his for a long and heated moment. She didn’t give in to shyness or to fear and skitter away from the intimacy, but felt herself fall deeper into Jake’s eyes. A flush rose to the surface of her skin, her breath fluttered in her throat. “I don’t doubt it.”

              Her words were barely a whisper, but he heard them and responded. Liquid fire seemed to jump in his eyes.

              “I don’t want you to wait for this,” he said, and picked up the serving fork the waiter had left with the appetizer.

              “I’ve waited long enough already,” she agreed.

              Jake scooped a slice of the strudel, the lobster coated in a thin flaky phyllo dough and stuffed with caramelized onions and fresh bousin cheese, and slid it onto her plate. He did the same for himself.

              Ivy brought a small bite of the delicacy to her lips and felt her mouth water, her eyelids drift shut as she took her first taste. She wasn’t deliberately baiting him, but she was aware that her approach to eating was unleashing in Jake a hunger that had nothing to do with caloric intake. The opposite, really. And she loved that. She listened to his breath thicken and wondered what was happening to other areas of his body. When she opened her eyes she found a visibly restrained Jake staring at her.

              “This is costing you,” she said.

              “I can’t decide if it would be easier on me if I helped you or if I just sat back and watched.”

              “Let’s try it both ways,” she suggested. “You’ve watched, now let’s see what happens when you participate.”

              Jake accepted the invitation, though his movements were slow. He never took his eyes off hers as he broke off a piece of the strudel and brought it to her lips. She noticed a slight tremor in his hand, that his skin had deepened further, and realized that discipline was deeply ingrained in him.

              Ivy took the bite and when he tried to pull the fork back, she hung on a beat, two, and met his eyes in a firestorm of emotion.

              He swore but it sounded more like a term of reverence.

              “Two hours.” He spoke the words like they were an impossible feat.

              “You have more discipline than me,” Ivy conceded. “More patience.”

              “More experience,” he said. “And that means I’ve had more losses than wins. It’s enough to make me vigilant. It
was
enough…”

              “So maybe you should go back to watching.”

              He agreed, but said, “It wasn’t much better.”

              “I could tie you to the chair.” She smiled, not so much at his discomfort, though she loved that she was the source of it, but at the image of a strong and sturdy Jake wrapped in coils of rope—and nothing else. Of course, not here in the restaurant, but she’d file the idea away for later use.

              “Would you like that, Ivy?”

              “Maybe.” She gave her next words careful consideration. “I think you’re used to being in charge and that may not work for me. Not all the time.”

              Her words seemed to hit him like mortar. She waited for him to respond.

              “I don’t have to be in the driver’s seat. Not all the time.” But he still wore a stunned expression.